Eric Weinstein on Bitcoin (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein on Bitcoin
Information
Host(s)	Peter McCormack Travis Kling
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	02:26:06
Release Date	2 June 2021
Links
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Eric Weinstein on Bitcoin was a discussion on What Bitcoin Did by Peter McCormack, with co-host Travis Kling and guest Eric Weinstein.

Description

Bitcoin can be a toxic place. If you question a narrative or fall on the wrong side of a debate, you will quickly find yourself on the receiving end of the ‘bitcoin plebs’, and rarely a day passes without a fight of some kind exploding on Twitter.

Earlier this year, Eric Weinstein found himself amongst a heated discussion after challenging the narratives of bitcoiners across Clubhouse and Twitter.

Eric is a cultural commentator who has been aware of Bitcoin since as early as 2010. Whilst supporting Bitcoin and the community, he does not consider himself a bitcoiner.

In this interview, we discuss Bitcoin maximalism & toxicity, Elon Musk and whether Bitcoin fixes everything. My friend Travis Kling joins me as co-host for this episode.

Transcript

00:00:00
Peter McCormack: Eric, welcome.

00:00:02
Eric Weinstein: Peter, thank you.

00:00:03
Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming to do this. You're the hardest person to schedule in the world, but we got here.

00:00:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, appreciate you, uh, being patient with me. Forgive me.

00:00:12
Peter McCormack: No, all forgiven. Thanks for doing this. Uh, we're joined by my friend Travis. Uh, I've made a few podcasts with Travis. I tend to be better asking the questions, but when we get into a bit of a discussion about deeper topics, Travis here is, uh, the expert I asked to join us.

00:00:26
Travis Kling: He's the muscle.

00:00:27
Peter McCormack: He's the muscle.

00:00:28
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:00:28
Peter McCormack: He's the weight. He's the brain. Where do we start?

00:00:31
Travis Kling: There is no chance I'm the brain at this table.

00:00:32
Peter McCormack: You would d- ... Well, there's no chance I'm the brain. [laughs] All right. So you've been going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole for around... I know you've been in a long time, but-

00:00:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, I found out about it, I think, in 2010 from Jordan Greenhall, now Jordan Hall, and I was astounded.

00:00:52
Peter McCormack: But you've been-

00:00:53
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:00:53
Peter McCormack: ... a little bit more public about it recently. I care about your recent experience.

00:00:57
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Um, well, okay, in 2010 I wrote this essay called Go Virtual, Young Man, about decamping into the electron layer, the idea that we should leave our physical personas behind, and that we should realize that more and more things... And it, it was in part built on the idea that the double spend problem in crypto is effectively a conservation problem in the physical world. So how is it that my gold isn't your gold until it changes custodianship? The fact that that problem was soluble at a distributed level took me completely by surprise. Did not see the technology, did not understand that it was imminent, and when I found out about it, my thought about it back then wasn't as money. It was, "Oh my gosh, someone has figured out how to port the constraints of the physical world into the digital layer," and therefore we can set about rebuilding everything that we know to be possible. Because the physical world is a proof that what we see in front of us, bottles, glasses, uh, microphones, are, are real.

00:02:03
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:02:04
Eric Weinstein: And so the idea that you could take physical law, come up with a digital form of it, and then, um, have that govern a system so that you can't create, you can't counterfeit, you can't, uh, have a central bank come in a- and, uh, execute a seigniorage play against your currency, all of those things had me in mind of how do we decamp the, uh, the world of the physical and move into the world of data, of bits, of electrons, rather than the world of atoms. And only recently did I come in contact with the Bitcoin universe by mumbling, or I guess I also had Vitalik, uh, of Ethereum fame on my podcast.

00:02:48
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:02:48
Eric Weinstein: And many Bitcoiners, uh, responded to that in a way that I had not sort of understood, which is, "How dare you talk to charlatans and scoundrels?" And-

00:02:58
Peter McCormack: Oh, how dare you?

00:02:59
Eric Weinstein: How dare you?

00:03:00
Peter McCormack: I was one of those.

00:03:00
Eric Weinstein: Were you?

00:03:01
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:03:02
Eric Weinstein: Tell me about that.

00:03:03
Peter McCormack: I can't remember what I put. I think I probably put something, "Why are you talking to a scammer?"

00:03:07
Eric Weinstein: Really?

00:03:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah, something like that. I don't know. I'd have to go and dig it out.

00:03:09
Eric Weinstein: That doesn't seem very nice, Peter.

00:03:11
Peter McCormack: Well, we're not very nice people sometimes. We are actually. Bitcoiners are really nice people.

00:03:15
Eric Weinstein: I can't figure it out because you, you guys do seem to be sort of weirdly idealistic and decent, but somehow you appreciate the aesthetic of being a dick.

00:03:26
Travis Kling: It's-

00:03:26
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:03:27
Travis Kling: It's a little bit like a, um, it's like your, your body's own defense system against getting sick. Like, you get food poisoning and you're just v- vilely ill afterwards, coming out of both ends. You wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy, right? And that's your body repelling, um, uh, this thing that, that it deems to be, uh, uh, dangerous to it. And, and I think for the OG Bitcoiners that have been around since, you know, the 2012 cycle or whatever, I think they've seen... And that's not me, but I, I, I know these guys and I, I've studied the history of, of, of Bitcoin and the various alt cycles that we've done previously, and they've seen so much of it come and go and s- l- l- you know, just wave after wave of, uh, things that promised to do something but then not actually deliver on it, that I think the collective, like, OG Bitcoiner community and then the new Bitcoiners that have, like, added onto that have, like, adopted this stance that is, um, you know, commonly referred to as maximalism, which is, like, the refusal to sort of, like, even, uh, entertain that maybe there could be something else, uh, uh-

00:04:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:04:41
Travis Kling: ... out there worthwhile.

00:04:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:04:43
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:04:43
Peter McCormack: But also, we're very protective over this Bitcoin thing because it's, you know, it's a project that's taken 30 years to exist, the previous projects by cypherpunks to try and build this form of digital money, which many failed.

00:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:04:57
Peter McCormack: And finally we have one that's worked, and it is working.

00:05:01
Eric Weinstein: And it's worth fighting for.

00:05:02
Peter McCormack: It's worth fighting for.

00:05:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:05:03
Peter McCormack: And, and the way people explained it to me, 'cause I very early on, I made shows about toxicity saying, "You can need to be nicer. You need to be welcoming people in," but-

00:05:12
Eric Weinstein: No, I didn't, I didn't say that.

00:05:13
Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I did.

00:05:14
Eric Weinstein: I know, but I, I want to be very clear-

00:05:16
Peter McCormack: Lex Fridman did

00:05:17
Eric Weinstein: ... that, yeah, that's, that's the kumbaya love perspective.

00:05:20
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:05:21
Eric Weinstein: I, I have probably have a different perspective.

00:05:22
Peter McCormack: Well, so I think what it is, is once you, once you've been in for a while, and like Travis said, you hear the same bullshit over and over again, but once you have your material amount of net wealth in there, you want it protected. It has to be hard to change.

00:05:34
Eric Weinstein: But that's talking your book, and it's a very... When, if the issue is, is that my net worth is in this object, and now the idea is that that object is, uh, susceptible to going down or going up depending upon how people feel about it, I have to ensure that people feel about this in a way that's coincident with my financial goals. And so-

00:05:55
Peter McCormack: No, that's a different point. So, so, so forget the financial goals. Uh, I, you know, we've had all this stuff with Elon recently, and plenty of us You know, I've said, "Fuck off. Sell your Bitcoin. We, we don't want you here." Like if you're, if you're gonna cause issues, and we'll take the net loss. We're in this for the long term. This is a multi-year project for us.

00:06:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:06:12
Peter McCormack: It's more about people coming in trying to centralize the project or trying to influence narratives in, in a new way. This kind of... You see the meme, "I just discovered Bitcoin. I'm here to fix it."

00:06:22
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:06:23
Peter McCormack: That kind of thing. Uh, and also trying to defend against the basic principles of what we're trying to achieve here, which is just decentralized money and, and very simple properties, 21 million coins. You know, uh, uh, this-- I mean, Bitcoin has to do three things. It has to secure 21 million coins, has to issue new coins in the process, and it has to, uh, an- allow for censorship-resistant payments. And just protecting that is why people can get quite rabid.

00:06:51
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:06:52
Peter McCormack: And I think it's kind of interesting. I think it's-- I took a long time to get my head around it 'cause I, I think what it comes down to is this idea of learning in public, right? And learning in public when you've got 500 followers is different from 500,000 followers.

00:07:08
Eric Weinstein: That's true, but I don't think that's where I have my differences with you all. In other words, I understand the idea-

00:07:13
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:07:13
Eric Weinstein: ... that this is something worth protecting to you.

00:07:15
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:07:16
Eric Weinstein: I understand that this is something that is constantly under attack. It's under attack by people who don't even understand that they're-

00:07:22
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:07:22
Eric Weinstein: ... attacking it. Let's assume that we go through all of this, okay? Maybe I have to pass some sort of a written, you know, number two pencil bubble quiz. Assume that I get most of the answers right. At that point, what I, I understand of it is, is that this system has a bolt-on culture that is necessary potentially in order to get it to f- to function. Like, it, it may be that Bit- Bitcoin maximalism is a necessary part of Bitcoin for Bitcoin to work. So assume that that's true.

00:07:55
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:07:55
Eric Weinstein: In which case, it isn't just the protocol from the white paper or whatever. It's in fact a composite. It's like in Judaism, you have written Torah and you have oral Torah. So in a weird way, the culture of Bitcoin is one that is highly idealistic in its interior very often. It's not, it's not homogenous. Um, many different kinds of people live in this ecosystem. But then the crust of it is extremely unpleasant, and the idea that you have to have that kind of a dichotomy present between, uh, an idealism because you're trying to do something different and a sort of an armed wing. Let's think of it as the armed wing of the Bitcoiners, right?

00:08:40
Peter McCormack: [chuckles]

00:08:41
Eric Weinstein: The, um... You know, that, that's a known way of dividing things. Like Hamas, for example, does a lot of social services in Gaza with hospitals and schools and the like, and they also do firing of rockets. So y- it's very common to have some sort of, uh, idealistic thing coupled to some very, uh, aggressive military thing, and I, I don't see Bitcoin as particularly distinguished in that regard. And it's sad to me in part that the architecture of the coin isn't better so that the culture of the Bitcoiners can be less focused on this issue of attack. And of course, this was-

00:09:21
Peter McCormack: Hmm

00:09:21
Eric Weinstein: ... one of the problems to begin with, which was, what are we gonna do? If this technology works, anyone can create a coin. And if anyone can create a coin, now we have a new problem, which is we've never had more than a handful of really important currencies before, right? So if you think about, for example, in, in fiat space, what are the really important liquid currencies? You've got, uh, USD, uh, EUR, GBP, uh, maybe you have CHF, um, JPY. It's, you know... It thins out very, very quickly. Even Australia, New Zealand, Canada, uh, Swiss, you know, the, the-- these are smaller. And so in part, this problem of the ability to create currencies at will mirrors, if you, if, if you like, the fact that central bankers can print money at will, and this is one of the problems is, is that they have the ability to print, and you have to have a culture that stops printing. And so what you guys have figured out is that you have to have a culture that stops printing crypto and not printing it in the level of new bitcoins, but new coins.

00:10:36
Peter McCormack: We can't really stop that, though. It-

00:10:38
Eric Weinstein: But you're-- But in part, what you're trying to do is you're trying to make it non-profitable.

00:10:42
Peter McCormack: No, actually, I think, I think what we're trying to do is, uh, if you've been in long enough, you've seen people, uh, buy a new coin, make a profit, and then suddenly be in a loss as the rug gets pulled, and then that coin just dies off. Very few have survived multiple cycles. It's more about trying to guide people towards Bitcoin and what's different about it.

00:11:02
Eric Weinstein: Yes and no. I would say that part of it is altruistic, saying, "I don't want you to make these mistakes."

00:11:08
Peter McCormack: Mm.

00:11:08
Eric Weinstein: You know, there, there is the altruistic aspect of have fun being poor. You're trying to tell somebody, "You don't have to lose."

00:11:14
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:11:15
Eric Weinstein: Yes, you're, you're not gonna win as much as if you'd got in at 20, in 2011, but on the other hand, you don't have to lose. So in a weird way, even the, uh, completely charmless, uh, epithet, have fun being poor or staying poor, uh, has a bit of idealism to it. So-

00:11:32
Peter McCormack: Of course.

00:11:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Uh, but here you are both talking your book. I mean, you, you said it yourself that when your net worth is invested in this object, you have a different feeling about it. And the issue of talking one's book is distinct from warning other people, is distinct from having a preference for Bitcoin over everything else, i- f- if for no other reason than its ideology is different. It comes from a mysterious place that we don't yet understand. It's not trying to be smart contracts, um, although there are things that are bolt-ons and, and off to the side that m- m- may have that, those properties. So let's agree that there is some standard process by which people discover the world of crypto. They make certain canonical mistakes Right?

00:12:20
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:12:21
Eric Weinstein: There's a way in which the community has been through this a million times. People come in at different levels. People come in just wanting to learn. Other people come in saying, "Don't worry, I've solved everything," and, uh, you know, buy a, buy BrunoCoin or buy SallyCoin or whatever it is, you know. So you create your own. Okay. What I'm much more interested in is where is the really good conversation to be had around crypto in general, Bitcoin in particular, and the relationship between fiat and crypto, between that which is enforced by violence and that which is enforced by math.

00:13:02
Peter McCormack: Well, a lot of people in the circles I mix in, they don't even entertain the conversation of crypto. They don't even use the word. It's like, "No, I'm not in crypto, I'm in Bitcoin."

00:13:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:13:11
Peter McCormack: That's, that's just a bunch of bullshit. And, and the, the way I tend to think about it myself, the way I've compartmentalized it, is that I consider Bitcoin to be my vault that's protected. It's protected by math, cryptography, and a rabid army of plebs who are... or cyber hornets, as Saylor calls them, who are there to, you know, protect Bitcoin.

00:13:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:13:32
Peter McCormack: And then I consider all the other stuff, I think that's me taking a bit of money out of my vault and going to Vegas and going to the casino, just playing the roulette.

00:13:39
Eric Weinstein: See, but you... This is one of these revelations-

00:13:42
Peter McCormack: Mm

00:13:42
Eric Weinstein: ... which is that you think of this primarily as money.

00:13:44
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:13:45
Eric Weinstein: And one of the ways in which I get into trouble with Bitcoiners is not thinking about this primarily as money.

00:13:51
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:13:52
Eric Weinstein: The, the, the issue of it being a form of money was important in to getting people to adopt distributed computing. And so even if you view it as purely a technology, the fact that that technology was a technology built around money, and it could make you rich in traditional terms by understanding it, is a very good example of getting fitness landscapes to cause the adoption of a new technology. So in a certain sense, you know, uh, wealth is its killer app so far. People are always saying, "What's the application?" Well, I would say one thing is, is that, uh, it's made a lot of people very wealthy.

00:14:30
Peter McCormack: It's true.

00:14:30
Eric Weinstein: And so in a weird way, money is the killer app of the blockchain decentralized computing story. But if I s- continue to think about it as technology, in every other situation, people wanna innovate.

00:14:43
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:14:44
Eric Weinstein: And the great danger in Bitcoin is, no, no, no, you can't innovate around this because it's money. Because it's money, it should be resistant to certain kinds of innovation. Then we get into a different discussion about, well, do you have to do something, you know, in the main thread, or can you do something off to the side, and we're not really against innovation. My concern is, is that there are a huge number of uninteresting conversations to be had around this, and I don't wanna waste your time and your listeners' time in one of the rivulets. One of the things that I've learned is, is that everybody sounds like something. And so whether or not I'm just saying the same thing everybody does when they, when they alight in the Bitcoin universe or whether I'm saying something different, people will hear it in terms of what they've already heard before.

00:15:31
Peter McCormack: Yeah, look, I get that. I mean, I was talking to Travis on the way up. Yeah, and even, uh, Rich, who's been kind enough to, to loan us his studio, is that a lot of the conversations are the same.

00:15:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:15:42
Peter McCormack: Yeah. And, and it is good to get different voices on and hear different voices. And I was pestering you because I actually wanted to hear about the things you have to say. Whether or not I agree, it doesn't matter. We can debate those. But, but it is, it is interesting to get into that. But it's funny that I, I mean, I, I don't consider this a technical revolution. This, to me, is a monetary revolution. I absolutely believe-

00:16:02
Eric Weinstein: You don't see this as a technical revolution?

00:16:04
Peter McCormack: No, I, I see it as a monetary revolution.

00:16:06
Eric Weinstein: No, I see it as a technical revolution as well.

00:16:08
Peter McCormack: Yeah. The... I tell you-

00:16:09
Travis Kling: I think it's both.

00:16:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:16:10
Travis Kling: Yeah, it seems like it's both. The, the, the, the, like, shorthand way that I, I think about this a lot and, and as a guy that runs an investment fund for a living have definitely spent tons of time for years th- thinking about this, a lot of different use cases for distributed ledger technology. At the moment, money and specifically store of value appears to be the killer app right now. And wh- and when you evaluate these different, um, use cases, I l- I like to ask four questions: How ready is the tech for the world? How ready is the world for the tech? What do you need decentralization for? And how decentralized is decentralized enough? And in my opinion, and again, not a Bitcoin maximalist, f- fund doesn't reflect that, um, but I think Bitcoin more fully and convincingly answers those four questions than any other crypto asset in existence today. And that's, that's not to say that there's not a lot of really interesting innovation that's going on down market cap from BTC, and, you know, Eth and what's going on with DeFi would be the, the poster child for that. But within those four questions, and specifically I think what do you need decentralization for and how decentralized is decentralized enough, well, if, if you need sovereign grade censorship resistance, you gotta have a lot of decentralization for that, and that's Bitcoin that exists on 10,000 nodes all across the world. When you look at Ethereum, which is, um, a smart contract platform, decentralized compute, however you wanna say it, it's kind of at the, the furthest end of the spectrum in terms of decentralization for that kind of thing. And then all the way over on the right side is AWS. And man, AWS works amazing, right? And it's cheap, and we use it a lot for our business, and it's like, it's, it's a, it's a great product. And if you're, if you're going to run, you know, CryptoKitties, there's, there's a question on ... what you need decentralization for versus just running CryptoKitties on top of AWS. And there's a lot of other competitor smart contract platforms to Ethereum that sit at, at different places along that spectrum, and I think it's the market is collectively trying to figure out what exactly do we need decentralization for, and how decentralized is decentralized enough.

00:18:32
Peter McCormack: See, one of the big debates right now between Bitcoin and Ethereum is to do with the consensus mechanism. But that, to me, isn't an argument over technology. That's an argument over the resulting impact it has on the monetary policy. Proof of work being free market and proof of stake being kind of a, a rebuilding of the system we have now, which can drive wealth inequality and centralizes power, centralizes the rewards from the system. Like, anyone can spin up a miner and start earning Bitcoin, but with proof of stake, you already have to be invested, and the, and, and the wealth is redistributed to the people who have the most money, and the power is. So for me, it definitely is a monetary revolution. There is technical aspects to it.

