Episode 19 Murray Simser Says Social Media Captured Elections, and Citizn Reverses It

Social media has reshaped political power, voter attention, and public consent.

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EP19 - Murray Simser Says Social Media Captured Elections, and Citizn Reverses It

Published May 15, 2026 Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu

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Murray Simser explains why he believes democracy needs new tools, and how Citizn aims to give citizens an AI-powered way to understand issues and express informed consent.

Social media has become a dominant force in elections, agenda setting, and public debate. Murray Simser, Founder, CEO, and Chief Architect of CITIZN, joins Emanuel Petrescu and Kevin Carney for a wide-ranging conversation on geopolitics, empire, currency, energy, China, Taiwan, and the future of democracy.

The conversation moves from global power shifts and economic instability to the role of AI in civic life. Murray outlines his view that modern elections have been captured by social media dynamics, bots, algorithms, and attention systems. Citizn is presented as a response: a national civic network designed to help people understand policy, verify participation, protect privacy, and give informed consent through an AI-powered personal chief of staff.

Full episode and transcript: https://curiouspundits.com/podcast/ep19-citizn

Episode Show Notes

Hosts: Emanuel Petrescu and Kevin Carney
Guest: Murray Simser, Founder, CEO, and Chief Architect of CITIZN

Topics covered

Murray Simser’s background in technology and entrepreneurship
Microsoft Teams, Groove, and long-term technology bets
The end of empire, global power shifts, and the future of the West
Bretton Woods, the gold window, petrodollars, and currency systems
Canada, Europe, NATO, and transatlantic relationships
Ukraine, Iran, drones, missiles, and asymmetric warfare
Oil shocks, energy consumption, and GDP
China, Taiwan, BRICS, and non-dollar trade systems
Bitcoin, digital currencies, and alternative payment rails
Social media as the fifth estate
Why Murray believes elections are being captured by social media
Citizn as a civic technology platform
Democracy GPT and AI-assisted civic participation
Identity verification, privacy, bot prevention, and informed consent
The role of timing in political and technology adoption

Episode Timestamps

00:00:18 Introduction and welcome
00:01:40 Murray Simser introduces himself
00:02:18 Microsoft Teams, Groove, and long-term technology bets
00:03:02 The state of the world in May 2026
00:04:07 Empire, history, and the end of Pax Americana
00:07:34 Bretton Woods, gold, banking, and money
00:10:50 Europe as a future capital of the West
00:15:41 Canada, Europe, and possible deeper integration
00:18:41 Asymmetric warfare, Ukraine, Iran, drones, and missiles
00:22:26 Oil shocks, energy, inflation, and economic pressure
00:28:29 China, Taiwan, and the risk of a Pacific theater
00:31:01 China, BRICS, resource extraction, and global trade systems
00:41:39 Digital currencies, Bitcoin, and non-dollar payments
00:43:42 Currency as agreement and the changing role of the U.S. dollar
00:51:14 Democracy, civil conflict, and peaceful institutional change
00:53:11 Trump, working-class frustration, and political competence
00:55:36 How social media captured modern elections
00:58:46 The fifth estate and agenda setting
01:05:32 What Citizn is
01:12:06 How Citizn avoids capture by special interests
01:13:20 Citizn as more than a social network
01:14:37 How Citizn knows what citizens need to know
01:16:13 Identity verification and bot prevention
01:20:03 AI, consciousness, and the Turing test
01:25:27 New political candidates and public frustration
01:28:16 Where to find Citizn
01:28:52 Closing remarks

Episode Links

Episode Website URL: https://curiouspundits.com/podcast/ep19-citizn

Curious Pundits website: https://curiouspundits.com/

Citizn: https://www.citizn.world/

Democracy GPT: https://youtu.be/Qvfmoe-oq28

Odd Lots Podcast: https://www.bloomberg.com/oddlots

Odd Lots Episode – How Taiwan Became the World’s Most Perilous Geopolitical Chokepoint: https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-y96x6-2d52312f

The Princeton Study: Congress Literally Doesn’t Care What You Think: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

Episode Website URL: https://curiouspundits.com/podcast/ep19-citizn

About the Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu, two curious minds exploring ideas, culture, and everything in between. Curious Pundits is a conversational podcast where each episode starts with a topic that caught our attention and unfolds into thoughtful, unscripted discussion. We follow curiosity wherever it leads, across disciplines, opinions, and perspectives, without pretending to have all the answers. Their main ventures are https://1307.digital/ (Emanuel) and https://organicgrowth.biz/ (Kevin).

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Entities mentioned in this episode

People

Emanuel Petrescu
Kevin Carney
Murray Simser
Steve Wood
Ray Ozzie
Ray Dalio
Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Richard Dawkins
Alan Turing
Elon Musk
Donald Trump
Justin Trudeau
Mark Carney
Chrystia Freeland
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
George Herbert Walker Bush
George W. Bush
Clement Attlee
Winston Churchill
Nixon
Putin
Bill Gross
Katy Perry

Companies, Organizations, and Institutions

Curious Pundits
CITIZN
Citizn Canada
Citizn United States
Citizn France
Microsoft
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Teams
Groove
Silicon Valley
Bell Labs
DARPA
European Union
NATO
World Trade Organization
World Bank
International Monetary Fund
Bank of International Settlements
BRICS
SWIFT
Parliament of Canada
Magna Carta
Treaties of Rome
Treaties of Maastricht
Clear
Mensa
The Odd Lots Podcast
Reddit
4chan
Twitter
Facebook
Google
YouTube
LinkedIn

Products, Platforms, and Technologies

CITIZN
Democracy GPT
ChatGPT
AI
Internet
Social media
Blockchain
Bitcoin
Digital currencies
Central bank digital currencies
ARM chips
AWACS
BYD
KYC
API
Bot farms
Algorithms
Social Internet
Fifth estate
Turing test
Jarvis
iPhone
Phones
Newsletter
Podcast

Places

Toronto
Canada
United States
America
Britain
United Kingdom
Europe
European Union
France
Germany
Berlin
Paris
London
Rome
Constantinople
Istanbul
Byzantium
Aachen
Washington
DC
Ottawa
Sydney
Canberra
Montreal
North America
Australia
Oceania
Asia
China
Taiwan
Formosa
Hong Kong
India
South Asia
Russia
Ukraine
Iran
Persia
Israel
Pacific
Arkansas
Alabama
Aruba
Grand Cayman
Maine
Manchester
Westminster
Silicon Valley
New York
Fort Knox
Strait of Hormuz
Persian Gulf

Political and Historical Entities

British Empire
Commonwealth
Pax Britannica
Pax Americana
American Empire
Byzantine Empire
Roman Empire
Kuomintang
PRC
United Nations
Tea Party
Liberal government
Democratic Party
Republican Party
Canadian Liberal Party
Ontario Liberal Party
American judicial system
American democratic system
The West
Global South

Events and Historical References

World War I
World War II
COVID
Bretton Woods
Gold window closure
1971 gold standard shift
Oil crisis
China-Taiwan conflict
Ukraine war
Iran conflict
Chinese Civil War
Partition of India
Civil wars in Britain
Northwest Rebellion in India
Lucknow
Concert of Europe

Economic and Policy Concepts

Petrodollar
Gold standard
Currency rails
Payment rails
Reserve currency
Dollar demand
Euro payments
Renminbi
RMB
Tariffs
Trade blocs
Resource extraction
Colonialism
Capitalism
Manufacturing
Supply chains
Strategic reserves
GDP
Energy consumption
Fiscal deficit
Military spending
Inflation
Working class
Agenda setting
Share of voice
Informed consent
Direct democracy
Identity verification
Privacy policy
Public feed
Polling
Lobbying
Special interests
Electoral process
Social media zeitgeist
Democratic participation

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Emanuel: Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. I’m one of the co-hosts, Emanuel.

Kevin: I’m Kevin.

Emanuel: The other co-host. And if you like what you’re hearing today and want to hear more or watch more, go to curiouspundits.com. That’s where you will find today’s recording, future recordings, previous recordings as well.

That’s– That being said, we’re going to dive right in because today I’m really, excited about a very special guest that we have, with us, and I will do no justice if I will make any other comments for the introduction.

I’m just gonna simply let him do the intro for him, tell [00:01:00] us, the audience, what he wants us to know about him and about what he’s doing. And as the podcast tagline is Bits of Everything, we’re gonna be covering a little bit about I like to joke with Kevin saying that because many topics are very, controversial, and in order to avoid that, we reduce it to only two: religion and politics.

So that being said, it’s my pleasure and privilege to introduce today’s Murray. He’s also from Toronto. I know him personally. Welcome, Murray.

Murray: Thank you.

Emanuel: you do Who are you, and what do you do, and why are you on this podcast?

Murray: I’m nobody, but I have a lot of opinions, so I think that’s the reason I’m on this podcast. I’m a Toronto boy who grew up here, went to school in the capital. Studied economics, wanted to be a banker, but somehow ended up being a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I was mentored by one of the founders of Microsoft, Steve Wood, and I went on to run a whole bunch of tech [00:02:00] companies, including buying some very big platforms from Microsoft, before moving back to Canada, where I now live in my hometown and run and build and fund tech companies.

Emanuel: Any platforms that we might have heard of?

Murray: I bought the original kernel for Teams, we bought Ray Ozzie’s company out of Boston. At the time we thought it was gonna be the greatest acquisition ever. We break it into Microsoft’s Office that everybody knows about. It was a product called Groove, and it went through about five iterations over a decade because the business didn’t really go anywhere. But all of a sudden when COVID came along, Teams was one of the most prescient acquisitions that Microsoft ever made. Took a decade to get there but it got there in the end.

Emanuel: It took a pandemic to get there.

Murray: And this is the proof of what we say in the Valley, that you gotta believe that in the future things will come together, otherwise you’d never do anything.

Emanuel: Definitely. We’re [00:03:00] recording this somewhere towards the middle of May 2026. And for the ones that are watching from the future, the world is one… some people might consider it upside down a little bit economically or politically with all over… things are upside down and I don’t know even where to start.

On the one hand, we have the emergence of the AIs or whatever people conventionally call AI, and I know you know a thing or two about that, so I’d like to get there as well. I would also like to talk about the current situation and get your point of view on what’s happening globally, not necessarily politically.

I’m not sure that you and I can do much, but would like to see how this all fits and influences economical and especially technology, something that you know a thing or two about, and what you’re currently doing, your project, which is something I’m very interested in, and my colleague Kevin as well as I think he has more questions than I do.[00:04:00]

That was a very long intro, but where would we want to start?

Murray: Let’s start with the state of the world. I think that’s the entirely correct place. I think that we live through such a great time, the golden age of all of history that we came to think that history was inevitably going to be better every year because of it. But if you’re a student of history, you know that the times of plenty are followed by the opposite and that good times never last. In fact, if you look at the cycle we have good and bad times with great regularity throughout history, and the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Famously my empire, that is the one I grew up in… the British Empire, and its sort of its follow on… the Commonwealth. There was a time where the sun never set on the British Empire, we ruled the world, we invented the modern world. We created science, technology, and even the stuff that we’re sitting on using today. That all comes out of Britain. ARM [00:05:00] chips, for instance, just the latest thing. But it’s not there anymore. Britain is not the power that it once was. It went broke in World War II, and all of the dominions, like Canada where I’m sitting went off on their own and became great nations, great powers, just like the parent power, which was Britain. And we saw America rise and create sort of the continuance of the Pax Britannica, which was roughly the equivalent of the capital moving from Rome to what is today Istanbul, Constantinople. And now guess what? It’s moving back again. Europe’s gonna be the center of the universe. Pax Americana is over. So we’ve seen this happen before. 30, 40, 50 years of peace is exceptional. We had 75, 80 with only regional skirmishes. I’m actually one of the few people that thinks the world’s fine, okay?

But it is… We are, [00:06:00] in point of fact, in the same period that we saw from about 1914 to the 1950 region, okay? This was the end of the empires, the beginning and rise of the nation states and then the sort of Bretton Woods system the economic structure was gold-backed, and then in 1971 there was a similar situation to right now… where we changed the Bretton Woods system, we shut down the gold window in Washington… Sorry in New York and we said, “Look from now on, you can’t draw gold,” because the number of dollars that were out there were much higher than the available gold in Fort Knox. And so now we have a petrodollar, and that’s now changing. And finally, the last piece, the Americans have a structural fiscal deficit that they can’t plug. It’s not possible. Not with trade, not with tariffs, not with anything else. The only thing that they can do is cut spending, and the only thing they can cut [00:07:00] spending on is military power. So we have the end of the American Empire.

We have the collapse of that empire because of the fact that the Americans themselves have pulled back from it. And when when an old empire fractures, I don’t have to tell you that things like partition happen in India. I don’t have to tell you that local tribal histories start to flare up. The power provided by that empire when it retreats is almost always as damaging as its creation.

Emanuel: A lot to unpack there. I suppose Kevin has a few things to…

Kevin: Yeah, I do want to comment on a couple of things. And a couple of them are going to sound like nitpicking, But I too read a ton of books of history and the history of economics. Britain didn’t actually invent the structures that took over the world in terms of the global spread of capitalism.

Britain was literally the second mover.

The colonial plantation [00:08:00] system, which is what modern capitalism directly grew out of, came from a French aristocrat named Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the early 1600s.

Britain saw what he did and said, “Hey, that is a good idea,” and just did it better in a lot of ways, right?

Murray: That’s right.

Kevin: And then a lot of people complain about the surrendering of the gold standard in 1971, but the United States had no choice.

Murray: Not.

Kevin: One of the fundamental contradictions of a capitalist economy, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the idea of the money is in the bank, right? The money is simultaneously in the bank and not in the bank at the same time because we basically– A bank makes a loan. To the bank, that loan is an asset. To the borrower, that loan is a liability. To the borrower, it’s exactly the opposite. The loan is the liability, and the deposit is the asset. And basically, [00:09:00] bank liabilities are what we call money, right? And there’s never enough money in the vault to cover all the liabilities if all the depositors show up at once and say, “I want my money,” right? So what happened in 1971 was France did a one-depositor run on Fort Knox, and they just kept sending in their claims for gold, and the US is like, “We have two choices. We either satisfy all their claims until we’re out of gold, or we stop satisfying their claims.” Those are the only options available.

Murray: That’s right.

Kevin: So the US really had no choice. It wasn’t that somebody decided to go off the gold standard. It’s that France forced a decision whose outcome was inevitable.

Emanuel: Always the French. Something else.

Kevin: Always the French, yeah.

Emanuel: Toujours. Something else caught my attention when you spoke. The poles were changing and everything will go back to Europe. I [00:10:00] think that if you ask the majority of people, or at least the thought leaders would say that somewhere in Asia would be the next center.

You said Europe.

Kevin: And I am one of those people.

Emanuel: And you said Europe, Murray. And let me ask you why is that? And most people will tell you China will be the dominant leader.

You have Ray Dalio who has been speaking about this loudly for at least the past 10 years, right? I would say even aggressively. And with him, a plethora of other thought leaders, economists, journalists, people from all parts of and different industries as well. So not necessarily comparing, but why Europe?

Why do you say Europe?

And Which

Murray: to be clear, I’m not saying Europe becomes the global hegemon. I said that Europe becomes the capital of the West once more.

So there’s a very big distinction between the idea that the capital moves around Rome, which is the metaphor I was using. It [00:11:00] moved from Rome to say Constantinople. Became Byzantium ultimately once the sort of Latin portion of the empire collapsed and only the Greek portion was left.

That’s where you get the Byzantine Empire. I think what I’m articulating is that the West as a concept is different than the other large population centers that are surrounding a single large country. So if you look at South Asians, broadly speaking, India represents the very large portion of that population.

China is the largest Asian hegemon, and they’re all billion-plus people. If you want the equivalent cohort for us, what you need is North America, Australia, Oceania, and Europe put together. This is the white… If you want to think about races the white races. And the West was really what came out of the white race.

And so in theory, the West never had a single capital. It always had these sort of empire structures, these imperial [00:12:00] structures. The very concept of the imperial structure is a Western thing that comes out of Rome. And so we’ve had more empires than we can count. The capital has gone from Rome to Aachen to what was after that? It would’ve been the Parisians, I think, and then you had the Brits, okay? That was where the thing went. And you had some Swedish, Lithuanian, Polish jobs and the Eastern guys in there for a minute. But largely speaking, the capital moved around Europe for call it 1,000 years, okay?

And then all of a sudden, Europe was burned to the ground, okay? In World War II, it was leveled. And when I say leveled, I mean nothing left, okay? We literally carpet bombed Northern Europe into stones, okay? And the capital moved to DC. That’s how that capital moved, and most of the time when a capital moves, it’s after it’s been burned to the ground, okay?

