Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Peter McCormack: Digital Currencies & Spy States

Transcript

Peter McCormack: Digital Currencies & Spy States · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, digital currencies, super-states
• 0:08
  spying on your every move, your every purchase, controlling you by controlling your purse strings.
• 0:16
  Whatever happened to Bitcoin? Was Bitcoin a fad, a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi scheme, or does
• 0:23
  it still provide a way for individual human beings to extricate themselves from the arms
• 0:29
  of the state, the arms of big finance, and pursue a freer future? That's the worldview of Peter McCormack,
• 0:36
  who knows as much as anybody about Bitcoin. He has not been in the least bit dejected by the
• 0:44
  travails of cryptocurrencies over the past year or two. He has a podcast called What Bitcoin Did,
• 0:51
  and he reached out to me after seeing me online and invited me on that podcast. I guess it would
• 0:56
  be a couple of years ago. And we hit it off. He's a very smart thinker. He's not just a tech
• 1:02
  bro with his head in the clouds. He thinks a lot about politics, about the relationship of the
• 1:07
  state and the individual, and he's still bullish about a future in which Bitcoin untathers us
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  from the ties that constrain us and provides a future that's brighter than the one that we currently
• 1:20
  have. And the flip side of that is that there is a dystopian future without Bitcoin that he's
• 1:25
  keen to articulate. I think I'm the fascinating. I hope you do too. Enjoy the one and only,
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  Peter McCormack.
• 1:41
  Are you still on the old Twitter?
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  X. X. On and off. I go in, I go in little spells. I don't know. It's just, it's a bit like smoking.
• 1:53
  Right. Like I like it, but I feel shit afterwards. Yeah. So I'm not even sure that I like it,
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  but in that way, maybe it's like smoking as well. You just sort of think you like it,
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  but if you actually pay attention, you don't. Well, I overall, I'm like, I always question,
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  what's it adding to the world? And I buy that argument like during the hour of spring,
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  it was amazing to find out exactly what's happening. And even now, something happens if you hear of
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  like a playing crash or a volcano, you can just search on Twitter and you find out exactly
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  what's happening straight away. But apart from that, you know, when I bring up my phone,
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  I have a look. It's just people being digs. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it? Yeah. Do you understand
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  why? Well, you see, I mean, the algorithms designed in a way to make us argue and stay on the
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  platform. I was just looking at it. And I'll put it Weinstein. It's a block by Elon. He's
• 2:48
  got. Yeah, I like that you're so online that you already know that that's happened. Yeah,
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  Brett's in a half. Did you see that? So Brett Weinstein's been blocked by Elon, which I thought
• 2:58
  it's weird because I didn't think Elon blocked people. No, well, I don't mean I would have assumed
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  that he did, but not people like Brett Weinstein. He says, Brett says, my account seems to be
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  specially restricted on X slash Twitter, high engagement tweets stay well below the fold on trends,
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  not the case under previous management. I brought this to Musk's attention. He asked for more
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  info. Then blocked me when I provided it. Perhaps that's on me. It says, but increasingly, I just
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  feel like it's a bunch of wankers in a circle, jerk, trying to like, winging about why they're not
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  more popular and why the algorithm's not favoring them more. Yeah. Well, so they had that recent
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  thing where everyone started to get their payouts. Remember their payouts? No. Oh, so you can now
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  get a payout. What's that mean? So if you're verified. Yeah. And you over a certain level engagement,
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  you get a payout Twitter will say the ad revenue with them. Yeah. Some people were sharing like
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  tens of thousands of dollars right, Danny. Like tens of like some people can like 20,000 dollars.
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  Producer Danny is also in the room, but he's off my color Danny. Welcome to the show. It's gonna
• 4:01
  be weird and awkward with him just sitting in the corner like a schoolboy who's in trouble.
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  Now a lot of people now listen to the show just for Danny. Do they? They're gonna be disappointed.
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  Should Danny be on mic? I mean, he doesn't want Danny his own camera. Danny's getting big for his
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  boots. So watch out. Watch out, Peter. He's gonna come up and knock you off your perch. He's got
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  careful. He's got a stalker called Derek. Oh, that's nice. An online stalker. Have we met Derek? No,
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  we don't know who Derek is. Hi, Derek. Did you listen to Derek S coming to our then?
• 4:30
  Oh, he's already done a background check to make sure he's got security onto it. Excellent.
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  So on these payouts, the other it was like a few weeks ago, people were moaning about how much their
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  payout was. And I was thinking hold on a second two months ago, you didn't get anything. That's
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  right. Exactly. How fast we forget. And now you're bitching because you got a thousand dollars
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  and not two thousand dollars. It is funny. Isn't that the yeah, the fact that we've set up and
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  I mean, this is I'm not the first to make this point, but the fact that you know, in a night to
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  create an ideal society, you would want to make all the incentives to be aligned so that ordinary
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  people going about their ordinary business responding to ordinary human emotions and human instincts
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  would be kind of channeled towards the better angels of their nature. And we've created exactly
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  the reverse with social media where things that inflame us or outrage us or pander to us or demonize
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  things that we disagree with or you know, feed our worst insecurities or create bogeyman
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  or make us feel good about ourselves like for irrational reasons, all of those things the
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  dial has turned up on. And now so now we you have to be a really good person just not to be a dick
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  on Twitter. So I've got so many things to say about this. So we've got time, baby. So many
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  things to say about this. Got even even where to start firstly, when you described about the
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  incentives, what drives incentives and what would be fair. Interestingly, the whole time you're
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  saying that and thinking back into my world, a Bitcoin because we do have this system that is
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  designed based around incentives as a system you can't cheat, blah, blah, blah. That's one point
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  book. Secondly, I recently, so we're out last nine, Danny said, oh, you've had a couple of tweets
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  recently that done quite well, but I haven't really tweeted that much recently. I think what it is
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  is I've stopped, you know, me a tweet for the sequence, I shit, I should tweet something today.
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  And then increasingly, I don't know that feeling, but I remember it. While I was looking through
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  your Twitter and you promote the show and it's basically automated now in complain of airlines.
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  That would have been a while ago though. I don't even think I would have tweeted anything in
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  six months, eight months, maybe. No, but because of that, you will probably notice if you had a look,
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  things won't do as well anymore. Right. You kind of have to stay in the bun fight. Yeah, you've got
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  to feed the beast to feed the beast. And I increasingly don't want to be part of that. No,
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  because I think ultimately it's a better, it's a set of bad incentives that conditions you to
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  let me put it a different way. I can, like, I consider myself a centrist. Now,
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  there's some people in America who think I'm woke lefty. There's people in the UK who think I'm
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  Alex Jones. That's because all British people are communist, right? Exactly. I consider myself
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  kind of a centrist, but like I will, I will veer into any end of the political spectrum where I,
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  yeah, what I think is right. I'll just say what I think. I don't think Twitter is good for a centrist.
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  No, of course not. Or a reasonable person. No. It's good if you're, like, even today I went on
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  today and I saw all I saw today all day long was Tucker Carlson has interviewed some guy who
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  apparently smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. Good to know that Tucker's coming up in the
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  world. Yeah. I was just like, what the fuck is this trash? Yeah. This is, I mean, by definition,
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  if you use, I was talking to a brilliant guy, Toby Walsh, who if people haven't listened to my
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  episode of uncomfortable conversations with Toby, they should. He's Australia's leading AI expert
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  and one of the world's leaders in artificial intelligence. And he is reflecting on social media
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  and saying Zuckerberg created social media to foster meaningful connection between people.
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  That was his catchphrase. He wanted to create meaningful connection. You can't measure
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  meaningful connection. So instead he created proxies for meaningful connection, which were the like
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  button sharing content, commenting on things. Turns out those are terrible proxies because meaningful
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  connection or centrism or nuance and not is not necessarily stuff that you actually want to engage
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  with. Stuff that you want to engage with. Stuff that you want to either thumbs up or thumbs down
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  or comment on or share is often stuff that just riles you up emotionally. It's often stuff that
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  either aggravates you or pandas to you. So you're right. Why would anyone bother to write an
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  angry screen in the comments section and then forward a post about something that was reasonable?
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  Yeah. I think there's a difference between Facebook and Twitter though. Like what Zuckerberg did
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  with Facebook is essentially create a community for you and your friends and your family.
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  And so I don't tend to see, I don't really use Facebook much anymore, but when I did, it was kind
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  of like baby photos or we went out last night. Here's some photos or you know, I'm traveling here
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  and that's cool. I'm there as well. Like I find it. I've not used it since 2008, Peter. No.
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  It hasn't been that for a while. If I go to people I think. Really? Yeah. You get more and more of
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  the person who knows the person who's in a group with somebody else on Facebook who's shouting
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  loudly about Boris Johnson. I see less of that, but I don't use it so much. But it's not as bad as
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  Twitter, but that's a low fucking bar. Well, I just I always felt like Twitter was when that was
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  happening. Twitter was that kind of like reasonable place originally where you could go and have a
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  conversation about things that interested you to do with work. And then just over the last six,
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  seven years, he's gone just crazy with politics. And people focusing on their career using Twitter
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  for their career. And the problem with Twitter for your career is it rewards being a dick or it
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  rewards partisan opinions. I always I always use Tim Paul as my reference point. I used to really
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  like his films. He made a long time ago. And I know you're called him a dumb dumb. I did call him a
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  dumb dumb. You can stand by that. Yeah. The man is technically a dumb dumb. Yeah. I feel like
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  he has been audience captured. And now he knows how to monetize being a dick. And I feel like
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  he's left behind who he who he was because he found a way of monetizing right wing anger.
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  And it doesn't like being called right wing. I don't think I mean, I don't pay attention to him,
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  but that was what also caused Umbridge when I said that he was right wing. He's a he's a champion
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  of the left. What does left and right main in that context? You're an anti-establishment populist
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  slash conspiracy theorist and you can be from either end of politics. Yeah. No, you can be. So
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  he called himself what is a disaffected liberal or disenfranchised. I don't pay much attention to
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  the man. I mean, he doesn't have to be right wing to monetize the anger of the right wing.
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  Right. And I just found like he was increasingly just just being inflammatory. Yeah, I mean,
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  I think he's more than a dumb dumb now. He was a dumb dumb when I said that on Joe Rogan's show,
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  which was 18 months ago now. Now I think I'd up from what I can see of him. He's actually a dick
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  or a dick dick as well. It's probably a dumb dumb end a dick dick because like, you know, he's not
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  just an idiot peddling that spacious, you know, chaff to to people who who want to lap it up. He's
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  also just a mean and nasty person that seems because the things, the types of things that that
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  universe of, I don't want to throw Tim pool under the bus, although I do, but you know, there's
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  it is not the only person in this universe that has gone down the rabbit hole of cherry picking
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  things to get outraged about and then misrepresenting them to millions of people. Yeah. But he,
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  that to me is the perfect example of somebody who's, as I said, is captured by his audience.
