WBD380 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin & The Decentralised Future with Michael Casey

Interview date: Monday 2nd August

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

In this interview, I talk to Coindesk’s Chief Content Officer, Michael Casey. We discuss the power of controlling information, the divisiveness of left v right politics and how in the future governance may decentralise.

“We’re going down the path of black and white, good and evil because we have a centralised approach to it that is fundamentally out of touch with what we really should be thinking about. ”

— Michael Casey

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: How are you, man?

Michael Casey: Good, not bad.

Peter McCormack: We're recording.

Michael Casey: Yes, we are.  I took a week off last week.  Man, it was good, I needed that.  Went up to Lake Placid which is up in the Adirondack Mountains, swimming in lakes, getting away, was good.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man.

Michael Casey: I did the best.  I hadn't shut off the world for a long time and this was the first chance; it was good.

Peter McCormack: I'm about to shut off the world in about two weeks. 

Michael Casey: Yeah?

Peter McCormack: I had planned to.  I had this back operation done because I could barely walk and I was stuck in my --

Michael Casey: What did you have done, because I had some back operation on New Year's Day.

Peter McCormack: A microdiscectomy.

Michael Casey: Yeah, welcome.  Which disc was it?

Peter McCormack: The lower, it was the L5.

Michael Casey: Yeah, mine was L4, L5, yeah.  So you had sciatic pain before that?

Peter McCormack: Dude, I've never had so much pain in my life.

Michael Casey: Yeah, it sucks.

Peter McCormack: By the end of it I couldn't even sit down, I was laying down.

Michael Casey: Yeah, yeah.  Man, I didn't realise you went through this, I had the same thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Casey: I couldn't sleep at night.  I remember when they said do the magnesium, I had to sleep on a sofa with my leg perched up on the edge of the sofa because for some , if I had it flat, the pain was too much.

Peter McCormack: Well, I had it to the point then when the drugs stopped working, so I was taking everything.

Michael Casey: Yeah, me too, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And it just stopped working.  But then I went for the operation and I woke up and I was instantly fine.

Michael Casey: Yeah, me too.  Man, you and I had a parallel experience.  I remember just wanting to hug the doctor afterwards because I was, "Jesus, you got it".  But he said in my case -- herniated discs are usually just squishing out and touching a nerve, but in my case a bit of it had broken off and it had just latched onto the nerve and was sitting on it basically.

Peter McCormack: Ow!

Michael Casey: So yeah, I couldn't stand up straight.  If I was straight, it hurt, so I had to bend over all the time; I was like an old man.  I was living in Argentina at the time, and I had flown from New York to Argentina on a trip back home, returning, and it's really interesting; to me it's about how a diagnosis, and you can apply this to anything, it's all about what story's being told. 

I was misdiagnosed and I'm not entirely blaming the doctor, I am largely, but in some respects I initiated it, because the pain I was initially feeling was quite small and it was down in my leg, it was at the edge underneath my knee.  I said, "Oh yeah, I flew on this long flight and didn't sleep perfectly, it was an overnight flight".  He went, "Oh, it must be a pinched nerve.  You must have sat…", etc, and he showed me the little nerve ending that was probably pinched.  He said, "Oh, go and take this" whatever it was, the nerve-killing pain and, "take some of that and you'll be fine".  I was, "All right.  Can I run?"  "Yeah, yeah.  Exercise, that's a good idea." 

So, I was running every morning and it was warming up my legs and therefore, the pain was going and I just kept going and doing it every morning.  But by the end of every evening, I was feeling worse and I'd do it again.  It was, "Pain's getting worse.  I'd better run again" so I'd run again.  Then it kept on happening.  I was having MRIs on my leg; I was having all this.  "Where the hell?  There's no real problem.  We don't know what it is". 

Eventually, my GP who knew there was something seriously wrong with me, lay me on a bed and he said, "Right, just lie down" and he grabbed my leg and pushed it out straight and I went, "Fuck!" and he goes, "Herniated disc", and that was it and then they fixed it.  But for ages, I was making it worse and worse and worse.

Peter McCormack: Man.

Michael Casey: Yeah, so I'm sharing your pain in the literal sense there, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Mate, honestly.

Michael Casey: It's just the worst, it's the worst.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I herniated it about a year ago and spoke to the doctor and the doctor was like, "Just get back down the gym, get exercising" and I did and it fixed and I was fine.  Then I herniated it again and it never fixed and I couldn't train, I couldn't run; I could swim a little.  And then I said, "Look, I need an MRI, I need to get this sorted".  Then my health provider was messing me around and then I got the call for El Salvador so I was, "Crap, I'm going to deal with that".  But I only had back pain. 

It was after El Salvador when I was in Indianapolis after the 500, I just woke up one morning and I was, "Hmm, there's a pain in my leg.  I wonder what this is.  It's probably related", but it was really mild.  By the time I got to Miami, I could barely move.  So I got an epidural, which at the time I thought was the right thing to do.

Michael Casey: Jesus, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Worst thing to do, because then you think you're fine, and so I just acted normal.

Michael Casey: When it comes off you're like, "Fuck!"

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, by the time I got to that president interview, I couldn't sit down.  Well, I've told that story so I won't tell it again, but basically I just couldn't sit down, so I just got pumped full of drugs.

Michael Casey: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And then it got to the point whereby everywhere I was travelling, I was having to lay down on back seats, because I couldn't sit down anywhere; and the drugs had stopped working and then I got to the point of tears.  And then, had the operation but the operation's a miracle; it's so funny, because anaesthetic's so weird.  We were talking about sleep earlier.  When you're asleep, you drift in and out, you kind of know you're sleeping all night.

Michael Casey: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: When you have an anaesthetic, you close your eyes and then you open!

Michael Casey: Yeah, yeah, I know!  It's so funny I have a very similar story.  So, yeah, what was your case, because to me it's the break in reality?  I've actually had a couple of anaesthetics, but when I had my back done, I remember I was chatting to the nurse and she was saying to me, "You speak pretty good Spanish.  Do you speak Portuguese?"  She must have been Brazilian and I was, "I don't really.  I can get by", something like that, etc, and I said, "I speak a bit of what they call Porteño", but I didn't get round to saying that.  And then I remember continuing the conversation. 

So, "Yeah, I can do a bit of Porteño", etc, and she's not there and there's somebody else looking at me, "What the fuck are you talking about?"  "You're not her?"  "No, you've had your operation, dude."  It's like this bizarre no consciousness of being asleep or out of it.  It just starts and then it finishes; it's amazing.

Peter McCormack: The last one I had was when I was a kid, so I remember them telling me to count it down, but I don't remember the whole thing.  The anaesthesiologist, is that what they call it, is it the anaesthetist?

Michael Casey: Anaesthesiologists is what they call them here, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  He came out and he was talking to me before the op and he started looking at my neck; he was measuring, grabbing my neck.  I was like, "What's that?"  He's, "Well, it's for the breathing tube".  I was, "What do you mean, the breathing tube?"  He's, "When you have an anaesthetic, everything stops; you stop breathing".  I was like, "Well, nobody told me this".

Michael Casey: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: "What?"  He's, "Yeah, we have to intubate you".  I'm, "Okay, this is new".  He was, "Well, you've just got to deal with it".  So anyway, I was going into the room ready to do my countdown and I'm laying there and they start putting stuff into the tube into my wrist, I feel a tingle and then I'm gone and I didn't even know it.  Then I wake up like that.

Michael Casey: Yeah, I know.

Peter McCormack: I wake up and I'm just laying there and then I drift off back to sleep.  And I wake up and I was, "I feel great.  I feel good".  I was feeling, I could feel everything.  I just probably shouldn't tell this on a podcast, but then I felt my balls and I couldn't feel my balls.  I'm like, "Why am I numb here but everything else is fine?"  So, I panic and get up Google and search and there's this whole thing about people who have a microdiscectomy who then basically can't have sex afterwards.

Michael Casey: Paralysed?

Peter McCormack: No, no. 

Michael Casey: They can't have sex, literally.

Peter McCormack: They have erectile dysfunction.

Michael Casey: Jesus.

Peter McCormack: I was, "What the fuck?"  So anyway, I try to get the doctor.  The nurse comes in and she's, "What's the problem?"  I was, "Can I speak to the doctor?"  She said, "No, he's busy".  She's, "What's the problem?"  I'm, "I can't tell you, I can't".  Anyway, she eventually got him in and he was, "No, no".  He said, "Can you feel your ass?"  I was, "Oh no".  So that was the last place for the numbness to go but I couldn't stand --

Michael Casey: The numbness is still going, Jesus.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Casey: So, it's a panic, wow.

Peter McCormack: But dude, honestly it's a miracle.  Since then, everything is back, life is back to normal.

Michael Casey: This has happened pretty quickly, because I saw you when you were -- I know you had your interview, I didn't realise you were doing it.  I don't think I watched it or anything, but you were lying, you had all these issues with it, but wow.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, dude, I was jacked up on the drugs, because you saw me and we had a couple of cheeky gins in New York before I headed out.

Michael Casey: Yeah, exactly.  You were probably just getting by on the drugs at that point or something or an epidural.