00:19:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm not, I'm not fighting the idea that it is a monetary revolution in particular.

00:19:21
Peter McCormack: Mm.

00:19:21
Eric Weinstein: What I'm really trying to say is the first way it strikes me is as a new technology.

00:19:27
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:19:28
Eric Weinstein: And the, the fact that money is part of the adoption scheme is weirdly, to me, part of the technology. I mean, I keep referring to Daniel Suarez's book, uh, Demon and Freedom, and those books talk about a guy, I think, who dies and more or less puts an entire world in motion after his death by using incentive structures and technology. And so in a weird way, you know, this is something that causes humans to adopt it by making them richer.

00:20:01
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:20:02
Eric Weinstein: And by getting humans who are curious and ha- are high in trait openness, if you did a Big Five personality inventory, maybe it requires less of it now, um, yes, that, that, that wealth-building ability is part of the tech. Now, the, the problem, and what makes it unique, is that if I disrupt the tech platform, I may disrupt the wealth, and that causes people to want to freeze it in. Now, we, we have analogs of this. There is, for example... I mean, the last line of the Torah, uh, says something about an, uh, there never came another that God knew like Moses. And if you think about Islam, there's this concept of bid'ah, or innovation, which is a bad thing. If you innovate after Muhammad, then you've taken this perfect interaction that Muhammad and God have had, and you've sullied it, you know? And so in a weird way, the idea is we've had our divine moment, uh, and don't, don't touch this thing. And, you know, that's not true at a, a certain level. There's lots of work being done on Bitcoin and around it, but there's another weird way in which, yeah, it is really true, don't touch this thing. And that comes from its monetary nature, not from its technological nature a- as a pure sort of digital technology, not, not the meta technology that includes money as its adoption process. Sorry.

00:21:34
Travis Kling: Well, well if you're competing against gold, we've been using gold to store value for 5,000 years. You know, the incumbent has this, like, stunning head start on you, and in order to convince increasingly more people to adopt this alternative store of value based on this technology that people don't really understand all that well, uh, you know, I think, um, uh, being slow to change, that's like a f- a feature, not a bug, right? And, uh, I- I'm always reminded of, uh... Peter, you've definitely seen the movie Snatch, right?

00:22:06
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

00:22:06
Travis Kling: You ever seen that movie-

00:22:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:22:07
Travis Kling: ... Snatch?

00:22:08
Peter McCormack: Guy Ritchie.

00:22:08
Travis Kling: Yeah. Anyways, one of my all-time favorite movies, and, uh, this Russian mobster, uh, sells this, uh, this gun to, uh, one of the main characters, and, uh, he hands it to him, and it's this, like, enormous old-looking revolver, and, uh, the guy goes, "Little heavy, isn't it?" And, uh, the Russian mobster goes, "Heavy is good. Heavy is reliable." And, like, in a lot of ways, that's how I think of, like, Bitcoin as it changes on the main chain. Like, it just needs to... If it's gonna compete against gold, people need to understand that it's gonna be the same. Uh, it's just really hard to change. Yeah.

00:22:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:22:44
Peter McCormack: And I th- and I think some of the competing cryptocurrencies, uh, they're making trade-offs which make it... which might sound like it's a better technology. M- Me and I get trolled all the time, get... I'm into the boomer coin. Bitcoin's the boomer coin. It's slow, blah, blah, blah. And what I don't think they understand is the, uh, the properties that make it the best form of money. So if you make block... You know, we went through the scaling wars. We had this war, you know, and Bitcoin won, and the reason it won is because the trade-offs aren't worth it. When you went for bigger blocks, you further centralize the project.

00:23:18
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:23:18
Peter McCormack: If you try and be faster, you further centralize the projects. So I'm not op- I'm not opposed. I think a lot of Bitcoiners wouldn't be opposed to if a better Bitcoin comes, but there just isn't.

00:23:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, but it's also less... Uh, actually, I don't really believe that. I really believe at some level that when you have your wealth bound up in this thing, you have multiple feelings about it, right? And one of the feelings is, "I want to get richer," right? And so if there w- if there was some opportunity to have a much better decentralized form of money and smart contracts and all this stuff, and it was gonna obliterate your wealth, you wouldn't be indifferent to it.

00:23:56
Peter McCormack: But you could put your money easily into that.

00:23:58
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

00:23:58
Peter McCormack: You know?

00:23:58
Eric Weinstein: But maybe you're slow to figure it out because you're a Bit- Bitcoin maximalist, and you spent the first four years of its life, whatever this new thing is, talking about it as shitcoin. Okay?

00:24:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:24:07
Eric Weinstein: What, what I'm trying to get at is let's cut the-

00:24:12
Peter McCormack: All right

00:24:12
Eric Weinstein: ... right? So, you know, the, the fact is we have an asset. It's making people richer.

00:24:16
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:24:16
Eric Weinstein: In a weird way they are both philosophical about it. They're also disingenuous about it. Then you have the people coming in from outside. They are both knowledgeable about things other than Bitcoin, and they're also posers. And they both want to change the world, and they both-

00:24:29
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:24:29
Eric Weinstein: ... want to rip people off, right? All of these things are going on. S- and, like, look, I want to have the conversation after all of the typical foreplay.

00:24:39
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:24:40
Eric Weinstein: Right? So all of the foreplay has to do about, "No, no, no, we don't really mean this, and we may appear this way, but we're actually trying to do something. And if you get to know it..." Uh, whatever. Doesn't matter. The more interesting thing to me is this technology and this new form of money is really interesting.

00:24:57
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:24:58
Eric Weinstein: And it's new, and it means something. And what I want to get to is, well, where are we really headed, and what does it do, and is this really a store of freedom? We talk about a store of value, but is this really an effective store of freedom? If the world's major governments decide that they can't stop the technology, but they can cause the penalties to be very high, just the way we do for counterfeiting-

00:25:22
Peter McCormack: Counterfeiting-

00:25:23
Eric Weinstein: Fiat currency

00:25:24
Peter McCormack: ... by, by, by the populace, not by the government-

00:25:29
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:25:29
Peter McCormack: ... because the government counterfeits.

00:25:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, the government prints.

00:25:32
Peter McCormack: It's counterfeiting.

00:25:35
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not. It's retaining a right to transfer wealth by printing fiat currency.

00:25:42
Peter McCormack: I, I think they're counterfeiting.

00:25:46
Eric Weinstein: They're counterfeiting.

00:25:47
Peter McCormack: I think the government counterfeits currency-

00:25:48
Eric Weinstein: What does that mean?

00:25:48
Peter McCormack: ... when they print it because it's no different to if I was to create a machine to print money. They-

00:25:53
Travis Kling: No, I m- no, I mean, the definition of counterfeiting is, like, you know, making fake money. And the government, part of its role is it gets to create real money.

00:26:01
Eric Weinstein: Government creates... Or if you like, j- just to riff off this, the government creates a fake reality, if that's what you want to call, uh-

00:26:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:26:08
Eric Weinstein: ... civics.

00:26:08
Peter McCormack: But they get to. They get, they get to print their way out of mistakes.

00:26:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. All right.

00:26:11
Peter McCormack: We don't.

00:26:11
Eric Weinstein: So now the idea is that you have civics is fake.

00:26:14
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:26:14
Eric Weinstein: Right? Okay. So we have a fake democracy. We have a fake military that deals out real death. I, I, I don't know where we're going with this. If you... In other words, I, I may be your ally in saying I can't stand the government's-

00:26:29
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:26:29
Eric Weinstein: ... right to print money and claim that it's engaging in stimulus or relief or, you know, lubricating the economy or who knows what, right? You're transferring wealth by making, by diluting. Okay?

00:26:41
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you j- I just consider it l- l- legalized counterfeiting.

00:26:44
Eric Weinstein: But you just said leg... You have to say legalized.

00:26:47
Peter McCormack: Yeah, like I'm just saying it's, it's the exact same map. Uh, if I could, if I could create perfect notes-

00:26:52
Eric Weinstein: Which we call tax theft.

00:26:54
Peter McCormack: Uh, I mean, listen, I think that's... There's certain people who are listening who want me to say that.

00:26:58
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. That's what I'm start, trying to say, which is-

00:27:00
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:27:00
Eric Weinstein: ... this is the problem I have with all of these conversations.

00:27:03
Peter McCormack: Hmm. I'm not an anarchist though.

00:27:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Whatever. But w- we get into these things where w- we just have these typical well-worn conversations about things like is, is printing money cou- counterfeiting? You, you know as well as I do that it is a kind... If you believe governments are legitimate, then they're retaining a right over their fiat currency to make more of it, diluting people in the process, right? So they're gonna devalue it with, through the mechanism of seigniorage.

00:27:34
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:27:34
Eric Weinstein: Now, we can say seigniorage, and we know we're not gonna get upset. But if you want to say counterfeiting, I'm gonna sit there and say, "Well, what's the dictionary definition?" If a government counterfeits in its own currency, I agree that if you start printing euros and you're the United States, then you've got a different issue. But does the United States have the right to print US dollars if it enforces its currency by violence? Yes. It calls counterfeiting what it does done by anyone who is not it.

00:27:59
Travis Kling: There we go. I like that. [laughs] I like that.

00:28:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:28:03
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but, uh, my point being is, is they g- they have the right to print their way out of their mistakes, and we don't.

00:28:09
Eric Weinstein: That's right.

00:28:10
Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, okay, if... Let's, let's do it a different way then. Shall we theorize the impact of the growth in Bitcoin? If it just continues to grow, what will the impact be? Rather than debate whether tax is theft and yada yada, theorize where it goes, then. What is the actual impact if-

00:28:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, at some point, crypto gets big enough that our governments who issue fiat currency are gonna want a do-over.

00:28:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:28:36
Eric Weinstein: And that scares the crap out of me because the, the number one ploy will be to say, "If we catch you transacting in this, we're gonna make your life hell, and we're not gonna catch all of you." Right? If you, if you decide that you're gonna print a dollar bill on your home printer, the odds that we're gonna catch you are very, very low. But we're gonna make the penalty very, very high so you don't start experimenting with this. All right, well, that's what you're gonna start to see is you're gonna start to see draconian penalties for doing things that are difficult to stop using crypto if we are not careful.

00:29:14
Travis Kling: What do you think the likelihood is of that outcome?

00:29:16
Eric Weinstein: Depends. I mean, there are a lot of ways that the Bitcoin story goes south in a very dangerous way, and one of-

00:29:24
Travis Kling: By s- by south, you mean, you mean, like, Bitcoin fails, or you mean, like, south like it gets so big that...

00:29:32
Eric Weinstein: We don't know. This is a novel object.

00:29:34
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:29:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:29:36
Eric Weinstein: And part of what makes it exciting is novelty. Now, when you hear many people talking about Bitcoin, they will talk about it as if its past will be its future. The most remarkable thing about Bitcoin by far is every day I check it, and it's not zero against the US dollar, and I think this thing is a miracle. And literally, I, I-

00:29:56
Travis Kling: Lindy, Lindy effect. People love that word in Bitcoin.

00:29:59
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

00:29:59
Travis Kling: Yeah. Just means it's been around.

00:30:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I can't tell you how impressed I am every day that it's not at zero. It's just one more day this thing, which the prize for taking this thing down is enormous. Effectively, it's offering a bounty, and it hasn't ... happen, you know, even after, like, the Mount Gox, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

00:30:22
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:30:23
Eric Weinstein: I- i- it has been very durable, and that's one of the reasons why it has a very stable following of people who are fanatical, because it ha- it... Everybody wants to take it down. I mean, you think George Soros wouldn't enjoy speculating against Bitcoin and m- making billions and showing up the community?

00:30:40
Peter McCormack: Shorter than, shorter than-

00:30:40
Travis Kling: He's actually been investing in the asset class. He's actually gone the other way, but-

00:30:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm just, I'm just-

00:30:44
Travis Kling: Sure. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah

00:30:45
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, it... How much fun to, to, to have all the Bitcoiners in your back pocket, uh, because you, you, you, you skin them alive, you know? Now, that world, um, in which Bitcoin continues to exist has to reconcile with s- off with the fact that Bitcoin hasn't been exposed to most things that can happen. Bitcoin has happened, uh, during a period of relative quiet in terms of the world's, let's say, military engagements. It has taken place in a period of relative technological stagnation. I don't know how Bitcoin behaves more generally or what happens when it gets close to its, you know, 21 million ceiling or, or anything. I don't know how it will continue to deal with its challenges. Now, it's got a l- you know, a large number of, of years where it hasn't fallen apart. But no, this is, this is a dangerous object to your point about gold. We know a lot more about gold. I mean-

00:31:48
Peter McCormack: Dangerous in what way, though? What, dangerous as a threat to government?

00:31:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, l- let's think about gold, the US dollar, and Bitcoin in the same terms.

00:31:57
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:31:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Gold comes not only from physics, but from violent physics. It doesn't just come from stars. It comes from, like, collisions and explosions of stars. It's very hard to make gold.

00:32:11
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:32:11
Eric Weinstein: Fiat comes from a printing press and the threat of violence. So we've got gold that comes from violent engagements of stars. We've got, uh, USD, which comes from the full, uh, faith and violence of the US government.

00:32:29
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:32:30
Eric Weinstein: And we have Bitcoin that comes from what?

00:32:34
Peter McCormack: Peaceful revolution. Come on. You're not reading it, Carter?

00:32:37
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, it comes from elliptic curves. It comes from math. And in a weird way, that shift, um, towards number theory, you know, it's t- to make sure that you have a form of money, that reveals a potential undoing. If there's a huge change in quantum computing or cryptography, or we come to understand that there's a backdoor, if we have, uh, some change, for example, in physics, maybe we can make gold atoms out of helium and hydrogen. I don't know. Um, y- you know, potentially you always have the problem of a central bank goes hyperinflationary and just runs the printing presses morning, noon, and night. All of these things have a problem because if you think about the traditional definition of money, um, you know, we have store of value and medium of exchange-

00:33:33
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:33:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and unit of account, all these things. It may be that there really isn't any good example of money.

00:33:39
Peter McCormack: Well, they're all relative to each other.

00:33:41
Eric Weinstein: Right. That's the point.

00:33:42
Peter McCormack: And depending on what you're measuring it on.

00:33:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, but the, but one of the issues is-

00:33:45
Peter McCormack: Yeah

00:33:46
Eric Weinstein: ... does the volatility of the exchange rate, if it's volatile enough, actually function as a threat to store of value? Even assuming there's no drift of the median exchange rate. You can-

00:34:00
Travis Kling: Well, it's, it's, it's only been volatile to the upside over any kind of, like, meaningful amount of time, right?

00:34:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, th- this is the point you have, that you have a long-term trend, and so you can de-trend it. You know, you can subtract off the trend and just say, um, you know, what is its propensity of the exchange rate? Can we remember it's not Bitcoin, it's, it's the exchange rate of Bitcoin-

00:34:22
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:34:23
Eric Weinstein: ... that has the volatility to it. So then you can ask, okay, well, how volatile is this asset on an annualized basis? It's pretty volatile. Now, that means that even if the, the middle point, however you want to define it, doesn't move that much, if I get in when it's, you know, very high, and then it mean reverts, and it goes way below, that is not gonna be a great store of value with, for me, based on my entry points and my exit points.

00:34:54
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:34:54
Eric Weinstein: And so in part, it, Bitcoin, its volatility is part of a threat to its use as money.

00:35:05
Travis Kling: Well, well, well-

00:35:06
Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah

00:35:06
Travis Kling: ... I, I don't think... You can't go from zero to, you know, gold's worth $10 trillion in aggregate. You can't go from zero to 10 trillion without volatility in the price.

00:35:15
Eric Weinstein: But imagine, for example, that with gold, uh... No. Imagine a new element, um, I don't know, pre- precium. Okay? So pre- uh, precium, uh, transacts where it can be $5 b- the exchange rate, uh, of, um, [sniffs] five and 5,000, and it doesn't drift relative to USD. Okay? Just imagine. But it, it really varies within that range, between five and 5,000. That's a tough store of value. Even if you believe in some sense that it, um, it doesn't drift, it means that where you enter and where you exit really make a difference.

00:36:03
Peter McCormack: But the market is pricing in a new global money, and as Travis said, you know, the... You can't go from zero to one, five, 10 trillion over 10 years, 12 years without some volatility.

00:36:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but again, do you want it to be volatile? Do you want i-i- in some sense, if I think about three different universes-

00:36:27
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:36:27
Eric Weinstein: ... I have the universe of, let's say, con- consumer prices, okay? I have the universe of fiat currencies, and I have the universe of crypto.

00:36:37
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:36:38
Eric Weinstein: What... So i-i- if those are three vertices of a triangle, then the edges of the triangle are all exchange rates. E-e- even the price-

00:36:48
Peter McCormack: Yep

00:36:48
Eric Weinstein: ... of a consumer good in f- fiat currency is really an exchange rate, right? How many pairs of tennis shoes? Okay. What should those legs look like if fiat currency is itself garbage? I mean-

00:37:04
Peter McCormack: Well, this, this is all relative again.

00:37:06
Eric Weinstein: I, I-

00:37:06
Travis Kling: No, pri- no, the, things are just gonna keep getting more expensive, right? Isn't that the answer?

00:37:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, so that wa- that was my point is that, uh, assume that the dollar, for example, has a property w- with respect to consumer prices, that it has low variation with respect to consumer prices, but it has a high propensity to be inflated away. Just assume that that's true for the moment.

00:37:28
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

00:37:28
Eric Weinstein: And then assume that Bitcoin had a low propensity to be inflated away but had extremely high volatility with both of the other objects because they both have low volatility relative to each other.

00:37:38
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:37:39
Eric Weinstein: So in some sense, you would have one o- one vertex being a better traditional store of value but subject to sky-high volatility, and you have the other thing being a better medium of exchange with respect to short-term fluctuation but being a very poor store of value over a long term. Okay.

00:38:00
Peter McCormack: But that, but that's how-

00:38:00
Travis Kling: Yeah, yeah. So, so this-

00:38:01
Peter McCormack: But that's how we use money, right?

00:38:02
Travis Kling: Yeah, so this is this view that, that gold is good at storing value over time but not space.

00:38:08
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:38:09
Travis Kling: And fiat currency is good at storing value over space but not time, and Bitcoin is superior at both 'cause it's instantly transferable anywhere in the world, really cheap, and it has the properties to store value very, very well. In, in Austrian economics terms, it's the hardest money in human history. And to your earlier point, the world hasn't actually ever had anything like it before. But there's, like, a qualitative framework around assessing potential stores of value that's been around for a long time, right? Gold, 5,000 years. Before gold, we're using salt, seashells, really big, heavy rocks. And there's a reason that, like, when gold came along, over time, humans decided collectively that gold was better at storing value than salt, and it's, it's like an Austrian economics framework, hard money versus soft, sound versus unsound, the six characteristics of money: durable, divisible, portable, uniform, accepted, scarce. And when you line salt up next to gold, gold's definitely the winner there. And then when you put Bitcoin up next to gold, you know, you can make a real credible claim that Bitcoin is superior in five out of six of those characteristics, and it's really just acceptability given that gold is, like, not really the foundation of the global financial system, but, like, kind of 'cause central banks hold a lot of it. Um, and, you know, Bitcoin's made pretty good headways in terms of acce- uh, acceptability versus a 5,000-year-old asset in 12 years.

