Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "How I Lost Millions In Crypto" with Peter McCormack

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"How I Lost Millions In Crypto" with Peter McCormack · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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We argue on Twitter. We argue on podcasts. We're pro-vax or we're vacs hesitant. We're just asking
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questions. Maybe we trust the experts or maybe we do our own research. Some of us are team,
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public safety. Some of us are team. Don't tread on me. Some of us are team. Sweden got it right.
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Some of us are team. Why the hell do all these assholes keep talking about Sweden all the time?
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It's time for bigger conversations, broader conversations. It's time to exit our social media
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silos to step into No Man's Land and share a cigarette or a vape or a bowl of ayahuasca
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kombucha and lift our eyes to the stars, lift your lips to my ears and to whisper to each other
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conversations that are relevant, urgent, provocative and sometimes, yes, uncomfortable.
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Today on the show, terrific guests who just dropped into my lap straight out of the Twitter
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universe and into your pod ears. The audio quality, not great? In this episode, I mean this is,
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this is, this sounds fantastic, but wait till you get a load of the actual conversation,
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it's ratchet. But I say that just by way of small apology in the sense that this is a conversation
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that I didn't want to delay. Peter McCormack hit me up, feeling like there was a dearth of voices
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who were in the independent alternative media verse but who were also not deranged by crazy.
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He's one of them. I'm one of them. He has the world's most popular podcast about Bitcoin. It's called
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what Bitcoin did, but he's a fascinating guy. I mean, I'm interested in how he earned millions
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of dollars in crypto and then lost millions of dollars in crypto and we get into that. But I'm
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more than that interested in his outlook on the world, the lessons that he's learned from the
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battle scars that he's earned and his place, I suppose, in the media landscape, a similar sort of
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no man's land that I perhaps find myself in. I won't preface this too much. We will have another
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conversation on his podcast which will get into more of the questions about truth and misinformation
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and podcasting and the alternative media landscape. This is more really an introduction to Peter,
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for those of you who don't already know him. If you're new to this podcast and you've just discovered
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this fabulous show, I do encourage you to do the boring thing. You know what I'm about to say?
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You know what I'm about to say? You know what I'm about to say? Have you taken your phone or your
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pocket? Is it in your hand? Are you going to go to the app store and make sure that you're subscribed
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and that you've rated the show and that you've commented on the show? Here's the thing, algorithms
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are funny things and the amount that you can charge advertisers is a funny thing and where you show
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up on the iTunes store is a funny thing. It's all ineffable. It's all just designed by Pixies
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who are toiling away in some slave dungeon somewhere in Silicon Valley. I don't quite know how it
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works. I think that's how it works. And what the Pixies like is when you don't just listen to one
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episode, but you actually click subscribe. And what they like even more, in fact, what they get
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their jollies, their dirty little pixie jollies out of, is you leaving a rating and a review. You
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can even review it and say, Josh is terrible. I'm only here for Peter McCormack. Why is he still
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talking? I don't want to hear his stupid Australian accent go away. That'd be fine. The Pixies are
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love it and more people will find this show because you will have helped it go up the algorithm
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ranking thing that the Pixies produce. Can you tell I'm not that technically savvy with the algorithm
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Pixie thing? Maybe it's time to just get to the conversation. I hope you enjoy it with the one
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I know only. Peter McCormack.
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Well, I'm interested in you because you've been on the vague periphery of my Twitter
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universe for a while. And I'm sort of partially interested in your life story. I'm partially
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interested in your attitude towards crypto and your insights there and partially interested
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to where you sort of see the culture, the transatlantic culture in the UK and the US evolving.
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So why don't we start with why you hit me up? How did this unlikely alliance or perhaps likely
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alliance even come about? Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?
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Well, listen, I was listening to Rogan. I was listening to your show on Rogan and I'm based in the UK.
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I'm British, but I found myself in this place where I've got this Bitcoin podcast, which is quite popular.
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It's one of the most listened to. It's not the most listened to one.
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But that means I spend a lot of my time with Americans and I spend a lot of time in America.
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And it's a very different culture from the UK even though we speak the same language.
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And then amongst the Bitcoin community, there is definitely this push to anti-state
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anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism. And whilst I found myself agreeing theoretically
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with some of their ideas, I still find myself being somebody who is a proponent of democracy and
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would rather strengthen democracy than then burn it all down. I think the burn it all down
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idea wouldn't make the world a better place. And so when I was listening to your show with Rogan
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here in your pushback, especially with regards to a lot of the stuff relating to COVID,
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I reached out to you because I was like, okay, I feel like somebody out there actually
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pushing back on some of these narratives with regards to COVID that it's all a scam and Pfizer
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just wants to have a drug out there that we have to have every six months and that it doesn't work
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and it's killing people and that is causing, you know, everyone to have heart attacks and children
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to die. And look, I'm not a somebody, I'm in LA at the moment, I've got to wear a mask everywhere,
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which I think is idiotic. And my children aren't vaccinating and they won't be. And I feel like
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there's this middle ground where I sit in, which I felt like when I saw your show with Rogan,
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I felt some affinity to you and I thought, okay, that's somebody I want to talk to. And
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and there's somebody also that I'm a fan of Clare Lemon from Coalette and I think it's
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particularly where you called out Tim Paul as a dumb dumb that stood out to me because
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I'm also a particular criticism, I haven't been made in person, but nonetheless true if that
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fits. Well, there's some of the stuff that Tim's done, I am a fan of,
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some of his old films I thought were great and I've watched his show sometimes I think he makes
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some interesting points sometimes, but I kind of just got fed up with the whole, like,
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Australian is creating concentration camps. I think that's a massive insult to the people
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who actually live through concentration camps during the Second World War or other times,
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you know, history of the world. And this kind of, I just did a show with David from,
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which he should listen to, which he'd like, because he says, when I talk about this,
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this question of, are they concentration camps in Australia? David from former George W. Bush
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speech writers says, do they have pillows? If they have pillows, they're not a concentration
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camp, so start being such a fucking baby. Well, the thing is, I feel like there's this kind of audience
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capture going on now, which exists within, I don't want to just say the right, but more from people
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who are suspicious or fed up of, you know, all the crap that comes from the state or comes from
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centralised entities that have destroyed our trust, whether that's government entities or
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mainstream media. But at the same time, I do feel like there's a more sensible conversation
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that needs to happen regarding this. And I think the reason I see, I clash with a lot of the
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Bitcoiners, because they call me a status car, and they accuse me of being paid by Pfizer to promote
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the vaccine and things like that. And I think what it is, it's just a cultural difference,
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because I think in the UK, and especially across Europe following the Second World War, we
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are just a little bit more socialist. We don't have first a member of protection, which is
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terrible, I wish we did have something like the First Amendment. But the second time we don't
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have guns, which I'm quite happy with. And I think we just organise ourselves in a different way.