Peter McCormack: No, I had the epidural, but I was fine.  It was when I got to El Salvador, the pains came back; but it was literally the morning of the interview, I got up, went to get a coffee and I went to sit down and I was, "I can't fucking sit down.  What?"

Michael Casey: Jesus.

Peter McCormack: Today of all days.

Michael Casey: Yeah, I know, I absolutely know it.  It was horrible.  All righty, so…

Peter McCormack: Yeah, listen!

Michael Casey: At the beginning of the podcast, you talked about erectile dysfunction!

Peter McCormack: Back pain!

Michael Casey: Midlife crisis with backpain, yeah exactly.

Peter McCormack: We'll talk about ex-wives next if we want; I don't know if you've got any of those!

Michael Casey: No, I don't have any exes but I've got -- yeah, we won't go there.

Peter McCormack: We had a good chat in New York.

Michael Casey: We did.

Peter McCormack: It's left me for a while, what we spoke about, and I think it's a really interesting subject, this whole new battle.  I'm always trying to bring things back on a personal level, but I've been wrestling with politics now for a good four, five years.  I've felt myself in Bitcoin go from what would be seen in America as from left to right, what in the UK is from right to almost libertarian.  It's different where you are in the world.

Michael Casey: Yeah, the word liberal means something completely different on either side of the Atlantic, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Completely different.  I am now completely disenfranchised with all politics, but struggling to see a world without some form of centralised government or governance, let's say.  I know other people are, "Well, you've not tried it".  I had the interview with Michael Malice and I definitely like a lot of the things the anarchists talk about and the libertarians talk about, but I'm really disenfranchised with politics, especially during this time of COVID; everything just seems completely crazy.

So, the conversation we had and the conversation we're going to have today, I think, is useful for me and I think for other people; but just before we get in, just so people know who are you because I know who you are, I know about the book you wrote with Paul and I know obviously that you work over at CoinDesk, but do you want to just give people a bit of an intro so they are aware of you.

Michael Casey: Yeah, okay.  Hi everyone, Michael Casey.  I am currently the Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk and continue to be for a while by the way.  I didn't mean to lay a qualifier on that for any other reason other than I haven't been there that long.  Before that, I was at MIT for a little while as part of the Digital Currency Initiative, but most of my life I've been a journalist and so I was at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal for a bunch of years, lived all over the world, did different things as correspondents and so forth, and basically covered global finance and economics and things, and stumbled into Bitcoin in 2013 and wrote a book, the first book of a couple we've written.  It's with Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency.  We wrote another one called The Truth Machine, more about blockchain technologies and so forth. 

So yeah, I'm an author.  I run the content side of things at CoinDesk, do a podcast, write a weekly newsletter called Money Reimagined; a podcast with Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum, same thing once a week.  I manage a rapidly-growing team of journalists and multimedia people and researchers and so forth at the most important media platform for the crypto economy in the world, CoinDesk.  There you go.  How's that?

Peter McCormack: I would debate you on that last point!

Michael Casey: I thought you might, but I just have to plug it man, sorry!

Peter McCormack: I'll take Bitcoin, you can take crypto.  We'll leave it there; we won't have that fight.

Michael Casey: Yes, we won't go with that one; that's a different conversation.

Peter McCormack: We won't go down that.  Well, look, this conversation is really interesting because one of the most interesting things I've observed with politics, I've seen it less in this country, I find it more as an observer of the US just because I think I'm on the outside of how these battlelines on specific issues are drawn; if you're on the left, we're black; if you're on the right, we're white; and whatever the issue is, people seem to be drawn into their camp, they seem to be drawn into their political camp.  But I heard this really -- I think it was on Rogan the other day where someone was talking about it, and it was something like the 80% silent exhausted --

Michael Casey: Majority?

Peter McCormack: -- majority.

Michael Casey: Yeah, exhausted majority; that's nice.

Peter McCormack: So, the majority of the fight is between 10% on each side and everyone else is just exhausted by it all.  I think the Trump era, and this isn't to blame Trump, it's more to blame the media, but the Trump era created this character who was great for TV.  But it pitched two sides against each other like I've not even seen before.  You might have seen it differently and maybe it's my age but I just…

Michael Casey:  I'm older than you, I think, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Just a couple of years.

Michael Casey: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But we seem to be in this new era of crazy politics now, even crazier than I've ever known, and it is leaking here in the UK, it is happening here as well.  We're seeing demonstrations globally, we're seeing revolutions, we're seeing, I don't know, just like a really crazy time right now.  So, I think it is a good time to have this conversation on centralisation versus decentralisation.  I've got my own thoughts on it, but it's something you've focused on and you've been tweeting some ideas.  Do you want to give an idea of your kind of thesis?

Michael Casey: I think the tweet you focused on was my idea that basically, Bitcoin itself is something that is challenging the traditional left/right divide.  But before we go into that, I think the heart of the problem has a lot to do with this centralisation/decentralisation, specifically as it pertains to the internet and social media. 

I wrote a book with a guy called Oliver Luckett, who's a social media entrepreneur, called The Social Organism, and it was all about social media and how it is this completely radical new system of information exchange.  It shows the history of it.  We went from these very centralised systems; the Church was basically the arbiter of facts at one point and the only guy in the town who could read was the priest, and he imparted the knowledge all the way down. 

Then eventually you moved to books, the Gutenberg press came out, everybody could read, but you still had a control of the printing presses.  Then you end up with television and things like that with the broadcast tower being almost like the steeple of the church and Walter Cronkite imparting his knowledge.  And we basically broke it down and down and down and eventually we got to the point with the internet let everybody have a voice.  That is a decentralised architecture; the whole point of the internet was that it was decentralised. 

So, we're starting with this issue whereby we have a new information system that is completely decentralised.  What that meant is the Overton window, which is a word, a phrase that was popular in the 1960s that nobody talked about it and now everyone is talking about the Overton window and the Overton window has widened. 

It used to be that the Walter Cronkites, if you like, the people who owned the distribution mechanism, which was a very expensive thing to own if you were a monopoly media company, you had to pay a lot of money to build a television system or build the printing presses; you basically used that power to dictate who had a voice.  And basically, if you were of the extreme right, you were a Klu Klux Klan white supremacist, you really didn't get a look in, you weren't listened to.  If you were a radical Che Guevara-loving Marxist, and by the way if I was around, I would have been able to show you some of my Che Guevara paraphernalia because I wrote a book about Che.

Peter McCormack: Did you?

Michael Casey: But it was more about the image and the cult and everything else, and it was about capitalism and how really it turned Che into what it is.  But anyway, those two extremes could not really make it certainly into American public discourse, because the controllers of the media said so. 

Now we've blown the whole damn thing open, right.  So we have this decentralised system for information exchange, everyone has a voice, but you know what hasn't changed?  The actual centralised systems of government, as well as the centralised control of not only regular companies, but of the internet itself.  So, we have Facebook and Twitter as these captured powerful monopolies, a very centralised architecture, but we have this decentralised mechanism for actually taking in information.

So, these two things are clashing, because there's just no way for us in this world to make sense as we used to.  Our brains are pretty limited, Peter.  I hate to say it, yours is maybe a few times more powerful than mine, but ultimately, when you've got this barrage of everything coming at you, you need something to make sense of it, which is why we have our feeds and why we actually just choose to watch some things and not others. 

But if you've got algorithms that are actually working with this emotional aspect of what you're doing, and by the way, this was the other part of The Social Organism; it was all about using this biological metaphor to describe how information flows in this environment, and that it is similar to the way that biological functions happen, evolution, also the spread of genes, the spread of disease, viruses, all these sorts of things. 

Ultimately, memes and things function in this way; it is a mechanism by which these nodes come together and spread information, but you can monkey with that.  It's our emotional responses that actually triggers what we like, what we share, what we retweet and so forth.  And algorithms, as we all now know -- Surveillance Capitalism, by the way, the best book that tells us how terrible this stuff is -- are essentially designed to manipulate us to do these things.  So, we're all losing our free will because the algorithms are telling us, "Here's what you want to look at, here's what you don't".  In this environment, where anybody can say anything, it all feeds into this other form of filtering, which is an algorithmic control through the corporate entities that control the platforms. 

So, that's the biggest problem in the world right now, not whether or not you think that we should have an 80% tax rate or a 20% tax rate.  It is that essentially, our information system is supposed to be decentralised, which could have been a good thing if we would allow it to naturally form our new mechanisms for governance, but instead it is controlled by these entities.  This is where Bitcoin, and I'm going to say blockchain as well, because I do think that these systems actually give us a chance to think about how we would structure governance, which is the word you use which is exactly the right word, in this environment where we're breaking down naturally all these centralised structures including government control.

So, it's a completely disorientating state of affairs and it starts with the internet; it really does.  I don't think people really quite understand how utterly completely phenomenally transformative the internet was to how we actually, as a society, come together and figure out ideas.

Peter McCormack: Well mate, half the people who listen to this, maybe half, maybe a bit less, won't have known a time of no internet; they just don't know it.

Michael Casey: That's right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Which is a weird thing to talk about.

