WBD209 Audio Transcription

Is Coronavirus a Challenge to Political Identity with Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Interview date: Wednesday 1st April 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Andreas Antonopolous. 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 Andreas M. Antonopoulos, speaker, best selling author and Bitcoin evangelist. We discuss whether Coronavirus is a challenge to political identity, the largest monetary experiment in history, bailouts and money printing.

“How do you apply the non-aggression principle if breathing is a form of aggression?”

— Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Andreas, how are you?

A. Antonopoulos: I'm doing as well as can be given the circumstances. I've been very lucky to have somewhere to weather this storm, this pandemic, and I'm isolating. I have been actually now for almost six weeks, and yeah, it's hard!

Peter McCormack:  Well you're like me, you're used to traveling quite a bit, moving around.

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, no longer a nomad. That lifestyle is currently dead. We'll see how it goes in the next year or so, but yeah, doing great with staying at home for a bit and I think I'm in the, count my blessings phase, of grieving with the life that no longer exists and the normality that no longer exists, but it comes in waves. Some days I'm counting my blessings and I'm feeling very lucky and other days I'm despairing and freaking out and going stir crazy. So just one day at a time, although I can't remember what day it is. That's the other thing that's happened is...

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, it's like Christmas.

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, all of the days of just blurred together and it's just weird.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, it's like that time of year between Christmas and New Year where you forget what day it is because it becomes so unimportant. The days are only usually important because of work, because most people do a five day week, but no, I feel similar. It's really strange times. Trying to understand the reality of it all and deal with it is quite overwhelming, because we're living during a historic moment in time, even if for some amazing stroke of luck, some vaccine was found in the next six weeks, it doesn't change the impact of what's happened here.

It's unprecedented times, and I was actually talking to my daughter and son about it last night, because they have so many questions, and I was saying, "This will be something you talk to your kids about and talk about how you live through this and what happened. It's part of the history books now."

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah!

Peter McCormack:  So how are you taking it all in? And the reason I ask that and the reason I wanted to talk to you is I, like many, have trained myself and learned a lot about Bitcoin through your videos and your talks. You don't need me to tell you that for a lot of people, one of their first points is to go to YouTube and watch a lot of videos, and then following that, you and I have done a couple of interviews where we've talked about Bitcoin, but also in the context of politics, the state, the global economy, and now we're in one of these situations where it's highly relevant.

Also sometimes I find myself almost not wanting to talk about it, because I think I don't want to be opportunist about any of my language, but at the same time, it's impossible not to recognize this is one of the biggest tests ever of the state and of money and probably the biggest test of state and their money in my lifetime. So how are you processing all that in the context of everything you've learned, everything you've talked about in all your hundreds of talks?

A. Antonopoulos: For me, ironically, this is perhaps not the biggest test of money in my lifetime, but that's because I grew up in Greece.

Peter McCormack:  Greece, yeah!

A. Antonopoulos: So we had some pretty big tests, not least of which was the introduction of the Euro just after the devaluation of the drachma. Yeah, it's really weird, because as you said, I don't want to spend too much time talking about it and I think there've been some crass responses and glib responses to what is a humanitarian catastrophe and Bitcoin seems like a very small consideration in the big scheme of things. But at the same time, the primary focus of Bitcoin came from being born during an economic crisis. I've always found the there's two major themes in Bitcoin.

The one I've been most interested in from the beginning is the theme of economic exclusion, or the ability to create economic inclusion through an open system, to bank the unbanked and underbanked, to serve the other 6 billion, and that's one theme that is important right now. Then there's this other theme that I think is fairly recent over the past three or four years that has gotten a lot of attention, which is kind of the monetary maximalist theme in Bitcoin, which has spawned a bunch of memes from the to the moon, to the hyperbitcoinization concept, stacking stats, money printer goes brrr, all of these memes that are coming out and that has never been my primary interest in Bitcoin.

I never came at this from an economist perspective, because I'm not an economist, or from monetary perspective. To me that's an interesting side story to an open protocol for money is the monetary policy of that open protocol. To other people, that's the central theme. The monetary policy is the central theme and the open protocol is secondary. I think it's really interesting right now, because these two different perspectives are both highly relevant, because we're seeing kind of the war on cash accelerate, the need to use money as a surveillance tool accelerate, all of which creates the need for open banking and open money protocols for those who are unbanked and underbanked, or about to become underbanked, unbanked, or controlled through money and at the same time, you've got this crazy amounts of stimulus that is truly unprecedented.

A few years ago during a talk I said, "I want to talk to you about one of the most radical monetary experiments ever, and that monetary experiment is not Bitcoin, it's modern central banking. It's that at this moment we have 21 central banks doing zero or negative interest rates and feeding unlimited stimulus into an economy that is barely moving, and we're almost 10 years out of a recession." I said that back in 2017, 2018, and now that's even more true. We're in a truly unprecedented monetary experiment, and it's not Bitcoin. It's everything else that's happening. I don't really have any predictions as to where this is going. I'm fresh out of predictions! My prediction timeframe is usually fairly short. I look out months at a time, not years, and now I can't even make predictions about next week. So I think we're at a point of huge uncertainty.

Peter McCormack:  Do you remember the prediction you made in our last show?

A. Antonopoulos: I don't no, but the internet has an incredible way of reminding me of all the predictions I made, especially the wrong ones!