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  He's learned a way to monetize it. He's learned a way to
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  rile people up to get his likes, to get his retweets, whatever. And I think it's sad because I
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  thought it was a good journalist. Do you worry about that in your line of work?
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  What worry about it broadly or for myself? For yourself. No, it's hard for me to get captured
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  because in our little Bitcoin world, I'm probably considered by,
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  ah, this is where Danny needs a mic because Danny would be a better person to ask, but
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  there is a lot of people who are, I would say the Bitcoin world is predominantly people from
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  the right or libertarian camps. And obviously there's a big crossover between the two.
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  There's very small left progressive Bitcoin movement but growing. And I think
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  if you ask people to put me on the spectrum, they'll put me more towards the left. Right.
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  No, but I mean, you can be captured by audience in any number of ways, right? You could pander
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  towards preconceptions and misconceptions that people who tend to be keen on Bitcoin hold,
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  even if they're not political. No, I think I, I think I'm probably one of the people who
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  has done their best to avoid that because I actually realized, you know, in the world of podcast,
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  in the podcast game, most important thing is authenticity, like being you. And it's better to have
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  people dislike you, but believe you believe what you're saying. Yeah. Then try, then pander to
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  the audience. Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of, I say a lot of things that consider
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  controversial in the world of Bitcoin and have a lot of people call me an idiot, but like my show
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  is probably the biggest one about Bitcoin. And then I think that's happened because I won't,
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  I can't get captured. Yeah. Yeah. That's not to say, ah, look, it's a slippery slope that you
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  can easily fall into sometimes. Yeah. I think it's, I don't think people do it intentionally.
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  Yeah. And it just, they just see what works and see what gets clicked and what doesn't.
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  It is something they have to be mindful of. I have to be mindful of it as well. And the price is
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  probably that we have a smaller audience than, well, I have a smaller audience than I could have
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  if I were corrupt. I think you're buying, I think you're buying time and longevity over kind of,
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  like these short term gains. Yeah. And like, I don't, I don't want to be a dumb, dumb or
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  addicted, you know, like, so there's, there is a value in being neither of those things. What
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  about respect, you know, what about having respect, being respected, having credibility? These are
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  things that I value more than sheer brute numbers. Yeah. It is, it is, and it can be a tricky one.
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  I think for some people, because I think some of these people perhaps go through a period where
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  they're trying to make this career in this world of content. And it can be hard to make money.
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  You know, I, I think making money of my podcast for two years. And then you do. And if something
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  you're doing is getting more downloads, whether it's like a clickbait title or, you know, an extreme
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  guest of some kind, like I give a good example. There was a whole period where Andrew tape was doing
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  the rounds. And I wouldn't have them in my show because I think he's a fucking idiot. But I could
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  have. And I know that show would probably be probably the biggest show I would have had.
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  But I just, I think that was a short term play, because you're kind of, you're given up part
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  of your soul to get that, you know, show that does one, two million on YouTube, whatever. And I just,
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  I didn't want that. So I think you're treating time and longevity.
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  There probably is a way of doing Andrew tape, but you'd probably need to spend a long time
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  doing a lot of research and come armed with a lot of facts and take them down.
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  Yeah, I just, I just don't want it. That may not be your M.O.
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  Yeah, right. It may, it could be the right person. I just, I don't know, I just zero, it's
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  something I have zero interest in. And so I like, I won't talk to that person. And I've had some
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  controversial people on my show. I mean, at Nigel Farage, I'm recently in, you know, sharing that
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  show up on Facebook and what's my close social circle. I know there's a lot of people who would
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  just be horrified. They even spoke to them. So I'm not, I won't avoid controversial people,
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  but it has to be relevant. I'm not, I'm not going to trade, I'm not going to trade longevity.
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  Yeah, I mean, it depends how you do it as well. It just does depend. I mean, you know, there's
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  this weird phenomenon at the moment of the Lex Friedman style podcast where you just get someone
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  on and then you just basically let them talk and you have almost no skill in wrangling the conversation
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  or pushing back on them whatsoever. God bless Lex. I mean, but and I've never seen a man do more
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  with so little than Lex Friedman. Like he just sits there and then asks like one, the next question
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  that he's written down on his piece of paper without listening to the guest and then they talk for
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  a while and then he just asks the next question. And if you go on Lex Friedman show, you are definitely
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  not going to get pushed back. Have you known Lex Friedman? But I have not. No, but I mean, I would not,
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  I would not be worried or scared going into that room being like, wow, this ferocious intellect is
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  going to come come at me with everything he's got. He listens and asks polite questions.
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  Well, he blocked me on Twitter. How do you get blocked by a, you know, by a limp wet fish?
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  What is that? What do you have to do? I don't know. He blocked a lot of Bitcoin people on one
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  point. Did he? Yeah. But he did it with love and yeah. Yeah. So he did it with love. Yeah,
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  I'm sure he did it with love. He just wants to understand everybody wants everybody to be able to
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  talk to each other. Yeah. Well, go on. Well, just going to say, and then if you are doing critical
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  or journalistic interviews or trying to have uncomfortable conversations and dig into what makes,
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  really makes people tick the other odd thing about having controversial guests is that it does
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  seem there's a kind of an uncanny valley here where if they're a bit bad, you'll get more pushback
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  than if they're genuinely horrendous. Like I'd get more pushback from having Nigel Farage
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  on the show than I would a serial killer. You know why, right, though? Why? Because I think at the
• 18:34
  more extreme ends, you will bring out their fans into, like how do you judge it? Do you judge it by
• 18:42
  the YouTube comments or tweets? Well, I just think I would be more likely, I would be less likely to
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  be cancelled. If I interviewed the Christchurch shooter, then if I interviewed, I'm trying to think
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  of normal Australian examples, Nigel Farage would be a good one. Yeah, I tend to find the most
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  extreme people have a really hardcore group of fans. And so when I judge it, say by YouTube
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  comments, it's mainly positive that you've had it once. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, Nigel's
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  great. Nigel's absolutely amazing. So that's why I think that maybe happens.
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  No, but I'm saying the reverse. I'm saying it would be more blowback. There is more blowback
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  from a Nigel Farage than he is from a serial killer. Okay. In other words, you interview someone
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  who's a bit bad and I feel the blowback is worse than you in interviewing someone who's really,
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  really bad. My only assumption is that if I interview a serial killer, everybody knows that I'm
• 19:41
  not sympathetic to serial killers, but I find interviewer white supremacist, for example,
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  I'm not saying Nigel Farage is one, but we're either interviewer white supremacist and people
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  like, well, why are you platforming white supremacists? They wouldn't say why are you platforming
• 19:52
  a serial killer? Yeah, that platform. I hate that platform. Okay, let me ask you then. So
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  uncomfortable conversations is your podcast. Yes. You did used to work. You don't still work
• 20:02
  at the ABC. I do still work at the ABC as well. Yes. But okay, what is the crossover between the two?
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  There is none. No, but is it, but what I mean is, is there a chance that you have, just by having
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  a conversation on your podcast, you'll put it at risk what you do with the ABC. Yes, definitely.
• 20:20
  Okay. Yeah. And if that happens, so be it. That's fine. It's a big world. There are other opportunities.
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  But are you under any pressure? No. And the reason I've wrote it down here is this morning,
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  I was listening to Uberman's podcast. Yeah. He needs to be blown up at the moment. Yeah.
• 20:34
  Good for him. Yeah. He's not a lecturer. He's an actual human being with ideas and thoughts
• 20:39
  and understanding and knowledge expertise. He had Mark Andrewson on. And it's a really good one.
• 20:44
  Oh, great. I like both of them. Yeah, I can listen to Ralph. But he was saying he has a list of
• 20:49
  things now. He keeps this list of things he knows he can't talk about. Who? Hubey? Yeah. Well,
• 20:55
  Hubey. Hubey's got a list. A band list. Yeah, he's got a list of things. I have to drop Hubey
• 21:00
  a line. I mean, you can hear it. He says the list of things he can't talk about.
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  We won't talk about because he said it the way it may get caught for different box pops.
• 21:09
  Oh, come on. But these should be in a pussy. I mean, who? Who's who? You can't take down the
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  hubs. The hubster. Hey, listen, I'm just I'm just he doesn't even work for anyone else. He works
• 21:18
  for himself. I'm repeating the message. He said it's a growing list. This is part of the problem.
• 21:23
  We've got to grow a pair. Yeah. But so with your podcast, are you seeking? Are you essentially
• 21:31
  seeking his list? You want in a way, in a way, in a way, I think that we need to
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  to the if we end up in a better situation culturally and politically than where we are.
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  If we avoid a scenario in which we are more and more divided into more extreme camps that
• 21:54
  understand each other less, if we are to head off the threats posed by the far right and the far
• 22:02
  left and grapple with the challenges that humankind faces like pandemics and climate chaos and
• 22:09
  nukes and whatever, then it will be because we are less anxious about tiptoeing around subjects,
• 22:19
  less keen to jump down each other's throats, less eager to demonize other people's points of
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  you, more keen to be as generous as possible towards other people's ideas and more keen to have
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  conversations that are uncomfortable. That's my general philosophy. So to the extent that prominent
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  people like Hubertman refrain from touching issues that they regard as being toxic, that is
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  not a contribution. Yeah. So I found it disappointed. Like when I heard it, I was like, well hold on a second,
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  that there is self-sensorant, but there's publicly admitting your self-sensorant
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  and saying you've got a list and it's a big growing list, did make me think, huh,
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  I, there's a chance I avoid your podcast now. Because I know some people were self-sensorant to
• 23:07
  accept, I mean, you know, do I self-sensor possibly on certain, very specific, extreme issues I
• 23:16
  just don't want to get into because I just, it's not in my world. What are those? What are the things
• 23:24
  I would potentially self-sensorant? Okay. I own a football team. It has a man's and ladies team.
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  I self-sensor getting into when any, like I feel like sometimes people when I'm asking me about
• 23:38
  the football club, they're trying to get me into conversations about maybe gender. Right.
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  I don't want to get into because I'm trying to run a football club. Right. I avoid having that
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  because I think it's a trap. Yeah. I think someone's lame me a trap and they're trying to get me
• 23:55
  to a position where I can be cancelled. Right. But isn't that, it doesn't matter where that conversation
• 23:59
  takes place. If it takes place on your terrain, on your podcast, for a duration as long as you want
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  it to. I think it wouldn't be able to do that. I think it's different when I'm being questioned,
• 24:10
  when I'm doing it on the podcast, which is that weird world of like part media, part journalism,
• 24:16
  to be in the chairman of a football club where I'm running a business. Yeah. Yeah. I see.
