WBD447 Audio Transcription
Bitcoin: The Financial Singularity with Austin Hill
Interview date: Sunday 9th January
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Austin Hill. 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 the second of two interviews, I talk to Austin Hill, the entrepreneur, cypherpunk & venture capitalist. We discuss the singularity and vulnerable world hypothesis, how technology can strengthen totalitarianism and the role of Bitcoin in harm reduction.
“The singularity is a point on an exponential curve whereby change starts to happen at exponential rates that you just can’t predict and you can’t understand. If we don’t figure out how to use Bitcoin to lift everyone’s economic ladder up… then the risk factors to the future are just too high.”
— Austin Hill
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Morning, Austin.
Austin Hill: Morning.
Peter McCormack: So yesterday, we were meant to sit down and talk about the Vulnerable World Hypothesis, but I wanted to set it up and ask you a little bit about Bitcoin. Then we ended up recording a monster show just about Bitcoin. So, here we are back again. You touched on it yesterday.
Austin Hill: Hinted at it, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Hinted at it, but it's worthy of its own show, so we're doing an Austin Hill doubleheader.
Austin Hill: Okay, appreciate the opportunity.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, it was a fascinating chat yesterday. Me and Jeremy were a little bit taken aback. It made me think a lot yesterday about Bitcoin and the importance of Bitcoin, but we have to park that for now; we have to talk about the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.
Austin Hill: So, no discussions about Peter Schiff?
Peter McCormack: If it's relevant, we'll bring it up, but we'll just have him as a backdrop for now.
Austin Hill: Hopefully we find time for it later, because I have a lot of empathy for Peter and his family story. I view the entire thing as like a Star Wars saga.
Peter McCormack: And I understand that. I actually like Peter Schiff. I think he's one of the smartest people out there with regard to his observations on the economy, I just feel like he hasn't moved with time and technology. But I do appreciate him.
Austin Hill: But you understand why? His father, Irwin
Peter McCormack: Well, I know what happened to his father.
Austin Hill: Yeah, and he and his brother -- I mean, his father died in prison. How can a man go against his father? So, I literally view it as, think about it like -- I'm a big Star Wars geek.
Peter McCormack: Aren't we all!
Austin Hill: I hope so. Think of him like Anakin; he's trapped in the dark side. He's trying to honour his father's name, revenge for his father, and yet his son is into Bitcoin and hopefully his son will be Luke, who will save him and teach him Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: That is great, I never thought about it like that.
Austin Hill: He can't go against his father. I mean, this was his father's battle.
Peter McCormack: Of course.
Austin Hill: Gold will be the rock he dies on, because his father died on that rock. But hopefully his son will teach him Bitcoin and bring him over to the light side.
Peter McCormack: Well, I feel like Bitcoin is a tool that helps him with his ideas.
Austin Hill: He loves it, everyone needs an opponent, everyone needs an enemy, and he's used it to promote his gold and his stance. But there's a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty not opening up to the argument, but when you were raised on that, he and his brother… His brother is a comedian, he talks about the economy going dead. Both of them saw their father die in prison at the hands of the government, promoting free, libertarian tax ideals and sound money.
Peter McCormack: But this is one of the reasons why I think he should like Bitcoin, because it's an even better tool to work against the state.
Austin Hill: Sometimes we don't understand.
Peter McCormack: I almost want to have a conversation with him without cameras, like a real chat, man to man, "Let's talk about it". Maybe it will happen one day. But I actually do like the guy. I troll him and he trolls me and we have a bit of fun, but I do actually like the guy.
Austin Hill: I view it as this epic Star Wars saga that I just love seeing play out!
Peter McCormack: That's such a great analogy. All right, let's not divert ourselves for another hour and a half and miss the main topic I want to talk to you about, this Vulnerable World Hypothesis. So, let's go back, shall we just start by explaining the singularity again, because that is something you talk about a lot?
Austin Hill: Yeah. So, the singularity, by looking to Ray Kurzweil and a number of people, is a point on an exponential curve whereby change starts to happen at exponential rates that you just can't predict and you can't understand the pace, and society can't understand the pace of changes that are occurring; generally thought to be when we have nanobots, nanomaterial, programmable microbiology, so we can go into our bodies, programme our bodies, and we have either applied AI, or AGI, that is able to direct, control, manage these things. And the combination of all of these things together is going to create a society and a set of technologies that we have just not even comprehended yet.
That exponential curve is coming at the exact same time as what Jeff Booth talks about, which is the exponential curve of fiat debt. And those two colliding forces are going to create a risk factor, if you think about it from a threat modelling point of view, that is just too large for us to handle. If we don't figure out how to use Bitcoin to lift everyone's economic ladder up, you know, rising sea raises all boats; if we don't figure out how to do that, then the risk factors to the future are just too high.
So, as I mentioned yesterday, Jeff Booth has this famous comment, "Tell me one point in world history where you could build walls big enough to keep the haves from the have-nots". I described the scenario yesterday where a disaffected Venezuelan, or some other country who has been denied entry into the United States because they don't have the right economic status, or they're not the right colour, they're trapped maybe in Mexico, or maybe in some other Latin American regime that's a failed state because of failed drug policy, narco-terrorism. They've seen incredible horrors. I mean, you hear the stories. People are showing up in some of these, applying for asylum, these are not unreal stories. There are people who actually have seen their families co-opted by gangs, raped, murdered.