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For example, the NHS, a lot of these Americans criticise it, they say, it's socialism, and it's
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the worst healthcare in the world. I actually quite like the fact that anybody in the UK, whatever
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social status they have, or economic status, if they have a heart attack or break their leg,
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they're going to get seen to not have their life destroyed by it. So yeah, I just look,
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it was good to see you push back on some of the ideas, and I felt an affinity with you,
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and I just wanted to talk to you really. Well, I mean, I think the way in this, you know,
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you and I sort of occupy a funny place, an audience capture is an interesting way of putting it.
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I should also clarify, like this whole, like, temple thing, has is sort of, like, as you
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made detect just a vast piece of inconsequential sort of mutual trolling, I think, in the sense that
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I didn't really know anything about him until he just started parachuting into my mentions all
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the time talking about Australian concentration camps. So you're probably quite right that he's
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done great work in the past. There are tons of people at the moment who've done great work in
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the past, who's sheen has come off them as a result of audience capture, and I think the cognitive
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bias of always wanting to be skeptical of official narratives. And, you know, as you mentioned,
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perhaps institutions have not covered themselves in glory in the past two years. It has been chaotic,
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we have been unprepared, human beings are clumsy and self-interested, so things don't go perfectly.
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And so there's, there are a number of people who, in this universe that you and I sort of find
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ourselves in, which is, I guess, an independent thinking kind of intellectual dark web adjacent,
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sort of not quite mainstream media, but also sort of, you know, not down the Alex Jones rabbit hole
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either. We're in this precarious position where we're trying to be critical and skeptical without
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also being credulous towards the crazy. And I think what's shocked me in the past couple of years
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is the credulity towards crazy that has happened among some of these people where the more you talk
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to the same people over and over again, the more conspiratorial your worldview becomes. And you
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actually find yourself in a place that is frankly quite infantile and unskeptical and credulous
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in how much you're willing to believe about how corrupt the whole system is. And so at some point,
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you know, it, I don't think the, I don't think that everyone who criticizes voices like this
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is right because a lot of those people are just
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parroting the same institutional lines and will change their opinion as soon as the CDC changes its
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opinion. And that's not, that's no way to lead a rational life either. But it's equally
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fallacious to, to do the opposite, to do the exact mirror image of that and just disbelieve
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everything that elites are telling you because there has to be some vast conspiracy that's,
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that's behind the scenes. So that's, that's just my like, temple caveat. Like I don't actually know
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anything about the guy. I don't know anything about his background. He behaves in a way that is
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like trolley and ridiculous and clearly uninterested in, in getting to the truth of the matter,
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clearly uninterested in understanding the experience of people who actually are going through the things
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that he is criticizing and completely uninterested in actually finding allies and being strategic about
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what is going to solve problems instead of exacerbate problems. This is part of my problem.
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Yeah, like the extreme, everyone's extremism is just ratcheting up the other side. And so
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people in the middle who are probably the best placed to have credibility in the eyes of
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the people we're trying to sway find their lives made much harder by extremists who
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who tarnish our reputation by being fucking idiots and put, you know, on our, on our side of the aisle.
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Um, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to throw that up up that thought and then I want to go to
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your biography. Yeah, no, but that's why I wanted to really keen to hear you and him sit down and
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talk to each other because I think, I think you have that Aussie tone which allows you to bring
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humor into kind of disarm people and actually have an intelligent conversation with them and,
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and correct them on that. And I just wanted to throw in that, that audience capture. It's a,
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it's a real problem and it really is for me is where we're potentially, people want to burn down
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the mainstream media because they don't trust them. Uh, despite the fact check in departments,
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they don't trust any of them and then they want to replace it with these new independent heroes,
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but who are at risk of the same issue with the incentive model where the commercials drive the
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audience capture. And that really worries me because it creates this echo chamber. And I, I don't
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know if you've experienced it, but I've had to find myself fight back against it. I, you know,
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I often talk to my producer, Danny's actually here with me now in the room. Hey, hey, Danny,
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yeah, we, uh, we talk about it nearly every day because the reward mechanism is to follow the
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crowd and, uh, and I've taken a lot of anger and accusations just because I don't follow the crowd
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because I don't follow that, that narrative, but I have felt myself one gets sucked in,
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but also recognize the economic benefits if you do. But so it's something I've really had to fight
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against just just to try and protect myself because I think long term, it's a short term play
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really long term. You have to just try and be as honest as you can be about what you're thinking.
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But yeah, so I just, I do worry about audience capture. Yeah. And it's, I mean,
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you, you actually in a, in a strange way, have more experience of this than I do because as a,
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I mean, I'm a sort of a, I don't want to say a polymath that sounds like I'm big-noting myself,
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but like a man of many skills rather than an expert in anything in particular. And so
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the, I've traditionally found myself in a fairly comfortable position ideologically in the sense
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that I'm willing to give a hearing to anyone from any walk of life. If they are persistently
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mouthing bullshit, then I'm going to call them on it in, as you say, my unbearably charming
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Australian way, which is disarming and, and, and pleasant and makes, makes them not realize that
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I'm sliding the knife in, uh, I say with tongue fully in cheek. And, but there hasn't been a big
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consistent coherent, um, sort of ideological movement that I have found myself
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both in and also in opposition to, perhaps until now with the coronavirus misinformation.