00:39:41
Eric Weinstein: Great. I mean, it's something wildly new, super exciting.

00:39:44
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

00:39:45
Eric Weinstein: But what do you guys really wanna talk about? [laughs]

00:39:47
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:39:48
Eric Weinstein: No, seriously, because i- there's some level at which I don't wanna-

00:39:51
Peter McCormack: Well-

00:39:51
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait. Just one sec. I don't wanna talk about Austrian economics one more time, and I, I don't wanna talk about mediums of exchange and units of account one more time.

00:40:00
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:40:00
Eric Weinstein: And I don't wanna talk about central bankers one more time. You guys wanna talk about something.

00:40:05
Peter McCormack: Well, we talk about this stuff every week.

00:40:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:07
Peter McCormack: You know, you're a different, you know, a different voice. You have a lot of conversations with other people.

00:40:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:13
Peter McCormack: You meet a lot of people. I want y- I wanna know what, what you think. Where are the areas you wanna get into? What is interesting you in Bitcoin? Like, what are the topics where you're like... What is it making you think, you know, in terms of threats, opportunity? You're definitely interested. I know you see the threat of inflation, and I know you recommend Bitcoin.

00:40:30
Eric Weinstein: I see the threat of abundance. I hate abundance.

00:40:32
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

00:40:33
Eric Weinstein: Everybody in my world just goes crazy for abundance. They go to Burning Man one, one day a year or one week a year, and then they have these experiences, right? And they say, "Oh my God, it was so beautiful. Everybody was gifting. I w- I wish Burning Man could be 365 days a year." And it, there's a relationship at Burning Man between Black Rock City, right?

00:40:52
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:40:53
Eric Weinstein: ... and what they call, uh, the default world. Have you been?

00:40:59
Peter McCormack: I haven't.

00:40:59
Eric Weinstein: You haven't been?

00:40:59
Peter McCormack: I've heard good things.

00:41:00
Eric Weinstein: Okay. All right. So they, they say, "Welcome home. This is, this has always been your home," and you've left the default world, and the default world is fiat mediated, right? And so there's a weird way in which Bitcoin and Black Rock City are, like, real things. They're durable. They've been doing the Black Rock City for quite some time, since it was on Baker Beach. And there's a relationship between the old world, that is fiat currency or the default world, uh, and Bitcoin or, or Burning Man because B- Burning Man couldn't exist without the default world. You spend 51 weeks a year earning in the default world to blow it on one week at Burning Man, right? There's, all that treasure that gets trucked into the desert came from somewhere. And in a certain way, at some level, fiat currency is inextricably intertwined with, uh, Bitcoin and with crypto in a way that's uncomfortable because, of course, the Black Rock City folks want to do away with the default world. They want to live in, in Black Rock City.

00:42:06
Peter McCormack: Isn't that a barter economy when you're there?

00:42:08
Eric Weinstein: Pardon me?

00:42:08
Peter McCormack: Isn't it-

00:42:09
Eric Weinstein: There's n- there's no thing that looks like an economy once you're in Burning Man.

00:42:16
Peter McCormack: Isn't it, like, exchanging of things, though?

00:42:20
Eric Weinstein: You gift things.

00:42:21
Peter McCormack: You gift things.

00:42:21
Eric Weinstein: You don't expect-

00:42:23
Peter McCormack: There's a-

00:42:24
Travis Kling: Sorry, I, I lost the comparison to Bitcoin in, through that.

00:42:27
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that you have- Worlds that feel free of the old, but they're actually inextricably connected.

00:42:35
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:42:36
Eric Weinstein: See, for... When, when people are, have their wealth in Bitcoin, and then you see them clutching their heads in pain as some were doing recently, um-

00:42:44
Peter McCormack: I don't know. Some of us were laughing

00:42:46
Eric Weinstein: ... some people were talking about why doesn't, uh, why don't some of the people who have mediated this crash understand the toll, uh, in human lives. I just put, you know, everything I had into this asset, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:57
Peter McCormack: Well, they're an idiot.

00:42:58
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Oh, should we tell them that?

00:43:00
Peter McCormack: Well, I think I just did.

00:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:43:02
Peter McCormack: [laughs] I mean, look, there's, th- there was two kinds of reactions to what happened over the week, that week. There were the Bitcoiners who just laughed, and there's the shitcoiners who are in Bitcoin who were devastated.

00:43:12
Eric Weinstein: No, the Bitcoiners didn't just laugh.

00:43:14
Peter McCormack: A lot of the ones I know did.

00:43:15
Eric Weinstein: That's not what you- you-

00:43:16
Peter McCormack: Travis didn't, 'cause he's a, you know-

00:43:19
Eric Weinstein: No

00:43:19
Peter McCormack: ... he's a trader

00:43:19
Eric Weinstein: ... a lot of people didn't laugh.

00:43:22
Peter McCormack: A lot of people did laugh, though.

00:43:24
Eric Weinstein: A lot of people laughed, and a lot of people didn't laugh.

00:43:28
Peter McCormack: Should we talk about the ones who did first?

00:43:30
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:43:30
Peter McCormack: And talk about why they did.

00:43:32
Eric Weinstein: We should do that, but a- again, I, I'm put in mind the fact that you asked a question, which is y- what is the relationship of BlackRock, Citi, and Bitcoin, and m- my comment was is that there's an uncomfortable relationship to the outside world that you're trying to disintermediate, and the fact that you are dependent in some sense on that outside world.

00:43:56
Travis Kling: Big time. Yeah, yeah.

00:43:58
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so the... my claim-

00:43:59
Peter McCormack: Mm

00:44:00
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and which was supposed to be uncomfortable, but, you know, hey, may- maybe Bitcoiners are all just geniuses and the rest of us are all fucking idiots, um, is that it wasn't universally seen as fun.

00:44:13
Travis Kling: Of course not. Yeah.

00:44:14
Eric Weinstein: Right. It, it just wasn't, and, and it bothers me that we're gonna retcon this and say, "Oh, yeah, real Bitcoiners didn't even bother. They didn't even notice."

00:44:22
Peter McCormack: Didn't flinch.

00:44:22
Eric Weinstein: They didn't even... They-

00:44:23
Travis Kling: No, no, no.

00:44:24
Eric Weinstein: They didn't flinch.

00:44:24
Travis Kling: That wasn't the point.

00:44:24
Peter McCormack: Look, I'm being s- I, I... No, I'm being slightly facetious, but the point I'm trying to make is, is the overall narrative of what happened over the week, right? Um, you know, Bitcoin's had a great year. Um, but Bitcoin, as we said, it, it's, it's meant to be decentralized, and decentralization isn't just the decentralize of the tech. It's a decentralization of the power. If you look at the, how the, uh, process works for doing upgrades to Bitcoin-

00:44:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:44:50
Peter McCormack: ... the BIP process, the review process, the social consensus that's reached, the s- the, the, the test, the building of the code, the testing of the g- code, the deployment, the signaling for the code. That, you know, that is a beautifully designed, decentralized process to ensure it's hard to change, and when changes come, they're necessary, and they're big and important upgrades to the system. What we had was a centralization of power and influence over narrative and market prices, which came essentially a lot from Elon Musk, um, who's been kind of, uh, schizophrenically changing his opinions on Bitcoin, and that, that... A lot of Bitcoiners don't like that because it's too much power and, a- and, and concentration.

00:45:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, who gave him this power?

00:45:36
Peter McCormack: Well, [scoffs] he, he, he took it.

00:45:38
Travis Kling: He took, he took it.

00:45:39
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:45:39
Travis Kling: He took it.

00:45:39
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, it's-

00:45:40
Travis Kling: He bought, he bought a billion and a half dollars

00:45:41
Peter McCormack: ... but, but, well, actually-

00:45:41
Eric Weinstein: That may be, but the, the-

00:45:42
Peter McCormack: No, in fairness, Travis, we also gave it to him 'cause, I mean, uh, hi- hi... you know, myself, I was, like, celebrating. This is amazing. Tesla are involved. This is gonna be great 'cause other companies are gonna think about it. I now reflect on that as, okay, you know, we go through learning journeys with anything, you know? But we... I reflect on it and go, "Actually, that was wrong," because there was too much p- p- p- power in the hands of somebody who's highly influential, also erratic, um, and he can influence the narrative, which, well, happened. And he's also got all other weird incentive structures going on with his business and carbon credits. Like, and th- and that's why it was kind of like, actually, this would be better if he went. There's, like, the meme that came out. It, it was like this car on a road. Did you see it? It's like the car can go two ways, and the sign says, uh, uh, "Number go up or tell a billionaire to fuck off," and the car's going that way. And the point being is Bitcoiners will tell him to fuck off. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or Travis, Pete, Eric, whoever. We don't want concentration of power.

00:46:40
Eric Weinstein: But you partially got into trouble because you forgot your own culture.

00:46:44
Peter McCormack: How do you mean?

00:46:46
Eric Weinstein: Super sexy man with rockets.

00:46:48
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:46:48
Eric Weinstein: Smartest man on Earth, et cetera, et cetera. Coolest dude ever embraces Bitcoin.

00:46:54
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:46:54
Eric Weinstein: It's like, oh, you see? See, Mom?

00:46:57
Peter McCormack: Yeah, no.

00:46:57
Eric Weinstein: I told you this was gonna be something.

00:46:59
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:46:59
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:46:59
Peter McCormack: We all got excited.

00:47:00
Travis Kling: Big time.

00:47:00
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:47:01
Travis Kling: Yeah. It, it, it's a weird balance of, of, of antifragility, which, you know, I think a lot of Bitcoiners would argue is, is one of Bitcoin's great- greatest properties, where you, you have periods of time where a single individual or, or a group or an organization moves into a position where they can have an outsized influence on, you know, price or potentially the direction of the project, like let's say in the, in the block debate in 2017, and, you know, I think the Bit- Bitcoiners have this long, storied history of these back and forths towards, like, well, we appreciate that somebody is shining a light on why this is important, but at the same time, deeply, uh, understanding that decentralization is, uh, is one of the most critical components.

00:47:55
Eric Weinstein: You don't have a long, storied history. You just don't. I mean, sorry.

00:47:59
Travis Kling: Yeah, yeah.

00:47:59
Eric Weinstein: You know, I'm 55 years old, and if, if I know somebody for the length of time that, that Bitcoin has been on Earth, I don't consider them an old friend.

00:48:06
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:48:07
Peter McCormack: Okay.

00:48:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:48:07
Peter McCormack: That's a fair point.

00:48:08
Travis Kling: It's a great point.

00:48:09
Eric Weinstein: So next point. Um, yeah, when you guys were going through your loving Elon phase because Elon smiled and that gave legitimacy-

00:48:19
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: ... it spoke to me about things we don't like to talk about, which is I've taken so much shit for holding this asset that's made me rich. It feels wonderful.

00:48:28
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was validation.

00:48:28
Eric Weinstein: It's some... I understand that, but that broke your rule Right? We don't trust, we validate.

00:48:38
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:48:39
Eric Weinstein: Who did the validation? Some outside force. You allowed you-

00:48:46
Peter McCormack: Not me [laughs]

00:48:46
Eric Weinstein: ... on average, the community, which isn't a community. You don't understand. Nobody speaks to-

00:48:51
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:48:51
Eric Weinstein: Blah, blah, blah.

00:48:52
Peter McCormack: It is a community.

00:48:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Allowed yourselves to get suckered-

00:48:57
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

00:48:58
Eric Weinstein: ... by validation. Now, one of the things I will say in my own defense, because I'm the only one defending me here, right, is-

00:49:04
Peter McCormack: You did as well.

00:49:05
Travis Kling: We love you, by the way.

00:49:05
Eric Weinstein: I-

00:49:05
Travis Kling: You know that, right?

00:49:06
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:49:06
Travis Kling: I mean-

00:49:07
Eric Weinstein: I've been super excited

00:49:08
Travis Kling: ... just love your ass. [laughs]

00:49:09
Eric Weinstein: I've been super excited to do this, and we are natural allies, and this will all work out-

00:49:13
Travis Kling: Yeah

00:49:13
Eric Weinstein: ... in the end. However-

00:49:13
Peter McCormack: But you watch your step. If you, if you, if you put a foot wrong, we'll fucking come after you.

00:49:17
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:49:19
Travis Kling: [laughs]

00:49:19
Eric Weinstein: Which is why I'm introducing Eric Coyne.

00:49:21
Peter McCormack: Yeah. [laughs]

00:49:21
Travis Kling: [laughs]

00:49:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, um. What, what I was gonna say is, is that I didn't allow you guys to push me off Bitcoin when you were being dicks, and I'm not gonna abandon Bitcoin because its number goes down.

00:49:34
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:49:34
Eric Weinstein: And so fr- from my perspective, I'm just looking at this laughing, no offense-

00:49:38
Peter McCormack: Mm

00:49:39
Eric Weinstein: ... which is I got your stuff better than you did.

00:49:42
Peter McCormack: Well-

00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: Which is don't suck up [laughs] to the billionaire.

00:49:48
Peter McCormack: Well, we can't be absolute about this. Uh, there were plenty of people when Elon came in, plenty of... You know, you've heard of the plebs. Plenty of those were like, "Not sure, not sure." And do you know what? And I think it's made everyone a bit cautious now. Even, I, I would say since this episode, even Michael Saylor is now being watched with a different eye. And like I, I don't mind saying that. I was saying it to h- him. You know, I think there is that n- kind of nervousness now. And, and I also think one of the things with the Elon thing is like he's getting a lot of pressure. Uh, I think it's, the reason he's getting a lot, a lot of pressure because we're test- he's being tested now. Like you're either in properly or, or it's like-

00:50:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, what he did was just wrong.

00:50:25
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

00:50:25
Eric Weinstein: And it was wrong at multiple levels.

00:50:27
Peter McCormack: Well, what do you think he did wrong? 'Cause I, I've got two things.

00:50:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, one thing I did th- uh, did wrong is that he explains why he's backing away from this based on information that he had when he was backing into it.

00:50:37
Peter McCormack: Mm.

00:50:37
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:50:38
Eric Weinstein: So-

00:50:38
Travis Kling: Huge question around all this

00:50:39
Eric Weinstein: ... so you know, my feeling is, come on. Cut the crap. What's really-

00:50:42
Peter McCormack: What do you think happened?

00:50:43
Eric Weinstein: Who cares? I mean, here's, here's, here's my problem.

00:50:45
Peter McCormack: Mm.

00:50:47
Eric Weinstein: I don't think Elon is really central to the Bitcoin story. I just don't.

00:50:52
Travis Kling: Agreed.

00:50:52
Peter McCormack: Agreed.

00:50:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I think that what he-

00:50:54
Peter McCormack: You think he needs pushing away from it

00:50:55
Eric Weinstein: ... what he... No.

00:50:56
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:50:58
Eric Weinstein: I think that the key thing is you gotta free your mind of Elon, right? You have to appreciate Elon for all the wonderful things that he is.

00:51:05
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:51:05
Eric Weinstein: And you have to recognize that it's counterbalanced by all the things that he is that you wish he wasn't, right?

00:51:11
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:51:11
Eric Weinstein: And in so doing, he is like the rest of us, right? Now, what I get is is that Bitcoin is bigger than any particular person. It doesn't really belong. It's a decentralized... Okay, that's its ethos. Within that ethos, um, I think Elon is a guy working out his own problems from being too famous and under too much scrutiny.

00:51:37
Travis Kling: Mm.

00:51:37
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:51:37
Eric Weinstein: And so he likes to say-

00:51:39
Peter McCormack: He must, yeah

00:51:39
Eric Weinstein: ... random stuff. He likes to... You know, his comment that the world takes the path that is maximally entertaining, right? It's, it's pure chaotic neutral, right? [laughs]

00:51:50
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:51:50
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:51:50
Eric Weinstein: On some level.

00:51:51
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:51:51
Eric Weinstein: Um, and so in a weird way, he's not your hero. He's not your villain. I- I- I don't think he's done with Bitcoin. My, my sense of it is that he's gonna come back into the Bitcoin universe. He... What happened with Tesla being forward-thinking enough to accept Bitcoin immediately resulted in Tesla not being forward enough to accept Bitcoin because it wasn't ready, and in so doing-

00:52:16
Peter McCormack: It wasn't ready?

00:52:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:52:18
Peter McCormack: What do you mean it wasn't ready?

00:52:20
Eric Weinstein: My belief is, is that there's a reason that so few large ticket items advertise that they are purchasable simply in Bitcoin for a reason. You're talking about something with volatility properties that if it comes in contact with the normal financial universe are going to lead to enormous swings. If you hold a lot of Bitcoin on your balance sheet, you've got a situation if, if, if you're going to be priced in a numeraire like USD.

00:52:50
Travis Kling: It's complete-

00:52:51
Peter McCormack: That's the... Yeah.

00:52:51
Travis Kling: It's completely conjecture on, on my part, but I would guess that Tesla sold about 40 Teslas for Bitcoin. Like it just-

00:52:58
Eric Weinstein: Who knows?

00:52:58
Travis Kling: Uh, you know, uh, it, it's a guess, but there's, uh, uh, Gresham's law. I mean, um, bad money drives out good. You, you spend the money that's not very good at being money, and you hoard the money that's good at being money.

00:53:13
Eric Weinstein: I'm just-

00:53:14
Travis Kling: And-

00:53:14
Eric Weinstein: I'm trying to get the idea that when you're first out of the blocks to try to do something big like this, you find out all the reasons why nobody else has done it.

00:53:24
Travis Kling: Right.

00:53:24
Eric Weinstein: Right? [laughs] So, you know, you announce something. You, you get all the plaudits, and people say, "Wow, great job," and then you actually have to manage the situation. And so I remember thinking, and, and maybe this wasn't a very elevated thought, I wonder how long that's gonna last.

00:53:40
Travis Kling: Mm.

00:53:40
Peter McCormack: Mm.

00:53:41
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:53:41
Travis Kling: It, it... Accepting Bitcoin for payment for Teslas, uh, plus buying $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin on a publicly traded company's balance sheet, if you're gonna... Uh, that's about 1%, uh, impactful accepting Bitcoin and 99% impactful that he put it on his balance sheet.

00:54:01
Eric Weinstein: Yes, but my feeling is it was all coming from something that wasn't very well thought out.

00:54:07
Travis Kling: Mm.

00:54:07
Eric Weinstein: And that my, my point wasn't about which is the more, which has more impact. Um, my, my thought was, maybe it's just dumb, but I heard Tesla's accepting Bitcoin, and I thought, "So cool." That was my first reaction.

00:54:23
Travis Kling: Mm.

00:54:23
Eric Weinstein: My second question was, I wonder how long that's gonna last?

00:54:25
Travis Kling: Mm.

00:54:26
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the 180 with a press release based on energy uses and then energy use becoming the narrative-

00:54:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but maybe the idea is that what re- he really thought about was- ... that he'd spent so much time on a green narrative with a car company, he hadn't figured out how... Like, maybe he had rejected the idea that Bitcoin wasn't green enough, and then he found that that was gonna be too diffi- who knows?

