WBD276 Audio Transcription

The 1 Bitcoin Trump Bet Update with American HODL

Interview date: Friday 6th November

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with American HODL. 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, American HODL and I catch up before, during & after the US Election. We follow the ups and downs of election night, Trump threatening legal action in various states, demanding recounts and what happens between now and the inauguration.

“I think this election was Trump vs the media, Biden was just a placeholder.”

— American HODL

Interview Transcription

PART 1 of 3 - Before the election

Peter McCormack: What's up, brother?

American HODL: Hey, what's up, man?

Peter McCormack: How are you doing?

American HODL: I'm excited to spend your Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, I don't think you've won it yet, dude; I don't think you've won it yet.  Are you going to spend it or just hodl it?

American HODL: No, I'm going to hodl it, of course.  I mean, I'm going to spend it ten years from now on maybe a nice villa, South of France, something like that, you know.

Peter McCormack: You see, I'm going to spend it slowly and I think I'm going to spend it a little bit every day over the year and every day, I'm going to send you a photo of what I've spent it on.

American HODL: Yeah!  I was telling somebody, I was like, "Man, it's so terrible if Pete wins my money, because I just assume he's going to spend it on, I don't know, stupid English crap like bangers and mash, and tea and crumpets, and stuff like that".

Peter McCormack: Some shepherd's pie!  The worst thing is -- actually, I'll get it worse than you, the victory on Twitter.  I'll get it worse than you, because I think most people are on your side, because they all think I've had -- I'd had it this week.  A couple of them have been like, "Why the fuck are you so pro-Biden?" and I'm like, "Go and find one tweet I've said positive about Biden; just find one tweet, please.  Show me where I've said -- I've said Trump's a moron, because he is, but find me one pro-Biden tweet, because I haven't".

American HODL: Even crypto Twitter, which skews more liberal, is heavily biased towards Trump.  Like, CryptoCobain was putting up polls and I think they were like 65% Trump.  And, you know, the Ethereum crowd is much more liberal than the Bitcoin maximalist crowd.

Peter McCormack: But, there's a lot of confirmation bias in this, right?

American HODL: Well, yeah, that's politics.

Peter McCormack: I'm not surprised in Bitcoin world that we don't have many democrats and Biden fans.  I think there are some hypocrites, right, there's people that are totally anarchist and then they're like, "Well, yeah, but …"; they secretly want Trump to win, or libertarian.  And then it's like they'll give some excuse like, "Well you know, he wants freedom, and he wants …", you know, they talk about some of the things that mildly align with it, but basically it's still big government; it's still on that spectrum of collectivism.

American HODL: I personally don't claim libertarianism, because I think the state is the weapon and that machine has already been built and people will harness it and use it against others; so, you might as well attempt to get your hands on it, you know what I mean?!

Peter McCormack: All right, well, listen.  We took out a bet; how long ago was that?

American HODL: It was during the riots during the summer, so it probably would have been July-ish, I think we made the bet.  It was before 4 July, because that was when the Mount Rushmore speech was.  I remember, I took the bet before that speech had happened, and I was feeling kind of shit about the bet when I made it, which is the hallmark of a good investment.  I felt really terrible about it the moment I made it, because I was like, "Fuck, Pete's probably right.  Trump doesn't seem to have an answer; he's losing ground.  The pandemic has hit him hard; people are angry, they're in the streets", etc.  And then the riots went on from three days to a week to the whole summer.

By the end of the summer of riots, it was clinched in my mind for Trump, because normal, regular, hard-working Americans hate that shit; they hate it.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's funny you should say that because when I took the bet, I was fully confident; I was like, "Trump's fucked".  And then, funnily, Mount Rushmore, I was like, "Hm, no, that was a good speech".  I mean, I don't know who wrote it.  I'm assuming Tucker Carlson had --

American HODL: He had a good writer; a good writer wrote it, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But, you know, I'm not a fan.  I'm a fan of a lot of Republican ideals, but I'm not a fan of sometimes the way they're delivered.  But I thought, you know what, that's a good speech; that's a good fucking speech.

American HODL: Let me ask you about one of your tweets recently.  Why do you think that Tucker Carlson is a grifter equivalent to Don Lemon, because I see them as very different?

Peter McCormack: I think they're doing the same thing from the other side of the aisle.  I mean, I see them differently.  I do not like Lemon at all; I just don't like Don Lemon.  I think he's just full of shit and, like, I can't watch him, I have to turn it off when he comes on, because he epitomises Trump's derangement syndrome; he's fully infected.

Whereas, with Tucker Carlson, sometimes he says some good stuff, sometimes he's full of shit, sometimes he makes me laugh.  He is completely partisan.  And my problem with all of these people is, the best thing was the Matthew Taibbi milkshake email.  Do you subscribe to his Substack?

American HODL: Well, I read the tweet threads about it, but I don't subscribe to his Substack, no.

Peter McCormack: It was perfect.  He was like, "They're both fucking shit" and he said -- he gets it right.  He was like, when you say Trump's a liar, people are like, "No, he's not".  But, he said it perfectly.  He said, "Trump is probably the most lying president and the most lied-about president ever", and that was the perfect way; because, then you can mix it up and go, "Well, maybe he lies because he's so fed up with being lied about and it's his way of fighting back", etc.

But, he did that and he got it right on both of them, that it's just two terrible fucking candidates.  Whereas, somebody like Tucker Carlson, he has to play into that, politics is entertainment; we've got to get our numbers up; we've got to support our base.  Yes, he's not the worst, but at the same time, it's not journalism; it's entertainment.

American HODL: Yeah, it's entertainment for sure.

Peter McCormack: He's not as bad as Don Lemon.

American HODL: Let me just tell you, I am not a Fox News watcher.  I mean, I'm switching back and forth right now between, I've got Fox News on at the moment, but I switch back and forth between this and CNN, because I like seeing the different perspectives, and they're obviously crazy biased.  It's like watching two totally different movies play out.

But, since the summer, since the riots and Tucker's message about the elites and how they have abandoned regular-class Americans and things like that, there hasn't been honestly a word that's come out of his mouth all year I haven't agreed with 100%, right.  Because, the elite class has really hollowed out our country and, you know, people like Joe Biden, right,Trump to a lesser degree, because Trump made the bulk of his money on American real estate, but the elite money class has been hollowing us out to China for pennies really.

Wall Street has been selling us to China for pennies, selling our IP, selling our American innovation and letting China basically rape our country.  I think that we are the world Davos man idealism of the Clinton era and the Clinton administration.  It is just very, at a base level, it is an ideological cover story for plunder.  They were stealing and hollowing out the American middle class and, you know, this has been my opinion the entire time about Trump.

And Tucker Carlson's been saying the same thing, it's that it doesn't matter who Trump is as a person.  He's a piece of shit; we all know that.  None of us really like Trump as a person.  We don't think he's a man of high moral character; he's not necessarily somebody you'd want to leave in the room with your wife, right, etc.  But, he is standing up for the voiceless in America.

The people like Hillary Clinton think that because they made a bunch of peasants in Mexico two times richer and lifted them from extreme poverty to regular poverty, while shoving their countrymen under the bus that that was okay or morally justified; it wasn't and people are very upset about it, and as they fucking should be, man.  And, I think you're going to see that show up today.  It's been my theory the entire time and I don't think it's changed.

Peter McCormack: Well it might be like our last election, because it was very much the Conservatives coming into our last election with a strong base and we had the Labour Party going for a big push.  It was an absolute fucking landslide, like, they got absolutely killed and the Conservatives stayed in power.  I think they're fucked next election because of COVID, but they got absolutely fucking destroyed.

I say that, I say it's similar, but I still think this one's kind of hard to call; I'm not confident either way.  It's so hard to call; I can't even call it a 50/50, because a 50/50 says it's close.  I actually don't know.  I can see a scenario where it's a Trump landslide; I can also see a scenario where it's a Biden landslide; and, I can also see a scenario where we wake up in the morning and it's, yeah, off to the Supreme Court, because there are different indicators pointing at different things.

So, for example, the absolute massive confidence of the Republican base is one indicator to me that Trump's got it again.  But, the second indicator is the number of people who have wanted to speak to me about it, because of the stuff I make, who I think were definitely previously Democrats, who have flipped, and their arguments make me think.

But then, there are other things like, I was watching a thing earlier about the volume of mail-in votes.  In some of the, I don't know if it's counties or states, but as I was seeing this, the volume of mail-in votes that they've had already surpasses the total votes for the last election.

American HODL: Yeah.  101 million, they just said on TV; 101 million.  That's a fucking lot; it's a lot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, if everything stayed about the same, that's actually a good indicator for the Dems, because mail-in voters tend to be more from the Democratic base.

American HODL: I will tell you though --

Peter McCormack: I'm saying, on those fine-line states where they were close before, if it's similar, it could swing it.  If it's not, if Trump's got more support, then I don't know.

American HODL: I feel you, but Trump has been telling his base to stay home and vote on Election Day; he's been telling them that everything's fraudulent, etc.  And, you know, I've driven by several polling locations just this morning and you obviously can't know who people are voting for, right, but the parking lot is full of pickup trucks, there are a lot of American flags, there are a lot of men in line.  All of those things lead me to believe that all three of the polling locations -- and, the lines were fucking huge, dude; they were massive.  I've never seen lines like this.

Peter McCormack: Did you vote?

American HODL: Yeah, I sent in an absentee ballot a week ago.

Peter McCormack: For Biden, right?

American HODL: Of course!  No, Trump, baby!  I'm a former Obama vote.

Peter McCormack: I know.  You told me, man.

American HODL: I have not voted since 2008 because, you know, in Mitt Romney, I was like, I had already soured on Obama in 2012 but I was like, Mitt Romney; I don't like this guy.  Then in 2016, I hated both obviously.  I thought Trump was ridiculous; I thought Hillary was evil; and so, my choice is between a clown and basically this woman who has done unspeakable acts of terror against anybody who's been politically against her; so, I stayed out of that one.