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But the world that you swim in, I do think has a huge narrative going on inside it,
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the crypto world, which is either going to be proven right in some ways, completely wrong,
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I mean, in terms of the most revolutionary sort of idea, like, um, almost utopian vision of
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the way that crypto is going to revolutionize everything. Um, or is, you know, like, in other
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people from the outside of it, even people who are very, very knowledgeable, but who haven't
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quite drunk the cool aid, regarded as being, um, almost an ideology like you might think of
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Marxism or, or techno utopianism as being an ideology. And I get the impression that whilst you're
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a thousand percent on Bitcoin train, you're not a thousand percent on all of the political and
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cultural consequences that people predict might, might happen there from. Is that right?
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Yeah, I mean, look, it's a really complicated area this crypto and I spend most of my time trying
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to explain to people why I'm only focused on Bitcoin. That's the only thing I work on. I don't
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really work on any other cryptocurrency. I don't, I don't really pay attention to much of them.
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I'm not really that interested in. That's most of the time I spend explaining things to people,
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but also as somebody with one of the leading podcasts, um, I am probably the only one who is outside
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of the America. There are a few smaller ones, but most of them based in America, most of them
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would probably veer more to like libertarian, uh, can, uh, republican kind of political standpoint,
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whereas I consider myself more as, I don't want to say a centrist because I'm not always in the
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middle some issues. I'm left some. I'm right. It just depends on, on the issue. Um, but I'm not one
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of these people who looks at Bitcoin as a, as a technology and a monetary revolution, which is
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going to burn down the state. I actually see it as something that will just make the state a bit
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more financially responsible. So I kind of come from, from that position, it is quite a challenging
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position to come in because I'm not somebody believes that everything should and will be decentralized.
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I think some things should be centralized. I also, as I said to you at the very start of the show,
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I am a firm believer in democracy for all its failings, you know, for all its absolute failings.
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And I have been fortunate enough to spend time with Michael Malles. I recorded a show with him,
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and I really like talking to him and I really appreciate his viewpoint. I just, I'm not somebody
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who sees how, you know, anarchism can actually make the world a better place. I think we've,
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you know, we've been through these kind of various revolutions and changes in society. We've got to
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the point where we're at with democracy and I, I don't think the improvement is to burn it down
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and start again or hold guns and hold our own money and, and have private companies and contracts
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and insurance systems to replace everything. Peter, can you just round out that worldview that you're
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talking about because many of, many of the people who are listening to this who are only vaguely
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aware of the contours of, of crypto land will hear you say that you're in favor of democracy and
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think, well, yeah, I mean, apart from a few fringe university professors in Ivy League
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towers who are teaching political, the political philosophy of anarchism, aren't we all in favor of
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democracy? Everyone from QAnon to the capital, to the capital riders on January 6th to everybody
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claims to Putin claims to be in favor of democracy. But you're actually talking about a phenomenon
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that's quite real in technoland, which is, yeah, an opposition to the democratic status we know
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it now. What does that look like? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be always be the best person to explain
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this. There's plenty of other people and maybe, you know, I could recommend something to talk to,
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but just kind of in summary, it is people who just do not believe in government that nobody should
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have power of you and create rules that you should abide by and that society would operate better
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if we had no state and everybody operated independently with private property rights and
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within that structure, rather than have the state-creative rules, you would have basic kind of,
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I can't remember what they call it, it's like common law or I can't remember the name of it,
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but it's decided that there would be no state and everybody would be able to protect themselves,
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you'd be able to arm yourselves and that you would have a verse in such as insurances in place
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to protect society, you would have private, say private security forces that you would pay to
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to protect you and things like that and like I said, I'm not a great person to explain it because
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I've not spent too much time reading it because every time I go down that rabbit hole, I find myself
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saying in theory, I agree with you, this sounds great, but I kind of very quickly dismiss it
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has something that won't work because wherever you find a country where there's been a breakdown
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in the rule of law or a breakdown in government or breakdown in the systems, you usually see
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the same things happen as you see an increase in violence, you see an increase in
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danger towards women and children, the money breaking down, so I'm not a burn it all down person,
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but there are people out there that do believe in this, I've read some of the work from Mises and
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Rothbard that I've been directed towards, but again, I think if you're a critical of a system,
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it's very easy to write a paper that would define a better system that would work better,
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but the reality of how does that play out? I just don't see any scenario where a society without
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some centralized government which is democratically elected that has a centralized police security
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in rule of law can work, so I don't usually spend much time in it, so I've probably done a bad
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job explaining it, but within the Bitcoin world, there's definitely a large group of people
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who believe in this. No, I mean, it's a pretty good shape to the world view, and I would also just
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say not only are there a lot of people who believe that this world is desirable, but there are a
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lot of people who believe that this world is inevitable in the sense that the impact that decentralized
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finance and cryptocurrencies are going to have on central government's ability to control us
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using the purse strings is going to inevitably lead to the collapse of the state. I mean,
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I saw you had biology, Shrinivas and Glenn Greenwald on the show, and I'm, biology's coming on
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this show at some point in the not too distant future, but I think you know, I've heard him say that
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the United States of America will cease to exist by the middle of the century regardless of whether
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we want it to or not. So let's talk about then where you fit into this big mosaic. What is Bitcoin
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good for? That's a really great question. A number of things. We can talk about the kind of
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basic use cases, and then we can talk about the wider use cases. So one of the things a lot of
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people talk about is Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, which is a funny thing to talk about,
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because it only tends to be a hedge against inflation over a long period of time. I saw a really
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great tweet the other day, somebody saying, I bought Bitcoin at $50,000 to hedge 7% inflation,
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and I'm down 42%. It's a really great tweet because Bitcoin itself is super volatile,
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but Bitcoin tends to work in a way where the time preference has changed. So it will hedge
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inflation usually over a longer period. So every Bitcoin that's been purchased will always,
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it has always been historically in profit over a minimum of a four-year period. So we say always
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about how many four-year periods have there been since Bitcoin was created? Well, so we're up to
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13 years now that Bitcoin has been in existence. We've got an end of three to look at.