• 24:19
  Let me just run that business. I'm going to focus on that business. I think that's like the only
• 24:24
  place. I might not talk about things because I think it's boring. Yeah. Well, there's lots of
• 24:29
  course that I don't talk about because I think it's boring or because I think it's worth
• 24:35
  focusing on or there's an opportunity cost in talking about that when we could be talking about
• 24:39
  other things. Yeah. But I agree with you. I'm not going to wade into the precise nature of
• 24:45
  biological differences between men and women. If I'm being asked a question on a panel show or
• 24:51
  something like that, which might be the equivalent of you acting in your capacity as the chairman
• 24:55
  of a football club, like there's a time and a place for everything. But I think there is no
• 24:59
  better time or place than on one's own podcast to to to bridge sensitive issues. If we can't do
• 25:06
  it there, then we can't do it anywhere. And if we don't model those conversations for lay people
• 25:11
  who don't have the luxury of having podcasts with large audiences, then people don't get to see
• 25:15
  that actually you can try to wrestle with things in a constructive way without demonizing other
• 25:22
  people and ending up in fisticuffs. And so I do think it would be a shame if more and more people
• 25:27
  followed the hubam and root of having lists of things that I don't talk about. You can't talk
• 25:32
  about on social media because it's impossible to have nuance there, right? And we've established
• 25:38
  that. But I think you can and should talk about it in forums where if you were to get misrepresented,
• 25:45
  you could just say, look, go back and listen to the whole hour and a half or two hours and then come
• 25:49
  to me and get angry about that clip that you just extracted. Yeah, I can completely agree with the
• 25:57
  you kind of get to the nuance of a discussion on Twitter. Plus also, I don't feel like people
• 26:03
  are trying to have a fair back and forth on Twitter. They're trying to score points. Yeah,
• 26:08
  they're trying to win at any cost. I think it's much easier in a podcast. Like if we were in a
• 26:12
  difficult topic, I'd feel, you know, feel quite comfortable going, you know what, Josh, maybe
• 26:17
  rethink that. Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps I was wrong. I think that's an easier forum for it. I do though
• 26:23
  that did kind of like that hubam and thing this morning. Yeah. Yeah. That's really tricky,
• 26:29
  like do I do I trust you on any of your answers, but I do then I think back and I think you know
• 26:36
  what it is uncomfortable conversations that you're doing. We are in a place where like our mainstream
• 26:41
  media will not have the uncomfortable conversations. Is this like the resistance? I mean, one thing,
• 26:48
  one benefit that I have is that I had this podcast before the public broadcaster offered me a show.
• 26:53
  And so I was able to say I just have to be able to continue doing the podcast without any interference.
• 26:57
  And so that is the norm, right? That is the standard under which I'm employed. If I had had my
• 27:04
  public broadcasting show and had wanted to launch a podcast like this, there's no way that I would
• 27:08
  have gotten clearance to do it. I imagine. So that's the status quo. Will there come a day when
• 27:14
  someone mischievous who wants to take me down extracts a whole bunch of things that I've said in
• 27:18
  various episodes of this podcast and puts together a mashup that makes me seem either wildly
• 27:23
  left wing or wildly right wing or bigger than in some way or a delusional in some way.
• 27:29
  Probably, right? And maybe then I'll lose my job and that will be fine. I mean, it won't be fine,
• 27:34
  but that will be a price that is worth paying to try to continue fighting the fight of allowing
• 27:40
  civilization to flourish and human beings to have reasonable conversations with with each other.
• 27:45
  I would not I would feel corrupted if I had to curtail the kinds of things that we talk about on
• 27:51
  this podcast for fear that someone is going to get into mischief.
• 27:57
  But is it the resistance? Is this, you know, it's the success of your show,
• 28:02
  Rogan, people who are pushing the envelope of conversations? Is this like the resistance response
• 28:07
  to the fact that the mainstream won't deal with that? I wish the mainstream would and I try to,
• 28:11
  as much as I can. And to be honest, I have fairly free reign. I think a lot of this is self-imposed.
• 28:16
  I think a lot of the behavior of journalists in mainstream media institutions is self-imposed
• 28:23
  fear. And just, you know, not wanting to go through the hassle of, you know, speaking about gender,
• 28:28
  there was, I did one story on my ABC radio show about the closure of the tapestock gender clinic
• 28:34
  in the UK, which was a big deal in the UK. This was the leading gender clinic in the UK.
• 28:41
  And it was found to have not been serving the interests of young people, especially who were
• 28:46
  coming in to get gender care. And the Australian media was silent on it. And I thought that was
• 28:53
  odd because doesn't what the UK does have some bearing. Wouldn't that cause some reflection on
• 28:58
  the way that we do things here? Wouldn't that be just a little part of the media cycle?
• 29:03
  And so I interviewed the head of the Australian Psychiatric Association who also had concerns
• 29:10
  about pediatric gender policy in the medical establishment. His concern was that if a 15-year-old
• 29:19
  girl presents with gender dysphoria and claims that she's actually a boy, and that she wants
• 29:26
  to transition, that for a psychiatrist to ask about other underlying psychological conditions
• 29:31
  that might be going on, for example, whether she has autism or depression or anxiety is sort of
• 29:37
  taboo now. That's regarded as being de-affirming care or unaffirming care, whereas the model is
• 29:45
  that you're supposed to affirm. So his point is it sort of deprives psychiatrists of some of our
• 29:51
  toolkit if we're mandated to take at face value every claim that every young person makes regarding
• 29:59
  their own gender identity. These are complex things and there can be a social contagion,
• 30:04
  there can be other things that are going on that are worth interrogating. So I had him on my show
• 30:10
  and needless to say, then had to spend a half day responding to complaints that come in.
• 30:17
  And their clever, like extreme activists know how to read the charter of the public broadcaster
• 30:23
  and compare it to everything that you've said and nitpick, the precise number of people who I
• 30:28
  said were involved in the class action suit against Tabestock, you know, where the number was
• 30:34
  estimated by a law firm, but actually ended up being a slightly different number. So you have to go
• 30:39
  back through all the reams of research, where did I get that information from, where did I get
• 30:43
  that information from, it ended up being cleared. But the point is not whether it gets cleared or not
• 30:47
  or whether I did anything wrong, which I hadn't. The point is that they know that there's attacks
• 30:52
  on your time and your attention. And so a lot of journalists I think it's just like not worth
• 30:57
  the hassle. Why would you, why would you wait into this? So I don't think it's an institute.
• 31:01
  When you say the resistance, I don't think it's like resistance against the dark force of like
• 31:06
  the mainstream media, which is in the pocket of corporations or like in cooots to push a
• 31:12
  particular narrative. I think it's more insidious than that. It's just the, the accretion of millions
• 31:18
  of little decisions made by individual journalists and editors who come from a particular worldview and
• 31:24
  are doing things the way they think they should be done. That text is interesting because
• 31:33
  you have to be well prepared in advance. Because you know, it's like sometimes like,
• 31:39
  you don't know what we're going to talk about today. No, that's right. So you might wait into a
• 31:43
  topic and go, well, I'm kind of aware that like the data tells me something along these kind of
• 31:48
  lines, but you would have to be accurate up front prepared for that challenge. Yes, it's
• 31:55
  difficult. I mean, especially when you're doing a three hour talkback radio show, like I'm not
• 31:59
  putting together a news bulletin, which is five minutes long where I can check everything. It's
• 32:03
  off the cuff. So, but there is as a result, a certain amount of lenience on my show that there
• 32:09
  wouldn't be if it was a BBC news report. Yeah. It is fascinating to follow, though, because I don't
• 32:18
  know. I mean, I don't really watch or listen to much mainstream content anymore,
• 32:23
  more just because I buy more into the authenticity of an independent publisher, whether it's yourself
• 32:29
  or Joe or I haven't even listened to Lex a few times. I'll have to give you not not for a while.
• 32:36
  But I feel there's like a more authentic conversation happening there. They are diving into
• 32:43
  important issues. They are open themselves up a bit more to risk, yeah, to the risk of the
• 32:51
  council crowd coming up to the coming for them. And then after that, like I think also because
• 32:57
  you make a show when you go back to something like the BBC, which by the way, I don't think all
• 33:02
  that bad. Yeah, they do some on certain topics. They do some great reporting on other things. You know,
• 33:07
  they've been to the need to the, well, sometimes even the government. But I kind of find myself
• 33:17
  in a world where I'm noticing the questions they're not asking. You know what I mean? Yes, I do.
• 33:24
  Why aren't you asking that question? Why aren't you pushing here? And then I know why they're not
• 33:28
  because they want to stay in this kind of like awful narrow lane. I mean, the problem is that
• 33:34
  Joe and me and you and Lex, we're not newsgatherers. So there is still a, a keen need for mainstream
• 33:43
  news. And you're like, as AI gets better and as the bullshit fire hose gets stronger and stronger
• 33:50
  and more and more convincing, it's going to become increasingly necessary, I think, for us to
• 33:55
  rely on certain gatekeepers of information like the BBC and the ABC because you're not going to be
• 34:00
  able to go on Twitter when there's a volcano erupting and rely on what you see there because so
• 34:06
  much of it is going to be produced by artificially intelligent bots. You've come quite down that AI
• 34:12
  rubber hole. Yeah, it's starting to worry me. Okay, interesting. Okay. And there's lots of
• 34:17
  opportunities, but I don't think we're grappling with the threats. Are you using yourself at all?
• 34:24
  Not much. No, only as a novelty. Right. Okay. So I use it on a daily basis. What for?
• 34:31
  Writing, press releases and artwork, concepting, design, work, and mid-journey. I mean,
• 34:38
  I can get a design concept put together in 10, 15 minutes and take it to a designer, say,
• 34:44
  is it brief? Right. I find it very useful, but I'm also very consciously aware of what this
• 34:53
  potentially means. Let's say the softest level in the jobs market as somebody with two kids
• 34:59
  thinking about their future. I'm probably not as aware as I should be of the potential threat.
• 35:08
  I can see now how I can see the AI bots on Twitter. I've got one specific one that responds to
• 35:14
  every tweet I write. Right. Just summarizes it. And I think it's like an interesting window to
• 35:20
  what's coming. Yeah. But I think there's a really cool thing that might come out of this,
• 35:25
  that AI might destroy Twitter. Make it completely unusable. Yeah. I mean, it may just
• 35:31
  throw the internet. I've interviewed one expert and she thinks that within 18 months, potentially,
• 35:39
  90% of the internet will be produced by machines and that really the worldwide web as we know,
• 35:46
  it may end up only having a lifespan of a few decades from when it began until now,
• 35:51
  as a place where human beings communicate things with other human beings, because the AI is
• 35:58
  going to be indistinguishable from people and they'll be able to use websites and click on things
• 36:03
  and enter information and sign up for things. And we may have to create walled gardens for humans
• 36:10
  where you need human verification to get in and there'll be little intranets where we can,
• 36:15
  which we can use as if it were the worldwide web, but the actual internet as a place where you can
• 36:20
  comment on things and stuff like that is about to be washed away because so many of the commenters
• 36:25
  will be computers. Isn't that part of you that thinks actually that might be a good thing?