00:54:52
Peter McCormack: Who knows.

00:54:52
Eric Weinstein: But again-

00:54:53
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah. Could be tough

00:54:53
Eric Weinstein: ... my, my question is, I really wanna talk to Elon about interplanetary stuff and physics.

00:55:00
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:55:01
Eric Weinstein: I'm not that interested in talking to Elon about crypto unless he's going to do something huge using his wealth or his brain. But it just... Again, I get back to the s- I'm somewhat bored of the standard conversations we can have around this. Like, what is it that you guys wanna do that's next level and awesome? And that's a great... I, I feel like the Bitcoin community is one of the best [laughs] communities to take on the future.

00:55:37
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:55:37
Eric Weinstein: And I'm much more interested about what a bunch of pirates wanna do. I, I've got a, a huge number of rich, idealistic pirates.

00:55:47
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

00:55:49
Eric Weinstein: That should be the most riveting thing. That's one of the reasons that I was dying to do your show when you asked me. We've got rich, smart, heterodox, idealistic, iconoclastic pirates.

00:56:01
Peter McCormack: Yep.

00:56:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay, what are we doing? [laughs]

00:56:03
Peter McCormack: We, we're gonna build a country.

00:56:05
Eric Weinstein: Are we?

00:56:06
Peter McCormack: Maybe.

00:56:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:56:07
Peter McCormack: If we find the right island.

00:56:08
Eric Weinstein: We start with money.

00:56:09
Peter McCormack: We got e-

00:56:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:56:09
Peter McCormack: ... we got enough of it.

00:56:11
Travis Kling: Th- th- there is this turn of phrase of like, uh, you know, save the money, save the world. Fix, fix the money, fix the world.

00:56:16
Eric Weinstein: I understand that.

00:56:17
Travis Kling: And I think that-

00:56:18
Eric Weinstein: So right now I have things I want to fix right now.

00:56:21
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:56:21
Peter McCormack: What do you want to fix? I'll tell you how Bitcoin fixes it.

00:56:23
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:56:24
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

00:56:27
Eric Weinstein: Right, my relationship with my second cousin. Bit- Bitcoin fixes everything.

00:56:30
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:56:30
Eric Weinstein: Um, okay. What, what really is going on for me is sense making.

00:56:37
Peter McCormack: It's the, the interesting thing-

00:56:38
Travis Kling: What do you mean? Sorry, what do you mean by that?

00:56:39
Eric Weinstein: We used to have newspapers. We used to have universities. We used to have scholars.

00:56:44
Peter McCormack: But we're turning everything on its head right now.

00:56:46
Eric Weinstein: You, Bitcoin, or we the humans?

00:56:47
Peter McCormack: No, everyone. Everybody is.

00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:56:49
Peter McCormack: Like, everybody's questioning everything, questioning the media, questioning education, you know, questioning politics, ques- you know. Everything is being re-thought out right now.

00:56:59
Eric Weinstein: Except for things like honey badgers which just don't care. Right?

00:57:02
Peter McCormack: I-

00:57:02
Eric Weinstein: And Bitcoin is supposed to be like a honey badger.

00:57:04
Peter McCormack: I think they, I think they care first. I think-

00:57:07
Eric Weinstein: You think honey badgers care the most?

00:57:08
Peter McCormack: Well, no, no, just about certain things. It's like they're the first ones, they were the first ones that I saw, you know, who were re- Th- they, they were, they were trashing the media, they were trashing polit- they trash everything. Basically, they don't trust Verifii. They don't trust vaccines. Yeah, not everyone.

00:57:25
Eric Weinstein: Who? Who?

00:57:25
Peter McCormack: It's a spectrum.

00:57:26
Eric Weinstein: Who's they?

00:57:27
Travis Kling: Bitcoiners generally.

00:57:28
Peter McCormack: Bitcoiners generally, and it's a spectrum, you know. Certainly more on the right or, or right-leaning or libertarian. There are some on the left, but they keep quiet because they get attacked for being socialist.

00:57:39
Travis Kling: [laughs]

00:57:40
Peter McCormack: Um, but, but certainly they, they see that you have to change the money to fix a lot of these problems. You can, you can... The root of a lot of these problems is the money, the cheap credit.

00:57:55
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:57:55
Peter McCormack: You fix that money, you fix a lot of these problems. I mean, you've talked about it a lot, about the degradation of society.

00:58:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:58:01
Peter McCormack: You know, the, the-

00:58:02
Eric Weinstein: Embedded growth obligation. I'm all over this action. We are supposed to be natural allies.

00:58:06
Travis Kling: Yeah. I agree with that.

00:58:07
Eric Weinstein: It's just that the idea is that I'm supposed to put laser eyes in my f- in my profile photo.

00:58:12
Travis Kling: Yeah.

00:58:12
Eric Weinstein: And I'm supposed to say I'm a maximalist now as if I've touched a pot or I'm some s- kind of a Stepford wife. F that.

00:58:18
Travis Kling: No, nobody's asking you to do that.

00:58:19
Eric Weinstein: But, but no, no.

00:58:20
Peter McCormack: Have you got laser eyes, Travis?

00:58:22
Travis Kling: I took mine off when we hit an all-time high.

00:58:24
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I took mine off.

00:58:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:58:25
Travis Kling: [laughs]

00:58:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, whatever, it doesn't matter.

00:58:26
Travis Kling: No, no, I, no, no, I hear you.

00:58:27
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

00:58:28
Travis Kling: I- I- if, if I was gonna try and attempt to, to, to bridge a lot of the things that I've heard you talk about, um, in various different capacities, I, I would bring up this concept called the trust revolution-

00:58:39
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:58:39
Travis Kling: ... that, that I've talked about for a while, and it, it, and it's, um, something that initially attracted me to this asset class and this technology in 2017 when I was first going down the rabbit hole, and it's actually stunning how much it's been exacerbated since then. But we have seen unchecked power failing society at multiple levels, and that is getting worse, not better, and society is recoiling from that to an increasing degree, and younger generations feel this more acutely than older generations. I, I think Millennials and Gen Z are generations that think Wall Street is rigged, politicians are crooked, and big tech takes your data and they do shitty stuff with it, or they don't keep it safe, or they use it to make themselves the richest people in the world and they, they don't return that value back. And-

00:59:39
Eric Weinstein: Yep

00:59:40
Travis Kling: ... there's, there's commonalities across a- and, and y- you can ask the question, like, when did this start? And, and I think you could make the case that it started when in 2001 on the back of 9/11 when we went over into the Middle East and tens of thousands of lives were lost on the American side and many more on the other side, $10 trillion were spent, and what we went over there for in the first place never ended up happening, and there was a question about why that happened. And then it was exacerbated in 2008 on the back of the financial crisis when you damn near blew the whole world up. Nobody went to jail. Everybody, the bankers were all fine. And, and, and, and then you fast-forward to, uh, Brexit and Donald Trump, and why did those two things happen on the other side of the world within a handful of months of one another but with, like, th- sort of like the exact same underlying drivers? And then you just had hit after hit, NSA spying-

01:00:39
Eric Weinstein: Black Lives Matter, uh, the Me Too movement, um-

01:00:43
Peter McCormack: It's all coming apart

01:00:44
Eric Weinstein: ... Harvey Wein- Like, yeah, all of these things. And, and society is recoiling from-

01:00:50
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but we're not built-

01:00:50
Eric Weinstein: You know, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

01:00:53
Peter McCormack: Right. That's right.

01:00:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:00:54
Peter McCormack: And the question is, what... Decentralized power, what does that do?

01:00:58
Eric Weinstein: So, so I, I think distributed-

01:00:59
Peter McCormack: We don't know

01:01:00
Eric Weinstein: ... oh, I, I think distributed ledger technology can serve as the technological platform to drive societal change for the good in that it can start to dismantle, um, these centralized powers that are failing the people. And money's a great place to start with that, and it, and it obviously dovetails into the way our political system is in the United States right now, which is, I mean, I think as broken as it's been since, I don't know, maybe the Civil War. I don't know.

01:01:31
Peter McCormack: Well, you know, because you and Brett tried to make an attempt on it, and you became censored.

01:01:36
Eric Weinstein: [lip smacks] Yeah, well, I d- I didn't believe Brett's attempt would work, but I was willing to throw my, my name behind him because it shows why we can't have nice things. [laughs]

01:01:51
Peter McCormack: Well, the most interesting thing about that was the censoring of it.

01:01:54
Eric Weinstein: Exactly, right.

01:01:55
Peter McCormack: Like, like what?

01:01:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, that was the whole point is is that as soon as you have something that's completely non-threatening, like bipartisanship should be threatening to no one, of course it has to be censored because that's what's really threatening, right? [laughs] So if you had stable money, and you had bipartisanship, and you had a green world that was much less dependent on fossil fuels, uh, what would power do, right? I mean, it would just spy on you, on, on your relationships with your ex-boyfriend on Facebook. I, I don't know what, what it would do. So we, we have a situation whereby, um, you know, real power, which is very hard to locate-

01:02:33
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:02:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and find out who's behind it, [laughs] um, has, I think been getting... well, has been decreasing, but everybody else's power has been decreasing at an accelerated rate to that. So I believe that our, our central shadowy powers, uh, still exist, but they aren't that powerful. What's happened is is everyone else has gotten incredibly weakened.

01:02:56
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:02:57
Eric Weinstein: And Bitcoin is one of the few things as a community that's gotten stronger. And so the really interesting question is, okay, well, what do you guys wanna do? You know, is, is just, just hang on for dear life and buy a Lambo at some point? Is that, is that what we're doing, or are we, are we, are we taking on nation states? What, what's the plan here? There is no plan.

01:03:20
Peter McCormack: It's not binary.

01:03:20
Eric Weinstein: We don't need a plan.

01:03:22
Peter McCormack: It's not binary.

01:03:23
Eric Weinstein: What?

01:03:23
Peter McCormack: It's not binary. We can get Lambos and take them on. [laughs]

01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, but you're, but you're taking them on less.

01:03:30
Peter McCormack: I-

01:03:30
Eric Weinstein: Like, I, I'm really excited... I mean, you have to appreciate-

01:03:33
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:03:33
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm really excited about not dying, right? Not dying is one of the things that excites me the most.

01:03:39
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:03:39
Eric Weinstein: And, um-

01:03:41
Peter McCormack: Are you getting cryogenically frozen?

01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Not that kind of not dying.

01:03:45
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:03:46
Eric Weinstein: You have kids?

01:03:47
Peter McCormack: I have two.

01:03:47
Eric Weinstein: All right. That kind of not dying.

01:03:49
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:03:50
Eric Weinstein: Right? So my, my feeling is I, my, I want my lineage not to have a death sentence, and being trapped on a thermonuclear planet with lunatics, uh, with fingers on the button is not my idea of a good time.

01:04:01
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:04:02
Eric Weinstein: So I want out of that, and most determinedly, I want off this planet.

01:04:09
Peter McCormack: So you want to go to Mars?

01:04:10
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:04:11
Peter McCormack: Where do you want to go?

01:04:12
Eric Weinstein: Um, Mars and the Moon are starter planets.

01:04:17
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:04:17
Eric Weinstein: But there are only two of them.

01:04:18
Peter McCormack: Is, is Elon gonna give you a seat?

01:04:20
Eric Weinstein: No, he's not gonna give me... I don't know Elon.

01:04:22
Peter McCormack: Oh, I thought you might be able to apologize to him for me because I-

01:04:25
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:04:26
Peter McCormack: ... I kind of need a seat.

01:04:26
Eric Weinstein: He's giving me your seat. [laughs]

01:04:27
Peter McCormack: He's giving me my seat. [laughs] Fucker.

01:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Um, no, I mean, I think what we need to do is focus on physics.

01:04:33
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:04:34
Eric Weinstein: And I keep saying to you guys, "Okay, you're getting so rich. Number go up. When are we doing physics? When are we, when are we actually going to invest in the ability to escape this planet?"

01:04:45
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

01:04:46
Eric Weinstein: Now, again, that's my pet thing, which is that I want hu-

01:04:48
Peter McCormack: That's your-

01:04:49
Eric Weinstein: ... I want humans to survive.

01:04:50
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Okay. That's not my pet thing.

01:04:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You don't care.

01:04:55
Peter McCormack: Yeah. No, no, I do, but I just think it's not gonna happen in my lifetime, probably not happen in my kids' lifetime. It's not my focus of attention. My focus of attention is-

01:05:03
Eric Weinstein: You are aware that there are UFOs.

01:05:06
Peter McCormack: Yeah. This is a good timing, isn't it?

01:05:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I think you should rescale-

01:05:09
Peter McCormack: Are you-

01:05:10
Eric Weinstein: ... your time horizons.

01:05:10
Peter McCormack: Are you a, are you a UFO?

01:05:13
Eric Weinstein: Everyone is.

01:05:13
Peter McCormack: You are. Well, look, I, I just-

01:05:15
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. Are, are you not?

01:05:17
Peter McCormack: I just don't know. I'm just not sure.

01:05:20
Eric Weinstein: Oh, you should verify.

01:05:22
Peter McCormack: [laughs]

01:05:22
Eric Weinstein: Don't trust me.

01:05:23
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look, look, but I, I... You know, I'm in more simple terms. I'm not a, uh, I'm a bit of a moron really, and I don't have a university degree, and, and I, I... all I can think about are the things that are close to me, which is me-

01:05:35
Eric Weinstein: So you are bragging-

01:05:36
Peter McCormack: ... my kids, and my family

01:05:36
Eric Weinstein: ... that you weren't dumb enough to invest in a university degree, and you're doing it through false humility.

01:05:40
Peter McCormack: No, I'm a dropout. I'm a university dropout.

01:05:42
Eric Weinstein: Peter, you're really pissing me off with your arrogance at this time. [laughs]

01:05:43
Peter McCormack: I'm a university dropout. I am actually a university dropout, and I'm, uh, I'm g- I have to br- when I get a smart person, I have to bring someone smart like Travis to help me. Listen, look-

01:05:53
Eric Weinstein: [snores]

01:05:53
Peter McCormack: ... I have to think, I have to think close to me and what's important to me.

01:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:05:57
Peter McCormack: And the things that are close important to me is me and my family. What, what's gonna happen to the UK over the next 10, 20 years? Is it, is it gonna, you know, see a similar... well, it is seeing a similar societal breakdown as the US happened. Um, where do I wanna live? Where do I wanna be? What's gonna give me freedom? I s- I actually start from a very selfish point. What is best for me and best for my family? Where, where should I live? Actually quite, quite like the look of Texas at the moment though. But the, by the by, and then what can I do to help others? Um, and I think in terms of this, in terms of what we do with Bitcoin, it's just trying to drive some form of choice and financial freedom, some kind of separation from this system which is unfair. Like my prod- my producer, you know the website WTF71, because you like it. My producer Ben worked on that. Uh, um- You know, I, I know that m- what we've seen is, like, a lot of my friends would be traditionally m- middle class now don't really have much disposable income at the end of each month.

01:07:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, no kidding.

01:07:00
Peter McCormack: And we're seeing-- So, so I see Bitcoin as a chance to-

01:07:04
Eric Weinstein: So is it a revolution? Is it a financial revolution?

01:07:06
Peter McCormack: It's definitely a monetary revolution.

01:07:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:07:09
Peter McCormack: But I don't f- like, I don't understand how it's gonna play out because I-- you know, we're building something new here. You know, it's, it's a form of money we've never had before, completely decentralized, completely digital. We're trying to decentralize power. I mean, we talked about what happened with Elon earlier. It go, it goes through-- we go through learning lessons. You know, 2017 was a scaling wall. We learnt that forks aren't popular. We learnt that big blocks don't work. This, this year we've learned that billionaire power isn't good. You know, we keep going through these episodes.

01:07:39
Eric Weinstein: Oh, but you knew that.

01:07:39
Peter McCormack: No, I didn't. I think-

01:07:40
Eric Weinstein: Yes, you did.

01:07:41
Peter McCormack: I, I-- Well, maybe if I'd thought about it through.

01:07:43
Eric Weinstein: You guys made an exception.

01:07:44
Peter McCormack: If I'd rationalized it maybe I had.

01:07:45
Eric Weinstein: No, you made an exception for a particular billionaire because the particular billionaire showed up with the cachet of cool.

01:07:51
Peter McCormack: Well, strictly speaking then, we've made the same for Michael Saylor, so we've made it for two billionaires, and Jack Dorsey, a third billionaire. So we've actually-- It's not just-- We've made it for all billionaires.

01:07:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's say it, uh, it's not really about billionaires. It's about acceptance.

01:08:04
Peter McCormack: Hmm. Yeah, and the validation and the, yeah.

01:08:06
Eric Weinstein: And validation.

01:08:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Yeah.

01:08:09
Eric Weinstein: And I w- and I wish in s-- Look, in part, I'm looking for confidence, right? The confidence of the community. And we talked about the toxicity-

01:08:20
Peter McCormack: Oh, they're confident.

01:08:22
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, they're not.

01:08:24
Travis Kling: I mean, you could wheel some maximalist out here-

01:08:26
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:08:26
Travis Kling: ... that would give you a line that would-- there'd be zero doubt.

01:08:29
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:08:29
Eric Weinstein: I'm not talking about absolutism, right? Totalizing behavior is one of the downfalls of the system. I mean, if, if, if, if we brought somebody out who was completely convinced of Salafist Islam, you know, would they be confident? I mean, they might be willing to blow themselves up, uh, you know, to show, to show their confidence that, uh, they're-- they had an eternal reward taking out people who are threats, you know, to Islam. I don't know.

01:08:57
Peter McCormack: What do you mean by confidence then?

01:09:00
Travis Kling: Yeah, I don't think I know the difference-

01:09:01
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:09:01
Travis Kling: ... between confidence and conviction.

01:09:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, confidence, um, I think at some point you're looking for a quieter, kind of more deliberative phase of this, of this project. Like the, the initial phase is, uh, I, I-

01:09:18
Peter McCormack: Initial phase is survival.

01:09:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, yes. You say, "I'm worried about my family. I'm worried about the UK," right?

01:09:23
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:09:23
Eric Weinstein: So we s-- The first thing we saw was you're worried about you, and you're worried about your family, which is you extended.

01:09:29
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:09:30
Eric Weinstein: Then we were worried about UK, which is your country.

01:09:32
Peter McCormack: And my friends. Put them in there, yeah.

01:09:33
Eric Weinstein: And your friends. Okay. So friends, next country. So, you know, these are sort of circles of empathy.

01:09:40
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:09:40
Eric Weinstein: And they're radiating out, and eventually, you know, you care about [chuckles] all of your fellow men. Um, there comes to be a point where you're not worried about the Bitcoin. You're not worried about your own personal finances. You're not worried about whether you're right or you're wrong. You've already given yourself your pats on your back, and you start thinking, "Okay, well, what is this meant to do? What, what should we be doing?" And in part it's going to be a self-organizing system, and one of the things that we're going to find out is did this select for people who are able to form institutions themselves, or are these people who hate institutions so much, "We're not gonna do that. That's what boomers did, man." Okay, so. Now, if you form institutions, what will the nature of those institutions be? One possibility, you see, is, is that Silicon Valley was not good at forming new institutions because it was so good at taking apart old ones.