So nobody voluntarily gives it up. The Brits, they had their capital burned to the ground, and they had their financial system burned to the ground. And so [00:13:00] Washington didn’t win through conquest. Washington won just like Ottawa won because we were the only two capitals left on the planet outside of Sydney, or sorry, Canberra. And if you think about that structure, you are never going to have 300 million people rule over 750 million for very long, no matter how much more productive Americans are. The European Union is the economic population intellectual epicenter of the West, whether we like it or not, and this nonsense that, “Oh, Silicon Valley,” and all this… Look, we invented steam power and electricity in Britain, and within 30 years it was everywhere and we were irrelevant in those industries are dead. So I don’t ever want somebody to think because Silicon Valley, starting with the chip manufacturing at Bell Labs, say, moving to the West Coast and then this flourishing that included my companies back in the 2000s, that is permanent in any way.

There’s no [00:14:00] intellectual property in Silicon Valley that, that can be kept away. The genie’s out of the bottle. That’s it. Anybody can build technology now. When I was a dot comer, there was a very unique set of things in the United States that allowed this to happen, the ancient network for DARPA. Okay? Now we didn’t have that anywhere else, and so you had to always go through Mae East and Mae West in the United States, old stuff, but we’ve distributed that architecture now, okay? It’s done.

Americans are now competing with Chinese people who can build this stuff at one-fifth the cost, or Indians that do it from their bedrooms with a shitty Internet connection, and they have every bit the capability that we do. And so what you end up with is not Europe becomes the hegemon globally, but we’re entering something like the Concert of Europe, where you don’t have a single hyper power like Britain or the United States. What you have now are once more competing empires. So this is 1870 to [00:15:00] 1914 all over again, okay? And by that, I mean it’s going to be unstable. Europe will be one of the four or five poles in the world that, that wields the most power. And I have every belief that China will rise to be the equivalent of Europe in terms of economic power, but it won’t be any more powerful than those groups at all.

There’s this, “Oh, China’s gonna overtake the US.” Yeah, the US, not the West. The West and the US are two very different things.

Emanuel: I somehow missed when you said the capital of the West. I can understand the capital of the behemoth. There was a narrative suggesting Canada should actually join European Union, the European Union recently. Interesting thought.

Kevin: It would require that the EU charter be changed, but it’s not as bizarre a thought as it sounds.

Murray: I would say, look, [00:16:00] my two cents on this is we just dumped the long relationship with an empire that we come out of. Then we dump a hanger-on relationship through CUSMA with the Yanks. Look, it’s lovely to be able to be part of other things. What the hell do we need a partnership for that?

We’re the only country on Earth that can shut the doors tomorrow, and need nothing.

So why the hell are we giving away ten million square kilometers to any organization? The better solution, and it’s already clear in the minds, I think, of the architecture in Canada and in Europe, is that the European Union, I wrote about this the other day is not a country in the traditional sense of the word.

They learned their lessons from World War II when the European Union was built, and that is too much centralized control eventually leads to some nutcase running the place and you don’t want that. What you need is subnational release valves, and that’s why the Treaties of Rome, the Treaties of Maastricht, which form the core of the European [00:17:00] Union, are as loosely written as they are. The European Union has about six levels of integration, if you think about the sort of core group, and then you think about the non-Schengen, and then you think about the Euro, and you think about the security relationships and the security blankets. I don’t think that Canada becoming a highly integrated partner of the EU is a bad idea.

I think it’s a terrific idea. So you have free trade here, and then you have full EU membership up here, but I don’t see why Canada plus Europe is not a natural transatlantic partnership, okay? What I see in the next twenty years is NATO’s gone as a concept, but the headquarters in Brussels gets renamed, and you take one flag down.

It’s as simple as that. You do some relationship for the finances, but Canada becomes baked into it the same way that NATO has its high command. I’m not sure that everybody realizes just how integrated NATO is, okay? Whether the Yanks leave or not, nobody cares. It’s [00:18:00] not like it used to be where that would have been a major problem, okay?

The AWACS, yeah, they’ve got those, that’s terrific. They’re made in Montreal now, okay? So what do you need this for? You don’t. Nuclear power, oh, we gotta deter the Russians? I don’t have to tell you that the Ukrainians whooped Russia’s ass, okay? In a way that is not funny, and I don’t think that I’m too afraid of Putin and gang and his broken down golf carts of weapons.

All right? That’s number one. Number two, we’ll send the Ukrainians after him, and he’ll run. Okay, bye.

Kevin: Actually, you’ve brought up what I think is a really significant point in terms of the way things are changing, ’cause yeah, Ukraine is really holding their own against the superior force of Russia, and Iran is holding their own against the superior forces of the United States and Israel. The buzzword being thrown around is asymmetric warfare. But basically, the damage that the Ukrainians and the [00:19:00] Iranians have been able to do with relatively inexpensive drones and ballistic missiles has completely changed, in my opinion geopolitics on a go-forward basis.

Everyone’s talking about…

Murray: okay?

Kevin: What’s that?

Murray: It’s like the longbow.

Kevin: Yeah, very much… very much…. everyone keeps talking about Iran and their

sure they have them. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from this recent war, it’s that they don’t need it. They can just use inexpensive drones and ballistic missiles and suddenly choke off 20% of the global production of oil.

Murray: Yep.

Kevin: At will.

Murray: Think about the, if you think about the structure of war historically where empires have been flattened and thrown away or where change has happened, it always happens like that, okay? You think the big bad guy’s coming to get you, and all of a sudden the little guy beats his ass.

This is the story that [00:20:00] comes out of our Bible, okay? David versus Goliath.

Now, the mistake people make is they think that that David was an idiot small kid. Could this… How people interpret this, it’s lucky that he won. What they don’t know about that story is David was a calculating son of a bitch, okay?

And he knew exactly how to beat Goliath’s ass. It’s called leverage, all right? That’s it. Small guys, you put them in a corner, you’re done. And empires should listen to the risks of history. Never pick a fight with somebody who is existentially threatened, because if you lose the credibility of the empire. But if they win, they become a great power, and if they lose, it just doesn’t matter. They’re the little guy fighting for, good and country.

Emanuel: Arguably.

Murray: The United States and all of these groups are now facing these Davids that are frankly embarrassing them.

Emanuel: But Persia, I would argue, is not really a [00:21:00] David. When I look at Persia personally, I don’t see Iran, I see Persia and its history and whatever it means. And it’s as big and it’s been more influential throughout the world, throughout history than United States has been. It’s just that we’re more contemporary with that.

The keyword was there. Speaking of the current affair over there and choking the oil prices that inevitably will drive up some major consequences economically around the world, not just in North America or in that part of the world. What are those? What are we to expect short term, long term?

And again, I’m in Canada, so as you said, Murray not just shutting off the borders and leave, but also live fairly decent, live fairly well. Because somebody was saying to me, “Yeah, but China is, can starve themselves a lot because they’re used to.” [00:22:00] Yes, okay, I understand that, but we won’t be starving.

Obviously, we won’t be probably consuming that much either, but Canada, it’s a place that really has everything that that we need. So what short term and long term should we expect?

Murray: Yeah. So that’s it’s probably the most important question that we can answer about this whole affair. I’m brought back to the ’70s again, the crisis we talked about in Bretton Woods 1971, I think was the gold window with Nixon. That was also the last time we had a major oil crisis, okay?

And back then, I want people to remember that oil and gas products were the lion’s share of the energy of the world. You’re talking about almost 100%, okay of, generating capacities. Pre-nuclear, you’ve only had one or two plants, hydro was just coming online a little bit… You had most of your energy, whether it was transport or airplanes or manufacturing, all this run by those. And so the oil [00:23:00] impact back then, the oil crisis back then, in my opinion, contrary to a lot of pundits today, I think was much worse because it touched absolutely every portion of a human’s life in a way that- The market back then was unable to respond to, okay? Now, that was a very different world than today, okay? There were only eight or nine manufacturing countries then. The rest of them bought stuff and sold stuff into those countries. It was almost a mercantile structure globally in terms of trade. And today, one of the beautiful things that we have that didn’t exist then is we roughly now have 60 to 80 really good trading countries in the 200 or so countries that exist in the world, giving us diversification against any of these shocks, okay?

And so if you look at the impacts that you’ve had on the metrics like market or the rest of these things, the markets are not afraid of this as an oil shock. They don’t care, as a [00:24:00] matter of fact. The oil companies are facing a bit of a problem because they have costs that go up. People manufacturing, say, mice from Microsoft buying the plastic, buying the oil for their stuff, they pay a little bit more. But then they’ll source their chips from a different country, they’ll balance out their supply chains, and we do it in real time thanks to the Internet. It took weeks and months to make a change like that in the old days. Before you even knew something bad was happening… it was weeks before you got good data, even in the ’70s, where telephones were everywhere. But today capitalism is so efficient because of the Internet that I really don’t even care about the oil shock in the short term. But I will say this. I come out of out of the working class, okay? And I will say that if there is going to be a problem, there’s going… It’s going to be that there’s a certain group of people in society for whom an extra $100 a month is catastrophic, okay?

And I want to be clear on this point. [00:25:00] There is no revolution. There is no destabilization of the planet. This Iran core moves, who cares, okay? But for democracies, this is a major issue when you’re talking about the portability of votes. And so we’re gonna have a vote, Canada, in the next couple of years, and depending on how prices play out here, depending on how unemployment plays out here… that lower quintile the lower two quintiles of people in the country are gonna get pretty pissed off pretty damn quick. And so the good news is I think governments have woken up to the idea that you gotta stop that. So now governments, including the most recent Liberal government here in Canada with Mark Carney at its head, they’re sending out checks, two grand, 1,000 bucks. They’re making square the people who have no money. And as a consequence, I’m not worried. And this may sound like, “Oh, no big deal,” but I actually think this is no big deal. [00:26:00] The issue is not that. In my estimation, the issue is… does this, in addition to Ukraine, EP 19 – Murray Simser Says Social Media Captured Elections, and Citizn Reverses It

[00:00:00]

Emanuel: Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. I’m one of the co-hosts, Emanuel.

Kevin: I’m Kevin.

I’m just gonna simply let him do the intro for him, tell [00:01:00] us, [00:27:00] the audience, what he wants us to know about him and about what he’s doing. And as the podcast tagline is Bits of Everything, we’re gonna be covering a little bit about I like to joke with Kevin saying that because many topics are very, controversial, and in order to avoid that, we reduce it to only two: religion and politics.

So that being said, it’s my pleasure and privilege to introduce today’s Murray. He’s also from Toronto. I know him personally. Welcome, Murray.

Murray: Thank you.

Emanuel: you do Who are you, and what do you do, and why are you on this podcast?

Murray: I’m nobody, but I have a lot of opinions, so I think that’s the reason I’m on this podcast. I’m a Toronto boy who grew up here, went to school in the capital. Studied economics, wanted to be a banker, but somehow ended up [00:28:00] being a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I was mentored by one of the founders of Microsoft, Steve Wood, and I went on to run a whole bunch of tech [00:02:00] companies, including buying some very big platforms from Microsoft, before moving back to Canada, where I now live in my hometown and run and build and fund tech companies.

Emanuel: Any platforms that we might have heard of?

Murray: I bought the original kernel for Teams, we bought Ray Ozzie’s company out of Boston. At the time we thought it was gonna be the greatest acquisition ever. We break it into Microsoft’s Office that everybody knows about. It was a product called Groove, and it went through about five iterations over a decade because the business didn’t really go anywhere. But all of a sudden when COVID came along, Teams was one of the most prescient acquisitions that Microsoft ever made. [00:29:00] Took a decade to get there but it got there in the end.

Emanuel: It took a pandemic to get there.

Murray: And this is the proof of what we say in the Valley, that you gotta believe that in the future things will come together, otherwise you’d never do anything.

On the one hand, we have the emergence of the AIs or whatever people conventionally call AI, and I know you know a thing or two about that, so I’d like to get there as well. I would also like to talk about the [00:30:00] current situation and get your point of view on what’s happening globally, not necessarily politically.

That was a very long intro, but where would we want to start?

Murray: Let’s start with the state of the world. I think that’s the entirely correct place. I think that we live through such a great time, the golden age of all of history that we came to think that history was inevitably going to be better every year because of it. But if you’re a student of history, [00:31:00] you know that the times of plenty are followed by the opposite and that good times never last. In fact, if you look at the cycle we have good and bad times with great regularity throughout history, and the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Famously my empire, that is the one I grew up in… the British Empire, and its sort of its follow on… the Commonwealth. There was a time where the sun never set on the British Empire, we ruled the world, we invented the modern world. We created science, technology, and even the stuff that we’re sitting on using today. That all comes out of Britain. ARM [00:05:00] chips, for instance, just the latest thing. But it’s not there anymore. Britain is not the power that it once was. It went broke in World War II, and all of the dominions, like Canada where I’m [00:32:00] sitting went off on their own and became great nations, great powers, just like the parent power, which was Britain. And we saw America rise and create sort of the continuance of the Pax Britannica, which was roughly the equivalent of the capital moving from Rome to what is today Istanbul, Constantinople. And now guess what? It’s moving back again. Europe’s gonna be the center of the universe. Pax Americana is over. So we’ve seen this happen before. 30, 40, 50 years of peace is exceptional. We had 75, 80 with only regional skirmishes. I’m actually one of the few people that thinks the world’s fine, okay?

But it is… We are, [00:06:00] in point of fact, in the same period that we saw from about 1914 to the 1950 region, okay? This was the end of the empires, the beginning and rise of the nation states and then the [00:33:00] sort of Bretton Woods system the economic structure was gold-backed, and then in 1971 there was a similar situation to right now… where we changed the Bretton Woods system, we shut down the gold window in Washington… Sorry in New York and we said, “Look from now on, you can’t draw gold,” because the number of dollars that were out there were much higher than the available gold in Fort Knox. And so now we have a petrodollar, and that’s now changing. And finally, the last piece, the Americans have a structural fiscal deficit that they can’t plug. It’s not possible. Not with trade, not with tariffs, not with anything else. The only thing that they can do is cut spending, and the only thing they can cut [00:07:00] spending on is military power. So we have the end of the American Empire.

We have the collapse of that empire [00:34:00] because of the fact that the Americans themselves have pulled back from it. And when when an old empire fractures, I don’t have to tell you that things like partition happen in India. I don’t have to tell you that local tribal histories start to flare up. The power provided by that empire when it retreats is almost always as damaging as its creation.

Emanuel: A lot to unpack there. I suppose Kevin has a few things to…

Britain was literally the second mover.

The colonial plantation [00:08:00] system, which is what modern [00:35:00] capitalism directly grew out of, came from a French aristocrat named Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the early 1600s.

Britain saw what he did and said, “Hey, that is a good idea,” and just did it better in a lot of ways, right?

Murray: That’s right.

Kevin: And then a lot of people complain about the surrendering of the gold standard in 1971, but the United States had no choice.

Murray: Not.

Kevin: One of the fundamental contradictions of a capitalist economy, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the idea of the money is in the bank, right? The money is simultaneously in the bank and not in the bank at the same time because we basically– A bank makes a loan. To the bank, that loan is an asset. To the borrower, that loan is a liability. To the borrower, it’s exactly the opposite. The loan is the [00:36:00] liability, and the deposit is the asset. And basically, [00:09:00] bank liabilities are what we call money, right? And there’s never enough money in the vault to cover all the liabilities if all the depositors show up at once and say, “I want my money,” right? So what happened in 1971 was France did a one-depositor run on Fort Knox, and they just kept sending in their claims for gold, and the US is like, “We have two choices. We either satisfy all their claims until we’re out of gold, or we stop satisfying their claims.” Those are the only options available.

Murray: That’s right.

Kevin: So the US really had no choice. It wasn’t that somebody decided to go off the gold standard. It’s that France forced a decision whose outcome was inevitable.

Emanuel: Always the French. Something else.

Kevin: Always the French, yeah.

Emanuel: Toujours. Something else caught [00:37:00] my attention when you spoke. The poles were changing and everything will go back to Europe. I [00:10:00] think that if you ask the majority of people, or at least the thought leaders would say that somewhere in Asia would be the next center.

You said Europe.

Kevin: And I am one of those people.

Emanuel: And you said Europe, Murray. And let me ask you why is that? And most people will tell you China will be the dominant leader.

Why do you say Europe?

And Which

Murray: to be clear, I’m not saying Europe becomes the [00:38:00] global hegemon. I said that Europe becomes the capital of the West once more.

China is the largest Asian hegemon, and they’re all billion-plus people. If you want the equivalent cohort for us, what you need is North America, Australia, Oceania, and Europe put together. This is the [00:39:00] white… If you want to think about races the white races. And the West was really what came out of the white race.

And then all of a sudden, Europe was burned to the ground, okay? In [00:40:00] World War II, it was leveled. And when I say leveled, I mean nothing left, okay? We literally carpet bombed Northern Europe into stones, okay? And the capital moved to DC. That’s how that capital moved, and most of the time when a capital moves, it’s after it’s been burned to the ground, okay?

