WBD457 Audio Transcription

Is There Life After Democracy? with Vijay Boyapati

Interview date: Thursday 3rd February

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Vijay Boyapati. 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 Software Engineer and Author Vijay Boyapati. We discuss the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter, whether solutions involve centralisation and reducing freedoms, if society is best served by democracy, and the inevitable need for humans to escape the earth.

“I think we are very close to a catastrophic end for our civilisation… the earth is our womb, we were born and grew in the womb, but eventually, we have to escape; if we don’t escape that’s it - we’re never going to answer the big questions, we’re never going to survive as a species, we have to escape the earth.”

— Vijay Boyapati

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hi Vijay.

Vijay Boyapati: Hey, Pete.

Peter McCormack: Thanks for coming in, man.

Vijay Boyapati: Thanks for having me.  Thanks for having me in Malibu, this is incredible.

Peter McCormack: You just doxed us, man.  What kind of bitcoiner are you? 

Vijay Boyapati: I'm not very good at OPSEC!

Peter McCormack: I'm the worst.  Matt Odell always shits on me for it.  Mate, listen, we've done a few interviews before, we've never had a chance to do it in person, so I'm very excited about this.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, and I said this last night, it's good to see your face, to be here with you.  It just feels nice to be with a person.

Peter McCormack: Well, we got about five minutes in Miami.  We got to hang out at your party after the launch of your book, which I got my very special limited-edition version, which I really appreciate.  Thank you very much for that.  It's an incredible book.  I still recommend your article from Medium to everyone as their first place to go, and The Bullish Case for Bitcoin has essentially become a term, the opening term for people who say to me, "I don't understand about Bitcoin.  Where do I learn about Bitcoin?"  I'm like, "You need to go and read The Bullish Case for Bitcoin".  If they find your article or your book, I don't care, as long as they read one.  But congratulations on that.

Vijay Boyapati: I appreciate that, thank you.  Yeah, I'm glad it's found its little niche, where people who don't know much about Bitcoin, don't know much about money, don't know much about the history of how money came about, it's become an introduction for those people.  So, I'm glad it's found its niche.

Peter McCormack: Will you ever write another one?

Vijay Boyapati: The Bearish Case for Ethereum!

Peter McCormack: Ethernet, The Bearish Case for Ethernet?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I could see myself working on something like that.

Peter McCormack: Did we ever make that show, I can't even remember?  Because we made The Bullish Case for Bitcoin first show, and then we talked about making The Bearish Case for Ethereum.  I can't even remember if we did.

Vijay Boyapati: I never wrote the article, that was the problem, and I wrote The Bullish Case for Bitcoin when I had one kid.  I'm about to have four kids now, and it's more a time thing.  I think a podcast would be great, because it's something where I could articulate the ideas without having to write them down.  And the problem for me is I'm a very, very slow writer.  The Bullish Case for Bitcoin took me a year to write.  It was like a sentence a day, kind of thing.  It was also because I was working and I had a newborn.  But I'm generally a perfectionist and cringe when I say something that doesn't sound right.

Peter McCormack: Well, we won't talk about having four kids, apart from the fact that I think you're a psychopath.  I've got two and it's enough for me.  Four, I don't know.  Are you going to stop, are you done now?

Vijay Boyapati: Yes, we're done.

Peter McCormack: No fifth?

Vijay Boyapati: No.  We did IVF, because we're a little older, and it was hard for us to get pregnant, and we had five embryos.  One of them didn't work and four of them stuck. 

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Vijay Boyapati: So, I feel incredibly grateful to be blessed with four kids and that it worked out so well for us.  It is actually very difficult to get pregnant as you get older, so my advice to any people who are listening is, "If you're in your twenties, start thinking about having kids now!"

Peter McCormack: Well, the other advantage of that is, I'm 43, I don't know how old you are.

Vijay Boyapati: We're the same vintage, we were born in the same year.

Peter McCormack: You're a 1978?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When's your birthday?

Vijay Boyapati: November.

Peter McCormack: We're very close.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, we are.  We've talked about this.

Peter McCormack: Have we talked about this?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I said we were the same vintage.  That was three years ago, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: Are you also a Scorpio?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Right, we've given a lot of info.  I'm not asking for the exact date, because then it will be, "Just give me your pin code"!

Vijay Boyapati: Do you need my social security number as well?

Peter McCormack: I need your social security number.  Yeah, we're the same vintage, wow, that's very cool.  Well, listen, you're at the other end, you're the wise dad. 

Vijay Boyapati: I don't know about that.

Peter McCormack: And I'm the young dad who can go to the football with his son, so I got the other end of the stick.  My first one's about to, within months now, of leaving home.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I can't imagine.  When you're in that early stage when they're -- my kids are all less than five.  You can't even imagine what it feels like for your kids to be leaving the house, or what it will be like when they have their own opinions and you can't control what they do.  So, I always love speaking to parents who've got older kids and they can tell me what it feels like.

Peter McCormack: It's wild, especially the last year with my son.  He's become a full adult, not just having his own opinions, but the full ability to look after himself.  He's learning to drive, has a girlfriend, he's preparing for university, he has a job.  Some days he just get himself home from school, gets ready, goes to work.  He's fully self-sufficient, but you never think they're going to leave home, and then at one point they do, and this is coming.  I have really mixed emotions about it.  I feel excited for him and I'm going to miss him.  It's a weird thing, but it goes quick.  Like the cliché says, it goes really quick.

The other thing that's interesting is how different they can be.  So, he's mildly interested in Bitcoin.  Him and his friends are artists, so they want to mint NFTs of course, and I'm like, "You're a disgrace.  You're a disgrace to the McCormack name".  But my daughter, she's orange pilled, she's on it.  So, you might have an interesting time to see which of the four become orange pilled and which don't give a fuck.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I haven't really talked to them about money yet, they're not at that age, but I'll be interested to see how they receive what I tell them, because a lot of my ideas are not within the status quo spectrum, they're kind of far out there on a lot of different topics, not just Bitcoin, but politics and various other things.  So, when they go through school, they hear what the status quo is, they're taught the status quo, so I'll be interested to see what that dynamic is and whether there's some rebellion against me as a dad, because I believe this crazy stuff.  It's going to be interesting.

Peter McCormack: Or, maybe they'll be running a little group in the playground teaching Mises to everybody else!

Vijay Boyapati: I hope so, I hope they'll be orange pilling their friends.  We'll see.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I'm really excited about this topic, because it's something I'm aware of.  I'm a bit of a space nerd and the Fermi paradox is something I've read about quite a bit.  There was a really great article written on it by that guy, Wait But Why.  He covered it which was my first exposure to it, and I was like, "What the fuck?"  This blows my mind and I'm really interested to see where the Bitcoin connection is for this.  So, I think just a good starting point for anyone listening who hasn't heard of The Great Filter.  Let's start by you just explaining what that is to people.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah.  I want to start actually a little bit before that and say that people probably who are into Bitcoin may have heard me on some podcasts and I usually have a fairly sunny disposition, but this is something I want to talk about, because it's something I'm really worried about, and I'm worried about our future.  And I don't mean that in the sense I'm worried about inflation or the response to COVID.  I don't want to minimise those things, I think they're a big deal, but I'm worried about our species, I'm worried about the survival of our species.  And to get into this topic, we'll get to that question of why I'm worried about our species.

The Fermi paradox is this idea that the universe is huge, absolutely massive.  In our galaxy alone, there's somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, and there are at least 100 billion galaxies --

Peter McCormack: In the observable --

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, in the universe that we know about.  So, the universe is really, really big, and these numbers are too big for us to even think about.  They're so massive that -- we're not good at comprehending large numbers, but the universe is massive.  And there's this physicist, Enrico Fermi, who looked up at the stars and he wondered why do we not hear from other civilisations, why do we see no sign?  There is no sign of intelligent life in this gigantic universe, and this calls for an explanation.

If you think about the size of the universe and you apply some rough numbers to it, and you think about, "Why aren't there other species like us, who are capable of sending signals out that we can see?"  So, if you think about the universe and you think there might be life out there, and if there's life out there, it probably developed in an environment similar to ours.  So, how many environments are there in our universe that are similar to ours? 

There's probably about 5% to 20% of the stars in the universe that are similar to ours; similar size, similar luminosity, and of those stars, I think that makes about 100 billion billion stars that our similar to ours.  And of those stars, physicists have estimated that there's somewhere between 20% and 50% of those stars have planets like ours orbiting them.  That makes a lot.  That's a lot of planets like ours.

So, just in our galaxy alone, just in the Milky Way, there's at least a billion Earth-like planets.  And if you do a very conservative estimate and say, "Life is rare, but it's probably out there", and you say there's only 1% of those planets have life; and then you say, of those planets which have some kind of life, only 1% of those have intelligent life, you would still expect at least 100,000 advanced civilisations in our galaxy alone.  That's a very large number.

Our star is actually a very new star.  It's relatively new in its age.  I think it's something like 5 billion years old, maybe a little bit older than that.  So, you would imagine that of those 100,000 intelligent civilisations, some are probably, or have been around a really, really long time.  And if you imagine that civilisation becomes advanced more quickly over time, they must be way, way more advanced than us.  Human civilisation's only really existed for 7,000 years, about that, since the Sumerians.