But then, you know, the riots, man; the riots fucking pushed me to get off my arse and vote and flip everybody around me.  So, I got a lot of people who were around me like wife, mother, mother-in-law, uncle, etc and I was like, "We're all going Trump".  And, these people are not as politically tuned in as I am and I was like, "We're all going Trump.  Trump, Trump, Trump"!

Peter McCormack: But, that's an anti-left vote, right?  That's not a pro-Trump, that's an anti-left?

American HODL: I'm not pro-Trump at all, I'm anti-communism and I do think that Biden is a back door for communism.

Peter McCormack: I still don't buy this shit.

American HODL: I get that you don't believe that, right, but here's -- okay, even if you don't take that; let's take that off the table.  We have an entire media establishment that is pulling for one party.  We've never had that before in American life.  That's so dangerous, I just can't even -- I am not going to gift whatever that is, that Democratic superpower; I'm not going to gift them the executive branch, there's no way.

Peter McCormack: Let me ask you something.  Are you saying that entire media apparatus is pulling for Biden because they've declared they have, or because of the way news is being spun, and that's your read from the kind of stories that are going out, etc?

American HODL: Well, you know, it's a lot of things, right.  Some of them are obviously biased, MSNBC is obviously biased; some of them are non-obviously biased, CNN, ABC, NBC.  Some of them are incredibly biased, like the New York Times is full of social justice warriors and that's an insane thing to me.  Also, I come from a media family, so my father used to be the Vice President of a large media organisation and he oversaw 180 papers.  I've walked through news rooms and all that.  My entire life had been around the news and been around reporters.

Reporters used to be blue-collar guys who really had an axe to grind against the powerful, because the powerful were the people who'd fucked over their parents when they were growing up, right, and you can totally understand that it makes sense.  And, these were the guys that would grind it out, beat the pavement, go to the bar afterwards, drink hard; they were really good guys.  They have all been replaced by these little, pissy, young girls who went to Princeton and went to Yale and Columbia and think they're better than everybody else.

Peter McCormack: That's not fair; that's not all of them.  There are some really good journalists out there.  Even in the New York Times, there are some fucking good journalists.

American HODL: It's very rare to find good journalism inside of these institutions, Pete.  But, I agree that Matt Taibbi on Substack is probably amazing journalism.  I don't subscribe to it personally, but I think Taibbi's a really smart guy.  But, inside the New York Times, the institutions are wholly fraudulent because of their incentives.  They've been saddled with the embedded growth paradigm and, you know, the money fucked that up, and we know about all that stuff.  So, their incentive is …

And, the business of journalism is dead.  It used to be that you had a regional monopoly and it was a licence to print money.  And then, when the internet democratised information, there was no way to make money anymore.  And, I watched it happen with my father and the other newspaper executives; revenues just went down, down, down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it became clickbait.  Everything's clickbait now because of the way the online model works, because I lived through that with my agency.  It was the whole banner model that you have to have a certain number of page views to hit the impressions, etc.  So, what gets the impressions; clickbait.  It's funny though, I was thinking about it today; a lot of people complain about clickbait.  But, social media conspiracy grifters, who are essentially using online clickbait for likes and follows themselves, they're part of the problem as well. 

But, I think there are some good people out there who want to be journalists, but I agree with you it comes across as a very left bias.  But, because I'm doing this -- you know I'm doing this Chaos thing, right?  We should talk about that as well; I'll talk about that in a minute.

American HODL: I haven't listened yet, but I want to.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll tell you what happened with that, but I'm definitely going to do a look into the news and why this has happened.  Perhaps because news is now, like you say, it's not journalism; it's more media and entertainment.  Maybe it draws a different type of person now.

American HODL: A lot of it is activism.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but some of it could be personality-based and location-based.  You know, are these publications mainly in California and New York?  They're going to maybe attract more left-leaning people.  But I agree, that's one of the reasons I changed the whole Chaos thing.

So, I did the first thing.  You know, we were going to do, The Accidental Dictator, and we wrote -- I'll share it with you; you can have a read of it.  We did about eight of the chapters, right, but it was more like an audio book than a series, and it was just a full investigation into him.  Most of it, you can't actually argue with. 

We did, the accident was that you didn't he would ever become president and he did, and it was mainly a revenge against Obama; that's what we think.  But, we looked into his entire business career, the people he fucked over in Atlanta, the banks he fucked over.  He has got a ropey track record. 

The only way he's a successful businessman is he's bought properties that have grown in value and he's leveraged the value of those.  Some will say that's smart.  I think the trail of destruction he's left for hardworking Americans and other businesses, especially in Atlanta, I think in itself is pretty fucking bad, right.

So anyway, we went through all of that, but I've got someone like you in my ear, I've got Junseth in my ear, everyone on Twitter on my ear going, "You've got it wrong; you've got it wrong".  So, I just had to take a step back and I was really struggling with it.  I was thinking, there's no point telling this story because all I'm going to do is have people who like Trump go, "It's bullshit"; and, people who don't like him go, "Yeah, it's great"; so, you achieve nothing.  As a content provider/kind of journalist, you achieve nothing.

So, we decided to approach it completely differently, and it is so fucking hard to find the truth about anything; dude, literally anything.  Like, give Hunter Biden's laptop as an example, right?  Either he left a laptop in a Delaware store with a bunch of pictures on and a bunch of emails looking like he's doing some dodgy business deals; or, he didn't, somebody else made that happen, right. 

And one side's like, "Why isn't this being reported?  Why isn't the news reporting this?  There's clearly something going on here".  And then, let's get away from the just definite left places; it didn't even feel like Fox wanted to run the story.  Fox weren't heavy on the story and I was like, well, why aren't Fox heavy on the story?  So, I can't find any objective truth, yet you've got a presidential debate where the president is using that information.  How is anyone meant to know what the truth is there?  I mean, what do you even think, dude?

American HODL: Man, it's like a few years ago, I felt, you know, I'm a smart person, so I felt like I was ahead of the conspiracy theories and that the people being duped by them were stupid people.  And, that was true, I think, let's say 2016.  It's not true anymore.  The smart people are being duped like crazy left and right.

I remember watching something where Michelle Obama, who I consider a very smart person, was duped by some Qanon conspiracy theory, and she was out there presenting it as actual fact.  And it's just, you know like, let's say in North Korea or Russia; the way they control dissent and the way they control information is to put stopgap measures in place and to actually control what you're seeing.

In America, the way we do propaganda, and in the entire western world, the way we do propaganda is to flood the system with information.  I mean, it is so hard to figure out what to pay attention to, especially when you're a normal person who's got to go to work, and get up, and you slept bad, and your kid's being a brat.  I don't know what's on Hunter Biden's lap top; who fucking knows?!  It's so confusing.

These are not only the most confusing times on record; these are the dumbest times on record.  I feel collectively much dumber than we used to be, right.  I was explaining to my wife about the media and how the media calls elections, earlier today.  I was like, you know, it's always been sort of a polite fiction based on estimates and everything, but it was a fiction that worked because everybody believed it.  And now, it's not a fiction that works anymore, so the entire way we've constructed this democratic process is grinding to a halt.

For years, we've let the media basically announce the winners.  And, even the New York Times was on Twitter today saying that the media is supposed to be the ones who announce the winners; it falls on the shoulders of the media to announce the winner of the presidential election.  And it's like, why is that the case?!  We have such better systems now that we could build to prevent things like this.

Peter McCormack: Well, you haven't listened, but I'm going to make you listen to it, but why I decided to do this first one, I found a Republican guy who's never voted Democrat; and, I've got a friend who's a Democrat who's never voted Republican; and I just had a talk to them.  And do you know what's really fucking interesting?  Two things: I don't think the sides are that far apart.  I think there is a radical left group of rioters. 

And by the way, I think within that, there's a whole bunch of people who are just opportunist, who saw a chance to loot stores and get some free shit.  And, I don't think they're of a political persuasion; I just think they took advantage.  But, I think that radical left Marxist group, I think is actually a very, very small number of actual Democratic people; I don't think it's big.  I think the same; I don't think there's a big percentage of the Republican base which is white supremacist; I just don't think it's that.

But, it was actually quite interesting the amount of things they kind of agreed on, the things that they found important.  But, one thing that stood out that both of them said is, I think this guy, Chart, the Republican guy said, "Politics is in your face now; it used to be distant from us".  And he said, "And, sometimes you'll sit down with your crazy uncle and he'll tell you his conspiracy theories", and that was it.

And, Julie was saying, with regard to her, she was like, "It's everywhere; it's ubiquitous; you can't get away from it; I'm getting alerts on my phone", and that's the thing.  Everyone's been drawn into it, and it's been gamed by the media company as entertainment and now, we're all pitted against each other.  And, it's really funny.  Julie's husband also wrote to me a really great email with some things in there where he was saying, "Essentially we create false arguments over false positions".

So, for example, if it's abortion, you're either against reproductive rights, or you want to kill babies, and there's no in between.  Actually, the argument's in the middle.  It's like global warming; it's the end of the world, or protect the oil industry in America.  Actually, everything is important in the middle, but someone like Trump, or even Biden, definitely Trump more in this instance, but definitely Biden, they want a sound bite.  And then, a sound bite is a chorus.  And, that's no fucking use to anyone.

American HODL: Well, totally.  And also, we're in a position where we killed God.  I mean, we don't have God in our society.  I'm not a particularly religious person.  I mean, I've probably been what you could consider a devout atheist since I was 13 or so; but then, I did a lot of drugs and I was like, "You know what; shit's crazy, because who knows what's going on, right?"

But, humans tend to have a religious module in our brain and we look for religion in everything.  And, when we don't have a God, we make politics our God.  This is our God now.  This is Sunday church service.  "The battle for America's soul"; that is literally the Democratic slogan, right?  This isn't the battle for souls; this is the battle for which arsehole gets to rule over us.