Michael Casey: But they also are fed the ideas that you're supposed to be able to -- they don't recognise that this is the internet.  They don't understand the architecture underneath it that's feeding all this stuff.  They're still accepting what the algorithms are telling them as if they think they're in control, but they're not.  It's the matrix, it's truly the matrix.

Peter McCormack: Sometimes I wonder.  I think I had a happier childhood than my kids do in some ways, because we didn't have the internet.

Michael Casey: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: There was no internet.

Michael Casey: I tend to think so.

Peter McCormack: I've got a constant argument with my daughter about Instagram at the moment.  She wants it and I'm just not allowing her to have it.  I watched the Rogan interview with Jonathan Haidt where they talked about the increase in teen depression and self-harm because of Instagram, because you've got kids who are seeing these images of these beautiful people, which are essentially using algorithms to filter themselves, and the pressures that puts on them. 

So, I sometimes think I had a happy childhood; it was mostly outside.  Pretty much we would just go out and do what we wanted and run around the fields and start little wars and things like that and it was great.  My kids are doing similar but online, so headsets on in their bedrooms and stuff like that.  People will say, "Bad parenting", but it's just a different time and you try and drag them away from it but they still want to be back in there in the virtual world; they want to Ready Player One world.

So, I think a lot about that, but I'm also thinking a lot about social media, about the algorithms, about how the algorithms incentivise your own behaviour, they drive your own thinking.  I actually deleted Twitter off my phone today.

Michael Casey: Wow!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Casey: No more Peter McCormack on Twitter!

Peter McCormack: No, no.  I'm on Twitter, just off my phone.

Michael Casey: Oh, just off your phone.  Sorry, sorry, that was an extreme move.  Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: I was looking at how much screen time I'm on Twitter and I'm just using it, I'm saying it's work as an excuse.

Michael Casey: True, true.

Peter McCormack: But I'm sitting there arguing with people who've got 20 followers.  No disrespect for their number of followers, but why am I wasting my time with this?

Michael Casey: I've stopped arguing.  People look at me and they go, "Why aren't you responding?"  I'm, "Just because I don't want to go there".  I feel like I'm part of the 80% exhausted, that's the point.  It's too exhausting to engage, right.  And that's actually not healthy, because I do think that if we were to do this right, if there were to be (a) education, if we all understood what was going on; (b) there were not these algorithms manipulating us; and (c) we had essentially a government that understood this, because we do need our governments, we might actually find that this whole social media structure is a really conducive way for us to develop as a society. 

I tend to agree with you on the kids, because I just can't help think the same way.  I had a very similar childhood, lived in Australia, surfed, rode bikes, played footie, played cricket, that was it; but then when I look at my kids, yes: phones, whatever.  However, one of my daughters is gender-fluid and I remember thinking when she came out, "Oh my God, she's going to get teased, it's going to be horrible, how is she going to live with this?  She's going to have no friends", etc, because that's what my childhood was.  If you were that different, you were completely ostracised. 

But because of the internet, she's had connections that she's made all around the world and she's built this sense of identity, she's an artist, she's going to the School of Visual Arts, she does animation.  She's a brilliant, smart, clever kid who has built a sense of self and community, I think very much because the internet gave her something that she didn't have.  So, there's various ways to skin this cat.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Michael Casey: But it's just we have a structure that doesn't work.  I definitely think our politics is completely and utterly broken as a result of this.

Peter McCormack: There's evolutionary steps to this.  There was an incentive for companies to build these structures and we've created billionaires out of them, but it has become concerning over the last  -- again I harp back to the Trump era, but seeing a president de-platformed was a really weird moment in time.  To see that you could actually take a president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world essentially, and you could remove him from Facebook and Twitter, you could remove his voice, that was a moment that at the time I treated like a joke, it was almost funny that this could happen.  But then I had a conversation with David Bailey about it and I was, "You know what?" because he was really upset by it.  He came off Twitter because of it and I thought, "You know what; he really had a point".  Perhaps it's just these evolutionary steps.

Before we get into that, I just want to pick you up on one point because it's a really important point to discuss, especially amongst the Bitcoin crowd, because you say, "We do need governments".  I talk about that sometimes and I get viciously attacked as a cuck, a statist, etc.

Michael Casey: I'm looking forward to all the Twitter attacks that we're going to get now then.  I think we need governments largely because of where we are right now in this transitional phase.  By the way, this transitional phase is not something that's going to be over and done with in your or my lifetime.  I do think that ultimately, they're an anachronistic concept.  I think more importantly the nation state is a completely anachronistic concept. 

I know that you've been interested in the plight of refugees and so forth.  I'm an immigrant, you hear this accent, it's not an American accent.  I grew up and fell in love with an American, totally felt like the border's completely constrained.  Now, by the way, right now, I can't visit my dad who is suffering from Alzheimer's, because Australia has this fortress rule, even though I'm an Aussie.  So, the control of our international environment by these arbitrary things, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities concept, all this is an anachronist concept. 

But government or governance, whatever you want to call it, has to be there.  I'm not a hardcore libertarian by any stretch.  It's just literally impossible to go off and not have some form of rule system by which you interact with others, because all of our wellbeing and wealth really comes from that, certainly in this age.  It might have been different in the nomadic era when you could go off and kill your own beast and eat it, but every aspect of where our prosperity comes from is a function of our interaction with somebody else.  You need rules for that, you can't possibly engage without rules.  

Now, how do we actually govern those rules is the question; that's again where Bitcoin and blockchain is really interesting, because it gives us a framework.  I think libertarians tend to focus too much on the outcome of a blockchain structure, of Bitcoin, "I've got this thing, this asset and so leave me alone".  What's really most interesting to me at least, as somebody who's studied political economy most of my life and why I was drawn into Bitcoin, is because oh my God, this was a system that without anybody in control, gave us a bunch of rules that we were all agreeing to and it would therefore allow us to do what we really want to do which is interact with each other. 

I can exchange with you and even though I don't know you, which is the power of a government in the first place, is allowing all these disparate imagined communities to form as if they know each other and can talk to each other and trust each other, can now do it regardless of any sense of who you actually are or where you are in the world.  So, it is the first step to breaking down the nation state, which I think is a good thing, but my God, we've a long way to go because so much of the world is still dependent upon these systems. 

It's a pipe dream to imagine that we could just do away with government altogether and we'd all happily treat each other with love and affection and we'd magically all discover these rules.  Aspects of this are there, like culture itself is a rule system; it is a protocol.  Language is a protocol.  These things evolved and they are mechanisms by which the way we say please and thank you and we all agree to line up in a queue and stuff, some of this is automatic agreed-upon rules; but we also know that human greed is just a powerful force and this is not new, this is the story of humanity. 

So, we need governments right now, absolutely.  How we evolve them into a new form of governance is the big question.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Immigration is a really interesting issue.  I went out to Turkey just before the COVID lockdown, when the border crisis with Greece started blowing up.  I smuggled myself into this camp that had just popped up out of nowhere, just right at the border crossing, because the Greeks wouldn't let anyone in.

Michael Casey: Yeah, I watched that.

Peter McCormack: They built up the barbed wire fences and basically all these people from different communities, it was almost like a festival; they were just building tents and structures.  There was humanitarian aid coming in and I just went round talking to people and they're from everywhere: Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, all different places.  And obviously, there have been a lot of issues in Greece and I understand what some of the complaints are about, but I'm very sympathetic to immigration because talking to these people and understanding their plights, their situation is no different to mine. 

If I want to move to the US, which I've always talked about wanting to do, it's because I want to go for economic opportunity, because that's where I think my business will be best placed.  It didn't matter who I talked to, whether they were from Eritrea or Syria, some were escaping war, some were escaping oppression, but most of them it was just about economic opportunity. 

So, I came to this position and I felt like immigration is really a racial and a class issue, because you and I, as white first world Australian/English people, we can move to other countries and nobody really gives a shit.  I think it becomes more of an issue where people are coming from poorer countries and they need a leg up perhaps when they get to the country to work.  I think it also, for many, it is just a plain and simple race issue.  But I am very sympathetic on the immigration issue. 

I know it's complex and I am sure it's very complex in the US on the Mexican border with people coming up from South and Central America.  I don't know the answer, but I'm sympathetic to every person who wants to move to another country to better their life.  I get really disappointed with some of the arguments I hear against it, because they're usually coming from someone from a position of privilege.

Michael Casey: Yeah.  It is one of those, the gene lottery.  You happen to be lucky enough to be born a certain colour and in a certain place and in our current post-Westphalian world, which we've had for the last 400 years, with these nation state concepts, you happen to have been born within the boundaries of this arbitrary line that was built around these things.  I have so much more in common with, say, an Indian who loves cricket and is maybe into tech, etc, than I do have with many of my immediate neighbours; and yet I'm supposed to be aligned with them around some nebulous concept of national identity, even though I'm an immigrant who came in here as an Aussie.  I do actually have US citizenship for a bunch of reasons, but I won't go into that. 

But this is part of the problem and that's why, to your point and I agree with you 100%, it is just unfair.  So, how do we deal with that?  Again, this comes down to, immigration is itself I think and the problems we have with it now, are an outcome again of this clash between the decentralisation of our information system.  You can talk to anybody, anybody in El Salvador and we can talk about why El Salvador and the Mexican border is a really interesting issue right now with regard to Bitcoin; you know, anybody in El Salvador can look and see what is happening right now in the United States, what they can get, what they can't, etc.  We live as if we almost can touch, in an unreal sense, the lives of others, the experience, but our physical experience is completely different. 