01:10:37
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:10:38
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, the concept of software eating the world meant: Why should I create anything in the world if software is just going to eat it later? So the only thing worth doing is doing lightweight software things because everything that's brick and mortar is gonna get blown away. Well, in a certain sense, it may be here's a good reason why Bitcoin should fail. Bitcoiners being decentralized are going to build decentralized things, and those decentralized things will be very good at removing corrupt things that are centralized, and will be very bad at actually creating the new framework, um, that we need when centralization is necessary.

01:11:21
Travis Kling: Yeah.

01:11:21
Eric Weinstein: Now, that-- I don't know. That's a story, right? May-- It's not necessarily a true story. Maybe the Bitcoiners are exceptionally good at doing centralized thing when centralization is called for. I don't know.

01:11:32
Peter McCormack: Well, w-we, we, we, we're talking in absolutes again. That's the thing about Bitcoin is there's a range. There is an absolute range. There are those that want complete breakdown of the state and believe in anarchism, which I don't. I don't think it's-- It's not whether I theoretically believe it or not. I just don't believe it can happen-

01:11:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, agreed

01:11:47
Peter McCormack: ... because humans want to organize.

01:11:49
Eric Weinstein: You and I have talked about this sometime.

01:11:49
Peter McCormack: We talked about this and, and, you know, we had that conversation 'cause I found-- Oh, God, I'm gonna get so much hate for saying this, but I found your conversation with Brett about the monopoly on violence really interesting because I was trying to weigh up the net of both scenarios. You know, absolute freedom versus, uh, state and a monopoly on violence. Like, which is net best? And it depends where you measure it. Like, if you are a complete freedom-loving anarchist, abs- you absolutely believe that you should be free and no one should, uh, have any right to make any decision over you. Others believe that it's better that we organize when we have a- agreed collective rules. I find that super interesting. But the spectrum is there. You have got anarchists, and you've, you've, you've got some quiet under-the-radar socialists who don't want to admit it 'cause they don't want to get-

01:12:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:12:35
Peter McCormack: ... called a s-- you know, and everything in between. And, and, um, you know, s- you know, so, so there, there are a range of people and th- they want to do a range of things. But I think the common thing that brings most Bitcoiners together is they want to end what is considered the cancer of central banking. That is, I think that is one of the-

01:12:56
Eric Weinstein: What is the cancer of central banking?

01:12:58
Peter McCormack: I just think it's the ability to m- mess with the money, and that where you are, you know, you've seen different impacts with whether you're in Venezuela, which I've been to, to see the impact, or whether you're in Lebanon, it's different, or whether you're in Turkey, it's different. Different levels of inflation that's affected them. But I think generally speaking, there is that common, common understanding, a common agreement that the money printer is too easy to turn on now. There is no check on the power of the money printer, and if we can end that or reign that in, that's gonna be better for society.

01:13:30
Eric Weinstein: And what if you had an MMT person across from you?

01:13:33
Peter McCormack: I've done it. I did it with Stephanie Kelton. I enjoyed-

01:13:36
Eric Weinstein: No, but-

01:13:36
Peter McCormack: ... having the conversation. I think she's full of shit, but I enjoyed having the conversation.

01:13:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But let, let me just stand in for her-

01:13:41
Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay

01:13:41
Eric Weinstein: ... since she's not here, right? So the idea is no, no, you don't understand. This is great. We have a problem if we can't print our way out of our own debt. Um, you have to appreciate that this is a, a feature, not a bug. Uh, and that in effect, um, part of the problem is, is that if you actually introduce the kind of money that you wanna introduce, you're going to be condemning society to cyclical tragedy, uh, that effectively w- without central banking, um, a- and various illusions involving money, um, we have no way of dampening the cycle, and it, it's just gonna be a cycle of monetary, uh, and financial violence that is revisited upon, uh, everyone at times of the, the market's choosing and not when we can afford it.

01:14:28
Travis Kling: Well, if you, if you can't print money, you can't go to war in most cases, and when you look at the collapse of fiat currencies, the vast majority of time they happen because a country went to war and kept going to war and financing wars that it couldn't win. And in that way, trying to, uh, remove that capability over a long period of time from governments is like unequivocally a, a, a peaceful endeavor.

01:14:57
Peter McCormack: I've never actually always bought that argument because we've always been pretty much in a perpetual state of war somewhere on this planet.

01:15:05
Travis Kling: Yeah, it's like we can get back to the nature of humanity-

01:15:07
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:15:07
Travis Kling: ... on that, but just looking at the history of fiat currency collapses-

01:15:11
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:15:12
Travis Kling: ... they happen from war.

01:15:14
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm-- what I'm saying is I, I think it's... sometimes I feel it's a bit reckless to say, "Oh, if you fix the money, there won't be no-- there won't be any more war." I don't-

01:15:22
Travis Kling: I agree with that.

01:15:23
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I just-

01:15:23
Travis Kling: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:23
Peter McCormack: I think that's too-

01:15:24
Travis Kling: No, I mean, humans-

01:15:25
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:15:25
Travis Kling: ... we're gonna do what we do. Although we're killing each other less than we ever have before, so.

01:15:28
Peter McCormack: Which is good.

01:15:29
Travis Kling: Yeah.

01:15:30
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Um, so based on what you said, the, the Stephanie Kelton argument, let me tell you my position. So I've... The position I hold isn't as common in Bitcoin as, or if it is, it's under the radar. I actually think there will be a symbiotic relationship with fiat currencies and Bitcoin forever, and I don't think we will lose the state. Some would disagree. My friend Robert Breedlove, big fan of the sovereign individual, he thinks this... you know, we're on a different path, you know, because the logic of violence changes with technology. And I, and I love the arguments, I love the theory, but I think humans organize, and they want a bit of protection, want a bit of centralized protection. I think what will happen is we will have some, potentially some check-in on the power with Bitcoin, but you will still have the money printer, but it's... it would have to be used in a more responsible way. So for example, you know, go back to pre-'71. I'm not a huge expert on the gold standard, okay? But there was a check on the money. But it didn't stop government being able to have the ability to print money, and I think that symbiotic relationship is needed. I think, I th- I still think you need some form of way of organizing society. Because if you have the big... Uh, I spoke to Scott Horton. He was like, "You don't want to have the big red button to get rid of government," even though he's a libertarian. He said, "It'll be chaos."

01:16:48
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

01:16:49
Peter McCormack: But what you can do is, let's say, target making it just a bit smaller. Or as Eric Vorhees, he talked about that, 1% or 5% smaller, and let's just try and check the... because it's got out of hand now. So if Bitcoin can reduce government by 1% next year, I would, I would, I would call that a huge success. Huge success.

01:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I don't know where... I think you and I are in different places.

01:17:15
Peter McCormack: Well, I expected that.

01:17:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I, I think I'm worried about general collapse at a level that you're not.

01:17:24
Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I am.

01:17:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:17:25
Peter McCormack: No, I am. But it-- but different types of collapse.

01:17:28
Travis Kling: Like societal collapse?

01:17:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Be- beyond... I, I, I'm worried right now that what we have is we have a technically de- demanding planet.

01:17:41
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:17:42
Eric Weinstein: Leadership, peacetime leadership that is completely, uh, mismatched with the challenges that we actually face, a potential energy function for violence that is confusing everyone from Steven Pinker on down because, you know, this idea that in general things are as peaceful or more peaceful than they've ever been. And so it's like, wow, this forest hasn't burned for seventy-five years.

01:18:05
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:18:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, [chuckles] what do you think's gonna happen when it does burn for the first time in seventy-five years? It's gonna be pretty exciting. So right now what I think is that we're in a terribly dangerous situation that isn't obviously dangerous, and I'm much more concerned, I think, than you guys are.

01:18:25
Peter McCormack: No, I, I def-- Do, do you think we're in a fourth turning?

01:18:30
Eric Weinstein: Can, can I be straight?

01:18:31
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:18:32
Eric Weinstein: I hate this stuff.

01:18:33
Peter McCormack: Why?

01:18:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, because I've been talking recently about this as snap-to-grid intellectualism, right?

01:18:43
Peter McCormack: We had this conversation.

01:18:44
Eric Weinstein: And snap-to-grid intellectualism is like you said something that reminds me of something I heard. And then, and then somebody will repeat something like, you know, "Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men." It always is a cycle, right? And then you just think, "Okay, well, that has some kind of naive hold on my mind, but let me break that for a second." Since 1952, we've had thermonuclear weapons, so don't talk to me about the fourth turning. Like, we can't afford for weak men to make hard times and know that this thing goes on forever.

01:19:19
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:19:20
Eric Weinstein: Things changed huge, huge. Enormous change occurred.

01:19:24
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

01:19:24
Eric Weinstein: And so my concern is I'm here to have a different conversation. I don't want to have any of... I don't want to have a Milton Friedman conversation. I don't, I don't want to have a Hayekian conversation. I don't want to have an Ayn Rand conversation. I don't want to have an MMT conversation. You guys are something new. I'm here to have a new conversation without fourth turnings. We're in deep shit. You guys are rich. You guys are talking about a new form of money that doesn't have a country to go with it.

01:19:52
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:19:52
Eric Weinstein: It's not a chemical element, right? What is the biggest, most beautiful future that you imagine for your families? Like, mine begins with survival.

01:20:05
Peter McCormack: It's a li- no, it's a life raft right now.

01:20:08
Eric Weinstein: I, I, uh, believe me, I hear that.

01:20:10
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's... We're safe.

01:20:10
Eric Weinstein: But, like, what are we, what are we gonna disintermediate? Who are we gonna disintermediate? What are we, what are we doing?

01:20:18
Peter McCormack: I'm... [sighs] I'm, I'm not sure we can change anything, Eric. We can try.

01:20:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, that's the thing.

01:20:25
Peter McCormack: But my point is, I think we may be on this natural path to collapse or certain collapses in society. We may be on this natural path to high inflation coming soon. You know, we may be, we may... It... The reason I said the fourth turn, it's not because I believe it's gonna happen, but the book's interesting because, uh, s- same old saying, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, right? There is a lot of similarity. Perhaps this is something we can't stop. I don't know. I don't know. What do you w- what, what are you specifically worried about?

01:20:56
Eric Weinstein: All right. I'm worried about a universe where the chairs that are supposed to be reserved for smart people have no smart people sitting in them.

01:21:09
Peter McCormack: Well, we should probably... Rich, you wanna come up here? [laughs]

01:21:13
Travis Kling: Are you referring to the people in government? 'Cause we're there right now.

01:21:16
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:21:18
Eric Weinstein: Not just government.

01:21:19
Travis Kling: And we definitely got the B team out there right now.

01:21:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I'm not so sure that I'm so thrilled with our tech companies either, and I'm not so sure that I'm thrilled with our university departments.

01:21:30
Travis Kling: Yeah.

01:21:30
Eric Weinstein: And I'm not so thrilled with our newspapers and our news agencies. Like, more or less, this is what's interesting.

01:21:38
Peter McCormack: This is the abundance of information.

01:21:39
Travis Kling: De- de- decentralization can be the, the... Not even-

01:21:46
Peter McCormack: Catalyst.

01:21:46
Travis Kling: Not, not... Yeah, the catalyst.

01:21:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:21:48
Travis Kling: The ca- a- across all of those things.

01:21:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, maybe I'll throw some... I just feel like it's almost impossible to have the interesting conversations anymore. I don't even know how to do it, right?

01:22:00
Travis Kling: Well-

01:22:00
Eric Weinstein: So in part, my thought is, if you really wanted me to talk and say something that's gonna piss off your audience that I find fascinating, it's how do you get a bunch of people who get decentralization to do something centralized? Right? That's hard. That's one of the reasons why I'm not totally maximalist in, in my orientation, right? At some level, you got a bunch of hard-bitten peo- "We don't trust." Okay, I get it. You don't trust. Okay. You're gonna have to trust, and you're gonna have to do something centralized if you're gonna do something that shows that this was what you guys said it was.

01:22:39
Peter McCormack: Well, there's a, there's a different point here. We're decentralized. We power the platform, the protocol. Okay. You can get them t- together to centralize to go and do something external for Bitcoin. Just don't make it Bitcoin. Like, you can, you can, if you wanted to create the... You know, for example, uh, libertarians who are anti-politics, I, I always find that's a bit of a problem. I think if you want to attack the-

01:22:59
Eric Weinstein: You're not a libertarian.

01:23:00
Peter McCormack: I'm not a... I'm... I love the ideas theoretically.

01:23:04
Eric Weinstein: Do, do you like hanging out with libertarians?

01:23:06
Peter McCormack: I do like hanging out with them.

01:23:07
Eric Weinstein: So do I.

01:23:08
Peter McCormack: I love them.

01:23:08
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:23:09
Peter McCormack: I, I think they... the picture they paint of the world is incredible. I actually-

01:23:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that's, that's the problem. It's, it's, it's... If it were credible, I'd be more excited. It's incredible.

01:23:17
Peter McCormack: Well, it, f- the problem is from whatever political position you're in, you believe your s- story is credible, and you believe others aren't credible. I was just down in El Salvador with a, a, a, a, a, with a group of people. One of the girls from the US was trying to sell me on Marxism. She thinks it's great. I was like, "What?"

01:23:35
Eric Weinstein: Marxism?

01:23:35
Peter McCormack: Yeah. She was trying to sell me on Marxism. The point being is from... But she-

01:23:39
Eric Weinstein: If you can sell Marxism, that's, that's... You-

01:23:40
Peter McCormack: She didn't-

01:23:41
Eric Weinstein: You, you have talent in sales.

01:23:42
Peter McCormack: She... No, she didn't do a good job. But the point being is she hates capitalism, right? Whether you're left, whether you're right, whether you're a libertarian anarchist, from where you are, you believe your picture of the world is right and everything else is nonsense. And what we've haven't got is enough people trying to just... trying to see everyone else's version of the world. That's what we don't have. Everyone's like, "This is my fucking..." It's selfish.

01:24:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay. Well, but, but we're getting back to-

01:24:08
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What do you think we need to do? Could... Just tell us. When you say centralized, what do you mean? You mean we need to go political, attack the system with our money from... with... and change it?

01:24:19
Eric Weinstein: You've got a survival issue. I, uh... Look, I, I, I bore myself on this topic, but this is the end game. We're watching the end game. We can't recognize that it's the end game because we're not at... You know, we're not in a shooting war with China at the moment.

01:24:37
Peter McCormack: Yet.

01:24:38
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:24:39
Travis Kling: It's worth mentioning that Bitcoin is, like, firmly in the middle of US-China relations.

01:24:43
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

01:24:44
Travis Kling: Firmly.

01:24:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We are in a situation in which we've got a dire economic problem, which is communism failed first. Capitalism appears not to be able to get the job done. We don't seem to be able to think much beyond communism versus capitalism. This is what's new Gentlemen, this is what's new, and we're still having old style conversations about what's new

01:25:12
Peter McCormack: You're circling... I feel like you want to tell us something, and I'm like-

01:25:15
Eric Weinstein: No, I don't want to tell you anything because w- every time I say... I don't want to say anything like that because if I say, "I'm Eric Weinstein and I believe X, Y, and Z," "Oh, Eric Weinstein thinks..." But-

01:25:25
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I don't care about them. I care about these... Tell me.

01:25:28
Eric Weinstein: That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is I would like this to do something new beyond just be a new form of money.

01:25:36
Peter McCormack: Well-

01:25:36
Eric Weinstein: If it doesn't want to do that, if it just wants to be a new form of money, and it wants to make sure that some people can have a, have hopes and dreams for their children, and you can buy that heart operation you were hoping to get your spouse or who knows what, great. No arguments with it. I happen to have a different question, which is does it solve everything, right? That's really my question because if it solves everything, I would know what I would want to go shopping for first. What I would want to go shopping for is a return of sense making and a lineage level solution for human survival. Now, people, they aren't used to these things, right? They say like, like, "If you had a billion dollars, what would you... I'd buy my, my great aunt, you know, the house she'd always want." Okay, that's great. Uh, I would like to get off this planet, and I would like to get off this planet with options because as we just saw under COVID, we're running one centralized experiment.

01:26:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:26:36
Eric Weinstein: And that one centralized experiment is too dangerous with this many stupid people in positions of leadership, and right, right now, whatever we're selecting for in terms of leadership... We used to have a lot of brutal people on the world stage who were very talented, and we have fewer brutal people on the world stage-

01:26:53
Travis Kling: And way less talent [laughs]

01:26:56
Eric Weinstein: ... and way less talent, right? And so this idea of making everything dumber... We've had 75 years of peace that are coming due. We are out of shape. We have no idea what it, what enforced 75 years of peace within a thermonuclear planet. And that this is coming to an end, right? So my feeling is we've had what I've called the great nap. We've had 75 years to get out of shape, to, to forget what it means to be a country, why we have centralized institutions. Nobody can even remember why we have journalists because they used to put their lives on the line to get the story and, and follow certain sorts of codes. Uh, now they seem to be, you know, a pox on, on, on-

01:27:45
Peter McCormack: But you know why that is. Again, that comes down to the money. They don't have the money anymore. I mean, it's part... [tsking] Yeah, the internet changed things. It changed the economics of journalism, you know, and the, the economics of, uh, entertainment and eyeballs completely changed. It's become about clicks. We know that.

01:28:03
Eric Weinstein: Ye- but it's not about clicks. Nothing sells journalism like Jeffrey Epstein stories. And then you find people say, "Oh, people aren't interested in Jeffrey Epstein stories." Are you kidding me?

01:28:13
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's random bits of great journalism. You know, there are-

01:28:16
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, but I'm trying to make... Okay. I am failing. I desperately want to be having a different conversation.

01:28:24
Peter McCormack: I don't know what the conversation is you want to have.

01:28:26
Eric Weinstein: I... Let's start from a different perspective.

01:28:29
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:28:29
Eric Weinstein: Bitcoin fixes everything. Now, you don't literally believe that.

01:28:33
Peter McCormack: I don't literally believe that.

01:28:33
Eric Weinstein: I don't literally b- believe... But somebody somehow thinks that this is a good slogan. So the question is, okay, assume that it doesn't fix everything. Assume that Bitcoin fixes a lot, okay? That is a statement I would be up for. I think you guys would be up for it.

01:28:49
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:28:53
Eric Weinstein: Do we get to get to a next thing, or does the Bitcoin culture... See, you see, the tech culture should have fixed science, but it couldn't. You know, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner, you know, came up with a prize. "Let's give $3 million to people who are really good at science." Okay, well, it didn't do very much. Um, why couldn't science's little brother fix science? Well, in part because the ethos of software is we're here to destroy things that look old.

01:29:23
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:29:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay? And i- in some sense, that's where Bitcoin gets its energy. We're here to destroy things that look old and diseased and flabby. Okay, good on you. Now, what does the lesson of that destruction teach? Well, one thing it ta- taught us in tech was don't build a new university. Disintermediate. Do Khan Academy, you know? Okay. So you'll keep learning that lesson over and over and over again, but you never learn that there are some times when you want to go the other direction.