And it's also, you're right about it being ubiquitous.  The fact the "End racism" is in the end zone at the NFL is insane to me.  The vast majority of people are not racist.  I stood in Grant Park when Obama got elected and I thought that we were living in post-racial America, and how --

Peter McCormack: Dude, let me tell you something.  I interviewed that dude, Zuby, and he says some really smart things somethings.  But one thing just blew my mind.  He said, "The demand for racism far outweighs the supply".  He's fucking right.

American HODL: Yeah, big time.  Well for me, I think part of the reason why I voted Trump is because I view this far leftist -- you know, I don't like this equivocating that's going on between Qanon and Antifa.  Antifa is much worse and much scarier than the Qanon thing.  Antifa is like the KKK at the height of their powers; they're everywhere.  It's invasive; it's in all institutions.  This social justice bullshit has invaded our schools, our governmental bureaucracies, our military; it is pervasive, right. 

And, if you don't drink the Kool-Aid and go along with them, they're going to lynch you, like legitimately.  It's going to be digital and it's going to be reputational violence, but that is still real to a vast majority of people.  And, if it affects your ability to earn and provide for your family, it is definitely a type of violence.  It's a very feminine energy too, very female.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, that's why that Brian Armstrong thing was brilliant, right, for Coinbase.  He gets a lot of shit all the time and, you know, some people say rightly so, whatever.  But, that thing he did with Coinbase was absolutely brilliant; I thought it was great.  He's like, "Get this shit out of here.  We're here to grow our company, we're here to make money; get this shit out of it.  And by the way, if you don't like this, here's a generous severance package; go and do your own thing".

So, in doing that, he got rid of all the annoying people who do want to talk about that shit.  I thought that was one of the coolest things I'd seen.  It's like, it is ubiquitous, it is everywhere, it is affecting …  It was like when Black Lives Matters happened; it cracked me up.  You know Black Friday, you get all the emails, right, that come in from every single email list you're on with the Black Friday deal?  Black Lives Matters was the same.  I got so many fucking -- here's our racism policy, here's our Black Lives Matters policy. 

Look, don't get me wrong, right, I think there are some clear issues that need to be dealt with.  There is clearly a cycle of poverty and opportunity which affects certain, and let's just say "neighbourhoods"; and, those neighbourhoods might be predominantly black, but there are going to be white neighbourhoods as well, but they might be predominantly black.  There are issues there, and it certainly needs some investment there.  But, the fact that companies felt the need that they had to bend the knee and do something straight away, I think reflects that there is this social pressure on companies which goes too far; it just fundamentally goes too far. 

American HODL: Yeah, talking about the racism thing, this brings me back a little bit to the Trump stuff.  I agree with Zuby.  I think the supply, you know, the desire for it way outweighs the supply, right.  And it's like, when I was a kid in the 1990s, it was casually accepted in white America to talk shite about poor black people; it was.  And, it's classic "othering".

It's like, "Them over there, they're bad; so therefore us over here, we're good and everything we do is great and look at them.  They wear their pants too low and they drink purple drink and they do this and that", and it was this mockery of black culture that went on and in the elite conservative circles.  It went on all over white America, right.

That has evaporated because it's become so socially gauche to do something like that, so nobody would dare do it nowadays, but the energy is still there.  And, you know where it goes?  It goes to poor white Americans, who are struggling just as much as poor black Americans, but it's become acceptable to view them as basically pieces of shit who deserve everything they get.  "Oh, fucking factory's closed and you're addicted to opiates?  Why don't you learn to code, right?"

Then, that's where that whole thing came from.  It's like, "How dare you belittle these people and tell them to learn to code when your dumbass can't do that; you can't learn to code?"  And then we memed it so hard on Twitter that we're not even allowed to say it to the elites anymore, right, when they're the ones who are provoking these people who are dying of diseases of despair, killing themselves in insanely high clips; their lives are bad, really fucking bad.

Peter McCormack: Let me ask you a big question then, because this is a really important one for me --

American HODL: And, Donald Trump loves them and he supports them and he sees them, you know?

Peter McCormack: Well, division has been gamed, right?  If you are a political leader, division is gamed for you for your end goal or retaining power; less so than the others, but let's just say it is.  Division has certainly been gamed by the news companies, the Roger Ailes strategy, let's go after the Republican base, let's not fight for everyone else.  Let's create a multi-billion dollar advertising business off the back of that.  Right, so there's no need for us to be impartial; we just have to support our base and keep them happy.  The strategy then copied, certainly by MSNBC on the left, and to a certain extent, CNN, etc.  Then you've got smaller publications who game it; Breitbart as an example on the right.  I don't know, a left maybe --

American HODL: Huffington Post, maybe, or something like that.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, or is it Quillette?   I mean, I don't really know.

American HODL: Quillette's on the right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Is it?  Is Quillette on the right?  I don't really know that.  What's the one, is it Vox I'm thinking of?

American HODL: Vox, yeah; Ezra Klein, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Maybe; I don't know.  But then, it's social media even worse.  Like, if you're Ben Shapiro on one side; and again, I don't actually know them.  I tend to know the right more, certainly on social media.  But, it's certainly been gamed to the point where it benefits you, the division benefits you.  You meme someone, you insult someone, you raise -- it's game, so it creates more of that hate and mockery, etc.

I personally don't think it's good.  I don't think it's healthy, and maybe that's a British view.  Americans think fuck knows.  I don't think it's healthy.

American HODL: No, it's not.  I agree with you; it's not healthy, obviously.

Peter McCormack: And I think the first presidential election, like everyone stood back and went, "That was fucking terrible; that was a shit show", whoever you were.  Both of them were terrible.  It was just awful, right?

American HODL: Yeah, the debate, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

American HODL: That was an embarrassment.

Peter McCormack: What did I just say, the "election"?

American HODL: Yeah, it's all good.  That was an embarrassment for our country.

Peter McCormack: But, if we can all agree that this isn't good, how do we come back from it?  I've got ideas for myself, but how do we come back from this because what you're going to do, in four years, have the same shit again?

American HODL: I feel that we're at this point of the movie where there's this idea from B F Skinner, from behavioural modifications that, if you can control a thing's environment, you can control that thing.  And, we are the thing and our environment has been controlled.  It's like the end of that movie, Seven, where he's like, "John Doe has the upper hand".  That's the moment of the movie where we're at where I think those of us who are paying attention are realising.

I deleted my Facebook, my Instagram and all that shit.  I'm still on Twitter because that's where the bitcoiners are and I love the bitcoiners.  But, I just can't engage with friends and family and bicker constantly.  I'm as gaslit, I'm as gamed, I'm as fucked up as anybody else and just having that slight degree of metacognition, just enough to delete the apps and get the fuck off, has been really helpful for my mental clarity, mental sanity, all of that. 

But, how do we have that unplugging en masse, because we're in a trance.  And, if we don't get out of it fucking soon, civil war is going to happen here in America and I don't know what's going to happen in the world, but it could be worse than what a civil war was like.

Peter McCormack: Well do you know, it's funny; I was talking to my brother.  I think people think of civil war as like, I mean, you've had one civil war previously where you kicked our arses out, you chucked away the tea in your big sulk because you kicked us out.

American HODL: Well, that was a hard fork.  I mean, you guys were like the Bitcoin Cash and we're like the Bitcoin, you know?

Peter McCormack: Shut the fuck up!  We're not!  But anyway, listen.  You had that civil war, right, but that was a war, an actual war, with guns and fucking cannons and a proper war.  When people talk about civil war, I've heard some people say it's ridiculous.  I don't think the next, if you have a civil war, in some ways you're in a civil war, but it's like a cold war, like it's a cold civil war.  It's being fought over the internet in cancel cultures.

American HODL: Getting cancelled is like a death in the 1880's civil war.  It's like, you getting reputational violence done against you is like a death in this day and age, especially if you're a regular person with asymmetric power.  Like one of the big accounts like you were talking about, the influencers, they send a hate mob after you, right, and you're some little piddly account like, who was the woman? 

Justine Sacco, right, who was on Twitter and she made a joke about being white and how she can't get AIDS; do you remember this story?

Peter McCormack: No.

American HODL: She was one of the first people to be -- she was just a regular lady, she popped some Xanax and some wine, she was getting on a flight to South Africa --

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I remember.  She woke up and her shit blew up, yeah.

American HODL: Yeah, "Well, heading to South Africa, hope I don't get AIDS.  Jk, I'm white", right?  When she woke up, she had lost her job, her relationship, her reputation was in check.  So, that's happening all over the place, and that is like getting shot by a cannon.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but do you know what, there's a slight difference.  I felt sorry for her, but she said a dumb thing, right, but I felt sorry for her.  It was too extreme, but she said a dumb thing.  But people are getting -- but what I mean is now, I don't think -- I think it's very hard for you to be a popstar or a Hollywood actor and come out as a Donald Trump supporter.  I mean, you can do it if you're like Kid Rock, or you can do it if you're a Country and Western star; and, you can perhaps do it if you're a rapper and kind of get away with it.

American HODL: Did you pay attention to Chris Pratt?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.

American HODL: So you saw that, right?  All he did was not show up to a Biden fundraiser; that was it.  He didn't say, "I'm voting for Donald Trump", nothing.  And what people did is what people are doing a lot nowadays, is that they're projecting on to him.  He may not even vote for Trump; we don't know.  He didn't come out and support Trump.  Who knows?  Who's to say what's in the guy's head, right?

But, people assumed and then they started trying to cancel him, because of an assumption.  It's fucking dangerous, that kind of thing, you know?  It's a witch-hunt, right?

Peter McCormack: But it's like everyone -- look, one way to get it solved is the right -- I don't mean right as in on the right -- the right person comes in as a presidential candidate who wants to build unity and doesn't want to play the shit show and that kind of Obama first, Reagan.

