WBD171 Audio Transcription

Michael Goldstein on Rejecting All Forms of Activism

Interview date: Thursday 22nd November 2019

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Michael Goldstein from Noded podcast. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Michael Goldstein, the co-host of the Noded Podcast and President of the Nakamoto Institute. We discuss Libertarianism, the free market, rejecting activism and the transition to an anarcho-capitalist society.

“The reason that we’re into Bitcoin is not that Bitcoin is the end itself, it’s because of what we believe Bitcoin enables.”

— Michael Goldstein

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Finally, Michael on the podcast, Bitstein on the podcast! Good to have you man! So what are your favourite 5 alt coins?

Michael Goldstein: My 5 favorite alt coins? Definitely Tron Chain-link, Aurora coin, we got to put Dogecoin in there.

Peter McCormack: I haven't got anything. I've got all the shit I've been given and that's it. I've got some Ripple, I've never converted a Bitcoin. When it goes up to $567...

Michael Goldstein: You're a bag holder! I'm sure it'll go up again at some point. We got to make Garlinghouse the richest man in the world again.

Peter McCormack: Well that's the other stupidity... Look we're going to get into talking about alts coins now, because I was going to go, "yeah, but they're selling off 400 million!" Let's not talk about this, let's talk about Bitcoin fixing things. So I was meant at BitBlockBoom, it was in Dallas right?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah BitBlockBoom. Remember you're on the list.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I'd been traveling a lot back and forth and my kids kind of got a bit fed up and I was like, "oh, we're going to go on holiday to America. By the way, I've got to go to a conference" and they were a bit like "urgh." So I said, "okay" and I let then know I couldn't go and we went to Vietnam, but it sounds like I missed a really good event.

Michael Goldstein: It was a very good event. First thing I'll say, family is more important. The reason that we're into Bitcoin is not that Bitcoin is the end itself, it's because of what we believe that Bitcoin enables and I think for a lot of us having families and a prosperous life and peace and all of that, that's why we're in it. So no hard feelings for missing out on the conference, but it was an extraordinary conference!

Peter McCormack: I'll confess, I've still not watched your presentation. I know what it's going to be in it, right?

Michael Goldstein: You know a lot of the haters didn't watch it either!

Peter McCormack: Well that's the same, the haters tend to do two things. I like the haters I get before a show is released. I'm like, "you haven't heard it yet, listen to it first!" Or my favorite haters are the ones that go, "oh, I listened to your show, it's fucking bullshit" and they do that every show, so they keep listening, they keep coming back and saying it's bullshit!

Michael Goldstein: Right, which just gives you more ad money!

Peter McCormack: But you're a nice guy man, you're like a really nice guy and you went out there and triggered the fuck out of a lot of people!

Michael Goldstein: Yes, I do enjoy mass triggerings! In person I am nice and I think online I am nice. I can be aggressive sometimes, although there's fewer types of arguments I like to get into online.

Peter McCormack: You don't Twitter fight?

Michael Goldstein: Not as much anymore. I used to back in, let's say 2013 through 2016, I was really in there with a prison shank, just stabbing anything around!

Peter McCormack: I'm trying to wean myself off it.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah and I guess actually when... I have deleted my Twitter account a couple of times and I came back actually around UASF and that was sort of a beacon to me of like, "oh, I need to be out there fighting the good fight" and I guess probably, I would have to go back and look at my Twitter history, but I'm sure I was getting into plenty of nice battles then.

Peter McCormack: But when you delete your account, don't you lose everything?

Michael Goldstein: I did at the time.

Peter McCormack: Now it's risky though!

Michael Goldstein: Now my Twitter account is way bigger than it had ever been. I brought back the Twitter account prior to the 2017 bull run, so UASF was of course much before that, so that really bolstered the account, because a few choice tweets, choice shit posts on the way up, just kept really bringing in the followers and stuff.

Peter McCormack: You're more of a retweeter?

Michael Goldstein: I go through phases. Sometimes there's a lull and you don't always have necessarily something new to say, at least I don't. So every time that there's a really cool technical thing going on, I'm going to want to retweet it.

The guys at Bitcoin Optech even pointed out to me that they reliably know that Pierre and I are going to be retweeting their stuff, because the technical stuff is very important and Pierre's just constantly putting out good content and I just want to signal boost good content.

But occasionally I'll get into the mode where it's like, I have my fight that I'm trying to make, I'm trying to craft certain ideas and that's when I go hard in the paint.

Peter McCormack: And you've got Pierre closer to you now?

Michael Goldstein: Working on it! He's not in Austin yet, but he'll be here soon.

Peter McCormack: Does that mean more Noded shows?

Michael Goldstein: Yes! We really want to set up a studio and everything and make it serious, because why not shit post 24/7 if possible!

Peter McCormack: The daily Noded.

Michael Goldstein: Yes! My whole life I've always had opinions that don't resonate with everyone. So I'm used to people disagreeing with me and because of that, I think had a joy in having people disagree with me. If I actually believe I'm right, now then what's the issue with them disagreeing with me?

Peter McCormack: What's the background to you and Pierre, because you have this amazing relationship?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, we met at the University of Texas. So there was a group called Libertarian Longhorns at the University of Texas. I was connected to a lot of the college libertarian groups and I will put my foot down that Libertarian Longhorns was the best libertarian group out of them all. From that we also had a spin off group that I'd started called The Mises Circle that was focused on Austrian economics and I think Pierre found us through one of our Facebook groups and was getting into fights with some of the people on there.

So naturally we got along very well, we both came from that same sort of anarco capitalist, Austrian libertarian background and we're both a bit trollish, just in our nature. So we got along very quickly and very well. The Mises circle also was where all of our Bitcoin stuff started. So we've just been fighting in the trenches of Bitcoin since the day we learned about it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so let's talk about the libertarian stuff, because I'm new to the libertarian rabbit hole. So I drove the other day from New York to Ohio, which is an awful, boring drive, which I didn't realize at the time. I like to do on these trips, a couple of big drives, so I can do some podcasts and do some audio books. I finally did "Economics in One Lesson."

I skipped some of the chapters, they seemed a bit out of date, but very useful. I listened to probably 30 Tom Woods' episodes and right now, I'm regularly fighting on Facebook with my friends regarding a lot of the political debate at the moment because we've got an election coming up, we've got Brexit. So today Labour released their manifesto, I don't know if you know about this, but there's a lot of far left socialist policies, like re-nationalisation and a huge increase in corporation tax, a lot of new socialist policies.

So I'm sat there now in my new trench, I'm not comfortable debating on Twitter because there's a lot of smart people there, but I'm on Facebook arguing with people saying "this is bullshit, it doesn't make sense, it's dangerous" and I'm getting a lot of flak back. People think I'm nasty now, like I had two people call me and one text me, concerned about my welfare and that they think I've become some like nasty Nazi. Have you experienced that?

Michael Goldstein: Not that much, although I have quite the bubble, so I just hang out with libertarians and most of my friends have been libertarians since probably even late high school. So I don't really deal with that too much, but there has been a trend where anyone who is outside of the status quo, there are certain words that they want to use to just label it all and it's very unfortunate, because it obviously poisons the well of debate, but that's also the purpose of it, because they just wants to shut down opinion rather than have a discussion.

From their perspective, the reason is because they have their own slippery slope visions of how things could turn, "if you start to allow this kind of thing, you end up with concentration camps", the same way that they might view libertarians or what libertarians might actually have, which is if you start to allow this, you're going to end up with concentration camps. So everyone has their slippery slope visions and so they kind of want to cut it off at the pass.