01:29:56
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:29:57
Eric Weinstein: This would be... In, in biology, this would be called regulated expression. There's some times when you want to break something up. There are other times when you want to bring something together.

01:30:05
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:30:05
Eric Weinstein: And it, it's not always the same thing. So my question is does Bitcoin as a community, which of course isn't a community, it's just, it's such-

01:30:14
Peter McCormack: It is

01:30:14
Eric Weinstein: ... but it's so tiresome to... Every time you say something, immediately somebody will just come back with, "No, you don't understand."

01:30:20
Peter McCormack: It's because we're decentralized. We all have different opinions.

01:30:22
Eric Weinstein: It's because it's boring. I'm sorry to say it. It's just boring to go through this-

01:30:26
Peter McCormack: But, but go ahead. Yeah

01:30:26
Eric Weinstein: ... whole narration. Okay. Is there a part of this community that understands time to build?

01:30:37
Travis Kling: Yeah.

01:30:37
Eric Weinstein: Time to build the sorts of things that look awful right now, that may become awful with time. They may degrade, right? You m- maybe you had like Edward R. Murrow and CBS News, and maybe CBS News got horrible, but there was a period of time where CBS News really mattered. Okay? Right now it's time to build some stuff, to search for solutions to our problems, problems of economic distribution, post capitalism, post communism. What comes after both capitalism and communism? What comes after, uh, you know, h- what comes in life cycle terms after the pill, um, and, um- ... reliable paternity tests? What comes, uh, in work after telecommuting? What-- we, we've, we've got 75 years of pent-up questions where we stayed in a stasis, where we're leading archaic lives in general, and everyone knows that our lives don't really make sense anymore. We have archaic money. We have archaic, uh, national stories. Okay, it's time for something new, and Bitcoin is a constructive story about destroying the old. But I'm looking for more of a story, given that it's the money, and m- the reason that money's so important is that it, it's fungible and allows us to do everything else. Right now, I would like to build a strategy for looking for human survival situations.

01:32:02
Peter McCormack: Maybe that can only be done in, in the fiat world. Maybe the, the s-

01:32:05
Eric Weinstein: Maybe.

01:32:06
Peter McCormack: Maybe the story of Bitcoin is, is, is the only way to win is not play, radical individualism. You know, a lot of them are anonymous.

01:32:13
Eric Weinstein: Then maybe I wanna go back to the... You just made the single best case for going back to something that I don't wanna do. I don't wanna go back into the fiat world. I want it to be Bitcoin and things of that nature. If the idea is, is that that Bitcoin kind of mentality is so rooted in not centralizing, not having leaders, not, you know, no trust, da, da, da. If the problem is, is that all of that is co-traveling, that is the overlearned message that comes from having to deal with central bankers, that has to comes-- have to, to dealing with lying activists posing as journalists, that come to-- that comes from looking at, uh, citation cartels inside of academics, where people are just so deep in the political economy that they've stopped caring about their subjects. Okay, so I keep hearing this thing is honest. It's, you know, it fixes things. And, well, the question is, does it? Does-- is there enough trust in this community? Is there enough that's positive and pro-social that allow the wealth that has accumulated under this to now do beautiful, amazing things?

01:33:27
Travis Kling: Yeah, so it, it sounds like what you're talking about in some cases would be, like, patronage. Like, it would be like, what is the group of Bitcoiners if they, if they become wealthy by owning a lot of Bitcoin, what some subset of, of those Bitcoiners are gonna decide that, uh, you know, getting human species living on other planets is very, very important, and they're gonna, um, dedicate resources to trying to push that forward. And, um, you know, I think from, from a government perspective, I think part of the reason why... And, and there's plenty of, of, of, of, of Bitcoin fo-folks that are more on the, like, theoretical side of things, uh, spend more time thinking about stuff like that, that have views of what this world is gonna look like after Bitcoin kinda, quote unquote, "wins." But I, I think a lot of us are more focused on what is the path gonna look like as Bitcoin gears up to increasingly fight the fight against governments and against fiat currencies, so that there, there is some amount of struggle to imagine what comes after that because, because we don't know what either the timing or the specifics around what that fight's gonna look like.

01:34:47
Peter McCormack: Maybe we don't know either. Maybe we-

01:34:49
Eric Weinstein: I think you don't know, and I also think-

01:34:51
Travis Kling: Yeah

01:34:51
Eric Weinstein: ... let me be blunt about it. I also feel that people... You know, you know that part of that meme, "I just found out about Bitcoin, and I'm here to save it," or something like that?

01:34:59
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

01:35:01
Eric Weinstein: Um, maybe in part, I feel like I've been fighting some fight since the early 1990s.

01:35:07
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:35:08
Eric Weinstein: And then Bitcoin comes around, you know, 2009, 2010, and it's the newcomer on the block. I'm super excited to see it. But I wanna go back to fighting the fights that I was fighting in the early 1990s, one of which is about inflation. Let me just be very clear about it. I don't think the economics depart-- uh, profession knows how to measure inflation.

01:35:36
Peter McCormack: Oh, I think they know. I just don't think they want to.

01:35:38
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, I don't think they know-

01:35:40
Peter McCormack: Well, the, uh, the, the economics what? Department of the government?

01:35:43
Eric Weinstein: No, no, the, the, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the ones who are tasked in the United States with publishing the CPI-

01:35:52
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:35:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and the variance of CPI. They are trained inside of the university system. I don't think academic economists know how to measure inflation, even theoretically. Like, the two ways in which they would like this number to go down, you see, because when, when the inflation estimate goes down, that means the tax brackets don't get indexed up. So they get to tax us more, and they get to give us less in terms of entitlements that are cost of living adjusted. Now, the two things that they know to bring down that number, right, that CPI number, um, that are clearest theoretically is, one, they say it shouldn't be a fixed basket, right? So imagine that we have, we have tea, and we have coffee.

01:36:47
Travis Kling: Hedonic adjustments.

01:36:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, hang on a second. Um, if the cost of coffee goes way up because there's a frost, let's say, um, unseasonably cold temperatures in the coffee growing regions, if I'm indifferent between the two, I just switch to tea. And if you give me the money needed to buy back even amounts of coffee and even amounts of tea, uh, I'm gonna use almost all of that money not to purchase coffee, which is very expensive. I'm just gonna buy tea because I'm equally as happy and spend the rest on cocaine, let's say. Something. And in that world, um, you're not talking about a cost of living adjustment. Because I should be able to say, "I only need to compensate you to make you equally happy. I don't need to compensate you to buy back whatever you had previously purchased only to watch you use the money totally differently than I was expecting." The other thing they know how to do is something called chaining. Now, chaining really just means going towards the continuum limit. Instead of checking every year, I'm gonna check every quarter. Maybe I'm gonna check every month or every day or every hour or every minute, and I'm gonna compare the prices and quantities. And so as you go to- towards that continuum limit, you get a different decrease usually in the rate of inflation. But we don't know how to chain a cost of living adjustment, because then it ends up picking up your changes in taste. And the dirty little secret of neoclassical economics is that as soon as your tastes change, the entire th- theory of human welfare in economics falls apart. Okay? And so what they've done is they've got an elaborate... Do, do you remember seeing this picture of J.Lo, uh, in the Versace dress?

01:38:35
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:38:35
Eric Weinstein: Right? So it's like nobody can figure out exactly how this thing is staying together, and it seems like the tiniest stitch goes wrong and the whole thing blows apart. That's modern neoclassical economic theory with respect to the changing preference hypothesis, which is they claim, "Just don't allow people to form different tastes from each other or from themselves a minute ago and everything will be fine. But if you move, the whole thing is gonna blow apart." Now, as a result of this, yes, I'm gonna make a very strong claim.

01:39:12
Peter McCormack: Go for it.

01:39:12
Eric Weinstein: Economics doesn't know how to calculate the rate of inflation, because they need something called gauge theory. And because they don't know gauge theory, and because they don't understand inflation, and because they want to preserve the freedom of the Bureau of Labor sta- s- uh, Statistics or of the Fed or whoever puts together GDP, uh, and productivity gauges, they want the freedom to make things up as they go along. And I've been like, "I want to take that freedom away." You say trust... We don't trust, we verify, right?

01:39:41
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:39:41
Eric Weinstein: I want to disintermediate economists. You're angry at all central bankers. I'm gonna one-up you. I'm angry at neoclassical economists who pretend that they know what's going on, and they don't know what's going on. Here's a problem that I have. I want to drive home to the economics profession that they not only don't know how to calculate inflation, but if anybody shows up who does understand gauge theory, who does understand, uh, how to calculate inflation, they will destroy that person's career so that they can continue to do what they do. Now, if Bitcoin solves everything, help me construct something to show that the people who are con- tasked with constructing our rates of inflation and our rates of productivity growth are not using state-of-the-art theory. I'm not even talking about how to w- turn this into something practical that can be computed every month. Even their theory is wrong.

01:40:34
Peter McCormack: Why though? Like, w- we see the CPI calculations. We all know it's bullshit. We see the prices-

01:40:41
Eric Weinstein: You say we all know it's bullshit, but if we are all forced t- to pay our taxes relative to a CPI-adjusted tax bracket, if we are forced to expect our Social Security or Medicare payments based on a cost of living adjustment, then in a certain sense, it's not bullshit. It's very much like-

01:40:59
Peter McCormack: But how are you gonna enforce that? How are you gonna, how are you gonna have the policy changed so you do?

01:41:05
Eric Weinstein: I'm trying to get into a fight with the economics profession. Because I know things that they don't know how to do, and they want to say that they are in a position to peer review me. I'm saying, "Okay, great. Let's do it out in the open." Send me your smartest economist, whoever she or he may be. Is it Janet Yellen? Is it Paul Krugman? Send me whoever the smartest economist-

01:41:27
Peter McCormack: Definitely not Janet Yellen.

01:41:29
Eric Weinstein: Maybe it's Janet Yellen.

01:41:30
Peter McCormack: Yeah. [laughs]

01:41:30
Eric Weinstein: Who knows? Okay?

01:41:32
Peter McCormack: Krugman hates Bitcoin. [laughs]

01:41:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It doesn't matter. I'm trying to say something else to you guys.

01:41:37
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know.

01:41:38
Eric Weinstein: Maybe it's not... It's not about-

01:41:38
Peter McCormack: No, no, no, no, no. I hear what you're saying.

01:41:39
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, hear me.

01:41:39
Peter McCormack: We're listening.

01:41:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay. They don't know how to calculate inflation. They don't know gauge theory. They don't understand why the marginal revolution ends up in gauge theoretic economics. They've lied about preferences. They've lied about tastes, right? They, they've gotten so much firepower behind this lie that our tastes don't change and that they're the same f- between you and me. This was written into a 1977 paper by two supposed Nobel laureates, Bec- uh, Becker and Stigler, called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, and they said that tastes are like the Rocky Mountains. They are unchanging, and they are the same to all men. F these people. Seriously, I'm just tired of this. These guys aren't that smart. They don't know that much math. They go into every other field. They have something literally called economic imperialism, as if this is a great thing, and they will write, "We know more math, so we have the right to invade every other subject." Time to invade economics, gentlemen.

01:42:42
Peter McCormack: Let's go.

01:42:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:42:44
Peter McCormack: All right.

01:42:45
Eric Weinstein: But what I'm trying to say is-

01:42:46
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:42:46
Eric Weinstein: ... it's the economic heft of the Bitcoin community that can make this happen. I've been trying to do this through intellectual interchange since, I don't know, almost 30 years.

01:42:58
Peter McCormack: How do we know you're right and we should put our weight behind you though?

01:43:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, I wouldn't trust. I would verify.

01:43:03
Peter McCormack: Well, that's what I'm trying to do first.

01:43:05
Eric Weinstein: I know. But what I'm trying to say is, is that-

01:43:07
Peter McCormack: Like, who else is-

01:43:09
Eric Weinstein: I'll tell you what

01:43:09
Peter McCormack: ... who else is behi- Like-

01:43:10
Eric Weinstein: I'll tell you what

01:43:11
Peter McCormack: ... y- who else are you talking about gauge theory with? Like, where is the gauge theory movement? Or is it just you-

01:43:17
Eric Weinstein: I'm-

01:43:17
Peter McCormack: ... as a solo warrior?

01:43:18
Eric Weinstein: More or less. I mean, Juan Maldacena wrote an article about this when he was given the $3 million prize Uh, he did not initially cite our work, but he did, uh, after he was reminded that he had, did not originally cite our work. Um, but yeah, it's just me and my wife

01:43:36
Peter McCormack: Could you be wrong?

01:43:37
Eric Weinstein: We can find out. You see, if we were to take, for example, the Boskin Commission-

01:43:43
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:43:43
Eric Weinstein: ... which was the first attempt to revisit the construction of the CPI from the perspective of senior economists tasked by the government.

01:43:51
Travis Kling: What year was that?

01:43:53
Eric Weinstein: 1996, something like that. In the beginning of their report, they had, they tried to show why we needed to move towards cost of living, and they had a, a too good toy example, maybe chicken and beef, and two sets of prices. Well, if you, if you hypothesize that the consumer was given by the m- most common form of an idealized preference map called a Cobb-Douglas function, preferences would had to have changed between the two periods that the Boskin Commission wrote down, right? I can back that out. So if you take the initial example in the Boskin Commission-

01:44:34
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:44:35
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, report, they can't linearly interpret, interpolate pr- uh, prices and preferences given by the Cobb-Douglas linearly between time zero and time one and compute the rate of in- inflation because they claim that the index would not exist. Technically called a Laspeyres-Paasche index. Uh, if you allow, um, the Paasche index to have changing preferences, they can't compute it. We can. I can give you a number.

01:45:02
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

01:45:04
Eric Weinstein: And then you can ask, well, can they... You know, maybe they can compute it, but I can, I can promise you that in their literature they claim not only haven't they computed this, but that it is impossible. Work of, uh, Fisher and Shell claims that it is impossible to have a changing preference, um, in that cost of living adjustment.

01:45:25
Travis Kling: Well, the, the answer is that the US government do- like, doesn't want the accurate measurement.

01:45:31
Eric Weinstein: They don't want... I wouldn't say it that way. I would say they don't want it something where they're not allowed to toy with it by construction.

01:45:39
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

01:45:39
Eric Weinstein: So my goal and your goal-

01:45:41
Peter McCormack: Because they want to control the money

01:45:42
Eric Weinstein: ... well, this is, this is, this is where our commonality and our-

01:45:45
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm

01:45:45
Eric Weinstein: ... difference occurs. So my perspective, again, I... Look, I'm not smart enough to come up with Bitcoin. It's an ingenious thing. Never thought of it. We were smart enough to come up with the fact that they don't compute inflation correctly, and they don't compute productivity correctly because they don't know enough differential calculus, to be blunt. And because they don't know enough differential calculus in order to make these computations, they've retained rights. Well, who knows? Maybe we'll do a little bit of hedonic adjustment. Maybe we'll do a little bit of outlet bias. Maybe we'll, um, you know, do a little bit more chaining. And so by, by saying that it's an art, it's not a science, there's nothing, you know, absolute, they've retained the freedom-

01:46:27
Travis Kling: Yeah

01:46:28
Eric Weinstein: ... to mess with our money and to mess with our statistics. So this is really where I come to you from. The, my context is, y- y- well, you want to show me how brilliant you guys are? Shut down not only the economists at the Fed, but also shut down the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hand-chosen experts. I'm gonna claim right now, I don't think Paul Krugman knows how to do a cost of living adjustment, uh, with chaining towards the continuum if preferences are shifting. I don't think that this field is mature enough intellectually to peer review its own challenges.

01:47:09
Peter McCormack: Well, just, just gonna be honest, we just did a whole 15-minute segment where I had no idea what you were talking about. [laughs] We're in a whole, like, different world, but I think I get what you're saying is, "Let's prove them wrong." I don't understand gauge theory.

01:47:23
Eric Weinstein: No, I don't know any... You guys say things, again, you can say we don't, but Bitcoin solves everything. I'm getting bored of this. If Bitcoin solves everything, I... Hey, here's something right in your wheelhouse. It, it, it's... Think of this as a high-

01:47:35
Peter McCormack: Bitcoin can't fix that. That's people who fix that.

01:47:37
Eric Weinstein: No. You-

01:47:39
Peter McCormack: People. You know, you, what you need is people to help build a theory.

01:47:41
Eric Weinstein: I don't know what Bitcoin solves everything means. What does Bitcoin fix everything mean?

01:47:45
Peter McCormack: It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a meme.

01:47:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay, what does that mean?

01:47:47
Peter McCormack: The meme means fix the money, fix the world. The, the biggest problem in the world at the moment-

01:47:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:47:52
Peter McCormack: ... is cheap credit.

01:47:53
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, but I still don't understand. It means something. I'm a literal guy, right? One of these guys on the autism spectrum.

01:48:00
Peter McCormack: Mm.

01:48:00
Eric Weinstein: What does it mean? Are, are we fixing things? 'Cause, like, I would imagine one of the first things that Bitcoiners would want to do would be stop economists from computing the rate of inflation however they want.

01:48:11
Travis Kling: Yeah, I would, I would agree-

01:48:12
Peter McCormack: But they, but they are attacking that. They are attacking that.

01:48:13
Travis Kling: No, I would, I would agree with that. The, the-

01:48:15
Peter McCormack: Yeah

01:48:15
Travis Kling: ... to, to Peter's point about it, it's people in government that, uh, right now, the way it's structured, can affect change in, in that way, and I think you slowly, over the coming years and decades, are gonna have increasingly more individuals that align with Bitcoin's potential and its principles that will enter into the US government, and at some point you may be able to get, um, some status quo around that. And we're starting to, we're starting to make progress. Cyn- Cynthia Loo- Cynthia Lummis, senator from Wyoming, she's on the Senate Banking Committee, card-carrying Bitcoiner.

01:48:53
Peter McCormack: Do you know what it is? It's the narratives that we have-

01:48:55
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. What you just did there, I don't want to do that. That's the same thing that got us into trouble with Elon. A card-carrying senator... It's like, if we're serious about this-

01:49:06
Travis Kling: Yeah

01:49:06
Eric Weinstein: ... F the Senate. Look, I, I want to put this idea directly across to you guys because I want to hear it fail in the right way. I want to go to war with the idea that the economists are intellectually capable of doing what they say they're doing.

01:49:24
Peter McCormack: Well, you should sign up to Marty Bent's email. Listen, th- these conversations are happening, but they ha- they haven't gone mainstream out of the Bit- it's the Bitcoiners talking about them.

01:49:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I understand this, so I'm, I'm coming back to this. Right now, I want to, I want to make a frontal intellectual assault on the Bureau of Labor Statistics rights- Ability and intellectual capability to calculate rates of inflation according to a theory which they have in fact got wrong.

01:49:53
Peter McCormack: Let's fucking go.

01:49:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I don't know how to do that.

01:49:56
Peter McCormack: Well, well-

01:49:57
Eric Weinstein: I've been trying to do that since... This is, this is where I come from, right?

01:50:00
Peter McCormack: I th- Okay, so you understand the theory, what you... Maybe you need some PR.