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, well actually, this is a right one. I don't have it written down. I'm just remembering it because you've just said it now. So I'm going to try and get this as best as I can. I'll have to double check, but I'm almost certain you said during the next economic collapse, this won't be a situation where Bitcoin flies. The price of Bitcoin will likely fall with the stock market fall, and then it's at that point that it may decouple.

A. Antonopoulos: Yes.

Peter McCormack:  And the reason I remembered it is somebody tagged it in a tweet the other day, they actually said, "This is how Andrea predicted it."

A. Antonopoulos: In January, yeah.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, and we all get predictions right and wrong, but so far, essentially you're right in that, and one of the things I've been talking to people about is that how do you teach people about Bitcoin? I'm always thinking about teaching and getting new people in, and some people say, "Well sometimes you have to go through pain," and perhaps you're right and perhaps this next period of, whether it's 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, this period will be a period of pain.

Perhaps this economic stimulus will lead to inflation, perhaps people will see products become more expensive, maybe not to the extent that Venezuelans experienced, but still to some extent. Perhaps they will see savings wiped out, and maybe that's the pain that we'll go through that will teach people that there are other options out there. Bitcoin is another option. So perhaps your prediction there is right.

A. Antonopoulos: Well the prediction was predicated on two things. One was understanding that the Bitcoin bubble was not separate from the broader bubble, meaning that cheap money leads to asset bubbles across the board, and people chasing for yield with not too many good investment. It decouples investment decisions from fundamentals and ties them directly to the availability of cheap money. When the future cost of money is zero, then the amount of risk you're willing to take in an investment to get yield just goes to infinity. So you might as well just throw money at everything, and in that period of time of course, that means the Bitcoin was getting the benefit of that, as were all cryptos, just because there was so much money sloshing around in the economy.

So the prediction really was that at least in the beginning of an economic depression, we're going to see a pullback of investments because there'll be a liquidity crunch, and that's exactly what happened, and Bitcoin suffered from that too. I don't know how long it takes to decouple the two, but I think right now we're kind of in this very weird interim phase, because now we've gone from money is cheap to it's expensive to save. It's even worse than before. I don't know if we're going to see hyperinflation of Venezuelan style, or if we're going to see kind of a weird stagflation style like we had in the 70s or if we're just going to see such an enormous wealth transferred to the super rich that it really exhibits itself in inequality and an inability to invest in your future.

So maybe milk will still be cheap, but healthcare, education, housing, and quality of life gets expensive, maintaining your rights that have been commoditized becomes expensive, and maintaining freedom and independence and self-determination becomes expensive. Maybe those are the products that become very expensive. We've been in this period of commoditization of rights over the past couple of decades, where it's become increasingly expensive to be free, and so the thing is that the consumer product index or purchasing index, CPI, is going to probably show that there is no inflation, just like it did for the last decade, because milk is still cheap because it's massively subsidized.

Just like in Venezuela, gas cost less than water for a very long time, but everything else is massively inflated. Yeah, I don't know when we see the decoupling or how the decoupling will look, I feel like we're going through a period of great uncertainty, and for me, Bitcoin is serving a very important role. It's allowing me to engage with a global audience and also to engage with a global workforce and pay my employees, my staff, my suppliers, my contractors to help me do more work, and it's also giving me an opportunity to have more financial independence, but not because it's going to the moon, but because it continues to give me a degree of freedom that I don't have with traditional money.

So from that perspective, it's already serving its role. We'll see if the monetary theory of Bitcoin is correct and whether it starts behaving more and more like gold, or even some kind of super gold over the next decade, but I think in any case, it's going to take time for these effects, both in terms of the damage that all of this mal-investment and stimulus is going to do, and in terms of the benefits of alternative systems, it's going to take probably near a decade before we see this play out. What happened today will have a ripple effect in the future.

Peter McCormack: Well there's a few things I want to go through with you. I've obviously followed you and known you for a while now, and you're not one of these people in the Bitcoin world who is without conscience. I know certain things weigh heavily on you to the point that some people may overtly criticize you, which I don't think is always fair, but I know you think of the humanity in situations like this. You're not the kind of person just to sit there and just say, "Well, what will be will be. We should let this disease flush through the system, we should let the companies fail," and I know you think about these things quite deeply and I'm wrestling with a few things.

So there's some things I wanted to put to you, because the other interesting thing about Bitcoin is that yes, Bitcoin is a form of money, but it also introduces you to new topics. When I got into Bitcoin, it was censorship resistance, to buy a product for my dying mother that I couldn't buy with normal fiat money, and then I've been introduced to libertarianism, privacy, a bunch of different concepts and ideas that I've learned more and more about, and I've never claimed to be a full libertarian because I've never been able to fully rationalize a stateless society.

I've not got there, but I appreciate a number of the things that libertarians stand for, but coronavirus has come in and completely shifted my worldview, completely thrown it back, and it's made me really challenge some of these ideas that anarcho-capitalists have or the anti-state people have in terms of trying to be practical in the world we live in and that whatever your future desire is for society, we do have democracy and we do have a government.

So trying to rationalize the two, and observing human behaviour through this for me has been really interesting, because coronavirus has almost been a test of identity for some people. Some people's identity is so tied to being anti-state that there is an inability to even rationalize an option whereby right now, perhaps a state solution, even temporary, may be what is required to protect a significant part of humanity, because this is a humanitarian crisis.