So nobody voluntarily gives it up. The Brits, they had their capital burned to the ground, and they had their financial system burned to the ground. And so [00:13:00] Washington didn’t win through conquest. Washington won just like Ottawa won because we were the only two capitals left on the planet outside of Sydney, or sorry, Canberra. And if you think about that structure, you are never going to have 300 million people rule over 750 million for very long, no matter how much more productive Americans are. The European Union is the economic population intellectual [00:41:00] epicenter of the West, whether we like it or not, and this nonsense that, “Oh, Silicon Valley,” and all this… Look, we invented steam power and electricity in Britain, and within 30 years it was everywhere and we were irrelevant in those industries are dead. So I don’t ever want somebody to think because Silicon Valley, starting with the chip manufacturing at Bell Labs, say, moving to the West Coast and then this flourishing that included my companies back in the 2000s, that is permanent in any way.

There’s no [00:14:00] intellectual property in Silicon Valley that, that can be kept away. The genie’s out of the bottle. That’s it. Anybody can build technology now. When I was a dot comer, there was a very unique set of things in the United States that allowed this to happen, the ancient network for DARPA. Okay? Now we didn’t have that anywhere [00:42:00] else, and so you had to always go through Mae East and Mae West in the United States, old stuff, but we’ve distributed that architecture now, okay? It’s done.

Americans are now competing with Chinese people who can build this stuff at one-fifth the cost, or Indians that do it from their bedrooms with a shitty Internet connection, and they have every bit the capability that we do. And so what you end up with is not Europe becomes the hegemon globally, but we’re entering something like the Concert of Europe, where you don’t have a single hyper power like Britain or the United States. What you have now are once more competing empires. So this is 1870 to [00:15:00] 1914 all over again, okay? And by that, I mean it’s going to be unstable. Europe will be one of the four or five poles in the world that, that [00:43:00] wields the most power. And I have every belief that China will rise to be the equivalent of Europe in terms of economic power, but it won’t be any more powerful than those groups at all.

There’s this, “Oh, China’s gonna overtake the US.” Yeah, the US, not the West. The West and the US are two very different things.

Kevin: It would require that the EU charter be changed, but it’s not as bizarre a thought as it sounds.

Murray: I would say, look, [00:16:00] my two cents on this is we just dumped the long relationship with an empire that we come out of. Then we dump a hanger-on relationship through [00:44:00] CUSMA with the Yanks. Look, it’s lovely to be able to be part of other things. What the hell do we need a partnership for that?

We’re the only country on Earth that can shut the doors tomorrow, and need nothing.

They learned their lessons from World War II when the European Union was built, and that is too much centralized control eventually leads to some nutcase running the place and you don’t want that. What you need is subnational release valves, and that’s why the Treaties of Rome, the Treaties of [00:45:00] Maastricht, which form the core of the European [00:17:00] Union, are as loosely written as they are. The European Union has about six levels of integration, if you think about the sort of core group, and then you think about the non-Schengen, and then you think about the Euro, and you think about the security relationships and the security blankets. I don’t think that Canada becoming a highly integrated partner of the EU is a bad idea.

It’s as simple as that. You do some relationship for [00:46:00] the finances, but Canada becomes baked into it the same way that NATO has its high command. I’m not sure that everybody realizes just how integrated NATO is, okay? Whether the Yanks leave or not, nobody cares. It’s [00:18:00] not like it used to be where that would have been a major problem, okay?

All right? That’s number one. Number two, we’ll send the Ukrainians after him, and he’ll run. Okay, bye.

Kevin: Actually, you’ve brought up what I [00:47:00] think is a really significant point in terms of the way things are changing, ’cause yeah, Ukraine is really holding their own against the superior force of Russia, and Iran is holding their own against the superior forces of the United States and Israel. The buzzword being thrown around is asymmetric warfare. But basically, the damage that the Ukrainians and the [00:19:00] Iranians have been able to do with relatively inexpensive drones and ballistic missiles has completely changed, in my opinion geopolitics on a go-forward basis.

Everyone’s talking about…

Murray: okay?

Kevin: What’s that?

Murray: It’s like the longbow.

Kevin: Yeah, very much… very much…. everyone keeps talking about Iran and their

Murray: Yep.

Kevin: At will.

This is the story that [00:20:00] comes out of our Bible, okay? David versus Goliath.

And he knew exactly how to beat Goliath’s ass. It’s called leverage, all right? That’s it. Small guys, you put them in a corner, you’re done. And empires should listen [00:49:00] to the risks of history. Never pick a fight with somebody who is existentially threatened, because if you lose the credibility of the empire. But if they win, they become a great power, and if they lose, it just doesn’t matter. They’re the little guy fighting for, good and country.

Emanuel: Arguably.

Murray: The United States and all of these groups are now facing these Davids that are frankly embarrassing them.

The keyword was there. Speaking of the current affair over there and choking the oil prices that inevitably will drive [00:50:00] up some major consequences economically around the world, not just in North America or in that part of the world. What are those? What are we to expect short term, long term?

Obviously, we won’t be probably consuming that much either, but Canada, it’s a place that really has everything that that we need. So what short term and long term should we expect?

Murray: Yeah. So that’s it’s probably the most important question that we can answer about this whole affair. I’m brought back to the ’70s again, the crisis we talked about [00:51:00] in Bretton Woods 1971, I think was the gold window with Nixon. That was also the last time we had a major oil crisis, okay?

And back then, I want people to remember that oil and gas products were the lion’s share of the energy of the world. You’re talking about almost 100%, okay of, generating capacities. Pre-nuclear, you’ve only had one or two plants, hydro was just coming online a little bit… You had most of your energy, whether it was transport or airplanes or manufacturing, all this run by those. And so the oil [00:23:00] impact back then, the oil crisis back then, in my opinion, contrary to a lot of pundits today, I think was much worse because it touched absolutely every portion of a human’s life in a way that- The market back then was unable to respond to, okay? Now, that was a very different [00:52:00] world than today, okay? There were only eight or nine manufacturing countries then. The rest of them bought stuff and sold stuff into those countries. It was almost a mercantile structure globally in terms of trade. And today, one of the beautiful things that we have that didn’t exist then is we roughly now have 60 to 80 really good trading countries in the 200 or so countries that exist in the world, giving us diversification against any of these shocks, okay?

And so if you look at the impacts that you’ve had on the metrics like market or the rest of these things, the markets are not afraid of this as an oil shock. They don’t care, as a [00:24:00] matter of fact. The oil companies are facing a bit of a problem because they have costs that go up. People manufacturing, say, mice from Microsoft buying the plastic, [00:53:00] buying the oil for their stuff, they pay a little bit more. But then they’ll source their chips from a different country, they’ll balance out their supply chains, and we do it in real time thanks to the Internet. It took weeks and months to make a change like that in the old days. Before you even knew something bad was happening… it was weeks before you got good data, even in the ’70s, where telephones were everywhere. But today capitalism is so efficient because of the Internet that I really don’t even care about the oil shock in the short term. But I will say this. I come out of out of the working class, okay? And I will say that if there is going to be a problem, there’s going… It’s going to be that there’s a certain group of people in society for whom an extra $100 [00:54:00] a month is catastrophic, okay?

And I want to be clear on this point. [00:25:00] There is no revolution. There is no destabilization of the planet. This Iran core moves, who cares, okay? But for democracies, this is a major issue when you’re talking about the portability of votes. And so we’re gonna have a vote, Canada, in the next couple of years, and depending on how prices play out here, depending on how unemployment plays out here… that lower quintile the lower two quintiles of people in the country are gonna get pretty pissed off pretty damn quick. And so the good news is I think governments have woken up to the idea that you gotta stop that. So now governments, including the most recent Liberal government here in Canada with Mark Carney at its head, they’re sending out checks, two grand, 1,000 bucks. They’re making square the people [00:55:00] who have no money. And as a consequence, I’m not worried. And this may sound like, “Oh, no big deal,” but I actually think this is no big deal. [00:26:00] The issue is not that. In my estimation, the issue is… does this, in addition to Ukraine, provide opportunity for a third theater to open up in the Pacific?

Emanuel: It’s the one we’re all concerned about that will inevitably reflect in…

Murray: Now that would be a crisis. Ninety percent of high-end chips block, I’d really start to worry, okay? Oil, I could care less.

Kevin: There is an aspect of the oil shock that could be a really big deal relatively soon, and we have to wait and see how it pans out. It’s true that oil is not 100% of our energy, but it’s still an incredibly high percentage. I’d have to look up the details, but [00:56:00] it’s incredibly high. People don’t realize the extremely tight coupling between energy consumption and GDP. So I saw somebody do a mapping between them, and if [00:27:00] you do a world GDP and world energy consumption, the correlation is 0.98.

And then if you do a correlation in the change of energy consumption with the change of GDP, it doesn’t correlate quite that high, but it still correlates incredibly high. So the closing of the Straits of Hormuz starved the world of 20% of the daily oil production. Now, daily oil production is 100 million barrels a day, so now it’s 80 million barrels a day. And the problem is not that the states inside the Persian Gulf can’t continue to produce oil, but they have limited storage capacity.

So if you’ve got no place to put it, you’re gonna stop pumping it, right? So since then, nations around the [00:57:00] world have been dipping into their strategic reserves in order to keep the supplies as high as possible. Once those reserves are depleted, then global daily oil consumption must [00:28:00] drop to 80 million barrels a day, ’cause that’s all there is, right?

And if that happens, global GDP drops by 20%, and it stays dropped until the oil starts flowing again. That could be a problem.

Murray: Big problem.

Emanuel: Where should we start? We were Pacific? Taiwan?

Murray: we were almost at the forthcoming China-Taiwan war.

Emanuel: So it’s happening basically what you’re saying or…

Murray: Do you know, there’s something really… There’s a wild card in that equation that I hadn’t thought about for ever, okay? And, it’s not the wild card you might think. So there’s two possibilities for the future, okay? China continues the plan, which is 2027, we’re gonna really be pushing like a [00:58:00] bunch of nutters, okay?

We’re gonna have a military capable of doing it and, we may even go so far as blockade or a few other things. The United States is writing their script, okay? It’s a distant blockade of Hormuz. This is [00:29:00] not hard. You don’t have to invade, throw in a few missiles, couple of things across.

You don’t have to use those nice boats they have with the big sorta big gigantic cranes on them. These are landing ships. That’s scenario one. Scenario two is that China sees that they’re no longer the bad guy in the world, and decides, “Holy shit we can become the hegemon without having to wreck stuff.” And that’s a bigger boon to our credibility long term that the soft– the what’s called the comprehensive national power index that they like to think about, which they invented to try to understand [00:59:00] why the West wins at everything and they lose. They now understand what comprehensive national power is. And I wonder, and I’ll put this question out to you guys now, they haven’t seen an opportunity because Trump has been so ridiculous in his behavior that by comparison, the Chinese [00:30:00] could actually come out of this no longer as a pariah state that was somehow taken over and now we gotta begrudgingly respect them, but as an actual peacemaker.

Emanuel: I think that’s a solid opinion in many people’s eyes. They actually think that. For starters, they made investments around the world. Now, strategic investments, of course, to manipulate, to control, and so forth. But we need to remember that the people and the majority of the population, they made those investments, didn’t have any kind of alternative.

So it was a Godsend as they say it. So for sure [01:00:00] that’s something– That’s a narrative that can happen. I’m not entirely percent sure. Probably it’s gonna take a little bit of more work. It’s not gonna be easy, but it’s not this unlikely scenario. It’s not too sci-fi.

Kevin: China seems to be doing that already, and they’ve been doing it for several years. They’re going [00:31:00] around the world… Let me back up a bit. I’m gonna go back in history, right? So We have this idea that colonialism is something that happened in the past. Colonialism was structures built around resource extraction. Structures built around resource extraction have not gone away. We just do it differently. And when I say we, the dominant economic powers on Earth.

China is in the resource extraction game just as much as the United States and Europe is. They just seem to do it a little bit differently. So China has been [01:01:00] going around the world and making trade deals with countries where they’re building airports, they’re building maritime shipping terminals, and what they want is access to the resources that country has to offer, but they’re not doing it in a World Trade Organization way.

Now I’m clearly not an expert on this, but I listen to podcasts, I read articles. I’m [00:32:00] paying attention to this thing called BRICS, which is… people complain about these BRICS people are doing a currency, and actually I’ve seen very little evidence that they want a currency. They want a completely separate trading system. They want to replace the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund with different institutions who, in their mind, do it in a way that is more fair to the Global South. And China is just– seems to be all over that. They are just in BRICS [01:02:00] world so deep, and they’re going all over the world, and they’re providing money for projects and blah, blah, blah. And the deal is, and then we have access to your nickel, to your copper, to your oil, to your whatever, right? And all that stuff goes back to China, where they then use it as inputs to manufacturing process and they build finished goods which they then sell around the world. To a large extent, it’s a kinder, gentler form of 200 years ago [00:33:00] European expansionism around the world, where they did the same thing but with cannons and bayonets.

Murray: I think you’ll be surprised to hear that I’m one of the people who don’t think that the British colonial project was evil. And this is the… I think that the, I think that the Chinese foreign policy is, as you said, almost identical to, say, Cecil [01:03:00] Rhodes and his gang, okay? So it’s the way you managed things back then was guns and troops.

That, that was it. Cannons and the rest. Today, you don’t hear about a security force that’s protecting a mine wiping out a village anymore. It just happens quiet, okay? So I don’t think anybody’s any more gentle today than they were then. As a matter of fact, I think that it’s nonsense to say that they were bad.

In point of fact, the exact description that you said about building forts and roads and railroads and things, that was the exact offer that we made and everybody’s made through all empires throughout history, okay? We’ll give you all the benefit of being part of [00:34:00] our thing, some security, some dough, some this. In exchange, we want some concession, whatever that concession is, pass-through water resources. It’s always been the same. [01:04:00] Having said that China is only new at this game in a sense, okay? If you think about the British project and then you think with the iterations it went through, oftentimes the restructuring of the British project where people were pissed off about it was exactly because people had gone and tried to burn the shit out of everything that was created within that capital structure that we just described, and then the Brits defended it. And you can think about Lucknow, you can think about any number of the Northwest Rebellion in India. You can think about all of this stuff as the normative structure of a society that’s global, and that’s what I think of as empire. When you have distant regions that you’re managing from the center, good luck, okay? There’s always gonna be some nutcase that’s out in the middle of that structure who does [01:05:00] something stupid and the center gets blamed. But the fact of the matter is [00:35:00] that’s the nature of the game. To think that China’s any gentler… I’ll go with I have a different opinion on that. But if we come back to the core of China’s imperial project now, if we want to call it that, just to articulate what you said, the sort of Belt and Road Initiative, which is the money thing that you talked about where they’re building stuff or frankly creating the conditions where they map a non-dollar denominated world order, which is their primary goal.

They don’t really care if it’s currency or not. What they care about is that their currency becomes the core of a system that can’t be blocked by the Americans. Because anybody today, through the SWIFT system, through the Bank of International Settlements, which Mark Carney famously ran, they…

[01:06:00] You can’t do anything if anybody in the West decides to turn off the spigot. You’re done. So you have, BRICS that started about, about 15 years ago, but that’s why I say I think China’s gonna recalibrate because the Europeans are now doing [00:36:00] exactly the same thing, creating their own payment rail and their own currency rail and their own institutions that are adjacent to but complementary to the World Bank, the IMF or the SWIFT system. There’s already a Euro rail that’s been created for euro payments. I don’t have to tell you this is gonna drop 60% of dollar demand overnight. And so… here’s, what, BRICS plus Europay, if I could just call it that for fun it’s just a… I don’t know what it’s ultimately gonna be, but this new structure is the end of empire for America. And by that the currency is no [01:07:00] longer a currency where they can print ad infinitum without inflation. That’s the kinda definition I’m working with. This is why Nixon pulled off the gold standard, because otherwise inflation was coming and if he didn’t do that they would’ve had no control.

And so the theory behind this now is I think we’ve seen that a hegemonically managed world [00:37:00] eventually leads to the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so DC is now seen even by people in Ottawa, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and London as a weird place now, okay?

It’s not a place you go to do business. It’s not a place where you go to… that deal you signed we’re not too sure if that’s bankable. I’m not sure we’d recognize that deal just yet from an accounting standpoint. That’s a problem, okay? And if China just sits back and quietly [01:08:00] says, “We’re moving away from this Taiwan thing,” you will have countries embrace them today in a way that will force them to choose to be part of that international community because of the fact that international community will wipe them out if you touch our damn chips, okay? There’s the incentive.

Kevin: For what it’s worth, one of the podcasts I listen to is called “The Odd Lots Podcast,” and the most [00:38:00] recent episode I listened to was a guest who had just written a book about the China-Taiwan relationship. So I’m relaying his opinion in this, and he says China will never relinquish their claim on Taiwan. They view that as an unresolved issue in the Chinese Civil War. However, according to this guy, his prediction is they will never initiate armed aggression against Taiwan because of what you just said. They recognize the damage they would [01:09:00] do, not just to the global economy, but to themselves if they were to do so. So his prediction is, and he framed this as “This is just how they do it,” slow, methodical, patient economic coercion until Taiwan one day democratically decides to rejoin China. Now the problem with that is that the people in Taiwan who might democratically vote to do that, saw what happened to the people in Hong Kong when they did that, [00:39:00] and he says, “So that may have set the process back by 100 years, but they’ll just wait it out,” right?