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Yeah, which is a tricky thing, but I think what it is at the moment, we're just in this speculation
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phase. We're trying to reprice the world with a new financial asset. The world's never seen
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before a decentralized financial asset, which is trying to find out how it fits in society,
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how it's governed, how it's used. And 13 years, we're very early in that phase,
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but if Bitcoin does deliver on its goal of being the standard financial asset for the world,
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at that point, because it still likes to say very early, the liquidity will be at a point whereby
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it is used so universally that you won't see these massive fluctuations in price,
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and then you will be protected from inflation. But talking about Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation
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in a country like the UK, or the US, or even Australia, where we're talking about low
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single digit, well, low to mid-single digit inflation, four to seven percent, it's quite difficult.
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The use case really is proven when you start looking at countries where they've got failing
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currencies. So if you look at Lebanon, Turkey, Argentina, or Venezuela, which I've been to,
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countries that have experienced high double digit inflation and currency collapses,
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almost anybody within those countries who have bought Bitcoin have been able to protect
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their wealth and their financial assets. When I was in Venezuela making a film,
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I met a guy there and what he does, he holds all his money in Bitcoin, and then every week,
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he just transfers the amount in these in Bolivars to survive. And he said, even when the price
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crashes in Bitcoin, he's always tends to be up because the inflation is so high in that country.
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So the inflation store itself is kind of tricky. It is proven itself in the most disastrous
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economies, and then in the more kind of well-established stable economies.
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And just to ask a follow-up on that, Peter, when in a scenario in which the currency,
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in which a national currency is just not doing the job of a currency like Venezuela,
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where it's complete calamity, isn't anything going to provide a refuge from that? Rather,
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they could have been exchanging their Bolivars into Mexican pesos, and that would be much,
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much better, and we could uphold the Mexican pesos as the future of currency. It doesn't really
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prove anything. If I'm in the middle of a catastrophe, then even a shoddy product is going to do
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a better job at saving me than the catastrophe itself, but that doesn't mean that that product is
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the answer to all of our prayers. No, you're right. When I was in Venezuela,
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they were using five currencies. They had the Bolivar, they had Bitcoin, they had the US dollar,
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they had the Colombian peso, and then they had this, like we are kind of remember the name,
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this weird Venezuelan cryptocurrency, but there are some added advantages with Bitcoin, say over
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the US dollar, getting dollars into the country really means getting physical dollars into the
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into the country, because they don't really have the network and the infrastructure for a digital
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dollar, unless they're using something like Tether, but the great thing about Bitcoin is,
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there's been a mass exodus of people leaving Venezuela going across the border around the world,
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because they can't find work in the country, and the inflation is so high that they've
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going out to work, and what they can do is they can actually transfer Bitcoin back into the country,
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so that's something that happens quite regularly, a huge amount of Bitcoin gets transferred back into
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the country. Just to clarify for people what Tether is, that's a US dollar generated cryptocurrency
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that doesn't fluctuate, that is supposedly always going to be pegged to the US dollar, is that right?
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Yeah, they call them stable coins, essentially US dollar pegged, so that yeah,
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people can actually transfer the Bitcoin back into the country, and the one interesting,
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one not the one, but one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is when I send you Bitcoin,
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it is actually final settlement, so if I was to send you money over PayPal, that isn't final
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settlement, because PayPal essentially gives you a IOU, same with bank transfers, but if you're
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holding a Bitcoin wallet, and I send it to you, it is actually final settlement, so what's
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happening is if you are transferring Bitcoin into the country, the people receiving it are physically
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receiving the Bitcoin into their wallet. Right, so I think even crypto skeptics would concede
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that in cases of dictatorships that are blocking currency flows in and out of the country,
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authoritarian regimes that are trying to crack down on people's ability to acquire wealth,
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economic basket cases where the currency is becoming worthless day on day, there's definitely a
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use case for crypto currencies. I've heard crypto skeptics say yes, but that's very quickly going
26:37
to be gobbled up by traditional financial institutions, which will find ways of
26:43
depositing, of using blockchain to deposit value using their own, their own algorithms, and perhaps
26:51
their own cryptocurrencies, perhaps state-backed cryptocurrencies, like there's no reason to believe
26:55
that Bitcoin is forever going to be the asset that is required for this Bitcoin might just devalue
26:59
over the course of the next half century as traditional banks and governments get in on the game
27:04
and provide the same kind of functionality that you're talking about in failed regimes.
27:08
Yeah, so I would challenge that on two fronts. The first one is that you don't tend to find people
27:14
who've gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole come out of it. Once people have gone down and they
27:18
understand the nature of money, the history of money, how money works, and how Bitcoin is different,
27:22
you tend to have them for life. There's very few people I've met. I actually can't think of an
27:26
instance. Somebody who said, yeah, I tried Bitcoin. It just wasn't for me. I've given up on it.
27:32
So once people go down that rabbit hole, they tend to stay. So it is a growing movement.
27:37
The second thing is these other crypto currencies or government currencies, they don't offer
27:43
the same thing, which is really the point of Bitcoin and they can't do the same thing.
27:48
They fundamentally won't be decentralized and that's a super important point. We can come back
27:52
to why decentralization matters, but they won't be decentralized. They probably won't be censorship
27:56
resistant and they probably won't be resistant to an increase in the money supply. So a government
28:02
CBDC really is just a replacement of the local currency. If we had a British pound CBDC.