I think some people can't admit that because their identity is tied to anti-state. So any admission of that is a destruction of their identity, and this is a behaviour that I've observed through in this process and I've been trying to challenge people, and I've come up against some walls. What have your observations been through this?

A. Antonopoulos: Well it's even more extreme in the United States right now, because the coronavirus pandemic has become politicized, and it's pretty much lined up in terms of partisan politics, primarily because the initial response by the President and his party was to downplay the risk, and as is the case with many of these belief systems, people got invested in that perspective and when it proved to be wrong, they were unable to shift from that position, and therefore, anybody who was saying, "Hang on, this isn't the flu, this isn't business as usual, this is not normal, this is something extreme and dangerous and very threatening", people like that were painted as alarmists and discarded and ignored.

This is led to some really, truly bizarre behaviours, like the kind of defiant risk-taking that you expect from teenagers being executed by boomers in Southern states who have the most to lose. "I'm not going to change my life because if I take precautions, then coronavirus wins," as if coronavirus is some kind of sentient thing that's trying to terrorize us rather than a self-replicating piece of RNA that doesn't know it's in your lungs and doesn't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat.

It's a very bizarre anthropomorphizing of the threat and kind of philosophical response to something is that simply is and has no position. The coronavirus isn't doing this to make a point, it's doing this to make more virus, quite simply, but we're just Petri dishes. It's really bizarre because a month ago I was having a conversation with some friends and I said, "Mark my words, there will be people who will not only defy this, but they will make a political performance art out of their defiance." We have a phenomenon here in the States called rolling coal. Have you seen that?

Peter McCormack:  I've heard of it.

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, it's where people modify their pickup trucks and remove catalytic converters and things like that, and instead tune their engines to be over rich so that they produce thick black diesel smoke out of these stacks that come out of the back of the pickup truck, or they sometimes turn them up so they're vertical, and so then when they rev their engines, it makes this thick black smoke coming out the top, and it's a performative political statement against ecological attitudes.

I'm like, "People who have that kind of attitude of performative defiance are going to go out and they're going to lick produce, cough on bananas, and beat up people who are wearing masks," and my friends were like, "Come on, nobody's that stupid," and of course all of those things have happened. Sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent!

Peter McCormack:  No, that's fine.

A. Antonopoulos: It's a really weird phenomenon.

Peter McCormack:  It's funny you should make that alignment with the politics there as well. There was a really great article in Wired last week from Gilad Elderman I think, where he was identifying the parallels between coronavirus and global warming. In terms of political reaction, in that very much conservatives, especially in the US, were almost in denial, whereas the Democrats were almost the opposite, kind of pushing for a kind of global recognition of what's going on with coronavirus, and he identified that, and this is where the initial defiance from the President came from, because considering the impact of coronavirus on the economy, on his own presidency, it was almost too difficult for something like him to comprehend and change policy on.

Because what is actually required is quite ironically, as we have a conservative government now in the UK and there's a conservative government in the US, that they're actually starting to push quite socialist policies to get through this. So essentially the coronavirus is exactly what's been playing out with global warming, but at 1000x the speed.

A. Antonopoulos: Yes, and the problem is, from my perspective, and climate changes is as big a disaster, and maybe actually closely related to the emergence of these zootropic viruses and things like that, but because it moves so slowly, we ignore it at huge peril. But regardless, the bottom line is this isn't political, and so interpreting this kind of as a battle between libertarianism and socialism, I think is seeing it wrong.

It's post libertarian, it's post socialist, it's post politics, and I think the biggest lesson that comes from this is that there is such a thing as society and there is such a thing as community. To quote Margaret Thatcher's famous, "There is no society, there's just people and families", I'm paraphrasing of course, but one of the difficulties is that this forces you to understand that in certain areas, such as public health, we are only as healthy as the least healthy of us.

We are only as healthy as the most vulnerable, and when you have a system that doesn't give a shit how rich you are and will kill you anyway, that really brings to force kind of the public nature of this threat, which is that if we don't take care of public health, health of the entire community and the weakest chain, then everybody's at risk, and that's not a socialist perspective, it's a simple fact. It's physics, it's chemistry, it's math, it's reality. It has nothing to do with your philosophy or political philosophy, and what it's doing is it straining all political philosophies that are sufficiently abstract and detached from reality is to be able to play these fanciful almost sophistry games. How do you apply the principle when breathing is a form of aggression.

Peter McCormack:  That's a really good point.

A. Antonopoulos: I think the basis for many of the principled libertarians is the concept of the non-aggression pact, the NAP, and the idea is as long as you're not hurting somebody else, you're free to do what you want and no one is allowed to use violence and coercion and force on others. But here's the problem: being in a public space, especially if that's a contained public space and breathing less than six feet from another person is aggression at this moment, because every one of us can potentially be a virus producing machine, and so it's very, very difficult to overcome kind of the reality of that, because that calls then for the kinds of...

Even though it's perfectly consistent with the non-aggression principle to say, "And that's why you can't go out in public and not wear a mask," the only way to actually apply that in a society is with the course and force of the state, because there will always be idiots and those idiots will go out and they will endanger millions of people with their idiotic behaviour. We even have a term for it now, "covidiots", and it really challenges kind of the abstract nature of many of these political philosophies, because the reality is much more harsh. So the old saying, "There are no atheists in a foxhole," which I think is offensive, but...