When this aggrieved person, in five years, in ten years starts to look at the world and sees a bunch of people getting rich, having a great life, having great opportunity, they're going to have access to a set of technologies to express their hate that we are only beginning to understand, CRISPR, synthetic bio, autonomous insect-sized drones, just the mix of technologies are just limitless. Revolutions and changes in fusion power, we're going to be having all these technologies that someone will create a mass casualty event. This is Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis, that essentially every time we reach into the urn of invention, he talks about, we risk pulling out a "black ball", he calls it. I don't like that metaphor, but it's a poisoned pill, if you will.
So, in this scenario, this aggrieved individual could or might, because today we have aggrieved individuals who go out and grab their AR15s, they shoot up schools, they shoot up movie theatres, who's to say that someone's not going to go to a university lab and say, "I'm going to weaponise some virus. I'm going to create some COVID-55 that's genetically engineered to wipe out 20 million or 40 million people of a certain race, of a certain economic class. I'm just going to deploy it in this city"? When you have a mass casualty event of 10 million or 20 million or 30 million people that's genetically engineered and intentional, how do you think the world's governments are going to react to that?
Peter McCormack: Similar to now, but more extreme.
Austin Hill: So, take away all our freedoms, move to a totalitarian state, geopolitical wars. So, autocratic leaders and populist rise in power, because they need an enemy within and an enemy without, like an external enemy, and then they need to form dissension internally, and democracy starts to fail.
Peter McCormack: Democracy's already failing.
Austin Hill: Democracy has challenges, but there are opportunities.
Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.
Austin Hill: I think there are a lot of opportunities, and you can imagine… So, when you start doing futurecasting, there's a lot of great people who are doing harm-reduction strategies. So, harm-reduction strategies say, "Okay, if this is going to happen…", so the greatest threats in the next 10, 15 years are going to be economic- and climate-related migration. So, you can believe in climate change or not, but the science is there clearly.
Peter McCormack: I do.
Austin Hill: There is going to be massive amounts of weather-related disruption that's going to ruin countries, rising sea levels, people are going to be climatically displaced -- sorry, climate-related displacement. And at the same time, there's going to be economic displacement, because their currencies are being displaced in the currency wars, they're robbed of opportunity and they have to flee to better shores and better opportunity.
Peter McCormack: Which we're already seeing early signs of economic displacement. I mean, it's been happening for decades, but it seems to be there is a growing number of people migrating, people are trying to migrate across Europe. We have massive issues across Europe.
Austin Hill: Look what's happening in Turkey.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. On the border of the US, we have migration from Central and South America up to the US, thousands of people.
Austin Hill: It doesn't serve the politicians right now to solve the immigration problem, because it's a rubber chew toy to fight over in a two-party system that's broken.
Peter McCormack: But even in a bitcoinised world, which we believe will bring more economic prosperity and a lower economic disparity between haves and have-nots, it still may only limit the issue of this access to exponential technologies. But there will still be people who feel like they're a have-not and there'll still be psychopaths and there will be people who are angry. They might be angry for a variety of reasons. We might have religious fundamentalists who are angry. So, it doesn't eliminate the problem, it just reduces the problem.
Austin Hill: Yeah, it's about reducing the threat profile, reducing the exposure. So, when you think about threat modelling, you're thinking about, "Okay, so what are some of the things that could be done, what are some of the technologies, what are some of the investments, what are some of the opportunities that we could do to reduce the overall threat profile for the world?"
Peter McCormack: And, sorry, just to remind, we're talking about CRISPR, we're talking about nuclear technology, we're talking about AI?
Austin Hill: Not so much; AI could be misused, but the barrier to entry for AI is quite high.
Peter McCormack: AI combined with these technologies?
Austin Hill: No, AI is going to power a lot of these technologies that will allow people to do problem-solving, new designs. You'll be able to go and ask an AI agent, "Please show me a molecular design for XYZ". If the AI agent doesn't have constraints on it and isn't told not to model a hostile version of COVID-55, it will help you design a perfect weaponised version of a drug.
Peter McCormack: What about AI to sow discord?
Austin Hill: Yeah, certainly we've seen the effects of what happens when AI is let loose on public feeds in social media, it's a huge issue. The work that Tristan Thomas is doing, I don't know if you're familiar.
Peter McCormack: No, tell me.
Austin Hill: He does incredible work on just the addiction to technology. And Roger McNamee, who was a great VC in the Silicon Valley has helped fund him. They called out Facebook and were very vocal about the idea that the governance around Facebook and how they control their feed and how they've built AI to kind of gamify hate and discord has just created a perfect platform to allow dissension and political speech and essentially get you addicted to debate, hate, dissension.
Peter McCormack: Keep you on the platform, send you advertising.
Austin Hill: Jack has done a really good job in rethinking how Twitter can approach this, but it's also not perfect. There is no one easy solution to these things.
Peter McCormack: The monetisation of social media is about eyeballs, what is the best algorithm to keep your eyeballs, or keep you coming back?
Austin Hill: Yeah, but frankly, the Chinese with TikTok came at it from a totally different approach, which was, "We're going to create a creator space, that enables creators to be creative and commercialise their production of art", people singing funny songs. And that actually came from an acquisition from Farhad Mohit, who's this great LA entrepreneur, who had built Flipigram. That got acquired and ended up becoming TikTok.