28:09
What does it mean? A central bank digital currency. It's essentially a blockchain-based
28:14
version of the sovereign currencies. Do any of these exist yet? I know that a lot of countries are
28:19
talking about launching one. I think China is a late stage testing one and I know other countries
28:27
are looking at them, but they're not going to have the same properties of Bitcoin. They're not
28:31
going to fix it. They're not going to create a fixed limit to it because we know governments need
28:35
to be able to manipulate the money supply to solve their problems of overspending, especially
28:41
as we've seen during the COVID times. I mean, the UK government has printed ridiculous
28:46
amounts of money. I think the US government has printed some 25% of all the dollars that ever
28:50
existed in the last year or so. Some ridiculous number like my stat will be wrong, but so Bitcoin
28:56
is fixed to 21 million. We'll only ever be 21 million, so they can't compete on that level.
29:00
They also, we know the state likes to like surveillance, they like to track everything we spend,
29:05
who we send money to and from, and a CBDC is the perfect tool for surveilling or you're spend.
29:10
That's again a bit more difficult with Bitcoin, so unless they're going to create something
29:14
better than Bitcoin, there's no reason to move to that currency. If Turkey was to implement
29:20
the CBDC under their current dictator Erdogan, I still don't believe the public will believe and
29:26
trust that money over Bitcoin, especially if they're already a Bitcoiner. So I just don't
29:30
see any competition from that and then competition from other cryptocurrencies. I've been in this
29:35
for a long time, Josh, and I've seen so many different cryptocurrencies bring brought out and say
29:40
they're better than Bitcoin because they're faster or cheap to use, etc. Most of them fail on
29:45
multiple fronts, but the most important one is they fail on this decentralization. Now this is
29:49
super important. Bitcoin is designed in a way that anybody can run a node. And so what that means
29:55
is you can hold a full copy of the blockchain and verify every payment that comes in.
30:00
And there are tens of thousands of people who do this around the world. You don't need to do it,
30:04
but you can do. And what that means is that it's fully decentralized, that the consensus is
30:09
being checked all around the world, that all the payments are assured to be correct. And this is
30:13
super important because if the state wanted to attack Bitcoin and they wanted to switch it off,
30:19
even if they tried like a whole country like China band, they can't still stop Bitcoin. And even
30:24
if you're in China, you can still receive Bitcoin, even though it's banned. Whereas if you look
30:28
something like Ethereum, it's much harder for someone to be able to run a node. There's not as many
30:33
people running the nodes. And it would be fairly trivial for the state or a group of countries to come
30:39
together and force that to be closed down because essentially the nodes are run out of data centers.
30:45
So Bitcoin really, for me, and this is why I focus my entire life on Bitcoin. And there are other
30:50
people who are crypto proponents. And I think really the main reason is that their careers are
30:54
based on that, or they've bought some cryptocurrencies and they want it to go up. But I think anyone who
30:58
really truly understands what cryptocurrencies are, what Bitcoin is, what decentralization is,
31:03
and what the properties of Bitcoin are, they very quickly dismiss all other cryptocurrencies and
31:08
CBDCs and sovereign currencies. It's funny, Peter, that you say that you've never seen anyone go
31:13
down the rabbit hole and then come back out and say no to Bitcoin. That's an interesting way
31:20
of framing it. There's something logically fishy about that, which I'll come back to you on.
31:24
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think you're sort of defining away the problem by setting
31:29
up parameters that are self-confirming. In other words, it depends on how you define going down
31:35
the Bitcoin rabbit hole. So I was in Italy just before Christmas with a friend of mine who's the
31:43
former European economics correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and I was amazed at how
31:47
little he seemed to know about crypto, in which I'm not an expert, but I've dabbled, I own some,
31:52
I own a bunch of coins. And he was just saying, oh, those coins and everything, this is all just
31:59
nonsense. It's all just a bubble. And I was pushing him on the difference between Bitcoin and
32:05
Ether and the potential utility of something like Ethereum and smart contracts. And he knew nothing
32:13
but he went away and to his credit as a good financial journalist did a ton of reading and a ton
32:18
of research and spent an entire day while we were in Sicily reading up on it and came away and
32:25
concluded that he was going to put just 1,000 euros, which is not a lot for him, into an ETF,
32:32
sort of a crypto basket, but that was probably the amount of exposure that he felt comfortable with.
32:39
And so that clearly doesn't satisfy your definition of someone going down the rabbit hole in Bitcoin,
32:44
but it does satisfy a prudent financial, you're highly financially literate, highly
32:51
economically literate person's vision of what level of risk he's willing to take in crypto. So if
32:59
you define it as spending weeks and weeks and weeks reading every blog about things,
33:05
then maybe people don't come away without being Bitcoin devotees, but maybe the type of person
33:13
who is going to read weeks and weeks and weeks of Bitcoin blogs is the type of person who was
33:17
inevitably going to ultimately drink the Kool-Aid because if they weren't and if they had a level of
33:22
conservative, conventional, economic understanding that my friend from Oxford Cambridge does,
33:29
after day one, they'd go, all right, I think I get this thing. It doesn't really do anything yet,
33:34
but it definitely might, and if it does, it's going to change the world, but it's brand new,
33:38
so nobody can be sure. And that's the sort of precautionary position. Is he wrong?
