WBD461 Audio Transcription
Web3 Does Not Exist with American HODL & Junseth
Interview date: Saturday 12th February
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with American HODL & Junseth. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this interview, American HODL and Junseth take aim at Web3, NFTs and the metaverse and discuss why they believe that it will not only fail but that it doesn't even exist in the first place.
“Every time this thing pumps a million billion new people coming in and all of them run through the exact same fucking scams again and again and again, and they get here and they pretend like they know what they’re talking about and it’s literally a manifestation of… I just heard about Bitcoin and I’m here to fix it.”
— Junseth
Interview Transcription
Junseth: I feel like the odd man out right now, I'm the only one with his shirt off, but you invited me to do that when I was in the metaverse.
Peter McCormack: Well, that's why we did it.
Junseth: You told me that you were all going to do it, and then I came out of the metaverse and all of you had your shirts on!
Peter McCormack: You see, you need to go back in the metaverse.
American HODL: Why don't you take your shirt off, man?
Peter McCormack: Because I look disgusting with my clothes off.
American HODL: That's true.
Junseth: Oh no, but I look beautiful.
Peter McCormack: You do.
Junseth: That's actually what I've got to say about me when you're liking me shirtless.
American HODL: He's just standing there, nips out, just being like, "'Ello, guvnor!"
Peter McCormack: How are you doing, HODL?
American HODL: Good, man, I'm good.
Peter McCormack: HODL's been drinking.
American HODL: By the way, I owe you some -- I have been drinking.
Peter McCormack: You owe me some Bitcoin.
Junseth: He does owe you some Bitcoin, he does owe you Bitcoin.
American HODL: Peter's producer supplied me with --
Junseth: HODL?
American HODL: Yeah?
Junseth: You owe him some Bitcoin.
American HODL: No, I do, I'm getting there. Peter's producer supplied me with Modelo and blends, and so I'm "cronk", as the kids say.
Peter McCormack: I've been gone for 45 minutes.
Junseth: He told me he'd been drinking since he got here, which seemed like it was a lot longer than that!
American HODL: I owe you half a Bitcoin, which is roughly $20,000 at the moment, and I gave it to you on this Opendime, because I straight up -- here you go.
Peter McCormack: Oh, I will fuck this up.
American HODL: I know you don't know how to sweep another one. That's why I gave it to you on an Opendime, because you LARP like you know how to open an Opendime, but you have no fucking idea how to open one, and it's hilarious to me that now you have possession of $20,000 worth of Bitcoin that you have no idea how to access.
Peter McCormack: What do I do with this, Danny?
Junseth: First, you have to insert it in your anus.
Peter McCormack: No, but listen, that's a whole Bitcoin I've had off you now. How do you feel about that?
American HODL: I feel like what I'm going to do is, let me tell you, I have a whole plan to get it back.
Peter McCormack: I wish you'd have taken that other bet.
American HODL: I'm going to show up to Bedford Real, or whatever the fuck your shitty soccer team is called, and I'm going to bet on the opposite side of it, and you have to bet your club, because you're Bedford fucking to the death. And I'm going to show up in England, in Bedford, one of these days, and I'm going to say, "Peter, I'm betting the other side, you have to bet Bedford for 1 Bitcoin". Will you take it?
Peter McCormack: I've got a better bet.
American HODL: Pussy!
Peter McCormack: No, no, I've got a better bet. I bet you a Bitcoin, next season, we finish top of our league, and you can have every other position.
American HODL: This is bullshit, because I know for a fact that because of the Bitcoin fucking price pump, you have more money to work with than every other fucking team in your league. So, no, the answer is no. You're going to have to bet a specific game with me, specific game, and I'm going to fly to fucking Bedford, I'm going to fucking fly there!
Peter McCormack: Okay, first game in the season.
American HODL: Not first game, no, I'm going to pick the game. I'm going to show up, and if you don't support your club, people are going to know what a bitch you are, straight up. No, straight up, they're going to know.
Peter McCormack: It's done, a Bitcoin behind my club. You pick the game next season.
Junseth: It seems like he really wants to give you back your Bitcoin.
American HODL: Done. Come on!
Junseth: You're determined to make sure he gets more!
American HODL: Come on!