Murray: They will. It’s a society that’s eight, nine thousand years old and counting, okay? When we think about North America even Emanuel from Europe, he’s from where all our history comes from, okay? The idea is that I think that because America’s behavior has been so bad, China has less [01:10:00] incentive to mess around with Taiwan. And I’ll point out that Taiwan and China are functionally the same country.

They’re two halves of a civil war that is not over, Okay? The Kuomintang famously went to Formosa, set up shop, and eventually that became Taiwan after Nixon went to China and said, “Okay, we’re gonna give the PRC the seat at the UN and you, Taiwan, you’ll hang out and we’ll do a special relationship.

We’ll give you money, dough, and defense.” Okay? That old structure, I don’t think anybody disagrees that [00:40:00] there’s one country, okay, between these two places. Nobody, not even the West disagrees with that. The only question is, can you settle the matter with war or not? So long as it’s peaceful, nobody cares, but if it goes to war, until now there’s been this sort of concept that the West invades. This is the [01:11:00] last theater of World War II, just to be clear. Okay? Very important to understand. The war started in China, World War II, and it’s gonna finish in China. We often say World War I and World War II are, two parts of the same war. Actually, if we end up with the Taiwan-China war, it will have been one century long where we’ve been fighting the same damn thing, and if that happens, North and South Korea are likely to go at it, and Japan will not put up with that shit and is rearming like a nutter. I think the prediction is stability, at least for the foreseeable future, because there’s enough deterrence power in Asia now [00:41:00] to keep China from saying, “This is a better outcome.” And more than that, all they have to do is sit back and be quiet because America’s embarrassing themselves. And [01:12:00] when America embarrasses themselves, people become very tolerant of a trading nation that wants to buy your stuff but they don’t have democracy.

Okay? All right. How much oil you want?

Emanuel: My question is, and again, a nice segue into the technology segment of where I’m interested in. You said currency. What about the emergence of the, for lack of a better word, independent or the digital currencies that tend to manifest? First of all, we have all the countries right now are issuing digital currencies in one form or the other.

That’s one thing, right? The centralized digital currencies. That’s just another method. But where does this… and we’re talking specifically about blockchain and specifically, [00:42:00] about Bitcoin. Where does this play in all this? Because one, to produce these, you need a enormous amount of energy to do this.

And also if we noticed, whenever ships want [01:13:00] to pass by through this Hormuz Strait. Apparently the payment and the scams, but also the real payments are happening, not in gold and not in silver and not in US dollars, but in Bitcoin, which is a highly volatile currency.

Kevin: Actually, I was reading an article that’s not exactly what’s happening. Apparently, what the Iranian said is, “We will accept a variety of forms of payment. We will not accept US dollars.” And then they had a negotiation like, “What have you got?” And the guy’s I got Yen, I got Rubles, I got Bitcoin.”

And they’re like, “Okay, I’ll take that. I’ll take that. I’ll take that,” right?

So it’s not just cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is something they will accept, but the only [00:43:00] requirement is it cannot be US dollars.

Murray: Republic credits? Republic credits? We need something more real out here in the outer rim.

Okay? [01:14:00] No, they… I don’t know if you’re a Star Wars fan or not…

Emanuel: PC points.

Murray: But…

Emanuel: PC points we have here in Canada, President’s Choice points, like the supermarket. You buy something and you get PC points, right? Then you get discounts. So maybe they’ll accept that. Anything that’s not US dollars, right?

Murray: Let’s do a little history on what a currency is, okay? Currency’s an agreement between people that a medium of exchange has value, okay? Canada, before we had the Canadian dollar, we had playing cards with stamps on it, okay? Or in other places, a bag of salt, okay? Or saffron, or… currencies come and go. We had one dominant currency at the end of the World War II, and we… Because the original dominant currency, which stopped being dominant during World War II, was the British pound. 90% of all international transactions [01:15:00] settled in British pounds, okay? By the end of World War II, none. [00:44:00] Very simple, okay? All American dollars ’cause Bretton Woods and this…

It wasn’t Bretton Woods right away, but it was the only currency left and eventually formalized into the serpentine Bretton Woods. Okay. So we know that a currency has everything to do with the geopolitics of the time. All right? The Deutschmark was a very powerful currency in 1913, okay? You could get a pound for 20 Deutschmarks then, and by the end of 1918, it was 45,000 Deutschmarks to one pound. And there’s no difference, all right? It’s just do you accept it or not? So what the Iranians did, because all oil contracts were priced in American dollars prior to Iran’s announcement, all of them, okay? Now, you broke that. Now, oil contracts are priced in whoever’s buying it currencies. The Chinese are [01:16:00] using this as an opportunity to say, “Oh, my currency’s not convertible? Go fk you.” Okay? That’s what they’re doing. Now their currency is totally [00:45:00] convertible because of the fact that anybody will accept it. So you know what’s gonna come next? Banks are gonna want to start to accept it and they’re gonna start to lobby the US government and the European government and say, “Look, renminbi we need to get the RMB to be able to be traded. The Americans screwed us. Let’s now open up that market.” The WTO, who cares?

We create our own trading bloc. It’s just what’s happening, okay? You’re getting multiple trading blocs, multiple legal system, multiple payment rails, multiple distribution structures, multiple no single point of failure in currency, in trade, in resource availability, and the further we go down this road, the less dependent we are on hegemons. And so [01:17:00] hegemons, eh, I’m not fussed. I don’t really care. What I care about… is your country set up to flourish in this new structure? And I gotta tell you something. In that new world, there’s one country that stands above all others in its ability to adapt, [00:46:00] okay? And I live in it, and I think all of us are in Canada right now, if I’m not mistaken. But the… Or actually, is one of us down in Alabama?

Kevin: Arkansas.

Murray: Arkansas. So sorry, not too far. Okay. So down in Arkansas. North America in general can shut the door and not care, okay? Look, we just approved another pipeline in the States. Why? Because we fight in public, but in private, we’re like, “Shut up. Don’t tell anybody,” okay?

It’s… That, that’s how it is in North America, okay? Our biggest customer for oil now, US. The [01:18:00] biggest customer after the new trade deal, US. Nothing’s gonna change. And Canada is gonna put pipes east, west, and north now, and we’re gonna sell everything we’ve got because the environmental nonsense is over. We got back to the business of being an exporting state with everything everybody wants. Now, because of that fact, the United States as a hegemon goes away. But this is not, as people have been [00:47:00] saying, America’s end. There’s nothing further from the truth than this. What’s gonna happen is America’s not gonna have the headache of having to manage the China zone, and they’re not gonna have the headache of managing the European zone. They can take care of themselves now because they’re no longer broke and flattened, okay? And so America will remain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But there’s only 330 million Americans, and that’s the [01:19:00] limitation, okay? Without empire, the reach is not the same. Now it becomes one in a concert of, say, three or four different organizations that are of that scale and have that kind of influence. And so the euro, if you look at settlements today you probably, prior to this nonsense, you probably had one in $10 were settled in euro versus nine in $10 that were settled in dollars. And now you’re starting to knock on 60% for American dollars. It’s a huge change, okay? And that’s reflective that it’s not [00:48:00] a reflection that dollar’s bad, it’s a reflection that the international demand for dollars is dropping. And so this is what killed our empire.

When the pound was no longer demanded, do you know what our problem was? We had a mountain of debt bigger than the Americans will ever have, okay? We were into the 230, [01:20:00] 250% range after World War II from a GDP standpoint. The Americans are… What are you guys at, a buck 30 or something max? It’s a nothing burger. It’s a nothing burger. But if it keeps up and you end up at a 200% level, then you lose the wealth too, just like the Brits did, okay? They lost empire and local wealth all at once. And so the Americans’ best job right now is to lean in on their technical dominance, lean in on their cultural dominance, and lean into their trade, and in the meantime, try to balance their books.

And through hook or crook, Trump’s gonna do it, okay? He’s doing whatever he does to get it done. But if I was in Trump’s [00:49:00] position, I’d do the same thing. Now, I’m an economist, okay? He’s right, and this is the part that people don’t get. [01:21:00] I lived in the US for 20 years. I don’t think people understand how shitty it is to be a working-class person in America and having paid the price for all of the wealth that was created in that country, okay?

The trading relationship replaced the working-class American who was doing very well in the ’60s and the ’70s with something of an underclass, okay? And it’s the Chinese and the Filipinos and everybody else that got those manufacturing jobs that are now middle class, okay? Rolling in their BYDs and their whatever.

It’s… And the Americans got screwed, okay? And when I say screwed, I mean screwed in a way you can’t possibly imagine. Trump is not anomalous, nor is he ridiculous. He is channeling something extremely powerful in the better part of 100 million people. And I think that you should think about [00:50:00] that because in our [01:22:00] own empire, it was the exact same people that toppled it. At the end of World War II, the people famously stood up and said, “Clement Attlee.” Okay? Clement Attlee, Prime Minister, not the hero Churchill. Okay? We were done. We wanted to have a society that had Medicaid and retirement packages and babysitting and all the stuff you need to have a decent society. Okay? And ever since, Britain has been a, what you would call a social structure country just like Canada. And you’re gonna see that as empire comes down, you’re gonna see the American people step up and demand I’ll call a new deal to use sort of the FDR parlance, but a stronger new deal that includes health, that includes universality to a lot of these things, and that’s gonna be the price of empire that’s gonna finally say, “I’m not gonna spend more on [01:23:00] military than I spend on people.”

Emanuel: Will it be a civil war that will eventually lead [00:51:00] to these demands, or will it be peaceful?

Murray: It’s gonna be very peaceful, and the reason it’s gonna be peaceful is ’cause I’m building it. Okay? So the idea that kind of a revolution isn’t peaceful I think is, it’s kinda, it’s old hat. It was peaceful in Britain too. Remember, democracies, especially old democracies like Canada and the United States and Britain you must remember what a parliament is. Okay? Why is the distance between the people X? It’s exactly the distance of two swords. Okay? That’s what that aisle up the middle is. You stand a sword’s distance to the person you’re fighting opposite. It’s war by other means. This is really important. So I have great faith that Britain, America, Canada, France, all of the European democracies will [01:24:00] all find their way without devolving into the old civil war, say, that the United States or Britain famously had 1,000 times. [00:52:00] Okay? We don’t need that anymore because Trump, for all of his bluster and his problem and everybody thinks he’s gonna cancel the election. It’s… Sure, he can try. But if you mess with the American judicial system and democratic system like that, I think Trump’s in for a rude awakening. The American system is the longest standing democratic system in the modern sense outside of Britain. Britain’s the oldest, of course. We invented parliament. We are the mother of all parliaments. But the United States is second.

Kevin: I would like to segue into your bigger project because it’s a super interesting project, but I want to make one comment about Trump because I have a significant frustration about Trump that kind of doesn’t jive with [01:25:00] popular perception. And your point that he understands the problems perhaps even at a visceral level, like I completely agree with that. He understands that the working class has gotten [00:53:00] screwed. He understands that Wall Street is ripping everybody off, right? But then he goes one layer down and he gets all the details wrong.

Murray: Yeah.

Kevin: So his complaint is valid and his solutions are fg stupid,

Murray: Yeah.

Kevin: What do you mean blanket tarrifs across the entire world based on some weird algorithm that nobody understands, right?

Do you know what industrial policy means? And no, he doesn’t, right? But at the highest level, he really taps into the frustrations that are valid.

Murray: Yeah. Look, I gotta tell you something. I did well in the United States, ’cause I was down there on an H visa, which means you had to qualify to be [01:26:00] a certain 90%– You had to be more qualified than 90% of people, and … I lived well. I had Microsoft health insurance. It was great experience for Murray going down to the States.

You get everything the same down there as you get here. Yeah, except that I’m going to the Bellevue Hospital, not the county hospital, okay? It’s… And you [00:54:00] don’t realize this until you grow up a bit and you’re not in your twenties and self-involved. But then to have a dinner and have two people at the dinner after their fourth wine glass start bawling ’cause they can’t take their kid to a hospital… these are moments in your life where you sorta, you understand it better.

“I’m gonna lose my home because my husband got cancer. I’m gonna…”. Those are the… The rest of this stuff is noise. I think in the long run, democracies [01:27:00] are safe. In the short run, they’re destabilized. But I think that’s as good a segue as any for me to answer your original question Emanuel, which is…

Emanuel: Who are you and what do you do?

Murray: How the hell do you fix this shit, okay?

Because the truth is that Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau, who was in before Prime Minister Carney…

Emanuel: Or Or better known as Katy Perry’s boyfriend.

Murray: Oh, yeah. It is perfect.

Kevin: Can I make on interjection for viewers and listeners?

Emanuel: Please.

Kevin: Murray is here because of what we’re [00:55:00] about to talk about. This was an almost hour-long just to get That’s okay, the warm-up is all that matters, okay? Because then the answer becomes painfully obvious.

Murray: If we leave things the way they are, it’s going to be Emanuel’s civil war, okay? And, let me tell you [01:28:00] something. Trudeau and Trump seem to be polar opposites, right? They seem to be the complete opposite of each other.

You got a commie on one side, you got a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist on the other side. You’ve got an ultra-feminist woke, and you’ve got a super Tea Party kinda guy. But guess what? They’re both exactly the same thing, and they’re just like you said, Kevin. They got elected because they knew how to tap into the social media zeitgeist. Let me be clear, the social media zeitgeist, okay? If you place a post correctly, you win. If you have the right groups posting, you win. That’s it. The whole electoral process has been captured by social media. [00:56:00] The only data set that matters for elections today is not polling or the rest, it’s social media. And that data set is so large that it took the traditional data [01:29:00] set, and it… And I don’t know if much about cosmology, but Stephenson is the largest star in the universe, okay? It’s 50 times the size of 130 astronomical units out to the Oort cloud. You could see it in the galaxy if you were looking at the galaxy as a whole. And it’s so big and so ridiculous that everything else doesn’t matter. Now, just like that, social media is so big and outshines everything else that all of the other stuff, like the executive power, the legislative power, the judicial power, the media, like TV, like newspapers, like websites, it’s all a rounding error in what’s called the share of voice.

So If the share of voice on social media is, say, 100 orders of magnitude, which is 10 zeros, so 100 zeros, just so [00:57:00] we’re clear, 100 orders of magnitude greater than all of the rest [01:30:00] combined, what chance is it that our democracy is being run by the electorate? Statistically, the answer is zero. You want to talk about a correlation, there isn’t one, okay? So it’s…

Kevin: There’s a famous, it’s called the Yale study, I think, where it presents evidence that if you’re not a major donor, your voice doesn’t matter.

Murray: But in fact, it was Princeton. Yeah, it was Princeton, and it said specifically that if you had 100% of people’s support and you had 0% of people’s support, the probability that you would get anything passed is the same, 30%. If you had a lobbyist or you were rich and you were influential, 66%. And these are completely independent of each other, meaning that the people removed from the equation changes nothing in the answer, okay?

And so Kevin, you’re nailing it. So here’s the short version, and I have [01:31:00] a paper [00:58:00] coming out on this subject that quantifies the size of the fifth estate.

So I’m not just speaking out of my ear here.

Kevin: Define the fifth estate for our listeners.

Murray: I call it the fifth estate. That’s the social Internet, okay? The fifth estate. So the first estate, executive. The second estate is the judicial. The legislative is the third. Media is the fourth. These are the order of arrival, by the way.

Kevin: Yeah.

Murray: So Magna Carta gave us the common law, which is the judicial. The printing press gave us the sort of media groups. And then finally the civil wars in Britain gave us parliament, or in your case, you might like the French. Or apparently there was some other Viking group up in the north that you’re into a little bit.

They were doing parliaments, and then I claim the [01:32:00] Greeks. But in essence, what we’re saying is, those three things that run our countries, the three co-equal branches of government that we all learn about on how a bill becomes law. It has effectively been replaced by social media.

Emanuel: Montesquieu[00:59:00]

Murray: Do you know that they…

Do you know there was a party here in Ontario that, that ran a campaign and did no door-knocking, ground games, or signs?

And still did as well as they did in the prior election?

Kevin: So their primary tool was social media?

Murray: Only social media.

Emanuel: Is it the liberal?

Murray: And it was the first time I’d ever seen it in practice, right? Now, my paper quantifies the issue at several hundreds of orders of magnitude greater influence from social media in voter… What’s called… The scholarly sector is called agenda setting, if you want to go and look [01:33:00] this up. Agenda setting is how the government determines what they’re gonna fight over. Okay? And right now the number one determinant for what the government is gonna fight over is what is trending on social media, okay? Literally. But it also means, to your point, and this Kevin was a very prescient point you made, is that also means that incompetent politicians are now the favored [01:00:00] politicians, because we’re not interested in people who do stuff or are competent or good fiduciaries or great people to manage an asset that’s worth hundred trillion dollars, like Canada, okay?