But there are other ways to build social media that promote artists, promote happiness, promote a different set of values that don't have to be gamified this way. But that will take time to play itself out. But in the Bitcoin world, if you imagine some of the things that are coming to fruition, Twitter, Lightning payments, Strike, the incredible work that Jack Mallers, all these people are doing on Lightning, the work being done in El Salvador, some of the stuff that Balaji talks about in terms of pseudonymous identities, being able to be nomadic, global citizens. So, you could have someone who actually earns Bitcoin, earns money from around the world, no matter where they are, as long as they have a smartphone.
Peter McCormack: As a pseudonymous influencer.
Austin Hill: Yeah, they can be giving English language courses; you can imagine a Zoom filter that just puts a different face on them and allows them to be a different person for that transaction and they can be a call-centre agent; they could do programming jobs. There are some incredible opportunities in the US. There are US online learning schools that teach you how to become a Ruby programmer or a Perl programmer or a software programmer, and they take a commission on your salary.
If that were all done in Bitcoin and available to the entire world, right now it's just limited in the United States because of payment rails, so all of a sudden you now have people who are getting rich in Bitcoin in a currency that isn't being debased while they're there. So, if they do end up knocking on a door and migrating, they're like, "I'm coming to move into a house I just bought in Denver. I have $0.5 million in savings in Bitcoin. Please can I have a US visa". That changes the total landscape. You now have an immigration policy that says, "Please, sir, welcome. You have a house, you bought a house, you have a job, you're self-employed, you earn money from wherever you want in the world".
If not the United States, Canada. Canada has one of the most informed immigration policies. Do you know that Canada is one of the few nations in the world where individual citizens can adopt refugees?
Peter McCormack: No.
Austin Hill: Yeah. So, Canada has this programme whereby a group of citizens can get together and they form a council, so five of six people, and they sponsor an immigrant family. They all agree to share responsibility for finding the person a job, getting them integrated in the community, finding them a home, and they can pick a family of five and directly bypass the government and say, "We want that family here next week".
Peter McCormack: It reminds me of my mother, God bless her, when I was maybe ten years old, we had a Yugoslavian family move in. I was even younger, I must have been about five years old. We had a Yugoslavian family move into our street. This was before the Balkans War. They couldn't speak English, the father came over for work, and my mum integrated them in the community, helped them learn English. It was brilliant.
Austin Hill: Yeah, so Canada, the success rate is off the chart. These people become very well integrated, they become totally economically self-sufficient, they have jobs, they learn the language very rapidly, and everyone -- it was kind of based off Grameen micro loans, if you're familiar with Grameen finance?
Peter McCormack: No, explain it.
Austin Hill: So, Grameen Bank went to Africa and started doing micro loans for women with cell phones.
Peter McCormack: Yes, I've heard about this, yeah.
Austin Hill: So, they would give women cell phone cards, and they became the economic driver for that village, because they would go in and essentially sell phone access to kids who had left and expats, and they would form these groups where five or six people would share responsibility for the loan, to make sure that that person didn't fall behind on the payment. So, if the person ever started to fall behind, everyone would chip in to make sure that that person didn't fall behind.
By creating this community-based lending where there were shared responsibilities, they built one of the biggest banks in India, and they modelled it. It's Grameen Bank, and they built software for it that does micro lending, micro loan programmes for economic development, in a bunch of nations. So, you can imagine doing some of these same things using Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: It's funny, Austin, sometimes I feel like I was born at the best time in history, in that my childhood wasn't destroyed by technology, we were out running around; but my adult life and career was enhanced by technology, so I got to live the best childhood and the best adulthood, and perhaps my time here will be done before we destroy ourselves. Whereas, in some ways, my children's childhood has been very different.
Austin Hill: Your time done, why? What do you think your average lifespan is?
Peter McCormack: Well, it's 78 for a man.
Austin Hill: You see, you're not thinking exponential tech.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've done a lot of drugs!
Austin Hill: Yeah, listen, I've treated my body very badly myself. For most of my career, I was over 300 pounds, I was very heavy, I literally treated my body like it was an Amazon box for my brain, shipping my brain from one meeting to the next, and I never really took care of it. But if you understand what's happening on singularity tech, medical tech, I figure on maybe 1,000, 2,000 years average life span.
Peter McCormack: You think you'll get to 2,000?
Austin Hill: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: We're going to have a population issue if we make this widely available.
Austin Hill: Let's go to the stars. And also, rediscover this planet and rethink how we use this planet. There's so much opportunity to use this planet more efficiently.
Peter McCormack: Agreed.
Austin Hill: When you have all these technologies, you can start thinking about vertically scaled micro farming, massive towers that provide food sources; you can do nutrient farming with micropsyllium and these protein-dense foods that will just be built into the city infrastructure. Robots will farm it and take care of it and it will provide food supply for 20 million, 40 million people, all right there next to your neighbourhood.
Peter McCormack: You said yesterday that you believe the singularity, is it around 2037?
Austin Hill: Yeah. Different people have different timeframes, but sometime around 2037 to 2045.
Peter McCormack: So, that's 16 to 21 years away.
Austin Hill: Yeah, if we get there.
Peter McCormack: If we get there, what do you mean?
Austin Hill: That's the risks.
Peter McCormack: If we get there, you mean if we don't destroy ourselves before?
Austin Hill: That's the Vulnerable World Hypothesis. So, Nick Bostrom theorised and he talked about, let's imagine we lived in an alternate universe, whereby nuclear fusion like uranium, plutonium, didn't take a reactor and massive particle accelerator, like didn't take the barrier to entry that does exist to create weaponised uranium. Let's imagine that you could just grab a handful of sand and put it in a microwave, and you could turn it into nuclear reactive material. If we lived in that kind of world, do you think we would be here currently today?