So I get why they think that, but for someone like me, I like intellectual freedom and discourse and stuff. I don't get afraid of various ideas and I can handle contemplating them without necessarily taking on all of the conclusions and incorporating them into my life.

Day to day, no matter what I'm kind of contemplating at the moment, whether it's because I was like digging into some Marxist type stuff or if I was reading some hardcore libertarian or other stuff, day to day I'm still just like a normal guy, going about my business and I'm able to just contemplate that. I don't want to like psychoanalyze other people, but I assume they have a certain fear of other people playing with these ideas because of where they think those ideas would lead.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I also think there's a certain conditioning. So I'll take it from a personal perspective pre-Bitcoin, not 2013 when I was using the Silk Road, let's go from 2017 when I first really started having an interest and then doing the podcast and reading. To me, politics was left or right or center. so you're very much a left wing socialist or you were a right wing conservative, but with a bunch of people who maybe have kind of centrist ideas, but at no point had...

So when I studied economics, we have something called A-level, which is like senior school, at no point in Economics did we ever get introduced to Austrian Economics. It was Keynesian economics, that's all we were taught and it was lauded as a hero of economics.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah and this is why, you mentioned Tom Woods, he talks about the index card of allowable opinion and in political theory they call that the Overton Window, which is, these are the sort of types of opinions that you can have in polite society and as soon as you step out of that, people get really upset, perhaps for some good reasons, perhaps for many bad reasons.

Peter McCormack: I don't think some people have been exposed sometimes to alternative ideas.

Michael Goldstein: Right and the unfortunate thing is that something like Austrian Economics, as soon as they hear it, because it's outside of that, they also assume that it's some kind of evil thing or for instance, you take any government program, whether it's some kind of a socialized healthcare and I don't mean just like what Britain has, I would call the United States, socialist healthcare as well.

Anytime that the government's getting involved in wanting to control the production of something or public education or what have you, people's responses are effectively, "but what about my roads?" So it's like, "who's going to build the roads" and they assume or "oh, you just want children to die, you don't care about the children, because you don't want to educate them." It's like, "no, no-one said anything about not wanting to educate them, it's that I don't think the government is best at providing that education."

But unfortunately there is that divide where they assume the worst once you've stated that you don't like how the government does it, they assume that you don't like that service altogether, which is also why like, "oh you're an anarcho capitalist, you must hate the law." No, actually I like law, I like law and order, I just see how the government handles things and we can point to endless cases of them not handling the situation very well for systemic reasons.

Peter McCormack: Ross Ulbricht.

Michael Goldstein: Ross Ulbricht is a great example.

Peter McCormack: My first visit to Austin, nearly two years ago, was to interview Lynn Ulbricht here, in the city. I think what you're saying is, "let's punish aggression, murder, rape, violence, fraud, but let's not punish somebody for smoking weed."

Michael Goldstein: Right, and even in Ross's case, my understanding of Katherine Forester's actual ruling as judge, was effectively "we're throwing you in jail for double life plus 40, because of your philosophy." So that's practically a thought crime. It wasn't because he himself was engaging in these behaviors. In fact, the Silk Road itself had law by the way, in the sense that you are not allowed to sell stolen goods, anything involving the harm of children and stuff like that.

Peter McCormack: Well I take a slightly different view on Ross, but a more practical view and I asked Lynn this question actually. My view is that whether or not I agree with the laws of the land, they exist and for my own protection I will certainly abide by some of them. So I don't smoke weed because it doesn't agree with me, but I don't have any issue with it and if I wanted to smoke a spliff at home.

I certainly wouldn't buy a pound of weed for a friend and hand it over, even if I believe philosophically it's fine, because I don't want to risk... So one of the questions I put to Lynn was, Ross did commit certain crimes under the law, because he wouldn't have been paying tax, essentially he's money laundering, so should he face punishment? As I remember, I think she said "yes", but time served now would be fair.

Michael Goldstein: My understanding of Ross, I haven't really interacted with him much personally or anything like that, but from what I know about Ross, had they given him the slaps on the wrist, he would go back to normal life and never cause harm again. So the fact that they felt the need to throw him in a cage until his bones rot, just like disintegrate into nothingness is justified, to me as a libertarian, that doesn't strike me as law and order.

Especially when all kinds of other people are getting away with all kinds of terrible things and no-one bats an eye. We see, I forget his name, the DA in San Francisco now who literally worked for Hugo Chavez and is saying he's not going to prosecute all kinds of various street crimes and yet they want to, "oh, let's focus on the corporations and stuff." So tech is the evil thing and it's okay if everyone's causing crime.

Can we call that law and order? It's the DA that's putting down the edict and I guess if you have what's called legal positivism, which is like, what the law of the land says, is the way it goes, then if he says that this is how things are, then it is. But I think it's right for some people to also look towards what would they make sense of how law ought to work and give their input.

There's also something to be said about, not purposefully causing any alarms to go off. I don't do drugs, I don't recommend people do drugs, I don't like war on drugs and not because I want people to be doing drugs and selling drugs, actually part of me finds it annoying that I'm going to have to deal with the smell of weed more in my life as it gets more legalized, but at the same time, I recognize what are the costs of having the war on drugs, which has just been massive.

You get people thrown in jail way more than they should, the goods still are valued, so there's just going to be a creation of a black market, which has all kinds of other issues, there's extra illegal violence, money laundering is different thing, but there's financial things that go under the radar and stuff. It's a mess and you don't help by making these things illegal.

Peter McCormack: Well, if you look at the change in the US, depending on state, but the majority of States have now either legalized or decriminalized, society has not collapsed and it's professionalized it! I went out to Bitcoin Mom's shop in Colorado, Jack Mallers' mom and recorded a show, but it's professionalized it. Before it'd be in a car park, it would be with a drug dealer, who'd be an hour late, he'd piss you around and you wouldn't know if you'd get the right amount.

Michael Goldstein: And who knows if they've laced it with something!

Peter McCormack: Yeah! That's less of a problem with weed, but certainly, I don't know how much, you know my backstory, but I was a cocaine addict and that certainly was a problem. You didn't know what it was laced with, the Silk Road was a godsend for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because of the review system, the free market operation, you were more reassured about what you were buying, so that was the first thing.

You were more reassured about the value of what you were buying, but actually a side thing that a lot of people didn't realize, it became very helpful to me, as I sank into the depths of my addiction, I was actually using the forums for advice saying, "look, my body's doing this, I'm feeling this" and that's kind of when I realized I was fucked. But actually that is the help I had that I needed, in the environment I needed.

Once that's gone you bring back all the risks of a black market. But yeah, it's kind of interesting and added to that also, going back to the Facebook thing, Facebook has become a testing ground of ideas for me. Actually Facebook and Twitter. Some of the things I put out on Twitter or Facebook, I don't always believe, but I use it as a testing ground for ideas to see responses and it has become super useful. But Facebook also has become a very interesting testing ground.

So on some of the libertarian side of things, I'm interested in talking about it with you because I think at the moment I consider myself maybe a moderate libertarian. I like a lot of the philosophy, I think of it is rational, but the problem I have with like full anarchist libertarian is, and I've still not seen this properly explained, is essentially how do we wean ourselves off the current system? What is the process from where we are, to the full anarcho capitalistic society? I can't see that.