American HODL: That will be post-collapse.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think that kind of person who just says it for what it is and everyone's just like, "Yeah, we've had enough of this"; I think it can happen that way.  But, I don't see how else it can happen.

The only way I see it happens is if we gradually move away -- like, this is the last burning embers of this kind of, what's written in that Fourth Turning.  I've not actually read it, so I don't know how it all comes crumbling down, but for example --

American HODL: I was listening to your interview with Raoul Pal and I agree with him that we're heading back towards feudalism and so, I think we are going to be these -- I think, The Sovereign Individual, which you haven't read yet, right?

Peter McCormack: No, but could you hear in that interview my mind was clicking, like, hold on?

American HODL: You need to read it. 

Peter McCormack: Dude, I've got it downstairs.

American HODL: I think the thing he gets wrong is that humans do have a desire to collectivise and so, it's really not the sovereign individual, it's the sovereign collective.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I could buy that.

American HODL: And so, if you look at Bitcoin maximalism, we kind of were one of the first tribes of truly sovereign pirate collectivists, right; we're a tribe and we live online and we maraud all day long.  You say something shitty about Bitcoin, we're in your mentions, fucking you up left and right; you say something great, we're showering you with love.

And, what we're doing is we're creating our own sort of behavioural environment in which you come into Bitcoin.  So, the same way Facebook and Instagram and Twitter game you with algorithms, we're gaming you with negative and positive love, affection and then hate, derision; and, we game you socially that way.  And that's why people like Michael Saylor …

For instance, when Michael Saylor put in $425 million and he came out with that super chat post where he was like, "By the way, I have another $180 million" --

Peter McCormack: My personal money!

American HODL: Yeah.  And, if he had done that anywhere else on the internet, that is bragging about wealth, that is gauche, that is -- there are all these pictures of Kim Kardashian's birthday and people were like, "How could she; during the pandemic?"  And I was like, I can't believe I'm sticking up for Kim Kardashian; I was like, "Let her have fucking fun, man, who cares; she's rich; she earned it", whatever.

But, in Bitcoin Twitter, we praise you; we praise you for being rich.  What a fucking amazing thing that is for a rich person in a world where everybody else hates your guts!

Peter McCormack: But, that's a traditional American thing, right?

American HODL: Yeah, totally.

Peter McCormack: Because, in the UK, we all hate rich people; any success, we hate you.  We will say to you, "Congratulations, well done, I'm really proud of you", but when you're gone, we're like, "Fuck that guy".

American HODL: Were you like a class trader in the UK or something, right?

Peter McCormack: But, in America --

American HODL: -- you're okay, like nobody cares, because then you're expected to be a rich prick, right?

Peter McCormack: But, America wants people to be successful.  I get that; they love that.

American HODL: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But, not everyone?

American HODL: Well, it's like, how to say it?  There used to be this thing under the gold standard where, if you saw a guy driving down the road in a Cadillac, you were like, "I want to be him; I'm jealous of him and I want what he has for me".  And then, when it became fiat power games, you saw the guy rolling down in the Cadillac and you wanted to throw a fucking rock at it, and you were envious of him.  And you thought, "I'll never get that, so I want to take it from him". 

So, that is the prevailing sentiment in American life now.  When you talk to younger Americans, they're really socialist and they really despise wealth and people shouldn't be billionaires, and all this kind of stuff, because they know that the system is unfair and they're getting fucked one way or the other.

But, my point is that you come into Bitcoin with, you know, you just say, "I'm a rich guy who bought Bitcoin!", we're all your best friend and we love you.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, also because we want you to tell your rich buddies and get them to do the same, right?

American HODL: Of course.  You're a human and psychologically, we're manipulating you, right?  We all do it.

Peter McCormack: Well, Bitcoin's game for us -- we all do well when the rich guys come in.

American HODL: It feels good to be manipulated, man.  It's like when you're with a chick.  If she's manipulating you, as long as she's doing a good job at it, you don't care; you're like, "Of course, go ahead, manipulate me some more"!

Peter McCormack: Well listen, bro, we were going to three half-hour shows; we've probably done three three-hour shows, but listen, I want to go and watch the news.  So I guess, at some point when it starts heating up, maybe --

American HODL: What time is it right there in the UK?

Peter McCormack: 10.45pm.  I'm going to be up all night, dude.

American HODL: Okay, so I'll probably stay up late, so maybe if you pass out, you can hit me up in the morning.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, I'll get you once before we go to sleep and say, here we are, where we're at; and that what we'll do, we'll do another one.  Whenever you're up in the morning tomorrow, you hit me up and we'll talk about the autopsy.

American HODL: I've got to tell you, I don't think there's going to be a president tonight or tomorrow; I don't think there's going to be a president for a while.

Peter McCormack: I've kind of got that feeling.

American HODL: There are going to be some declarations that happen on both sides, but nobody's going to be conceding.  In an American election, when you concede, that's when it's over.  So, I don't think either side's going to concede any time soon.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, I think the same.  All right, well let's catch up.  Well, whenever we need to catch up, we'll catch up and call each other, yeah?

American HODL: All right, just hit me up.

PART 2 of 3 - During the election

Peter McCormack: Yo, good morning.

American HODL: What's up?

Peter McCormack: What's the time there?

American HODL: What is it; 4.00-something in the morning; 4.47am.

Peter McCormack: I had three hours' sleep.  I ended up -- I fell asleep on the couch twice --

American HODL: Me too.

Peter McCormack: -- once around 2.00am in the morning; I was like, "I don't know where this is going".  And I woke up about 4.00am and I was like, "Oh, this is done".  I watched about an hour miserably, fell asleep again, then I got into bed.  I've had like three or four hours' sleep.  But, I thought it was done.  In my head, I nearly conceded to you.  I nearly put out a tweet saying, "I concede"!

Then, I woke up this morning and things started to change and, it's weird.  The FTX betting markets are quite interesting to follow, but I don't think they show a good prediction; I think they show a good reality of in the moment, what people are thinking.

American HODL: Dude, this is fucking …  This is not how elections go in America, do you know what I mean?  This is wild.  Since I started voting when I was 18, I've never seen the votes just stop being counted.  And it is especially weird that they all were stopped, they stopped counting, in all Democrat-controlled states, you know?

Peter McCormack: Woah, are you calling conspiracy?

American HODL: I mean, I'll tell you this.  I watched Trump's speech last night; pretty much agreed with his assessment.  It seemed like, you know, he could have been slightly more tactful maybe, but I don't know, it seems like the game is afoot.  It seems like something is going on, not taking for granted I just woke up five minutes ago.

Peter McCormack: That statement's been largely rebuked, even by Republican people.

American HODL: Well, I saw Ben Shapiro; he's a pussy.

Peter McCormack: No actually, I think Ben Shapiro's like, in fairness, he's willing to challenge Trump, which I think both sides need themselves checked out.  A bit like we have with Bitcoin, right.  You know how we keep people in check, even though we're all on the same side, we want Number Go Up; we keep each other in check, right.

We don't tend to have that in politics, because it's so partisan.  I actually think it's quite good that Ben Shapiro does that sometimes.  I think the Libs need it a bit more as well.

American HODL: Well, Ben Shapiro's harping back to this centrist America of yore.  That's gone now.  We don't have that political class where you hit each other hard on crosstalk on CNN but then, behind the scenes, you're friends.  Tucker Carlson was alluding to it on Fox News last night.  I don't know if you saw the clip of him, but he basically went on Fox News and called bullshit on the whole thing.  And, if you watch the coverage from Fox, even Fox was terrible.

Peter McCormack: It was terrible, yeah.

American HODL: It was terribly biased against Trump.  It was amazing!  They called the entire West Coast without a vote being counted, but Trump was dominant in Florida; they refused to call it forever, right.  What's up with Pennsylvania; I haven't …?  He was dominating that when I went to bed.

Peter McCormack: He's still dominating that.  I think the thing with Pennsylvania, some people have still got it in play.  In my head, it seems too far out.  But then, it's funny but, like you say, I'd given up, I was, "Okay, Trump's won, fair enough", and I'll come back to that because I've got an interesting point on that.

But, there seemed to be this quiet confidence on CNN; it was like, "Just wait, let's just let the votes come in".  And also, I think these people are pretty smart.  I think everyone knows what they're doing.  I don't think either the Biden camp or the Trump camp cared much about the polls.  I think they knew exactly what was going to happen.  I think they knew it was going to come down to these mail-in votes and it was going to be a close call, because all of the rhetoric from the last week starts to make sense.  I think they all knew.

But I think Pennsylvania; that seems a big gap to close.  We're talking 500,000/600,000 votes, whereas Michigan's gone from, whatever it was, it was like 220, I can't remember.  It's like 26,000 now.

American HODL: Well, yeah.  Pittsburgh is Trump's; they should declare that.  He's up like 700k votes and he has been since last night.  We'll see.  I mean, I don't know what's going on with the counting and the bullshit, right.

Peter McCormack: Can I tell you something I have noticed and I actually quite like?  So, there was a point where Trump was ahead and clearly ahead, and it looked like he was going to win; and, it's also turned back this day.  There hasn't been a lot of vitriol.  Now, I don't know if that's nerves, but I hope it carries through. 

Whatever the final outcome of this, I hope everyone just takes a step back and goes, "This wasn't good.  The last four years hasn't been good, the presidential debates weren't good, all the mud-slinging's not been good".  I hope everyone steps back and goes, "None of this has been good".

American HODL: Have you ever been to a boxing match or a fight where you're watching this fight and it's amazing, everything's going on in the fight, and then like what happened with the Conor Khabib thing, after the fight, that's when things go fucking crazy because something was seen as unfair in the fight, or there's a late punch thrown or whatever.  That's the feeling I'm left with over all this if Trump wins.

I don't know if Trump -- I think people are going to feel shitty, like it was stolen from them, if Trump loses, because it's very coincidental that it's all Democratic governors.  But, I guess the theory that the Democrats voted primarily by mail and that they were counting the mail-in ballots, like I think they're calling that theory, the "red mirage", already, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've seen that.