Peter McCormack: But if you lose, that will be 2 Bitcoin you'll be down.
American HODL: That will be painful. I don't want to think about that, yeah, I don't want to think about that.
Peter McCormack: Good.
American HODL: First of all, you need to figure out how to open a fucking Opendime. Now that I've given it to you, you're going to have to figure it out.
Peter McCormack: I'm just going to call up NVK.
American HODL: He has no idea, he has no fucking --
Junseth: There's a PDF online on how to do it, it's not going to be hard.
American HODL: No, he doesn't know.
Junseth: Your grandmother could figure it out.
American HODL: You think Peter can sweep an Opendime? What are the odds that Peter can actually sweep this Opendime?
Junseth: 100%.
Peter McCormack: I mean, I wouldn't bet a Bitcoin on myself.
American HODL: There's $20,000 on this Opendime. What's the odds that Peter can sweep it?
Junseth: 100%.
American HODL: Zero, zero.
Peter McCormack: It's not zero.
American HODL: The odds are zero.
Peter McCormack: I can use Google, I can phone NVK.
American HODL: Dude, Peter literally knows everybody in the industry. He could literally phone NVK who made the Opendime --
Junseth: That's true.
American HODL: -- and he still wouldn't figure out how to do it! That's why I gave it to him on an Opendime, because I know he doesn't know.
Junseth: I have confidence that Peter will be able to sweep it.
American HODL: I know he doesn't know.
Junseth: It's super-easy.
American HODL: No, he has no idea.
Peter McCormack: Is there like a password?
Junseth: Yes.
American HODL: No.
Junseth: No, there is.
Peter McCormack: Is that how you fuck me?
American HODL: There's not a password.
Junseth: There is a password.
American HODL: There's not.
Junseth: There is. It's a secret action you have to take.
American HODL: You just fucking press a fucking pushpin through the seal.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what I would have done if I were you? I would have given me an empty one thinking, "There's a good chance he can't do it".
American HODL: That one's full.
Peter McCormack: I know.
American HODL: Which is funnier, because I know you can't do it!
Peter McCormack: I'm going to figure this shit out. Anyway, HODL… Junseth, good to see you, man, it's been a while.
Junseth: It has been a while. We did our last show, I don't know, a year, two years ago. Before the pandemic, I feel like.
American HODL: It was good, I liked that one.
Junseth: Or was it a dream, the pandemic, I don't even remember? I know we were really close, in a hotel room.
Peter McCormack: It was probably during, because I was doing remote interviews.
Junseth: Yeah. No, you were doing remote. We were in a little hotel room.
Peter McCormack: No, we did one after that.
Junseth: Oh, that's true, that was during.
Peter McCormack: Where we discussed art.
Junseth: Art, yes.
Peter McCormack: Modern art.
American HODL: Modern art, yeah.
Peter McCormack: And our difference of opinion with people who don't like modern art.
Junseth: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Now we're going to talk about modern art on the blockchain.
Junseth: On the blockchain, NFTs, metaverse, Web3!
Peter McCormack: We're going to do the lot.
Junseth: We're set. Are we going to do everything?
Peter McCormack: We're going to do the whole lot.
Junseth: All right.
Peter McCormack: So, listen, it was Danny said to me Ben was in a Clubhouse room and you were doing a show about how the metaverse doesn't exist, you were having a discussion. So he said, "We've got to make a show on this".
American HODL: Okay, so let's talk it out, yeah. So, me and Junseth, both of us, not just me, but me and Junseth have both been talking about the fact that metaverse straight up doesn't exist, it's not even a real thing, it's fake. And I told Ben, I said, "This would be a funny show", and so that's how we got to here and now I'm sitting in palatial Malibu in an Airbnb that cost $5 million. I mean, Peter's spending way too many sats on this thing, it's obvious, but it's okay, you've got to live a little, you know what I mean. Peter's in very bad health.
Junseth: I think you funded this!
American HODL: No, Peter's in atrociously bad health. He could die at any moment.
Peter McCormack: You paid for this, dude.
American HODL: He's had COVID for eight months.
Peter McCormack: Dude, I just live on the money you lose to me!