Peter McCormack: Probably not.
Austin Hill: Right. The last 20 to 30 years of conflict, the wars and the people fighting conflict, whether it's Israel/Palestine, Africa, Christian fundamentalists in the United States who did the Denver bombing, someone would have said, "I'm going to grab a handful of sand, I'm going to weaponise it and I'm going to blow up 5 million people". Society would have basically fallen down, and we would be under autocratic despotic rule.
So, generally there's a huge amount to be optimistic. Steven Pinker writes about, and this is one of Bill Gates' favourite books, the trends of humankind are getting better on better, human on human deaths, child literacy, child mortality rates are dropping. Every statistic globally around the world is getting better except for one.
Peter McCormack: Economic?
Austin Hill: No.
Peter McCormack: No?
Austin Hill: The number of people living under dictators or autocratic rule.
Peter McCormack: Yes, it's over half the planet now. Alex Gladstein talks about this.
Austin Hill: Alex Gladstein does incredible work on this. Huge fan of his work, by the way. I think he's an unsung hero in the Bitcoin world. We literally have more and more autocratic leaders who are using populist government, and democracy is not catching up with this. And the governance around these technologies is failing.
The European model doesn't work. The European model is, sue the companies once they get big enough and try and broker some sort of payment, like a kind of greenmail scam. The US Government's approach is totally broken, which is, move fast, break things, and then by the time the new power becomes entrenched, they hire enough lobbyists to essentially just pay a few fines to the SEC or the FTC or to whatever person they offended along the way, and then just hire lobbyists, and keep Congress in a two-party never-ending lockup with entrenched powers.
Peter McCormack: It's a racket. What about the Chinese approach, because it feels to me, criticisms of China aside which are very easy and broad, that they --
Austin Hill: That they're running death camps?
Peter McCormack: Well, do we know they're death camps?
Austin Hill: You read the articles over the Uyghur Muslims?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course, I know a lot about it, but I'm fully aware that they are coercing and they are re-educating and they are creating slaves, and I've read reports of people who have been killed.
Austin Hill: Forced hysterectomies, forced rape.
Peter McCormack: Yes, but I'm just careful on the word "death camp", because the comparison there is to World War II and what happened across Europe, and it's not the same thing. I'm not approving it, but --
Austin Hill: The world said never again, and we are watching it happen in our lifetimes and people are still going to China celebrating the Olympics, people are still doing business all over China, and that's just a reality.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm just cautious on the word "death camps", because what's the definition of death camps? I mean, I'm aware there are reports that people have died in these camps, but this isn't mass extermination.
Austin Hill: Systematic of surveillance technologies to round up a religious population and force them to never reproduce with forced hysterectomies? I consider that death.
Peter McCormack: Because they're trying to kill off --
Austin Hill: It's genocide, but they're wiping out an entire race of people.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, look, I understand your explanation there, but I think the term "death camps", the assumption is the mass extermination directly of the people. Look, there's a slight difference, but it's not that I'm approving any of this and I'm completely on your side and, like you say, there are broad and well-deserved criticisms of China.
The point I'm trying to make is, there are limitations that the state has put in with the use of technology, that the belief is that certain technologies can corrupt, the youth can corrupt the nation. So, they have limitations on gaming, it's like an hour a day; they have limitations on their version of TikTok, or whatever it is, whereby again I think it's an hour a day. But it also switches off at a certain time, like 7.00 or 8.00. Whereas I know, unless I'm monitoring my children and take their phones off them, there's every chance at 2.00am in the morning, they're up and they've had a look at their phone, or they've spent two or three hours, unless I monitor them constantly.
China, the state, has decided to try and --
Austin Hill: Sure, and as a state, they are incredibly efficient, and that's one of the dangers. Communism and dictatorships generally failed. So, Yuval Harari, I can't remember, the author of Sapiens?
Peter McCormack: Yes, I've read the book. What's his name? I know who you mean.
Austin Hill: He talks about this very, very efficiently. He said, "The greatest danger in the future is the fact that dictators and dictatorships generally fail because of the inefficiencies of that model". But technologies actually allow them to mass control and mass manage a huge population with incredible efficiencies, and China's proving that. Look at what happened in COVID. They had drones doing body scans and temperatures. They literally broke into people's houses and forcibly removed them. They built new hospitals overnight.
The efficiency of the use of China in an autocratic system, where you don't have to worry about zoning rights, or you don't have to worry about regulation; we can't build a hospital in the United States, we can't build a bridge, we can't build powerlines without 40 lawsuits and 5 years of regulation. So, you can definitely see the benefits of technology in that autocratic system, but at the same time, they have cameras in classrooms.
Peter McCormack: Oh, no, let's be very clear, I'm not approving of this or saying this is right. I wouldn't want to live in China, I don't even want to visit it, and there's nothing about the Chinese Communist Party that I approve of. What I'm doing is, I'm highlighting the rules that the state's put in place to try and not corrupt people with technology. Ideally, I would have similar rules in my own house managed by me with my children, but just managing that, with everything else that goes on in life, it proves difficult.
Austin Hill: But it shouldn't be.
Peter McCormack: It shouldn't be, but it just is sometimes.