Peter McCormack: And the technological advances of the last 100 years alone.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, exactly right.  The advances in the last ten years even have become so rapid that you would imagine that a civilisation that's been around a billion years more than us would be so much more advanced and have so much more powerful technology, and that we would see signs of them.  They would have figured out how to colonise the galaxy, they would have figured out how to communicate and let other civilisations know that they exist.

Peter McCormack: Or figure out how to hide?

Vijay Boyapati: Maybe.  Maybe they don't want to know about us.  But it would be hard, I think, when you become that advanced, to not let information leak out.  Human civilisation is clearly letting information leak out from the Earth.  We have signals being emitted from the Earth and from space that, if there was another civilisation, they would pick up on it.  So, it's a paradox, that's Fermi's paradox, the question of, "Why do we not see signs of life in the universe?" 

One of the proposed answers to this paradox is that maybe there's a Great Filter.  Maybe there is a set of circumstances which make it incredibly improbable that advanced civilisation comes about, or that it gets to a stage where it becomes spacefaring and can travel and can colonise.  And what are those circumstances, what could they be?  Are they in the future, or are they in the past?  Is it the case that once a civilisation becomes advanced enough, it destroys itself?  Or, is it because the circumstances that you need for life to come about are so rare and so improbable that we're alone, just because it's so unlikely that there's a circumstance like the Earth, with our distance to the Sun and the chemical matter on Earth that gave rise to life, that it's just not possible for this to happen elsewhere?

This is an interesting question, because about a decade ago, or maybe it was two decades, they had the Mars Rover and they were searching for life on Mars, and there was all this excitement about whether there was life and what would be the implications.  The implications of life on Mars actually would be very, very bad for us, because what it would mean is that life did emerge on another planet, and if life emerges on another planet independent of the Earth, it probably means there's life everywhere.  And the reason we don't see evidence for these advanced civilisations is that the Great Filter is ahead of us.

That is what I'm deeply worried about.  I really believe we are, in the history of humanity, at the moment of maximum peril, the moment of maximum risk that we could destroy ourselves.  So, that's one vision of the future.  There are two visions of the future: one is the Great Filter, and the other is the singularity.  You may have heard of the singularity?  It's popularised by Ray Kurzweil, and it's this idea that things are becoming better faster, at an accelerating rate, so that the time it takes for you to be completely amazed by what happens in the future is being compressed.

So, if you were someone who lived, say, 2,000 years ago, you could jump ahead 1,000 years into the future and you'd mostly recognise it.  You'd be, "Oh yeah, I recognise the technologies that they have and the crafts that they have".  Maybe the pottery's got a little better and the clothing and the stitching and things like that have become a little bit better.  But you would largely recognise it.

But now, if you went back 100 years and you took someone from 100 years ago and brought them to today, they would be blown away.  And actually, you could probably go back 20 years.  So, the timeframe in which someone could go into the future and be amazed at what's around is shrinking.  So, the idea is that the future is going to be so amazing, because we're going to get to a singularity where we have artificial intelligence, and we have technologies which allow production without effort, so none of us will need to work, we'll be able to produce energy with complete abundance and this will allow for us to escape the Earth and to colonise the galaxy.  That's the positive vision.

But I think we need to think about the danger, which is the Great Filter, and I want to get into that a little bit with you.

Peter McCormack: I mean, it's a great subject.  I previously covered it in part with Rob Reid.  Do you remember I had that other podcast, Defiance, for a while?  We covered that with him.  He was primarily interested in CRISPR, which scared the shit out of me quite frankly.  And then recently, I did an interview with Austin Hill where we covered the singularity and, what did he call it; Danny, what was it called?

Danny: The Vulnerable Earth Hypothesis.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Vulnerable Earth Hypothesis.  So, we covered that with him and sometimes, Vijay, I'm thinking to myself, do we live in the best time or the worst time?  Sometimes I think we live in the best time, because we are still here, we haven't destroyed ourselves.  I can get in a flying chair and fly 500 miles an hour and come here and see you, and have a device here I can bring up and see my kids and talk to them and still be connected to them.  We have this amazing technology that allows us to travel and live and have these great lives.  And I know not everyone is fortunate enough for that.

But I also am like you, I'm concerned about things.  I am actually concerned about money, I'm concerned about the build-up of troops at the Russian-Ukrainian border, I'm concerned about Taiwan and China, I'm concerned about global tensions, I'm concerned about the advancement of technologies that might destroy this planet and not be a great place for my kids to grow up.  Essentially, you and I, we've had 43 years of relative stability; relative.  We came after World War II, so we didn't have to live through that horror, and we haven't ever really experienced much struggle.

Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, but I felt this is all going to be great, everything's going to be fine and easy for us.  For the first time in my life over this last two years, I share your concerns.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, we have lived in the best time in human history.  I mean, our standard of living is better than the richest kings of history, but it's easy to get complacent and to think that the future will look like the present.  I think that most people will tend to default to thinking the future will look like the present, but I don't think that's the case.  And the reason I don't think that's the case is I think we're getting closer and closer to developing asymmetric technologies, and I think human civilisation is essentially defined by asymmetric technologies, technologies that give advantages to small groups, to either use offensively or defensively.

Human nature hasn't really changed for at least 10,000 years.  If you went back to the earliest human civilisations, you would recognise those people, you'd recognise their needs and wants and the political dynamics that they have; very similar to today.  But what's changed is the scientific and technological circumstances of those ages. 

So, going back in history, one asymmetric technology is the bow and arrow.  You can do quite a lot of damage to people at a distance, which gives you a big advantage; if you're a kingdom and you want to conquer another kingdom and you have the bow and arrow, you have a huge, huge advantage.  A defensive asymmetric technology is the castle.  It gives the ability for a small number of people to protect themselves against a large number of people.  And actually, British history is really defined in a lot of ways by the castle.  The Normans came to England and they were a small group of people relative to the population, but they were able to conquer England and hold England, because they brought the castle to England from Europe.

Bitcoin is actually an asymmetric technology, because it gives a lot of power to the individual to be able to hold wealth without anyone being able to take that wealth from them, or even knowing that they have wealth, so that's an asymmetric technology.

I'm really worried that we're getting close to developing asymmetric technologies that let individuals do a huge amount of damage to societies, and I like to think of a thought experiment.  What would our world look like if you could develop nuclear weapons with household items that you could buy at the grocery store?  I mean, it's not possible today, but what would the world look like?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you need one psychopath.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, exactly right, one psychopath, and then human civilisation is over.  And that's part of my concern, is that all human civilisations have a distribution of social dispositions, and there's only a small number of people who are psychopaths or pathological and want to harm people just for the sake of harming people.  And, during most of history, they didn't have the ability to harm that many people, although that ability has been increasing rapidly over time.

So, think about mass shootings in the United States.  It's possible for someone to get an automatic weapon and find a good spot, find an easy target with a lot of people and kill 50 people.

Peter McCormack: From a hotel vantage point down at a festival.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, exactly right.  So, it would have been much more difficult to do that with a bow and arrow, or to do it with a sword.  And we're getting to the point now where the ability for an individual to do asymmetric damage is the greatest it's ever been in history.  An individual can't get a nuclear weapon.  Nuclear weapons are the scariest thing that we have on Earth, and when they were first developed, people were really afraid.  If you go back and look at videos from the 1960s, they were terrified about the world ending.

But it turns out the nuclear weapons are very hard to develop, and they're controlled by nation states.  Only nation states really have the capacity to build nuclear weapons, because of the cost.  And when you have an organisation which controls it, it's much less like that you're going to have someone who's at the extremes of the social spectrum.  There might be some people, but you're going to have a group of people around who say, "If that person's going to drop a nuke, we're going to kill that person", which is why they have, if you want to launch a nuke, you need two people to turn the key, you don't have a single person doing it.

But now we have technologies being developed, like drones, where you can buy drones off the shelf for a couple of hundred dollars which can deliver munitions.  And you could imagine, quite conceivably, someone developing a swarm of drones, say 100 drones, each with a bomb attached to it, and flying into some area.  I'm deeply concerned, not just by the fact that that's possible now, and that it's being developed by the military, but it's also being thought about by people who are terrorists.  There's no doubt that there are terrorists out there thinking about this as a way of disrupting societies.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've seen the drone lightshows at some events?

Vijay Boyapati: Swarms, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you get 100 drones or 200 drones, they're all coordinated to run specific patterns to create displays.  It's not a big stretch to see how that could be used for nefarious purposes.

Vijay Boyapati: Exactly.  I mean, I'm giving one example.  The development of viruses, for example.  COVID is an example where it seems likely that this was developed by humans, if it became possible that with a small group of people, you could increase the potency of some virus and let it loose into the population.  What I'm worried about more is the effect that that has on civilisation.