Somebody might've explained it, I talked about it with Erik Voorhees and he talks about actually what we should strive for, right now, is just less government, 5%, 1% and keep moving to less government, which to me feels responsible, because at least you can see the impact on society. Sorry, I'm throwing a lot in there, but I just want to throw one other thing in with that.

So when I was listening to "Economics in One Lesson" and the one lesson being that you don't look at the impact of a policy on a single group of people, you look at the impact on everyone. If for anarcho capitalist libertarian ideas, if there's the potential that it has a net negative on society and people, is there therefore potentially an argument for some form of collectivism? Do you understand the question?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, I think that a lot of these words are so loaded that even the term "capitalism", I have a very specific definition of what I mean by it, but I see all kinds of people of various political persuasions that use that word in a completely different way. Some people use it to mean "crony capitalism" and they mean it in a negative sense of, "I don't like the crony capitalism." Some people use it in a positive sense, where they actually support and they treat what we have in America as a free market and they love the big businesses and stuff and so they take that position.

You have all these different loaded things and even stuff like collectivism versus individualism, there's just so much loaded in there. I think this is where Austrian Economics is very useful and praxeology as a study, because what it does is simply, first of all, the whole practice is value free, meaning that it's a positive science. It is making positive claims about how the world operates, it's not saying good or bad.

So in fact someone could study praxeology and come out on the other hand wanting to be a socialist dictator and using what they learned about praxeology to best be a socialistic dictator, because they know, if I want to siphon off wealth in this way, this is the best way to do it because of these praxeological principles. Are you familiar with the term praxeology?

Peter McCormack: No, I was just about to say! I was either going ask you and think, "right, if this is another one of Pete's dumb questions, I'll just Google it afterwards!"

Michael Goldstein: If you don't know and I'm sure a lot of listeners don't as well, it's important to lay this out. So praxeology is the study of human action, prax being action. So basically you have... Ludwig Von Mises' developed praxeology basically as a way of formalizing how economics had always been done. He wasn't really necessarily trying to break through and say, "this is the new way to do economics", you're just saying, "this is how economics is done and here's that epistemology of what is it we're actually doing here?"

What he starts with is some simple axioms about human action. So human action is purposeful behavior, every time you do something it's because you're making a choice between A or not A, for whatever your reasons are. Now it also has extreme subjectivism, so goods only have value because the individual can make use of it and this comes from also a principle of methodological individualism, where you have to...

Even if you have a collective organization that's still made up of individual humans who are acting as humans for their own purposes, they just happen to be doing it in a way that is highly coordinated. So because of that, it's still individuals at work that form the collectivist entity.

Peter McCormack: Rather than enforced by the government?

Michael Goldstein: Right, I mean they can get to that point. I'm saying that government itself, like the government as this big beast that is doing X, Y and Z policies, that's still ultimately individuals. They've just found themselves in a certain complex structure that operates in that fashion, which I would say has negative consequences of various sorts. So when you get down to this and you just go with methodological individualism and subjective value and all of that and you sort of rebuild your picture of things, I think it can help break through a lot of this.

Another thing though, is when I think of anarcho capitalism, I almost don't even think of it as an end point per se. In a sense to me, anarcho capitalism describes the world as it is. There is no ultimate rule and people use tools to achieve ends. All capital to me, is not even necessarily a physical thing. Capital in a strict praxeological sense, is just a good of some kind, that is used for the purpose of producing other goods. So like memes are capital in a sense because it allows better transmission of various ideas.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so intellectual capital?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, that's capitalism to me. So now we've broken it down and that's what I mean by capitalism, so is there good ways of people using capital? Yes. Is there bad ways of using capital? Yes, because the government has capital, but they're clearly not using it in a way that respects certain things about private property that allows wealth to develop and society to flourish. So for me, and going back to, we're always in anarchy, even between nations, there's a state of anarchy. China and the United States are in a state of anarchy in relation to each other. 

So you never really break out of that problem, it's just like what scales are you dealing with that problem? So from that perspective, to me anarcho capitalism, that's almost synonymous with natural law. What are the laws of economics that we can deduce from the principles of praxeology and from praxeology, what can we deduce about legal principles.

So there's arguments as to why, for instance, to claim self-ownership doesn't exist, is a performative contradiction because by claiming that there's no self-ownership, you had to use and control your own body even to create that argument. So from there there's actually certain legal principles, I would argue that the non-aggression principle and stuff like that, is ultimately rooted there. So that's just how it is.

For me, when I look at a society, it's effectively, how well does it abide by this sort of natural law that we can glean from praxeological principles, versus how poorly does it do it and that's sort of the benchmark.

So anarcho capitalism as a toolbox for assessing how, I don't know what word to use, like orderly a society is, but even that has certain connotations, because you say that certain types of order are not exactly pleasing, because if you have communists marching in a line or whatever, but I think you get my point. How civilized, how flourishing of a society, is going to be interconnected to that.

Peter McCormack: So praxeology is going to be the next book I study?

Michael Goldstein: So "Human Action" by Ludwig Von Mises is very, very good, although it's not an easy read. But "Man, Economy and State" by Rothbard was originally written as a sort of easier to digest version of Mises' "Human Action", of just going, "okay we have these principles, how do we lay out economics from here?"

Peter McCormack: So I'm about four chapters into "For a New Liberty". I do the audiobooks, as I get through a book quicker with an audiobook.

Michael Goldstein: Are you doing the Mises one?

Peter McCormack: No, I've got the Audible one. That's what I found was quite tough with "Economics in One Lesson", the guy narrating was very hard to stomach for long periods of time. I find the audiobooks better, as firstly, I'll get through a bit quicker. If a book's a 9 hour audiobook, it would probably take me three weeks to get through that and then I'll put it down or sometimes I'll forget about it.

But with an audiobook, I can do it in two or three days. But I also find I digest it more and I take it in more, when it's read to me than reading it myself. I don't know if you have that thing where you're reading a book and you suddenly realize you've done four pages and taken nothing in and you have to go back?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: I find the audiobooks better. Okay, so that's very interesting, I'll definitely check that out. But, you've followed me long enough on Twitter to realize I like to dumb things down and just try and keep things easier for people to understand and the reason I do that, so for example, back to the testing ground of Facebook is trying to explain complex ideas, in a way that people can digest them. I'm still not clear on almost... Say Ron Paul had been successful, say Ron Paul had amazingly won an election...

Michael Goldstein: Praise be upon him!

Peter McCormack: Well yeah! I'll tell you something about that soon, but I really find the guy super interesting and I think he is one of the most practical politicians, if not the most practical politician, I've ever heard speak. But if he had been successful, say he'd won the election, what would have happened because I don't believe he could have instantly broken down and closed all the social structures that exist within government.

So has this been debated and do you have a personal opinion on what the first 100 days in office or the first year in office, the kind of things, the kind of positive steps that would be almost the... Let's get the marketing term, the quick wins, for changing the way politics works, because you can't get rid of everything.

Michael Goldstein: I'll say that I reject the premises of this question, because this question assumes that the only way to build towards a freer society is via the political route or like the explicitly democratic political route.

Peter McCormack: So do you not vote?

Michael Goldstein: No, I don't bother with that, it's a waste of time. Statistically it doesn't matter. I also, quite frankly, don't know what it takes to run a Department of Defense and as much as I'm anti-war, I also don't know the details of how you would scale that back safely.

I've never had experience war gaming at this high geopolitical level, so I'm not even qualified to be there and if I'm not qualified to be there, I don't know how I'm also qualified to know who should be there. So these are really complex questions that are kind of above my pay grade, as just like a normal American guy. I wish that I had some way to maybe give my input.