Austin Hill: And it doesn't need to be. There should be service providers, and there will be, that essentially just become like your AI agent, that allow you to talk to your AI, let's say, "Here's how I'd like my family's home network to be managed. Here's the screentime rules I would like to be applied to all of my phones", and it will automatically update. I mean, if you go through the effort, you can install parental control, you can install screentime, you can install restrictions, but it takes a lot of effort right now, and it forces the parent to become kind of an IT manager. But that's a small blip in the overall radar of time.
Peter McCormack: I think where I'm really going here with this is, for every criticism there is of the USA, they have performed the job of world police, making numerous fucking mistakes over the years, awful mistakes, but at the same time, we have 2.5 superpowers. I would say the US and China, and Russia are like a half a superpower, still a superpower. But is the communist approach of total control by the Chinese state, is that going to be more effective in maintaining its position as a superpower compared to the US position, and is it important?
Austin Hill: I hope not and it's critically important for the human race that it doesn't become, because the innovative entrepreneurial free spirit of America and democratic nations around the world that create an economic zone of opportunity, that create a place where -- look at half the CEOs of Big Tech now, they're all immigrants. The CEO of Google, the new CEO of Twitter, this is the land where you can come to and create opportunity, Canada similarly, and we need that innovative free spirit where you can't become like Jack Ma, who essentially disappeared and got re-educated the minute he got high enough.
Peter McCormack: But we are also in the land of creative censorship within Hollywood to ensure that films aren't banned from China, the almost outlawing of dissent within sports of the Chinese state, because, who was it, the Boston Celtics guy, the Turkish guy? Enes Kanter was critical of the Chinese state, and Boston Celtics games were immediately pulled. So, we're in a position where there is over-control over freedom of speech, freedom of creativity within the US because of fears of economic punishment within China.
Austin Hill: But that's never been one-sided, but there does exist opportunities. I mean, I think China made a major mistake, and thankfully so --
Peter McCormack: With the mining?
Austin Hill: Yeah. It's great for America, it's great for the western democratic nations, and if they can pick up that opportunity and actually embrace it, and if America doesn't, Latin America will, we'll see more countries adopt and do what El Salvador did, then I actually think we can really start to create an economic engine that uplifts and brings people up under democratic values. Alex Gladstein talks about this, how Bitcoin is one of the few technologies where the economic incentives have this poisoned Trojan horse, this poisoned pill. I think it was on your show that he talked about it, or it might have been Lex.
Peter McCormack: I think it was Lex.
Austin Hill: Yeah, Lex's show, he talked about the Trojan horse, where economic engine goes up, freedom goes up, and it's a very, very rare set of circumstances.
Peter McCormack: Okay, let's get back to this Vulnerable World Hypothesis. What are the things we can do, without entering into totalitarianism and everything being controlled by the state?
Austin Hill: One of the things that Nick Bostrom's thesis scared me, is he basically theorised that the only way to solve this is to build more policing technology, essentially like an AI monitor that follows everyone around, that's a recorder, that basically catches crime, essentially Minority Report Precrime. And that scared the shit out of me. In the hands of the wrong government, that totally goes against my privacy, individual, self-sovereignty ideals. I don't want a global AI watching every move I make.
Peter McCormack: I don't want Precrime; that would destroy freedom of thought.
Austin Hill: So, the discussion starts to expand into what can we do. Great TED Talk by a gentleman named Rob Reid.
Peter McCormack: I know Rob; I've interviewed Rob.
Austin Hill: Oh, really?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I interviewed Rob with regards to CRISPR.
Austin Hill: Fascinating guy, hilarious. His sci-fi books are incredible; huge fan of Rob. I got talking to him this year and spent some time with him in Monterey, it was incredible, one of my great moments this year. He talks about, in this TED Talk, the idea that we need to start telling better stories. We need to empower our storytellers to tell alternate visions of the future that don't involve this dystopian tech. The reason we're scared about weaponised Terminator drones is because James Cameron has popularised the Terminator idea so well that everyone talks about, "We can't have Skynet".
We need to have 50 more discussions like that with great storytellers talking about the things we shouldn't be building. Black Mirror's just one of them. So, we really need to start investing in this storytelling to get, what shouldn't we do; but also start to do some positive storytelling about what a society might look like that actually is a healthy society. So, let me give you some examples.
Peter McCormack: Well, because we are storytellers, and so much of storytelling through film predicts really dystopian, scary futures. You mentioned Terminator and Minority Report, we have the Matrix. The Matrix connected to the metaverse actually feels like something closer to reality.
Austin Hill: I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, a total other discussion, we'll get sidetracked!
Peter McCormack: Okay, another time. We could do a whole series!
Austin Hill: But there are certain things that we can start thinking about: drug addiction, mass psychosis, drug policy. Take a look at what Rick Doblin's doing at MAPS. Do you know MAPS?
Peter McCormack: No, I don't.
Austin Hill: Multiphasic Association for Psychedelic Studies, incredible TED Talk. He talks about using psychedelic and plant medicine and FTA approved to deal with PTSD, trauma, soldiers coming back. They're having breakthroughs using a whole suite of medicines, plant medicines, MDMA, all clinically FTA approved. And they're doing incredible, incredible work in helping people deal with addiction, trauma. We start looking at plant substances like iboga.
Peter McCormack: Iboga, is that the one where you go through like a 24-hour mirror of your life and it gets you off addictions, it's for treating addictions? It's 24 hours and it destroys your addictions, but you have to face your own soul.
Austin Hill: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've heard about this.