If you go back to 9/11 and think about, what was the effect of 3,000-ish people dying?  It profoundly transformed US society.  What is the effect when a small group of terrorists launches a drone attack on a country like the United States?  The impact it has is that people feel a deep sense of dread.  And when they feel that dread that it's possible that they could be harmed, it paves the way for authoritarianism, it paves the way for the most oppressive kinds of surveillance societies, where people will tolerate every aspect of their life being observed and controlled --

Peter McCormack: For safety.

Vijay Boyapati: -- for safety.  So, this is something that I've been thinking about for at least a decade, the concept of what happens when we have the ability to destroy each other and it's cheap and easily available.  This thought experiment of a nuclear weapon being cheaply available has really troubled me for a long time, because I thought we'd get there, I thought we'd get to something like that, and I think we're very, very close.

So, I think we're at the point of maximum danger for our species that we could destroy ourselves.  And then, we will tolerate something that will make it impossible for us to leave the Earth.  I don't think we can get to a point of our civilisation where we can escape, unless we have a major flourishing of civilisation, a complete change in the ability for us to accumulate capital and become wealthy.  I don't think we'll be able to leave the planet.

There are very few people thinking about that, thinking about the species level survival.  Most people are thinking about their day-to-day concerns.  There are a few counterexamples, like Elon Musk, but he's very rare.  There aren't many people saying we need to be a multiplanetary species.

Peter McCormack: Well, after my Austin Hill interview discussing the singularity and very similar topics, I had a long conversation with my brother.  My brother now works with me, he works with us on the team.  He does a lot of research, researching for shows we want to do, topics to cover.  And him and I spent quite a long time discussing the solution to these, how do you stop these technologies getting in the hands of a psychopath, who might want to kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and researching other people who've been through thought experiments looking at this.

The really difficult place we kept coming to, which I didn't want to come to and I'm trying to fight against, especially being a bitcoiner and caring about decentralisation, is that the defence against a number of these technologies, or what appears to be one of the best defences against these technologies, is the nation state, is centralised regulation around these technologies; because, without some form of regulation, you don't know who's going to get their hands on these technologies.

I know people listening won't like this.  Every single path we went down, trying to figure it out, we kept coming back to regulation, nation state, or international institutions that regulate these technologies.  We couldn't find another way, we just couldn't do it, and that would concern a bitcoiner, because a lot of them -- I'm not one of them, I am a reluctant statist.  But many bitcoiners want to see the end of the nation state.  They see all its ills, and I see them too, and I don't think a lot of people would ever accept the idea that the nation state is the solution to this.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I don't want the nation state to be the solution, because I'm libertarian and I want human freedom.  I think we have the greatest flourishing under human freedom.  But I think it is really important to think about the risks as well of absolute human freedom.  And another thought experiment I'd like to have thought about in the past is, what would the world look like if every human could be completely anonymous, or completely invisible, for two hours a day?  That would give us a lot more freedom.  We could escape government in a lot of different ways and the state would have a lot less power.

But then again, you have people at the extremes of the social spectrum who could do so much more damage.  If you could become invisible, you could walk around and kill a bunch of people, and no one would ever know.  And, the vast majority of us, that would never occur to us, but there is a small part of the human distribution where they don't care about other people, they're lacking that compassion and empathy.  They've always been dangerous, but their ability to harm other people has always been limited.

Peter McCormack: So how, as a libertarian, do you wrestle with that idea of absolute freedom and the risks that come with it?

Vijay Boyapati: That's a great question.  I think of human freedom as an ideal, but I'm not an absolutist, because I think it's really important to always look at every side of a picture and what the consequences are.  So, I'm willing to acknowledge that there are extreme dangers to a completely free society.  Some people are willing to tolerate that and say that human freedom is an ideal that's worth having, even if it means really bad consequences.  I'm not quite so sure of that.

What I would love is to see humanity survive and to be able to answer the big questions like, "Why are we here?  What is our significance in the universe?"  We'll never be able to answer these questions if we wipe ourselves out.  Becoming multiplanetary is the first step, but we really need to be multi-solar system.  We need to eventually colonise the galaxy, but we'll never be able to do that unless we really move our thinking into the future. 

We are so present-oriented.  We are so focused on what our concerns are today.  We're concerned about inflation, we're concerned about COVID.  These are really, in the scheme of history, very, very minor matters.  And I am deeply concerned that our institutions are not going to allow this to happen.  There may be exceptions in individuals who are brilliant, like Musk, who are like, "This is important and someone needs to think about it.  I'm going to put my resources towards making this happen", but I don't think that as a species, we'll be able to escape the dangers of our Earth and development of technology, if it's just one person.  We need to rewrite our institutions, we need so much advancement.

Actually, a couple of years ago, I got to speak to the chancellor of my alma mater.  His name's Brian Schmidt, he's a Nobel Prize winner in astrophysics.  And I asked him a question that had been on my mind since I was a kid, "Are we ever going to reach the stars?"  He said he didn't have an answer for that, but he said, "To just get a camera, just a tiny, little camera to the nearest star, so we could take a picture and send it back, the cost would be so astronomical", it's kind of a pun intended, "that it's probably not going to happen at least for a long time". 

We need our civilisation to be so much more advanced to even dream about doing something like that, and that means so much more capital accumulation, it means so much more development of energy, so that each individual has the power of a million individuals today.  We are so far from that, and so that's why I think we need to talk about our institutions and the failure of our institutions and how we might improve them.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's a lot to unpack here.  Firstly, we went over $39,000.

Vijay Boyapati: That's one step in the right direction!

Peter McCormack: But that is one of those interesting points, is you said we are very much in the present, and we are.  We're very much in the present, very much about today, but not always, and that is a definite Bitcoin shift that happens to you, because you have to change your thinking, your time preference changes, you think about money differently.  So, I was the worst example of somebody who used to live in the day, live today, but now I live a little bit more in tomorrow, what do I want to happen tomorrow; what do I want to happen in the future?  And, I plan around that because of Bitcoin, it's just that shift that comes.

But I do just want to unpack a little bit more about this absolute freedom idea, because this is where, from my personal experience as a bitcoiner from Europe, not from the US, a society that is a little bit more socially cohesive than, say, the US we're a little bit more on the socialist side, whereas the US is a little bit more on the freedom side.  It comes with its drawbacks, I talked to you about it last night, and we don't have First Amendment protection, which I'm jealous of, I've talked about it a lot on this podcast; we don't have Second Amendment, which I'm not too worried about, I'm happy to live in a society that isn't plagued with guns and the issues with that.

Vijay Boyapati: Can I just say that what the American response to that would be, "We wouldn't have the First Amendment if we didn't have the Second".  But anyway, keep going.

Peter McCormack: And the other thing they tend to say to me is, "Isn't there a plague of stabbings in London?  You deserve to be able to protect yourself".  I'm like, "Yeah, I understand that argument, but really that is gang crime predominantly, and the number of murders that happen in the UK is so low that it doesn't feel like it's the risk that I'd have to worry about", and I can debate this forever.  But we formed a society in the UK that doesn't want to have guns as a part of it, and I'm happy with that.

It's like the NHS or health service discussion.  Our health services are not as advanced as the US.  It's a regular thing, Danny will know this, through your childhood or life that you will see campaigns online that, "A young child has got cancer and they're fundraising to go and get treated in the US", because cancer treatment is better here, it's more advanced.  But the trade-off is, you can break your leg here or get knocked down by a car and have your entire finances wiped out and be in debt for the rest of your life.  I know people, I've met people in the US, who've had their lives destroyed by financial bills.

We have the other side where everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, if you have a heart attack, you have your leg broken, you will get seen to.  There are these trade-offs, and I am pro-democracy wanting it to be stronger.  But the libertarian argument's really interesting.  Our mutual friend, Stephan Livera, is always hammering it to me.  I wish libertarians would engage more in politics to make democracy better, because I believe that if libertarians engaged more in politics, we would have that push on the state not to be so big, to be smaller, to promote ideas that give more freedom, but within the construct of not having that total freedom, which comes with its risks.  Does that make sense?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, it does, and I may say something controversial here.  I think one of the big problems is democracy.  When I talk a little bit about how we can improve our institutions, economic institutions, we can talk about Bitcoin, political institutions, democracy and scientific institutions; but democracy, I believe, is one of the core problems with why we are not future-oriented, and I think democracy, in the long term, leads to anarchy and leads to the dissolution of society.

I'm a big sceptic of democracy, and one of the things that I think is a huge problem for human society is that people don't even understand that it's a problem.  I think a lot of people, when you talk about different political institutions, they might be able to tell you the problems with them.  Like, if you ask the average person on the street, "Why is monarchy worse than democracy?" they'll probably be able to give you a fairly coherent answer as to why they don't think monarchy is a good idea.

Peter McCormack: Saife would disagree with you.

Vijay Boyapati: There are very few exceptions, but Saife would disagree.  But I don't think most people think about the flaws of democracy, and I think democracy as a political institution is deeply flawed.  And I think it encourages short termism, it encourages a renter mentality instead of an owner mentality.  And it inevitably leads to control from external groups.  Most people have this kind of naïve understanding of the political system and democracy that they learned in a civics class, that the voters control politics and they vote and they choose the leaders and then the leaders do what the voters want.  That's not at all what happens in a democracy.  