American HODL: So, the thing is, on Clubhouse over the last several months, I've been talking to idiots who've been telling me that essentially, the metaverse is a real thing. And they would say things to me like, "Not only is the metaverse real, but we're in the metaverse right now", and I would say, "What the fuck does that mean? We're on an audio app on Clubhouse, how is this the metaverse? In my definition, this is the internet". And they would say, "No, no, it's the metaverse, we're in the metaverse, dude, you don't even get it, bro".
Peter McCormack: Can you go deeper than that; could we actually be in the metaverse?
American HODL: No, we're in the metaverse.
Junseth: Only if simulation theory's true, Peter.
American HODL: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: What odds do you put on simulation theory being real and that we're in a simulation? Zero?
American HODL: Here's the thing that most people who are stupid don't understand about simulation theory, is that in Nick Bostrom's original paper on simulation theory, the most likely outcome is that humanity never reaches a post-human civilisation, or post-human era. And so, the most likely outcome is that we blow ourselves up through nuclear war or climate change or starvation or whatever, and we never reach the post-human era.
Peter McCormack: The Great Filter.
American HODL: And, the second most likely outcome is that we reach the post-human era, and we create myriad simulations and we live inside of one of those simulations. So, the lowest probably denominator is that we live inside a base level reality in which we create the simulations. But the most likely scenario is that we die out before we create simulations.
Peter McCormack: But it's a non-zero chance we are in one?
American HODL: Yeah, it's non-zero, it's the middle scenario, essentially.
Peter McCormack: Well, what percentage chance do you put that we're in one?
American HODL: I would say the likelihood that we don't reach the post-human era is at 80%, especially with everybody arguing about what their race and their dick is, and stuff like that.
Peter McCormack: So, there's a 20% chance we're in one?
American HODL: Yeah, there's a 20% chance that we're in a simulation, and there's probably a 0.0000001% chance that we're in the base level reality that creates the simulation.
Peter McCormack: What about you, Junseth; do you think we could be in one?
Junseth: I don't know, I've never really thought about it. I tend to think that the simulation theory is just a nice way for atheists to tell me they believe in God.
American HODL: It is a version of intelligent design, as Junseth put it.
Junseth: The question is whether it's Vitalik Buterin, or a man with a beard in the clouds in some ethereal place. And, I'd put my money on the second one.
Peter McCormack: All right, so listen, you've got these conversations on Clubhouse, okay; there are people saying we're in the metaverse now; are you saying there could never be a metaverse?
American HODL: I think that's the thing I want to be specific about before we start this essentially interview.
Junseth: It's already started!
Peter McCormack: We started earlier! We've started.
American HODL: I'm aware! What I'm saying is that I'm more or less bullish, the idea of VR, AR, XR, mixed reality, whatever you want to call it, I'm bullish that idea. I think it's a really interesting idea and I've been bullish for it a long time, and I think that humans are naturally going to want to live in extended versions of their reality, and mixed versions of their reality.
But the problem with it becomes -- the version of it that's being sold now, that we're all in the metaverse, is essentially this, "Hey, we're in an NFT universe and I bought this Bored Ape and we're going to live in this version of the reality that I subscribe to where this Bored Ape is on my T-shirt when I attend a Marshmello concert in Fortnite and that's going to be the version of the metaverse that I'm aligned with", and I think that version of the metaverse is vapourware and I think it's bullshit, and I think that --
Junseth: And also, that's the only version of the metaverse that they believe matters. They want to believe that they -- I was in a Clubhouse room similarly, and the guy was telling me how aeroplanes are going to be amazing in the future, they're going to be cheaper, because you can build them in the metaverse! I tried to push back on the point, I told him that that was -- I was very respectful, I said that's idiotic.
Peter McCormack: Why would you get on a plane in the metaverse?
Junseth: I don't know!
Peter McCormack: You could just hop!
American HODL: Teleport, yeah.
Junseth: It doesn't make any sense. Technology in the metaverse is not an issue. You can literally put Star Trek reconstitution engines in the metaverse that will disintegrate your particles and then move you some other place, because you're just information, so there's no reason. But he was like, "Aeroplanes are going to be cheaper to build, it's going to be cheaper to get places, everything is going to be way, way cheaper because we're in the metaverse". I just couldn't believe that this was something that somebody was saying, and it sounded very much like they were saying it because they were trying to convince themselves.
Peter McCormack: There are a lot of stupid people out there.