We’ve got a three and a half trillion dollar economy. You would say a country’s worth 100X on its its total wealth. The United States is a thirty-five trillion dollar economy. It’s worth 100 times that in terms of market cap. You think about sending somebody in there to manage it, [01:34:00] you would think you’d want competence, okay? But instead, we get Trump and Trudeau. I don’t have to tell you that neither of these people are what you would consider the geniuses. Now, Mark Carney happens– We happen to have gotten a genius out of this, okay? Smartest man in the world.

Kevin: Yeah, you really dodged a bullet on that one.

Murray: I don’t know how the hell that happened, but it was like… I was so delighted that fear finally switched people in Canada of choosing somebody who’s not an idiot, okay? [01:01:00] Really. And I think the same’s gonna happen in America as that pressure starts to be applied to it. We have a bad economic situation combined with the Chinese are coming, so if you think about back to the old, “The Russians are coming,” and all this sort of stuff, Americans, they have a lot [01:35:00] of patience for bullshit, but when they are done, they’re done, and they switch like that in terms of politics.

I watched it happen from the 2000s to the 2015s where we went through that whole Tea Party was an anomaly, and by the end of it, you ended up with Trump. And so it happens fast, and I think this idea that countries are so rich and hegemonically powerful that they can hire idiots, it’s just like it’s a fg tree that prints money. I think we’ve realized that’s not necessarily guaranteed, and I think you’re gonna see that the sovereign of the nation of America, and every other one for that matter, they’re gonna start to tend towards the Carney’s of the world, okay? Competent leadership [01:02:00] again. For whatever you want to talk about Bill Clinton, the guy’s a smart man, knows shit, and he’s read every [01:36:00] book out there. He might have a little cigar problem the idea is that he knows… he was competent person, whether you were a Democrat or not. George Herbert Walker Bush was a bloody genius, okay? And the man was a statesman that was… that knew more about the world than almost anybody alive, okay? Even George W. Bush by comparison to what we have now today, and when I was living in the United States, you have to understand that George W. Bush was largely loved at first and then hated by the end, okay? But he was competent. And I don’t mean competent in the Carney sense necessarily, but by comparison to the Trump world, he was reasonably competent, okay? Different variations on it. We started hiring fools, and the reason we started hiring fools, and I don’t just mean America, all of Europe, all of Canada, all [01:37:00] of North America, in fact, other places as well, because it no longer mattered who [01:03:00] was in charge. We’re the bosses of the planet. Nobody’s fg with us.

Do we really care? Why are we spending so much money on government? What’s a missile missiles? Let’s have peace everywhere, kumbaya. This was the dumb of the ’60s all over again, okay? And what you ended up with is government policies that have torn it apart. The cause is human stupidity. Now, the solution is fixing human stupidity, and that’s what Citizn does.

So all of this stuff behind me right there, that’s my sorta Citizn wall where I… I’m in my office right now and this is what I do all day long. But the truth of the matter is that if you actually quantify who the people are, we have a fundamental problem making democracy direct, and that [01:38:00] is that people aren’t the brightest bulbs, Okay?

And, I don’t mean that they’re dumb. They don’t have the time to do the work to be able to understand what they need to understand to be able to give an articulate or even understand an articulate position or give informed consent on any subject. My [01:04:00] job, through Citizn, is to turn absolutely every voter into somebody capable of giving informed consent on every issue, every day through their phone, period. the way I achieve that is it turns out that AI’s really good at deciding if somebody’s dumb or smart and telling them what they need to hear so they can give informed consent. You don’t believe me? Do jury systems work? Yeah, they do, and it’s the same structure. The juries are not Mensa members.

They’re average people from average neighborhoods and they largely get picked by two [01:39:00] lawyers that are in opposition to each other trying to get the best deal for whoever, whatever. But nobody disrespects the jury, least of all the defendant, okay? This is important. You’re talking life and death.

You’re talking about bankruptcy or not, and we respect the 12-person mandate because we know it’s a controlled environment.

Emanuel: Citizn one hour in, you just introduced the name Citizn. We’re after the one hour mark. We [01:05:00] are not constrained by time, but we should navigate towards…

Kevin: We should get on topic.

Emanuel: You mentioned Citizn. What’s Citizn exactly? You mentioned, but

Kevin: Yeah.

Murray: So Citizn is the response to the last hour, okay? Imagine the last hour represents the last forty years, all right? We’ve had technology that has frankly irrevocably altered the landscape, okay? We used to manage village idiocy by keeping the village idiot in the village. But [01:40:00] now they can find each other online and create village idiot cities And therein lies the problem of the Internet. Okay? The Internet, while it connected eight billion people, it also connected various quality of eight billion people inside of that. Not everybody is a quality person. Not everybody wants good relations.

Some people just want to see the place burn. And so you have that human element on the Internet that created the 4chan and the Reddit, and this sort of subculture that was really goofy thing. But then something [01:06:00] happened. Up to that point 2012 everything was fine, okay? We had some algorithms that were treating people badly, but it was still humans behind, okay? Now we have fake humans behind social media, and by and large, about 60 or 70% of accounts on social media are fake, okay? And that number is from five years ago, [01:41:00] so I don’t even know what the number is today. But it’s some ridiculous number that we live in a world where you’re actually fighting with somebody’s AI. And what I mean by that is it looks at the response, and then it responds, gives you a choice, and you bang. And you can respond at scale. And if you’re a really lousy bad actor, you create a bot farm. You put up phones, and you see them on the walls, and you manage them with one computer, and you can start to produce content at a scale that means that the human percentage of that fifth estate is infinitesimal.

Now you see it dropping. AI content [01:07:00] or non-human content has become the lion’s share of the fifth estate. Now, who controls that content? The answer is whoever wants to. So whoever gets the biggest share of data can [01:42:00] control the American political system. That’s unacceptable. Okay? And what I mean by that is, as long American citizens, giddy up. But if it’s not American citizens controlling what American citizens think about a given law, whether federally, in Congress, or in some state legislature, there’s a lot of things that are going on there, but one of them isn’t democracy, okay? And as a consequence, we have let the management of our state fall out. This must change, and it must change in a way that makes it simple to bring back in regular voters, the people we were talking about before that got a shitty deal especially, okay? Because these are the people that are not necessarily capable of deciding if something’s good or bad that [01:08:00] they’re looking at, if it’s right or wrong, truthful or not. They don’t have the time, nor do they have the [01:43:00] inclination, and perhaps not even the education to be able to do it. But that’s no reason to let them be manipulated by foreigners And so Citizn is designed as a federation of national networks owned by and controlled by the people in that country with all residency in that country and all control of the technology local. We are a licensing organization in Toronto. Citizn, that much ARM licenses the technology into a preexisting company inside of each state, and that company, Citizn Canada, Citizn United States, Citizn France all the way through the world. I don’t think China will let it in, and I certainly don’t think Russia will let it in anytime soon, but we’re working on that, too.

We think eventually they’ll want it. But Citizn is by and large a personal chief of staff for every single [01:09:00] person in every country, and the chief [01:44:00] of staffs work with you to elevate you to that of not ignorance and work on your behalf to find consensus with the other chiefs of staff in the background so that you don’t have to be involved in the debate. But it knows what you think because it interacts with you much like Jarvis does in Iron Man, if you want to think about it like that, and it tells you what you need to know. “Oh, Carney just introduced a new bill today, the budget. What you need to know about the budget Murray, because you live downtown Toronto in a condo in Canada, is that here’s how it’s going to affect you.

You know my income, you know all this sort of stuff. The AI’s capable of telling me what I need to know. And Murray, this may affect you quite a lot ’cause you’re gonna sell [01:45:00] a cottage or you gotta think about this, you gotta do that. And then it’s capturing the essence of your opinion through that dialogue, and it deals with it for you.

You don’t answer surveys, you don’t answer nonsense, does all this bullshit of… If you just be yourself, and it will quantify [01:10:00] your will. Now, how it does that is set up by us, Citizn, the center. But that’s manipulable, just like an algorithm is manipulable. Do you want to do more of this or more of that? That’s controlled by the people of America on the app itself, so all the Americans in the Citizn app in America will have total control over the privacy policy, the algorithms, and all of that so that frankly, Elon Musk can’t fk with the Twitter algorithm and elect Donald Trump. And when you do that, there’s a consequence. It means [01:46:00] that every person can have the same dialogue the three of us are now having about politics, and they are not hobbled like they would otherwise be. They are expert in politics, every bit as capable of articulating their positions on this because just a politician, I don’t know if you know this or not, I worked at Parliament in Canada. Not every politician’s the brighest bulb. Okay? That might you, but I’m telling you they’re just average, regular people. But the [01:11:00] reason they do so well and they sound so aware is because they have powerful teams that do the triage work and the education work for them. And I intend to digitize that and make sure that every person, no matter how big or small, how weak or strong, how rich or poor, possesses that strength.

And this changes everything for one reason. Imagine a world where [01:47:00] every citizen is able to give informed consent.

Kevin: How do you prevent Citizn from being hijacked by special interests in the way that Facebook has been, for example?

Murray: You remove the public incentive to participate and be part of it with other people. Most people act stupid when other people are watching, okay? If you take away the incentive to be seen aligned, and you make the relationship with you and that chief of staff private, what incentive do I have to be on Hillary’s side or Trump’s side or whatever?

I can actually tell the chief of staff what I really think. And do you know [01:12:00] that most people, seven out of 10, do not speak publicly about what they really think? This is the middle that we often talk about politics, okay? Seven in 10 people don’t say anything at all. This is so important.

[01:48:00] Emanuel: I’m married, so…

Murray: And you’re a smart man, okay? And half of the 15% on either side, the extremists, you call them, most of those are just idiots that want to be part of something. So it turns out that if you take out the incentive to fit in, the massive insecurity that is represented by the massive society it turns out that people emancipate themselves without even knowing they’re doing it, and I digitize that.

Kevin: So it’s not a social network per se. It’s a repository of data about laws and bills and all this kind of stuff that you can interrogate and it will tell you based on your personal situation, these things should matter to you.

Murray: More than that, [01:13:00] you don’t interrogate it. It interrogates you, okay? So this isn’t ChatGPT that you can go into and ask political questions, okay? That [01:49:00] is how you get the data out. That’s how we make money, is we have a chatbot called Democracy GPT that you can go into, and if you’re a pollster, you can buy my data, okay? That’s how the Citizn platform makes money. But it’s not a social network. There are social elements to that network, meaning there’s a bit of a public feed and stuff like that. But the primary thing is not, “Here’s my breakfast, here’s what I’m doing. Oh, by the way, we’ll incidentally talk about politics or something over here.” The primary interface is you get up in the morning and Jarvis says, “Hey, Kevin, you know what? Here’s the things you need to know.” And it talks to you like you and your toothbrush, okay? And then, or whenever you want to hear it, and it will interject all day long, all week long, all [01:50:00] year long with notifications saying hey, come here. Gonna tell you this. You gotta know this shit for brains. You gotta read this. Get going.

Kevin: How does it know what I need to [01:14:00] know?

Murray: One of the byproducts of the Internet is that we have digitally mapped the persona of absolutely every person on Earth. I don’t have to know that. It’s already there. I can call one API, and I’ve got the last time you had a dump, okay? We are so far beyond digitizing who Murray is and quantifying my skills and abilities. The same applies to almost everybody. And so I would almost say that’s not a technical issue, nor, by the way, is the takeover concept. Nobody can take this over at all, and the reason is because there is no incentive to be taken over. You’re one person in verify. There’s no [01:51:00] creating fake accounts. There is no creating bot farms. There’s no pretending you’re somebody you’re not. There’s no creating a real account and leasing it out and giving credentials to people. The AI’s too smart for that, okay? That’s all old-fashioned nonsense. It’s architecturally been replaced. What’s going to happen from now on is anybody, no matter how smart they are, will have somebody [01:15:00] proactively chief-of-staffing them, just as Chrystia Freeland had a chief of staff, or Hillary Clinton had a chief of staff, or Donald Trump has one.

I don’t know. He still doesn’t listen to her. So I can’t fix dumb, but I can fix that problem.

Kevin: Word is Donald Trump’s chief of staff is the smartest person in the room, and they don’t listen to her.

Murray: She actually is brilliant. Do you know that? She’s actually a brilliant woman, but she is not my [01:52:00] kind of brilliant, okay? She’s too… She’s just too rednecky for me. It’s just I can’t do it.

Kevin: How do you verify or how does Citizn verify that the people are real people?

Murray: First off, we can do it in multiple ways, but the first is you use some form of gating, okay? I don’t know if you use Clear to go through the airport, for instance. It’s a great American tech company that does ID verification from the government. You can use that or any number of other identity providers as a first step.

Emanuel: KYC. KYC, [01:16:00] know your customer.

Murray: It’s basically KYC, but the problem is beyond that. KYC gets you the identity of the person that showed up the first time, okay? But it doesn’t guarantee that person is there as you go on, and that’s done algorithmically, okay? So what we do [01:53:00] is, on the balance of probabilities, just like your credit card if you go to Aruba all of a sudden instead of being in Arkansas, they’re gonna start to say what the hell are you doing in Aruba?

You never go there. You’re usually in Grand Cayman. Okay? And so if you’re in Aruba, not Grand Cayman, they usually say, “Call us,” okay? To get the transaction approved. We’re not doing that. I’m just using that as a metaphor for we can accept some people out of the system, and then we can put them through a battery of tests.

We can do all kinds of stuff to make sure that, bot farms and nonsense like that doesn’t come up. But the most important thing we can do is we can localize the system in such a way that it doesn’t exist outside of a geographic boundary. When you [01:17:00] [01:54:00] do that, meaning Citizn Canada is a physical institution in Canada, there’s no using, say a phone from the United States. Okay? You don’t have a local phone and address, and we can prove it over and over again. Oh, and on the Internet, all your socials and everything, which we will check, okay? On the balance of probabilities, we will continuously evaluate what the cookiesphere says you’re doing. And if you’re not who you say you are, you will lose access to that system in about five seconds, okay?

And you’ll have to prove it to get back in. And initially, that’s a problem. But once you become Facebook, if you lose Facebook today, people freak out. So you get to the point where … It makes a behavior modification in people. They aim to keep it good, just like their credit score.

Emanuel: I wanted to say that to [01:55:00] an extent, you might call it a digital consciousness of yours that’s kinda like helps you come up with the, to the right conclusions on your own, asking why this, why that, hopefully. Will that be a fair statement or at least a partial decision?

Murray: It’s a very [01:18:00] accurate statement. The the whole point is, it turns out the psychology of people is pretty fd up. If you stick them in a room with three or four people, they don’t have any opinions. People like me have opinions. Okay? Always. On my own, independent, auto-energizer bunny.

But do you know how many think I’m… think I’m crazy? Okay? “Oh, the guy’s nuts. He has opinions.” it turns out that if you remove that social component and you have a good relationship over time of trust between you and that AI, people will unload everything, and they would tell [01:56:00] you things that they will never tell anything else.

And so the theory goes that it is like having a little angel on your, shoulder going, “Hey, stupid, stop being a fg idiot,” okay? “Now wake up. This is dumb.” And then you got the bad guy. “Oh do it it.” it’s it’s a digital consciousness that says… And more than that, it’s gonna score your stuff. Okay? So let’s say you’re gonna post something. It’s gonna say, “Hey dum-dum, do you know that if you post that, you look like an [01:19:00] idiot for these reasons?” And people are not gonna want to look like idiots. I’m telling you something. You need to have a system that will really educate people properly.

And because it’s based on trust and privacy, it doesn’t matter. There’s no cost to them. They’re actually going to become great if they just follow the [01:57:00] rules, which is don’t be stupid.

Kevin: I just want to push back on the idea of consciousness. It’s a massive repository of data that interacts with me in ways that informs me of things that I need to know, But I don’t want to anthropomorphize it and give it human qualities and attributes.

I know this is like a quick segue, and I want to get back on track in a minute, but Richard Dawkins wrote an article a couple days ago in which he said…

Murray: I’m so upset by what he said. What an asshole, okay, saying that. Desperate plea for attention, in my opinion. Go ahead.

Kevin: That very well may be, right? But I heard about that, and I read people [01:20:00] who said, “Oh my God, he’s right,” and, “Oh my God, he’s an idiot.” And I can’t help but wondering if he’s just [01:58:00] trolling us as a joke. As I understand it, I have not read the article, but I’ve watched a lot of people talk about it.

He basically said, we created a Turing test that basically said, if a computer can fool us in the following ways, it must be conscious. This computer fooled us in the following ways, therefore it must be conscious. But that only works if you accept that the first premise is valid, right? That if it can fool us in a certain way, it’s conscious.

And I think, based on other things I’ve heard him say and books of his that I’ve read, that the odds that he thinks that being able to fool us in that way is evidence of consciousness, I would say is probably slim to none.

Murray: I would say that it’s evidence of dementia, okay?

So it my sort of… You [01:59:00] know, Let me be clear. The [01:21:00] Turing test, okay, that he’s speaking of has already been debunked, okay, by anybody in computer science. Okay? So the Turing test is bullshit, okay? It’s pop culture psychology nonsense. So yes, by that standard, sure, AI’s conscious. But we already know that’s not the standard of consciousness, okay? And more than that, he should have known better. All right? And his area of study, he knows the difference. Now, let me say this.