American HODL: It's disconcerting that they already have a name for it and everything, that it was pre-planned.  But, we'll see.  I mean, Pennsylvania's going to Trump; Nevada's really close which, by the way, I'm here and I put all the votes in the mail yesterday, so they're going to show up late and get counted, so that's good; I'm feeling good about that, just for my personal …

It's always funny when you feel like you have an actual say in the election via voting.  Like, now that Nevada's in play and I'm here and I convinced my friends and family to vote for Trump, I kind of feel ownership over it rather than just being like, if you're in California.  I think they got trounced by 3 million votes or something, right, if you voted for the Republican side.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I still see this, however it's called, even in Michigan flips and Wisconsin flips and Nevada holds, right; even if that happens and it looks like, okay, Biden's got the 270 required, I don't think it ends there.  I just can't see Trump conceding.  I see him almost certainly taking it to the Supreme Court, but I don't know what his angle is.  I'm not close enough to know what his argument is.  Does he want an investigation, or is there a specific rule that he thinks is broken?

American HODL: Yeah, this is going to come down to really esoteric legal precedent if it goes to court, and I think it's looking more like it will go to court, unless they call it for Trump.  It's going to be some esoteric legal precedent that's going to have to do with mail-in ballot.  Like, I don't know if you saw Nic Carter's tweet about hanging chads from 2000; do you remember any of that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I remember the chads.

American HODL: So, they were like little bits of paper that were stuck, and they were like, "Do we count them, do we not?"  It was a whole drama, right.  And there is some equivalent concept that I think we're going to see in this election where there's going to be some esoteric principle, that none of us know what it is, but by the end of the week, we'll all be fighting about it.

Peter McCormack: Remind me what happened in 2000 though?  Was Bush ahead and it all went to the courts?

American HODL: It all went to Florida and they recounted the entire state basically.

Peter McCormack: But, did it come out that Bush was ahead; they did the recount and then it flipped?  I can't exactly remember, I'll have to look it up.

American HODL: I was 11, so I'll have to go back in my memory bank.

Peter McCormack: Well, the risky thing is, if it is called a Biden victory, there haven't been any reports of irregularities yet.  There's only one thing I've seen about 300,000 missing votes, or something; but, they're more likely Dem votes.  There haven't been any irregularities. 

If this goes to the courts and it's for some way given to Trump over some esoteric thing, like you said, I think that's a very dangerous situation.  I think that is going to rise up the kind of radical left Antifa lot, even though they hate everyone; but, I just can't see that happening.

American HODL: Honestly I think, for me, the best thing that could have happened was that we went to bed with a new president last night.  I even told my wife when we went for a walk in our neighbourhood, I was like, "If Joe Biden wins tonight, I don't care.  I think everything's okay, I think America's used to …"  You know, it is interesting.  As vitriolic as the summer was here in America, and it's the most vitriolic I've ever seen it and probably the most chaotic and turbulent it's been since the late 1960s, Americans still get their shit together. 

I mean yesterday, I didn't see a lot of fuckery on Twitter that was happening at the actual polling place.  I saw a dusting of it, but no more than would have happened in a regular -- like, somebody, I think, had a Biden sign in front of one of the polls; some Republican guy was threatening him and telling him to take it down, and you could have seen that happening anytime. 

But, I didn't see a lot of -- there was a lot of talk about, there was going to be intimidation at the polls and that there was going to be Antifa or Qanon or this and that.  And honestly, I've got to give America a fucking solid A+, because we conducted ourselves pretty well yesterday.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, look, it's kind of weird that you have these different voting rules in different states.  It feels like if it's a national election, every state should have the same rule.  I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.  I might be naïve on these sort of things, but it feels like it should be that?

American HODL: No, it's antiquated. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like -- it feels like everyone who wanted to cast a vote has been able to cast a vote in the way they wanted to, whether it's in person or mailing because of coronavirus stuff.  I wonder if coronavirus -- well, two points on coronavirus.  Firstly, on coronavirus, if it hadn't happened, I don't think Trump loses anyway.

American HODL: Yeah, he was going to dominate.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he was going to landslide, yeah.  But, imagine coronavirus didn't impact the decision to go to the polls, imagine it was just something else, I still think Trump would have won.  I think mail-in votes just makes it easier to go, "Tick a box; in the post box", rather than actually going and standing in a line.  I wonder if people just could not be fucked, you know.  Again, I don't know; it's a weird thing.

American HODL: Also, it takes away from my sneaky husband theory a little bit, because I think when you vote at home in front of your wife, you do it at the kitchen table and she's been, "He's the worst.  He said, 'Grab women by the pussies'", you know, and she expects you to mark Biden.  But, when you go to the voting booth, you're partitioned off and you're like, "Yeah, honey, okay, I'm going to vote Biden", and then you're just like, "Trump"!

So, I do think mail-in votes favour Biden for many reasons, but that's just like a funny one I just thought of.

Peter McCormack: Another thing; I think, what's quite interesting, I don't think this is either a rebuke of Trumpism, or it's a rebuke of the radical left.  I don't think either of those things have happened.

American HODL: Which sucks.  I would rather have seen the rebuke of the radical left.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you say that?  In some ways, it's kind of like, I don't think the radical left represents the left; I think it's a very small group.  It depends what you call radical.  But, there is definitely an issue on the left with cancel culture and the shaming of being a Republican Conservative; I think that's disgusting.

But, at the same time, I wonder if this comes to a point where people are like, "Well, hold on, we're clearly very divided.  Two groups of people have different sets of values; we're split down the middle; we've got to find a way of working together; we've got to a find a way of common ground.

American HODL: Well, normal people feel that way right now; they've always felt that way.  It's the fucking media and the elite media institutions.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

American HODL: I sent you that tweet from Ida what's-her-face, the 1619 Project chick.  When she found out that Latinos had voted Trump in Miami-Dade, she was gearing up a hit piece about how Latinos weren't real Latinos.

Peter McCormack: I know, but fuck her.

American HODL: No, but she writes for the New York Times!  So, this is why we're so confused, because we've been looking to these institutions for so long to, you know, be fact-based, cogent, make sense, be sort of a guiding light for us; and, they've been hollowed out by this weird, extreme, anti-left, anti-American sentiment.  And I agree with you; regular people want to get along.

I mean, dude, it's not like it is on TV.  You can tell your neighbour you voted for Trump, or whatever; they don't care.

Peter McCormack: Dude, I've been to the States 60 times and I've been to New York, Wyoming, I've been to Texas, I've been to LA, Portland; I've been to all different places.  People aren't that different, right?  I mean, yes, somebody who lives in Williamsburg in Brooklyn is very different from somebody who lives in Wyoming, of course.  But, generally speaking, I still find them proud Americans, care about their family, care about the country, want a strong economy and everybody wants the healthcare fixed, just in different ways.

The problem is, as you said, the fucking media.  The media games it because it's to their benefit.  If anything, the best autopsy of this would be something to happen to the media.  I'd like to see a proper, fair, balanced, independent, non-partisan news source; I think that would be great.  And, I would like to see a rebuke of this kind of cancel culture stuff that's sprung up from the left.

Like I say, I said to you about Brian Armstrong, I think what he did at Coinbase was fucking brilliant and more people should be talking about that.

American HODL: Yeah, I back him for sure.  And, you know, I've said for a while that I think that this election was Trump versus the media; Joe Biden was just a placeholder, right?  And I think the media anchors, from watching the coverage last night, I think they were pretty stunned that Trump was doing as well as he was, because they think they have a lot more power than they actually do.  And, there's like a Wizard of Oz situation where we've all seen behind the curtain and we know how full of shit they are. 

They're living in a world that's 15 years ago where we weren't all sending videos to each, right?  So, the minute they do something, it's being taken apart online and post-modernised.  And, when they do something wrong, their mistakes are blown up like crazy.  They don't get to just go on and be like, "Well, yesterday, Jen, we made a mistake; silly us!"  They don't get to do that anymore.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, we all get so many different sources and it depends, like some people are very partisan and refuse to check themselves; but, you know I wrestle with this shit, right?

American HODL: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When I was making this thing, I started the Accidental Dictator and look, I was firm in my views of Donald Trump as his business career being a myth, fucking people over, stuff like that, and I still think that deserves looking into.

American HODL: I agree with that; I don't think he's a good businessman.

Peter McCormack: But, what I needed checking on, which you did and Junseth did and various people did, is that I still hadn't spent enough time understanding why some people didn't care about that; the bigger issue at play was that this kind of strong, independent individualism that's important for people in America, and they don't want to be railroaded, you know, you do have First and Second Amendment, which are things we don't have here in the UK.

I was trying to explain to my friends, you know, the guns issue's so funny because, I was trying to explain to them; they just don't get it.  "Everyone's killing themselves?"  I said, "But, yeah, you've got to out there; you've got to spend time in Wyoming; you've got to go out and hang with the Jamieson lot; you've got to talk to these people".  It's a completely different culture and there's a completely different understanding, and it really checked me in place with this.

I don't know what happens now, but just a lot of people need to have a mirror held up to them.

American HODL: Yeah.  I mean, I'm proud of Americans that they didn't let the media gaslight them.  I mean, I think half of them did, but there was half of us that didn't.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, sorry.  The point I was going to make that I didn't make is that I think, while Fox and CNN still get the numbers, because you're going to sit down in front of the TV and it's on there; what they're not accounting for is that midweek, you're getting in your car and you're listening to Rogan, and you're getting to work and you're putting on your Twitter, and you're seeing things.

So, while I was firm in my views on Trump, I had my doubts because of the people I spoke to on Twitter; I had my doubts because I was listening to stuff on Rogan.  And those little doubts in your mind are starting to make you think, "Hold on, we can't trust these media companies anymore".  We still don't have these good universal sources of truth; we haven't got much outside of Matthew Taibbi, but yeah, sorry, that was what I was going to say; sorry to interrupt you.