So, we're allowed to imagine a relationship with everybody, and that has never been made more and more as possible as it is now through this technology, but at the same time the same old centralised arbitrary structures about where we can and can't live are there.  So, these two things are just creating a cluster, as I would say is and will climate change; these things are going to really push these things out. 

The answer, if we want to talk about immigration, to me and it's not a revelation, but it is how do we invest in systems that allow for domestic prosperity in these places.  Regardless of whether -- and again I agree with you, I think these borders and rules and controls are just fundamentally unfair, but we just literally can't have everybody living in the United States or in the UK.  What we need, of course, is opportunities everywhere in the world and to breed systems that actually self-generate that sense of prosperity and welcome, which is why the El Salvador experiment is so interesting. 

I'm on the fence as to whether or not it's going to go the right way, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, but I do think that if I were to be the US President, I would be looking at what they're trying to do with Bitcoin and thinking, "How do I make that project move in the direction that I want it to be, rather than the direction that it shouldn't be?" precisely because El Salvador is either first or second in the biggest sending nation for immigrants crossing the border.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Casey: There's a whole lot and this stuff comes full circle in quite an interesting way when you think about immigration and Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I'm wholly wrapped up in the El Salvador project now, travelling back and forth.

Michael Casey: Yeah, I bet you are.

Peter McCormack: I love the country, firstly, I just love the country, I love the people.  I've been treated so well there every single time.  It isn't the country you are led to believe it is.  The first time I went, I was getting off the plane nervous because they said, "Don't get any money out at the airport.  People will follow you from the airport".  None of that.  Maybe historically it has happened, but I tend to find our government advice websites tell you the most fearful version of visiting a country.

Then when you search for El Salvador, you hear about the gangs, 18th Street.  You go onto the documentary channels, there's World's Worst Prison and one of them will be El Salvador and so you have this belief that you're going to get off the plane and you're going to walk into gang country and it's going to be guys covered in tattoos and white T-shirts and long socks and, "Hey, yes", all that stuff and all that cliché and I haven't seen any of it, it just doesn't exist.  It's a beautiful country and like most places in the world, you have to travel with a bit of common sense, but I feel perfectly safe there, happy to take my kids. 

But the project itself to me is super important because it's so tied to the success of Bitcoin.  If Bitcoin is a successful project over, let's keep it shorthand, the next decade, it will be infinitely more successful for El Salvador, because it will raise up the opportunity of investment into the country because it's just a few things that you have to think about; they have a deflationary -- well, let's say they have the US dollar which is a currency that's being debased. 

They have Bitcoin now and for everybody who wants to go into the country and have residency, it costs 3 Bitcoin of an investment.  So, that puts 3 Bitcoin into the country.  Every single major company, exchange, Bitcoin company is also looking to invest in the country.  You only have to go on Twitter now, every bitcoiner's been there or is going there and when they're going there, they're leaving dollars but they're leaving sats. 

So, my very simple thesis on El Salvador is if over the next year, two, three years there's a huge injection of Bitcoin into the country, if Bitcoin continues to do as it does, it's going to accelerate the GDP growth of the country; it's going to just naturally become a more wealthy country.  That's going to be really interesting, because that's going to be something other countries can look at as an example of how you can invest in a country. It's not just about the Bitcoin and Bitcoin going on bull runs, but it's showing how you can invest in a country, how people can go and live in a country like that, work from there, they can establish themselves, yet they don't have to worry about currency.

I think there's so many interesting parts of that El Salvador project and I'm almost fearful as well that it doesn't work; what are the implications of that as well?

Michael Casey: Can I just hit on that, because I think it's absolutely fascinating.  I think it's basically pregnant with possibility.  This could be, to your point, something that just transforms development as a concept and a role that Bitcoin could play in this.  My concern is not that it won't generate GDP; I tend to think that Bitcoin's price is going to rise and therefore that there will be.  And this idea of the 3 Bitcoin coming in every time someone arrives is going to play into that, etc.

My concern is how well the wealth of it is going to be distributed.  To come at it again, this whole conversation is about left and right; this is really about centralised control.  My concern is that they haven't yet built a model by which the most immediate on-the-ground almost real estate grab of this Bitcoin isn't going to be in the hands of the powerful.  I don't just mean the government, and this isn't to pass judgment on Bukele or otherwise, I know he's a problematic, controversial figure, but it's really about the structures they put in place and the state on the ground of the villages. 

It is a big gang place and I'm sure you were treated beautifully, but MS-13 is truly there and they have relationships in these villages and so forth.  So, how do you keep the Bitcoin out of their hands and also, by the way, out of the hands of corrupt state bodies and get it spread amongst the people?  So, the Lightning app is fantastic, Strike is going to be useful, all that stuff's great; but you really want to have a way to autogenerate self-power in this situation. 

What I worry about is, the volcano thing set me off because I was, "Come on, dudes".  It's sexy, right, volcano money, but that's a state-run geothermal plant.  All of that Bitcoin is going to go into the hands of the state coffers.  Will they distribute it through some sort of magnanimous altruistic tax or welfare distribution system?  Maybe, that would be great, but I think what really needs to be happening are models for auto-generation of Bitcoin wealth. 

I could talk until the cows come home about it, but decentralised solar microgrids, structures in these neighbourhoods, that give them free or very, very cheap power and a mechanism for actually funding that through Bitcoin mining, that then is fed amongst these communities and decentralised autonomous structures, allowing these folks to actually not just use it for commerce, but have an income from this at that village level.  If you can build a structure like that, then you've got an absolutely mind-blowing change in terms of direction of development.

Here's why I think we still need to be cautious.  It's called the curse of OPEC.  Nigeria is resource-rich, but it's a screw up, right, it is a screw up; oil is not distributed well.  With Venezuela, Venezuela's an even better example.  You could use an analogy with Bitcoin in this context.  It's not perfect but by no means is this to disparage Bitcoin as a thing, but the idea of centralising the mining of Bitcoin around an all-powerful single state-owned concept where all that mining, all that Bitcoin is now going into the hands of one entity, essentially; that is part of a problem that you've seen repeated over and over again across all of the OPEC countries. 

Norway is the only OPEC country, obviously Middle Eastern countries are pretty wealthy and prosperous, but as functioning societies I wouldn't necessarily want to live in them, and the rest of them are all complete basket cases; they're failed states basically.  So, you have that as an unfortunate precedent.  Again, I think that the rest of us in the western world should be out there helping El Salvador get the structure right, so that Bitcoin and decentralised technologies develop in that part of the world in a much more distributed, even opportunity for everybody kind of model.

Peter McCormack: The Venezuelan model, let's talk about that for a moment because, as you say, it's an oil rich country, the richest country in South America at one point when oil was $120 a barrel and Chávez was in power.  Yes, he was a socialist but he did want to redistribute the wealth.  Was his biggest mistake essentially creating, I think, was it one in three jobs were state jobs at one point?

Michael Casey: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Then when the price of oil dropped, obviously that was a catastrophe for the country.  We don't need to debate his authoritarian tendencies but if he'd have approached that differently to begin with, rather than using the wealth to create state jobs, actually use that to inject, to create a more capitalist society, do you think Venezuela could be in a completely different place now?

Michael Casey: Yeah, if they'd followed the Norwegian model, perhaps, where you treat this largesse of the oil wealth as something to help spread access, but also you hold it in reserve, you don't blow it all at once; you use it as some buffer against the future.  So, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, of course, is very, very well managed and it uses that.  However, it's very difficult to do that without having the right structures in place. 

Here's why Bitcoin and oil are completely different.  You can't really build an oil wealth, an oil organisational structure, the infrastructure that you need to build that, without the centralised power of something, whether it's a large corporation that then ends up extracting all that rent for itself, or a government which is the case of Pemex -- no, what's it called?  Blanking on the Venezuelan…  Pemex is the Mexican one.

Peter McCormack: You'll pick it up.

Michael Casey: Anyway, basically the Venezuelan state-owned oil company almost had to be there.  It could be privatised but it's the same sort of thing, because you need to spend a lot of money on that infrastructure.  Where Bitcoin is phenomenally different is anybody can run a node, anybody can run a miner.  Now, it's expensive to run miners but if you're poor, you don't need to generate that much in the way of Bitcoin and if you have enough of a collective structure -- again, decentralised microgrids that pool all that mining power, you can start to earn sats that are there and all of a sudden, that centralised monopoly over the wealth creation, the extraction of the mining, is no longer just in the hands of the government; it's something that can be pushed out and spread.

So, Venezuela could have maybe gone down the path of Norway, but you have to then reform government itself and do all these other things to make sure you distribute the wealth in the fairest and most sustainable way over the long term.  But with Bitcoin you have an opportunity to actually just in fact reimagine how the wealth itself is actually emerging in the first place, and that's what I think is really interesting. 