• 36:31
  Yeah. Possibly. Possibly. I mean, comments, threads, see ya, Twitter. Later.
• 36:37
  You must be a similar age to me. Yeah, I'm 45, I don't know.
• 36:40
  I'm 45 and October. There you go. See, you remember a world of no internet?
• 36:44
  Oh, absolutely. It's extraordinary. Yeah. No mobile phones, no web ads. Yeah.
• 36:48
  Just went outside and did things. Yeah. My daughter is addicted to TikTok like every other girl,
• 36:54
  and as much as I try to stop her, I can't be there all the time. No.
• 37:01
  I see a different childhood to the one I had, one where I have a childhood that's much more controlled
• 37:08
  by screens and less running around in the fields. It just naturally exists. Also that fear that you
• 37:12
  have, if you could spit out there in the fields and do the fuck. But like, I can kind of romanticize
• 37:19
  about the internet being destroyed. Right. In a weird way. Yeah. But I don't think it's going to
• 37:25
  be replaced by running around in a failed paper. No, but you know what I mean? Better human
• 37:28
  interactions. No, you don't, you don't see the thing. Well, if I were convinced that human
• 37:35
  interaction was going to replace the demise of the internet, I would be hardened by that,
• 37:39
  but I think it'll just be interactions with more sophisticated machines and with people who are
• 37:47
  mediated by increasingly sophisticated prisms and portals that we engage with each other through.
• 37:54
  I don't see a de-escalation of the sophistication of algorithms and social media.
• 38:00
  So, what is it you're saying? The internet function is today will be destroyed,
• 38:05
  but we still use it. Yeah, that it'll be replaced by, yeah, by a
• 38:09
  hodgepodge of other things. But I mean, I'm not talking, when I say the internet, I don't mean
• 38:13
  TikTok. I mean, TikTok will still be TikTok, right? You may need to be verified as a human being
• 38:18
  to use TikTok. But it'll still exist. I mean, what's amazing to me is that there's also what's
• 38:24
  happening to your daughters. Just attention and capacity for a depth of focus. Like, that's
• 38:30
  the thing that I miss. Like, it's amazing. I was thinking about when I was 15, say, and you
• 38:38
  made plans to go to the movies with a mate, and you know, you would show up at the movie theater
• 38:44
  on time. On time. And if they weren't there, you had no way of contacting them, and you had nothing
• 38:51
  to do. You didn't have to, you didn't have a supercomputer in your pocket to pull out and
• 38:55
  look at other people who were presenting photos of themselves or videos of themselves to, you know,
• 39:01
  that were algorithmically selected to around you in some way, not sexually, but like just to
• 39:06
  engage you in some way. You didn't have Twitter to look at other people arguing on the other side
• 39:11
  of the world. You just stood there and you like looked at other people's faces as they walked past
• 39:16
  and you looked at the clouds until eventually when they didn't show up, you just wandered off
• 39:21
  and went home. Well, you had a walkman, maybe. Maybe. Or a Discman, possibly.
• 39:26
  With a bit of Bon Jovi. And it's amazing to me that it's amazing to me that that's how we lived.
• 39:32
  You know, it shouldn't be amazing to me that that's how we lived, but it is amazing to me to
• 39:36
  imagine that you couldn't fill every spare second of time with something that was going to
• 39:43
  capture your attention. And you actually just have to sit and ponder, okay, generally. It's
• 39:49
  funny you raise that because I tell my kids this. I was like, yeah, I saved me. Go to the cinema,
• 39:55
  you go to town, you say, well, meet there, we'll be there at two o'clock. And usually that'd be
• 40:00
  there within five minutes either side of that. But you had to be there. You had to turn up. People
• 40:06
  would puncture. There's no phone call. I'll be there in 20 minutes and they'll go off and do something.
• 40:10
  There isn't even a phone call anymore. There's just a text message. You know, you don't even plan
• 40:14
  for what movie session you're going to see. You don't even plan for when you're going to,
• 40:17
  you know, we'll catch up tonight or tomorrow. Oh, text me. You even watching the movie?
• 40:21
  Yeah, that's right. Watching something else on your phone. So where is Crypto going to come
• 40:27
  into all this? I want to get your thoughts about how your thinking has changed if at all over
• 40:32
  the past couple of years about the role of crypto currencies. Well, it's all Bitcoin. Everything
• 40:39
  else is bullshit. Okay. It's just be quite frank about that. And the only use for Crypto outside
• 40:46
  of Bitcoin is we have these things called stable coins, digital dollars that exist on certain
• 40:52
  networks. I've just been out to Argentina ramp and high inflation. If you've got access to the
• 40:58
  tools, you know, converting your local dying Argentinian pesos into a digital dollar is useful
• 41:06
  to protect you, especially with 10% monthly inflation. Unless the, unless the link snaps as it
• 41:11
  did with one of the tethered coins, didn't it? I don't know what you mean by that.
• 41:16
  Didn't during the crash last year, it wasn't one of the USDTs or something like that. I mean,
• 41:22
  it was supposed to be tethered to a dollar, but it turned out not to have stocks. Everyone lost
• 41:26
  their share. Luna. Yeah. Luna went down. So then it was. Yeah, but but that wouldn't be the one
• 41:32
  I would use. I don't. Tether is the one I would use. And that exists. There's some multiple
• 41:38
  different protocols. That's drawn. It's on a theorem. Yeah, it's platform agnostic. But
• 41:43
  but generally speaking, that's the only use for Crypto. I see outside of Bitcoin. What about the
• 41:48
  boosters of ether and Ethereum and smart networks and whatnot? I just think smart contracts.
• 41:54
  Yeah, I just think people, I think these people believe in something. I don't think they're seeing
• 42:00
  the bigger picture. They're believing in something that's becoming more centralized. And they don't
• 42:05
  fully understand Bitcoin. So the power Bitcoin is very simple. It's decentralized. That's it.
• 42:12
  And because it's decentralized, I can send Bitcoin to you from anywhere in the world at any point,
• 42:17
  no one can stop me. There's no middle man. Government can't switch it off. And it's decentralization
• 42:23
  makes it a very powerful tool. But the full concept that you've got this one thing in the world
• 42:28
  that the government cannot switch off, no government, even China banner, they've not managed to switch
• 42:32
  it off. It's super powerful. The fact it also then has value is even more powerful.
• 42:37
  Like I'm off to Lebanon next week to make a documentary. And I have to pay for a service up front.
• 42:43
  I had to use Western Union. And I hit a Western Union limit. So I could only send a certain
• 42:48
  amount. So I've got to take cash next week. It would be much easier if that person was a Bitcoin.
• 42:52
  I could just send them the Bitcoin than it would be done. So this power of decentralized money,
• 42:58
  that is censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer, is super useful for me. I think the people who have
• 43:05
  born into the other cryptocurrencies, the other platforms they promote, they just not see
• 43:12
  in the big picture. So what about the skeptics who say that all of that sounds great with the
• 43:17
  exception of the fact that the value of your money with Bitcoin when you translate it into
• 43:22
  Fiat currencies is so volatile. It might as well be the Argentinian peso because now it's worth
• 43:27
  half of what it was 12 months ago. And it's very hard to do business when there's something that
• 43:31
  goes up and down that much. Yeah, I mean, it's a very good point. And the two points I would make
• 43:39
  on that. Firstly, the volatility you're paying for now is the price of risk for investing early.
• 43:45
  You cannot take a asset. Are we still early? Yeah, very early, I would say. I'd say we're very early.
• 43:52
  I mean, think about it like this. You know, somebody has managed to invent a decentralized currency.
• 43:56
  Nobody knows who they are. It can be used globally on any electronic device in the world.
• 44:02
  And there is an exchange rate value in nearly every country nor that's a pretty big achievement.
• 44:07
  But to go from, you can't go from zero. I mean, if we want to match gold, if you want to get to
• 44:11
  10 trillion, I think we're at 500 billion right now, you can't go from zero to a trillion without
• 44:16
  some volatility. Because what happens is, as the price shoots up, some people are highly crap.
• 44:21
  I've got like a bunch of money here now. I can buy a house or a car or whatever. So they sell a
• 44:24
  bit. So you're going to get volatility. And that's why most Bitcoiners would say to most people
• 44:31
  coming into Bitcoin is do not put much money into this. It's volatile. It's risky. You're essentially
• 44:37
  making a bet. It's an investment in the future of money. Now, for me, volatility doesn't worry me
• 44:44
  in the short, sorry, in the long term, what worries me is the debatement of currencies,
• 44:52
  of fear, currencies like my, so if you think in terms of savings, I can say with a pretty
• 44:58
  confidently any Bitcoin that I buy today in five years will be more valuable than it's today.
• 45:06
  That has been true. I think even on a four year period, almost any period in Bitcoin,
• 45:12
  like every Bitcoin ever bought has been worth more after four years. So in my head, I'm like, well,
• 45:17
  if I'm earning pounds and I want to save that, I want to save for the future, I know at the moment
• 45:23
  I'm losing five to 10% a year value. So you can pound that over four years. I'm losing a lot
• 45:30
  there with inflation. Right, but I've never understood this argument, Peter, because nobody does invest
• 45:33
  in fear currencies. Nobody, nobody invests in pounds sterling. They put that, they buy other things
• 45:40
  with it. They buy, you know, shares, which also go up every four years, fairly reliably.
• 45:47
  So you don't, you've never had a savings account like I have... Well, for walking around money,
• 45:51
  you do. But I mean, nobody, nobody expects to get long-term value out of fear currencies,
• 45:56
  because of inflation. Yeah, but that's the point. We've been conditioned to accept inflation,
• 46:01
  which is itself theft. Inflation is... But if we talk about investments,
• 46:06
  then we don't invest in fear currencies. We just use them as a means of temporary exchange.
• 46:11
  So saving savings? I mean, my parents always had savings.
• 46:14
  Right, but they probably, if they're not going to use it for four years,
• 46:17
  then they're putting it in a term deposit, which is going to outstrip inflation.
• 46:21
  But that's the point at the moment. It's not outstripping inflation.
• 46:23
  Well, right now we're in a high inflation environment, but it hasn't for a long time now.
• 46:30
  Like, you know, that we're talking... Since the probably 2008 financial crisis,
• 46:37
  down very much. Yeah, if you're incredibly cautious, and all you're doing is investing
• 46:42
  in term deposits and like something that's cash, a cash management account,
• 46:47
  then you're probably a little bit less than inflation. But if you're that cautious,
• 46:50
  then I wouldn't recommend that you buy Bitcoin, because the volatility is huge. If you're
• 46:53
  willing to put up with the risk of Bitcoin, then you're willing to put up with the risk of
• 46:58
  putting it in an exchange-traded fund that tracks the FTSE 500. And in that case,
• 47:02
  you are getting returns that fire outstrip inflation. Yeah, it depends. I mean,
• 47:07
  I think I probably just want to go a little bit more nuanced in this, just so I get my point clear.