American HODL: Yeah, well truth is just such a fucking tricky concept, man, in the post-modern era, because everybody has their own truth; that's true, and I've drilled down on this a lot.  And, I think the place where you find truth and where you look for truth is in the interstitial space between the subjective.  So, if you think of every participant in the world as a node in the network, you look at what network behaviours are doing as a whole and that's where you'll find reality; that's where you'll find truth.  You don't look at what this group of nodes is doing, or this group of nodes, right? 

I think the media still has a really hard time with that.  I mean, I was still watching them last night and they were demographising everything, right.  They were saying, "Oh, I think that black women, they came out strong for Joe Biden", etc and it's like, with the internet, man -- did you see that movie, Ready Player One?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, loved it.

American HODL: And the kid finds out at the end his best friend is this black, lesbian chick?  It totally doesn't look like the avatar, not who he thought?  Well, that's going on on the internet right now, right?  So, you don't know who Fartface2000 is; I met him in real life.  But, these characters online, you don't really know who they are and they don't have to be within this standard demo, and maybe they're in a place where, in real life, it's dangerous for them to say, "I'm a hardcore Trumpian Conservative".  And so, they go online, they have a MAGA profile, and that's where you're seeing it, right.

It's so outdated for them to be like, "Black women did this and Latino men voted this way", and this and that.  It's racist.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean, I think in some ways though, you need better leaders to be able to not be embarrassed about it.  Trump has a lot of flaws, right?

American HODL: Yeah, he's not a -- I wish he was Reagan, and then I would feel great, you know.

Peter McCormack: Well, I really like John McCain, right?

American HODL: Yeah, I would have voted for McCain too, except I voted for Obama in that election.

Peter McCormack: And, I don't think people would be embarrassed to admit they support McCain.  But, I also think some people should be mildly embarrassed that they support Biden as well, or definitely embarrassed they support Hillary.  Both sides have failed to put up good -- well, they haven't failed; they've just failed to support them.  I still think Tulsi Gabbard was great; I really, really liked Tulsi.

American HODL: Well, the Democratic Party has, I think, an interest in losing this election.  I mean, otherwise they wouldn't have run somebody as shitty as Joe Biden.  You know, I think that Trump is actually good for all the Democratic pundits, the political pundits, it's good for the media, it's good business if Trump wins. 

It's not good business if Joe Biden wins, because what the fuck do you write about every day, right?

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, I've got my son trying to call me, so I'm going to go and catch up with him.  We'll do another one of these either later today, or maybe even tomorrow morning, and then put this out on Friday and let people see what they think of it.

American HODL: What's your prediction right now; what do you think's about to happen in the next 24 hours?

Peter McCormack: I think Biden's going to take Wisconsin, Michigan, hold Nevada; I think he's going to lose Pennsylvania; I think he's got no chance of North Carolina; and, probably will lose Georgia.  And, I think he'll get his 270.  I think Trump's going to come out and start rage-tweeting, and then I think this ends up -- it depends what the reaction is.

If he starts talking about taking it to the Supreme Court, if he sees rebukes from the Republican side, it might not happen.  It depends if people want to stand up against him.  But, it gets into the quite complicated areas of US politics I don't understand, but I think Biden's going to -- what do you think's going to happen?

American HODL: Well, it's so weird.  The map I'm looking at, they still haven't declared Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina; those are obviously going Trump.  Pennsylvania's obviously going Trump.  So, to me, I think it's a Trump win, you know.  I think Michigan's going to go Trump.  Have you been to Michigan?

Peter McCormack: No, I haven't.

American HODL: Talked to people on the ground there?  Yeah, except for the city centres like Detroit, people are Kid Rock Conservative; it's great!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know what you're thinking, but if you just actually track which votes are still to come in, it's mainly mail-in votes and it's a lot.  Like, Detroit is a big one there.

American HODL: Oh, is there a lot in from Detroit?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a lot from Detroit.  And, Biden is something like -- again, I could be wrong here, I'd have to check my numbers, but I think he's like 300,000 below what Hillary was at this point in Detroit.

American HODL: In Detroit?  That's interesting.

Peter McCormack: I think actually Nevada's the most interesting.  In terms of my bet, I'm more worried about Nevada than Michigan.

American HODL: Yeah.  I'll tell you just from on the ground here, and I'm in Clark County, which is pretty a blue county, there's a lot of Trump support here; a lot, just anecdotally.  But, it just feel very split.  I've been having conversations in Uber; it's where I always hide my intentions.  And one Uber driver will be really pro this way, and one, you know.  So, we'll see.

Peter McCormack: I think if you're Vegas, you want Vegas to open up, so you want Trump.

American HODL: Yeah, I think so too.  But, also, there's a lot of Mexicans that run these casinos and they still don't really like Trump, you know, for obvious reasons.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know, dude.  All right, listen, let's catch up later, dude, but good to talk to you, man, and I'll speak to you later.  Peace out.

PART 3 of 3 - After the election…

Peter McCormack: For Fuck's sake, man!  Dude, listen --

American HODL: Dude, I told you we weren't going to have a winner, dude; I told you that!

Peter McCormack: I know, but do you know what I thought we would know?  I thought we would know who's most likely to win.  I thought we would have a count, like someone who would have hit the 270; I thought we'd have got to that point.  I didn't think we'd be --

American HODL: Yeah, not even.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what's strange is that, even after yesterday when it was clear there's some fuckery going on, right, and I'm not going to make any accusations right now, I'm just saying it's clear; everything was still calm.  CNN was calm -- I'm looking at CNN and Fox and trying to follow social media, and everything was kind of calm.  And, in fairness to Fox, I think they were pretty balanced about it all, right?

Today, it feels like the tension is just starting to really explode.  I'll tell you what's going to happen; you're going to see Antifa out tonight.

American HODL: Yeah, well they were already out last night in Denver.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

American HODL: So, it's coming.  And they don't even care.  I mean, dude, they'll riot if Biden wins, Antifa.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think they're a bit more confused if Biden wins.  It's like they're not angry enough.  If Trump wins, they're really angry; but, if it's Biden, I think it's like, "Oh, well, I think we need to smash some shit up".

American HODL: Their ranks will shrink if Biden wins.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

American HODL: They'll still be the hardcore, but the casual Antifa will go away.

Peter McCormack: But, even like the Republican side are like out now.  Was it the last voting place, there was a bunch of people --

American HODL: Yeah, in Arizona.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and they had their guns and they were protesting and scared the shit out of some people, etc.  But, right, I'm an outsider.  For you, how much could this boil over; and, are you worried?

American HODL: It's dangerous, man, because the right is starting to see this as fraudulent.  I mean, I have a conservative moral palette.  We always do ourselves a disservice in politics where we think, we came to these very astute, erudite conclusions; it's bullshit; it's all feelings.  Some of us feel this way; some of us feel this way, right.  So, I'm a person who feels conservatively.

To me, it looks like Big Tech and the Democratic Party teamed up to gaslight the American public, and then found a bunch of fake ballots and stuffed them in, because they knew that Sleepy Joe wasn't going to win, so they're intent on dragging him across the finish line. 

Now, if that premise is true, if it's conspiratorial, whatever, I don't know and it's confusing.  But, if I think back on the way we've been conditioned over the past several months about, you know, "Hey, the mail-in ballots are real.  It might take days, it might take weeks, we're not going to know who the president is right away".  We've been hearing that for a long time.

So, I start to think we've been setup for this scenario and the Republican side is going to be -- like, Republicans are okay losing the election.  I know that for a fact because, when I was watching the coverage on election night, I was thinking in my head, "You know what?  If they call it for Biden; fuck it, it's not going to change my life.  Let's just get on with our shit and go about our lives, make money, be prosperous, raise good families"; that's how I think.

But, Republicans are not okay having an election stolen from them, and if there's a wide-spread belief, doesn't matter if it's across the aisle, if there's a wide-spread belief on one side, the Republican side, that this was a stolen election, that gets really bad because you're going to -- I tagged you in this video with Steve Bannon saying, "He might not be at the nation's capital when he holds his hand up on 21 January, but he is going to hold his hand up on 21 January".

Peter McCormack: Steve Bannon is a fucking moron, like, cannot be trusted at all.

American HODL: Well, you can say Steve Bannon is Machiavellian, but he is incredibly smart.

Peter McCormack: No, when I say moron, I don't mean he's dumb; he is smart.  I've seen interviews with him; he comes across great.  I just mean in terms of, he is so partisan that I think he would break the rules.  I think he would be happy with tyranny.

American HODL: Yes, and I'll be honest again.  As somebody with a conservative moral palette, the more chaos goes on, the more riots, the more dissent, the more social conditioning and the cancelling and basically the DDoS that the left has performed on our society over the past several months, I've become very okay with some very authoritarian measures, because I just have a desire for somebody to put it right.

Now, I know that --

Peter McCormack: Dude, dude!

American HODL: No, no --

Peter McCormack: I don't think you really believe that.

American HODL: No, no, I don't.  Intellectually -- you see, there's a disconnect between what I think and what I feel.  Intellectually, I don't think that's a good idea at all and I would probably rather have a fake democracy where we have this charade of a vote, because who knows, man?  I mean, there could have been so much fuckery in the past with these elections; we will never know, because it was all behind the scenes on TV and it was gentlemanly conduct to concede the election and stuff.

But, people have been stealing elections since the beginning of time, even in America.

Peter McCormack: This is the thing I was concerned about, let me say firstly with Trump, then I had an argument with my brother about, okay.  So, my brother is very left wing and considers me right wing, and he was very keen on the idea of the original Accidental Dictator.

The fact that there is the possibility, and some people won't like this, that -- Trump can gaslight people no problem, right, and he could gaslight people into thinking an election's stolen.  And he certainly displays dictatorial tendencies, which I know triggers people but my point is, I believe if he was the kind of person who was this -- I think he's similar to like an Erdoŭan or an Orbán and if he was in a weak country, he could assume the power of the state; I think it's a possibility.