01:50:04
Eric Weinstein: Maybe. But Bitcoin solves this. Bitcoin fixes this. In other words, every time I try to lean on Bitcoin fixes this, the podium gives way. Okay? So I just keep thinking, okay, here I am trying to lean on Bitcoin fixes this. If Bitcoin doesn-

01:50:19
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're, you're, you're confusing what humans can do and what a protocol can do.

01:50:22
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, I don't really understand this. Are we in agreement that one of the greatest reasons for Bitcoin success [laughs] is that we're afraid of a printing press? I am afraid of a printing press. You guys?

01:50:33
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:50:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay, great. One of the reasons I'm afraid of the printing press is d- redistribution. Another reason is inflation.

01:50:40
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

01:50:41
Eric Weinstein: Some of those are connected. Would we agree that humiliating those economists who tell the rest of us to F off... We're smarter than they are. L- l- let me make a different-

01:50:55
Peter McCormack: Do you know what I, I think I know what you're saying, Travis. Travis, think about it like this. We, we all know that inflation is calculated in a subjective way that allows the money printer to go on, right? We've had the energy FUD recently, and whether you agree or not with what Michael Saylor did, he was trying to build the narrative so they actually have the data, so when anyone f- that fucking idiot Sorkin from The New York Times or the people of Bloomberg or the FT, when they go and print their bullshit, we have to go, "No, we have actual data. You're entirely wrong, and we have data that is both, uh, uh, uh, uh, allows us to look at the miners itself inside our industry, but compare it to other industries," and we can go, "You are wrong." So I think what Eric is saying is, like, similar. We all know inflation's bullshit. We keep saying it. Krugman put something up on Twitter, and the Bitcoin is piling the laughter.

01:51:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay, I wanna, I-

01:51:45
Peter McCormack: But we don't have the ob- the actual data to go, "Here, your statistic..." Like, journalists cannot ignore it.

01:51:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's the data, and there's also the theory.

01:51:51
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:51:51
Eric Weinstein: Really, what would be very valuable to me is I would like to get into a fight with any leading economist.

01:52:00
Peter McCormack: Well, the Bitcoiners will be with you for that.

01:52:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I don't know that they will or they won't, right? But we'll find out.

01:52:05
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

01:52:05
Eric Weinstein: Okay. My claim is, is that the theoretical basis of a cost of living adjustment, which is what they say that i- inflation should be based on, cost of living standard. If you chain a cost of living with changing preferences, the current theory collapses. They want a chain, and they want a COLA. And they want to measure the inflation, they want to tell us where to get off. My feeling is, over my dead body. You're not intellectually competent. Okay? Now, that's a huge statement. I'm not an economist by any standard measure. I'm willing to go on the show and s- and say I'm an economist simply for the pleasure of getting an economist to say, "That guy doesn't know anything about economics. He doesn't know anything about theories of inflation." Okay. Right now, I want to drag this back to an old fight between Irving Fisher and Ragnar Frisch. Irving Fisher wrote down a whole bunch of axioms that said how you measure inflation. And Ragnar Frisch said, "You know what? If you impose all of those axioms, there is no gauge that will work. I can prove that there will be no gauge that will work of inflation." The resolution of that is that one of Fisher's axioms was wildly off, right? And it says that if prices and quantities begin and end at the same levels, then rate of inflation should be one point zero zero, i.e. no inflation. Okay. Fisher was wrong about that. That's coming from what I call the Flat Earth Society of Economics. What I'm trying to say is, you guys are rich. You're powerful. You're in the headlines all the time. You're whining and complaining about inflation. I don't want to whine and complain about inflation. I want to go pick a fight with the supposed people who tell us that they're smart enough to manage our economy, and all of these people who go out to, you know, Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the summer and who put on suits and ties and, and, and have these resonant r- resonant baritone voices and tell us what reality is and isn't. I don't think they're that smart. And I-

01:54:07
Peter McCormack: You gotta find a way of selling it them.

01:54:09
Eric Weinstein: No. I don't know how to fix everything, but Bitcoin does. And so what I keep trying to say is, you're rich, you're focused on inflation, and you don't like to be told what to do by people who are dumber than you are, who have beautiful, you know, titles, and they sit in fine chairs at wonderful institutions. All I'm trying to say is, I don't know, do you guys want to do something or not? If you don't want to do something, feel free. We can sit around whining about inflation and the fact that they c- they don't know how to compute it, or we can actually take the fight to them where they live because they're not intellectually capable of actually returning fire. Now, I can't figure out how to get this issue off of my plate and onto yours. But if I were you, I'd go directly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics and say, "You guys are using what? A chain-less pairs con- conus, COLA? Something? How do you come up with th- this basket? Are you sure that, you know, that, that inflation isn't at-"

01:55:11
Peter McCormack: But it's too... This is the point. This, you get into these areas and-

01:55:13
Eric Weinstein: I don't actually-

01:55:14
Peter McCormack: ... you lose people.

01:55:14
Eric Weinstein: I don't care.

01:55:15
Peter McCormack: But you do care.

01:55:16
Eric Weinstein: No, but I don't.

01:55:16
Peter McCormack: You can't do that. You can't ever. You can't say, like, "I want this COLA," and they-

01:55:19
Eric Weinstein: No, I can give you... I can write something down to show you exactly what I'm talking about.

01:55:23
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

01:55:24
Eric Weinstein: And then you can say, "Oh, that's over my pay grade." And then somebody else can say, "This is, you know, too complicated." Somebody else can say, "This isn't data-driven." Okay. Then Bitcan- coin can't do everything.

01:55:36
Peter McCormack: You wanna go and pick a fight. I'm telling you, you gotta wake it, m- make it a way that is e- easier to digest and understand. That you w-

01:55:43
Eric Weinstein: You guys figure that out.

01:55:44
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but, but-

01:55:46
Eric Weinstein: No, no. Look, I, I can write down what I'm saying-

01:55:49
Peter McCormack: Write it down

01:55:49
Eric Weinstein: ... okay, mathematically.

01:55:50
Peter McCormack: Okay.

01:55:51
Eric Weinstein: And somebody in the community can figure out what I'm saying. But that's not the energy behind it. The energy behind it is I take you guys literally when you say, "Fix the money, fix the world," or, "Bitcoin fixes everything," or, you know, w- what we're really against is central banking and hyperinflationary and blah, blah, blah. Okay. Honestly, I don't see you guys as being part of the fight against neoclassical economics. I see you guys as talking about Austrian economics amongst yourselves. I see... But in order to take, to, to, to, to flex this stuff, you actually have to beat them. And I'm gonna say it in, in, in terms that we learned from Morpheus. Morpheus says something to Neo like, "I'm not gonna lie to you, Neo. Anyone who's ever stood his ground [chuckles] to fight an agent has lost and died." Okay. Everyone who takes on neoclassical economics, m- maybe with the exception of Daniel Kahneman, fails. We don't know why. It's time to take this thing on, gentlemen. And, and, and what I really mean is it's not that smart, and we need to basically make the point, Paul Krugman isn't that smart.

01:57:06
Peter McCormack: Oh, I think we're all in agreement with, on that.

01:57:08
Eric Weinstein: No, he's pretty smart.

01:57:10
Peter McCormack: Well.

01:57:10
Eric Weinstein: He's not Ken Arrow.

01:57:11
Peter McCormack: No.

01:57:12
Eric Weinstein: Ken Arrow is really smart.

01:57:13
Peter McCormack: He's smart if you believe his Keynesian theory of economics or his-

01:57:16
Eric Weinstein: It's not that. He, he became something else. He was really a pretty good, pretty great economist. It doesn't matter.

01:57:22
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

01:57:23
Eric Weinstein: What I'm trying to say is it's time to pick a fight with neoclassical economics, and I see you guys as being sort of inward looking.

01:57:35
Peter McCormack: I don't think that's fair. We're definitely outward looking.

01:57:37
Eric Weinstein: All right. Well, then let's pick a fight with these guys. Or y- you know what? I, I don't really know where we are. [laughs] More or less my feeling about this, and the reason to have-

01:57:46
Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah

01:57:46
Eric Weinstein: ... you on the show and, and, and to talk about markets is is that I am convinced that w- we are being called upon to create something that isn't capitalism, isn't communism, doesn't use fiat money, that understands how many unincorporated externalities exist in markets, that understand the danger of markets as a runaway automated process. As much as I hate having Janet Yellen tell me what to do, I also hate the idea of being hooked up to a potential doomsday machine which can't be interfered with if it starts to become that AGI that we worry about being told that it has to make paperclips. And one of the great dangers of Bitcoin that we're seeing is maybe the idea of having something so decentralized actually winds up undoing everything because effectively there isn't anyone in control. We don't know.

01:58:37
Peter McCormack: Maybe we do need to unwind everything.

01:58:39
Eric Weinstein: Maybe. I, I'm not... But, you know, you say that casually.

01:58:45
Peter McCormack: No, I'm not. I'm, I'm-

01:58:45
Eric Weinstein: You've got kids on this planet.

01:58:46
Peter McCormack: No, listen. Look, I j- I don't know the answer.

01:58:49
Travis Kling: This is a... Part of this is like Balaji's line of thinking, is that you're gonna undergo this, like, multi-decade reorganization of how groups of people come together and that the internet makes, makes everybody, you know, like that you can just come together in these, these communities that have much more, uh, uh, acute belief systems and that, uh, just over time, the concept of a nation state is gonna start to dismantle and people are gonna be... You know, local is gonna matter more because it's, it's, it's who you're physically around, but you're gonna spend more and more time in, in a digital space, and you're just gonna choose very specifically who you're gonna connect to in that, in that digital space. And, you know, TBD on... I, I mean, you can, I think you can imagine 50 years from now, uh, you know, lots of little factions and, um, you know, where war fits into all that, um, I wouldn't pretend to know, but-

01:59:49
Peter McCormack: You know what Breedlove would be saying here? If Breedlove was... He would be talking about the logic of violence and that technology changes the logic of violence. And, you know, not always, you know, not always can we say it's for the better. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. Maybe we just are having to go through this shift right now. We can't change it. Maybe the forces at hand are too big.

02:00:09
Eric Weinstein: May- maybe, but right now I'm feeling like we don't have much time, and by w- not much time, I mean a few hundred years at the outset, so it's not like by next Thursday we better have a solution.

02:00:18
Peter McCormack: Whew.

02:00:19
Eric Weinstein: But I, I do think we're playing Russian roulette as of now.

02:00:22
Travis Kling: Yeah.

02:00:22
Eric Weinstein: It's just the g- the, the gun has an enormous number of chambers that are hollow, right, that are, that are empty. A- and as a result, um, it feels like we have a lot of time. But really what we have is, is that we have a very small amount of time. And I guess what I'm t-

02:00:36
Peter McCormack: What's the action? What's the action then? What are you saying next?

02:00:40
Eric Weinstein: Uh, look, I, I, I wanna do next level... What do I wanna do next?

02:00:43
Peter McCormack: What are we doing next?

02:00:45
Eric Weinstein: I wanna get institutions that can actually pay people who are heterodox and, and make them... I wanna redistribute fuck, fuck you money before we redistribute regular money.

02:00:56
Peter McCormack: Just come down to El Salvador and see whether that's being redistributed to change things there.

02:01:00
Eric Weinstein: Well-

02:01:00
Peter McCormack: It's interesting. I'll talk to you about it off this 'cause-

02:01:02
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I'm, I'm in- I'm interested.

02:01:03
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

02:01:03
Eric Weinstein: But I, I really think that the biggest problem is that the people we need to be fat and happy and working on next level stuff are in general under somebody else's thumb.

02:01:14
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

02:01:15
Eric Weinstein: And so one of the things that's really important to me is giving more people use of their middle finger who are actually trying to build and do things. And in general, what I find is that there isn't a lot of ethos around making... I want to empower the people who are going to take down these structures, who actually maybe know what they're doing or what they're talking about differently than I want to empower everybody who has the ability to get rich.

02:01:46
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, what I will say, and, and I think- A thought to leave you with is that what I know amongst the Bitcoin is, is they don't trust, and they're very distrusting of the education system and the institutions and, and, uh, the media industry and yada, yada. They're getting really fucking rich, and they do distribute their money, and they maybe are distributing that money-

02:02:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:02:08
Peter McCormack: ... to projects they care about, like interesting, different kinds of projects.

02:02:12
Eric Weinstein: So are they-- I can't imagine that they don't wanna take out neoclassical economics.

02:02:16
Peter McCormack: Uh, y-y-you can't speak for a, for-- You can-- You can't speak for individuals or them as a group.

02:02:20
Eric Weinstein: No, I'm just saying, um-

02:02:20
Peter McCormack: But there will be someone. There will be someone.

02:02:22
Eric Weinstein: Where is the well-heeled-

02:02:22
Travis Kling: Well, a lot of them are gonna hear this.

02:02:23
Eric Weinstein: Where is the well-heeled-

02:02:25
Peter McCormack: Yeah

02:02:25
Eric Weinstein: ... where is the well-heeled group that wants t-t-to tell neoclassical economists to shut the hell up?

02:02:31
Peter McCormack: Hey, listen, a lot of them will.

02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:02:33
Peter McCormack: Especially the Austrian economists.

02:02:33
Eric Weinstein: So that's one thing that's really important to me. Another thing that's really important to me is we gotta get back to science, and if everybody's worried about losing their job every time they open their mouth, right? They didn't say something that was diverse enough, inclusive enough-

02:02:47
Peter McCormack: Oh, we all agree on this

02:02:48
Eric Weinstein: ... and had enough equity. What?

02:02:49
Peter McCormack: We all agree on this one.

02:02:50
Eric Weinstein: No, we don't.

02:02:50
Peter McCormack: No, we do.

02:02:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, we, we, we do, but look, I don't have the money to, uh, found a new science institute. So let me know when s- one of these people who does have enough money to found a new science institute founds a new science institute.

02:03:04
Peter McCormack: How much do you need?

02:03:06
Eric Weinstein: Hundreds of millions. What do you got?

02:03:08
Peter McCormack: Well, it's pocket change for a few of our friends. [laughing]

02:03:10
Travis Kling: [laughing]

02:03:11
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not pocket change for anyone.

02:03:12
Peter McCormack: For a few.

02:03:12
Eric Weinstein: One of the thing-- Ha-having hung out with billionaires, I now can say one of the sad features that I did not... Uh, 'cause I didn't hang out with billionaires up until ten, fifteen years ago a-at all. I didn't know any. Nobody's got a f- a spare million bucks.

02:03:26
Travis Kling: Hmm.

02:03:27
Eric Weinstein: You hear pe- "Oh, a million is nothing to him. That's like chump change." No, I d- I've now met enough people who are seriously rich to tell you that a million dollars is not chump change to any one of these people. So the-- Mike Lazaridis endowed the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I think, was it Citicorp, Citigroup did the Santa Fe Institute. I don't see anything that is trying to endow something new. You know, Bill Gates, who came from the traditional and traditional economy, you know, probably did more trying to get s- you know, Sal Khan and the Khan Academy going on th-than I've seen coming, the energy coming out of the Bitcoin universe. So my, my feeling about this is that I'm somewhat watching a different version of the tech money, where the tech money came with the tech ideology. Software eats the world, and that was inhibiting, inhibitory of any attempt to actually rebuild the world. Well, why, why rebuild the world if software's there to eat it? Well, in, in some sense, the problem with Bitcoin is, is that it's gonna put the money in the hands of people who understand that certain central f-features need to be decentralized, but there are other things that need to be recentralized, right? And so that's gonna be a much harder lesson to a group of people. And, and trust is important, right? Trust is-- Yes, it's, it's true that sometimes you can't trust other people, but sometimes you have to.

02:04:59
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

02:05:00
Eric Weinstein: And if you can't figure out how to get to trust, to recentralization, to building, in some sense, you're just one more utopian community that came through promising everything to everyone, and you couldn't deliver. And so the reason that I stay on this is, is that when somebody says, "Bitcoin fixes that. Bitcoin fixes everything," I get real dumb. I say, "Great, 'cause I've got a laundry list of things that I want."

02:05:24
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

02:05:24
Eric Weinstein: And then people say, "Oh, well, Bitcoin can't fix this. It can't..." And then if you like-

02:05:28
Travis Kling: I understand the call to action

02:05:28
Eric Weinstein: ... then shut the fuck up.

02:05:30
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a meme though. It's a bit like when somebody sh-

02:05:32
Eric Weinstein: It's not-

02:05:32
Peter McCormack: But have-- No, but that's-

02:05:33
Eric Weinstein: No, but that-

02:05:33
Peter McCormack: ... Paul's a meme, but they say it to Elon Musk.

02:05:35
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.

02:05:35
Peter McCormack: It's a meme.

02:05:36
Eric Weinstein: Actually, it's not a meme.

02:05:38
Travis Kling: No, n- I, I, I understand your point.

02:05:39
Eric Weinstein: Because when you say that, what you're doing is you're playing the Motte and Bailey game. "Oh, no, no, we didn't really mean that." Yes, you did.

02:05:47
Peter McCormack: Semi-meme. It's a, it's a-- Look, it's a meme.

02:05:49
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no.

02:05:49
Peter McCormack: You know what memes are exaggerations.

02:05:50
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. I get really dumb. Maybe you mean it, maybe you don't. Do you? I think you don't.

02:05:56
Peter McCormack: Well, some people do.

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: I don't think they mean it.

02:05:59
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

02:06:00
Eric Weinstein: I think that w- the, the people with Bitcoin wealth don't mean it. I think that the point is, is that when it comes-- That we have a huge number of problems. Now, the reason I bring up the inflation problem is, is that it's the clearest indication to me that the community doesn't even care about what the community cares about.

02:06:19
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I, I-- So again, I disagree with you. I, I mentioned Marty Bent. I mean, he's r- he's regularly talking about this, and there are other people having the conversation. They care about the inflation problem. Maybe they just don't want to attack it the way you do.

02:06:31
Eric Weinstein: That's fine.

02:06:31
Peter McCormack: Or they haven't boarded your idea.

02:06:32
Eric Weinstein: Then it doesn't fix it. What I'm try-- Y-y-- W-We're not understanding each other. What I'm trying to say is I happen to be in possession of a piece of knowledge, and that is, is that all of neoclassical economics is vulnerable to the changing preference problem in ordina- ordinal welfare theory. I also-

02:06:51
Peter McCormack: But this is, this is a claim. This is your claim.

02:06:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but it's a mathematical claim.

02:06:58
Peter McCormack: Well, uh-

02:06:59
Eric Weinstein: I, I can show you what the p- the paradox it results in.

02:07:03
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what's the process it should go through? Is it paper, peer-reviewed, tested? Like, uh, y-

02:07:08
Eric Weinstein: No. Well-

02:07:09
Peter McCormack: It has to be sold to people.

02:07:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. As-assume that I give you a paper.

02:07:12
Peter McCormack: Yes.