Peter McCormack: Is this discussed in libertarian circles then? Is the existence of a libertarian party, antithetical to libertarian ideals?

Michael Goldstein: It depends on what... I mean, libertarian is such a big tent term that it almost... I don't know. For me, I've never cared about the libertarian party. I was actually done with politics before I even learned about libertarianism and only after the fact, I kept seeing Ron Paul's name on mises.org, after I'd been reading a bunch of Rothbard and I was like, "oh, he was one of us the whole time, that's cool!" In 2012, when he was running, I wasn't excited about Ron Paul because I thought he was going to win and we're going to go in.

I mean of course I have my dreams of like, "oh, we go in and we just get the paper shredder going, just industrial size and just every last tax code, law, whatever, we just start shredding." But I wasn't going to stake my hope in the world on that happening. We can see... The concept of the deep state has suddenly become a sort of normalized thing such that, yeah, there's some kind of thing. If this deep bureaucracy is keeping this thing going, rather than just the figurehead, then putting someone in the figurehead position is not going to do much.

They're going to get a lot of backlash and it's going to be very hard to get anything done. Now in the real world, for the rest of us, not dealing with the inanities in Washington, let's go back to that fact of, I think of anarcho capitalism as a process, as this thing that's not the end game, but it's how do you work with what you have, what capital do you have available and how do you accumulate more capital, so you can get things done in your favor, towards what you think society should be.

Peter McCormack: So you therefore live a life following your own libertarian philosophy, but within the constraints of the current law or how far you're willing to push the law? But it's almost like a personal practice?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, I reject activism by and large. I think that people should focus on working and accumulating capital, so that they can actually make change. So what does this mean? This means starting businesses, this means acquiring Bitcoin. Bitcoin is probably the greatest representation of this entire thing that I'm saying, which is why I'm so into Bitcoin, because not only does it encapsulate the process of just creating something to make change, but it's done completely without permission and it strikes right at the root of the entire system.

As far as the whole thing and everything we see around us that we don't like, there's a reason why people like us, are always like, "oh, Bitcoin fixes this." It's because money is such a fundamental piece of civilization, that it touches everything. When you start to poison it, it spreads and so you're getting to the root of problems and that's not to say that sound money is a necessary, but insufficient condition for creating a sound civilization.

But you get to that point, and it did not require... I mean Ron Paul, bless his heart, he was out there speaking against the Federal Reserve since the 70s and he was able to make a huge splash in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but still, we don't even get to audit the Fed, we don't get anything.

There hasn't been a lick of change in the entire Fed process, except the fact that we did get a lot of people who are now kind of openly like, "we don't like this Fed thing." But even prior to Bitcoin, for me, it was like, "okay, maybe we just wait for this thing to collapse and then we all hope that we have some gold or something."

Peter McCormack: But Ron Paul is a good marketing device for libertarianism.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, I used him in 2012. It was like, "hey, like there's this guy and by the way read Rothbard!" But my point is like, he did that since the 70s and yet one guy actually creates capital, in terms of just like this actual working product that you can use and it totally just obviates the entire debate. I don't care about the Fed anymore. If anything there's part of me that's like, "yeah, please continue quantitative easing, bring it on!"

We've moved on from... Peter Thiel and "Zero to One" has his indeterminant pessimism to determine optimism. We've gone from the indeterminate pessimism, like I don't know when this thing is going to go bad, but it's going to go bad and I don't know how and I don't know how we're going to fix it or whatever, to now a libertarian can go through the world and can, "oh, I'll just stack sats and I am funding and I am building a better society." So it's a very definite optimism of, here's this root you can strike at and build a better world.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to go back a step, because you said you reject all forms of activism.

Michael Goldstein: Just generally speaking, I don't think that waving a sign affects much. You might get a message out I guess, but you also don't know how that message is going to be perceived, which is a major issue and it doesn't actually change the substrates of civilization that we're dealing with.

Like when you accumulate capital, you now have something, there's something, I don't want to use the word tangible because we're Bitcoiners here, but there's some real change in your world and some actual control, when you have capital you have more control over you and your surrounding.

Whereas activism is just waving a sign and that's nice, there's a lot of things that people are activists about that I certainly sympathize with, I just personally don't think that it's going to be any use to me and likely not for them, it's up for them to decide for themselves, but likely not for them as well, to be waving a sign if what they really want some change.

We can look at a lot of different, almost cliched examples of how the market has changed things and I think a good example is Uber, where taxi monopolies are actually something that I used to complain about, as the libertarian. Now, why would I ever think about taxi monopolies, because someone actually went out and created the capital to create some alternative and once that alternative exists, then people are just naturally like, "it's a better alternative, so just buy into that."

Peter McCormack: I'm glad you brought that up, because this does take me into other areas. So the Uber example is really interesting, I just watched a documentary by a guy called Jamie Bartlett who did the "Missing Cryptoqueen" podcast, who I just interviewed. He also did a two part BBC documentary called the "Secrets of Silicon Valley" and he went out to India where Uber expanded rapidly and they were providing loans for people to get new cars for Uber, so they could become taxi drivers and it was all very good.

But as the market grew, there became more drivers and not enough customers and the rates dropped and people ended up in debt and there are a number of people who just committed suicide. So whilst I fully understand and like the libertarian philosophy of free markets, I sometimes don't think it fully grasps the human impact sometimes, there is real human impact.

So one of the things I definitely disagree with, is building regulations. I think human greed would lead to the disastrous building of structures. We saw that in China during the earthquakes, where a number of buildings collapsed because they didn't follow the proper building regulations and Ai Wei-Wei actually built and did a whole artistic piece with the wires from the fallen buildings.

Michael Goldstein: I think there was actually a piece of his here in Austin, an art piece.

Peter McCormack: Yeah he's fantastic. We had a massive fire in the UK, Grenfell, which was where a building had cladding around, I don't know if it made the news here, but essentially a bit like you have projects in the US, these are essentially a council tower block. Now they wanted to refurb it because these tower blocks are old and ugly, so they put cladding around the outside.

They used the wrong cladding, a fire started, the building went up in flames, 85 people died. So now they're going around looking at the buildings, looking at all the cladding, at all these buildings. Now correct me where I'm wrong, but the libertarians would say, "well in a free market, if this happened, no-one would use that company to build buildings anymore."

But that doesn't ultimately protect people. Actually the regulations in place weren't followed. Okay, I understand that someone broke the rules, but the regulations are in place and if you speak to my uncle, who was a fireman, he will say there's very specific regulations that are essential, that save lives upfront and I sometimes think... You can do the same sometimes with food as well, the protection from certain foodborne diseases. I think in a fully free market, we don't fully appreciate human greed and the impact on life at the end of it.

Michael Goldstein: Well, so I do disagree with that.

Peter McCormack: But you understand my concern?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely and this, once again, goes back to like, "oh well you don't want the government to be doing the law, therefore you don't like laws at all or something." But I think this is a little more nuanced, because it's saying that unless you have that guy with a stick at some point, beating them, they're going to find ways to cheat that do harm people, just because they want a cheap win.

Peter McCormack: And people can be fucking greedy.

Michael Goldstein: Yes, absolutely. I think one thing to consider first off is that, and you did point to instances of it, part of this, there is a lot of government intervention in the first place. So I don't consider us living in a free market right now. There's many aspects of it that are very free relative to, other economies, but it's not like America is a free market paradise. I tend to, and this is sort of a libertarian bias, I tend to suspect that the government rot is much, much deeper than other people think.