Democracy is shaped by public opinion, because people who get into power are catering towards public opinion.  To get elected, you have to serve public opinion.  But how does public opinion get formed?  Are people out there independently thinking about issues and figuring it out?  No, they're not.  They're being manipulated into believe things, and they're being manipulated by the press.  So really, what we have is a system that's controlled by the media, and the media is largely controlled by the ideologies that come out of universities.

Most of the people in the media have their belief system shaped by the university that they went to, and the media shapes public opinion.  They largely decide what people think about certain issues.  COVID's a perfect example of this, where the media shaped the narrative of what we should think about COVID.  Should we have lockdowns?  Is the lab-leak theory true or not?  These weren't open discussions where we said, "We don't know, we need to be humble, we need to figure this out.  This is a new thing, we haven't seen a pandemic like this for 100 years.  Let's have an open mind and figure this out".  It was shaped from very early on by media narratives that came from inbuilt power structures within the state.

This is another problem with democracy, is this idea that we elect leaders, they're in charge and they make decisions.  Really what happens, over time, is that you get this large bureaucracy that's created, the permanent state.  And the permanent state is doing essentially the bidding of the media narrative.  They are acting independently of voters, so you have a thin veneer of elected officials, say 5% of the government, as we understand it, is elected.  Then you have these huge bureaucracies, like the FBI and the Federal Reserve and the EPA, and these represent the vast majority of the government.

Really, what happens in public policy creation is that policies come up from these bureaus into policymakers' hands and they advocate for it.  So, most people in Congress don't know anything about monetary policy, they don't really know much about law enforcement; they trust what these bureaucracies tell them.  And the problem is, these bureaucracies become completely unaccountable.  There's no one who really has oversight over them.  We think there's oversight, because we elect people into Congress and they oversee what's happening in these bureaucracies, but that's not what happens.  The bureaucracies tell the elected officials how things should go.

This is actually very different to a monarchy, a political system like a monarchy, where you have someone who's in charge and they essentially own the system.  They become the form of account, because they say, "Well, this is how I want my country to go and I own all of these bureaucracies, they answer to me.  And if they don't do what I want, they're gone".  We don't have that.  We have a system where people who control the government are essentially completely unaccountable.  They do whatever they want, they're not future-oriented, they're not thinking about the future of our species, they're thinking about --

Peter McCormack: The next election.

Vijay Boyapati: Well, the people in the bureaucracy are just thinking about increasing their own power.  The elected officials who are supposed to be holding them to account, and making sure those people in the bureaucracy are doing the right thing, they are only thinking about the next election.

Peter McCormack: Do you think that's universally true, that every person just wants more power?  Because, I understand the argument, but I do believe there are people with honest intentions within government, who want to deliver for their constituents, who want to do a good job.  They're few and far between, but Rand Paul, I would say is somebody who wants to deliver for the people, and he will challenge institutions.  I don't look at him as somebody who wants to gain more power.

Vijay Boyapati: They are few and far between.  But what happens is, when they get into the political process, over time their principles get shredded.

Peter McCormack: Is it the game theory of the machine?

Vijay Boyapati: It's the machine.  The machine shreds principles, because if you don't shift your principles, if you don't do what will avail you to be successful, you're gone.  So, it's this strong incentive -- this is a question that Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Price winner in economics, tried to tackle.  He tried to answer, "Why did the worst get on top in politics?"  Well, there's a reason there's a political incentive to have no principles.  If you're someone who has principles who won't budge on those principles and won't deliver what's popular to the public, then you're gone.

There are very few counterexamples to this.  Ron Paul is a counterexample of someone who held to his principles, but he was a congressman in a fairly small district in Texas, and he was able to maintain his seat for a long time.  You couldn't do that as President, you couldn't do it as Senator, you couldn't be that principled.  A recent example of this is Kyrsten Sinema.

Peter McCormack: Arizona?

Vijay Boyapati: Arizona, that's right.  She's a Democratic Senator for Arizona and she said that, "We shouldn't get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, because it will have dire consequences for the future of this institution, the Senate, as a deliberative body, and it will cause more polarisation in our society".

Peter McCormack: Can you just explain what the filibuster is.

Vijay Boyapati: The filibuster is the way for a minority party in the centre to hold up legislation that they don't like.  The Senate in the US was created as a compromise, so that the smaller states would join the union.  Because they said, "If this is a majority vote kind of system, which the house is, it's a majority vote, then we have no say and we don't want to join the union.  Why would we join the union?"  But the Senate was created so that each state, no matter how small, has the same number of votes as every other state.  So Wyoming, which has very few people, has as much voting power in the Senate as California. 

Objectors to this say, "Well, that means the minority can hold up the majority's view, or the majority wants to pass some legislation, so the minority can block it", and that's certainly true, but that has very positive effects in that you don't get minority rights trampled, you don't get the Californias of the world stomping on the interests of Wyoming.  Because what would happen is, Wyoming would just say, "Why are we in the union?  Nothing that we want, as a state, is being represented".

So anyway, Kyrsten Sinema said we shouldn't get rid of the filibuster which protects those minority state rights, and the Democratic Party, a lot of powerful forces within the Democratic Party said, "We need to get rid of her", and a number of people who backed her said, "We're not going to fund you in the next election.  We're going to run a candidate against you, we're going to get rid of you".  This is just a small example of what happens in the machine.  You don't get in line for what you should do, and you'll be booted out.

It's a system which shreds principles, has very little accountability, and is very easily manipulable by the media.  It has these huge, huge problems and overall, my worry is that it makes us so much more present-oriented.  We don't have any form of leadership who can look to the future and say, "I'm the leader and I'm going to be the leader for a long time, so I'm going to start thinking about the future".

Now, this kind of sounds scary to most people.  They hear what I'm saying and they might say, "Well, is he saying we should have a dictator of the United States?"  Not exactly, but I do think monarchies have a lot of advantages.  And I think that if you look at the moments in human history where we had the greatest flourishing of civilisation, it was in these environments where you had monarchies that were much smaller and were competing against each other.

So, you think about the city states in Italy during the Renaissance.  That was an incredible flourishing of civilisation, and it was largely because you had strong, executive leadership in these political bodies that could think about the future and could attract talent.  These city states would say, "How do we get the best people in Europe to come here?  What policies do we run to get the best artists, the best scientists, the best philosophers here into our country?"  And we don't have that now.  So, I think we need a radical reformation in our political structures if we're every going to escape the Earth.

One of these economic structures which needs reformation is money, which is a big piece of it.

Peter McCormack: Well, that was my next question is that, can Bitcoin fix the political structures?  We're seeing now the game theory play out politically in the US, and globally to some extent.  We've seen El Salvador make Bitcoin legal tender, there was a French politician, I can't remember his name, but he was saying that Canada should adopt Bitcoin and put $10 billion worth in their coffers and underpin their financial strength for the future.  But we're also seeing a play in the US.  We may have Senator Warren, very much against Bitcoin and spouting bullshit against mining and potentially regulation coming down from the federal government; but at the same time, we've heard this week that Arizona wants to put in a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender. 

Texas is very much a Bitcoin state, Wyoming is very much more of a crypto state, but still very much Bitcoin.  We've seen Governor Abbott very much pro-Bitcoin, talks of Bitcoin stabilising the grid in Texas.  Then we've seen a lot of new people coming in who want to campaign for the Senate, campaign for Congress, who are pro-Bitcoin, and they get the hack whereby they suddenly get 10,000, 20,000 new followers who are bitcoiners who support them, who may donate towards them.

Is there a chance that Bitcoin, as part of the political process, fixes some of the problems within that political structure?

Vijay Boyapati: I think Bitcoin can help with the present-orientedness of our society, and you've seen this in yourself, I've seen it in a lot of people, the transformation of a person when they start saving in Bitcoin and realising this is something which can't be debased, "I get to keep it and no one can take it away from me", and that's something that most people haven't experienced in a very long time.  Maybe a century ago with the gold standard, people had that same feeling. 

The transformation is that people start thinking about the future, they think, "Well, there's a finite number of these Bitcoins, and I want to have a big a pie as possible, so I need to squirrel away as many Bitcoins as I can as quickly as possible.  So, they take from the consumption in the present and they transform it to savings, which is a future-oriented activity, where you're accumulating savings, because you can use those savings in the future.  So, I think Bitcoin is definitely helpful in that regard. 

But I don't think that Bitcoin, in the long term, if it succeeds, can coexist with our current institutions.  That's something that's perhaps a little controversial.

Peter McCormack: Not so controversial in Bitcoin land!

Vijay Boyapati: Maybe so, but I think a lot of people, even people who are fairly influential in the Bitcoin space like Michael Saylor, who I'm a big fan of, think of Bitcoin as kind of outside the dollar system, and it can exist as this external store of value.  But I think if Bitcoin were successful and became a global reserve currency, it would transform political institutions.

Peter McCormack: But Michael Saylor's in a very different position, and I'm never 100% sure if his views are definitely 100% authentically his views, or if he's playing his own game theory out, trying to protect Bitcoin in the short term from attacks from institutions, from the government; he might be playing his own game there.  I'm never 100% sure with him.