Peter McCormack:  I interviewed Scott Horton this week. Do you know Scott Horton?

A. Antonopoulos: No.

Peter McCormack:  He's a libertarian anti-war guy, very smart guy, and I wanted to escape out of the kind of Bitcoin libertarian world and talk to a kind of traditional known libertarian, and I wanted to put the challenge to him. I said to him, "Look, I'm struggling with this," because I did admit that I think we need a state response, which came back with the, "You're a boot licker," kind of response, but I'm trying to be practical about this in that I have friends who are health workers for example, and they go into work facing the prospect they may get sick and they might die.

It's happening. We've had over 50 in Italy and the first 2 or 3 in the UK. We've just had 1 in the US, this absolutely genius surgeon who's one of the world's best neurosurgeons and a surgeon for Siamese twins died from coronavirus. This is happening! We are losing geniuses of medicine, and even if somebody wants to go out and do what they choose, they might end up leading to other people needing more help or that overflow of the health system. So I just wanted to talk to a libertarian who isn't exposed to Bitcoin, who maybe isn't so radicalized, and just say to them, "What do you think?"

And he came back with a very good response I'll recall. He said, "I don't think that it's necessarily an abandonment of libertarianism itself to concede that the government has a role in restricting behaviour in a public health crisis", and he goes on to talk about, "But we must be extremely vigilant that there isn't this erosion of civil liberties."

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah.

Peter McCormack:  The UK has been pretty good at this. Already, there's a lot of pressure on the police for overstepping the mark, whereas we've seen in Hungary that they're very much becoming the new Turkey.

A. Antonopoulos: Well the UK has already eroded civil liberties into a thin filigree anyway. So at this point...

Peter McCormack:  Of course, but his point, and it is a real challenge, because even my own identity of somebody as a Bitcoin podcaster, late to libertarianism, learning about it thinking, "But in my heart, what do I actually believe?" And I'm convinced there's too big a risk right now as a British person to not support the government and not support the NHS, but with my own vigilance that when this is over, then absolutely we need to push back to get where we were, but it's a real challenge and I've regretfully gone, "Oh if I admit this, I might lose audience," but it's what I feel in my heart, and I have been struggling with it.

A. Antonopoulos: Right. It's very, very dangerous without a doubt, because the most effective responses have been by authoritarian governments that have been able to take extreme authoritarian measures, and yet the very reason we're in a pandemic is because of authoritarian government covering up and not managing some things that could have been a localized epidemic, and also not effectively managing the root causes of these kinds of... At least the zootropic pandemics, and I think it's dangerous to cast blame here.

There's a lot of jokes going around about, "Someone ate a bat and now I can't leave my house," but we don't know that it's actually zootropic. We don't know it came from the wet markets, it may have had a different origin. I don't think we yet have enough facts for that, but certainly if that is the case, the coverup of an authoritarian governments to downplay this thing in order to save face that China did, and then the US did, and then the UK did, and sort of even Western, supposedly free governments and countries have responded with kind of a knee jerk reaction that makes this worse. So the problem here is that government is the solution, but government is also the cause.

Peter McCormack:  Yes.

A. Antonopoulos: Government is the only way we can coordinate in order to create the necessary circumstances to avoid a catastrophic pandemic, but government is also what caused this to even be an option of a catastrophic pandemic. It's subtle. In the US for example right now, doctors are being fired from hospitals for revealing the lack of personal protective equipment. They're being told not to wear masks in waiting rooms and things like that so as not to scare the patients. They're being told to downplay the pandemic and it's not just governments, it's also private corporations and the private healthcare system in the United States.

So even though we need coordinated response, we're going to see all of the worst problems of governments validating the libertarian attitude that says that "Yeah, that solution comes with side effects that are really, really, really bad." We're going to get government overreach, control, power plays etc. No crisis will be left to waste and will be exploited fully, and I think someone said recently that this is a bit like 9/11 and the 2008 economic crisis wrapped in one. So we'll get all of the worst power hungry, Patriot Act, civil liberty eroding response, and at the same time, a massive bailout for the rich and large corporations, and that's exactly how it's playing out.

So I think it's important to realize that the answer to this is to recognize that society needs to act, but that is not the same as governments need to act, meaning that the most effective things that have happened in the US, for example, have not been actions of the federal government, but have been actions of local government, very much not centralized, but decentralized. It's been the governors and the mayors who have taken charge, primarily because the federal government has proven incompetent and slow to act, but the biggest successes have actually been popular culture and memes and spreading information in that way so that people change their behaviour, and that has nothing to do with government.

That's society, and I think that's an important distinction that both libertarians and socialists if you like, or statists miss, which is that there's a difference between society and government, the state and the community. We can achieve a lot by coordinating with our neighbours and protecting each other, and in fact, that's where all of the... The end result comes from a behaviour change and the way we make personal sacrifices to protect our neighbours and those who are vulnerable around us, not because of a mandate, not because of enforcements, not because of coercion, but because of peer pressure and community response and social stigma, in some cases, and social reward and other cases, and the social feedback mechanisms of approval and disapproval.