So it's almost like a Rorschach test where someone's going to look at it and it's like, "oh, well this happened because there was too free a market" and I can look at the same thing and am like, "oh, this happened because there was too much government." So there's always going to be that Rorschach thing.

But I was having a thought as you were saying that obviously India had this sort of shock on the market, as Uber came in and like this almost sounds callous, but it sounds like Uber was just a wild success in that it was seriously providing value to it, such that it grew that big.

Peter McCormack: Yes, but they also had themselves... So I interviewed Jamie about the series and one of the things I observed within this, it feels almost abusive positions of Silicon Valley companies is they have such deep pockets, so much VC money, they can go into a market, operate at a loss, squeeze out the competition and then change the rules to their advantage. Whilst they're still part of the free market, sometimes that's kind of abusive.

Michael Goldstein: This gets you to a couple of those things that I wanted to get to. First off, I really get the suspicion that a lot of VC money is basically off easy credit. That is to some degree, like the Federal Reserve prints money, ends up in the pockets of VCs and at the very least, the dollar becomes a game of hot potato where you just have to invest in stuff quickly to just get high returns very fast, rather than investing long-term. The other thing is that, when you have that...

Peter McCormack: But that doesn't change the rules of the game. Even without, that, they would still have deep pockets and they would still be able to go into a third world country or a developing country and have much deeper pockets than the local market and squeeze out the competition and then ultimately drive capital back into the richer country, with what you would say if you believe in a structure, then you would say that they are potentially abusive strategies.

Michael Goldstein: I'm willing to agree with that kind of stuff. I'm not trying to defend Uber in this case or anything, I don't know enough about it. I'm just trying to point out what may be other ways of inquiring into this, to get multiple perspectives. I can imagine a situation where the government has caused so much rot and problems, they've stifled a society so much that when capital is injected like that, it can cause a bigger shock than it otherwise would've been.

So that's perhaps another thing, but the reason I brought up Uber, was not necessarily because I want to talk about like viral Silicon Valley technology, but instead just the role of how society changes with technology, like that process. There's a really great essay that I've referenced a number of times called "The Will To Be Free, The Role of Ideology and National Defense" and this essay comes up because in anarcho capitalism, one of these sort of ultimate questions, when it really boils down to it, is national defense. how do you protect yourself from foreign invaders?

There's many different ways of thinking about that, probably too much for this podcast or whatever, but this essay applies I think more generally than just national defense, which is why I bring it up. What Jeffrey Rogers Hummel argues in it, is that basically right now, the state is the de facto provider of national defense. We live in such a society that we have only accumulated so much capital, that no individual really has the ability to compete with the state anyway, so they remain the provider of X service.

However, as society does accumulate capital and become wealthier as a society, suddenly you can start competing. What he argues is, there could be a day when some individual organization has accumulated enough capital that they can provide an alternative national defense type, some security service and when that goes on the market, if it's marginally beneficial compared to the old service, people will kind of naturally switch over.

Peter McCormack: A national militia!

Michael Goldstein: I don't want to use those words because that's how you get on FBI lists and this is an example of something. I'm not arguing people go and start that necessarily.

Peter McCormack: Again, I'm not sure how practical that is. I understand the argument...

Michael Goldstein: But what I'm saying is, for an industry that people associate with government, this can happen and someone finally accumulates enough capital where they can just provide it. If it's better, people will switch over because why wouldn't they? It's in their simple economic interest, which is like, "I want better service for less money so I'm going to use this service."

Now if this continues happening and people switch over to that new service, then it's won and those people are actually going to have very hard time being told, "oh, you shouldn't have that service." Which is actually interesting in this conversation, where it's almost like... It's actually difficult, 10 years ago or whatever, if you told me like, "okay, there's this company and you just get in some random person's car" and whatever, that'd be absurd and yet now you're having to tell me about some pretty potentially nasty stuff in India for me to sit and think like, "oh, should I not use this service?"

That's how far the sort of ideology, so to speak, around that service has shifted. So I view this as happening. This is the sort of process of anarcho capitalism for a lot of things, where you will accumulate enough capital, where you'll just be able to outcompete the government where it fails. So education, I'm not saying that it's necessarily like a full replacement yet, but we have things like Khan Academy and Wikipedia that are really great. I wish I had them as a kid!

I would have skipped school all the time just to go sit and learn calculus and read Wikipedia. These things exist and they didn't prior and so actually, it's not that Khan Academy doesn't necessarily show you why we can just have everyone not be in the public school system anymore, but it does raise the opportunity costs of being in public school. It's like, "why would you be there for 8 hours a day, when you could just be doing this and open yourself up to these opportunities?" It changes that economic balance over time.

So this is, I think a much more low time preference way of doing things and it removes the politics, so you don't have to sit around and getting upset about politics all the time. I'm hoping I hear as little as possible about the 2020 election, but we know how that will turn out, it'll still be surrounding me all day and all night.

Peter McCormack: I appreciate the response. I'm not sure it fully dealt with the question of, I don't want to say monopoly abuse, because Uber doesn't have a monopoly, it's essentially a duopoly now with Lyft, but it's almost like there is a collaterol damage and that some humans are collateral damage in a free market. It's like, "well yeah, there may be a human cost."

Michael Goldstein: There's also the human costs of government. [Inaudible] We look at democracy and stuff and we had how many tens of millions of people die in the 20th century at the hands of governments?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't disagree, but it still doesn't deal with it.

Michael Goldstein: I guess the point is like, what are the actual risk analyses of this. Now that's not me trying to be cold about human life, I cherish human life, but the actual risks for instance, of how many people die in plane crashes, it's very, very low because some people will die. But this is also... In a sense, at some level that's inevitable. We can't live in a perfect world where no-one gets hurt. So I just worry about trying to use that too much to stop free market innovation, because it's an intractable problem anyway.

Peter McCormack: But this is almost the crux of the debate going back to Facebook that I've had with people, is that when I'm there saying, "these socialist programs, they're dangerous because they don't consider the full economic impact." The view and the response is, "oh, you're just wealthy and don't care about poor people. Austerity has been awful and 187,000 people have died" and I'm like, "no, I do care!" I'm on the other side when I'm in that argument.

But I guess where I'm getting to is, I wonder if a fully decentralized human structure is best. So one of the things, in the rabbit hole that I kind of went down for a little while was, I was put in the direction by Francis Pouliot, which was minarchism. Is this some things that make sense perhaps to be centralized? 

So for example, could maybe considerations for the impact of monopolies and abusive practices on people or maybe building regulations are a good thing, because they do save lives. I almost think therefore in the world of libertarianism, do we have to wean ourselves off these structures and say, "okay, this structure works better, centralize this. This structure works better decentralized." Can you see the way my mind's working?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, I think also this goes back to some of these terminology issues of like individualism versus collectivism and stuff. Libertarianism, partially because of most libertarian activists themselves, is very much portrayed as an atomistic philosophy, where it's like every man has his own island and all that.

But if you go back to the sort of praxeology of things, like the nature of political theory even of itself, there's scarcity, so people have conflicts over scarce goods and so they have to come up with ways of being able to come at peace with one another to rise up. With that in mind, every man is not an island, so when we talk about centralized versus decentralized, I don't think that it's really that, it's very much like a sort of spectrum.

I'm also not a central planner, I don't know where is best on that spectrum for all people. I have my personal preferences and needs where I would probably tend to be more on the decentralized side. But there's some people who are like, "I don't want to think about X, Y, and Z, I'd rather outsource that to a particular centralized institution." So I don't want to impose decentralization on everyone and I don't even know what that fully means.