Kevin: Of all of the scientists out there, he’s the one most likely to know that very premise is bullshit, which is Yeah, and, And yet he…

help but wonder if he’s just trolling us on his way out, right?

Murray: I don’t think it’s trolling. What is the greatest incentive for the fifth estate, which is social media?

Emanuel: Attention.

Kevin: Attention.

Murray: How do you measure attention [02:00:00] as a man who has a public persona? Used to be sell tickets to your talks or sell a [01:22:00] book.

Nowadays, it’s get likes and get clicks and get shares and… Dude isn’t trolling. Dude’s selling books, okay?

Emanuel: And get three dudes to… talk about him in a podcast.

Murray: So we already have proof here at this table that Richard Dawkins has modified his expertise at the altar of attention, and somehow we don’t think politicians are doing that?

Kevin: Yeah, good point.

Murray: Therein lies the core problem that Citizn solves once and for all.

Because you know what Citizn would tell me once Richard Dawkins did that shit? And it won’t be like Facebook that says every time the word climate shows up, it fucking gives you this blur. It’ll actually say Kevin, you know that stupid thing you read? Yeah. Dude’s a nutter, okay? [02:01:00] And everything he’s ever said discounts this, and yet he’s doing it.

He’s a nutter. Stop listening to him. And guess what? You probably stop listening to him.[01:23:00]

Emanuel: So many things.

Murray: This is how we correct the world. The problem isn’t that poor people or working class people are stupid. The problem is that they don’t have the time, energy, or inclination, or perhaps the knowledge to make an appropriate decision. We solve all of those issues, and we give them the value they should have as the owners our respective countries. And I don’t think that somebody who doesn’t have an education or money is any less important than you, me, or fancy Emanuel, okay? The idea is every person in a democracy needs to be able to give an informed consent, and until that’s true, we live in something, but it is not a democracy, and [02:02:00] it’s my job to fix it.

Emanuel: I would end it here because this is such a powerful statement. I will pass it along to Kevin also to give the final words and then to Murray to actually end up before we do our promo [01:24:00] again, where to find us, where to like us and all those things. But maybe we get now a promise that you will come again and talk about whatever is hot at that time.

We love doing that. We are trying to change a little bit to try to educate ourselves in the first place and our audience as well. But I’ll leave you with that because I recently read a book. There’s this concept of capitalism without democracy, and you’ve underlined this democracy keyword a bunch of times, and it’s very important to Citizns.

So before, my suggestion would be to go to [02:03:00] Kevin, give his comments and then to you. And also please let people know where they can find more information, website, social media, LinkedIn, and your newsletter as well. But also…

Murray: Kevin, have at it.

Kevin: I just wanted to comment that I think your timing is really opportunistic. In the last election in the United Kingdom, a plumber in [01:25:00] Manchester won a seat in Parliament.

Like a working class person who in her acceptance speech apologized to her customers as “I know you’ve booked work, but I’m not gonna be able to make it because I’m going to parliament.”

Murray: Cause I’m in Westminster.

Kevin: Right now, in the state of Maine, an oyster farmer just beat, if I understand it correctly, just beat the sitting governor in the Democratic primary and is currently polling 40 points ahead of the incumbent Republican senator.

Murray: Wicked.

Kevin: He [02:04:00] has run for political office, like on the local planning board and stuff, and he went straight from that to a Senate race, and he’s probably going to win, right?

People are ready to move past the bullshit.

Murray: Yeah. People are desperate, and I’m gonna close with that because I think, Kevin, you summarized it. We are too smart [01:26:00] with the Library of Alexandria in our pockets, okay? We know just enough to know that we’re being bullshitted all day long by politicians of all stripes in all countries, okay?

This is not a US issue. We got the same nutters up here, okay? It’s same deal. The point is, we’re also smart enough to know the difference now, but we don’t yet have the tool to control it. And that tool’s coming, okay? It’s coming fast, and it’s coming furious. And I’ll tell you something. I do [02:05:00] agree with you that the timing is right. Now, I’ll say this for my shareholders that have been waiting five years, they think that it’s been a long road, okay? But you’re entirely correct. This is just the time it takes to build these companies. Gross in Silicon Valley, one of the most prolific investors that built what you would call the dot-com era, famously says almost everything in a corporation’s success is tied to timing. Forget the people, forget the idea, forget the [01:27:00] capital. That’s table stakes, okay? Timing is everything. And when you see politics pissing people off to this degree, and they’re going on social media and expressing it, this is the populace crying out for expression and to be heard, and we’re gonna give them that power, and we’re gonna return the power to the people where it bloody well belongs. Because no single group [02:06:00] of three or four hundred people has the power to dictate anything in a democracy while I have breath in me. And I think that’s maybe a great segue for me to say thank you for having me on, gentlemen.

Emanuel: And we’re gonna put links to your website and to your newsletter, but just briefly, where can people find you? Just Google Citizn, spell the…

Murray: The only thing you need to know nowadays is that Citzen has no E in it, okay? C-I-T-I-Z-N. Go look it up on Google. You’ll find thousands of entries, videos, books, pages. And look for us to be coming out in Canada [01:28:00] either end of this year or the beginning of next, and concurrently launching in the United States.

These are two very easy things for us to do here in North America, but the natural next step will then be Europe [02:07:00] and the Asias.

Emanuel: We’re gonna put links in the description. In the meantime curiouspundits.com is the website where you’ll find this episode, future episodes, previous episodes. We also have links to all the platforms that you might like to listen to podcast audio or video from YouTube, Apple, Spotify or

I don’t know if Google Podcasts, I think that’s not around anymore. But…

Murray: I think they’re done now.

Emanuel: Yeah.

But if it’s an app, most likely we’re there. Let us know what you like, what you didn’t like. If we got anything wrong because we might get some dates and some facts wrong, please correct us as well. Until the next time when Murray might be a guest as well.

And I really hope because we haven’t touched technology that much, we haven’t touched AI and LLMs, and we haven’t touched quantum. And you and I had [02:08:00] some serious conversation on that [01:29:00] aspect, and I truly think that most people should actually get that information. You gave the best definition of what AI is right now when you compared it with a non character NPC.

Murray: Non-player character.

Emanuel: An NPC essentially.

Murray: If you play video games, you’ve been using AI since the ’80s, okay?

Emanuel: And you would like… And because my opinion you have all those like pixelated characters and whenever you ask for medical advice you remember, would you ask that guy for the medical advice? So I think you shared that in a conversation or a podcast, so thank you for that.

Curiouspundits.com. Until the next time. My name is Emanuel.

Kevin: My name is Kevin.

Emanuel: Thank you for listening.

[01:30:00] provide opportunity for a third theater to open up in the Pacific?

Emanuel: It’s the one we’re all [02:09:00] concerned about that will inevitably reflect in…

Murray: Now that would be a crisis. Ninety percent of high-end chips block, I’d really start to worry, okay? Oil, I could care less.

Kevin: There is an aspect of the oil shock that could be a really big deal relatively soon, and we have to wait and see how it pans out. It’s true that oil is not 100% of our energy, but it’s still an incredibly high percentage. I’d have to look up the details, but it’s incredibly high. People don’t realize the extremely tight coupling between energy consumption and GDP. So I saw somebody do a mapping between them, and if you do a world GDP and world energy consumption, the correlation is 0.98.

And then if you do a correlation in the change of energy consumption with the change of GDP, it doesn’t correlate quite that high, but it still correlates incredibly high. [02:10:00] So the closing of the Straits of Hormuz starved the world of 20% of the daily oil production. Now, daily oil production is 100 million barrels a day, so now it’s 80 million barrels a day. And the problem is not that the states inside the Persian Gulf can’t continue to produce oil, but they have limited storage capacity.

So if you’ve got no place to put it, you’re gonna stop pumping it, right? So since then, nations around the world have been dipping into their strategic reserves in order to keep the supplies as high as possible. Once those reserves are depleted, then global daily oil consumption must drop to 80 million barrels a day, ’cause that’s all there is, right?

And if that happens, global GDP drops by 20%, and it stays dropped until the oil starts flowing again. That could be a problem.

Murray: Big problem.

Emanuel: [02:11:00] Where should we start? We were Pacific? Taiwan?

Murray: we were almost at the forthcoming China-Taiwan war.

Emanuel: So it’s happening basically what you’re saying or…

We’re gonna have a military capable of doing it and, we may even go so far as blockade or a few other things. The United States is writing their script, okay? It’s a distant blockade of Hormuz. This is not hard. You don’t have to invade, throw in a few missiles, couple of things across.

You don’t have to use those nice boats they have with the big sorta big gigantic cranes on them. These are landing ships. That’s scenario one. Scenario two is that China [02:12:00] sees that they’re no longer the bad guy in the world, and decides, “Holy shit we can become the hegemon without having to wreck stuff.” And that’s a bigger boon to our credibility long term that the soft– the what’s called the comprehensive national power index that they like to think about, which they invented to try to understand why the West wins at everything and they lose. They now understand what comprehensive national power is. And I wonder, and I’ll put this question out to you guys now, they haven’t seen an opportunity because Trump has been so ridiculous in his behavior that by comparison, the Chinese could actually come out of this no longer as a pariah state that was somehow taken over and now we gotta begrudgingly respect them, but as an actual peacemaker.

Emanuel: I think that’s a solid opinion in many people’s eyes. They actually think that. [02:13:00] For starters, they made investments around the world. Now, strategic investments, of course, to manipulate, to control, and so forth. But we need to remember that the people and the majority of the population, they made those investments, didn’t have any kind of alternative.

So it was a Godsend as they say it. So for sure that’s something– That’s a narrative that can happen. I’m not entirely percent sure. Probably it’s gonna take a little bit of more work. It’s not gonna be easy, but it’s not this unlikely scenario. It’s not too sci-fi.

Kevin: China seems to be doing that already, and they’ve been doing it for several years. They’re going around the world… Let me back up a bit. I’m gonna go back in history, right? So We have this idea that colonialism is something that happened in the past. Colonialism was structures built around resource extraction. [02:14:00] Structures built around resource extraction have not gone away. We just do it differently. And when I say we, the dominant economic powers on Earth.

China is in the resource extraction game just as much as the United States and Europe is. They just seem to do it a little bit differently. So China has been going around the world and making trade deals with countries where they’re building airports, they’re building maritime shipping terminals, and what they want is access to the resources that country has to offer, but they’re not doing it in a World Trade Organization way.

Now I’m clearly not an expert on this, but I listen to podcasts, I read articles. I’m paying attention to this thing called BRICS, which is… people complain about these BRICS people are doing a currency, and actually I’ve seen very little evidence that they want a currency. They want a completely separate trading system. They want to replace the World Trade Organization, the [02:15:00] World Bank, and International Monetary Fund with different institutions who, in their mind, do it in a way that is more fair to the Global South. And China is just– seems to be all over that. They are just in BRICS world so deep, and they’re going all over the world, and they’re providing money for projects and blah, blah, blah. And the deal is, and then we have access to your nickel, to your copper, to your oil, to your whatever, right? And all that stuff goes back to China, where they then use it as inputs to manufacturing process and they build finished goods which they then sell around the world. To a large extent, it’s a kinder, gentler form of 200 years ago European expansionism around the world, where they did the same thing but with cannons and bayonets.

Murray: I think you’ll be surprised to hear that I’m one of the people who don’t think that the British colonial project was evil. And this is the… I think that the, [02:16:00] I think that the Chinese foreign policy is, as you said, almost identical to, say, Cecil Rhodes and his gang, okay? So it’s the way you managed things back then was guns and troops.

In point of fact, the exact description that you said about building forts and roads and railroads and things, that was the exact offer that we made and everybody’s made through all empires throughout history, okay? We’ll give you all the benefit of being part of our thing, some security, some dough, some this. In exchange, we want some concession, whatever that concession is, pass-through water resources. It’s always been the same. Having said that China is only new at this game in a sense, okay? If you think about the [02:17:00] British project and then you think with the iterations it went through, oftentimes the restructuring of the British project where people were pissed off about it was exactly because people had gone and tried to burn the shit out of everything that was created within that capital structure that we just described, and then the Brits defended it. And you can think about Lucknow, you can think about any number of the Northwest Rebellion in India. You can think about all of this stuff as the normative structure of a society that’s global, and that’s what I think of as empire. When you have distant regions that you’re managing from the center, good luck, okay? There’s always gonna be some nutcase that’s out in the middle of that structure who does something stupid and the center gets blamed. But the fact of the matter is that’s the nature of the game. To think that China’s any gentler… I’ll go with I have a different opinion on that. But if we come back to the core of China’s imperial project now, if we want to call it that, just to articulate what you said, the sort of Belt and Road Initiative, which is the money thing that you talked about where they’re building [02:18:00] stuff or frankly creating the conditions where they map a non-dollar denominated world order, which is their primary goal.

You can’t do anything if anybody in the West decides to turn off the spigot. You’re done. So you have, BRICS that started about, about 15 years ago, but that’s why I say I think China’s gonna recalibrate because the Europeans are now doing exactly the same thing, creating their own payment rail and their own currency rail and their own institutions that are adjacent to but complementary to the World Bank, the IMF or the SWIFT system. There’s already a Euro rail that’s been created for [02:19:00] euro payments. I don’t have to tell you this is gonna drop 60% of dollar demand overnight. And so… here’s, what, BRICS plus Europay, if I could just call it that for fun it’s just a… I don’t know what it’s ultimately gonna be, but this new structure is the end of empire for America. And by that the currency is no longer a currency where they can print ad infinitum without inflation. That’s the kinda definition I’m working with. This is why Nixon pulled off the gold standard, because otherwise inflation was coming and if he didn’t do that they would’ve had no control.

And so the theory behind this now is I think we’ve seen that a hegemonically managed world eventually leads to the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so DC is now seen even by people in Ottawa, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and London as a weird place now, okay?

It’s not a place you go to do [02:20:00] business. It’s not a place where you go to… that deal you signed we’re not too sure if that’s bankable. I’m not sure we’d recognize that deal just yet from an accounting standpoint. That’s a problem, okay? And if China just sits back and quietly says, “We’re moving away from this Taiwan thing,” you will have countries embrace them today in a way that will force them to choose to be part of that international community because of the fact that international community will wipe them out if you touch our damn chips, okay? There’s the incentive.

Kevin: For what it’s worth, one of the podcasts I listen to is called “The Odd Lots Podcast,” and the most recent episode I listened to was a guest who had just written a book about the China-Taiwan relationship. So I’m relaying his opinion in this, and he says China will never relinquish their claim on Taiwan. They view that as an unresolved [02:21:00] issue in the Chinese Civil War. However, according to this guy, his prediction is they will never initiate armed aggression against Taiwan because of what you just said. They recognize the damage they would do, not just to the global economy, but to themselves if they were to do so. So his prediction is, and he framed this as “This is just how they do it,” slow, methodical, patient economic coercion until Taiwan one day democratically decides to rejoin China. Now the problem with that is that the people in Taiwan who might democratically vote to do that, saw what happened to the people in Hong Kong when they did that, and he says, “So that may have set the process back by 100 years, but they’ll just wait it out,” right?

Murray: They will. It’s a society that’s eight, nine thousand years old and counting, okay? When we think about North America even Emanuel from Europe, he’s from where all our [02:22:00] history comes from, okay? The idea is that I think that because America’s behavior has been so bad, China has less incentive to mess around with Taiwan. And I’ll point out that Taiwan and China are functionally the same country.

We’ll give you money, dough, and defense.” Okay? That old structure, I don’t think anybody disagrees that there’s one country, okay, between these two places. Nobody, not even the West disagrees with that. The only question is, can you settle the matter with war or not? So long as it’s peaceful, nobody cares, but if it goes to war, until now there’s been [02:23:00] this sort of concept that the West invades. This is the last theater of World War II, just to be clear. Okay? Very important to understand. The war started in China, World War II, and it’s gonna finish in China. We often say World War I and World War II are, two parts of the same war. Actually, if we end up with the Taiwan-China war, it will have been one century long where we’ve been fighting the same damn thing, and if that happens, North and South Korea are likely to go at it, and Japan will not put up with that shit and is rearming like a nutter. I think the prediction is stability, at least for the foreseeable future, because there’s enough deterrence power in Asia now to keep China from saying, “This is a better outcome.” And more than that, all they have to do is sit back and be quiet because America’s embarrassing themselves. And when America embarrasses themselves, people become very tolerant of a trading nation that wants to buy your stuff but they don’t [02:24:00] have democracy.

Okay? All right. How much oil you want?

That’s one thing, right? The centralized digital currencies. That’s just another method. But where does this… and we’re talking specifically about blockchain and specifically, about Bitcoin. Where does this play in all this? Because one, to produce these, you need a enormous amount of energy to do this.

And also if we noticed, whenever ships want to pass by through [02:25:00] this Hormuz Strait. Apparently the payment and the scams, but also the real payments are happening, not in gold and not in silver and not in US dollars, but in Bitcoin, which is a highly volatile currency.