Vijay Boyapati: You could be right, but I think there is the view that Bitcoin can coexist with the current system.  I think amongst politicians who are pro-Bitcoin, I don't think many of them are like, "This is going to end US democracy".  I don't think if you asked, say, Senator Lummis, that it could transform society in a way that we don't have the same society and the same political structures. 

I am sceptical with Bitcoin's success that our current political structures will exist, and there's a quote from The Economist from many years ago.  I actually brought it, and I hope you'll forgive me for reading this quote, which I think was incredibly important and inciteful.  I'm not a fan of The Economist at all, it's a mouthpiece for the status quo, and I never forgave them after the Iraq War and their advocacy for what was a catastrophe, a global catastrophe, that destroyed an entire region and wasted so many lives and so much money.  They're a mouthpiece for that, but occasionally they say something very inciteful and this is something that I want to read to you:

"Britain adopted the gold standard in 1689, which was to last, in peace time at least, for much of the next two centuries.  Over the long run, prices were remarkably stable during this period.  Over the short run however, the discipline required by this standard required some short, sharp slumps, which imposed considerable pain on the working classes.  The advent of universal suffrage after the First World War made it impossible for democratically elected governments to impose such costs on their voters.  Commodity money disappeared and fiat money, ie money that is what government declares it to be, became the norm".

I think that is unintentionally incredibly insightful.  What they're saying is that the gold standard could not survive in a democratic society, because the pain, the short-term pain that came from the slumps, could not be handled by people in power.  The strong incentive in a democracy is to do what's popular, and what is popular is to avoid short-term pain.  It's kind of like the heroin addict.

Peter McCormack: This is what Giacomo Zucco talks about.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, it's much easier to give the heroin addict another hit of heroin, because if your power as a drug dealer comes from that person using heroin, you're just going to dish out the heroin over and over again.  You're not going to say, "This is really bad for you, eventually you're going to die.  You're going to need to suffer some pain, get through this and we'll be better off together after that".

Democracy doesn't have that.  Democracy, the incentive is to say, "We have a recession, what are we going to do?  We're going to reduce the interest rates, we're going to print trillions of dollars so that people don't feel pain".  Feeling pain is one of the most important aspects of being future-oriented, because you have to put away what is pleasurable in the present for what is beneficial in the future, and we do not have that.

Peter McCormack: Well, this takes us back to parenting.  You have to let your children experience pain in different ways, you have to let them experience failure.  This is why participation trophies are bullshit, and we had it with my son when he first started playing football.  I remember the first football tournament he played in, no team was allowed to win, and I was like, "This is fucking dumb".  We have to let people experience pain. 

You can take it through every level.  It's one of the biggest problems with the economy, is that no government now wants to allow people to feel economic pain, unless it's a COVID crisis, which they've let every small business suffer economic pain.  But generally speaking, they're always trying to avoid the bust period of the boom and bust cycle.  We've tried to eliminate pain from society at every level, and it's been a complete and utter failure.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, absolutely.  The example of parenting, I think, is really important, because I noticed that tendency in myself.  It's very hard to see my kid suffering in any way, so there's this strong internal bias to intervene.  But there's a long-term consequence, and that's what we have at the level of societies and nation states.  We have this kind of nanny state mentality, that everyone needs to be protected from themselves, and this group of elites who know what's best for everyone needs to intervene and protect us from our own stupidity, and protect us from the pain of our own stupidity.

This is why, going back a few steps, I don't think Bitcoin can coexist with democratic governments.  I think the gold standard didn't exist, the gold standard was removed by governments, because they couldn't handle the pain; democratic governments couldn't handle the pain of the slump that was caused.  One of the narratives that's given by economists today is that the gold standard failed and because it failed, we have government money.  No, what happened was --

Peter McCormack: Government failed.

Vijay Boyapati: -- government failed.  There was a massive amount of spending during World War I and governments couldn't pay down those debts, because those nations which overspent during World War I were completely bankrupt.  Their societies were destroyed, their countries were destroyed, and what was the easy way to get out of that?  Get rid of the gold standard and start printing money, which is why you got the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.

So, the thing is, the gold standard wasn't that difficult to remove, because gold has this problem of centralisation, it's difficult to store, it's hard to assay, it's dangerous to store it and costly to store it, so people give it to banks.  So, governments had a very juicy target when they wanted to get rid of the gold standard.  This is one of the huge advantages of Bitcoin, is that it's much more resilient to government attack.

So, if Bitcoin was to succeed, I think it would be much harder for governments to then attack it, because of its decentralised nature.  So, what happens when you have governments which can't handle the political pain of a hard-money standard and you have a hard-money standard that can't be removed?  Something has got to give, and I think what's going to give is our political institutions.  I think they're going to be replaced, and I think they're going to be replaced with something that I think is superior which is, I hope, a bunch of -- and I think we can imagine this society.  It doesn't have to be scary, it could just be a bunch of competing city states.

So, instead of having the United States, we have Los Angeles is its own nation state, Seattle is its own nation state, and they compete with each other to try and attract the best talent.  And I move to the city where I feel like my values are best represented, and this is really the vision that the Founders had for America in the beginning, not at the city state level, but at the level of states.

Peter McCormack: This is what Balaji talks about quite a bit, and we've seen part of this play out during COVID, with the mass migration of people out of California, maybe to Texas, Wyoming; a mass migration of people out of New York down to Miami.  We're seeing the early parts of this play out, but I just want to go back a step, because what you were talking about with regards to the gold standard and essentially prefacing a Bitcoin standard, this was probably my biggest lightbulb moment with Bitcoin, is when I realised that I was personally on a Bitcoin standard, because I was holding the majority of my company treasury in Bitcoin and my personal wealth in Bitcoin. 

I realised I'm on a Bitcoin standard and nobody can take me off that.  And perhaps you, Vijay, you're on a Bitcoin standard and we can trade with each other, or work together, cooperate on that Bitcoin standard.  And then perhaps Danny, and this spread of people putting themselves on a Bitcoin standard that can't be stopped, that to me was like a massive lightbulb moment, that you can optionally choose to live on a Bitcoin standard, and your cohort of people you can exist with on that is growing and growing and growing, and it becomes that unstoppable beast.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, and if it is unstoppable, how does the nation state, as it exists today, continue to exist?  The nation state today is fed through inflation, it's funded through inflation.  And if we have this growing body of people who have their savings in something that can't be inflated away, something has to structurally change.  The nation state can't continue the way it's continuing.

One of the big problems with the US as well, you're talking about the migration of people from New York to Florida, is that in the early days, the Founders of the nation envisaged a lot of the power that wasn't enumerated and given specifically to the federal government would be reserved for the states and the people.  The problem is, the federal government has grown and grown and grown, so that the vast majority of political power in the country is now concentrated not in the individual states, it's concentrated in the federal government.

So what happens is, there's no way to escape it.  Whether you go to Florida or you go to Seattle, you're going to be subject to the same federal laws.  And the total number of federal laws has become so large and so onerous, and the tax burden of the federal system has become so large and onerous, that essentially your life is governed more by the federal government than the local government.  Of course, you can get some differences when you move state and some of them are nice.  Like, we're not allowed to have plastic bags in Seattle, for instance.

Peter McCormack: Those fucking plastic bags!

Vijay Boyapati: Then you go to Texas or Florida, you can get plastic bags, but that's a small issue.

Peter McCormack: What about straws; are you allowed straws, plastic straws?

Vijay Boyapati: I don't think we're allowed plastic straws anymore.  You get the ones which kind of melt in your mouth while you're drinking, and you get halfway down your drink and you're eating your straw.  It's just not pleasant.  So, issues like that, yeah, you can get some benefit by moving.  But the big issues, you can't escape, and that's part of, I think, one of the big reasons why American society's becoming so polarised, is that there is so much more power in the central government, that each side that has different views on what the federal government should do, they get in power and they use the federal government as a weapon against their enemies.

Peter McCormack: The issue of states' rights is something I'm seeing debated a lot more now, and probably more from the Republican states.  There's obviously a big push for Texas, where plenty of people right now want the state to secede.  So, are we seeing the early stages of the potential break-up of the United States; is that something you're seeing potentially happen?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I definitely think we're on that road, and I think the risk of a civil war in America is increasing dramatically.  I think we already saw the early stages of a civil war during the Trump Administration, when you saw federal troops in Portland, who were fighting against the local authorities who are much more left wing; that's what you might call the kind of "cold civil war".  It hasn't burst out into armies marching against each other.  But the United States is becoming more and more balkanised, and the potential for a civil war has increased by at least an order of magnitude, I would say, in the last decade.

Peter McCormack: Do you see it as a potential violent civil war, or a continuation of a more cold civil more, more economic and political civil war?

Vijay Boyapati: You know, it's hard to see how it will play out.  I think there's a potential for a hot civil war, for sure.  If you have a state secede and you have the federal government say, "We're not going to let you secede", then it could become a hot civil war.  But barring that, I see this cold civil war is going to become more and more intense over time.  That's, I think, very strongly related to the fact that the federal government has arrogated so much power to itself that what you do, if you have a different opinion, is get hold of that power structure and then use it against your enemies.