• 47:13
  When I talk about, there's another example. Let's take my business. I operate a business.
• 47:19
  You know, with a business with a team of eight, you have to have a high level of cash flow. So
• 47:23
  I have to operate always with six figures in the bank. I have to always have that money there.
• 47:28
  I can't invest that money. I can't put that elsewhere, but that also is getting debased month
• 47:33
  on month. And so there, I'm losing value just by the fact I have to have cash flow. I have to hold
• 47:39
  I have to hold money back to pay my taxability. Yeah, right. So that is being debased. But there
• 47:44
  is no reason for us to be debased apart from the fact that governments print too much money.
• 47:49
  It is a monetary phenomenon inflation. So for me, there are alternatives. Now I can't,
• 47:55
  as a business, put into Bitcoin because of the short term volatility, but I do have to constantly
• 48:00
  think about this. And it reminds me of the fact that inflation is a theft from us that we shouldn't
• 48:06
  have to go through and we don't have to go through. But the bigger point is when you look at something
• 48:11
  like the inflation we're dealing with here, I'm going out to Lebanon next week. I've been out
• 48:16
  to Argentina. I've been to Venezuela. I've been to countries with very high inflation.
• 48:20
  For them, holding Bitcoin is a real alternative and a valuable alternative even in the short term.
• 48:26
  Yeah. So if you had up on there, if you had the Bitcoin chart against the US dollar,
• 48:30
  you would see we had a spike in the price and the peak was probably a year and a half ago.
• 48:35
  If you go to Argentina, it's now. Right. Like the highest price is now. So
• 48:41
  I don't, or when I talk about these things, I don't always talk about just from the perspective
• 48:45
  of me, somebody living in, you know, someone like the UK, where even though we've got kind of high
• 48:51
  inflation, there are places where it's much worse and it's a much more useful tool. That's why
• 48:55
  when I travel for the job, I go to these places because this is the true story of inflation,
• 49:00
  the real serious side of inflation. But we do have the potential of having those levels of
• 49:06
  inflation happen in Australia, UK, US, we could have high double digit inflation over the next
• 49:13
  10, 20 years. It's entirely possible. And so for me, it's just like Bitcoin makes a lot more
• 49:18
  sense. I know long term, that's just a good place. I can put my money. It can't be stolen from me.
• 49:26
  I can spend it how I want. I can use it how I want. And any money I put there for the long term,
• 49:31
  I'm pretty sure it's going to protect my spending. I mean, pretty sure, not certain. I mean,
• 49:37
  it doesn't have the duration, for example, that a property investment or the stock market has.
• 49:43
  As investments, you know, not as tools of exchange, as long term investments.
• 49:47
  Yeah, but you have to just weigh up these things that you understand where you want to put money.
• 49:51
  I own a property. Would I put all my money in property? No. The two times I bought property,
• 49:57
  properties one was at the 2008. It literally bought it in June 2000. I think it was a month before
• 50:03
  the global financial crisis. And I've just bought one six months ago.
• 50:09
  I bet the 2008 property is worth a ton more than you bought it for now.
• 50:14
  I tell you, I bought it for 285,000. I sold it 16 years later for 475. So not bad.
• 50:21
  Yeah, pretty good. I mean, so I mean, I have heard people say, even who are Bitcoin skeptics,
• 50:26
  yeah, this might be great in basket case countries like Argentina and Lebanon. But what you need
• 50:32
  is a central bank that knows what it's doing. And I mean, you say that inflation is theft,
• 50:37
  it is managed theft that we all sort of collectively agree on as being the price that the price to pay,
• 50:44
  for example, right now for certain outcomes. And you hope that you have a central bank that's
• 50:50
  good enough to be able to bring it under control by raising interest rates until until the inflation
• 50:55
  comes down to its target zone. Yeah, I don't quite understand. I still don't quite understand why one,
• 51:03
  what what the transition point is where if we don't become Argentina or Lebanon,
• 51:11
  why we're all going to want to take this shift. Well, okay, I mean, again, there's a lot to unpack
• 51:19
  there. You talk about could invest in property. Let me ask you a simple way. If you're if I'm
• 51:25
  in Argentina and my currency is being devaced by a huge inflation and physical mismanagement by
• 51:32
  the government, then if I could invest in the S&P like in the American stock market, if I let's
• 51:40
  suppose I have 100,000 US dollars in savings in pesos, if I could just transfer it into US dollars
• 51:46
  and put it in an in an exchange traded fund that just maps the top, you know, 100 biggest companies
• 51:53
  on the US stock market or on the NASDAQ. Then in the long term, would you recommend that I do that
• 52:00
  or buy Bitcoin? Depends on your timescale. Like if you're saying to hold something for 10 years,
• 52:05
  absolutely, I'd say Bitcoin because Bitcoin, my expectation is Bitcoin will massively outperform
• 52:11
  the ETF that tracks those companies. And let's be honest though, I mean, over the last year or two,
• 52:15
  the stock market has been super volatile. If you look at the Netflix and Facebook's, you could put
• 52:21
  your money in there and lost 60, 70% easily. So the stock market can be a hyper volatile itself as
• 52:26
  well. And so I mean, realistically, if you're advising someone to put their money, you just say,
• 52:31
  put a few plays, have a bit of property, have a bit of gold, have a bit of Bitcoin, have an ETF
• 52:36
  that tracks, you know, and we have this guy on our show called Color Roach. And I think his
• 52:40
  view is it's like 25% cash, 25% property, 25% gold, was it? 25% equities. He has a lot of gold,
• 52:50
  but sure. But his view is like, if you always hold 25% of each, what happens is that as markets move,
• 52:56
  people jump between one or the other, that kind of balance means that you will protect yourself
• 53:01
  long term. Right. And so Bitcoin is just one of those that sits alongside gold. It's kind of like
• 53:06
  gold. And so I wouldn't tell anyone to put all their money in Bitcoin. That's crazy. Yeah,
• 53:11
  absolutely stupid because Bitcoin is kind of linked to the S&P. The prices are kind of linked.
• 53:19
  But I would say, have a bit of Bitcoin, but have a property, have equities, have just a mix of
• 53:26
  things, but a mix of things you understand. Right. I'm not here to say Bitcoin is going to replace
• 53:31
  everything. You should put all your money in there. Honestly, it's too risky, especially in the
• 53:35
  short term. But you never know, if you put a hundred pound a buy, a hundred dollars a month by
• 53:41
  for the next 20, I mean, I've just, my kids were born. I put 50 pounds a month by in their
• 53:46
  bank accounts when they turned 18, they're 12,000 pounds. If my son now puts 50 pound a month by
• 53:52
  and puts it into Bitcoin every month, maybe in 20 years, that will be worth significantly better
• 53:57
  than put it in any other market. If you were not worried about governments controlling our money
• 54:04
  or companies like Western Union or PayPal or something like that, controlling our money and
• 54:09
  potentially censoring people from being able to exchange money for controversial ideas or
• 54:15
  something like that, then would the use case for Bitcoin be significantly diminished?
• 54:21
  Hell yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a guy called Safedin, he wrote a book called The Bitcoin Standard,
• 54:26
  and I asked him what's the biggest threat to Bitcoin and he said, good government.
• 54:29
  Right. We only have or need Bitcoin because of bad government. We only have it because
• 54:36
  I want to send money to Lebanon and Western Union has a limit. Or I'm suffering from high inflation
• 54:42
  because I live in a country with a high inflation. Or I've increasingly got government
• 54:47
  having banks run surveillance on what I'm spending my money on and invading my privacy.
• 54:51
  All Bitcoin is a reaction to large intrusive government and intrusive government policies
• 54:59
  and bad central bank policy. That's what it is. It's a response to that.
• 55:05
  Are you worried about like a growth in I guess authoritarian surveillance and
• 55:11
  there's this whole school of thought which I don't, I mean, obviously it's sometimes paranoid
• 55:18
  and delusional, but at the edges, I don't know how much credence to give it, which is that
• 55:24
  we're sort of on a path towards digital currencies that will be created by central banks,
• 55:34
  and we'll give them the ability to track what we spend, spy on us in my detail, prevent us from
• 55:42
  buying things, maybe even dock our pay or our assets if we do the wrong thing, if we talk about
• 55:48
  the wrong things, you know, have kind of social credit scores where we all have to be good work
• 55:52
  abys in order to be able to have access to our assets. Is that? Yeah, CBDCs. Yeah, I think there's
• 55:59
  a lot to be concerned about with CBDCs, I think, which are central bank digital currencies,
• 56:05
  and has any country done this yet? I mean, there's active tests. China has one. I'm not sure how far
• 56:11
  long they are. I'm not sure if technically it can be done the way governments think it can be
• 56:18
  done, but maybe it can be, but the thread is real. Why do they need a digital currency? I mean,
• 56:22
  wouldn't they, I've no quite understood why digital currency is a component of that authoritarian
• 56:27
  state. I mean, if the North Koreans or the Chinese want everyone to use a particular banking app
• 56:32
  in order to pay for things in yuan, then they can. I think the idea of a central bank digital currency
• 56:40
  is what it allows you to do alongside what it allows you to link to the currency, the full control
• 56:46
  in that. At the moment, our money is, there's levels of decentralization. Bitcoin is a fully
• 56:52
  decentralized money, but we still have elements of decentralization. I've got some pounds in my pocket.
• 56:58
  I have a credit card. No, good here, mate. Take your pounds back to bloody. I'm not going to accept
• 57:03
  them here. Danny will take them. But the fragmented system is an element of decentralization, a bit of
• 57:10
  cash, a credit card. I've got different pools of cash that I can use or money I can use with
• 57:16
  different technologies or just with cash. But when you move to a world of a CBDC, you're essentially
• 57:21
  eliminating all of that. You're essentially heading towards a single database for the money.
• 57:25
  So cash is gone, which by the way, I think is a terrible idea. I think cash is important for a
• 57:31
  number of reasons, privacy being one of them. But this idea that you have, there's one central
• 57:37
  database of money who has what, who spent with who. I think it just hands too much over to
• 57:46
  governments when we know what the risks are with government for the overreach, the potential overreach.
• 57:53
  And what about private industry? Apparently Google buys 70% of American credit card transactions
• 57:59
  from vendors and credit card companies and then uses that to cross-reference those transactions to
• 58:06
  your avatar that they have for you. So they know what you've been spending and they can target
• 58:10
  advertising to you. That's a trade and privacy. I mean, that's a different level of privacy
• 58:16
  invasion. That's an invasion of privacy to so you put ads in front of you to convince you to buy
• 58:21
  shit that you probably don't need. But I think we should stay on the central bank digital currency
• 58:27
  and the risks that come with this. I always felt like what happened with the trucker protest was
• 58:35
  an interest inside to the potential of what can happen. I think this is in Canada.