That's what makes things work in a society, not the penalty of enforcement, and in many ways in fact, government has actually undermined those social cues by spreading deliberate disinformation. So it's a mixed bag, because a lot of people will accept that only a strong government can solve this, and then you end up with the mess of Hungary and the kind of consolidation of power that leads to very, very long generation term dictatorships and semi dictatorships, and at the same time, you're not actually reducing the damage caused by this virus, because the state is not a benevolent entity that is technocratic, scientific, and rational. It's a power hungry organism that protects its own power first and foremost, and rewards loyalty above logic.

So you're going to get the worst possible outcomes in either case, although I think in the US the argument about libertarianism versus socialism is finding a very interesting nexus points in the issue of publicly funded healthcare because this has really revealed how broken the healthcare system is in the US.

It's not a private healthcare system that has competition, and it's not a public healthcare system that protects the vulnerable, it's the worst of both cases. So it's a system of cartel monopolies with obscure and opaque pricing that gouges everyone and produces very poor outcomes and at the same time, leaves the most vulnerable to die. In this public health crisis, it's made it very clear that it's going to be far worse in the United States than many other developed countries because we have a system of social policies that mean that service workers who are very vulnerable, have no sick pay, have no sick leave, have no healthcare and when they lose their jobs, they lose their healthcare at the same time, and will therefore go to work while sick in order to avoid losing their jobs.

So all of the incentives are for them to spread this infection while trying to simply survive. That has revealed massive problems in the system of society we have. It has nothing to do with governments or free markets because it's neither a free market nor a government system. It's just this corruptocracy that just milks the US GDP while leaving millions to die. It's a mess! So whether you're a libertarian or a socialist, I think you can honestly, or any shade in between or an enlightened centrist who thinks it's both sides, we can all agree I think, that something is wrong.

Something is really rotten here and in every country to different degrees. So I think one of the things that comes out of this is a change in attitude because what this coronavirus deal has revealed is that we can't continue business as usual because the system is broken. Now if that is what comes out of this, and the answer to that is not some extremist politics, but instead a greater recognition that change is needed, then we may get something good out of this. I don't know if I should be an optimist, maybe it's premature.

Peter McCormack:  There are some other side effects that I hadn't even considered as well. One specifically in the US is those people who would travel to Mexico for treatment or medicine because it's cheaper, now can't even do that. They can't even cross the border to get their treatments that they rely on because they can't afford the cost in the US. That as an option has been closed down.

There's people who are going to be getting sick, fearful they have coronavirus, too scared to phone in an ambulance because of the daily cost of treatment. I don't know where they got with in terms of treatment for coronavirus. I know Pelosi was pushing for everyone with coronavirus should be treated. I don't know where they've gotten with that.

A. Antonopoulos: Just to give you some perspective and for your international audience, an ambulance in the United States costs between $750 and $2,500, that's just the ride. So it's the world's most expensive taxi and that's where your expenses starts. Even with insurance, they're going to bleed you dry every step of the way.

Peter McCormack:  Well, that's a funny one you should bring up. I've got a friend from the UK who lives out in the US and his daughter broke her finger surfing, and they, by mistake, they called the wrong ambulance and got a bill for it and they couldn't get out of paying that bill. Then he was talking me through every single part of the process, all the different bills he receives from all the different people, the deductible he had to pay. Even with very good health insurance, it cost him thousands and thousands, and it took him a year to recover it.

A. Antonopoulos: Right! I have personal experience, when I first arrived in the US, I was diagnosed with cancer and I survived that at 29 years old. I had platinum, select choice, PPO, amazing insurance, the best you could possibly get and it took me three years to finally plough through all of the paperwork after all of my treatments. It took another three years of billing and paperwork and disputes and claims, and phone calls and conferences, and lawsuits and threats of lawsuits to get out of underneath the pile of paperwork that caused because they're like, "Oh yeah, well, the clinic you went to was covered, but the doctor you saw wasn't one who was participating in the program of blah, blah, blah, blah."

It's impossible to navigate and it's deliberately impossible to navigate. It's a broken system and it's a broken system for those who have insurance, and it's almost impossible to afford it for most people. So it's definitely a broken system, and it's being revealed for the broken system it is now. I don't know what comes out of that because honestly, right now, it seems like we're heading for repeats of 2016 with Biden versus Trump. But this isn't a local issue, the US is going to have to find its own path here.

I'm actually even more concerned by the implications of this on international trade and international relations, because one of the things we're seeing is this finger pointing scapegoating, as if this is a deliberate pandemic caused by someone. At least here in the US, people are looking for scapegoats and someone to blame. The American patriotic system, PC as we call it here, patriotically correct, well no, I call it that. But to be patriotically correct, you have to find someone to retaliate with shock and awe and some kind of bombing campaign.

The problem with coronavirus is we're not quite sure who we need to bomb in order to exact retribution for this damage to our economy, that's the patriotically correct US attitude. At the same time, China is going through this massive propaganda campaign to blame the US and Iran is blaming the US. So I'm worried about what this does in terms of international political relations, because that's the kind of spark that causes long-term problems.

Peter McCormack:  By the way, I didn't know you were a cancer survivor. Is that publicly known?

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, I've talked about it before. I was lucky, I got a fairly easy one and I caught it early.

Peter McCormack:  Well congratulations on that! Another thing that I've been wrestling with Andreas, is even post the virus leaving China, even if every country had done its best to react as quickly as possible, I still think we possibly would have headed to a recession because most likely the airlines and the airport still would have had to at least slow down. But probably, still get to where we are to protect...