Junseth: Yeah, but I think this is what the VCs are doing right now pitching this stuff. The metaverse pitch is that it's an alternate reality. And what's blowing my mind is the number of people that are excited about being plugged into this thing that they are literally pitching as the Matrix.
Peter McCormack: Right, let me tell you my interpretation of the metaverse, and then you can either destroy it or agree, whatever. For me, the metaverse, as a singular term, doesn't really work, because there should probably almost likely be multiple metaverses if they exist. To me, therefore, if there's a metaverse, what it is, it's like a VR SimCity. You go into that world and you maybe have a home in it and you can maybe go to your friend's home. You want to watch a Liverpool match, you end up in the stadium.
But perhaps the Liverpool thing's developed by themselves, so really what you're using is your VR set to go into your home; but when you want to go to the Liverpool game, you have to come out and then reload that application. And who knows if this stuff all integrates at one point so you don't have to log out?
American HODL: Isn't that just a video game?
Peter McCormack: I get what you're saying, but for me the metaverse is this world you can go in and live and do different experiences, and it can grow and grow and grow, and really it's just a label, but relabelling something we've already got for a future where it's a more holistic experience.
American HODL: Yeah, so I think the conception of the metaverse that you're describing is the sort of idea that there's going to be some device that's invented by Apple or Google or whomever.
Junseth: Got it right now.
American HODL: Right, and that you're going to spend 90% to 95% of your time in AR, XR, mixed reality, and that you will be essentially in the metaverse at that point and the metaverse will be an extension of the internet. I think that's a credible idea, I think that will happen at some point in the future. The problem is, we don't have that technology existing today, and there is no market leader with market share that makes it obvious that is going to happen.
So, this is a far-fetched idea on the technology spectrum that will happen eventually, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. So, if you're trying to sell your Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT or whatever, based on the predicate of this idea, it's just not going to happen.
Peter McCormack: At what point are you in a metaverse, or is it just too vague an idea, you can never even find it?
American HODL: No, the metaverse is a place and time like I just said. It's a place and time at which you're spending greater than 90% of your time in a digital environment.
Peter McCormack: So, you live in there and you come out of there maybe to sleep?
American HODL: I would say that today, we spend greater than 50% of our time in a digital environment using our smartphones, and with an AR glasses set or something of that kind, we will spend greater than 90% of our time in an extended reality, metaverse-style interaction.
Peter McCormack: So, you wake up, you put on your headset, you go in?
American HODL: Yeah, and then you go to sleep. You take it off to maybe have sex, to jerk off, to shit, whatever; but most of the time, you're in it.
Peter McCormack: You maybe would have the sex in the metaverse!
American HODL: I mean, you might, depending on who you were having sex with.
Junseth: You could even shit in the metaverse if you want! First dates could be in the metaverse. I think a lot of the metaverse conception right now is largely due to the fact that people are trying to justify these NFT purchases, and I find that interesting. I think a lot of them do believe that these NFT purchases are going to be worth something, because they're going to be used in the metaverse for some reason. Maybe they will initially, but over time you're going to have a degradation of the value of them, especially early NFTs. It can't be a flex forever. The art of CryptoPunks or Bored Apes is shit art. It doesn't represent much in culture, other than stupidity, I think.
Peter McCormack: All right, let me argue back with you on that, and as somebody who doesn't own an NFT, never bought one, I don't fully understand it, I don't care for them, but --
Junseth: Well, I tried to enlighten you on non-fungible tokens early on, but you rejected it.
Peter McCormack: Are we not being hypocrites here with the whole modern art thing? Are we potentially being boomers? You and I had a long conversation --
American HODL: No, no.
Peter McCormack: Bear with me, let me finish. This is between me and him! So, you and I had this long conversation about modern art. There are people, bitcoiners, who think modern art is fiat art, there's no effort that goes into it, like a Rothko can't be justified at $50 million, $100 million, because it's just a couple of squares on a canvas. But you and I said, this is not only wrong, it's insulting; art is subjective.
Junseth: I'm glad that you said, because I was afraid that maybe I'd taken the other side of that. I didn't remember, I was like, "Shit, did I say something?" I agree with that, I agree with all of that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but if art is subjective, could you not argue that, forget the technology on NFTs --
Junseth: I don't view art as subjective, I never have.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's personal, so it's subjective.