33:47
Well, everyone's position is their own position, right? And it's dependent on how much time they
33:51
spend on understanding it, what their background is, what they've been exposed to at various levels
33:56
of understanding. But I don't think one day is long enough, and I also don't buy the whole,
34:03
drinking the Kool-Aid thing because that implies that someone is being sold a myth, and for me,
34:09
it's really come down to understanding the nature of money, how money works, the history of
34:14
feared currencies, what control government have over them and their ability to manipulate the
34:20
currencies and print as much as they need. And for me, it's a harder thing when you look at
34:26
something like the UK and the US, because we do have fairly stable currencies that have lost
34:34
their value over time, and we are seeing inflation, which itself is a hidden tax, but I think it's
34:39
much more evident when you start traveling in new visit countries, which have suffered
34:43
much higher inflation due to economic mismanagement. And so for me, I think it's all dependent on
34:50
the individual, Josh. But what, like I say, for those who've gone deep enough down the
34:57
rabbit hole to really understand the nature and the history of money, and I think it's a bit more
35:00
than a day, they've decided I'm going to read some books on this, I'm going to read maybe the
35:06
bullish case for Bitcoin and the Bitcoin standard, I'm going to read articles on the history of money,
35:11
I'm going to listen to some podcasts, maybe like mine, and then over time they spend a bit more time
35:15
understanding money, and then just seeing it playing out in the real world, what's been happening
35:19
across the world over this last two years is really pointed to everything the people who have
35:23
been proposed as a Bitcoin for the last 13 years have been saying, but not everyone's going to get it,
35:28
but over time more and more people are getting it, which is why Bitcoin does continue to grow
35:33
and continues to grow in value and use cases. And there are, you know, I should talk about
35:39
another couple of just example use cases actually, because you did ask about that, I don't
35:43
need to look at the latest one, but there are really, there are a lot of other really interesting
35:48
use cases, but one that really stood out to me over the last couple of years was in support in
35:54
activists, so one example we can talk about is the NSARS movement in Nigeria, where there was
36:02
protests and demonstrations to kind of remove this or campaign against this violent police force,
36:08
which were attacking people within Nigeria, movement was created that allowed people to send
36:14
Bitcoin into the country to support them during their protests, and the great thing about Bitcoin
36:19
is that it does now have liquidity in every country in the world, you can send Bitcoin from one
36:22
country to the other country and be able to sell it on the open market. So as these protests were
36:27
happening and people were demonstrating around the world, Bitcoiners were able to send money into
36:33
the country to help people with their protests, then following that, we had the Lukashenko protests
36:40
in Belarus that dictated, supported by Putin, who has no care for democracy, one of the strategies
36:48
to try and protest against it, which ultimately didn't work, but was a fair attempt, was that
36:51
state workers were going to strike, and if the state workers were to strike, they would hopefully
36:57
be able to bring the function of the state down. Again, what happened was Bitcoiners were able to
37:01
send Bitcoin into the country, or anyone who wanted to support the protest, was able to send
37:06
Bitcoin into the country to these people, they were able to get liquidity into the country so they
37:10
could get the local currency to be able to pay their bills and feed their families. And that's not
37:17
really the idea here is not talking about just talking about activists and protests, what I'm
37:21
talking about here is the permission as a nation of Bitcoin that you can send it to any person
37:25
anywhere in the world and they receive it, trying to send money via banks and pay powers fraught
37:30
with issues and problems because it can be blocked or it can take time. If I send you money over
37:35
the Lightning network with Bitcoin, if I send it over the Lightning network, you receive that almost
37:40
instantly at almost zero cost and you have, you physically then hold that Bitcoin because
37:46
you have instant final set. I think everybody gets that, but I just want to park, I think there are
37:53
interesting differences of opinion between someone like yourself and someone like my
38:00
economist friend, then the question of whether or not blockchains are going to facilitate
38:07
greater ease and simplicity of money transfer. I think everybody would grant that and then
38:12
would arrive once again at the criticism that I raised earlier, which is yes, but big financial
38:18
institutions and governments are going to get very, very good at the technology as well. So then
38:22
you can always fall back and say, yeah, but they're going to only get good at the technology
38:25
and the context of a fear currency environment, which they're able to devalue and then my friend
38:29
the economist will come back and say, well, yeah, but who cares about a gradually devaluing inflation
38:36
rate of fear currency that is universally accepted everywhere in the world and is super, super
38:44
convenient in every other way. If the only problem you're trying to solve is being able to
38:48
have instant transfers, like instant transfers, instant shman transfers, by 2030, I'm sure that we'll
38:53
all be having instant transferring up the wazoo, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Bitcoin's
38:57
going to be the one gold standard by the people that are going to want to be exchanging.
39:03
Yeah, I think we should go, therefore, go back to the most important feature of Bitcoin,
39:08
which is the fixed limit of 21 million. A lot of economists have written off Bitcoin,
39:15
Keynesian economics, people like Paul Krugman have written it off,
39:19
MMT proponents who think that the government can print enough as much money as they want as
39:23
long as they control inflation. People are Stephanie Kelton who've been proved completely wrong
39:28
over this last year across the world in nearly every major economy as well as developing economies.
39:34
This cheap access to printing money has created a world of cheap credit and the world of cheap
39:40
credit has created a quite a widening wealth divide, which we saw again during the COVID era.
39:47
One of the big things that Bitcoin has cared about is this fixed limit of 21 million,
39:52
because there is this fixed limit, rather than facing inflation and looking at your savings,
39:57
doing the thing, well, crap, I need to get out there and spend this money before it loses value
40:01
and rewarding those people who have assets, but I haven't a fixed limit. You have to reconsider
40:06
your purchasing. If I hold Bitcoin now, if I spend it now, it may be worth 5, 10x in future years,
40:12
so I become a little bit more responsible about how I spend my money. This is where it gets to
40:19
the crux of why I care about Bitcoin. I don't want Bitcoin just to replace the state and destroy
40:24
fear currencies. I want it to give it as an option for people to opt out of fear currencies and also
40:30
create some more checks and balances on how the government spends money. Josh, you and I have
40:37
bills to pay every month. We have to feed ourselves and pay for things we need in life, whether
40:42
that's heating or our home. If we go over budget, maybe we can get a bank loan, if we don't pay
40:47
our bank loan, we'll have our house repossessed. There is no impact on the government on
40:51
overspending apart from perhaps every four years they face a vote and they could be elected out of
40:57
office. We saw, again, during the coronavirus pandemic, as we face lockdowns, many small businesses
41:04
had the option of maybe taking out loans or having their businesses closed. Lots of businesses now
41:09
near where I live close and I went to New York recently and there's a lot of closed businesses
41:13
there, but nobody in government lost their job. Everybody continue to get paid and governments
41:18
continue to get bigger. There's no checks and balances on government spending, really. Governments
41:24
use to operate with a surplus and a deficit. It's almost like the idea of a surplus has gone out
41:30
the window now that every government spends everything they want and everything they need
41:34
continually to support their need to look after what they say is look after society and ensure
41:42
they're reelected every four years. This is why I really like Bitcoin. I think it's a check
41:47
and balance on government, but we're very early for that. For me, it works. I operate a Bitcoin
41:54
standard. I keep my money, both in my business and personal life. I keep as much as
41:57
way from the government as possible and ever since I've done that, it's benefited me as the
42:01
government continues to print money and I think as more people understand that, it becomes that
42:06
real lifeboat for people in struggling economies, but also within developed and stable economies
42:12
as a check and balance on the government. Let's talk about your wild ride and what you've learned
42:18
from it. How much money did you make and lose in the past five years and how? Did you google that?