• 58:41
  Yeah, I think you can forget whether you agree or disagree with the protest. But just look what
• 58:46
  happened. I think the ability to protest is a bought part of democracy. I think we'd
• 58:52
  align on that. And just to remind people, this was during the pandemic when truck drivers were
• 58:59
  angry at the Canadian government, they're locked down policies and they're bored of policies.
• 59:05
  It was their border policies. And these were people who've been essentially being coerced into
• 59:10
  being vaccinated. But again, I don't need to get into the whole, I was vaccinated. But the idea
• 59:16
  that you should have a certain amount of liberty. But the big concern in part of it was this was a
• 59:23
  protest. Protesters were looking to raise funds to support their protests. And there was a five,
• 59:31
  10, whatever a million raised on GoFundMe, the Canadian government blocked that. And they actually
• 59:36
  started to close down bank accounts of people who are supporting protesters. Now that's concerning
• 59:42
  because if you suddenly get frozen from your bank account, you can't pay your mortgage, your
• 59:46
  credit rating can be affected. You can use your house. If you can't get money out of the bank,
• 59:50
  you can't feed yourself. So being financially frozen is I think a terrifying prospect. And given
• 59:57
  that tool and that ability to do the government, I think is super scary, especially in a
• 1:00:03
  world where if you eliminated cash and you only had the CVDC, you can switch people off. You can
• 1:00:07
  switch people off from society. And I just, I accept government and I do support the idea of
• 1:00:17
  democracy. But I don't support the idea of giving government so much power that they can essentially
• 1:00:22
  coerce your vote or coerce your decision making based on blocking you from being able to make
• 1:00:27
  financial transactions. Yeah, that's crazy. But they can do that. They're really tools. I mean,
• 1:00:32
  it happens in China. You can be stopped from being able to buy plain tickets. You can stop from
• 1:00:39
  being able to get on trains just by saying the wrong thing on WeChat. That is something that
• 1:00:45
  happens. And you know, we're a long way from China. But we are seeing the types of things that
• 1:00:51
  can say, I mean, another example, we have these ultra low emissions zone in London. You were
• 1:00:56
  this. Yeah, I saw actually you tweeting about this. Yeah, explain the ultra low emissions zone.
• 1:01:01
  So it's just that I think it's just another misguided green policy. And I'm not, yeah, I support,
• 1:01:08
  I support smart, intelligent green policies, not those that end up becoming attacks on the poor.
• 1:01:15
  This is essentially attacks on the older cars. It's a congestion charge in London. Is that
• 1:01:20
  right? But only for cars that aren't. Yeah, so we already have a congestion charge, which is
• 1:01:25
  essentially 50 pounds to enter London. This is an additional charge whereby if your car is not
• 1:01:31
  compliant with the ultra low emission grading, whichever whatever that is, I don't actually know
• 1:01:34
  what it is that you can be charged. But essentially what the mayor of London has done is he's put
• 1:01:40
  cameras up all around London, which track your number place, contract where you go, track where you've
• 1:01:45
  been. And then they can charge you for traveling to parts of London. Now,
• 1:01:54
  if you link that to a CBDC, you can automatically be deducted. And this to me is the kind of policy
• 1:02:01
  that's come through, which I think is an unfair tax on the poor. I think that the vandalization rate
• 1:02:07
  of these ULS cameras, which I think is something ridiculous, like 75% have been vandalized.
• 1:02:14
  I think that's you're at the point where the government needs to listen these to go, hold on,
• 1:02:18
  people really hate this policy. Maybe we've got this one wrong. And so I just think,
• 1:02:24
  giving the government cameras everywhere to contract everything, money that they controlled,
• 1:02:29
  the trajectory of where we had in this is too much control in the hands of people that I think
• 1:02:34
  have proven that they can't be trusted. Yeah. Do you not worry about it? I do worry about it.
• 1:02:40
  I do worry about it, especially since each step along the way seems to have its own internal logic,
• 1:02:45
  like, well, you know, here's his camera instead of, you know, finding lots of take a speed camera,
• 1:02:51
  which is an example that more people and more places would be familiar with instead of sending you
• 1:02:56
  a speeding fine. And then if you don't pay it, you know, we send you another speeding fine
• 1:03:00
  that's higher. And then if you don't pay that, then we send you a court summit. We can see a driver's
• 1:03:04
  license. And if you still drive, then we send you a court summons. And then like that all sounds
• 1:03:08
  complicated. Why don't we just dock the fine from your bank account when you get snapped by the
• 1:03:13
  speeding camera? Like that seems a lot more efficient for everybody. But of course, then you're
• 1:03:17
  going down the path of what you're talking about. And that would worry me. I mean, I already live in
• 1:03:24
  what I regard as being an extremely nanny state country and state in particular. I've lived most
• 1:03:31
  of my adult life in New York where there is a, you know, there are some things that are bizarrely
• 1:03:37
  dictatorial in New York City, like not being able to drink a beer in a park and stuff like that
• 1:03:42
  and being bothered, you know, about, about little ordinances and things like that. But in general,
• 1:03:48
  you can drive faster on the freeways and you're not going to get snapped by some hidden speed camera.
• 1:03:54
  You can do, you can generally get your funk on more than you can hear. Here we are an obedient
• 1:04:00
  people. We saw it during the pandemic, you know, a high level of what sociologist called vertical
• 1:04:06
  trust, which is the kind of trust in institutions and authority that you see a lot across East Asia,
• 1:04:13
  for example, and not so much at all in countries like the UK and the US. And that was a really
• 1:04:17
  interesting, I think sociological experiment where Australia and New Zealand seem to have developed
• 1:04:25
  this almost Asian style vertical trust in a way that is unusual in the Western world. You know,
• 1:04:32
  there are countries that have a lot of horizontal trust, meaning trust between people and not a lot
• 1:04:38
  of vertical trust. So, you know, Greece or Italy might be countries like that where neighbours trust
• 1:04:44
  each other that you trust strangers, but you don't trust that the government is going to do anything
• 1:04:48
  right. And then there are the countries that might be Japan where there's a lot of trust in
• 1:04:53
  government and in authority, but not a lot of suspicion about whether your fellow man is going
• 1:04:57
  to do the right thing. And you tend to see more horizontal trust and less vertical trust in Western
• 1:05:04
  democracies except for Australia. Why do you think that is? Because I remember in the pandemic,
• 1:05:11
  and you know, the pandemic screwed me up a lot. It shifted my whole world quite significantly
• 1:05:18
  because I started out as I didn't interview with a doctor early on, friend of mine, and he was
• 1:05:23
  talking about the influx of patients suddenly coming into the hospital and he said it was a trickle
• 1:05:30
  and then it was a stream and then they didn't know what the hell they were dealing with.
• 1:05:35
  And when the first lockdown happened, I was like, yeah, this makes sense. We should be doing this.
• 1:05:39
  And now I look back at embarrassment on that because it wasn't even a two-week lockdown,
• 1:05:43
  and it'll be months of lockdown. I've looked at how we were lied to by
• 1:05:48
  yeah, all the text messages came out from man, how can God be talking about? We need to scare people.
• 1:05:53
  You know, I've seen all that stuff. I got vaccinated. I don't know if I made the right decision
• 1:05:58
  anymore because I don't know where to find the truth anymore. My whole world has been shifted
• 1:06:03
  to a place of not trusting the government, but not knowing who to trust instead.
• 1:06:08
  I mean, I don't think you should trust the government, but I do still trust scientists,
• 1:06:12
  and I do still trust the medical establishment and the vast bulk of medical evidence,
• 1:06:18
  and it's not just from drug companies, which some people say, oh, you can't trust Pfizer,
• 1:06:21
  I don't trust Pfizer, but I trust a lot of very, very well-educated people who have gone over
• 1:06:27
  this a bazillion times by now and who find no long-term negative effects from the vaccines to speak
• 1:06:35
  of and who say that it has, it's very, very good at preventing hospitalization and death. So,
• 1:06:41
  it was probably the right thing to do to get it. And then I agree with you that where we fall
• 1:06:50
  on things like lockdowns, in countries where the virus was running rampant, it's hard to understand
• 1:06:58
  what the point of a lockdown is. I think in 2020 and throughout most of 2021, there was a lot of
• 1:07:05
  reason for lockdowns in places where there was no social contagion, like here in Australia.
• 1:07:13
  And I think we can misremember the harshness of the Australian lockdown. I'm not making any
• 1:07:18
  apologies for isolated instances of police overreach or silly laws, like not allowing someone
• 1:07:25
  to lie on the beach, you know, and being able to make them go home. But the reality is that in February
• 1:07:33
  of 2021, when the entire world was on fire with Delta and, you know, people were not locked down
• 1:07:39
  in the US and UK necessarily, but they were huddled inside and sheltering in place because of the
• 1:07:45
  the wave of increasing infectiousness. I went to see Hamilton in Sydney in a packed
• 1:07:53
  theater, like that was that there was no COVID. And so a succession of moderate lockdowns in
• 1:08:00
  New South Wales managed to keep raining it back in because we invested in contact tracing.