Junseth: I view it as a matter of taste, and I think that taste is something that you develop and is somewhat objective. And if you have taste, if you develop taste, what you can do is you can do something like look at a Rothko and you can say, "It's not for me, but I see the design, I see what it is".
Peter McCormack: I slightly disagree on that. I think there are things you just won't like and you don't appreciate.
Junseth: That could very well be.
Peter McCormack: Whatever. So, in the art world, there are tens of thousands of tortured artists not making money and then you get the odd Rothko, Picasso, etc.
Junseth: The Bored Apes entrepreneurs are not among those.
Peter McCormack: No, but what I'm saying is that --
American HODL: "I'm so depressed, I'm going to draw apes".
Peter McCormack: Could you not argue that Bored Apes are a cultural representation of this period of time; something we don't like, but it's still a cultural representation of this period of time?
Junseth: No, I think Rare Pepes are. This has been my point since the beginning, is that none of this is art, this is all response. Generally, art is conversational, predictive, stuff like that, it's advancing of discussion. Rothko and a lot of the modern art, in my opinion, is very interesting, just with regard to the intelligent service involvement in its creation to basically change conversation around what culture was an such. This isn't a change in conversation, it's not an advancement in conversation.
Rare Pepes however was, and the reason that was is because that was predictive. It was a predictive piece of art that said, "This is the stupid shit that people are going to do in the future", and they made it, what, seven years ago, eight years ago, six years ago, I don't know how many; it's many years ago before the NFT started.
This is before causation. Without Rare Pepe, and I'm glad to throw my own hat in the ring, and without Bitcoin uncensored, there is no Rare Pepe. Without Rare Pepe, there is no CryptoKitties; without CryptoKitties, there is no CryptoPunks; without CryptoPunks, there's no Bored Apes; without Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, there is no NFTs.
Peter McCormack: You can't guarantee that.
Junseth: It might have happened in ten years, that's the progression. CryptoKitties is a direct result of what people saw happen in Rare Pepes, and the Rare Pepes stuff was literally -- I mean, there's hilarious interviews with Theo, for example, that you can go and watch that are just fucking funny. And they're funny because he was acutely aware of what we were doing. Rare Pepe was a conversation about how dumb blockchain conversation had gotten, and how dumb it could get. That was the joke.
Peter McCormack: And a Rare Pepe sold last week for 18 Bitcoin.
Junseth: Yeah, so there you go.
Peter McCormack: Look, I've said my point on NFTs, I'm not a fan, I have no intention of buying them, I have no intention of creating them, it's just not a part of my life. But at the same time, I observe on Twitter and Twitter has now enabled people to post their flex as their Avatar, and people are doing it and that's not going away in the short term.
Junseth: I agree with that.
Peter McCormack: So, I think within the metaverse, you can see the NFTs then being an extension of your avatar.
Junseth: But it's just a Beanie Baby, that's all it is.
American HODL: What the fuck is the metaverse?
Junseth: It's just a Beanie Baby. I mean, people buy prestige all the time. The problem with prestige is that it's a moving target. People talk about what the next blockchain that's going to come up is going to be, and they try to jump on these trains. We talked about it last week, HODL, we talked about how early bitcoiners were wondering about Bitcoin bimetallism. Litecoin called itself, "The silver to Bitcoin's gold", and we had a big conversation about, in Bitcoin, whether bimetallism was a thing you needed. Did you need a silver to Bitcoin's gold?
One of my biggest critiques, and one of the reasons that I would call myself a Bitcoin maximalist, is it doesn't make any sense, particularly for a store of value, if what you have to do is maintain your eye on Reddit and find out what the next thing you're going to have -- what is the next thing you're going to have to move your money into in order to maintain your wealth; that doesn't make any sense, that's not a world that anybody actually wants to live in. It's a world that 13-year-olds want to live in, because they want to get rich, and the best way to do that is get on a pump and play.
American HODL: Hedge a new wave, yeah.