I don't think he can get away with it in the US, because I think the constitution's too strong and I think he'll be rebuked by Republicans; but, this was kind of my point with the guy.  But, he can also gaslight people into thinking tyranny's okay because you've been cheated, when maybe they haven't been; but, he gaslights them into thinking that, okay.

Let me just respond to your point on the left.  I disagree with you that there's an idea that Big Tech got together with the social media and decided to drag him over the line with fake ballots and censorship.  But, what I will say and I definitely agree on, is that I think Trump has been treated, let's not say unfairly, but he's certainly been censored by the press and he's been lied to by the press.

American HODL: You don't think the Russia thing was unfair?

Peter McCormack: The Russia thing is --

American HODL: I mean literally, dude, our intelligence agency, the CIA, went after a sitting US President; I mean, that's pretty insane.

Peter McCormack: Well, let me come back to that.  But, the point I was going to make is that, I don't think that Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and everyone's sat round a table and said, "Right, we need Biden in; this is how we're going to do it".  I just don't believe those conversations happened.  But what I do believe is that people who are naturally left, who run a company, will naturally have left-biased leanings in their policing of their content. 

American HODL: Of course.

Peter McCormack: Therefore, Trump is more likely to be censored, and I think that's what happening, and I disagree with the way he's being censored.  I actually think it brings more attention to it.

American HODL: Well, yeah, is it intentional; is it implicit bias; I mean, it doesn't matter because it's happening.

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah, but I agree that's happening.

American HODL: And, if you're one of the people who's being trampled underfoot by it -- I mean, just think.  If you're half the country and you feel like the election was stolen, it's a very hopeless feeling. 

I was at the gym and I had a little fender-bender in the parking lot with a guy, right, and it was like a 50/50 so we were like, "Hey, man, my fault, your fault, whatever; let's just call it off", and he was like, "Dude, I'm depressed about this election", and I was like, "Why?", and he was like, "Because they're stealing it.  Just look at what's happening".  And, this guy was a 40-something-year-old businessman in a very nice Mercedes; and, the fact that he was feeling this way, to me was this signal that just every Republican is feeling this way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they've been told it's been stolen from them?

American HODL: No, Americans think for themselves.

Peter McCormack: Where did he get that from?

American HODL: Pete, we're not being told.  It's the dissonance, it's the disconnect from watching what's going on behind the veiled curtain, where you have a bunch of a faux expert class who doesn't know what they're doing anymore; they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  And then, all of the videos and the information you're getting online that contradict the narrative.

The gated institutional narrative is something that Eric Weinstein always talks about, and he's right.  There has always been this gated institutional thing where they just told us the polite fictions we're supposed to agree with in society.  And now we have the ability to communicate with each other in real time about what's going on, like what's happening over here. 

And, a lot of it is misinformation, disinformation; yes.  But, when you sort down to it, a lot of it has grains of truth, and I'm not a conspiracy guy.  I don't get down with Qanon and all that crap; I think it's junk.  But there are real conspiracies.  Humans get together and they conspire, and --

Peter McCormack: I don't disagree, but I think that there is right-wing media that does exactly the same as the left is doing.  Breitbart does exactly the same as the New York Times.

American HODL: Of course, of course.

Peter McCormack: In some ways, Breitbart is worse than the New York Times, and that happens on both sides.  And, people on the right tend to lean towards the right media, and people on the left towards the left media.  But, just as an example today, I still believe you have to stand by the democratic process and then you have to go through certain steps if you want to challenge and legally challenge.

I don't know if factually, there has been voter fraud, right now.  I know there are a number of allegations, but just following the tweets that came into me; the first one that came into me today was one which was saying about dead people voting.  So, very quick Google -- do I believe that there are people in the Democratic Party submitting ballots for people who have died to try and get them through?  No, I don't.

So, I did some research and there was a piece of research done by Stamford University that said, "Every election, this happens", okay, it always happens.  But, it's something like 0.00003%, okay?  So then I was trying to say, well, what is the scenario that's happened?  There are always error rates in everything.  Everything you do, you have to have error rates.  I'm imaging there are systems for sending out the ballots and some people are still listed in that system and maybe they're old systems, or they don't have a thing to check for, like, what's the arbitrary date that you say that someone's definitely dead?

American HODL: Well, for instance, one of the ballots that got counted in, man, I can't remember where it was; but, the person was born in 1826.

Peter McCormack: I saw that, but still, what's the -- obviously, but how many of that's happened?  Is it like two people; does it swing an election?  Probably not.

But also, some of them, what they were saying, there are some people die between casting their ballot and the election, and they are double-checked; and these people, there are checks and balances in place to check whether people are alive.  These are removed.  But, there are naturally going to be errors in the system.

American HODL: Yeah, of course, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I imagine you could find, if you went through the whole of the national, every single vote, you might find errors of Republican people who are dead who have voted?

American HODL: Yes, of course.

Peter McCormack: So, that was the first one; that was the first one that came up.  The second one that came up was, "More people had voted than were registered to vote".

American HODL: Right.  There's a lag there probably, in terms of the data.

Peter McCormack: No.  Very quick bit of research is, the registered data they use was the 2018 midterms, compared to how many voted now.  But, we've had a much higher voter turnout --

American HODL: It's a pandemic, and, etc, yeah.

Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is --

American HODL: I don't necessarily buy that one, but there's a lot that's suspicious, you know?

Peter McCormack: Okay, fine; then investigate it.  But, what I'm saying is, again it reminds me of something you said.  The problem here is the speed of information. 

I was just talking to StopAndDecrypt on Twitter and he was like asking for an answer, and I said, "Do you know what; I can't do this.  I don't have the time to sit there and try and reply and research every single --"

American HODL: No, you don't.

Peter McCormack: I couldn't even get through them all day, okay; it's just impossible.  So, the system's broken.

American HODL: I've already thrown my hands up on the whole thing and I'm just getting that same vortex feeling I get when the Bitcoin price pumps.  It's like, I'm just being sucked into this wake vortex and I'm just along for the ride right now.  The Event Horizon is in the rear view mirror and we're here, and whatever happens next fucking happens, right.  And, it sucks.  It feels like the eye of a hurricane right now, because you know, this could be America's last election, man.

Peter McCormack: I don't know, man.

American HODL: Dude, that's on the table.  If you don't think that's on the table, you're being somewhat delusional.

Peter McCormack: No, I'm not saying it's not, but I just don't think it is America's last election.  So, in what way; tell me why you think that?

American HODL: Well, meaning that we split apart; that America goes through some sort of balkanisation process, because that's never been more within the Overton window that it is now.  And, all it takes is a couple of these red states to secede, basically.

Peter McCormack: Can't Texas -- doesn't Texas have a thing that allows --

American HODL: Texas can do it, but they need a certain number of votes from other states and stuff like that.  But, yeah, Texas would probably be the first to go.  I thought it was hilarious, by the way, that people were thinking Texas was going to go blue.  This is Texas; Texas is not going blue.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's a lot bluer than I realised.

American HODL: There's a lot of blue in the cities, but look at the entire map; every city is blue; every single city.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, have you seen, actually, the New York Times have got this great map; it's really, really cool.  When you go onto it, you can click on the map and it does these little bubbles, right, because the maps look very red.  But then what you see is all the red are tiny little dots and the blues are big bubbles.  It's really fascinating to see that.  Yeah, it's really fascinating.

American HODL: Well, it makes sense from a geographical perspective.  I mean, you're living on top of people, so you have more of a sense of, "Well, we've got to all get along and we've got to do this and that", and when you're living out by yourself, you're like, "Nobody come near me; this is mine and I'm protecting it".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Leave me the fuck alone!"

American HODL: And you're closer to nature when you're in a rural area, right, and there's very much an element of human beings protecting themselves against nature.  So, I think you're always going to see that.  I bet you would see that in your country too and in Europe, geographically.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, less so though.  Whilst we speak the same language, we are politically very different.

American HODL: Right, very different, yeah.

Peter McCormack: You know, it's interesting; there are parts of the Republican Party that feel very Conservative; parts of the Republican Party that feel very Labour, and vice versa.  I think one of the key differences is that the Labour party here are obviously towards that collectivist idea, but here they tend to be more working class; whereas, in the US, they tend to be more kind of big city, I would say, middle to upper class. 

Whereas, our Conservatives tend to be middle to upper class and your Conservatives tend to be more, when I say working class also in the US; working class is more like a description of hard-working people, not necessarily income brackets.

American HODL: Well we're also, you know, we're not as homogenous as you guys are; you guys are a very homogenous culture.  There's a lot of ancestral history there and we don't have that.  We're very new, we're very young, we're scrappy, man; we're scrappy upstarts.

I think it's interesting, you know.  One of the interesting stories for me, and I've known this because I talk to people all the time; I don't get all my news from the media, I talk to real people in the street constantly.  And, I think a lot of people were shocked by how Latino the vote was, how many young, black males voted for Trump?

Peter McCormack: Well, because he scared them off with socialism and his false description of socialism.

American HODL: Well, let's not go there; there is creeping socialism on the left by far, I mean, big time.  The Green New Deal is socialistic; AOC; the Squad; Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren.  Elizabeth Warren wants to tax unrealised gains in the stock market.

Peter McCormack: I know, I know.

American HODL: Pure socialism.  And, the left has always been socialist.  Every socialist party we have in America has come from the left flank; every single one. 

Peter McCormack: I don't think it's real socialism.

American HODL: Well, it's democratic socialism; it's European socialism.  Hey, we don't want to be European; we don't like you guys.  No offence; we don't want to be you!  We like our chaotic mess we have going on over here!

Peter McCormack: Well, I think some of them, there certainly are some European influences.  Okay, listen, how much of what you're seeing now, be totally honest because I'll be honest about it; how much of what you're seeing now, these accusations of voter fraud, is your bias saying -- like, if it was coming from the other side, like say chop his head --

American HODL: I would be ignoring it if it was coming from the other side, obviously.  So, yeah, we all have implicit biases.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And, that's the most unhealthy thing here.

