About

Hi, my name is Eugene Fernandes.

I graduated from UBC Okanagan in 2020 with a degree in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE). You can buy my thesis here.

Originally, I thought that podcasts were going to change the world because of how they democratized access to knowledge. That led me to work at Podscribe.ai right after graduation. I sent out weekly email blasts to ~1000 podcasters using Sendy, IcyLeads, and SendGrid after pulling them from an SQL Database. I also grew our twitter following from 20 to ~1,400 within 6 months. I thought that podcasts were revolutionary.

But after living through the shockingly irrational curfew in Quebec and then the mass imposition of vaccine passports across Canadian provinces, I realized that crypto, not podcasts, were the most revolutionary technology of the 21st century. This is in large part thanks to this mind-blowing conversation between Balaji Srinivasan and Tim Ferriss.

In university, I came to value, appreciate, and fight for classical liberal values. This put me at odds with people who were proponents of censorship, of mobbings and cancel culture (which are disproportionate and unjust), and of left-wing ideology. Try as I might, no amount of rational argumentation changed their minds. Even worse, a majority of people seemed to passively agree with them.

Then, the pandemic hit. Classical liberal values were cast aside once again, but this time from a growing appreciation and desire for a medical fascistic technocracy. Lockdowns, curfews, and vaccine passports were three things brought in with the justification that individual choices have collective consequences, and thus the collective has the right to override individual choices.

It was around this time (2021) that I realized that trying to win over institutions like universities and law societies are mere pyrrhic victories. I also realized that things like cancel culture and online mobbings arose not because people were being taught Maoism in class, but because social media facilitated the formation of mobs. The solution therefore was not to criticize the bad ideas, as I had done in university, but rather, to take advantage of new technological shifts and help build internet-native institutions.

That led me into cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are a paradigm shift that spread classical liberal values more efficiently than dialogue, colonization, or war ever will. It’s giving people worldwide access to financial opportunities that were previously available only to residents of liberal countries. For example, most women in Afghanistan need to have a brother or father open and supervise a bank account for them. But bitcoin lets them earn and keep their own money without anyone needing to know. Buried inside of their use of bitcoin is the idea that an individual (woman) should be sovereign over her labour and money, a very liberal idea.

That’s just one example of a problem that crypto and the blockchain solves.