• 1:08:06
  And we checked in everywhere with QR codes and we had this quasi-authoritarian system where
• 1:08:12
  every single place that you went to, you scanned a QR code. And then when a case would escape
• 1:08:18
  from hotel quarantine because every single person coming into the country was locked in a hotel
• 1:08:22
  for two weeks before they were allowed back out into the community, then, you know, you had thousands
• 1:08:28
  of contact traces working around the clock and tracing it back and getting those people to isolate
• 1:08:34
  and at home. And we did manage to rein it in again and again and again. And then once,
• 1:08:41
  actually, that was pre-delta of February of 2021. Then when Delta hit in June, July of 2021,
• 1:08:49
  it was too infectious and the contact traces were unable to get it under control. And then we had
• 1:08:53
  the bad lockdown, which was like 100 days in New South Wales. Melbourne had had much, much worse
• 1:08:57
  because they had a more incompetent contact tracing. They had different demographics. They had an
• 1:09:02
  inferior health system. So that was where you saw those really gnarly, you know, videos of,
• 1:09:07
  you know, people just relentlessly locked down. And there were horrible examples of police going
• 1:09:11
  to people's houses because they'd posted on the Facebook page that they were going to join a
• 1:09:15
  protest in the city or something. And it's reminiscent of the Canadian truckers thing. Like, why would
• 1:09:21
  a person be, ultimately, most of these things got overturned. So, you know, sanity prevailed,
• 1:09:27
  but why would a person even feel that they were under threat initially of being arrested and punished
• 1:09:32
  for saying that they were going to go to a rally during a lockdown? Nonetheless, it's hard to, you
• 1:09:39
  know, at the hindsight of 2020, we didn't know what it was at the time. Mistakes were certainly made,
• 1:09:47
  but, you know, I don't spend a lot of time. I don't stay up at night thinking that we were
• 1:09:53
  hoodwinked into a, a pandemic. No, I've never, I've never thought it was a dress rehearsal for
• 1:09:59
  authoritarianism or something. No, I think one of these things just comes down to incentives,
• 1:10:05
  human behaviour. And I just think it's mainly a series of unfortunate things, sometimes giving
• 1:10:13
  too much power to idiots. And I think there were a good example, I say, good examples, but actually
• 1:10:20
  really, they're terrible examples of police in the UK, Australia, America being given too much
• 1:10:26
  authority and being, I mean, I think I seem to remember one, it might have been in the UK where it
• 1:10:31
  goes, it's actually been strangled by a police officer. And I remember seeing things like that,
• 1:10:36
  they were just terrible, but I didn't really want to get into a COVID debate, but more the point
• 1:10:41
  was, I think the whole period has just made me a lot more critical where that we can be lied to
• 1:10:50
  by, it's significant lies from people of power and authority, Matt Hancock, all the text messages
• 1:10:58
  came out, they lied, they just lied to us. Matt Hancock was the, he was the, was the,
• 1:11:02
  position, the health secretary. Yeah. And I can't remember if he was, with position was afterwards,
• 1:11:09
  but he was the health secretary, but things can, it can't things also be just taken out of context,
• 1:11:13
  like I vaguely remember those tweets. So if you're saying that we need to scare the shit out of
• 1:11:16
  everybody, then can't the generous interpretation of that be like, fuck, we need to get people to
• 1:11:20
  take this seriously because it's going to be really bad. I think it's very generous. I think I
• 1:11:26
  would have to have the tweets in front of me to like, sorry, the, the text to show them. Right.
• 1:11:30
  But this is a time, you've got to remember, you've got to couple this with parties,
• 1:11:36
  parties within government when they're trying to tell us to scare the shit out of home. I'd
• 1:11:39
  just saying there's, there's a mix of bad and misinformation and disinformation. And it, you
• 1:11:45
  know, and I think if you, if you look at the government, you treat them as what they are,
• 1:11:49
  is part of the elite, who can tell us that we have to stay at home, destroy businesses,
• 1:11:54
  whilst they're having bodies getting drunk within the, the, the, the offices of government,
• 1:12:01
  and when you expand this to more power, how, how can it be misused? And so I'm not a
• 1:12:07
  no government person. I'm not an anarchist. It's just this check and balance. And I just think
• 1:12:11
  we've gone too far. There's too much overreach. So the idea of, you know, you couple a pandemic
• 1:12:17
  with a central bank digital currency. You couple a lockdown with the CBDC. I mean, how scary
• 1:12:23
  could that get? There's only things they could do. Okay. Well, we're in a pandemic. You
• 1:12:27
  shouldn't be by an alcohol. You cannot buy alcohol. Right. That kind of weird, scary. Yeah.
• 1:12:31
  I just, or you can imagine like it needs to see that you're, there was a period where you could
• 1:12:36
  only get in your Uber. If you took a photo of yourself wearing a mask and Uber had an AI to check
• 1:12:40
  that you're wearing a mask, right? You can imagine that technology being like before you leave
• 1:12:45
  your house, you have to be wearing a mask or if you're going to go into a cafe, you have to be
• 1:12:48
  wearing a mask. It wouldn't be a pretty world where you're micromanaged by bureaucrats.
• 1:12:54
  Yeah. So I think we have to push back. So for me, I think it's an important to people to fully
• 1:12:59
  understand what a CBDC is and push back because I think people could be easily hoodwinked
• 1:13:03
  into thinking, this is great. I mean, Richie Suneck branded it brick coin. Right. But again,
• 1:13:10
  even without the digital currency, there's something I'm not getting about this. Why couldn't they
• 1:13:13
  just do that to us already? I mean, yes, you could use cash for everything, right? But we don't.
• 1:13:20
  It would still be devastating. I don't have the cash on hand. If they wanted to punish me
• 1:13:25
  for having this conversation, they could just raise my bank accounts. They did it with the
• 1:13:29
  truckers and assuming that we're not all using Bitcoin, we don't need the digital currency. They
• 1:13:33
  can do it already. Yeah. So in terms of freezing bank accounts, they can. Okay. Like I said, look,
• 1:13:38
  but you still might have a credit card. They would have to go through every financial institution,
• 1:13:42
  every bank and have you block band by everyone, which I don't most of us probably don't
• 1:13:46
  deal with two or three financial institutions at the most. But maybe you can just go and get a new
• 1:13:50
  credit card the next day from somewhere else or the fact is you do also have cash. I mean,
• 1:13:56
  it's a lot of effort to block your account. But when you go to a CVDC, it's not just blocking your
• 1:14:00
  account. It's actually deciding what you can spend your money on. I put blocks on. You cannot spend
• 1:14:06
  your money on this auto deducting from your account. So the speeding ticket was a great example.
• 1:14:11
  What if they auto deduct on the last day of the month and you were right on your limit and
• 1:14:15
  to push you over your overdraft and then you get a fine from the bank? What if you wanted to
• 1:14:19
  appeal it? Are you less likely to appeal because you can't be bothered because you've already had
• 1:14:22
  it deducted? Yeah. Where else made what new fines might they introduce? Yeah. I don't think the
• 1:14:29
  ultra low emissions zone is a green policy. I just think it's a tax. That's right. I think it is.
• 1:14:33
  I don't think it's going to make one eye to eye to a difference to global emissions.
• 1:14:39
  Well, I don't think I'll make a relevant change. Yeah. It's statistically significant change.
• 1:14:44
  To me, it's just a tax, but it's a tax on the poor. And so when you start to just,
• 1:14:48
  you start to look at all these different pieces, more surveillance, more control over the money,
• 1:14:55
  massive growth in government debt, you start to realize like as much of the money tree system I
• 1:15:01
  can get away from the government, the better. It's a bit like separation of church and state. I
• 1:15:06
  think the separation of money and state would be a good thing. Personally, I quite like the idea of
• 1:15:09
  getting rid of central banks. I quite like the idea of having a fragmented financial system,
• 1:15:14
  different currency, different currency options. So when they fail, the failures are localized.
• 1:15:19
  Right. Right. Rather than global as we have now. And this is the other thing about Bitcoin.
• 1:15:26
  Going back to Bitcoin, to me, I think it's a mistake to think of Bitcoin as perfect functioning
• 1:15:33
  money today because it isn't what it is is the potential to be the best money there is on a
• 1:15:40
  number of different factors. You know, when you compare it to fiat money and you look at the
• 1:15:47
  the pros and cons, okay, where does it lose? Yes, it's volatile. Yes, there is enough physical
• 1:15:51
  cash equivalent, but where is it better? Well, it cannot be debased. Yeah. The government cannot
• 1:15:56
  spot transactions. They cannot send stop me sending money to you. So in a scenario where there is a
• 1:16:02
  lockdown or you you can't access your money, I can send you Bitcoin. Nobody can stop that.
• 1:16:06
  I can send it globally wherever I want. So it has all these other factors that make it an
• 1:16:11
  interesting alternative to the current financial system, the current money. And so
• 1:16:19
  nobody should really be putting all their money in it now, but they should be learning about it
• 1:16:22
  and considering maybe I should put a small amount in. And maybe that small amount I'm putting in
• 1:16:28
  isn't even an investment. It is a it is a vote is a vote for resistance against the government
• 1:16:35
  is to say there's this thing you don't have control. There's this one thing you can't stop.
• 1:16:39
  It's really that's that's a super important idea. That said, Bitcoin's gone from nowhere to be in
• 1:16:46
  the eighth biggest currency in the world. You know, it will eventually take the seventh slot and
• 1:16:50
  the sixth and the fifth. It will keep growing. It is a beast like that. And so for me, it makes
• 1:16:57
  sense to have a sort of my money in there. So it's both a protest and a sensible place to
• 1:17:04
  store some money. Yeah, and a hedge, I guess, right? I mean a hedge, but money out of the pillar.
• 1:17:10
  So what's everything? There's a really interesting chart where if you look at the rise in the price
• 1:17:15
  of Bitcoin, it correlates quite quite close to the periods of government printing, massive expansion
• 1:17:24
  of the government's balance sheet. And that's a quite interesting point is that people say,
• 1:17:29
  oh, I was told this is hedge against inflation is dropped 50%. You have to be ahead of the curve.
• 1:17:34
  Yeah, I don't mean a hedge against inflation. I mean a hedge against against the government,
• 1:17:38
  the kinds of policies that we're talking about or the sort of dystopian future that could be
• 1:17:43
  ushered in because it's very hard to argue against these things as well. You know, there's a language
• 1:17:46
  game that gets played where, you know, you argue against the ultra low emission vehicle zone and
• 1:17:54
  people say, well, why don't you want to do anything about the climate or you argue against speed
• 1:17:58
  cameras? And you say, do you want the roads to be more dangerous and more people to die on the roads?
• 1:18:04
  You know, there's always a compelling reason for the people who want greater intrusion into our
• 1:18:09
  lives to justify it. You know, you argue against the person being prosecuted for putting up on
• 1:18:16
  Facebook that they were going to attend a rally and you say, what do you want, you know, old people
• 1:18:19
  to be dying of, more people to be dying of COVID? No, of course not. But if you follow that logic,
• 1:18:25
  you end up in quite a dark place. If you're doing, if you're deploying the tools of the state
• 1:18:31
  to be maximally intrusive in order to protect us all from ourselves, I don't want to live in that
• 1:18:37
  society. No, I don't. I think it was quite, I find quite interesting about you, Josh, and why I wanted
• 1:18:41
  to talk to you is, you know, I don't, I would certainly place you, you might not want to be
• 1:18:48
  placed and you might find there's a massive insult. But I think you are, I feel like there's some
• 1:18:53
  alignment in our thinking. I feel like you're probably a bit more to the left than the kind of
• 1:18:58
  people I get on my podcast. But I, but I don't feel like you're becoming one of these captured
• 1:19:04
  crazy left people who will just accept living in government. Much more rational, reasonable person.