American HODL: I will tell you that it should have gone off like -- we're past it, but it should have gone off without a hitch on election night.  If Joe Biden had won on election night, I would be feeling very different.  I would be like, "Yeah, I lost.  I guess there are a lot of people who are pussies in this country!"  I wouldn't have cared. 

But, now it's been all this weird shit going on, and it is weird, this isn't like a standard American election, you just start to feel suspicious.  And them not calling stuff for Trump, which is obviously Trump, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but why did Fox not do it then?

American HODL: Well, dude, the Fox stuff is really bizarre, because Fox has flipped.  Fox is just like CNN.  I mean, honestly, I was watching both coverages; I think CNN's coverage was better, it was more accurate.

Peter McCormack: Well, do you think that's Fox's rebuke to Trump, because Trump's been giving them shit?

American HODL: Possible; or, maybe they're going out of their way to be extra cautious, they don't want to be accused of bias, or …  I don't know what it is, man, but Fox's coverage is more pro-Biden than anybody else's coverage, you know.

Peter McCormack: There's a guy on Fox I really like; I can't remember his name.  There's a guy I really liked.  It's funny, you're starting to realise who you like and who you don't like.  I quite like Anderson Cooper and I know he's partisan, but I quite like him.  I cannot watch Don Lemon.

American HODL: Don Lemon's atrocious, yeah.  He's so smug; that's why it's hard, you know.  He just thinks he's better than everybody, right?

Peter McCormack: I can watch Tucker Carlson, but I just find him a little bit full of shit.  All right, listen, we're probably going to have to do a follow-up to this.

American HODL: I know.

Peter McCormack: I think we'll know by the end of tomorrow, we're going to know what the vote count is.

American HODL: Everybody's been -- I said on Twitter, I said I would concede when Trump concedes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he might not concede.

American HODL: Well, I think they're going to drag him out, right!  I mean, somebody's going to be put in at some point.

Peter McCormack: It's whoever the next president really is, like, we'll know.

American HODL: We may have to wait until like January to fully settle up if it's going to be this months of fighting and stuff, you know.

Peter McCormack: It will be funny.  The funniest thing about it is the price keeps going -- it's now like a $50,000 bounty!

American HODL: I know!

Peter McCormack: It could be a $20,000 bounty then!

American HODL: I know, and then it's a $10,000!  It's a good thing I hedged it back when we made it.  When we made it, I think it was, the price was $10k maybe?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think it was a bit under that actually.

American HODL: Yeah, I hedged it out back then.  So, I'm only going to be down $5k, whatever, if I lose.

Peter McCormack: How's this going to play out?

American HODL: Here's what I think is going to happen.  I think the media's going to call it for Biden today or tomorrow and then, I think, Trump is going to challenge in every battleground state, every state where it was close.  There's going to be a month and a half of law suits, extreme legal challenges left and right.  They'll be trying to uncover voter fraud, they'll be trying to do recounts, etc.

So, you'll see these stories pop up like, "Now Georgia's in play; now Arizona's in play; now Nevada's back in play", stuff like that.  I think that's what we're in for over the next month and a half, two months, and I think it's going to go all the way into early December or mid-December, at least.

Peter McCormack: Right, I'll tell you what I think's going to happen.  I think they'll call it for Biden tomorrow.  I think Biden's going to take -- I'm unsure on Nevada.  I think he's got Arizona; I'm unsure on Nevada; but, I think he'll get Nevada.

American HODL: He's going to take Nevada because our governor is very Democratic and there's been a lot of fuckery.  You know, in Nevada you can put in a ballot seven days later.  So, people can put in a ballot right now.  It will get there and it will be counted in Nevada.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  I think he's going to take Pennsylvania; they seem very confident.

American HODL: You think Biden is going to take Pennsylvania?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because he's like 120,000 behind with 780,000 votes to be counted, and they're mail-in votes.  I just think he gets Pennsylvania.

American HODL: If he gets Pennsylvania, that's pretty much game over, if it's decisive.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Georgia's going to get close.

American HODL: I think Georgia will go red, but it's going to be close, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And, I think he will call it and I think Trump's team's going to go into overdrive with accusations.  I think we're going to see a lot of weird stuff come out.  I think Project Veritas are going to be doing their stuff.  Tucker Carlson will be losing his shit.

But, what I think will happen is, I think overturning a decision which has been awarded is quite difficult; a bit like what happened with Bush, right?

American HODL: Yes, of course.

Peter McCormack: I think that that's high risk.  I also think that some Republicans will start to also rebuke; I mean, that's already happening, right?

American HODL: Well, yeah.  If you pay attention to the Republican side, there are a lot of people being like, "This person's a fake Republican, this person's a fake Republican because they're …".  You know, what happens is, when you live in DC or you live in New York or LA, or whatever, you want to go to the parties with the Democrats, you want to be invited and accepted socially, right.  So, a lot of them are fake Republicans; they don't have the true courage of their convictions.

Peter McCormack: No, but I mean at senator level.  I think some --

American HODL: Well, yeah, I think those were never Trumpers; that's what I'm saying.  It's like, a lot of the elites, they want it to go back to how it was.

Peter McCormack: But, it's very difficult to stand up and oppose Trump.  Like, Mitt Romney did so at his absolute peril, right.  He's been absolutely destroyed since.  My understanding, he hasn't performed -- he's Utah, right; he hasn't performed too well.

American HODL: No.  Well, here's the thing about the Republican Party; no matter what happens with all this, the Republican Party has found its voice for the next generation, and that is a coalition of those who were left behind, and it doesn't matter what colour or class they are.  It's going to be the party of the working class, which is what the Democratic Party used to be. 

The Democratic Party has become elite soccer mums who drive their fucking expensive G-Wagon and look down their nose at other people, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But, imagine the next one, the next leader of the Republican Party, the next kind of nominee; took the best qualities of Trump in terms of standing up for the working people, standing up --

American HODL: But he had character, yeah; it would be better.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but had the character, like civility and unity within him and also, the right amount of progressiveness to swing some more people over from the blue side.  I think that would be positive.  I think a big risk for the Republic Party is with Trump's next move.

So firstly, he could run again in 2024, which would be a disaster.  But I think, weirder scenarios, he's clearly going to set up a TV network, because it will work, he will be able to challenge Fox, it will generate billions in revenue, probably, or hundreds of millions, whatever money they do.  But then, he potentially becomes kingmaker and has a lot of influence over the Republican Party.

American HODL: Well, this is why a lot of leftists are upset on Twitter, is because even if they win this one, they did not win it decisively; the Biden landslide did not materialise.  They didn't rebuke populism or Trumpianism; they didn't rebuke any of it.  And I agree with you.  And I think Trump's thing from the beginning was that he wanted a media empire to challenge Fox News?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that was the original idea.

American HODL: Because, you could see him when he was standing in the back of that shitty ballroom in 2016 when he won; he just looked shell-shocked, right, "Wait, I have to give up my good life?  People are going to be digging into my business?  I don't get to fuck porn stars for the next four years?"!

Peter McCormack: He didn't have a speech, dude, he didn't have a speech; he thought he was losing.

American HODL: I know, he was just like, "Well, oh, I guess I've won.  Anyway…"!  So, yeah, I'll tell you this; can I tell you this before we end it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, go on.

American HODL: I regret making this bet; not because it's looking 60/40 like I'm going to lose money to you, which it stings; that part stings, I'm not going to lie.  But, just the amount of attention I paid to this bullshit over the last however many months, and it's just all nonsense.  None of this affects my life one way or the other, you know what I mean? 

The only thing that matters is Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is the only shot we have at actually fixing things.

Peter McCormack: Hey, come on, man.  Listen, look, if this had been a Trump landslide, would you have been saying, "Pete, I really regret making this bet, I really regret having your half a Bitcoin"?

American HODL: Of course not, I would have been gloating, which is what I expect you to do on Twitter, if you win!

Peter McCormack: No, there won't be any vitriol from me.  There might be some little soul jabs.  But, what I will do is I will take you out for -- once these planes are flying, I'll get over to Vegas, we'll go have a big night out on me and eat some expensive steak.  I'll probably spend the whole half a Bitcoin in one night, because I'm a moron!

American HODL: That's a great idea; I'm down for that.  You're a better man than me, Pete, because I would have been gloating all over the place!

Peter McCormack: I know, I know.  But, listen, the thing I would have been regretting is the shit I would take because, you know, if I took an L with this -- because, a lot of people think I'm a Biden supporter and I keep saying to them, "Find me a pro-Biden tweet I put out".  The first one was yesterday when I said his speech was good; it was a good speech; it was a fucking solid speech.

American HODL: Well, you're weird because I get it that people over there think you're a Conservative, but you're all super far left to us.  Even your most Conservative person to us would be on the far left, you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: Well, we don't have guns and we don't march here.

American HODL: Right, I know.  There's no edge to you guys.  The worst that's going to happen is someone's going to throw up a pint of Guinness on someone, or something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, it's a different thing.  But, I certainly would live in a red state, dude.  I've got definitely some values that are very Republican and some that are --

American HODL: You want to live in a red state because it's normal there.

Peter McCormack: I want to live in Texas, dude.

American HODL: Yeah, I'm feeling the call to go to Texas too.  Also, the Unchained Cap guys are like, "Get out to Texas", you know.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, we should both go and visit at the same time, go and have a night out there.  I mean, Austin's great.  I like Dallas, but we should go out there and have a big night.  But, listen, this isn't over.

American HODL: Let's do it; I'm done.

Peter McCormack: This shit isn't over; we'll obviously see what fuckery happens the next couple of days, and maybe we'll do something next week.

American HODL: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: All right, peace out, brother, thanks for your Bitcoin!

American HODL: Peace, man!