Peter McCormack: And I think the spectrum helps the debate.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah and on top of that, if I have a home, the value of my home is not merely dependent on me and how well I take care of it, it's also my neighbors. So then you necessarily, even as a hardcore libertarian, have to be thinking carefully of what type of neighbors you live among, such as, if you want to have high property values, you have to have higher value people around you.

Peter McCormack: You collectivist!

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, so there are people who would probably treat that as a collectivism, but we can also step back and look at how that so-called collectivism is also in line with self-interest.

Peter McCormack: But I think the difference here, is where somebody could live in that neighborhood and choose not to be part of what you're talking about there. It's almost like the difference between optional and forced collectivism. Taxation is forced collectivism backed by guns, whereas this is optional.

Michael Goldstein: I think this exactly, kind of gets to the crux of it, is like, are you having to participate because you want to or because you're forced to? I will note though, that if that person opts out and just does not, there's going to be a lot more consequences than they might even think and I think those costs often get swept under the rug.

Peter McCormack: They won't get invited to the barbecue.

Michael Goldstein: Not only not invited to the barbecue, they're not going to get any benefits because people don't care about them and so they are choosing to be their own island and that's going to have ramifications. So those costs, I actually do think that those are heavily under appreciated by libertarians.

I think that's the side of it that they fail to understand because when they're talking about drugs and all that, well, how do other people feel about living next to someone who does a lot of drugs? Me personally, I would not be very comfortable living next to someone who does a lot of drugs and so I wouldn't want to interact with that person, so there are social consequences. So I would very much say that libertarians do often miss the mark on that, by ignoring those costs.

Peter McCormack: See this is where I consider myself a moderate libertarian right now. I consider myself right leaning, who cares for a social safety net to protect the most vulnerable in society being pulled by the gravity of libertarianism.

Michael Goldstein: Sounds like a Nazi to me?!

Peter McCormack: Well it's complicated, I think that comes from growing up very much a socialist, because I was a kid and I felt I had a heart and we should care for everyone and I didn't understand the economics of socialism, to spending a lot of time in the States and I've spent a lot of time with more conservative people.

I think American conservatives offer a much better structured, rational argument than British conservatives, I do. I think the problem with British conservatives is that they have this reputation of being toffs that have gone to private schools and are very posh. Whereas in the US a lot of Republicans I find, tend to be hard working, but they still have similar conservative values.

Michael Goldstein: I like some of those British guys though. Roger Scruton is a very interesting intellectual.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they're interesting. We have the Eton structure, which is the big toff school, which David Cameron went to. I'm not sure if Boris Johnson went to, but they're very out of touch with working class people. Whereas Donald Trump, who is arguably very wealthy, who knows how he got it, but he's very much more in touch with the working class. But then like I said, I'm feeling the gravity of libertarianism, but I haven't separated myself completely from the politics, because if I believe the politics can lead to a better society...

Michael Goldstein: If you have an example of a time that you voted, where it made your life better?

Peter McCormack: I'll give you a different example. So I'm half Irish, so my father's from Ireland and a long history of troubles and violence about territory because of England going in and fighting a war with Ireland and then a bunch of Protestants moving into Ireland. If I get any of the history wrong, my apologies. But we have this issue with Northern Ireland, with the Protestants at war with the Catholics, we have loyalists against neo-nationalists and I just followed a fascinating seven part series on YouTube called "Spotlight on the Northern Ireland Troubles."

It talks through the whole history, but what you follow is how it degraded into senseless violence, just murder. So it went beyond car bombs against army structures, because that's considered war to just outright murder. Ultimately, the deadlock of murder was broken by politics, it was the only way of solving it. The Sinn Fein eventually realized they were losing, they went to the negotiating table, the Good Friday agreement was born and sometime after, they eventually got to power sharing and hat was facilitated by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

Again, I might have some of this not entirely correct, but that was only achieved through politics. The end of senseless murders came through politics. So sometimes I recognize it, sometimes I think, "right, you need politics, however ugly and dirty it is, you need it to break certain deadlocks." The only way to break the deadlock between Israel and Palestine isn't Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't fix that, that is politics. So sometimes I think you have to play the dirty game.

Michael Goldstein: I think that's a fair example. When I'm saying politics, I'm specifically speaking of the democratic process, of you go to the voting booth, you vote for the person, some figurehead somewhere changes, whatever. You don't escape politics completely, humans are political creatures, we all face scarcity and thus we all face conflict of some kind, even if it's just very small stuff or very big stuff. You don't escape the fact that we have conflict. The reason why we have private property and all of these libertarian theories in the first place, is to deal with that fact that we are political creatures.

It's sort of how do we manage that? So I don't disagree that, yes, various politics, you're going to have to sit down and come to an agreement. You have to produce law, to come to an agreement, but even then, what does that mean? What does it mean to produce law? The modern people think that that means legislation, you vote the people in who write down on bills what everyone has to do and that's the law of the land or whatever.

But then there's other traditions, common law, where the law is actually more bottom up. The law is, you and I come together, we're having a conflict or we're about to enter a deal and we want to mitigate potential conflict in the future, so we write up an agreement and we find a neutral judge to look over that case and the contract itself becomes the law.

So it's very much a bottom up process and that whole process also comes up, it discovers the patterns by which humans can continually peacefully interact, that is common law. All of that stuff is present within libertarian society, it's just having a territorial monopolist, imposing taxation and all of that, is not necessarily the best way to actually produce that peaceful prosperity.

Peter McCormack: But, I'm going to go to, I think it's my interview with Balaji, he said, referring to the significant social networks up in Silicon Valley, I think it was him who said that they could end up becoming de facto Heads of State with the amount of power they have.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, that was a great interview.

Peter McCormack: It was, but they could end up becoming de facto Heads of State, so couldn't they end up in a similar position in a free market, I think I'm going round in circles here, whereby you end up having tyrannical, monopolistic power without regulation?

Michael Goldstein: Well I think that the point that Balaji makes with this, is trying to build capital towards making exit more easy. So that when you enter into Facebook or whatever, it's easier for you to also leave and that's something that you can do as a preventative measure, especially like in cyberspace specifically.

If you go onto Jack's fiefdom, over at twitter.com, which is a fiefdom, I very much treasure and you tweet on there and you don't make sure to back up your stuff, but then you say something that brings the wrath of someone at Twitter down on you or the mob or whatever, doesn't even matter who, but it gets you shut down for whatever reason and you didn't back up your stuff, everything was lost.

Peter McCormack: But you stand by that, that as a private company, they have the right to do that?

Michael Goldstein: There's lots of debates to have about that. My point is, at least in cyberspace, you can just store that data on your own anyway and so you don't lose your tweets if that goes down. Now do you lose access to their other services and be able to continue broadcasting? Obviously, but you can still post them on your own website. You still have the content. Does that make sense?

Peter McCormack: I understand what you're saying.

Michael Goldstein: It's obviously a very unfortunate thing if you get kicked off Twitter, but that person can publish on their own website and at the very least, they at least have their content, the tweets that they wanted to produce in the first place. In many ways that undersells the power of the Twitter platform. My point is, is that with technology, you can start to build better exits, such that if you have to go somewhere else, it doesn't hurt you as much and that's what Balaji is getting towards.

Peter McCormack: So you say that, but exit to where? So for example, Twitter for me is a central component of my marketing. I had a 12 hour ban, now the 12 hour ban in isolation wasn't a problem.