When the power structure itself is very weak and doesn't have much say over the states, people don't care as much, because if the federal government can't impose its will on you when you have different values, you don't care so much about it.  What you care about is what's happening in your state and what the governor of your state is deciding.

Peter McCormack: We've essentially hit the first step of that in Europe with Brexit.  Essentially the UK seceded from the EU.  It's not the same scenario as the US, because we are, at worst, a sovereign nation, and the union and the EU, obviously there's fundamental differences.  But that was the first step and we don't know yet the long-term benefits to the UK.  I expect them to be high, as long as the government in power takes advantage of their position.

One of those is, they have the advantage of taking the lead in terms of, say, I'm going to say crypto, but really Bitcoin, but we know they will be crypto laws, not Bitcoin laws.  And Matt Hancock recently stood up in Parliament and said about this, that we have a unique position in the UK.  I'm wondering, when do we get to that point in the US?

I love it here, by the way, in LA.  I love California, but it's a very different experience when you go to Texas.  It does feel like, in some ways, you're going into a different country from here and New York.  I like the idea of Texas seceding, I like the idea of seeing how that plays out.  Where you have your concerns, I have concerns of violence and what that will mean.  Is this something you're pro?  I guess as a libertarian, the idea of a smaller and smaller state, you support, so you would want that to happen?

Vijay Boyapati: I would like it to happen without the violence, but what I really want to happen is that our political structures become much more dynamic and future-oriented, and I think the way to get there is to try and get to a political structure which has smaller states, smaller city states which compete with each other.  Competition is an incredible driver for the betterment of humanity.  When political structures compete against each other, people benefit.

Peter McCormack: What is the government structure of those city states that you're talking about; is it still democracy, but at a smaller level?

Vijay Boyapati: No, I think it will be much better if they were run, essentially, like corporations.  And corporations are monarchies!  A corporation is a body that's led by a leader, the CEO, who's still accountable though.  The CEO's accountable to the shareholders and accountable to the board, so they can't do whatever they want.  So, bad CEOs can be removed.  But the important thing about having a CEO is that they have the executive function, they can make decisions in an executive way. 

Part of the reason America, I think, has managed to be successful, despite what I think are the deep flaws of democracy, is there's a lot of power in these mini monarchies, in corporations, and a lot of economic power held by people who have that executive ability and can say, "I want the resources of my kingdom to be deployed in this way".

Imagine if these corporations weren't run by CEOs, but were run democratically?  We wouldn't have the iPhone, we wouldn't have the Tesla, we wouldn't live in the state of prosperity that we live in.  You can't create wealth by committee.  You need an executive function, you need someone who can decide the allocation of capital and can think into the future and say, "How do I allocate capital in the present so that I benefit, my constituents benefit, in the future?"

You probably understand some of this intuitively, because you own your own company and you make decisions about the future.

Peter McCormack: Well, I consider my companies dictatorships!

Vijay Boyapati: They are, they actually are!

Peter McCormack: But I have to keep my constituents happy, otherwise they will quit and go and work somewhere else, so there's a balance.

Vijay Boyapati: Absolutely right, and that's one of the biggest misconceptions about monarchy, is that kings can get away with anything and they're tyrants and they rule over their people.  Really, their people are their constituents and if they don't cater towards those constituents, they're out.

Peter McCormack: Revolution.

Vijay Boyapati: Revolution.

Peter McCormack: Cut their heads off!

Vijay Boyapati: Exactly right.  One of the things which is great about monarchy is that when there is a problem in the leader, it's not a systemic problem to the society, it's in that person and that person has one head, and that head can be lopped off.  And, there are many examples in history of when a bad monarch was removed.  The problem that I see with democracy is that it is systemic, it infects all of society and it is like a poison that can't be removed, because it is all over your body. 

So, I would like us to move to city states competing with each other, and there are some governments which are thinking about this.  They're thinking about charter cities where they say, "We'll create a city and it's going to be run by a business, it's going to be run like a business, and it's going to think of the best policies for the people in that city", and El Salvador's kind of thinking about this a little bit, with Bitcoin City and the Bitcoin bond.

But I think if you look at the cities in recent history which have flourished the most, places like Dubai, which was just empty desert 40 years ago, or Singapore, which Singapore's nominally a democracy, but it's actually a monarchy.

Peter McCormack: It's really quite authoritarian as well.

Vijay Boyapati: It is quite authoritarian, yeah, and we can talk about the downsides to that.  But Singapore was a swamp 50 years ago.  It is one of the most prosperous nations on Earth, and there's a funny episode with Anthony Bourdain, who was very, very left wing.  He went there and he said, "You know, this is weird, I kind of like this place.  It's clean, it runs well, people are prosperous, but I also feel uncomfortable that I like it, because it goes against my values".

So, this is one of the things that's going to be very difficult in the current world to grapple with in our democratic world.  It feels uncomfortable to vest that much power in an executive and to say they get to decide everything, and maybe they decide things that make me feel very uncomfortable.

Peter McCormack: But there's parts of the way China's run which are highly successful, arguably successful, even though it is almost the worst form of authoritarianism out there.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, authoritarianism is a risk of a monarchy, but monarchies, I would distinguish them a little bit from dictatorships in the sense that dictatorships only survive because of the force of personality of the leader.  Once the leader is killed, the whole system falls down, because it relies on the leader controlling everyone. 

Whereas, a monarchy is a system where if the leader's head is chopped off and the leader is gone, the system itself continues, because people believe in that political structure and they say, "That guy was bad, but we believe the structure is good for us, so we will replace them with someone who we think is better", and there are many, many examples in British history where the monarch was booted out, because people became very dissatisfied with their leadership, like Henry VI, or Edward II.

I think what we need is political structures which will get us future-oriented which will compete with each other and work to the betterment of people, where people have a lot more choice.  It's going to be really hard to get there, because our current political structures don't want to give up power.  Most times in history, political structures were replaced because they became weak internally and they were conquered from without, but that can't happen anymore because our current political structures, no matter how much decay they cause, have nuclear weapons.  It's very hard to get rid of a political structure that has a nuclear weapon.

Peter McCormack: Does a monarchy have a nuclear weapon?

Vijay Boyapati: I would hope that we get to a world where it's commonly recognised that nuclear weapons are a disaster.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think we're already there.  I think it's commonly recognised that nuclear weapons are a disaster, but nuclear disarmament is something that has been slow and stalled, and I think even Russia now is increasing its nuclear arsenal.  If the US was to balkanise, become city states and complete for nuclear disarmament, Russia would be in a very, very strong position against this geography of the world.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, that's right.  This is one of the things that needs to be recognised.  The other side of the coin is that if you move to a system of city states, each individual city state doesn't have as much political power or military power, so are more vulnerable.  And the other downside is, of course, the city states fighting with each other.  There was a lot of conflict and warfare between the Renaissance states, but the end result was we had the Renaissance, which was an incredible flourishing of human civilisation.

One last thing I want to say is that I think, and I made this claim earlier, I think democracy slowly but surely leads to anarchy.  I think we're seeing this already, I think we're seeing this in America's great cities, we're seeing decay and the very obvious signs of de-civilisation.  You go to San Francisco, you go to Seattle, go to Chicago, go to Baltimore, go to Detroit, which was one of the shining jewels of the American economy.

Peter McCormack: You only have to go to Twitter to see it.

Vijay Boyapati: It's incredible to see and I think it points to the obvious decline of America.  And what it reminds me of is the decline of the Roman Empire.

Peter McCormack: I would argue a decline in a certain political wing of America.  It feels to me like it's very much on the left, Democratic Party-run states.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I agree with that, and that's the side of the political spectrum that is most pro-democracy, most power to the people, most economic power to the people, "We need to get power out of the corporations", get power, as I said, out of monarchies, corporations and monarchies, and take that power and put it into the people.  I think that's where you see the greatest decay, and America's great cities at their core.  If you go to the central parts of these cities, a lot of them look like Third World countries now, they really do.  You go to downtown Seattle, it looks like --

Peter McCormack: We're talking small parts of these cities.

Vijay Boyapati: I would say large parts of San Francisco look like a Third World city with skyscrapers.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I'm going to need you to explain that to me, because I've spent time in Third World countries and I've been to San Francisco and I can see the decay.  I've seen the, what is it, the Tenderloin in San Francisco when I was out running.  I was like, "What the fuck is going on here?" and I'm aware of what's happening in Seattle.  I'm seeing New York, which is a place I've been travelling to for 20 years, my last visit was really, really depressing seeing just some of the things I saw there with regards to the growth in the homeless problem, drug problems.  So, I am aware of it, but I've also spent time in Third World countries, and it's not the same to me.

Vijay Boyapati: I have too, I've spent time in Africa, I've spent time in India.  I mean, the amount of human faeces on the streets of San Francisco, the amount of homelessness, the amount of drug addiction.  I don't think it's just parts of San Francisco, I don't think it's just the Tenderloin, I think it's the Mission, I think it's various neighbourhoods, the Haight.