And they’re like, “Okay, I’ll take that. I’ll take that. I’ll take that,” right?

So it’s not just cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is something they will accept, but the only requirement is it cannot be US dollars.

Murray: Republic credits? Republic credits? We need something more real out here in the outer rim.

Okay? No, they… I don’t know if you’re a Star Wars fan or not…

Emanuel: PC points.

Murray: But…

Emanuel: PC points we have here in Canada, President’s Choice [02:26:00] points, like the supermarket. You buy something and you get PC points, right? Then you get discounts. So maybe they’ll accept that. Anything that’s not US dollars, right?

Murray: Let’s do a little history on what a currency is, okay? Currency’s an agreement between people that a medium of exchange has value, okay? Canada, before we had the Canadian dollar, we had playing cards with stamps on it, okay? Or in other places, a bag of salt, okay? Or saffron, or… currencies come and go. We had one dominant currency at the end of the World War II, and we… Because the original dominant currency, which stopped being dominant during World War II, was the British pound. 90% of all international transactions settled in British pounds, okay? By the end of World War II, none. Very simple, okay? All American dollars ’cause Bretton Woods and this…

It wasn’t Bretton Woods right away, but it was the only currency left and eventually formalized into the serpentine Bretton Woods. Okay. So we know that a currency has everything to do with the geopolitics of the time. [02:27:00] All right? The Deutschmark was a very powerful currency in 1913, okay? You could get a pound for 20 Deutschmarks then, and by the end of 1918, it was 45,000 Deutschmarks to one pound. And there’s no difference, all right? It’s just do you accept it or not? So what the Iranians did, because all oil contracts were priced in American dollars prior to Iran’s announcement, all of them, okay? Now, you broke that. Now, oil contracts are priced in whoever’s buying it currencies. The Chinese are using this as an opportunity to say, “Oh, my currency’s not convertible? Go f**k you.” Okay? That’s what they’re doing. Now their currency is totally convertible because of the fact that anybody will accept it. So you know what’s gonna come next? Banks are gonna want to start to accept it and they’re gonna start to lobby the US government and the European government and say, “Look, renminbi we need to get the RMB to be able to be traded. The Americans screwed us. [02:28:00] Let’s now open up that market.” The WTO, who cares?

We create our own trading bloc. It’s just what’s happening, okay? You’re getting multiple trading blocs, multiple legal system, multiple payment rails, multiple distribution structures, multiple no single point of failure in currency, in trade, in resource availability, and the further we go down this road, the less dependent we are on hegemons. And so hegemons, eh, I’m not fussed. I don’t really care. What I care about… is your country set up to flourish in this new structure? And I gotta tell you something. In that new world, there’s one country that stands above all others in its ability to adapt, okay? And I live in it, and I think all of us are in Canada right now, if I’m not mistaken. But the… Or actually, is one of us down in Alabama?

Kevin: Arkansas.

Murray: Arkansas. So sorry, not too far. Okay. So down in Arkansas. North America in [02:29:00] general can shut the door and not care, okay? Look, we just approved another pipeline in the States. Why? Because we fight in public, but in private, we’re like, “Shut up. Don’t tell anybody,” okay?

It’s… That, that’s how it is in North America, okay? Our biggest customer for oil now, US. The biggest customer after the new trade deal, US. Nothing’s gonna change. And Canada is gonna put pipes east, west, and north now, and we’re gonna sell everything we’ve got because the environmental nonsense is over. We got back to the business of being an exporting state with everything everybody wants. Now, because of that fact, the United States as a hegemon goes away. But this is not, as people have been saying, America’s end. There’s nothing further from the truth than this. What’s gonna happen is America’s not gonna have the headache of having to manage the China zone, and they’re not gonna have the headache of managing the European zone. They can take care of themselves now because they’re no longer broke and flattened, [02:30:00] okay? And so America will remain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But there’s only 330 million Americans, and that’s the limitation, okay? Without empire, the reach is not the same. Now it becomes one in a concert of, say, three or four different organizations that are of that scale and have that kind of influence. And so the euro, if you look at settlements today you probably, prior to this nonsense, you probably had one in $10 were settled in euro versus nine in $10 that were settled in dollars. And now you’re starting to knock on 60% for American dollars. It’s a huge change, okay? And that’s reflective that it’s not a reflection that dollar’s bad, it’s a reflection that the international demand for dollars is dropping. And so this is what killed our empire.

When the pound was no longer demanded, do you know what our problem was? We had a mountain of debt bigger than the Americans will ever have, [02:31:00] okay? We were into the 230, 250% range after World War II from a GDP standpoint. The Americans are… What are you guys at, a buck 30 or something max? It’s a nothing burger. It’s a nothing burger. But if it keeps up and you end up at a 200% level, then you lose the wealth too, just like the Brits did, okay? They lost empire and local wealth all at once. And so the Americans’ best job right now is to lean in on their technical dominance, lean in on their cultural dominance, and lean into their trade, and in the meantime, try to balance their books.

And through hook or crook, Trump’s gonna do it, okay? He’s doing whatever he does to get it done. But if I was in Trump’s position, I’d do the same thing. Now, I’m an economist, okay? He’s right, and this is the part that people don’t get. I lived in the US for 20 years. I don’t think people understand how shitty it is to be a working-class person in America and having paid the [02:32:00] price for all of the wealth that was created in that country, okay?

It’s… And the Americans got screwed, okay? And when I say screwed, I mean screwed in a way you can’t possibly imagine. Trump is not anomalous, nor is he ridiculous. He is channeling something extremely powerful in the better part of 100 million people. And I think that you should think about that because in our own empire, it was the exact same people that toppled it. At the end of World War II, the people famously stood up and said, “Clement Attlee.” Okay? Clement Attlee, Prime Minister, not the hero Churchill. [02:33:00] Okay? We were done. We wanted to have a society that had Medicaid and retirement packages and babysitting and all the stuff you need to have a decent society. Okay? And ever since, Britain has been a, what you would call a social structure country just like Canada. And you’re gonna see that as empire comes down, you’re gonna see the American people step up and demand I’ll call a new deal to use sort of the FDR parlance, but a stronger new deal that includes health, that includes universality to a lot of these things, and that’s gonna be the price of empire that’s gonna finally say, “I’m not gonna spend more on military than I spend on people.”

Emanuel: Will it be a civil war that will eventually lead to these demands, or will it be peaceful?

Murray: It’s gonna be very peaceful, and the reason it’s gonna be peaceful is ’cause I’m building it. Okay? So the idea that kind of a revolution isn’t peaceful I think is, it’s kinda, it’s old hat. It [02:34:00] was peaceful in Britain too. Remember, democracies, especially old democracies like Canada and the United States and Britain you must remember what a parliament is. Okay? Why is the distance between the people X? It’s exactly the distance of two swords. Okay? That’s what that aisle up the middle is. You stand a sword’s distance to the person you’re fighting opposite. It’s war by other means. This is really important. So I have great faith that Britain, America, Canada, France, all of the European democracies will all find their way without devolving into the old civil war, say, that the United States or Britain famously had 1,000 times. Okay? We don’t need that anymore because Trump, for all of his bluster and his problem and everybody thinks he’s gonna cancel the election. It’s… Sure, he can try. But if you mess with the American judicial system and democratic [02:35:00] system like that, I think Trump’s in for a rude awakening. The American system is the longest standing democratic system in the modern sense outside of Britain. Britain’s the oldest, of course. We invented parliament. We are the mother of all parliaments. But the United States is second.

Kevin: I would like to segue into your bigger project because it’s a super interesting project, but I want to make one comment about Trump because I have a significant frustration about Trump that kind of doesn’t jive with popular perception. And your point that he understands the problems perhaps even at a visceral level, like I completely agree with that. He understands that the working class has gotten screwed. He understands that Wall Street is ripping everybody off, right? But then he goes one layer down and he gets all the details wrong.

Murray: Yeah.

Kevin: So his complaint is valid and his solutions are f*****g stupid,

Murray: Yeah. [02:36:00]

Kevin: What do you mean blanket tarrifs across the entire world based on some weird algorithm that nobody understands, right?

Do you know what industrial policy means? And no, he doesn’t, right? But at the highest level, he really taps into the frustrations that are valid.

Murray: Yeah. Look, I gotta tell you something. I did well in the United States, ’cause I was down there on an H visa, which means you had to qualify to be a certain 90%– You had to be more qualified than 90% of people, and … I lived well. I had Microsoft health insurance. It was great experience for Murray going down to the States.

You get everything the same down there as you get here. Yeah, except that I’m going to the Bellevue Hospital, not the county hospital, okay? It’s… And you don’t realize this until you grow up a bit and you’re not in your twenties and self-involved. But then to have a dinner and have two people at the dinner after their fourth wine glass start bawling ’cause they can’t take their kid to a hospital… these are moments in your life where you sorta, you [02:37:00] understand it better.

“I’m gonna lose my home because my husband got cancer. I’m gonna…”. Those are the… The rest of this stuff is noise. I think in the long run, democracies are safe. In the short run, they’re destabilized. But I think that’s as good a segue as any for me to answer your original question Emanuel, which is…

Emanuel: Who are you and what do you do?

Murray: How the hell do you fix this shit, okay?

Because the truth is that Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau, who was in before Prime Minister Carney…

Emanuel: Or Or better known as Katy Perry’s boyfriend.

Murray: Oh, yeah. It is perfect.

Kevin: Can I make on interjection for viewers and listeners?

Emanuel: Please.

Kevin: Murray is here because of what we’re about to talk about. This was an almost hour-long just to get That’s okay, the warm-up is all that matters, okay? Because then the answer becomes painfully obvious.

Murray: If we leave things the way they are, it’s going to be Emanuel’s civil war, okay? [02:38:00] And, let me tell you something. Trudeau and Trump seem to be polar opposites, right? They seem to be the complete opposite of each other.

You got a commie on one side, you got a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist on the other side. You’ve got an ultra-feminist woke, and you’ve got a super Tea Party kinda guy. But guess what? They’re both exactly the same thing, and they’re just like you said, Kevin. They got elected because they knew how to tap into the social media zeitgeist. Let me be clear, the social media zeitgeist, okay? If you place a post correctly, you win. If you have the right groups posting, you win. That’s it. The whole electoral process has been captured by social media. The only data set that matters for elections today is not polling or the rest, it’s social media. And that data set is so large that it took the traditional data set, and it… And I don’t know if much about cosmology, but Stephenson is the largest star [02:39:00] in the universe, okay? It’s 50 times the size of 130 astronomical units out to the Oort cloud. You could see it in the galaxy if you were looking at the galaxy as a whole. And it’s so big and so ridiculous that everything else doesn’t matter. Now, just like that, social media is so big and outshines everything else that all of the other stuff, like the executive power, the legislative power, the judicial power, the media, like TV, like newspapers, like websites, it’s all a rounding error in what’s called the share of voice.

So If the share of voice on social media is, say, 100 orders of magnitude, which is 10 zeros, so 100 zeros, just so we’re clear, 100 orders of magnitude greater than all of the rest combined, what chance is it that our democracy is being run by the electorate? Statistically, the answer is zero. You want to talk about a correlation, there isn’t one, [02:40:00] okay? So it’s…

Kevin: There’s a famous, it’s called the Yale study, I think, where it presents evidence that if you’re not a major donor, your voice doesn’t matter.

And so Kevin, you’re nailing it. So here’s the short version, and I have a paper coming out on this subject that quantifies the size of the fifth estate.

So I’m not just speaking out of my ear here.

Kevin: Define the fifth estate for our listeners.

Murray: I call it the fifth estate. That’s the social Internet, okay? The fifth estate. So the first estate, executive. [02:41:00] The second estate is the judicial. The legislative is the third. Media is the fourth. These are the order of arrival, by the way.

Kevin: Yeah.

They were doing parliaments, and then I claim the Greeks. But in essence, what we’re saying is, those three things that run our countries, the three co-equal branches of government that we all learn about on how a bill becomes law. It has effectively been replaced by social media.

Emanuel: Montesquieu

Murray: Do you know that they…

Do you know there was a party here in Ontario that, that ran a campaign and did no door-knocking, ground games, or signs?

And still did as well as they did in the prior election?

Kevin: So their primary tool was social media?

Murray: [02:42:00] Only social media.

Emanuel: Is it the liberal?

Murray: And it was the first time I’d ever seen it in practice, right? Now, my paper quantifies the issue at several hundreds of orders of magnitude greater influence from social media in voter… What’s called… The scholarly sector is called agenda setting, if you want to go and look this up. Agenda setting is how the government determines what they’re gonna fight over. Okay? And right now the number one determinant for what the government is gonna fight over is what is trending on social media, okay? Literally. But it also means, to your point, and this Kevin was a very prescient point you made, is that also means that incompetent politicians are now the favored politicians, because we’re not interested in people who do stuff or are competent or good fiduciaries or great people to manage an asset that’s worth hundred trillion dollars, like Canada, okay?

We’ve got a three and a half trillion dollar economy. You would say a country’s [02:43:00] worth 100X on its its total wealth. The United States is a thirty-five trillion dollar economy. It’s worth 100 times that in terms of market cap. You think about sending somebody in there to manage it, you would think you’d want competence, okay? But instead, we get Trump and Trudeau. I don’t have to tell you that neither of these people are what you would consider the geniuses. Now, Mark Carney happens– We happen to have gotten a genius out of this, okay? Smartest man in the world.

Kevin: Yeah, you really dodged a bullet on that one.

Murray: I don’t know how the hell that happened, but it was like… I was so delighted that fear finally switched people in Canada of choosing somebody who’s not an idiot, okay? Really. And I think the same’s gonna happen in America as that pressure starts to be applied to it. We have a bad economic situation combined with the Chinese are coming, so if you think about back to the old, “The Russians are coming,” and all this sort of stuff, Americans, they have a lot of [02:44:00] patience for bullshit, but when they are done, they’re done, and they switch like that in terms of politics.

I watched it happen from the 2000s to the 2015s where we went through that whole Tea Party was an anomaly, and by the end of it, you ended up with Trump. And so it happens fast, and I think this idea that countries are so rich and hegemonically powerful that they can hire idiots, it’s just like it’s a f*****g tree that prints money. I think we’ve realized that’s not necessarily guaranteed, and I think you’re gonna see that the sovereign of the nation of America, and every other one for that matter, they’re gonna start to tend towards the Carney’s of the world, okay? Competent leadership again. For whatever you want to talk about Bill Clinton, the guy’s a smart man, knows shit, and he’s read every book out there. He might have a little cigar problem the idea is that he knows… he was competent person, whether you were a Democrat or not. George Herbert Walker Bush [02:45:00] was a bloody genius, okay? And the man was a statesman that was… that knew more about the world than almost anybody alive, okay? Even George W. Bush by comparison to what we have now today, and when I was living in the United States, you have to understand that George W. Bush was largely loved at first and then hated by the end, okay? But he was competent. And I don’t mean competent in the Carney sense necessarily, but by comparison to the Trump world, he was reasonably competent, okay? Different variations on it. We started hiring fools, and the reason we started hiring fools, and I don’t just mean America, all of Europe, all of Canada, all of North America, in fact, other places as well, because it no longer mattered who was in charge. We’re the bosses of the planet. Nobody’s f*****g with us.

Do we really care? Why are we spending so much money on government? What’s a missile missiles? Let’s have peace everywhere, kumbaya. This was the dumb of the ’60s all over again, okay? And what you ended up with is government policies that have torn it apart. [02:46:00] The cause is human stupidity. Now, the solution is fixing human stupidity, and that’s what Citizn does.

And, I don’t mean that they’re dumb. They don’t have the time to do the work to be able to understand what they need to understand to be able to give an articulate or even understand an articulate position or give informed consent on any subject. My job, through Citizn, is to turn absolutely every voter into somebody capable of giving informed consent on every issue, every day through their phone, period. the way I achieve that is it turns out that AI’s really good at deciding if [02:47:00] somebody’s dumb or smart and telling them what they need to hear so they can give informed consent. You don’t believe me? Do jury systems work? Yeah, they do, and it’s the same structure. The juries are not Mensa members.

They’re average people from average neighborhoods and they largely get picked by two lawyers that are in opposition to each other trying to get the best deal for whoever, whatever. But nobody disrespects the jury, least of all the defendant, okay? This is important. You’re talking life and death.

You’re talking about bankruptcy or not, and we respect the 12-person mandate because we know it’s a controlled environment.

Emanuel: Citizn one hour in, you just introduced the name Citizn. We’re after the one hour mark. We are not constrained by time, but we should navigate towards…

Kevin: We should get on topic.

Emanuel: You mentioned Citizn. What’s Citizn exactly? You mentioned, but

Kevin: Yeah.