Michael Goldstein: I got banned once or suspended as well once or whatever they call it, because I told a journalist to learn to code.

Peter McCormack: Oh I called a guy a mangina! I got a 12 hour ban for harassment. But the warning sign was there. I was like, "holy crap, I now have to consider my output on Twitter", which I don't do a very good job of, but I have to consider it, because if I was to be fully banned from Twitter, that would have significant consequences on the marketing of my show.

So I have to comply essentially and what I'm saying here, is that there isn't an alternative. It's not like I can go to Gab and suddenly build up the same profile or even Facebook, I just lose a platform and therefore what I'm saying is, sometimes I struggle to see the difference between the monopolistic power of a corporation and a government. They have very similar abilities to abuse positions.

Michael Goldstein: The thing is that the state in a way, is just a giant corporation. It's just an extremely poorly managed one.

Peter McCormack: And bankrupt!

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, so it's a terrible corporation, but I totally get why you see that. My point is that this whole thing, you should be just like, "how do we build things to kind of get out of it."

Peter McCormack: But what I'm saying is that without government, then would the monopolies step in place and start acting like government?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, but with government you still got banned on Twitter. Without government, Twitter could have banned you..

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but at least with government, you can at least have the debate and say, "is Twitter a public service? And therefore is a ban right or is it wrong?" You can at least... There is the threat of some form of regulation if something feels unfair. I'm struggling with weighing which situation is better and I lean towards with you and I lean towards the libertarian side, I'm just not familiar.

Michael Goldstein: These are very difficult questions and I don't know the full answers to these. What I'm trying to get at is I think that the road forward is like, "okay, well how do you build stuff so that it doesn't matter about Twitter? Are there ways to build platforms that do not have this kind of power in the first place?"

Peter McCormack: Well that's interesting in itself.

Michael Goldstein: Well, we'll see if that's possible. But to me, that's more interesting of a question, than getting into the nitty gritty of turning Twitter bans into this whole political process. If it got to the point where speech was like fully under democratic populist control, I wouldn't want to be on that kind of platform anyway.

Peter McCormack: I think it's already there.

Michael Goldstein: I can imagine ways it's moving there for sure. But as it gets worse, I don't even want to be on there in the first place, because it's obviously not going to be a very good place to share ideas.

Peter McCormack: But you can't share some ideas. So this came up on Rogan the other day, I think it was his interview with Matthew Taibbi, which is a fascinating interview actually and Rogan does some excellent things. He talked about the fact that people are being banned for discussing things, which are biological fact. We're getting into the trans area because you have this kind of march from the left to control speech and so even having the debate on Twitter, can see you be banned. Actually that makes me think of something even more interesting. Do you listen to Eric Weinstein's new podcast, The Portal?

Michael Goldstein: I've listened to a couple of episodes, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So I listened to his interview with Sam Harris, which kind of got a bit pompous at times and "I this" and "I that", but Sam Harris said something very interesting in that and he said, I'm going way off on politics here, so we'll rein it back in, but I just think it's interesting and I think people should listen to it. He said that the far left have the ability to control narrative, where the far right doesn't.

The far right narrative is usually rejected as insane and can't control any narrative, yet far left opinions can and I just found that kind of fascinating, but that has bled into the world of Twitter.

So Rogan said, there is a factual, biological difference between men and women, but a trans woman, if you even want to have the debate that a trans woman is not a woman, because therefore you want to protect people in the world of sports, you have the MMA fighter who cracks someone's skull, you can't have that debate now and that's dangerous, I think.

Yeah so that's point 1 done and we're an hour and 12 minutes in! So in essence, Bitcoin has been an amazing tool, therefore, for everything you studied previously, it really supports all your ideals with regard to libertarianism, about the accumulation of capital. Therefore, even though "Bitcoin fixes this" is a meme that's kind of been overdone, a bit like, "okay boomer" now, actually there's a real fundamental truth to it.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, actually I would argue it hasn't been done enough. What else have we not uncovered that Bitcoin will fix that perhaps we didn't even know was a problem. I was talking to a friend recently and I was telling him about the woes of modern architecture and he had never even considered that.

So there's all these types of things that we go day to day living in our fiat world, that is just trash and we accept it because it's been normalized. But what if it doesn't need to be that way and we can actually have a much better sound money and the accumulation of that capital and having lower time preference, yada, yada, yada, can incentivize people towards making better things. We don't even know what else is out there!

So yeah, people use it a lot, but they use it a lot I think with good reason and usually the responses to "Bitcoin fixes this" aren't like, "oh, it doesn't actually fix it because blah, blah blah." People just respond with snark, it's just like, "why do you think that this has anything to do with Bitcoin?" It's like, "well, let's actually step back and look how has the money..."

Peter McCormack: But it's not actually about Bitcoin, Bitcoin is just the tool. It's the ideology behind it.

Michael Goldstein: It's the fact that low time preference is the process of civilization. You create civilization by having a lower time preference, because you can accumulate more, rather than just spending. In order to build civilization, you have to have capital, you have to have bricks! You can't build Rome without bricks, so you have to be able to accumulate those somehow.

Having lower time preference is that delayed gratification that makes the whole thing possible and if money, at its base, this entire fiat system is forcing us towards consumerism, which everyone hates! Leftists don't like consumerism either, they call it capitalism because that's how they perceive it. They see, "well there's the big businesses etc, this is capitalism, I don't like it." I sympathize! I don't like it either, because I see how the fiat system has incentivized people to not be able to save at all.

You can't save, you have to go invest money in stuff to try to get a quick return to beat inflation and that's just to stay afloat, let alone grow in capital. So money is at the root of this and if you fix that, then you can get right back on track to lowering the time preference of people in society and as you lower time preference, you get the process of civilization and you build nice things.

Peter McCormack: It's a tough sell though. I get it now, two years in, I'm not the smartest guy, right? It takes me a long time to learn these things, but spending time with people like you and Pierre, Erik Voorhees, really smart people, I've got it almost through like the process of osmosis.

Michael Goldstein: My personal strategy with a lot of people and it seems to be effective and of course, I'm low time preference, I don't mind if it takes you two years to come around to it! But going back to the Overton Window concept, saying "Bitcoin fixes this", money has never been discussed. You took all these economic classes, they probably never talked about how the Federal Reserve... Like at least a perspective that the Federal Reserve would be decreasing the wealth in society or merely redistributing it or whatever. You probably never got that.

Peter McCormack: I was 39 when I first started learning about money! At no point had my parents taught me about money, at no point had school.

Michael Goldstein: Just consider how far outside the Overton Window bringing money into it is! It's not because it's shocking o racist or controversial or bad in an icky sense, that's not even part of people's conceptualizations. So for me, it's both joyful for me and what seems to be somewhat effective, is to go with that very shocking statement, to just like shock people out of that Overton Window and then gradually work them to what that means.

Peter McCormack: It's almost like the shitcoin argument. Someone like Mr Hodl will say, "just let them get wrecked, let them see what's happened with Bitcoin and they'll learn about Bitcoin." It's almost like you have to let people get wrecked by fiat. They almost have to let that happen, to question money.

Michael Goldstein: So I sort of disagree with it. I get the mindset, but first of all, I don't expect to just win everyone over. So if I lose a few too, that's fine. I care more about...

Peter McCormack: But listen, I'm the Bitcoin guy on Facebook and I am trying my best to explain things, share things, but no-one's listening. All they care about, is two years ago when it was going up!