Peter McCormack: I think it's fixable as well.  I've been trying to get this guy, Michael Shellenberger, on the show.  He wrote this book, San Fransicko.  He's campaigning to try and fix the problems of San Francisco, and it feels to me it's just a political problem in that they've got fucking morons in power there.  My assumption is, that is where hopefully, democracy will prove its power by electing in better leaders into these jurisdictions to fix these problems.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, I think this is probably something where we disagree.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Vijay Boyapati: I think it's a structural problem.  I think the system itself is creating this.  And I think, we could bet on this, ten years from now, San Francisco will be in a worse state.  But I think there are a lot of different measures where you can see --

Peter McCormack: Unless they get a Republican in there.

Vijay Boyapati: Well, I don't think they can, that's the problem.  You can't be a Republican and get elected in San Francisco.  I think what San Francisco needs, is San Francisco needs to be run by Google or Apple.

Peter McCormack: That's a fair argument.

Vijay Boyapati: If Google ran San Francisco, it would be an incredible place to go.

Peter McCormack: But will it?  Because, we've seen, even within these large tech companies, the left-wing attacks from within.  Like Twitter is now very much a progressive, left-wing company, which will censor the opinions it doesn't like, and will remove a President, sitting President, from Twitter, despite the arguments against his use of Twitter.  We've seen it with Spotify, we know there's influence within there that's trying to censor Rogan.  Could it not just be a repeat of the same problems, or do you genuinely think these companies can solve it?

Vijay Boyapati: They're certainly very left wing internally, but they're not run in a left-wing way, they're not democracies internally.  Google has a CEO and Google has executives that make executive decisions.

Peter McCormack: Is it a monarchy; is Google a monarchy?

Vijay Boyapati: It is a monarchy, it absolutely is a monarchy.  So, if a company like Google took over San Francisco, they would act in an executive way and say, "There are serious problems here.  We're not going to tolerate people defecating on the streets of our property", just as they would not tolerate people defecating on the campus of Google.  You'd be arrested and taken to jail.

I really think the structural problem needs to be addressed.  It's not just, "We need to change this leader"; we need to change the structure so that the people in power can think about the future of the city and what's good for the future of the city.  I just don't think the structure makes that possible right now.  And like I said in the past, what would happen is these systems would become so weak, they'd get conquered from outside, because you have a city state which has become decadent, and then the Spartans come and they conquer you, because you've become too weak.

We don't have that, we don't have the ability to get there, because these city states are protected by something which is like an asymmetric barrier, which is the nuclear weapon.  Our political structure, I don't think, can be overturned.  This is what worries me the most.  We're not going to get to a future-oriented state, to get back to the topic of this.  I think the Great Filter is not behind us, it's ahead of us, because our political structures have completely failed.  We're now at the point where we can do asymmetric damage to society, and the potent combination of these two things is going to end human civilisation, unless we radically overturn what we have today.

Peter McCormack: Okay, before we get there, because I do want to bring it back full circle, one thing we didn't complete was talking about the downsides of these city states.  The two examples you gave, Singapore and Dubai, I've got friends who left Singapore, they said it's become completely authoritarian.  And with regards to Dubai, the only thing I think of with regards to a city state such as that is, I think the progressives have done a lot for the world, I think the progressives have done a lot for equality and opportunity, and I know this is not always a popular topic, certainly in Bitcoin circles, but I would wonder what would happen to human rights, civil rights, equality of opportunity.

Dubai is very much a patriarchy, a subject that again, people don't like to be discussed.  There are certain people within our cohort who think we've gone too far on equality and feminism has stopped women having babies, etc.  But somebody who is a single dad who has a daughter who has said to him, "Why can't I do this that the boys are doing?" I'm never going to turn around and say, "Because you're a woman and you need to be preparing to have babies and look after a home".  She deserves to do whatever she wants with her life.  My worry is, in a city state, what happens to the advances in equality and human and civil rights?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, that's a great question.  I have two daughters and going to have a third.

Peter McCormack: You're going to have three daughters?

Vijay Boyapati: Three daughters, yes.

Peter McCormack: Holy fuck!  Lucky you've got that boy!  At the weekends, you two are going to be escaping from the madness of four women attacking you.

Vijay Boyapati: Especially when they're teenagers.  But so, I completely sympathise with what you're saying, and it is a legitimate concern.  I would say that it's possible to have left-wing monarchies.  Google is, what I would say, a left-wing monarchy.  It's possible to have those values valued in a society.  I think it would be much better to have a lot of different, small city states, with very different political values, and you find the one that meets your political values.

I think it's very dangerous to think that these values should be imposed on other societies, and to impose political structures on them.  I think one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of, I would say, this century was the belief that we should take democracy to the Middle East.  I think democracy is a political structure which has essentially destroyed the Middle East.

Peter McCormack: My dad always says something to me.  It was after the Iraq War and he said to me, "Saddam Hussein was clearly a bad dude.  He and his sons were tyrannical and they tortured people and they gassed the Kurds and they were clearly bad dudes".  He said, "But Iraq was a relatively stable nation".

Vijay Boyapati: Relatively peaceful, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Relatively peaceful, mainly because a lot of people were in fear of him.  Now, is that right or wrong; I don't know?  You can argue both sides.  I think you can argue from a net position of net good, net bad, he's a bad dude, but was it net good for the way the country was able to coordinate?  I don't know the answer to that, but my view on the Middle East, if it ever became democratic, it had to be something that would come within, a bit like with the expansion of women's rights within Saudi Arabia; that's come really from within.

I always feel like trying to impose the will and the culture of your country, the United States, or the UK on a wildly different country with a different history, is fraught with danger, as we've seen.

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah, the same thing with Afghanistan.  The people who went in there were trying to spread these very woke values, which did not fly in a very, very conservative society.  And most of the people who were working on that had to leave when the US left, because they didn't have the power structure behind them to try and get those values in.

Peter McCormack: That's also really sad what's happened in Afghanistan, because whatever people think about Afghanistan, and one of the main issues with Afghanistan was actually the distraction of the Iraq War, because there was a lot of progress in Afghanistan and young girls were going to school; that was happening.  And that's a good thing, that's one of the good outcomes of the Afghanistan war, is the opportunity for women within the country, who are largely oppressed, and that's all been undone now.

Vijay Boyapati: If it's going to happen though, like you said, I think it has to happen organically.  And what you said about Saddam Hussein, or what your dad said, is one of those very uncomfortable truths.  If we're going to get to a better world, we need to talk about these uncomfortable truths.  We need to talk about the downsides of our system and we need to not assume that democracy is a panacea, which a lot of people speak about democracy as a panacea that, "The problem with our society is we don't have enough democracy [or] we need to defend democracy". 

We need to think about the problems caused by democracy, because these problems are, I think, going to make us very vulnerable to extinction and I don't want that.  I want our species to survive.

Peter McCormack: Okay, back full circle, because we've got a football match to go and watch soon.  I told you, when you do it in person, these conversations are 50% longer.  So, what are the biggest risks to the Great Filter.  You say it's in the future.  I see there's a great argument that actually, it's in the past, because we went from single cell to where we are today, two friends sitting opposite each other in this lovely place having a conversation.  So, I see the argument that it was in the past, getting to multi-cell organisms was perhaps a Great Filter. 

But you say it's maybe in the future.  Maybe there's multiple Great Filters.  But what are the biggest risks that you see for this doomsday scenario, end of humanity?

Vijay Boyapati: I think probably the number one risk is the development of asymmetric weapons, weapons that can be bought cheaply, that can cause a lot of damage to a lot of people.  I think once that happens, people will tolerate societies which are complete surveillance societies, and you can't have the flourishing of civilisation in a surveillance society, I don't think that's possible.  That's the number one thing.

There are other risks, like development of viruses, which could potentially end humanity.  It was a big concern maybe 50 years ago of nuclear weapons ending society.  I think it's much harder for the extremes of the social spectrum to get hold of nuclear weapons and do asymmetric damage that way.  I just believe, and you can search for this, there are articles of the development of drones carrying munitions.  I remember the first time I saw that --

Peter McCormack: Was it Maduro; did somebody try to bomb Maduro?

Vijay Boyapati: Perhaps, yeah, I don't remember.  But I just saw that it was some military organisation developing this, maybe it was the US Military, and when I saw the article I thought, "This is the end of civilisation right here.  A cheap weapon that can be easily deployed and controlled remotely by a computer that can work in swarms.  That's the end of civilisation".  And even if you say these are illegal, that doesn't mean you can stop their development, because you can have people who develop them in private with 3D printers.

So, in a society which has become sufficiently advanced that individuals can print and develop technologies like this, maybe it's the end of us.

Peter McCormack: And when you say the end, it feels like you're not saying we go to a position where there's no human life left on Earth, it's more that we've reached peak development and we start going backwards?

Vijay Boyapati: Exactly, yeah, you're right.  I mean, it could also be the end of us as well, where you could imagine a world where society has crumbled enough that we have so many nuclear weapons that they become available in the black market, and that people are able to deploy them.  So, we have much bigger weapons than drones, it's just it's hard to get hold of them right now.  In a society which has collapsed, because these technologies make it possible for individuals to do a lot of damage and society starts crumbling, then even worse technologies become more easily available.