Murray: So Citizn is the response to the last hour, okay? Imagine the [02:48:00] last hour represents the last forty years, all right? We’ve had technology that has frankly irrevocably altered the landscape, okay? We used to manage village idiocy by keeping the village idiot in the village. But now they can find each other online and create village idiot cities And therein lies the problem of the Internet. Okay? The Internet, while it connected eight billion people, it also connected various quality of eight billion people inside of that. Not everybody is a quality person. Not everybody wants good relations.

Some people just want to see the place burn. And so you have that human element on the Internet that created the 4chan and the Reddit, and this sort of subculture that was really goofy thing. But then something happened. Up to that point 2012 everything was fine, okay? We had some algorithms that were treating people badly, but it was still humans behind, okay? Now we have fake humans behind social media, and by and large, about 60 or [02:49:00] 70% of accounts on social media are fake, okay? And that number is from five years ago, so I don’t even know what the number is today. But it’s some ridiculous number that we live in a world where you’re actually fighting with somebody’s AI. And what I mean by that is it looks at the response, and then it responds, gives you a choice, and you bang. And you can respond at scale. And if you’re a really lousy bad actor, you create a bot farm. You put up phones, and you see them on the walls, and you manage them with one computer, and you can start to produce content at a scale that means that the human percentage of that fifth estate is infinitesimal.

Now you see it dropping. AI content or non-human content has become the lion’s share of the fifth estate. Now, who controls that content? The answer is whoever wants to. So whoever gets the biggest share of data can control the American political system. That’s unacceptable. [02:50:00] Okay? And what I mean by that is, as long American citizens, giddy up. But if it’s not American citizens controlling what American citizens think about a given law, whether federally, in Congress, or in some state legislature, there’s a lot of things that are going on there, but one of them isn’t democracy, okay? And as a consequence, we have let the management of our state fall out. This must change, and it must change in a way that makes it simple to bring back in regular voters, the people we were talking about before that got a shitty deal especially, okay? Because these are the people that are not necessarily capable of deciding if something’s good or bad that they’re looking at, if it’s right or wrong, truthful or not. They don’t have the time, nor do they have the inclination, and perhaps not even the education to be able to do it. But that’s no reason to let them be manipulated by foreigners And so Citizn is designed as a federation of [02:51:00] national networks owned by and controlled by the people in that country with all residency in that country and all control of the technology local. We are a licensing organization in Toronto. Citizn, that much ARM licenses the technology into a preexisting company inside of each state, and that company, Citizn Canada, Citizn United States, Citizn France all the way through the world. I don’t think China will let it in, and I certainly don’t think Russia will let it in anytime soon, but we’re working on that, too.

We think eventually they’ll want it. But Citizn is by and large a personal chief of staff for every single person in every country, and the chief of staffs work with you to elevate you to that of not ignorance and work on your behalf to find consensus with the other chiefs of staff in the background so that you don’t have to be involved in the debate. But it [02:52:00] knows what you think because it interacts with you much like Jarvis does in Iron Man, if you want to think about it like that, and it tells you what you need to know. “Oh, Carney just introduced a new bill today, the budget. What you need to know about the budget Murray, because you live downtown Toronto in a condo in Canada, is that here’s how it’s going to affect you.

You know my income, you know all this sort of stuff. The AI’s capable of telling me what I need to know. And Murray, this may affect you quite a lot ’cause you’re gonna sell a cottage or you gotta think about this, you gotta do that. And then it’s capturing the essence of your opinion through that dialogue, and it deals with it for you.

You don’t answer surveys, you don’t answer nonsense, does all this bullshit of… If you just be yourself, and it will quantify your will. Now, how it does that is set up by us, Citizn, the center. But that’s manipulable, just like an algorithm is manipulable. Do you want to do more of this or more of that? That’s controlled by the people of America on the app itself, so all the Americans in the Citizn [02:53:00] app in America will have total control over the privacy policy, the algorithms, and all of that so that frankly, Elon Musk can’t f**k with the Twitter algorithm and elect Donald Trump. And when you do that, there’s a consequence. It means that every person can have the same dialogue the three of us are now having about politics, and they are not hobbled like they would otherwise be. They are expert in politics, every bit as capable of articulating their positions on this because just a politician, I don’t know if you know this or not, I worked at Parliament in Canada. Not every politician’s the brighest bulb. Okay? That might you, but I’m telling you they’re just average, regular people. But the reason they do so well and they sound so aware is because they have powerful teams that do the triage work and the education work for them. And I intend to digitize that and make sure that every person, no matter how big or small, how weak or strong, how rich or poor, [02:54:00] possesses that strength.

And this changes everything for one reason. Imagine a world where every citizen is able to give informed consent.

Kevin: How do you prevent Citizn from being hijacked by special interests in the way that Facebook has been, for example?

I can actually tell the chief of staff what I really think. And do you know that most people, seven out of 10, do not speak publicly about what they really think? This is the middle that we often talk about politics, okay? Seven in 10 people don’t say anything at all. This is so important.

Emanuel: I’m married, so…

Murray: [02:55:00] And you’re a smart man, okay? And half of the 15% on either side, the extremists, you call them, most of those are just idiots that want to be part of something. So it turns out that if you take out the incentive to fit in, the massive insecurity that is represented by the massive society it turns out that people emancipate themselves without even knowing they’re doing it, and I digitize that.

Murray: More than that, you don’t interrogate it. It interrogates you, okay? So this isn’t ChatGPT that you can go into and ask political questions, okay? That is how you get the data out. That’s how we make money, is we have a chatbot called Democracy GPT [02:56:00] that you can go into, and if you’re a pollster, you can buy my data, okay? That’s how the Citizn platform makes money. But it’s not a social network. There are social elements to that network, meaning there’s a bit of a public feed and stuff like that. But the primary thing is not, “Here’s my breakfast, here’s what I’m doing. Oh, by the way, we’ll incidentally talk about politics or something over here.” The primary interface is you get up in the morning and Jarvis says, “Hey, Kevin, you know what? Here’s the things you need to know.” And it talks to you like you and your toothbrush, okay? And then, or whenever you want to hear it, and it will interject all day long, all week long, all year long with notifications saying hey, come here. Gonna tell you this. You gotta know this shit for brains. You gotta read this. Get going.

Kevin: How does it know what I need to know?

Murray: One of the byproducts of the Internet is that we have digitally mapped the persona of absolutely every person on Earth. I don’t have to know that. It’s already there. I can call one API, and I’ve got the last time you had a dump, okay? We are so far beyond digitizing who [02:57:00] Murray is and quantifying my skills and abilities. The same applies to almost everybody. And so I would almost say that’s not a technical issue, nor, by the way, is the takeover concept. Nobody can take this over at all, and the reason is because there is no incentive to be taken over. You’re one person in verify. There’s no creating fake accounts. There is no creating bot farms. There’s no pretending you’re somebody you’re not. There’s no creating a real account and leasing it out and giving credentials to people. The AI’s too smart for that, okay? That’s all old-fashioned nonsense. It’s architecturally been replaced. What’s going to happen from now on is anybody, no matter how smart they are, will have somebody proactively chief-of-staffing them, just as Chrystia Freeland had a chief of staff, or Hillary Clinton had a chief of staff, or Donald Trump has one.

I don’t know. He still doesn’t listen to her. So I can’t fix dumb, but I can fix that problem.

Kevin: Word is Donald Trump’s chief of staff is the smartest [02:58:00] person in the room, and they don’t listen to her.

Murray: She actually is brilliant. Do you know that? She’s actually a brilliant woman, but she is not my kind of brilliant, okay? She’s too… She’s just too rednecky for me. It’s just I can’t do it.

Kevin: How do you verify or how does Citizn verify that the people are real people?

Emanuel: KYC. KYC, know your customer.

Murray: It’s basically KYC, but the problem is beyond that. KYC gets you the identity of the person that showed up the first time, okay? But it doesn’t guarantee that person is there as you go on, and that’s done algorithmically, okay? So what we do is, on the balance of probabilities, [02:59:00] just like your credit card if you go to Aruba all of a sudden instead of being in Arkansas, they’re gonna start to say what the hell are you doing in Aruba?

We can do all kinds of stuff to make sure that, bot farms and nonsense like that doesn’t come up. But the most important thing we can do is we can localize the system in such a way that it doesn’t exist outside of a geographic boundary. When you do that, meaning Citizn Canada is a physical institution in Canada, there’s no using, say a phone from the United States. Okay? You don’t have a local phone and address, and we can prove it over and over again. Oh, and on the Internet, all your socials and everything, which we will check, [03:00:00] okay? On the balance of probabilities, we will continuously evaluate what the cookiesphere says you’re doing. And if you’re not who you say you are, you will lose access to that system in about five seconds, okay?

Emanuel: I wanted to say that to an extent, you might call it a digital consciousness of yours that’s kinda like helps you come up with the, to the right conclusions on your own, asking why this, why that, hopefully. Will that be a fair statement or at least a partial decision?

Murray: It’s a very accurate statement. The the whole point is, it turns out the psychology of people is pretty f****d up. If you stick them in a room with three or four people, they don’t have any opinions. People like me have opinions. Okay? Always. On my own, independent, auto-energizer bunny.

But do you know how many think I’m… think I’m crazy? [03:01:00] Okay? “Oh, the guy’s nuts. He has opinions.” it turns out that if you remove that social component and you have a good relationship over time of trust between you and that AI, people will unload everything, and they would tell you things that they will never tell anything else.

And so the theory goes that it is like having a little angel on your, shoulder going, “Hey, stupid, stop being a f*****g idiot,” okay? “Now wake up. This is dumb.” And then you got the bad guy. “Oh do it it.” it’s it’s a digital consciousness that says… And more than that, it’s gonna score your stuff. Okay? So let’s say you’re gonna post something. It’s gonna say, “Hey dum-dum, do you know that if you post that, you look like an idiot for these reasons?” And people are not gonna want to look like idiots. I’m telling you something. You need to have a system that will really educate people properly.

And because it’s based on trust and privacy, it doesn’t matter. There’s no cost to them. They’re [03:02:00] actually going to become great if they just follow the rules, which is don’t be stupid.

I know this is like a quick segue, and I want to get back on track in a minute, but Richard Dawkins wrote an article a couple days ago in which he said…

Murray: I’m so upset by what he said. What an asshole, okay, saying that. Desperate plea for attention, in my opinion. Go ahead.

Kevin: That very well may be, right? But I heard about that, and I read people who said, “Oh my God, he’s right,” and, “Oh my God, he’s an idiot.” And I can’t help but wondering if he’s just trolling us as a joke. As I understand it, I have not read the article, but I’ve watched a lot of people talk about it.

He basically said, we created a Turing [03:03:00] test that basically said, if a computer can fool us in the following ways, it must be conscious. This computer fooled us in the following ways, therefore it must be conscious. But that only works if you accept that the first premise is valid, right? That if it can fool us in a certain way, it’s conscious.

Murray: I would say that it’s evidence of dementia, okay?

So it my sort of… You know, Let me be clear. The Turing test, okay, that he’s speaking of has already been debunked, okay, by anybody in computer science. Okay? So the Turing test is bullshit, okay? It’s pop culture psychology nonsense. So yes, by that standard, [03:04:00] sure, AI’s conscious. But we already know that’s not the standard of consciousness, okay? And more than that, he should have known better. All right? And his area of study, he knows the difference. Now, let me say this.

Kevin: Of all of the scientists out there, he’s the one most likely to know that very premise is bullshit, which is Yeah, and, And yet he…

help but wonder if he’s just trolling us on his way out, right?

Murray: I don’t think it’s trolling. What is the greatest incentive for the fifth estate, which is social media?

Emanuel: Attention.

Kevin: Attention.

Murray: How do you measure attention as a man who has a public persona? Used to be sell tickets to your talks or sell a book.

Nowadays, it’s get likes and get clicks and get shares and… Dude isn’t trolling. Dude’s selling books, okay?

Emanuel: And get three dudes to… talk about him in a podcast.

Murray: So we already have proof [03:05:00] here at this table that Richard Dawkins has modified his expertise at the altar of attention, and somehow we don’t think politicians are doing that?

Kevin: Yeah, good point.

Murray: Therein lies the core problem that Citizn solves once and for all.

Because you know what Citizn would tell me once Richard Dawkins did that shit? And it won’t be like Facebook that says every time the word climate shows up, it fucking gives you this blur. It’ll actually say Kevin, you know that stupid thing you read? Yeah. Dude’s a nutter, okay? And everything he’s ever said discounts this, and yet he’s doing it.

He’s a nutter. Stop listening to him. And guess what? You probably stop listening to him.

Emanuel: So many things.

Murray: This is how we correct the world. The problem isn’t that poor people or working class people are stupid. The problem is that they don’t have the time, energy, or inclination, or perhaps the knowledge to make an appropriate decision. We [03:06:00] solve all of those issues, and we give them the value they should have as the owners our respective countries. And I don’t think that somebody who doesn’t have an education or money is any less important than you, me, or fancy Emanuel, okay? The idea is every person in a democracy needs to be able to give an informed consent, and until that’s true, we live in something, but it is not a democracy, and it’s my job to fix it.

Emanuel: I would end it here because this is such a powerful statement. I will pass it along to Kevin also to give the final words and then to Murray to actually end up before we do our promo again, where to find us, where to like us and all those things. But maybe we get now a promise that you will come again and talk about whatever is hot at that time.

We love doing that. We are trying to change a little bit to try to educate [03:07:00] ourselves in the first place and our audience as well. But I’ll leave you with that because I recently read a book. There’s this concept of capitalism without democracy, and you’ve underlined this democracy keyword a bunch of times, and it’s very important to Citizns.

So before, my suggestion would be to go to Kevin, give his comments and then to you. And also please let people know where they can find more information, website, social media, LinkedIn, and your newsletter as well. But also…

Murray: Kevin, have at it.

Kevin: I just wanted to comment that I think your timing is really opportunistic. In the last election in the United Kingdom, a plumber in Manchester won a seat in Parliament.

Like a working class person who in her acceptance speech apologized to her customers as “I know you’ve booked work, but I’m not gonna be able to make it because I’m going to parliament.”

Murray: Cause I’m in Westminster.[03:08:00]

Murray: Wicked.

Kevin: He has run for political office, like on the local planning board and stuff, and he went straight from that to a Senate race, and he’s probably going to win, right?

People are ready to move past the bullshit.

Murray: Yeah. People are desperate, and I’m gonna close with that because I think, Kevin, you summarized it. We are too smart with the Library of Alexandria in our pockets, okay? We know just enough to know that we’re being bullshitted all day long by politicians of all stripes in all countries, okay?

This is not a US issue. We got the same nutters up [03:09:00] here, okay? It’s same deal. The point is, we’re also smart enough to know the difference now, but we don’t yet have the tool to control it. And that tool’s coming, okay? It’s coming fast, and it’s coming furious. And I’ll tell you something. I do agree with you that the timing is right. Now, I’ll say this for my shareholders that have been waiting five years, they think that it’s been a long road, okay? But you’re entirely correct. This is just the time it takes to build these companies. Gross in Silicon Valley, one of the most prolific investors that built what you would call the dot-com era, famously says almost everything in a corporation’s success is tied to timing. Forget the people, forget the idea, forget the capital. That’s table stakes, okay? Timing is everything. And when you see politics pissing people off to this degree, and they’re going on social media and expressing it, this is the populace crying out for expression and to be heard, and [03:10:00] we’re gonna give them that power, and we’re gonna return the power to the people where it bloody well belongs. Because no single group of three or four hundred people has the power to dictate anything in a democracy while I have breath in me. And I think that’s maybe a great segue for me to say thank you for having me on, gentlemen.

Emanuel: And we’re gonna put links to your website and to your newsletter, but just briefly, where can people find you? Just Google Citizn, spell the…

Murray: The only thing you need to know nowadays is that Citzen has no E in it, okay? C-I-T-I-Z-N. Go look it up on Google. You’ll find thousands of entries, videos, books, pages. And look for us to be coming out in Canada either end of this year or the beginning of next, and concurrently launching in the United States.

These are two very easy things for us to do here in North America, but the natural next step will then be Europe and the Asias.

Emanuel: We’re gonna put links in the description. In the meantime curiouspundits.com [03:11:00] is the website where you’ll find this episode, future episodes, previous episodes. We also have links to all the platforms that you might like to listen to podcast audio or video from YouTube, Apple, Spotify or

I don’t know if Google Podcasts, I think that’s not around anymore. But…

Murray: I think they’re done now.

Emanuel: Yeah.

And I really hope because we haven’t touched technology that much, we haven’t touched AI and LLMs, and we haven’t touched quantum. And you and I had some serious conversation on that aspect, and I truly think that most people should actually get that information. You gave the best definition of what AI is right now when you compared it with a non character [03:12:00] NPC.

Murray: Non-player character.

Emanuel: An NPC essentially.

Murray: If you play video games, you’ve been using AI since the ’80s, okay?

Curiouspundits.com. Until the next time. My name is Emanuel.

Kevin: My name is Kevin.

Emanuel: Thank you for listening.

Episode 19 Murray Simser Says Social Media Captured Elections, and Citizn Reverses It

EP19 - Murray Simser Says Social Media Captured Elections, and Citizn Reverses It

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