A. Antonopoulos: Without a doubt, yeah.

Peter McCormack:  So almost certainly, we would have had a recession anyway and so almost certainly, there would have been a serious amount of job losses.

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah.

Peter McCormack:  The meme about the money printer is valid, but at the same time, I'm not sure what else the government could do. Yes, some of the policies are clearly designed to bail out the billionaire friends and their companies. Okay, I understand and I've seen that. But at the same time, I don't think there is any other option than to fire up the money printer at some point. Am I missing something?

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, I think you're missing a couple of things. First of all, the trigger for the recession is the virus, but it's not the cause.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, of course.

A. Antonopoulos: The cause is that after 2008, nothing got fixed. The global efforts to financialize everything and do leverage and margin on everything and inflate these giant asset bubbles with stimulus for companies to do share buybacks and all of that, that kleptocracy, the corrupt kleptocracy of late stage capitalism in a broken system didn't go away in 2008. Instead, what happens is it got inflated to an even greater extent by the previous bailout. So the problem is that in a free market system, the way you deal with failed companies, even failed sectors is you let them go bankrupt, the investors get wiped out.

They eat the losses and the companies restructure under a bankruptcy plan, or they get liquidated and all of the equipment and employees get picked up by a more eager, less indebted, younger company that has newer investors and better operating practices and they build a better system out of the parts. That's what supposed to happen. If you stop that from happening, what you end up doing is not only propping up the broken business, but effectively you undermine any possibility of the younger business, the newer business, the better business from competing.

They can't compete against, for example, Boeing or American Airlines with all of their subsidies and tax breaks and regulatory cushy positions and airports slots, and all of their established control they have. So when we bail out Boeing, what we're also doing is ensuring that there will never be a competitor to challenge Boeing, that there will never be a new aerospace company in the United States that can challenge Boeing. When we bail out GM, we damage Tesla. When we bail out American Airlines, we damage Southwest etc.

So the bigger problem with these bailouts is what they're doing is they're encouraging even greater misallocation of capital by funnelling more money into zombie corporations that have no chance and they damage competition in the long run. So everybody loses. So the idea that if Boeing wasn't bailed out, what would happen to the poor employees? For $60 billion that Boeing got bailed out, I think the average employee would have gotten several tens of thousands of dollars directly. So instead of bailing out Boeing with 60 billion, if they instead gave 10 grand to every one of its employees or more, and burn the shareholders, then we would have a different outcome.

So the problem isn't just the fact that the money printer goes brr, the problem is that the decisions of how to allocate that money are removed from individual buyers, consumers, people, and redirected to one person, Steven Mnuchin, who also happens to be the architect of the foreclosure fraud and got away with it.

He was one of the owners of one of the companies that was doing robo signing mortgage fraud after 2008 and now he's being rewarded with the ability to distribute trillions of dollars to the most deserving companies. When you concentrate that decision making, instead of saying, "Everybody, here's a check, now you decide if Boeing or Southwest should continue to operate", or United or Southwest, or Boeing or Airbus, or whoever else and consumers should make that choice.

Peter McCormack:  That's not the bit I'm confused about. I don't disagree with that actually, although I can imagine there's weird dynamics there between countries imagining they need to stay competitive. I don't know the name of the company, but there is that growing Chinese company that is manufacturing jumbo jets now. So I can imagine there's some politicizing of this, where they're imagining they need to have a significantly large builder of jumbo jets in their nation.

A. Antonopoulos: If that's the answer, then it's really simple; nationalize Boeing and have the profits go back to taxpayers. But we already know that doesn't work.

Peter McCormack:  We know that doesn't work.

A. Antonopoulos: And the Chinese nationalized aerospace company that is building competitors, and mostly they're building 737 like planes, is unable to innovate and mostly copies the designs of Airbus and Boeing down to every last screw, because if you kill competition like that, you end up creating these companies that are unable to innovate. Now, Boeing has become a company that is unable to build planes that'll fly, and unable to innovate. The reason they've become that is precisely because of the 20 rules of overregulation and financialization.

So they became a bank that happened to have a plane department and an over regulated bank with an over regulated plane department. So the answer isn't to protect some national pride by creating a national aerospace company, that's a failed answer. But then again, these aren't free market companies. None of these are free market companies. They haven't seen a free market for decades at best. But you wanted to talk more about the stimulus act of central banking?

Peter McCormack:  Well actually no, I wanted to talk more about supporting the now millions, which might become tens of millions of people out of work; writing checks, because there are some people who believe that that shouldn't be done and that these checks shouldn't be written. But I don't understand how that is an answer for a group of people out of work, unable to work, with probably very little money, very little in savings. I just think it's a recipe for a huge social unrest in the US and a huge social unrest with a country that has a lot of guns.

A. Antonopoulos: Well the thing is if we're going to go for pure, unbridled, up-from-your-bootstraps capitalism, let's do that for everybody. The problem is that what we have is free market dog-eat-dog, rugged entrepreneurial capitalism for the lower middle class, and fully subsidized corporate socialism for everybody above that. That's how the system works. So it's like, well, if you want to not cut checks to all of those unemployed people, be ready for all of the businesses that they buy stuff from to go under, all of the landlords to be default on their mortgages and don't bail them out either.