But yeah, the Venezuelan case is still a cautionary tale, because you could imagine the same problem emerging if you haven't enabled that more decentralised access to that wealth and you've just centralised the control and so the geothermal volcano that everybody's excited about.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's quite interesting to talk about though because essentially, you're talking in the same voice about Bitcoin and social programmes, and many bitcoiners are anti any form of social programme; a lot of them are anti any form of redistribution of income, anti-government.  So, it's quite a radical concept in the Bitcoin world. 

I'm not anti it by the way.  Whatever my belief on government is, should it be smaller, should we have it, doesn't really matter; but whilst we have it and whilst we have governments, we do have taxation, we do have redistribution of income.  So, to have this based on Bitcoin is a unique concept, because we don't have any other government in the world who has treated Bitcoin like legal tender.  It's not going to be in any other government's coffers the way it is with El Salvador right now. 

We know Bukele has said that everyone has the Chivo Wallet, I think they're getting $30 of Bitcoin as a kickstart, but that's really a kickstart.  They could all just go and sell that immediately and not hold onto it.  I see what you're recognising is that this could create a new wealth divide in the country.

Michael Casey: Absolutely and, yeah, unfortunately this intersection between the reality of the moment, that we have centralised nation state government controls, and bitcoiners who are all anarchists and libertarians and so excited about the fact that this is being resolved by a centralised government that's making these rules, I think this is part of the challenge.  It's not to say it's not a good thing, the idea of legal tender and the possibility is huge. 

But it is just in my view, and I know that a lot of your listeners are going to think differently, it's naïve to think that any form of prosperity for the medium to long term can be created without some form of governance.  It's the same issue; we've got to figure this out, because what is your Bitcoin worth if you can't spend it on something that somebody else is going to create for you?  I want to interact with others for the simple fact of economic activity.  I can't buy the sun, but I do want to buy my food and I do want to buy my transport and all of the amenities that make myself happy; I need to interact with some of these.  Let's just put that aside; you need to have a system for how we all work together to make that happen.  Is that a decentralised government system or is it centralised government?  Put that aside.

But yeah, Bitcoin is now entering into that realm.  I think, because of that reality I just described, you just can't get away from the fact that we need governance and that there are existing nation states.  We've got to figure out how, as this new model emerges, does that system allow Bitcoin to work to the benefit of everybody.  I'm not talking about redistribution of wealth, by the way, not the way I see it.  Maybe people would see it that way, but I'm not saying, "Hey, take all your Bitcoin and distribute it as some nice largesse, some sort of Chávesque-like model".  I'm saying, "No, think about how you build the autogenerating element of mining and attach it to the most important infrastructure we have, which is energy, and build systems that allow everybody else…" 

Just the idea of, I built a project at MIT where we created a decentralised microgrid in Puerta Rico.  We were working on how outsiders can fund that through essentially crypto payments that are controlled by these smart devices that then allow you to essentially collateralise your investment.  It decentralises the ability to fund microgrids hopefully around the world.  The main thinking behind it was, if we gave people access to energy so it's just free, and by the way the sun is free; if everybody had access to energy and you had it in a community, what interesting new entrepreneurial opportunities would emerge out of that? 

People would start to build electronic vehicle transport systems and somebody would have a taxi system built on that and they'd put up Wi-Fi towers or they'd irrigate the farms, they'd use the pumps.  So, if you had access to this network of systems and you had a mechanism for funding it and monetising it in this decentralised way, what wonderful new civilisation-building things could emerge out of that?

So, I'm not talking about saying, "Hey, here's $3,000 a month worth of Bitcoin.  Go and sit on your arse and do nothing".  I'm saying, "Think hard about what it is that makes societies grow and entrepreneurship grow and everything else".  I think that you have, in the intersection between solar microgrids, renewable energy and Bitcoin mining, a really powerful way to lay the framework for that kind of essentially capitalist society, although again capitalism is a word that is a political word.  I'm talking about entrepreneurship and opportunity and the pursuit of prosperity and opportunity and happiness.  So yeah, a rabbit hole.

Peter McCormack: I don't see that happening in the short term in El Salvador anyway.

Michael Casey: No, but that's because partly the thinking is in the wrong place, and this is what's frustrating.  The project that Square is doing with Blockstream is very interesting.  They're trying to think this stuff through.  How would you build a mechanism by which you could have these?  Of course, you need to have a lot of energy to generate enough Bitcoin to be of any worth, which is why these massive mining farms exist in places like Iceland and now on the edge of a volcano in the middle of El Salvador. 

But if you had a DAO-like structure that then had, say, 1,000 villages all participating as de facto owners of this shared microgrid, one could imagine a place like Venezuela that's got plenty of sun and you paired it with wind and everything else, that you could generate enough energy at a local, decentralised level to do this.  By the way, one of the things about decentralised energy that I'm passionate about is it is also a solution against the greatest vulnerability that we face in terms of security. 

We saw the Colonial Pipeline shut down forming 60 million people in the US Eastern Seaboard suddenly vulnerable to a supposedly Russian hacker who just shut the thing down asking for Bitcoin.  The problem is not Bitcoin in that; the problem is the centralised control of the gasoline that is going down one pipeline.  It is a central vector of attack, which people in the crypto world know exactly what that means.  You distribute the attack vector, and it suddenly is not the same.  If you have all these redundancies, multiple microgrids everywhere with a certain amount of autonomy but are also inter-related with each other, now you have a much harder-to-break system. 

Again, are people thinking outside the box about this saying, "Hey we need renewable energy"?  That's just part of the problem.  It's not just, "Oh, we need massive government investment in wind farms and so forth".  It is, how do I actually build a truly decentralised architecture that is more secure, more democratic in terms of access to it, because the people who live in those places should have the rights to actually generate their energy and derive benefits from it, and then build a payments and a wealth generation mechanism on top of that.

So yes, it's not what's going on in El Salvador, because we haven't got the right mindset for thinking about these things, but there are people who are thinking about it.  I'm hoping that some of this crazy Elon Musk versus Jack Dorsey and everything else stuff is going to be generating some more outside-the-box thinking on this stuff.  But one could imagine, again imagine, because it's not the reality, a forward-thinking visionary US government going into El Salvador and saying, "Hey, this Bitcoin stuff seems crazy to us, but why don't we help you lay out this model because, by the way, we want your people to be prosperous because we don't want them coming across the northern border and that's how we can help out".  That would be my dream. 

Unfortunately, a person who should be thinking like that, Elizabeth Warren, for example, which is what triggered the tweet we were talking about, is completely in the wrong place about this because she doesn't get it.  So, the people who should care about the things I'm trying to talk about here, which is left-leaning people, my background basically, just don't understand how this could be an incredible driver of opportunity; and so we're going down the path of black and white, good and evil, because we've got a centralised approach to it that is fundamentally out of touch with what we really should be thinking about.  That's my concern with El Salvador.

Peter McCormack: It's definitely a relevant topic for the US right now because when I was there, waiting to meet the President the first time, there were people from the USAID there and I was talking to them because I think they were wondering who this weirdo was with tattoos on his hands, and they're all in suits.  They were all asking me and so, "I'm a Bitcoin podcaster" and telling them what I was doing.  They were fascinated by the idea of Bitcoin, because obviously it was a highly relevant time, the news had just been released, and I was asking about the work they do.  They'd just say, "We work on infrastructure projects.  We want to help El Salvador, because we want to reduce the number of people coming into the US.  It is a problem for us". 

It is on the radar; it's just, is it on the radar of the relevant people?  Is politics getting in the way?  You talked about Elizabeth Warren; I think she said some interesting things in the past.  I think she tried to hold Mnuchin to account in a really good way.  I try to look at all politicians objectively sometimes; I don't just dislike them all for the sake of it.  But her rants against Bitcoin recently were really disappointing.  It showed a distinct lack of understanding and investment of her own time to understand what it is. 

But this is what we always have to deal with with Bitcoin.  We know there's opportunities with Bitcoin to raise prosperity and create borderless payments and instant final settlement around the world with this amazing technology, but we can see the amplification of all the same messages: terrorists and criminals and boiling the oceans and that becomes a really difficult battle to fight; it's almost exhausting.

It was really interesting listening to --

Michael Casey: That word again, by the way, exhausting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that word again.

Michael Casey: Because it is part of the same problem.  It's the mechanism of control over the channels of information that are allowing this misinformation or this alternative narrative to take charge.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was listening to Michael Saylor and Marty Bent recently.  I don't know if you listen to them two together.

Michael Casey: Not the two of them together.  I've listened to both of them at different times, but I didn't hear that episode, no.

Peter McCormack: It's a really interesting one, because I think they both were brilliant in it and whilst they were both brilliant in it, they also at some points talk past each other.  But what I was realising that Michael Saylor was doing, which is really good and some people would disagree, but there is this whole Bitcoin toxicity and I understand toxicity around the protocol, not allowing people to come in and fuck with the protocol, because that's really important. 

Bitcoin is stable and where it's come from over the last 12 years and especially since the scaling wars is truly incredible.  I understand that, but this bleed of toxicity into any form of belief you have around government, COVID, global warming I think it sometimes goes too far.  I'm watching Michael Saylor and I'm listening to him and actually, what he's trying to do is be a PR machine for Bitcoin.  He's trying to work on getting good and helpful messages out. 