02:07:14
Eric Weinstein: Forget about peer review. Assume that I give you a paper which shows what the solution is, shows you places in the literature that says that this problem can't be solved. So on the one hand, it's a backwards compatible solution that is claimed, and another, it's claimed that no solution can exist. My point isn't about gauge theoretic economics in this particular issue. It's this is an opportunity to show you that the economists are not honest. They are not the experts, and they are not honest. Their process of peer review should naturally result in this thing Being accepted. Yes, it does everything that the old system could do, plus it does new things, plus it contradicts the claim that we made in our own literature that this is impossible, right? Now, what is the goal of that? The goal of that is not even the construction of an inflation gauge. It is to say you economists are not the experts on markets. Are we clear? Right? That's the point, which is going on offense against the world's most offensive community. This is the world's number one offensive community intellectually. No other community that I'm aware of would put imperialism after their subject matter. Can you imagine biologists talking about biological imperialism?

02:08:38
Peter McCormack: I, I, I wouldn't imagine thinking about that.

02:08:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, what I'm trying to say is econo- e-economists talk about economic imperialism.

02:08:46
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

02:08:47
Eric Weinstein: It's time for them to suffer a serious intellectual defeat so that the rest of us can get at our own economy.

02:08:56
Peter McCormack: But the intellectual defeat has to be one that was... It has to be.

02:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Look, I, I, I can't say it a million times. There's a, a problem of the theoretical construction of an inflation gauge. Currently, that is something called a Conus Index.

02:09:15
Peter McCormack: Hmm.

02:09:15
Eric Weinstein: You either know about Conus Indices or you don't. If you don't, that's fine.

02:09:19
Peter McCormack: Nope.

02:09:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Cost of living adjustment is based on a Conus Index.

02:09:26
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

02:09:27
Eric Weinstein: Conus Indices are based on welfare, a theory of welfare. Then there's an issue of something called chaining. Are you familiar with chaining?

02:09:37
Peter McCormack: No.

02:09:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So chaining and cost of living adjustments are the two ingredients here, and they're based on a, a theory of preferences over market choices. I want to show that this community is too intellectually corrupt to manage our markets. That is my point.

02:09:58
Peter McCormack: But take my feedback, okay? I think the pieces that you're missing is a way of the average person being able to digest this because I think a lot of people know th- this is important. Y- you know, like-

02:10:11
Eric Weinstein: So send me a bunch of interns, uh-

02:10:13
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying, no, no, no

02:10:14
Eric Weinstein: ... No, no, no. Send me a bunch of interns, and we'll do it in a, in a studio, and you guys will tell me. But I, I don't wanna do this, right? What's boring me about this-

02:10:22
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but y- you're contradicting yourself now-

02:10:24
Eric Weinstein: Go ahead

02:10:24
Peter McCormack: ... because you said, "I wanna go to war."

02:10:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:10:26
Peter McCormack: Okay, but then hear me out. What I'm saying is the piece you're missing is, like, a lot of this stuff, it just goes over people's heads. It's like you talk about a whole bunch of concepts and bring them together, and honestly I'm like, "What the fuck is he talking about?" And I... Am I an idiot-

02:10:37
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

02:10:37
Peter McCormack: ... or is, like, everyone?

02:10:38
Eric Weinstein: Come on. It's, it's the-

02:10:39
Peter McCormack: No, what I'm saying is that all, all you need is a way of making that to trans- translate. Trust me, as someone whose job is... Like, I am known for doing a show that gets people to break things down so the everyman can understand it.

02:10:50
Eric Weinstein: Do you have a whiteboard?

02:10:51
Peter McCormack: What? No.

02:10:52
Eric Weinstein: I'll, I'll do it right here for you on a whiteboard.

02:10:53
Peter McCormack: [laughs] Travis has to go to dinner. [laughs]

02:10:57
Eric Weinstein: Next, next episode.

02:10:59
Peter McCormack: Next ep-- I think... No, no, I'm, I'm not that I'm with you and not against you. What I'm saying is what... If I don't understand, I don't understand.

02:11:06
Eric Weinstein: Then maybe it's pointless. May- it w-

02:11:07
Peter McCormack: No. No, no, no. You're giving up because you're giving up.

02:11:09
Eric Weinstein: It's not that I'm giving up. I, I have to figure out where... L- Let me give you my calculation.

02:11:13
Peter McCormack: Yeah.

02:11:14
Eric Weinstein: My issue is I have a different issue than the rest of you. Many of you guys don't wanna be under anyone's thumb. The libertarian wing of your community is like, "Don't tell-"

02:11:23
Peter McCormack: Okay. Well, I've agreed I'm not in that.

02:11:25
Eric Weinstein: I know. I know. "Don't tell me what to do, man." Well, I have some of that in me even though I'm not a libertarian.

02:11:30
Peter McCormack: Mm-hmm.

02:11:30
Eric Weinstein: But my f- feeling is slightly, slightly smaller, right? My feeling is if you're dumber than I am and you're not public-spirited, I don't want your hands on the wheel. If you're smarter than I am and you're public-spirited, we can talk about it. But if you're dumber and you're not public-spirited, there's no way in the world I want you telling me what to do.

02:11:51
Peter McCormack: What if you're dumber and public-spirited?

02:11:53
Eric Weinstein: I don't think they are dumber and public-spirited. It's an interesting puzzle. What if they're smarter and not public-spirited?

02:12:00
Peter McCormack: Hmm. All, all I'm saying is, like, we could, we could do circles.

02:12:04
Eric Weinstein: I know, but I'm, I'm not interested in that. What I'm interested in is I want the people who currently are pretending that they know enough about the e- economy to force-- I want them to be forced to admit, "Yeah, we don't know how to do stuff."

02:12:19
Peter McCormack: Yeah. And what I'm telling you is that I think to get there, my personal experience is that you n- you need to find a way of making this so everyone can understand, and when I say that, then not to say you don't get. Like-

02:12:32
Eric Weinstein: No, it's not that, Peter

02:12:32
Peter McCormack: ... you clearly get.

02:12:33
Eric Weinstein: If I, if, if I have a board and we spend an hour and a half, right?

02:12:38
Peter McCormack: Next trip. [laughs]

02:12:39
Eric Weinstein: Then, then the objection becomes something else.

02:12:42
Peter McCormack: Okay.

02:12:43
Eric Weinstein: And then the objection becomes something else. My feeling is I'm 55 years old. I'm gonna be checked out. You know, in 40 years' time I'm out of this place, okay? I don't wanna have a non-converging conversation. What I wanna do is I want to disintermediate the people who've stepped forward and say, "We are the smart people," and my feeling is, "No, you're not." And in part, you know, part of, of celebrating Satoshi and saying, you know, Janet Yellen isn't our A team intellectually. I don't know who Satoshi is, but Satoshi, you know, in the internet language, Satoshi greater than Yellen, okay? So this is supposed to be the smart kids. I wanna go to war with the theory that has us under somebody else's thumb because whether, whether it's Paul Krugman or, you know, K- Marty Feldstein, uh, i- you know, in the old days, somebody's always telling us, Alan Greenspan, "Okay, the oracle has spoken." I'm anti-oracle, and the most important thing to being anti-oracle is to say, "You guys always claim that you're the smartest people in the room. You, you, you claim that you have the right to be in sociology, in psychology, in every field weaker than you are

02:13:57
Travis Kling: Okay?

02:13:57
Eric Weinstein: Are you talking about us as the big-

02:13:58
Travis Kling: No, no, no, no

02:13:59
Eric Weinstein: Oh, who?

02:13:59
Travis Kling: The central banking-

02:14:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:14:01
Travis Kling: ... neoclassical economists.

02:14:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:14:02
Travis Kling: So I, I keep thinking, "Oh, okay, so you guys have a problem with my enemy. So you're supposed to be my really close friends."

02:14:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But we are.

02:14:11
Travis Kling: Well, okay.

02:14:11
Eric Weinstein: That's why we want to have this conversation.

02:14:12
Travis Kling: I, I think-

02:14:12
Eric Weinstein: Everyone's gonna listen to this

02:14:13
Travis Kling: ... I, I, I think that, I think that there would be a general view, uh, amongst a, a lot of Bitcoiners that you wouldn't affect change by calling them out. Like we all... Like, like g- go log on to YouTube and watch a, a, uh, Jerome Powell live press conference, and in the comment section on the YouTube video, all it is is people going, "Money printer go brr and buy Bitcoin." That sort... And you sit there and you go, Bitcoin is, if it succeeds, going to dismantle all of this. And, uh, you know, calling it out, whether or not it, it, it's with a, a research paper or whether it's, you know, just, you know, yelling as loud as you can, it's not gonna make them change. They're not gonna change their actions.

02:14:58
Eric Weinstein: No, but just put, put some money behind it. You guys are money people. You, you love money. You talk about money constantly. I keep talking about this technology. People bang me on the head, right? "Hey, Eric, wake up. It's money." Okay, it's money. You're rich. You're rich. You're so incredibly rich. You bought planes with your Bitcoin. Fantastic. You bought private islands. Love it. Why don't you put some money into disintermediating the people who are constantly going to keep you sidelined?

02:15:27
Travis Kling: I get that. Yeah.

02:15:27
Eric Weinstein: And you're not, you're not doing that. Or why don't you put some money into physics research trying to get us off the planet? You're not doing that. So then the point is, okay, but I bought my mother a, a new c- new house. It's like, awesome. Wonderful. I'm so... Well, you don't understand, that's freedom. I get it.

02:15:46
Travis Kling: I, I think you're miscategorizing. I think that narrative is miscategorizing a group of people.

02:15:51
Eric Weinstein: Please tell me.

02:15:51
Travis Kling: 'Cause it's... Look, of course some people are gonna buy themselves some nice things at some point.

02:15:54
Eric Weinstein: No, no, and that's-

02:15:55
Travis Kling: Yeah, yeah. But the point being is like-

02:15:56
Eric Weinstein: Who doesn't want to buy themselves... That's not my point. My point is you're not-

02:16:00
Travis Kling: They've got different agendas from you maybe.

02:16:03
Eric Weinstein: No, they... Okay, this is, this is just... It, it, it's irritating for the following reason. When you have a leading brand, which is X solves everything, and then you don't want it to get hit, and you say, "That's just a meme." And then you say, you know, actually the community this, and then you say, "Okay, well, I task the community." Actually, there is no community. It's just like, okay, is this all quicksilver? Is it... Well, so and so speaks for our community. Really? They, they speak for your... No one speaks for our community. Oh, shit. T- trust, you know. We don't trust, we verify. Oh, but we trusted Elon. Oh, but now we don't trust Elon. It's just like, okay, let's calm down. What is a statement? What does Bitcoin fix? And who do you trust? And where is the community? And who more or less is thought to be an important voice in it? Because otherwise, it's just like the contradiction of the last thing somebody said.

02:17:05
Travis Kling: It's a, it's a, it's just-

02:17:06
Eric Weinstein: You should read Saylor.

02:17:07
Travis Kling: No, it's just-

02:17:08
Eric Weinstein: Does Saylor speak for the community? Not at all.

02:17:10
Travis Kling: Well, it's just-

02:17:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:17:11
Travis Kling: ... it is, the, the reality of it, it's a moving feast. It changes. It evolves.

02:17:15
Eric Weinstein: Great.

02:17:15
Travis Kling: It changes shape.

02:17:16
Eric Weinstein: So it's a-

02:17:16
Travis Kling: It's like a, it's like a, it's like a, I don't know, like a brain.

02:17:19
Eric Weinstein: Terminator 2.

02:17:20
Travis Kling: And it's learning. Yeah, yeah, Terminator.

02:17:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:17:22
Travis Kling: Yes.

02:17:22
Eric Weinstein: So it... Yes.

02:17:23
Travis Kling: I tried to break into the cinema to see that because they wouldn't let me in.

02:17:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but the Terminator 2 thing-

02:17:27
Travis Kling: Yeah

02:17:27
Eric Weinstein: ... so it's shape-shifting. It's quicksilver.

02:17:29
Travis Kling: Yeah.

02:17:29
Eric Weinstein: You don't understand it. You understand zen.

02:17:30
Travis Kling: And it's learning.

02:17:32
Eric Weinstein: But that also makes it much less interesting. I mean, in part, the idea is I, I very specifically don't think that we're gonna get rid of government.

02:17:45
Travis Kling: Yeah, I don't, I-

02:17:45
Eric Weinstein: Government is gonna continue.

02:17:46
Travis Kling: I agree.

02:17:46
Eric Weinstein: I don't think we're gonna get rid of all fiat currency for various reasons.

02:17:50
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

02:17:51
Eric Weinstein: I do think that we have a s- an upcoming rendezvous where sovereign... I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure to make Bitcoin highly regulated.

02:18:02
Travis Kling: It already is in places.

02:18:03
Eric Weinstein: And it really bothers me about what's coming. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to disintermediate the blockchain because I didn't want things to be traceable even if everything was anonymous, and then I understand, okay, well, we founded it on this, and so if you take that away, you're, you're attacking... At the end of the day, it's very intellectually unsatisfying to be caught in the same conversations when you see a world that you wanna get to, and every time you try to hit one of the claims of the community that you think that can get you to that next level, you run up against a different claim of the community, right?

02:18:39
Travis Kling: Mm-hmm.

02:18:39
Eric Weinstein: And so that's part of what the frustration is. The part of the frustration is, is that I saw Bitcoin really early on and got wildly excited about it, and I, and I wrote this thing, please check out Go Virtual, Young Man. Um, and then it just doesn't... Like same world. I'm still looking at the same world. I'm looking at a, a different group of people who've gotten some control over their own lives by believing in something heterodox that worked, and I think that's beautiful and it's wonderful. But man, I was excited about this beyond that. I was excited about this as a society world-changing event. And, and, and-

02:19:23
Travis Kling: It is

02:19:24
Eric Weinstein: ... maybe the problem is, is that I got excited in 2010, and I got excited because I thought that this w- that there was more, that Bitcoin was more. In my own mind, I saw distributed computing as we can port the conservation laws of the physical world into the digital layer. We can reestablish ourselves in some reflection of ourselves inside of our computers. We can take the network of computers and turn it into something like the space-time, um, substrate, you know? And we can have, just as gold travels on the space-time substrate, we could have digital gold traveling here and gold has no stench. So we could get rid of the stench, right? That was, that was sort of my thinking. And then I had this idea that from the early '90s, markets are just gauge theory. And you know what? Gold, which is a physical system of quarks and leptons, is also just gauge theory. And there's some sort of beautiful hope that we would do something that would be radically different, that would be beyond capitalism, beyond communism, beyond this planet, and really reflect on some sort of world-changing potential. And I guess the thing that I'm seeing is, is just like, okay, somebody came up with a new fucking meme.

02:20:43
Peter McCormack: No way, man.

02:20:43
Eric Weinstein: Or laser eyes or-

02:20:45
Peter McCormack: No

02:20:46
Eric Weinstein: ... oh, you know, toxicity is our best feature because it tells people who don't belong here to go away. It's like, whatever. I'm getting fucking tired.

02:20:53
Peter McCormack: Uh, listen. W- I, I'm gonna finish, but I think we, we can always come back to this. Memes are powerful, so I would defend memes. But do I agree with them all the time? No. Do we take things too far sometimes? But this is a decentralized moving beast. But the thing about Bitcoin that's great, Eric, is that everyone has the freedom to do what they want. If you want to do this, then you can go and do it. My only feedback to you is that, uh, I'm not the smartest man, but I am a fucking good salesman. And maybe, maybe there's another way to sell this to people.

02:21:28
Eric Weinstein: Sell what?

02:21:28
Peter McCormack: Sell this... The way that the approach to attacking the neoclassical economists, maybe it's just, it just needs sharpening. Like the, the, the... Like we as Bitcoiners, we need to sharpen our tools. We sometimes, we make good arguments and bad arguments. Maybe the arguments that you want to build, they just need sharpening in a way that is digestible by a, a large group of people. Because I, I would, I would imagine when people listen to this interview, and I think it's been very different what I expected and a lot of fun, but on this point, I could imagine, I could be wrong, but I imagine some people will say, "I, I kind of got lost and didn't understand it." I've got a good gauge for that. That's my gauge theory. I've got a good gauge for that. So maybe that's what it is. But time to digest it, I think.

02:22:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, my guess is, is that this is gonna land in some way where people are just gonna go back to their snap-to-the-grid perspective. Like, "I heard a bunch of stuff and it, you know, it didn't really speak to Bitcoin," or, "This guy really just, you know, uh, he's against the community, doesn't understand toxic-" That's tiring. What I'm really excited about, let me just be very clear about it. You've got the world's greatest recent innovation by some measures, and it's doing an enormous amount for an enormous number of people. Unfortunately, it comes with a little bit of ethos, which is it lends to a simplification. Namely, we can get by with memes, we can get by with slogans, and, uh, toxicity is our friend. Um, trust don't ver- uh, verify, don't trust. These are not things that are mature enough to replace the corrupt structures that I think are within its reach.

02:23:15
Peter McCormack: Mm.

02:23:16
Eric Weinstein: And so my feeling is I wanted to align myself, not necessarily to become this community, but to align myself with this community for fighting our common enemy, which is allowing, in general, much older people who do not understand what pressures we're under to continue to direct our society from positions of power. And my concern is that for some reason, the, the memes are hollow. If, if Bitcoin can't even go after the neoclassical economists who populate the Fed in an area where they are totally vulnerable, which is the topic of inflation, for which Bitcoin... I mean, this is Bitcoin's killer product. Its killer product is, is that you can hide from central bankers who are living through some MMT fantasy. You can, you can short central bankers using Bitcoin. My feeling about this was, hey, it happens that they don't know how to compute this. It just... It could be that they did know how to compute this, and that they still didn't want to compute, in which case I would have nothing to offer. But the, by virtue of the fact that they can't compute this, and it's in your wheelhouse, and you're not even going after that, or you're not even asking the right questions. Which, you know, this is like, "Well, Eric, can you sell it?" Well, why don't you send me a team of salespeople? Go, go take some Bitcoin and buy a team of salespeople and tell me what I need to sell, and then tell me a bunch of visual stuff that I need to do, and go, go buy the vis- visual stuff, then hold a conference, then have a prize. But ultimately, I would like to stop listening to Paul Krugman, and it's very important that if we find the thermal port on the economics Death Star, that our aim be true. And gentlemen, I thought that was what the Bitcoin community wanted to do. Why are you and your X-wing fighters rocketing down, you know, the canyons on a Death Star headed right for the exhaust vent, and you're, and y- you, you won't even take your shot on inflation? Are you guys kidding me?

02:25:22
Peter McCormack: No, listen, look, we are. We're, we're just not seeing it the way you see it. We're definitely going there. But look, it's, it is part of our narrative. But let's let people digest this. Let's let... Let's see what people say, because there will be some feedback on this.

02:25:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:25:35
Peter McCormack: But thank you for coming.

02:25:36
Eric Weinstein: Thank you for having me.

02:25:36
Peter McCormack: I appreciated it. It was definitely a challenge and a test, but it was definitely worth it. Uh, Travis. A pleasure. Thank you for coming on, man. Enjoyed the conversation. Thank you to my man Rich for Lenders Borough Studio. Um, I'm sure we'll do this again at some point.

02:25:49
Eric Weinstein: Inshallah, my friend.

02:25:50
Peter McCormack: Inshallah. [upbeat music]