Junseth: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I was here in LA a few years ago, and I met the guy, sadly he passed away last year, I think it was, the guy who used to run WAX, and he did a presentation on, they had part of their business where they were talking about buying things within World of Warcraft and things like that, and he talked about a guy who bought this limited edition, 1 of 1 gun, and it was $30,000. I was like, "What the fuck?" He said, "Listen, what do you like? Do you play golf?" I said, "I play golf". He said, "Well, some people play golf, some play tennis. And when they play golf, maybe they buy the most expensive golfclubs. They're not going to make fuck all difference to their game, but they want that". He said, "This guy doesn't play golf, he plays, whatever --"
Junseth: CS:GO, or whatever, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "-- and he wants that gun, he wants everyone to know he's got that gun".
Junseth: But this is my point, is that prestige items are a moving target. So, NFTs might be around a while, but these markets are going to form and collapse and form and collapse. If what you're trying to do is flex, you're going to have to spend a lot of money flexing over the next few years.
Peter McCormack: But maybe some people just will. Or maybe, a bit like the art world, there will be a few unique sets that will retain value. Maybe Bored Apes or Yacht Club, or whatever, I don't even know what they are, but maybe over time, because they were the original badass, expensive entity --
Junseth: But you're just buying receipts.
American HODL: Are CryptoPunks even a flex anymore, because it seems to me more that the Bored Apes are a flex. Justin Bieber owns a Bored Ape and so does Eminem and so does --
Junseth: He owns a receipt for a Bored Ape.
American HODL: Well, of course.
Junseth: I think fundamentally, what's interesting about the NFTs versus a Bitcoin, and I guess we're starting with the NFT conversation here, is that Bitcoin is interesting in that you can have it, but you can't really own it, because you have it if you know the private key. If ten people know the private key, all of them have it, none of them really own it. If you spend it, then you might own the thing that you spent it on, but anyone can have it, it's very difficult to own.
NFTs on the other hand, anyone can own, but nobody can have, because you don't have it, you have the receipt. The image, anyone else can download and take. Unless it's an in-game asset, it makes no sense. And the in-game asset even is a little bit problematic, because what you're doing if you're creating an in-game asset, let's say you make World of Warcraft in-game assets on the blockchain so everyone can see them, what you've effectively done is you've given your competitors a way to steal all of your customers. They can be, "Anybody who comes to our game can start at whatever level they were in, in World of Warcraft, import your assets. A giant Orc Hammer is this in our game".
Peter McCormack: And these games have solved this problem before?
Junseth: They've solved it, it's in a database, they don't need a blockchain.
American HODL: It's centralised, so why do they need to solve it? And like Junseth says, we were talking about this. It's essentially the idea that me and you both have the same NFT, but what does it actually mean to own that NFT? Does it actually mean anything? It doesn't.
Junseth: Well, somebody else is picking the image that the NFT represents, and they can change that image.
American HODL: Right, it's not actually on-chain, it's just a receipt for the image.
Junseth: Correct. And unlike Bitcoin, or even any of these blockchains, whether you're a Bitcoin maximalist or not, it is not the thing itself, and I think that's really important to understand. When you buy a Beanie Baby, they don't hand you the receipt and the receipt has value.
American HODL: They hand you a Beanie Baby.
Junseth: It's the Beanie Baby that has value. With NFTs, we've never had anything like it where a receipt retains value. So, some of these NFTs are conferring rights on people; that's a little different. Again, you don't need an NFT for that, you could have done that in plenty of other ways, it's just contracts. But some of these NFTs are conferring rights on people, fine, but you don't need blockchains for this. And there's no reason to use a blockchain, apart from the fact that you're just trying to jump on a trend. Blockchains are always marketing, always. If it's not being used for cash money, there's no purpose to it other than just marketing.
American HODL: Yeah, and this goes to the point of, what is the point of your crypto blockchain, because we as Bitcoin maximalists, we basically honed in on the idea that there is only one valid proof-of-work blockchain, and that is Bitcoin. And in fact, there's only one valid use of blockchain, and that is to securitise Bitcoin. These are endogenous systems and they only apply to the assets that are within their design.
So, what the fuck are you using your blockchain for, if not to be a shitty protocol that's ultimately centralised in terms of platform maximalism, so that you can get around the limitations of your shitty protocol design? It makes no fucking sense, and yet I have to deal with this bullshit from people who are NFT promoters all day long about what it means to be an NFT. It means nothing.