Do you know what?  One of the really interesting things is, since the Mining Council has come together, and I was very critical, is that I've seen some press articles recently that aren't so negative.  Some are neutral and I read a positive one the other day.  Actually, the positive one I read was the release of the information that comes from Cambridge whoever they are.

Michael Casey: The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Money, Alternative something, yes, I know the one.  But anyway, Cambridge Uiversity.

Peter McCormack: It's about being a bit more smart with the messaging, because if anyone's critical of Bitcoin on Twitter, you just go to the replies and all the bitcoiners are, "Fuck you, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about".  Then occasionally you have somebody with a more articulate answer or a more considered answer.  So, it's another issue I've been wrestling with, this idea of where should you be blunt?  I don't like the toxic term; I've used it myself but what is the messaging, do we need to be more mature with the messaging? 

Bitcoin now is a global asset that has liquidity in every country in the world.  It has a country that's made it legal tender, it has companies that have it on its balance sheet.  It's not going away, we're beyond the point of banning Bitcoin; yes, they might try and regulate it heavily.  Personally, I'm thinking do we need to be much smarter with the messaging now?

Michael Casey: I would definitely say yes, but the question is how; how do you institute that?  It is truly, by definition, a decentralised organisation and it gets back to what we talked about at the very beginning.  We are all, whether we like it or not, inside this matrix.  When you and I go on crypto Twitter, our brains are being manipulated by the algorithm, by each other.  We're looking for triggers.  The crypto Twitter troll is a beast that we know very, very well; it's all about the trigger, it's all about the response, etc.  That is not just a thing that affects our daily life; it is a business model; it is how Facebook makes its money; it's why the whole debate over Cambridge Analytica and the manipulation of the Brexit vote is because our brains get triggered, our brains get triggered, our brains get triggered. 

Oliver Luckett and I wrote this book, The Social Organism, and the thing I thought was really fascinating about this concept was the old infrastructure of information, the power over the control of information, was centralised because it was expensive to build the distribution cable lines, for example, or the printing presses.  So, to actually control this bit of information, it was expensive and that's why you have these controllers. 

Then we broke it all down, we flattened it and we gave everybody access, but we still had to figure out how does the power, what are the forces by which the power over the control of information come to bear in this environment?  It's about emotions, the connectivity of our system.  Now, the distribution system is actually emotions.  If people are going to share this podcast with everybody, it's because something you or I said triggered people to go, "Oh, I've got to share that".  And that becomes the actual distribution mechanism; so follows and shares and likes, etc, is distribution. 

So ultimately, if you're thinking as a capitalist, "How do I control that?  How do I get the control over that process?" algorithmic control is all about -- I'm sorry I'm going off on a tangent here, but it's relevant to how we get back to Bitcoin toxicity.

Peter McCormack: No, do it.

Michael Casey: Because essentially what Facebook created with this concept of "like" audiences, it's powerful for advertisers to know that there's a bunch of people who all agree on the same thing, who are completely passionate about it, who are going to reshare and like and engage with each other, because they're a sticky audience.  So essentially Facebook's, "I'm going to create an algorithm that makes sure that everybody who is a hard-line conservative is all inside this group, and everybody who's a really passionate liberal leftie is all in that group.  And what I'm going to do is feed them a select feed of stuff and I'm not going to give them this, I'm going to give them that". 

Ultimately what you've got is a re-enforcing loop that is creating echo chambers, it's creating group think, and it's creating a wonderful environment for advertisers because they know this is a targetable niche audience.  That means that Facebook advertising is worth a premium relative to the advertising that goes on an institution. 

Everyone in Bitcoin slams the mainstream press, but the reality is, and I came up in this profession, most sensible professional news organisations are trying to be balanced, they're trying to be actually open to everybody albeit in the old Walter Cronkite centralised structure and there's a narrow Overton window, they are nonetheless saying, "Hey, how do we be balanced and fair"?  Advertisers are, "That's all great but you know what, you don't get the same stickiness if you had these things". 

There's a great story about these Macedonian kids in 2016,, who created a website that was making up stories and were feeding them into a particular Facebook group, a bunch of Facebook groups, that they knew because the stories were going to resonate with Conservative voters, would get reshared and everything else; and then all these Google cents and dollars would flow back to them.  So, Facebook had created this architecture for its own advertising and these kids were making up lies. 

The thing that got me about it as a journalist for years was, "Holy shit, for years we've been struggling to get more pay and we've had to share the money around because of the expense of having lawyers and infrastructure and sending people out to cover wars; you name it, it's an expensive business being a news organisation.  And these kids in Macedonia can just make up bullshit like 'Obama's birth certificate found in Kenya!' and they know it's going to get shared and they're going to get more advertising dollars going towards them because of the business model that Facebook has created".  This is the fucking problem.

So, we're all, whether we like it or not, even in the Bitcoin community, prone to this.  We don't understand it; it's subtle, because it's everywhere.  You were talking about being in crypto Twitter all the time and having to take it off your phone.  We're all part of this.  What we need is awareness of that, awareness of our own limitations, our own constraints and the fact that there is a system; it is the matrix.  It's red pill, blue pill stuff.  When we see that, we can start to tackle the toxicity because it's literally in how we respond.

I like your point about toxicity and the protocol.  I think that's an interesting way to think about it, but let's remove the word "toxicity" and say, "No, let's take a hard-line position that we defend the protocol, not that we play games and troll each other and everything else because, yes, it looks immature".  We need the rest of the world to buy into this.  Again, certain Bitcoin maxis are just happy sitting on their bags and thinking they're going to get rich for ever.  I'm interested in this because I think it's going to change the world and if that's the case, we need to convince everybody of that. 

Those of us who have a voice in this space, yourself, myself, Marty Bent, people like this who really are out there and have a chance to change things, need to be just aware of the fact that the toxicity does not help.  By the way, that toxicity, you have no control over it; it's being dictated by this Goddam algorithm and all of the structures that exist within our own emotional responses.  I think an open mind, a generous -- my boss uses this word, generous listening, within CoinDesk.  These are traits that actually allow for a healthier discourse to emerge and I think that will serve the community far better than allowing ourselves to be controlled by the matrix.

Peter McCormack: I go through cycles of this.  I'd love to have my producer, Danny, on to talk about this because the amount of times I have a conversation with him and say, "I'm just not using Twitter in the right way, I'm just not; I'm trolling or I'm fucking around, I'm being a dick.  Maybe I should turn my Twitter off or maybe you should control my Twitter.  If I'm going to send a tweet, I send it to you first because you'd likely say, 'Don't send that, Pete'". 

There is that mix of it's so much fun firstly with also realising there's something really important going on here with Bitcoin.  As you say, it's a technology that can do so much for the world, break down a lot of barriers, it can help people in different parts of the world.  It's way more helpful to someone in El Salvador than it is to you or I.  So, I do feel this sense of responsibility and I also feel I am constrained not just by the algorithm but my own, what's the best word, I'll say courage; it sounds a little bit of bravado, but my own courage to say, "Look, I disagree with you here". 

I'll give you a couple of examples.  Firstly, I am not an anarchist and I'm not a libertarian.  I like a lot of the ideas; I think they sound brilliant, and I think if they can influence governments I think that's great, but I'm just not there yet.  But sometimes I feel like, "Shit, I just have to act a bit like an anarchist", because otherwise I'd just get shouted out, called a cuck and an idiot and all that kind of stuff.  That's one of the things and also being the toxic maximalist, again I feel sometimes I have to do that.

But I also then come back and think, "Why am I doing this?  What value is this adding?  What value is this adding to Bitcoin?  Are we all just wasting our time?"  Because I did the interview with Eric Weinstein and it was one of my worst because I'd prepared badly for it, but a few things that stuck in my mind, the one thing that really stuck with me what he said, and I want to get the words correct, "You created this amazing thing.  I really believed in bitcoiners, yeah.  All I see is like Lambo and Moon.  What are you guys doing?  What are you doing?  Let's stop fucking around and let's do something". 

That's another thing that's really stuck with me is that, I wonder sometimes as bitcoiners if we sometimes get lost, we get too defensive, we have to have a defence for every argument against Bitcoin and then we have to shout at people.  Whereas actually, can we be more constructive about the important issues?  Yes, hard-line on the protocol, great; keep the blocks small; let's have a fixed monetary policy; it has worked.  We've been 12 years in, hasn't had to change its monetary policy once, whereas Ethereum has multiple times. 

But can we have a better dialogue around Bitcoin?  Can we be more inclusive in that dialogue and inviting people in?  Do we really need to spend all day every day shouting at other protocols?  I think most of it is bullshit, but is it just a waste of time?  Is that a distraction from Bitcoin?  These are all things I wrestle with.  Every six months I wrestle with them again.  I think you're right in terms of the social media platforms because I think that's what's driving me to not act like myself. 

So, I'll meet somebody, I'll go to Miami to a conference and I'll hang out with somebody and they're, "You're not like you are on Twitter" or, "Your podcast is different" and I think Twitter, certainly Twitter, makes me act like somebody I'm not which is a problem, which is the whole focus.