Austin Hill: It was discovered in the 1970s, it's an incredible plant. So, you invest and you remake drug policy, you end the war on drugs and you approach it like Portugal, where you invest in drug rehab. You actually get people the help they need, you get them the proper medicine, you get them sober, you get them clearheaded, based off an actual path to management, you look at some AI technologies that are doing CBT. Are you familiar?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Austin Hill: Yeah, so there's a bunch of AI technologies that start doing self-help. These technologies can start doing harm reduction, they can give people someone to talk to. They are AI agents that do CBT to be able to navigate and manage people into the proper treatment zones they need, for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So, some of this stuff is happening. I'm involved in a few start-ups that are doing some of this work.
This is important stuff, because this gives people a vehicle to reduce the harm reduction, because as change management, as the future comes faster and more furious, people are going to be dealing with trauma, people are going to be dealing with life issues, like COVID, investing in some emotional intelligence technologies. There are a few start-ups doing things like women circles, talking circles, healing centres, sexual abuse victimisation centres. You can invest in these types of things that create harm reduction, that create centres of healing and support, that use new technologies at scale to actually bring medicine to the masses.
So, you can start to change the landscape, and this can be funded, potentially, with Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Okay, that's one area. The area that concerns me the most is CRISPR, because you have that ability to, on a computer, print out and create new strains of viruses that could have the mortality rate of Ebola, but with the virality of something like COVID.
Austin Hill: So, Rob Reid talks about, there are different types of models we can think about. Maybe we form a democratic leader of nations where we say, the technologies for CRISPR that are coming in the next five or ten years, the best technologies, will be a service-based industry, and we're going to restrict access to them to laboratories, where you send in your plans and they get verified that they're not going to be weaponised or illegal or bad, and then we develop a service-based model around these technologies.
So you create controlled environments, hub-spot environments, so you don't have at-home 3D printing CRISPR machines in the HP kind of world.
Peter McCormack: That scares the shit out of me.
Austin Hill: You actually push more towards a service centre model, whereby everyone sends in their plans and it gets developed and it comes back to you. It gives you choke points to control potentially how the technology evolves.
Peter McCormack: What stops a rogue state having access to CRISPR?
Austin Hill: You can't stop rogue states.
Peter McCormack: That's concerning. So, it is centralised, it's a bit similar to discussing --
Austin Hill: But there, you end up with mutually assured destruction, similar to nuclear, where you basically have some sort of treaty agreements at the nation level, that if a nation state is engaging in these technologies or is found to have sponsored these technologies or is supporting these, then they get blackballed on the global world order.
Peter McCormack: It reminds me of the discussions with people who are more anarcho-capitalists, which I'm not, but I do massively appreciate the ideas and theories behind anarcho-capitalism. I'll be called a hypocrite here for saying I believe in freedom, yet I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. But the idea that certain parts of the way we manage society are best centralised. Regulations with regards to nuclear, I think are kind of important; border control is kind of important. There are certain things that feel better centralised.
Austin Hill: Nuclear policy is so broken, it's horrendous.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, the policy's broken but at the same time, you wouldn't want anyone having access to nuclear facilities.
Austin Hill: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: So, there are certain parts of society that do feel centralised. At the same time, I feel the state is too big, but I don't believe in no state. I believe some things are better centralised. I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of people yelling at me for this, but it's similar to that is that some of these exponential technologies are better with some centralised authority controlling it.
Austin Hill: Yes, there needs to be some sort of governance mechanism. Private sector doesn't seem to be doing it very well. Yeah, there need to be better solutions, and Rob Reid put out the call in his TED Talk to ask storytellers to come up with those better solutions, start telling better stories, both about the threats, but also I think of the opportunities.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's the disaster scenarios that make more interesting stories and better films!
Austin Hill: Yeah, that's the way media runs. Even if it bleeds, it leads. Everyone loves to write about the disaster, no one wants to write about the promise.
Peter McCormack: Ubiquitous, cheap energy for all, the eradication of genetic diseases, they're just not as exciting as the robots coming from the year 2130 to try and kill John Connor.
Austin Hill: Yeah. I'm going to tell the story badly and not do it justice, but I'm going to do it anyway. So, when I was studying social capitalism, social entrepreneurship, one of my heroes in the world was Jeff Skoll. He created the Skoll World Forum, he's an incredible man. He funded a group called Ashoka, I think it's Ashoka.
Anyway, there's this book, How to Change the World, and in there, and I'm going to paraphrase this very badly, they talk about a politician in some Latin American country who for years, had tried to bring electricity to the impoverished people. And he fought the government, fought the government, every year his bill got funded and he literally was like, "If we can get them electricity, their lives change. The children can go to school, they can read. Please, electricity, electricity", and just could not get it done.
So finally, he left government and he went into private enterprise and he partnered up with a company that was building electric grid fencing, solar grid fencing. So, they were able to build an electrical grid on the fencing and he built an entire hybrid electric power grid, in this Latin American country that brought power to the entire nation. It electrified all the fences, it allowed them to segregate and start doing agricultural biopharming, really, really good farming, because they could have electricity and they could upgrade their food so they were able to sell their food better. And he became his own power company using private enterprise, using solar technology and using an off-grid power system that was essentially built off solar and electrical wiring.
It was this amazing story of how private enterprise can sometimes do things for the good of the people that governments can't. And the same kind of thing can happen in the United States, the same kind of thing can happen in Latin America. One of the companies I didn't mention, or people I didn't mention in the creation of Blockstream, was Real Ventures. Before Reid gave us the money, Real Ventures was actually the first money in, and it was my friend, Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer; he's an incredible venture capitalist.