Peter McCormack: So, how do we fix this, in your mind?  Obviously, I don't expect you to have the complete answer, but what are the things you're thinking about with regard to this?  I'm obviously reticent to say Bitcoin fixes this, because I think that is certainly not the answer, but what are the things that you've either researched, or that you're thinking about, that keep us away from this doomsday scenario?

Vijay Boyapati: I think we first need to talk about it.  We need to recognise that it's a potential disaster waiting for us in the near future.  I think orthogonal to preventing it, we need our civilisation to advance much more quickly than it is.  We need much more capital accumulation, we need to be much more wealthy.  We need to be able to send people to the Moon for a very low price, or Mars.  This is where I really admire Elon Musk for this, he's thinking about this and he's thinking about the cost, like how much would it cost to send a person to Mars?  Right now, it probably costs $1 billion.  That's clearly not cost-effective.

Peter McCormack: Up, up, up!

Vijay Boyapati: $1 trillion, yeah, you're right, probably $1 billion would be very cheap, because then some people would probably already be going to Mars; but $1 trillion.  We can only get there if our economic structures, our political structures allow for much greater accumulation of capital than is happening now.  We need a new Renaissance, we need a modern Renaissance, and we can't do that without changing our structures.

Peter McCormack: There are arguments against Musk and his ideas for going to Mars, that it's not really habitable.  And I know he talked about terraforming Mars.  I've heard that it's ridiculous, it's not possible, and the ideas about terraforming Mars are pipedreams and completely unrealistic, and that creating sustainable life on Mars is almost impossible.  And actually, all that money could be redirected to better projects here on Earth and fixing what we have here.  I'm split.

Vijay Boyapati: I think that's a little bit defeatist, because I think we can dream of futures that seem very difficult or impossible in the present.  I mean, there are a lot of humans who thought we would never be able to fly, or never be able to get to the Moon.  And when humans first left the Earth in a hot air balloon, it was a miraculous moment, "Wow, maybe we can, maybe it's possible, maybe we can dream that we can do it", and I think we should be at least dreaming about that.  I think it's possible, I definitely think we can get to Mars.

Whether or not we can colonise Mars, that's a different question, because we have all these biological constraints.  We evolved on a planet with a certain amount of gravity.  What happens when we're on a planet which has much less gravity?  What happens when we don't have any natural resources; can we terraform Mars?  These are big questions.  This is why, when I say we need to be more future-oriented, I'm not talking about political structures that help us think about 20 years ahead, I'm talking about 20 generations ahead.

Peter McCormack: We talked about the change in society in 20 years or even 100 years.  20 generations ahead…

Vijay Boyapati: We are running out of time.

Peter McCormack: Have you see the Doomsday Clock?

Vijay Boyapati: No.

Peter McCormack: So, there's a thing, there's a Doomsday Clock, and it's how close we are to catastrophe.  Danny, can you look up where we are?  I think we're one minute to midnight's catastrophe, or they might have moved it to one second.  They keep getting to these smaller --

Danny: We're at 100 seconds to midnight.

Peter McCormack: We're 100 seconds to midnight.  That's how close to doomsday we are.

Vijay Boyapati: I really believe that.  I think we are very close to a catastrophe end for our civilisation, and unless we start talking about this, unless we start talking about solutions to this, unless we start realising that the solution will mean thinking many, many generations ahead, not just thinking about, "We have 7% inflation now, how are we going to fix that?"  No, how do we corral the resources of humanity to think about escaping the Earth? 

The Earth is our womb.  We were born and grew in the womb, but eventually we have to escape.  If we don't escape, that's it, we're never going to answer the big questions, we're never going to survive as a species.  We have to escape the Earth, so whether it's difficult or not, we need to put our focus on that and think about how we get there and what we need to change to get there.

Peter McCormack: I do struggle with that, I do think of the resources that go into that and, is that a lifeboat so we can maintain the human race as the Earth is destroyed, like those science fiction films where you see a spaceship leave and it's got 100 people on it, and then some embryos and various plants; is that what we're talking about doing and hoping to find some planet we can colonise?  Or, are we really talking about being a multiplanetary species, because I don't know, I still feel that those resources, I don't think it's defeatist as well, but I still feel like perhaps those resources could be focused to problems here?  But maybe we're both right.

Vijay Boyapati: Could be.  But I like to think about it from more the big-picture perspective.  I think, getting back to Enrico Fermi, looking up at the night sky and saying, "Where are they?" I think there isn't any other life out there.

Peter McCormack: You don't think there is?

Vijay Boyapati: No.

Peter McCormack: Do you think we are the only species, the only planet with life in the whole of the universe?

Vijay Boyapati: I think so.  At least, I hope so.

Peter McCormack: Do you think because of the Great Filter, or we're a fluke?

Vijay Boyapati: I hope we're the only one, because then maybe the Great Filter question goes away.  And the reason we don't see other species is just because we are so unique and life was so improbable.  That's my hope, that we're the only species.  But if we are the only species, life is incredibly precious in this unbelievably large universe that we can't fully comprehend; we're the only life.

So, I think we need to focus on, how do we make life continue?  I think we should be thinking about colonising our solar system and the galaxy with life.  We should be sending out bacteria, we should be sending out plant matter and things like that, with the hope that we can colonise other planets, so that if we destroy ourselves, if the Earth ends, life isn't lost in the universe.  I think it's such a precious thing.

Peter McCormack: It's such a weird thing if you think about it!

Vijay Boyapati: It's weird to think about, I know, with our everyday concerns and with doom-scrolling TikTok or Instagram, we don't think about these big questions.

Peter McCormack: Do you have TikTok?

Vijay Boyapati: No, I don't!

Peter McCormack: It's going to become part of your life in the next five to ten years; you won't escape it.

Vijay Boyapati: I have Instagram, I barely have Instagram.  I only use it to follow my wife, because she posts a lot of pictures of our kids.  But I see things like that and I feel so worried, because people are so focused on what's right here in front of their nose, and they're not looking far enough ahead to see what the big picture is for, not just their family, but our species.  We have much, much bigger questions to answer, and we're so focused on the present.

Peter McCormack: I flip.  Sometimes, I think there's lifeform throughout the universe, but it's just so far away.  And then sometimes, I just think it's a complete fluke.  I read up on DNA and the structure of DNA and chromosomes and I think, "How does that spark happen to create those elements of what becomes multicell organisms?"

Vijay Boyapati: It seems miraculous, doesn't it?

Peter McCormack: It seems by design.

Vijay Boyapati: We've never been able to replicate it, trying to get the conditions of early Earth and having all these amino acids and proteins floating around and trying to get it to something that looks like life, we've never been able to make it happen.  So, it does seem designed.  I'm not particularly religious, but it's hard not to think that something that improbable happened just out of this big soup!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, with a lightning strike, somebody sparked life!

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's a great topic, it fascinates me and I share similar concerns.  But I also try and be an optimist a bit more these days and try and enjoy my time here, but I definitely think about it.  I think you would really enjoy sitting down with Austin Hill.  I'm going to send you the show I made with him on the singularity.  We were talking about very similar things, and I think you would enjoy sitting down and talking to him and sharing some of these ideas.

Vijay Boyapati: The singularity, sorry to interrupt, but the singularity is the optimistic side of the coin of the Great Filter, which is that things are getting better faster and faster, and we're going to live in this technological utopia, and we're going to be able to upload our brain into the cloud and be much smarter than we are.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to do that, because that's another Great Filter, if we upload ourselves all to the cloud, we don't need these fallible, biological bodies?

Vijay Boyapati: That's right, and then maybe our intelligence leaves the Earth and we survive in that way.  There's a great show on this, by the way, called Altered Carbon, where people are able to upload themselves into the cloud, and then if they get killed, they can find a new body and have their self downloaded into a new body.

Peter McCormack: Is it their actual self?  Is it their soul, or is it just a version of themselves; and would they ever know that they're the same one?

Vijay Boyapati: Those are great questions that are addressed by this show.  It goes into all these different hypotheticals, like are you really you, or are you someone else?

Peter McCormack: Or, what happens if you end up in a disc in a draw?

Vijay Boyapati: Yeah.  It goes into all that, it's fascinating stuff.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man.  Well, listen, loved this, absolutely loved this.  Is there anything we didn't cover?

Vijay Boyapati: We covered it all.

Peter McCormack: We covered it all, man.  Okay.  Well listen, Vijay, love talking to you and really glad we got to do this in person, and thanks for being a friend over the years I've been in Bitcoin.  I've reached out to you many times with questions and you've always got back to me, so I really appreciate you coming in today to do this.  Tell people where they can get your book from, and go buy his fucking book!

Vijay Boyapati: You can find it on Amazon, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin.  I make the argument that Bitcoin is the best form of money, and how money evolves, and why Bitcoin is a great store of value.  So, you can find that on Amazon, or you can find me on Twitter @real_vijay.

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, let's go and watch a football match, and great to see you.

Vijay Boyapati: Thanks for having me, Pete.