Michael Casey: It is and you're actually hitting on some really key points here.  What's also interesting, by the way, is look at this medium that we have, this podcast medium.  It's a completely different forum and you sit back and you listen and we engage, and you're being self-reflective, which is really impressive.  By the way, I think that's part of your appeal, part of your brand, which isn't a bad word.  Brand is not a bad word at all, it's a mechanism by which people are relating to you, and you can only do this in this particular medium because podcasting allows us to do it.  So, it's a completely different set of dopamine releases.   Dopamine release is the key point.

Peter McCormack: Let me just jump in and just interrupt you on that point; which is why I think Clubhouse, for all its faults, and now Twitter Spaces are actually a great tool.  They actually level up social media, because it's so much harder to say, "Fuck you, you cuck.  You're bullshit", all that stuff that people say when they're typing.  It's so much harder to say that with actual words.  They do, but I actually find the discourse in Clubhouse and in Twitter Spaces, I find it much better than a Twitter conversation.

Michael Casey: Yeah, absolutely.  But there's another aspect of the Twitter economy, which is the key point here that is challenging, and that is that, yeah, our control, can we recognise it?  Okay, there's a dopamine hit that I'm going to have if I respond to this and say something and I need to control that.  But in reality, it's also a business model, because the more likes and follows you get, which come from the actual building that self-feeding, by the way, viral concept, which is what we talk about in The Social Organism, of retweets and so forth is all dopamine release, it's all built into a big mushrooming ecosystem.  It breeds power, because you've got a lot of Twitter followers. 

By the way, this is going to be a way to think about this: so too is a gentleman that I know you've been sparring with a lot on Twitter who has many, many more followers; Elon Musk.  And we sit there and we go, "Oh, isn't this terrible.  Bitcoin's being hijacked by this one guy who has all this control.  That's horrible, we have to stop him.  So, let's yell at him" and all we're doing is the two of us, he and us, feeding the same model so the Peter McCormacks and the Elon Musks are really, whether they agree with it or not or even realise it, building up their own followships around a model that is inherently feeding off this horrible…

It's going nowhere.  It's just bouncing around, no one's resolving anything; whereas I think you're absolutely right, in terms of Clubhouse and things.  The pay-off is not the same, the pay-off is different and so we are going to be more restrained.  There's a whole load of social norms around that, which is another form of governance, as I mentioned before, that exists in this spoken environment and I think that's potentially really constructive.

Again, it comes down to being just aware and aware of our own failings, our own limits.  Dopamine is something that is an element of survival that we've evolved to have, but it's about our fight and flight response; but in this almost entirely online world where we live now, where it's just our ideas spinning around in hour heads, it's completely dysfunctioning; it's functioning as if we're running away from an attack by a pride of lions, but we're actually really not.  We're feeling like we're attacked by Elon Musk or Peter McCormack, or whichever side of the fence we're on in this. 

Peter McCormack: It's like a drug addiction as well.

Michael Casey: It is.  They're completely related; it is about addiction.  Let's think personally how we deal with that, but also recognise the very business model of social media.  Actually, Jack Dorsey's really interesting on this because I think he gets it.

Peter McCormack: He does.

Michael Casey: The whole de-platform is a part of this, but it's again about the central control over these massive distribution networks that are run on dopamine systems.  Then you have to make decisions, because they have real power and you think, "Oh my God, COVID misinformation, what am I going to do?"  The only solution is to actually be a censor, which is not what they want to do at all.  So, then you shut down Trump or you shut down whomever and we're all upset about that, rightly so, because we recognise these platforms have got too much power. 

But at the end of the day, you're, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"  So, the only thing to do about it is think about the model of social media.  Let's think about how we would build a system both from our personal level but also, I would argue, legislation.  Break these things up, create utility-type structures around it.  Web 3.0 may be a way through this.  There's a whole lot of different ways to think about that.

We've gone on a different tangent but at the end of the day, I think --

Peter McCormack: But it's important.

Michael Casey:  Oh yeah, because I think awareness of all of that then helps us think through this toxicity issue and how we can be constructive around it.  I think El Salvador is a perfect opportunity for the community to step back and go, "All right, how do we want this to work?"  This is an opportunity that could go either way, it truly could. 

If ultimately the World Bank, as we've already seen, and the US government and everybody else responds to this because they think Bukele has been captured by a bunch of crazy bitcoiners who are all drug addicts and arms dealers and whatevers, because that narrative ends up being dominated by whomever is controlling the vehicles of information on this, then there'll be a backlash on Bukele's part and, yes, he'll probably end up becoming more corrupt and the whole thing will be even more centralised and it won't really be what we want it to be. 

Whereas if we're able to allow the Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador to flourish in an environment in which everybody is talking about it in a constructive way and these terrified incumbent institutions like the World Bank start going, "All right, yeah, maybe we can work with this".  I actually know the people who run the Blockchain Unit at the World Bank and they don't think like this, they'd be really constructive around this, and you could imagine a very different conversation going on.

It all comes back to the same thing: we've got to recognise the capacity for our own behaviour, as those of us who have these megaphones, to influence how these other powerful people make decisions about what's going to happen in places like El Salvador.  Yeah, it's very, very important.

Peter McCormack: It's a big challenge though.

Michael Casey: There's no one telling us what to do; it has to come from within.

Peter McCormack: It's a bit like US interference in other countries.  People say no, the revolution has come from within.  If you're looking at what happens with Cuba now and Biden talking about further sanctions, you think does that help or does that hinder?  I think it hinders; I think it hinders.

Michael Casey: It's proven to have hindered.  I know quite a bit about Cuba because, as I said, I wrote a book about Che and spent quite a bit of time there.  Absolutely, the trade embargo has done nothing but burnish the Castro regime's representation of what they're doing.  Power comes from storytelling and, in fact, Cuba in that sense was revolutionary; they understood the power of memes, Che as a meme, the Buena Vista Social Club, all this stuff that they did in the 1990s when they realised that they had rebrand Cuba as chic revolutionary.  This was all ahead of its time but it was all in the service of protecting an existing corrupt socialist system. 

So, the trade embargo was perfect, "Look, big bad guy over there, what a story to tell.  It's not our fault that you don't have any food on your table; it's Uncle Sam over there".  All over Cuba there's all this imagery with Uncle Sam being the bad guy and yeah, it's been perfect for the narrative in Cuba.  So yeah, we have to think hard about how policies and positions and again why Elizabeth Warren is extremely frustrating right now, because she's just feeding in these false narratives around what could be possible and what's not.

Peter McCormack: It's the rebuilding of these platforms, if it is rebuilding, restructuring, that's what I don't understand because we've had newer platforms, we've had Mastodon come in and it's interesting and it gets some usage.  But people giving up their large followings on one platform to move to another is very difficult, so that's really difficult.  So, how do you get it from within Twitter? 

I kind of believe in Jack Dorsey and I know he has his critics.  I don't believe he is the guy sitting there banning people, etc, and I believe a lot of the decisions come from internally.  I don't know any of this, but my assumption is there's teams internally are making decisions.  He can't make every decision running multiple companies, but I believe that he recognises the problem and I believe he wants a solution to this.  I think ultimately, he has a very good heart, but I don't know the solution. 

I know my personal solution is to stop being a dick, stop getting into these fights and try and be constructive, have good constructive conversations.  I think the best person I see for doing this his Joe Rogan.  I know that's such an obvious thing to say, but he does; he doesn't look at the comments on Twitter, he engages with conversations with people in an honest way and he won't generally, I say just generally because some of the shows are now missing, but he generally won't self-censor, he has recognised the responsibility of his platform, having someone like Alex Jones on.  He did try to fact-check him which wasn't done in the best way possible but somebody like him has enough self-awareness to do things in the right way and maybe that's because he's in such a good position. 

But I think a lot of this does come from within, but how do we remove the reward structure, the dopamine hit, because it is powerful, it is like a drug addiction.  It's frankly like a drug addiction in many ways.  As I say, I'm a former addict, so as well as getting the dopamine hit, you get the depression afterwards and the guilt and the shame; that's all part of the same thing.  I don't know the answer, that's my problem and that's what I struggle with.

Michael Casey: It's very hard, because it is a structuralist thing.  Just because you solve it for you doesn't mean the other however many billion people are on Twitter and Facebook have also solved it.  So, yes right now, given what we've got, this is where it has to be but no, we have to think about the business models.  Again, we have governments and they're supposed to create rules around which capitalism can thrive and some of that -- Teddy Roosevelt was the anti-trust guy.  He realised that you should break down monopolies. 

What we then built was this whole, "Don't touch private business because that's…" even though the antitrust laws are in place and they've survived and served America well, any notion that we could apply those laws to, say, Facebook or Twitter is, "Oh, that's unreasonable because you're breaking down free enterprise, you're attacking businesses and, by the way, the products they're giving to us are wonderful and free.  So, shut up". 

The idea behind monopolies and fighting them was that they would have a monopoly power over the price-setting function and so people think, "Well, Facebook's free, Twitter's free".  It's not, of course.  It's Bruce Schneier's, "You are not Facebook's customer.  You are Facebook's product" that tells us that, because we are giving these platforms our data every day which they then back onto us.  Again, read Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism book.  They type that, the repurpose it into a mind control system that then they make money from by creating this business model. 