So, when Adam and I were in Malta creating Blockstream, I literally called him up and I said, "I'm coming out of retirement, I need some walking-around cash. I'm going to go and try and raise this crazy round, I'm going to try and help Adam do something crazy for the Manhattan Project of Bitcoin". I said, "I need some walking-around money", and JS literally within a week wrote me a cheque and gave us the money. So, they deserve tons of credit. Real Ventures, they're a Montreal VC fund, incredible people, they're investors in Blockstream, they invested in our round.
But they've invested in some other great companies. So, they have this drone company, it's an autonomous drone technology that drills electric utility panels, almost like what Elon Musk is doing with The Boring Company, but they do vertical drilling. This company is incredible.
Peter McCormack: Vertical? Horizontal drilling?
Austin Hill: Horizontal drilling with a drone. And they can remake the power grid. They can go through mountains, they can go through, totally rebuild, bring powerlines off overhead, get rid of all of the issues you're dealing with in terms of power transmission, and you can literally bring power anywhere across the continental US. You can go through mountains, you can go through shale, you can go through rock. These guys are incredible at mapping out hard-to-make terrain. And this drone just essentially will build a powerline tunnel.
So, you can move the entire US electrical grid system underground with solar, powered by Bitcoin with Bitcoin ASICs everywhere, with a bunch of hopefully American-made ASICs, because right now, there's too many fabs in Taiwan.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's a duopoly really now.
Austin Hill: Yeah. Well, there's a bunch of investments coming into Texas, so hopefully we'll see some factories.
Peter McCormack: Okay. That's a decade away though. Are you on about semiconductors?
Austin Hill: Yeah, it's coming. We'll see.
Peter McCormack: Do you consider Bitcoin an exponential technology?
Austin Hill: Yes, absolutely.
Peter McCormack: And the role of Bitcoin in protecting us against the risks as we head towards the singularity is a world of economic fairness?
Austin Hill: You know the game Snakes and Ladders?
Peter McCormack: Of course, pretty good at it!
Austin Hill: Bitcoin is the economic Snakes and Ladders. It allows people to climb up the economic ladder if they know how to use it well, or it will be to their destruction if they don't use it well.
Peter McCormack: Well, owning Bitcoin is like playing Snakes and Ladders in that you go up and down all the time, whatever number you roll!
Austin Hill: What, are you talking about price?
Peter McCormack: Price, yeah.
Austin Hill: No, I don't care about price. We're in this for the long term.
Peter McCormack: I mean, I care about price because the bigger the market cap, the more people own Bitcoin, the wealthier they are, the more they can put money into the right types of projects.
Austin Hill: Yeah, and the price will happen. But if the price moves too fast, we obviously deal with the very high lows and spikes, the volatility hurts a lot of people. We have all this leverage, the leverage long/short trades going on. Yeah, price doesn't interest me, I'm more into it for the freedom. The price will do what the price will do. I have total confidence Number Goes Up and I'm really, really good at believing in that, and the price will go up.
Peter McCormack: What do you believe the role will be between Bitcoin and governments, and let's just talk about the US, because I think a lot of the rest of the world will follow the US policy, a lot of the free democratic world will follow US policy, and how do you think the game theory is playing out? Because, we are seeing more politicians attach themselves to Bitcoin, whether they believe in it or not, or it's a hack for them for popularity, because they know tens of millions own Bitcoin, but how do you see the future of Bitcoin and the state within the US?
Austin Hill: Well, I'm a Canadian, so I care about US politics, I have companies, I have friends, I care about the US, I spend time in the US, I love the United States. There is an opportunity for some of the mayoral candidates, we talked about this yesterday.
Peter McCormack: Mayor Francis is an example.
Austin Hill: Yeah, some of the stuff Salim Ismail at ExO is doing, formerly Singularity University. There's an opportunity to start doing municipal, mayoral Bitcoin candidates, start remaking some cities, doing some interesting Bitcoin bonds, we talked about this yesterday. I think you could probably partner that with third-party candidates. The Good Party that Farhad Mohit is promoting I think has some incredible opportunity, and if we started seeing some candidates that backed Bitcoin, had economic…
There's actually a mayor out there, I'll find you the reference, who's actually talking about giving Bitcoin to every citizen in his city.
Peter McCormack: I think that's Mayor Francis.
Austin Hill: No, this is very small.
Peter McCormack: Oh, yes, I forget the name, I've seen the tweets about it.
Austin Hill: He's a very small-town mayor, it's a very small city, but he basically said, "We're going to give Bitcoin to every one of our citizens". If we start doing that at scale, we start doing that in a few other cities, where you have some sort of economic improvement, some sort of relationship between the municipality, the mayor system, you start seeing candidates and economic improvement occurring and everyday people's lives getting better. And taxes can be paid, based off conversion into fiat, based off people take loans against their Bitcoin assets, and you can have capital gains tax when you actually do cash out.
But you can create this economic engine and a candidate that backs that and supports that and gets on the ticket and starts getting voted in, Andrew Yang style, at least at the municipal level might start making some changes. If we start seeing that at the state and federal level, then that might get exciting.
Peter McCormack: How do you think Bitcoin changes the role of government as well? Do you think it forces it to become smaller and more service based?
Austin Hill: I'm not sure. Government is what government is. It's a hard problem to break. One of the best Twitter accounts I have to give is Rusty Russell.