But of course, that's not what's going to happen. Essentially what happens, and I think Bruce Fenton put it best, is we borrowed $18,000 from future income. Every person per capita in the United States borrowed $18,000 effectively from their future, and then they got a check for $1,200 and the other $16,500 went to corporations. That's a pretty raw deal!

I'm quite happy with the idea of money printer go brr and providing liquidity in order to give everybody a check for the next several months to avoid the liquidity crunch that comes from everybody staying at home, but we will still not avoid the productivity crunch that comes from that and when you have people who don't have disposable income, whose entirety of their income goes to pay for foods, healthcare and housing, and you give them a check that barely covers housing, none of that's going to go into the economy to stimulate the economy.

It's going to go to pay landlords for rent in its vast majority, so even the $1,200 check is effectively a bailout for landlords, and I say that as a landlord myself. I'm happy to take a bailout, but I didn't need it. What I needed was the ability to afford healthcare, which is a whole other issue.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, so how much are you thinking about the post-coronavirus world and what are the things that are on your mind? Obviously healthcare. We've talked about that. I'm assuming how much our civil liberty has been eroded. I know others are worrying about the fear of privacy invasions, that we may have to be handing over all phone data just because we need to prepare for the next coronavirus that may come similar to the invasions of our privacy with regards to any future potential terrorist act. What are the things that you're concerned about? What are you worried about? What are you optimistic about? We shouldn't just be miseries here.

A. Antonopoulos: Yes, I am worried about all of these surveillance effects. I'm worried, of course, not because people in power will do a power grab, because that's the obvious thing for them to do. What I'm more worried about is that people will become... Everyday normal people who have no power will become increasingly tolerant of and desirous of authoritarian responses because they feel unsafe and they want someone to tell them everything is going to be okay as long as we stop those dirty people from spreading the disease.

That's the kind of sentiment that leads to very dangerous things. It's one thing if you have the government overreach while being resisted by the population, it's another thing if you have the governmental overreach while being cheered on by mobs of authoritarians who are trying to outdo each other on snitching on their neighbours and kind of supporting that. I think that's extremely dangerous because the worst totalitarian systems we have came out of precisely those kinds of moments of crisis, whether it's the rise of socialism and communism in the East in 1919 and onwards or the rise of right-wing fascists in the West in 1930 and onwards, both precipitated by economic crisis, both precipitated by pandemics, both precipitated by social crisis and monetary crisis.

So we have that trifecta of economic, monetary and health crisis, social crisis, that is happening at the same time. In every country in the world a solid to 20 to 30% of the population will cheer on the brown shirts before they put a brown shirt on themselves, right? I feel that democracy and social order is a very fragile thing, so I'm worried that we're going to see potentially very, very rapid and very extreme change in places that we thought until now were relatively stable and long-running.

What happened in Hungary is not surprising for Hungary, but let's not forget that Spain had a 40 year fascist government up into the late '70s, and this stuff can happen again in Europe. It can happen in developed countries. It can happen in the US, and it can most certainly happen in a lot of other countries that are struggling with very, very young democracies and barely developed institutions.

So I am worried about the outcome of this, and I'm more worried not about the people in uniform who will come and tell me what to do, but about my own neighbours cheering them on as they drag me off into a van, right? Because that has happened in history before again and again. I'm also worried that one of the things we're going to see is an end to a kind of globalized travel friendly culture. I lived as a nomad for many years and that gave me a degree of freedom and self-determination that is rare.

I recognize that. As someone with a US and a British passport, I have a lot of options for visa-free travel. I'm worried that I'm never going to see that world again, just how World War II introduced passports and then ended kind of paper-free travel and integration around the world permanently. I worry that this will also end many of the traditions of free travel that some of us enjoy, and instead of those spreading to more people we're going to see them part of more greatly restricted.

Peter McCormack:  Let's finish on a positive note! What are you optimistic about? What do you think could come out? The reason I ask is I think if we come out of this and we've lost too much, people have suffered too much, we may see pockets of revolutions pop up, we may see people reject the status quo and say "Look, no, we've had enough of this. We can't carry on like this."

A. Antonopoulos: Yes, absolutely! Some people will see this change emerging in positive directions and it may galvanize various movements. One of the things that I think is very optimistic, which I find very positive, is the fact that in essence this is something that happens to all of us and the one thing that coronavirus affects is humans, and this is in some way a unifying and galvanizing effect for all of humanity. We are all equally susceptible to this and there is nowhere to escape from it.

That is actually a common human threat that we haven't faced for a very long time and it crosses all possible dividing lines of humanity. It's forced us in many cases to now use online systems, some communications systems, or it's forced everybody else to use them as much as you and I do. I've been working from home since 1994 and I haven't worked in an office for more than a couple of years in the entire 30 years I've been a professional, and throughout that time I was the weird one. Now everybody gets to live my life under the worse possible circumstances, because it's very different to work from home when you can leave and when you can't.

But still everybody gets to use the tools, have a reason to need the tools and it's breaking a lot of illusions. A lot of the meetings that we were having weren't necessary after all, or a lot of the face-to-face time wasn't necessary. A lot of the jobs that we thought had to be done in an office clearly don't, so a lot of these illusions, which are mostly kind of effects of habit, "This is how we've always done it, therefore this is how we must do it." No. Why?