Junseth: We have had representations of things, rather than the things themselves, that have value, and those are stock certificates. In some sense, those are like NFTs, but the reason that they're valuable is that there's legal infrastructure in place to make them valuable. And the reason that we did that is because those things produce things, they produce value. So, we wanted a way to distribute ownership and we did that.
Peter McCormack: Whereas, a blockchain is a way to route around regulations?
Junseth: Yeah, exactly.
American HODL: It's regulatory arbitrage, yeah.
Junseth: So, the only way that the NFT space sees any actual value going forward is if regulators get their claws inside of it and start building infrastructure around which people own jpegs.
Peter McCormack: Then, decentralisation doesn't matter.
Junseth: Right.
American HODL: It never mattered.
Junseth: But then, not only does it not matter, it's just a hilarious thing to think that Congress will do. If they started regulating NFTs and the selling of jpegs, I would laugh my ass off, it would be so funny. It would be a great waste of time; it would be the moment we knew that the country was lost.
American HODL: This idea of Web3 is that we're going to -- Web1 was this idea that everyone is going to be their own server and we're going to run our own email server and --
Junseth: I fundamentally believe that, by the way. I think the three most important inventions in my lifetime, I've been saying this for a while, Bitcoin, the internet, the Raspberry Pi.
American HODL: I think you're wrong, because what Web1 showed us is that people don't want to be their own server, they don't give a fuck about personal sovereignty.
Junseth: They didn't have the Raspberry Pi.
American HODL: Your aunt doesn't know what the fuck a Raspberry Pi is, or care.
Junseth: It doesn't matter. The single chipboards, or whatever, what are they called? The single PCBs, small-factor PCBs for $30, I mean it's not about whether your aunt knows, it's about whether you can be your own server, it's about whether you can use it for personal privacy and stuff like that. Particularly as Americans, we are obsessed with the idea that the government becomes rotten, and what we do if the government becomes rotten. That's why we're obsessed with guns, although we're in California, which is sad, because I view California as the defenders of the nation against China, so they'll march right in without any. Californians will throw rocks!
Peter McCormack: How far do they get? Arizona?
Junseth: Arizona's about as far as you get, the next state over. Utah!
American HODL: California would be like, "Thank you, we appreciate your multiculturalism".
Junseth: "We love you. Join our clubs!"
American HODL: Yeah, "We love you, you're so great! Did you bring Szechuan sauce?"
Junseth: But we are obsessed with this idea of the government going rotten. And if the government does go rotten, the internet, Bitcoin and the single, small-factor PCBs are the answer, and that's what's amazing to me, is that we have all of those things in place right now, and guns.
Peter McCormack: Is it though that they're just not that cool? I mean, we think it's cool.
American HODL: Well, it's just that people do not want to deal with the hassle of running their own Raspberry Pi node, they just don't.
Peter McCormack: But they don't have to, really.
American HODL: They do, though.
Junseth: They don't want to until they have to, that's the thing.
American HODL: For full self-sovereignty, they do.
Junseth: My friend, this is the Bitcoin argument. Bitcoin doesn't work -- you don't do Bitcoin until you have to come to Bitcoin, this is what always happens. People say, "I don't need Bitcoin", and then --
American HODL: But very few in the western world have to come, that's the problem.
Junseth: But it's a concentric circle of people that don't need it, right, it's smaller and smaller.
American HODL: That's true.
Junseth: The circle expands. First, years ago, what was it, who needed Bitcoin? It was bitcoiners and lowlifes, who decided that they were going to play with money. Money's always been dirty. That's why the Jews started picking it up and doing usury and stuff like that. Not usury, but interest, because the rest of society viewed this as filthy hookers' money. So, you end up with very wealthy people who played with money early, the Rothschilds and stuff like that. And, money's always been considered dirty. Bankers now deal with it and now it's a highfalutin thing.
But Bitcoin comes around and it's new money and it's dirty, just like money has always been considered dirty, so who gets in first? Hookers. Who gets in second? Drug dealers.
American HODL: That's why Peter's here.
Junseth: Who gets in third? Libertarians, no! Who gets in third? You have the neo-Nazis and such that start getting de-banked. And then the government has, in more recent years, been going after Conservatives in general, and the circle of people that need this is growing and growing. And it's the same thing with any of these devices. The internet early on, very few people used, and as it became easier and better, people used it. The Raspberry Pi's the same thing.