Michael Goldstein: Well the number go up is great for one. Especially like right now, when there is a dip and people freak out, because like, "oh it's under $8,000, it's dead!" They're all doing that, but I have such a joy showing people the log chart and showing them how actually we're just right on track. If you can show people, that number still go up, you were just looking at the wrong time frame because someone was scamming you with the news cycle or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Change your time preference!

Michael Goldstein: So yeah, I love showing them the all time log chart and show them how that differs. So there's a number go up meme, where it's like, "oh I thought that was dead, because I heard about it in the news when it was $20,000 and then went down, yada yada yada." It's like "no, it's still alive and it's actually better than ever. When you actually look at the economic fundamentals, number go up and the number is going to continue to go up! Also, stock to flow stuff, if that's correct, the number is really going to continue to go up!"

Peter McCormack: And if you show the reverse chart, the Dollar to Bitcoin chart, number go down!

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, exactly. So there's that and the other one, like "stuff like Bitcoin fixes this", that's a very personalized meme. If you're like me and you sincerely believe that fiat money has soiled everything it touches, which is everything, then everyone has problems and there's going to be something that you can tap into. So for us, it's like the architecture, there was someone else I'd been talking to and they're an architecture student.

I was talking to them and they were talking about sustainable architecture and stuff like that and I know enough about architecture that I can kind of bloviate about it and talk about how I believe that the time preference is an issue in architecture and how traditional modes of architecture, pre-fiat basically, were actually more sustainable than all of the nonsense that they go on about today. 

Through that, I was able to jumpstart this conversation and tie Bitcoin back into it, as just this monetary tool, this like fundamental, civilizational substrate to power that. So that is one of the real benefits of the "Bitcoin fixes this" meme, highly personalizable.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what? It's the meme of 2019! It's fully owned it, it has created a discussion. Have you prepped next year's meme?

Michael Goldstein: Well I'm working on something. So I don't go to a lot of conferences and BitBlockBoom is actually basically the only one I go to, because I just have to drive up I35 to get there.

Peter McCormack: I've got high expectations now, I'm going to come next year.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah well I think everyone is going to have high expectations now. So I've got to think of something that is equally controversial.

Peter McCormack: It's the tough second album!

Michael Goldstein: But with "Bitcoin fixes this" specifically, we have to give a shout out to Stephan Livera, because he was the first one to just utter those three words.

Peter McCormack: Was he really?

Michael Goldstein: Yeah! I mean, maybe someone said prior in this modern 2019 memetic form, but yeah, it all came from Stephan Livera.

Peter McCormack: I didn't know that, I thought it was entirely you?

Michael Goldstein: No, I was stating the state of memes.

Peter McCormack: Big up to Stephan!

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, I'm huge Stephan Livera fan.

Peter McCormack: Me too! Actually, me and him chat a lot in the background and he's been very helpful to me. I think I've been helpful to him as well, but I'll pick his brain on Austrian economics and then he'll pick my brain on marketing. But his show has been really helpful and actually my favorite show of his, I keep telling him this, was his solo show.

Michael Goldstein: Beginners to Austrian Economics? Absolutely fantastic.

Peter McCormack: I wish he would do more of that stuff! His solo show is the only one of his shows I've listened to twice and I wish he'd do more of them.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah, it's been interesting because when I first got into Bitcoin, Bitcoin was, as we said, the perfect incarnation of everything I believe. All the memes, like the maximalism and all that stuff, that's rooted and I was already like that prior to Bitcoin, Bitcoin was just the perfect embodiment of it.

Before that, it was gold, except I also had my doubts about the Gold Standard actually taking off, like how do you actually make that happen? Bitcoin creates a practical path, but all these beliefs existed and I had this feeling when it started, it's like, "Bitcoin's going to turn everyone into an Austrian and that's just the way it's going to be and that's going to be great!"

And then, this is 2012, 2013 and years pass and there's all the shit coins, this Cambrian explosion and then just on and on with ICOs and it's like, "I guess not, I guess we're all just going to be a bunch of Keynesians still until this thing collapses."

Peter McCormack: I think it's pretty amazing where we've got to though!

Michael Goldstein: Well, and now everyone just has a ravenous appetite for Austrian economics and it's incredible. So actually, for me, I was into Austrian Economics and it brought me to Bitcoin and there's some subset of people where the Bitcoin does bring them to Austrian Economics and now there's tons of people wanting to learn. I think those people are going to have their eyes open, just like I did, to all of the ways in which bad money and bad governance has just made society way less than it could be, is probably the best way to put it.

Peter McCormack: Well listen look, this has been fascinating. I haven't fucking touched any of my list by the way, there's all this shit here that we've not talked about, but that's always the best way! But I said to you beforehand, I said, "I can't believe I've done 170 shows and you've not been on!"

But I also a little bit believe in synchronicity, like things happen sometimes at the right time and I think this has happened at the right time. I think the fact that it's happened after I've essentially spent 15 hours in a car listening to "Economics in One Lesson" and a whole bunch of Tom Woods, kind of trying to consume all that and not having the past someone like you've had. So I've come at the right time, I think with the right questions. I hope they've been useful for you.

Michael Goldstein: Yeah! It's actually been a long time since I've really had to defend libertarianism, because I just kind of swim in it and it's just my world, so at some point you stop thinking about things as rigorously and so you're bringing up good questions to reconsider, as it's been awhile, like "oh yeah, how do you?" Then once you do reconsider it's like, "well maybe there's all the answers I had, aren't even the best ones to address it with." So it's actually very good to hear your questions.

Peter McCormack: I do this with everyone. I do it with Saifedean, yourself, Pierre. I kind of think my show is a bit like... I don't know, like the Taylor Swift of Bitcoin! You and Pierre do an amazing show, Trace does an amazing show, Stephan and Marty both do amazing shows, I kind of consider mine a bit... Like I try and ask the questions I think other people would.

Like you guys are all there, I'm not and I think a lot of people coming in aren't and so they're the kind of questions I ask. So I really appreciate that you give the time to do this, because I do get a lot of feedback and I know this show is going to go out and a lot of feedback's going to come and there's going to be people that are going to agree with you and there's going to be people who disagree with you and there's going to be people who agree with me...

Michael Goldstein: Then there's going to be all the haters!

Peter McCormack: Yeah and they're going to say, "oh you're so dumb McCormack! You still believe in part of the State, so you're a Statist!" All that shit is going to come, but I know these shows help, so I massively appreciate you coming on and I've really enjoyed this one. We've crashed through 90 minutes without touching a bunch of this stuff and it feels like a body of conversation.

Michael Goldstein: We have room for the second episode, whenever you want me!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I'll have listened to another 200 Tom Woods' episodes by then. So I'll be like, "yeah, we need to go through this again." All right listen, let's close out. Tell people to follow you, tell them about the Nakamoto Institute work as well. Just tell him about everything and then we'll close out, man.

Michael Goldstein: Well first of all, you can follow me on Twitter, I'm @bitstein. You can listen to the Noded Bitcoin podcast with Pierre Rochard and that's at noded.org. We're also on SoundCloud, iTunes, I think there's a couple that we don't end up on, but you'll find us out there. The Nakamoto Institute is what we founded back in 2013, as a way to catalogue the public writings of Satoshi, as well as the cypherpunk history and literature that was built upon that whole world as well as economic analysis now that Bitcoin exists and you can find that at nakamotoinstitute.org.

Peter McCormack: Amazing, brilliant, thanks for coming on!

Michael Goldstein: Thank you so much!