The iconoclasts are winning because nothing can be taken for granted, therefore nothing is sacred, therefore everything can be re-imagined, and that is a positive thing. So if we come out of this with a greater understanding of how we can live more of our lives online, a greater appreciation for people whose professions until now were considered not that important... You know, nobody is clamouring to visit their VC because they started coughing, right? Or we have a newfound appreciation for supermarket checkout people. So I think these are good things that come out of this.

Another example would be at this point I don't see it very likely for in the US, the Democratic convention and then possibly the November election to happen in person or with ballots of traditional form. The US has a very, very broken electoral system. Forcing vote by mail for no or any reason everywhere in the US, which may become a necessity in order for us to hold the November election, may be a good outcome.

That would revitalize American democracy in a way nothing else has and overcome decades of resistance. So from that perspective I think a lot of positive change comes simply because there are no sacred traditions and a lot of the petty, tiny, small problems that we all had have disappeared very, very quickly because we all have big and real problems now.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, so a friend of mine put one of those messages up on Facebook this morning. It's one of those copy and paste jobs and I don't agree with all of it, but it was quite good. I'm going to read some bits to you. Traffic is gone, fuel is affordable, kids are at home with their families, parents are taking care of their children, fast food has been replaced by home cooked meals, hectic schedule is replace by naps, the air seems cleaner, the World is quieter, people are conscious about hygiene and health again, we've had time to finally stop and smell the roses, finally get to see a woman's real eyebrows and hair colour, it seems like this may be the reset button.

I normally ignore those copy and paste things that go around the ranks, I just don't care. But I was like actually there's some real truth in this. I spend so much time with my kids recently. We go out every day for our government approved exercise, but we actually spend some time together, which is great. I've cooked every day Andreas! That's what has happened and I've been running every day, which I haven't done for a long time.

It's horrible that this horrible public health crisis is the reason it's happened, but it has happened, and I just hope personally as we come out at the end of this that some of these lifestyle changes remain, that we don't go back into that old world. I really hope we don't. I hope personally I maintain some of it, I really do. I thought that was quite interesting.

A. Antonopoulos: Yeah, that's a good positive note to end on.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, after we went through the misery!

A. Antonopoulos: I'm going to piss on it now a bit, and you can cut this out of the podcast. One of the things that I am concerned about is that we are experiencing the privileged version of quarantine, where we are not at risk of being homeless tomorrow, we are not at risk of running out of food, we are not at risk of getting this because we have to go to a place where we're going to be exposed to other people, so from that perspective it can be very, very rewarding or you can take the best out of it.

What I'm really worried about is there's a vast poor underclass in the US, but even more so in other countries, where this now an existential threat, a very, very serious existential threat, where they're facing homelessness, of food insecurity and health insecurity simultaneously. We talk about "Oh, it's such a drag to have to do social isolation." Well, if you live in Mumbai you can't socially distance. I mean it's not a matter of should you, should you not, do I go to spring break, do I not go to spring break, can I go to the beach, can I walk my dog?

It's very, very tightly packed, so the best you can do in terms of social isolation, it doesn't even come close to what needs to be done. So I'm very worried that we're going to have, as always, a very different experience for big parts of the human population, where one part of humanity is going to experience this the way... I don't know who this guy was who was sending photos from his yacht, the billionaire sending photos from his yacht complaining about quarantine, but in a sarcastic way.

There's going to be a vast underclass that is going to experience this as a catastrophic thing that kills half of the people in the family and leaves the rest destitute and starving. So I think one of the dangers here is that we get through this with vastly different experiences, and some parts of the population cannot see the experiences that other parts of the population are having because we're in effect very isolated from that, and that's a recipe for bad outcomes.

Peter McCormack:  The media certainly has a responsibility there, and I have seen some of it covered. I just interviewed a health communications worker out in Kenya talking about the problems out there, the different problems. So for example, the population is not far off the UK, it's 10 million less, whereas the UK has 3,900 ICU beds they have 155, and our ability to scale up is a lot easier.

But she said you can't just put these people into quarantine. You can try, but these people live hand-to-mouth every month. If you're not providing them with food they're going to have to do something, and she said the majority of these people would rather die from a disease than die from hunger, and you can't do anything about that.

A. Antonopoulos: Of course. Well there is one silver lining, which is that the average age in India and the average age in Africa is in the mid-20s, so the fact that COVID is a boomer remover, as they jokingly call it in the US, may actually mean that it's less of a disaster in countries where the average population age is extremely young. But, yeah, I mean I'm thinking more of places like Louisiana, for example, which is now I think the third worse outbreak in the US?

Peter McCormack:  Yes, you're correct.

A. Antonopoulos: It's one of the poorest places in the US, and it's going to be a disaster there. So anyway, yeah, let's end on a positive note and count our blessings!

Peter McCormack:  You're healthy, I'm healthy! Look, I appreciate every time we talk, appreciate you having on, just stay healthy and stay in touch. I'm sure we'll speak again before this is over.

A. Antonopoulos: Thank you, absolutely!

Peter McCormack:  But it's always a pleasure. You take care and I'll see you soon! Oh, you should always do this at the end. You should always shout out where people can follow your work.

A. Antonopoulos: I mean it's the usual places, Aantonop is my user name, @Aantonop on Twitter, Aantonop on YouTube, Aantonop.com is my website and almost all of my work is under open licenses and available to read, mashup and reuse for free.

Peter McCormack:  Amazing! Well, listen, take care and I'll see you soon.

A. Antonopoulos: Thank you so much Pete!