42:29
I know enough about you, Peter, to know your schedule background.
42:34
Well, I mean, it's on my, it's pinned as my Twitter. I'll talk about Twitter. People
42:38
can go read the story, but a regional story when I quit the advertising industry a few years back
42:45
took some time out and I had some money left over and I think I started with about 32,000 pounds.
42:50
I put into Bitcoin and all types of cryptocurrency and in that year that flated up to,
42:55
I've managed to trade that up to about 1.2 million, which was wild and I was buying myself nice
43:04
things and traveling in the world and flying first class and then in 2018 there was like the
43:08
market's crash, which I wasn't prepared for and I nearly lost the lot. It was a really painful
43:15
but good exercise in understanding money and preserving capital, but since then I changed everything.
43:23
I stopped buying crypto currencies, I stopped trading them and I focused on what I should do, which
43:27
is building a business, which historically, that's what I've done. So I built this podcast business
43:32
over the last few years and I continued to put money into Bitcoin. I'm not going to say how my
43:36
own, but I set myself up financially in a pretty stable position and also put my kids in a position
43:44
where I can afford to send them to college. Was the clawing back of money that you lost in crypto
43:51
trading a lesson that people can take something from if they're not in your unique situation?
43:57
Was the means by which you got rich the first time and then lost it different from the means by
44:03
which you've become, well, if not rich, then comfortable the second time.
44:06
I mean, it's just a typical story of greed. I've made one point whatever million and I remember
44:13
as with my dad and kids, we're a place called center part of the UK, it's like a holiday place
44:19
you go and my dad said to me, don't you think you should take some out? You could go out now and
44:23
you could buy three or four houses and that's going to set you up for the rest of your life and
44:27
I was like, yeah, but dad, what if this goes to five million? And then the market top down
44:32
January and completely crashed and like I said, I lost most of it and it really just lost this
44:36
January of what year? 2018. And I just got greedy, Josh. What was Bitcoin when you were a
44:46
millionaire? What was the price in USD? Gosh, but I mean back then it spiked at around 20,000
44:57
during that ball run. It's amazing isn't it that it's gone up to almost 70 in the interim?
45:04
Well, I tell you, I actually at one point I had 186 Bitcoin. I don't mind saying that now because
45:09
I have nothing near that. But at the time, I mean, if I had that now, you know, I'd be in a much better
45:14
position. But at the same time, it was quite stressful. It wasn't just that I was making the money
45:20
and in the training. I was actually spending all day, every day looking at the charts,
45:23
waking up in the middle of the night, checking the charts. It was no way to live and it wasn't really
45:28
a job. It was just this stupid thing I did all the time. And suddenly I by accident, after
45:33
meeting this guy, Rich Roll, who's a podcaster in the US, spend some time with him and just said,
45:37
actually, I like your life. I went and did the podcast and I've spent my last five years
45:42
building that and making films and just found something I really enjoyed doing. And it's,
45:46
yeah, most things. If you enjoy what you do, you would usually find a way to earn an income from it
45:51
that gives you the life you want. I'd be Josh. The biggest lesson I learned is that
45:56
and it's just such a cliche. I'm so embarrassed to say this, but the money did not make me happy.
46:01
The excitement, it felt exciting at the time to see the money going up. But was I happy? No,
46:05
it wasn't. I was not enjoying my life. I wasn't in a good place in my life. And now I am. I'm
46:12
really enjoying my job. I get a lot of benefits out of it. I get to travel the world. I get invited
46:16
to do cool things and I get to have a conversation like this with you. So it's so funny, isn't it?
46:22
I mean, the money doesn't buy happiness adage is one of those things that is both intensely true
46:28
and also intensely inaccessible until you've lived it first person. It's a bit like what other
46:34
people think of you doesn't matter. You can try to tell a 15 year old that what other people think
46:38
of them doesn't matter. But no matter how many times you say the words, it's never going to
46:43
make any sense. And you can try to tell a 15 year old that money doesn't buy happiness, but
46:47
it doesn't make any sense. And then once you've been rich and you've been poor and once you've been
46:54
famous or unfamous or fated over or despised, you ultimately realise that your grandparents were
47:00
right about all this. On the question of if just in case people are scratching their heads and
47:04
wondering what 186 Bitcoin is that you previously had at the peak value of $65,000 US dollars
47:12
were talking about 12 million US. But that would have required you to pick the top of the market.