We have to understand that it's not free; that in fact they've got more power than any monopoly's ever had and we are paying for it every single day with the data and contributions and content that we make to that thing.  That's the first thing.  Then what do you about that?  Maybe, breaking them up as a trust isn't the best thing because that's really heavy-handed and so forth.  But how do we invest, for example, in different systems? 

You made a really good point; there's this existing network effect.  Everybody's on Twitter, so everybody's on Twitter.  You go and create a smaller alternative, "I'm not going to go there, because everybody's on Twitter".  How do we build a system by which I can take my content, my data, as the creator in this business of making money from content?  How do I take that and now basically spread it across different platforms, aggregate that information, take data and now I'm in control, not somebody else? 

I'm doing a bit of a pitch here, because I formed a company and it's amazing and I haven't even got around to pitching it until now.  I founded a company before I went to CoinDesk, called Streambed Media, which is the heart and soul of what we're trying to do; how do we build data systems that run across these things independently as a platform so that creators now get control?  That's one piece of it. 

Web 3.0 ideas, which I know you're not an Ethereum believer, but it came out of Ethereum and now it's guys like Gavin Wood who have broken from Ethereum, but are working on the Polkadot protocol and things like that, that are trying to think through how does the structure of the web change when the very starting point for interaction with it is not controlled by ISPs, it's not controlled by these internet platforms but I, as the individual, am now interacting with this stuff.  That’s the vision of the internet that was supposed to have emerged when it was created, and that's where we need it to go.

So, a lot of it comes down to what was allowed to happen before blockchain emerged in the world and we had to put commerce onto the internet, and so we built business models around advertising and power.  We've got to figure out the business model.  No one's saying socialism, no one's saying, "Let's have centralised control of information".  It's the worst thing imaginable, we just talked about Cuba, but how do we build a framework?  This is what governments should do.  How do you build the structural thing?  How do you think like Teddy Roosevelt and go, "Okay, what can I do in terms of a legal political framework, so that a truly entrepreneurial free enterprise system can thrive in a way that actually benefits society in the interests of continued prosperity?" 

That's what the internet is not doing now because of these platforms and all the stuff we just talked about.  We've got to think like that and it's not easy, it is very, very difficult, but there are ideas.  I tend to be interested in Bitcoin as much, because I see the protocol as a system for governance and therefore, I've always been interested in Ethereum and all these other things that could emerge out of that.  Even if it doesn't have the exact answers, it makes us think about what a different decentralised framework for all this stuff could allow us to do in a way that wasn't so harmful.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it takes me back to that point about Weinstein, "What the fuck are we doing?" and I know not everyone likes him, but I do, I like the guy.

Michael Casey: He's an interesting guy, he's extremely intelligent, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I don't agree with everything.  I don't think he's always great at explaining himself, but I do think he has some really interesting ideas around firstly the breakdown of institutions, including academia.  But most importantly, just that question, "What the fuck are we doing here?" and I do keep thinking about it. 

Bitcoiners, they have a lot of wealth, they have power, they have the ability to do things.  So, what are the things that they can do?  What are the contributions they can make to make Bitcoin not look like the big scary monster it seems to from those on the outside?  Actually, what can it do for financial inclusion?  What can it do?  How can we help solve the issues of global warming, which amazingly some people don't still actually believe is caused by humans, which I find amazing?

Michael Casey:  Which is a function of all that disinformation and everything else, by the way; group thinking.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and migration issues.  I think bitcoiners can come together, they're smart people.  They've got powerful people around them now; Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, as you said.  Perhaps there is a better way to engage and all come together to build better structures, better systems. 

So yeah, I think you're right.  El Salvador is an interesting project.  This entire conversation has made me rethink the El Salvador project.  It's made me rethink, not that I have an answer, that I have to go away and think.  Because what I thought El Salvador was is now very different, having had this conversation.

Michael Casey: Okay.

Peter McCormack: I don't know why.

Michael Casey: I don't have all the answers either.  This is what's interesting about this type of dialogue and why podcasting is so good is, it's just somebody's ideas now being allowed to be introduced through the conversation and the freedom to go, "You know what?  That's made me think a little differently", and obviously it's what I get from listening to you a lot. 

I would never have been able to make the leap into Bitcoin as a guy who was writing about Wall Street for The Wall Street Journal and had that whole framework built around that if it weren't for a couple of things.  One was the fact I'd lived in Argentina where I got an understanding of --

Peter McCormack: Money.

Michael Casey: -- truly who dysfunctional money can be.  I've said before, you can understand money and you can understand systems when you see how it doesn't work; that's when you understand how it does work and you realise how it does work is completely fucked up.  So, that was the starting point, but I think, as a journalist, I was trained to have a little bit of an open mind. 

I was taken out for dinner by a bunch of fairly wealthy entrepreneurs when I wrote a pretty bad column about Bitcoin in 2013.  They said, "You know what, we'll take you out for dinner with a bunch of other journalists and we'll tell you about this" and my mind just went "pff" because I had that, I think at that moment in my life, open mind to do it.  So, I was able to cross the chasm and embrace an entirely different way of thinking about things.  Every bitcoiner has gone through that process, because some of them are, I suppose, born anarchists, but there are so many people who have gone, "Oh, wow!" 

By the way, the most enjoyable thing I ever hear from people is that my book helped them make that leap.  There's no greater reward than you've allowed people to actually go, "Oh, wow!".  But every one of us has made that leap and we need to be open to letting others do the same.  We also have to be open to adjusting our own mindset about other perspectives.  I think if you do that, it's just a much healthier opportunity for progress. 

So, again, this is a great conversation because it allows us to be this way and I don't know, Peter, the appealing part of it is the self-examination aspect of it and I think it's really constructive.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You've just come in at the right time, because I'm always self-examining, I'm always rethinking my own model.

Michael Casey: Health issues will do that to you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there is that and age does it to you and parenting does it to you and the examples you set.

Michael Casey: That's true.

Peter McCormack: When your child turns round to you and says, "Dad, why are you doing that?"

Michael Casey: You're, "Why am I doing that?"

Peter McCormack: "Why am I doing that?" and "If you were doing it, what would I say to you?"  Yeah, there's a lot of self-reflection right now and considering next phase of life, because you go through those phases.  I'm about to.  We're now in months with one of my children becoming a fully-fledged adult and perhaps leaving home and that's making me rethink certain things. 

But definitely in the world of Bitcoin, I'm very conscious that there is a platform and a lot of people listen to it and it's very easy to pick shows based on downloads, but it's also important to pick shows based on what the content is, the topic is.  Yeah, I'm wrestling with a few things at the moment and it's one of these ones I can't give an answer to.  It's one of these things I'm going to go away and I'm going to sit down with my producers and say, "You know what?  I think we need to rethink our content at the moment.  There's some interesting topics we can be approaching.  We can be challenging some ideas".  So, this was really useful for me.

Michael Casey: Thank you, totally for me too.  It's also just been great to see this way of approaching a podcast and the reflective aspect of it, and I hope you listeners get something out of that very act itself.

Peter McCormack: The listeners are very different from Twitter, that's one thing.  I'm in a fortunate position, but that's why sometimes I've not been afraid also to just go on my own path, because I get a lot of people write to me, I don't know who they are, they're not on Twitter and they tell me things.  They say, "I don't want to say this on Twitter, because I don't want to get yelled at" etc.  They're a lot of the drivers of some of the decisions I make as well and I think they will love this conversation.  I think this will be very popular.  I wish we could have done it in person with a few whiskies.

Michael Casey: Yeah, I know.  Yeah, exactly.  Someday we'll get there.

Peter McCormack: I'll be back over hopefully, subject to not having Coronavirus and being able to get in the US, I'll be back in the US.  I'm going to be in New York in September time anyway at a SALT conference, so if you're around we should probably catch up.

Michael Casey: I might even be there at the SALT conference, I think there's some talk about going there.  Good stuff.

Peter McCormack: We have no excuse, man. 

Michael Casey: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Tell people about the books, where they can find them and where they can find you.

Michael Casey: Yeah, absolutely.  So, https://www.coindesk.com obviously for CoinDesk stuff.  The two books of relevance, probably for the Bitcoin crowd at least is The Age of Cryptocurrency and The Truth Machine.  My personal website which desperately needs to be upgraded https://www.michaeljcasey.com has a bunch of details on that. 

I do need to make the final plug: Streambed Media, wish I'd said that earlier, I'm the Chairman of that but my co-founder, Jenna Pilgrim, is doing an incredible job building what we're calling a rights oracle for the NFT industry which I think is going to be really important for how we do rights management, some of the stuff we were talking before about; that's streambedmedia.com. 

Yeah, those are the best places.  As I said, my newsletter is called Money Reimagined and comes out on a Friday and the podcast is also out under the same name with Sheila Warren, Money Reimagined.

Peter McCormack: We will stick all of that in the show notes, man, and listen, hopefully I'll see you in New York in a couple of months.

Michael Casey: Yeah mate, it's going to be great.  All right, good stuff.

Peter McCormack: Catch you later.

Michael Casey: Thanks a lot. See you then, goodbye.