Peter McCormack: I love Rusty, love Rusty!
Austin Hill: He has that Twitter account.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know. He's retweeted me once.
Austin Hill: Bitcoin fixes this, where he mocks! And he's right, he's so right. Bitcoin doesn't solve all these problems. We have to have a bit of humility in some of this. Anyway, he makes me laugh, he's a great person. There will be other ways to solve these problems, it's not just Bitcoin. But I think Bitcoin could be a great tool and I think politicians who align themselves with Bitcoin, who are focused on getting money out of politics, they actually can get funded by an economic engine that's honest and transparent, because Bitcoin has that kind of economic engine, I think you can create different kinds of candidates, different types of people that emerge, and actually have a lot of support from people.
Peter McCormack: Going back to the Vulnerable World Hypothesis, I feel like we've done a good job, well I say "we", you've done a good job of highlighting the risks. I still don't feel like I know enough about the potential solutions: one, storytelling; two, some centralised control over the access to these technologies.
Austin Hill: Harm reduction around things like drug addiction, various things we can do to reduce the threat profile.
Peter McCormack: I think there's more that needs to be done for creating harmony between individuals and the states, because we seem to be living in a very tense world at the moment. We have a lot of disharmony, especially here in the US, but also at geopolitical level.
Austin Hill: So, definitely media information education, awareness training, needs to start becoming a basic requirement in K-12, teaching people how to understand how media lies, how misinformation works, how mass media works, the breakdown of Fox, MSNBC, left, right, the entire news media system, how broken it is, how to learn how to research trusted sources, how to learn how to verify whether or not you believe something, how to verify facts in scientific methods or Wikipedia, who to trust and how not to trust.
That should be basic kindergarten training that is being done all across the nation, because it's going to equip our kids and our parents, and we should be frankly doing adult re-education seminars for free online.
Peter McCormack: I was going to say, this is within an education system that itself is fundamentally broken.
Austin Hill: Yeah, but we can do online MOOCs, we can do online courses, we can literally offer it for free. We've got teenagers -- one of my friends homeschools their kids. It was so funny, we were in Malta with Adam, it was one of the investors in Blockstream, and this 14-year-old girl leaves the beach and she's like, "I've got to go and attend a course. I'm listening to a Stamford course I'm auditing". She's 14, she's auditing this Stamford course online. And I'm like, "This is amazing".
I turned to her mum and I'm like, "What kind of 14-year-old leaves the beach in the middle to go listen to --". She ended up getting into an Ivy League school, incredibly successful. She did Khan Academy, she did online courses, but I was having a discussion with this mother about homeschooling and education systems, and it was the funniest thing I've ever heard.
She was arguing with another parent. This parent was berating her for taking her kid out of school and saying, "How dare you, you're not socialising your kid, you're not exposing them to other people". And at one point, my friend kind of barked back and said, "Listen. You put your kids in school so they can get a job in the future. I took my kids out of school so they can create the company that's going to hire your kid for that job"! It was never a truer statement. She took her kids out of school and homeschooled and educated themselves.
So, yes, we have a massive education problem, but it's solvable. We have online courses, we can do online tutoring, we can do massive adult re-education. If we make it a requirement to create a nationalised media awareness and misinformation course and create a MOOC that teaches you how to read between the lines when Fox News and MSNBC are just lying to each other and populating your brain with garbage, and how to look up actual information and how to trust sources, how to read the newspaper, how to analyse whether your Times are bias versus Washington Post versus the Wall Street Journal.
Every single publication has a point of view and a bias and an editorial board, and if people are taught to be aware of that, they'll be able to operate in the world so much more effectively.
Peter McCormack: It's like a positive re-education camp!
Austin Hill: Yeah. It gives people the tools they need to be able to understand the media information wars and the media wars that are going on.
Peter McCormack: If enough people care, that's the problem; it's getting people to care.
Austin Hill: Yeah, but you can gamify it, turn it into a game, viral mechanics.
Peter McCormack: It does feel like you're an optimist, which is good.
Austin Hill: Yeah, I mean the solutions are out there. We just need enough motivated, hopeful people to apply themselves. The creativity of human spirit surprises me and amazes me. I'm not going to do it, I'm retired, I'm living in Latin America, I'm trying to get married, live a slow life.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I look forward to that. Okay, look, if people want to learn more about this Vulnerable World Hypothesis, where should they go and read? We've obviously mentioned Rob Reid in this, who people should research.
Austin Hill: Yeah, Rob Reid's TED Talk, Nick Bostrom's TED Talk, we can put these in the show notes if you want.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we will.
Austin Hill: Rob Reid's podcast is incredible that talks about some of these issues. Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov, I'm not going to pronounce his name, anyway the people behind REG Charity, these are some poker players who do charitable giving, and they invest in a huge amount of incredible charities, and they direct charitable giving on existential threats, harm reduction, AI safety. So, that's a great place to look, and I'll give you the link in the resources.
Peter McCormack: Amazing. Austin, this was a double pleasure, this and yesterday, and I've heard so many names that I want to go and research and try and get them on the podcast as well, and I think you and I will be doing this again, hopefully at some point in the future, but I really appreciate you coming and doing this. This was an absolute pleasure, I really enjoyed it. These are my favourite types of interviews.
Austin Hill: Peter, it's been really, really fun. I appreciate your time and I appreciate what you do for the community.
Peter McCormack: Thank you, man. Well, let's talk again soon, brother.
Austin Hill: It's been great, thanks.