• 1:19:08
  I'm an anti-authoritarian and I'm an anti-establishment person. I mean, I just think we have
• 1:19:13
  all have to be independent. I mean, to whatever enhances the greatest amount of human flourishing,
• 1:19:18
  I am for, I would say that is my guiding light. And if you can achieve, if you can use the state
• 1:19:23
  to help with that, then that's great. But I don't want people to be tied down by bureaucracy or
• 1:19:29
  intrusions into their lives because that doesn't enhance human flourishing. I like independent
• 1:19:34
  people. I, uh, we didn't feel this morning with the guy where he's like a financial advisor
• 1:19:40
  in a family office and he works on a state plan and he said that I think his number was the
• 1:19:47
  Australian government says that is it now or it's we're heading towards, they're heading towards
• 1:19:54
  50% of GDP will be generated by the government. Yeah, which is firstly, I, you know,
• 1:20:01
  funny that the government would say that because the government doesn't,
• 1:20:03
  right? How is that even possible? I think it really means that 50% of all, uh, uh,
• 1:20:12
  50% of the country will be working for the government.
• 1:20:16
  Did you say what time period it was? That can't be right.
• 1:20:21
  I think that must be like extrapolating from if the, if the government continued to grow at the
• 1:20:25
  rate that it's been growing over the past 10 years or something. But I think it's 50 years.
• 1:20:29
  I think something along those lines, but the point being I think what's more,
• 1:20:32
  more interesting is that this constant growth in the size of the government. So even during the
• 1:20:37
  pandemic in the UK when, uh, businesses were closed or had to close or couldn't open, I mean,
• 1:20:43
  I know people lost their businesses. The UK government grew by 90,000 employees. Right.
• 1:20:49
  It's, it's a constant growing business constantly needs to be fed. And again, this is why Bitcoin
• 1:20:55
  is an interesting pushback on that. The idea that you cannot just constantly print your way out
• 1:21:00
  mistakes. I mean, when I was a kid, I did economics of school, there was always this idea of a
• 1:21:06
  surplus and a deficit. It would never have a surplus anymore. It's just a constant growing deficit.
• 1:21:12
  Yeah. You know, if you look at where our government spending money at the moment, I mean,
• 1:21:17
  it's unbelievable. The amount of money which is just going into the bottom as pit, which is the
• 1:21:22
  NHS and don't get me wrong. I love the idea of our health service, but it, but it doesn't work
• 1:21:28
  anymore. You know, social care. Doesn't not work anymore. Doesn't not work anymore because
• 1:21:34
  conservative governments have ripped money out of it for no, it's not decades. No, it's not
• 1:21:38
  that. But I think if you're going to, if you're going to be fair about the problems of the NHS,
• 1:21:43
  you would recognize this is, uh, this has been something, this has been a growing problem for
• 1:21:48
  decades, which has gone through successive conservative and labor governments.
• 1:21:54
  Because if, oh, yeah, I mean, I don't mean to throw conservatives exclusively under the
• 1:21:56
  bus because you've got, you had new labor, which were also fairly conservative, small-sea conservative.
• 1:22:02
  But I mean, I think if you actually look at the bang for the buck that the UK gets, it doesn't
• 1:22:06
  spend very much on the NHS in comparison to other public systems and it gets a lot, quite a lot
• 1:22:11
  out of it. It's like, it's a lot more efficient than the US system. The US spends like twice as
• 1:22:14
  much on healthcare as the US does, as the UK does and gets slightly better outcomes.
• 1:22:20
  So 220 billion and I think our tax receipts are a trillion. So it's like 22% of the government's
• 1:22:28
  funding of the tax receipts going to the NHS. So I mean, I don't know more. I think it's smaller
• 1:22:34
  as a share of GDP than it used to be the NHS. I don't think it is. I actually think it's higher.
• 1:22:40
  We've looked at the fact that we've had the chance, haven't we, Danny?
• 1:22:45
  Yeah, I'm almost certain it has. See, what percentage of GDP that the NHS was in like the year 2000
• 1:22:50
  or 1995? The point is, to me, it is a broken system and the signals of how broken it is,
• 1:22:58
  just the size of the weightiness is just going up and up and up. Right, but wouldn't more money fix
• 1:23:02
  that? You say that, but constantly the weightiness go up and constantly every government promises
• 1:23:08
  more money and more money. But they don't really deliver much more money, yeah? Yeah, they do.
• 1:23:11
  I mean, it's gone up. What has it gone up? 100 billion in the last?
• 1:23:21
  Interesting. Yeah, I'm still not very much at the US is 18 or something.
• 1:23:26
  I'm surprised not higher because I'm pretty sure when we did the Dan tab interview,
• 1:23:31
  can you gone the office for budget responsibility? I mean, without getting into the weeds about the NHS,
• 1:23:35
  I take your broad point because he's saying that's a percentage of GDP. I'm saying a percentage
• 1:23:39
  of tax receipts. Yes, I understand that. But I think GDP is the fairer measure because
• 1:23:47
  economy's grow and different governments decide to tax differently and sometimes there's
• 1:23:52
  a huge amount of hypocrisy amongst conservatives who say that they want surpluses but actually cut
• 1:23:56
  taxes in the right ways that deliver deficits. I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for a broadly
• 1:24:03
  libertarian worldview which is like people should be allowed to do what they want to do and there
• 1:24:08
  shouldn't be huge bureaucratic systems for wanting their aspirations. I think you should be able
• 1:24:14
  to set up a company very quickly. I think you should be, you know, things should be nimble and
• 1:24:18
  government should be easy to work with. My only caution is that sometimes people who talk that talk
• 1:24:24
  will vote for policies or be parts of parties like the current Republican party in the United States
• 1:24:31
  which will actually systematically make life harder because, I mean, as Al Franken, the former
• 1:24:37
  sailing like live comic and sometimes Senator said, you know, Republicans run on the platform
• 1:24:43
  that government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it. So, you know, there are
• 1:24:48
  things in the US like doing your taxes every single year which could easily be undone. In other
• 1:24:54
  countries like Australia, the taxes just get done for you because the government, the tax
• 1:24:58
  office already has all of the information or everyone who's employed you has had to send in forms
• 1:25:03
  that say that you're being employed. They could just do it and you could just not have to worry
• 1:25:07
  about it but because Republicans are in bed with H&R block and the tax, you know, accounting people
• 1:25:14
  that don't want things to be easy and really they don't want it to be easy to pay taxes because they
• 1:25:17
  want taxes to be a monumental pain in the ass so that the party that campaigns on lower taxes gets
• 1:25:23
  more votes, right? I mean, so there are these, you go to a country like Denmark which, or
• 1:25:28
  which I lived in for a semester and went to school in Copenhagen, went to university in Copenhagen
• 1:25:33
  and it's so easy working dealing with the government that there are no lines in the post office,
• 1:25:39
  you know, things function easily in the US. My god, tries going into the post office and sending
• 1:25:44
  a package takes you three hours trying to get your license renewed at the Department of Motor Vehicles
• 1:25:49
  to nightmare. That is because of a lack of funding. I mean, maybe it's partly because of unions
• 1:25:56
  as well but it's largely because of a lack of funding and a certain lack of kind of nimbleness
• 1:26:01
  and adeptness from government. So I think there, I think you could have a situation that would
• 1:26:08
  please libertarians and also lefties alike just by having governments that are efficient and
• 1:26:16
  lean but also well-funded so they can do, they can actually help you to achieve your aspirations
• 1:26:22
  instead of thwarting them. What would make them more nimble and efficient though? Because I think
• 1:26:29
  that's kind of one of the main challenges that that government has that businesses don't, like
• 1:26:35
  the free market kind of works, kind of works. Yeah, let's avoid arguments about, you know, a full
• 1:26:44
  free market would lead to lots of pollution, like just companies that are shit lose their customers
• 1:26:49
  and they fail and good companies rise at the top. That kind of kind of works, you know, you make a
• 1:26:54
  good show, you're going to get more listeners and if you'll show you guys a bit shit, you'll get,
• 1:26:57
  like it just kind of works. Well, you hope that in a democracy that the voters are the people who
• 1:27:02
  decide on what's working and what's not and if things get too sclerotic and hard to deal with,
• 1:27:05
  then voters vote in a different government. But when they're both not working, when the
• 1:27:10
  when the institutional government isn't working, there isn't a problem. Yeah, that's, but hopefully
• 1:27:14
  there are people who come along and say this whole thing is not working. I mean, you know, sometimes
• 1:27:18
  people vote for such people. Margaret Thatcher ran on that platform, Ronald Reagan ran on that
• 1:27:22
  platform and they got in and they did make things much more lean and efficient and that had
• 1:27:26
  downsides and it had upsides and, you know, we see in that in Argentina, I just said to you I was
• 1:27:31
  out in Argentina and Millay, I don't know if you know much about this guy, but he won the primaries.
• 1:27:36
  He is Libertarian. Right. He is campaigning on a, his campaign is to get rid of the central bank
• 1:27:43
  to dollar house the country and reduce the size of government. He's a Libertarian. And he let the
• 1:27:49
  primaries and there's a very high chance he'll become president of Argentina that will be a
• 1:27:54
  drastic and radical change. But that's taken decades of, you know, inflation. That's taken
• 1:28:01
  decades of people having their, you know, the country is kind of systematically destroyed by
• 1:28:06
  government to get to that point. And how bad does it have to get for? Well, hopefully you have
• 1:28:11
  responsive systems of government that are more nimble at reacting to popular will. But I don't
• 1:28:19
  think we do. That's, I think that's the problem at the moment. It's like right now, I just,
• 1:28:22
  UK is a great example. We essentially have two parties with this kind of like,
• 1:28:28
  yeah, champagne, socialists in the middle to kind of separate the two. But there's nobody to vote
• 1:28:35
  for anymore. There's no kind of vote for Richardson. Absolutely not. But I've over here. So I'm
• 1:28:39
  absolutely not. Yeah. Do I think the conservatives stand for anything conservative anymore? No, I
• 1:28:44
  don't. Do I think the labor offering anything different? That's interesting. No, I don't. There's
• 1:28:49
  nothing of interest. There's nothing positive there at all. Like I just, there's no one to vote for.
• 1:28:54
  All right. We need to get Lex Friedman and Andrew Huberman to run for a power parliament in
• 1:28:58
  the United Kingdom and change the country. I'm going to let you out of this swerver. It's getting
• 1:29:04
  hot and it's getting late. Look, thank you so much. Well, I don't know if you should be
• 1:29:08
  hanging me on me because it's across over podcast, but it doesn't feel like it was uncomfortable
• 1:29:14
  enough for you. I can make it more uncomfortable. Stick around for the bonus segment. No, I'm
• 1:29:20
  kidding. Okay. If next time, if the government ever tries to deduct money from my account for
• 1:29:26
  speeding, and I'll buy some Bitcoin, okay? Yeah. You should deal. So do you not own any Bitcoin?
• 1:29:31
  I got rid of it during the crash. Does the boss you told at the bottom? Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  I actually needed to liquid. I needed to be a bit more liquid anyway. Okay.
• 1:29:41
  Fair enough. By the way, I'm much prefer asking questions and answering them. I'm never usually
• 1:29:46
  good. I think some people are going to do both. I think you do both. I never tend to be in
• 1:29:51
  this. I get out of town. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, man.