47:20
So where do you think I have to run soon, which is a shame. Unfortunately,
47:25
yeah, I stuffed up the technical aspect of this. So for the listener, we started speaking
47:30
later than we'd expected to. So I would have liked to talk for over an hour. We can't because I
47:35
have another obligation. But Peter and I are going to speak on his podcast. So the follow-up of
47:40
this conversation will be on Peter's podcast and you can hear it there. That being said,
47:45
what is going on with crypto at the moment? Because throughout last year, when Bitcoin went from
47:51
60-something thousand down to 30-something thousand, whenever that was March or April of 2021,
47:59
maybe is that right? Yeah. I thought, all right, well, this is my moment to start
48:05
dabbling because I don't know whether or not $60,000 was overvalued. But if it has been $60,000,
48:11
then I'm pretty sure that $30,000 is a reasonable price to pay. So I bought some and started doing
48:17
my research as they say. And everyone in the crypto space was saying, it's going to be a hundred
48:23
grand by the end of the year. It's going to be a hundred grand by the end of the year. This is the
48:27
year. This is the year. And I sort of thought, okay, well, we'll see. And sure enough, it tanks.
48:32
It went all the way up and then it tanked all the way up to 60-something and then quickly tanked
48:36
and ended the year in the doll drums. And now it's sort of just peatering along at less than I
48:42
bought it for and much less than everybody than a lot of people bought it for and much, much less
48:47
than everybody said it was going to be worth. What do you make of that? Well, that's what always tends
48:53
to happen. It's the cycles of Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's super volatile. Most people,
48:59
they get in later than they should of. They get told for years. And when they finally get in,
49:04
they get in at a price much higher than they originally heard about it. I mean, the first Bitcoin
49:08
I ever bought was about $80 and I was using it on the Silk Road, which you probably know what
49:13
that was for. And I've spent a lot of money on the Silk Road. We were buying textiles and
49:18
silks from China, right? Yeah, and yeah, bibles. But that money would have been worth millions
49:27
now. But what tends to happen is you come in and you hear about it and you finally jump in and
49:35
it does this to a lot of people that the price tags. You're like, what the hell happened? But
49:38
I would just say to people, or to you is just be patient. Don't think of Bitcoin as a certain
49:44
price you should buy. I'm always buying it. I buy it at 65,000. I buy it 30,000. I'll buy it 45,000.
49:50
I continually buy and accumulate Bitcoin because all the Bitcoin I buy is from money I don't need
49:56
for the next two to five years. It's money I don't need to spend. And because I'm under the belief
50:02
that we are repricing the world under a new standard and it will continue to grow. And every four to
50:07
five years, you will gradually see the price go up and up. But I think one of the most healthy things
50:12
that happened this year is that a lot of people, I was just talking to Danny about this. A lot of
50:16
people expected the price to go to 150, 200,000 because every previous cycle, it's seen these massive
50:22
rampups in the price. But the problem when it goes up massively in price, it then comes down
50:26
usually 80%, which is really painful for some people. I think what we're seeing is that this is a
50:31
market that is a lot more mature. We have derivatives. We have a lot more buyers. We have institutions
50:37
involved. So we're getting more liquidity and as you get more liquidity and more users, the price
50:41
will tend to stabilize. And I just think that's the sign of Bitcoin maturing. And I hopefully,
50:47
I hope that we get to a point where we don't see massive rises in the price, but we also don't see
50:52
massive falls in the price. For me, that's going to be a much more healthy position to be. And it's
50:55
going to be a lot easier for people to buy and use Bitcoin. But I'm entirely confident of confident
51:01
on a long enough timeframe. Bitcoin will always go up in price because there are more people
51:05
adopting it. So I would just say, Josh, if you're continuing to go down this Bitcoin rabbit hole and
51:10
learn about it, don't ever think about buying it a single price. Just do what they say is dollar cost
51:16
average and just buy a regular amount at the same time, whether that's a thousand dollars a month
51:21
or a hundred dollars a week. And then just ignore it for years. I talk about this thing. The first
51:27
you're first four years in Bitcoin is your tourist service. You are the surviving. Do you survive
51:32
your first four years in Bitcoin? It gets really easy. I have some kids, Peter. Someone told me that
51:38
having kids, I've got four-year-old twins and some older mother told me before I had them,
51:45
well, I didn't have them before we had them, that she was like, you know, just think of this as
51:49
a deployment to Afghanistan. You're going to be in the trenches for a few years and then you're
51:54
going to come back covered in blood and sweat and shell shock and then it'll be okay.
52:00
Well, your second kid's always the easiest. My friend said to me, and I wish he'd done it. He said,
52:04
I'm going to write this book. He's called, how to have your second kid like your first. Because once
52:08
you have your second child, you don't do all the panicking or worried. You don't go to the store and
52:13
buy all the little gadgets and things. Your second kid's born. He usually got a set of baby
52:17
grows ready for it. But Bitcoin's like that. The first four years is hard and stressful because you
52:23
see your net wealth jump up and drop and sometimes you end up negative. But once you get through that
52:28
first four years and you've been through a cycle and then you're in the green and you're comfortably
52:31
in the green, naturally becomes a lot easier. Buying Bitcoin for me is really, really easy now because
52:37
I'm in the green. I'm fully confident. I understand how it works. I've accepted that we're
52:41
reprising the world. We're speculating on this future money and I'm part of that. But it is
52:48
a tough verse toward duty. Peter, I've got to go. But so in 30 seconds or less answer my last question.
52:57
When you say that you're confident that in the long run Bitcoin's going to be a good investment,
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what percentage do you give that confidence? Out of 100%, how confident are you? Let's say that
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Bitcoin does not end up devaluing and turning out to have been one gigantic bubble.
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Well, I have 95% of my net wealth in Bitcoin. So I'm obviously very confident.
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Not 100% because there could be a coordinated global crackdown on Bitcoin from all the world
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governments and that's something that couldn't happen. But again, we're getting beyond that point,
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El Salvador has made it legal tender. There are various states in the US looking to make it legal
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tender, like the game theories plan out at a state level. So I don't think that's happening. So
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I'm highly confident. I'm 100% confident Bitcoin will still be here in a decade and two decades.
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I would say I'm at 95% sure it will be worth more in five years than it is now.
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Pete up, terrific to talk to you. Can't wait to continue the conversation on your podcast.
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Thanks for your time. Yeah, I love that. Talk to you soon.
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