A lot of these node interfaces that bitcoiners are using are running on, essentially, a Raspberry Pi, and you don't have to interface with the Raspberry Pi, because someone else did all the installation for you, but you buy it from Casa, or something like that. You basically are buying a Raspberry Pi with a node.
Peter McCormack: Correction, Casa doesn't have a node anymore. They used to, they discontinued that. I mean, just on that point, everyone should run a node, but it's not 100% essential. You can be pretty self-sovereign with a Coldcard.
Junseth: You've got to know why you should run a node before you do. I mean, that's the thing. With Bitcoin, it's hard.
Peter McCormack: Because you're trusting someone else's node.
Junseth: Well, you're trusting someone else's node, but you also don't understand what your node does at first. You don't understand until you're here a while.
American HODL: You don't have the scars, yeah.
Junseth: You don't understand that the node provides you privacy, and that the node provides you this and that. All of these things are abstract concepts in Bitcoin, and you don't understand them until you're here a while and you find out that you need them, because I don't know, maybe you're one of those people that the government doesn't like or you're a stripper or you're labelled a neo-Nazi like, I don't know, who's that kid? Nick Fuentes, who the government has gone after. That's the kind of person that suddenly it's very important that they're running a node and they can receive funds, or whatever the hell they want.
Peter McCormack: I think with nodes, it's going to be similar to cars, in that most people will take their car to a garage and very few actually tinker in the engine themselves and fix problems. I think with Bitcoin, it will be very similar. Most will use someone else's node, they will use a hardware wallet that interfaces --
Junseth: Go use Ledger's node or Trezor's node, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and they will trust that, and it will be more of a fringe idea to run a node.
Junseth: But you can.
Peter McCormack: You can, but you can also figure out how to change the oil in your car or fix certain things, but people just don't.
Junseth: That's man stuff! I agree with you, but to me, a lot of the sovereignty stuff, I'm not big on the notion of sovereignty. A lot of the bitcoiners are kind of obsessed with it, but I'm not super big on the notion of self-sovereignty. I'm a fan of the nation state in many ways. For many years, I was called a cuck in that way.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get that!
Junseth: I don't think that the nation state's the worst thing. I do think though that it's important to prepare for nation state rot, and I believe that these are the best vehicles to do that with.
Peter McCormack: So, would you say, I mean I would say, but it's pretty obvious we're in a phase of nation state rot right now?
Junseth: Yes, absolutely.
Peter McCormack: Pretty obvious. Do you think the NFTs themselves are a reflection of that rot?
American HODL: Yes.
Junseth: Yes, 100%.
American HODL: Look at the book, When Money Dies, by Adam Ferguson.
Peter McCormack: Read it.
American HODL: It's the same thing. It's like, when a currency is circling the drain, the people that are under that currency will speculate on the nation's dogshit, essentially.
Junseth: That's why Ethereum's where all the NFTs are.
Peter McCormack: That's not true. Some are on Solana.
Junseth: Just kidding!
American HODL: It's all the same shit. Solana's just dogshit under a different name.
Junseth: I think the current generation is suffering from a nihilistic attitude that is highly problematic, and in them is conferring this idea that what they need to do is put their money into these high-risk assets and hope and pray that they get rich. It's sort of an accelerationism that they've adopted in their thinking, and it's this notion that all of the juice has been squeezed before they got here, and that they're just skimming, they're licking the dead testicular skin that's left over.
American HODL: I want to read this quote real quick that I saw on WallStreetBets just a couple of days ago. This guy, YOLOd basically $500,000 that hit refinance on his home mortgage into options expiry on Tesla's earnings calls. And when called on it, he basically lost everything, because he was wrong on his bet. When called on it, people said, "You have that much money, but you still played a short expiry, you literally deserve it".
He said, "I didn't have that much money, I refinanced my house, which has appreciated a lot the last couple of years, and basically nothing changes in my life. I still have my house, my job, my income, I just will probably never be able to retire. This risk had two outcomes: I either retire and live my best life; or my life stays the same. It sucks to take the sell, but at the end of the day I won't be affected for many years. By the time that every cell in my body will have been replaced and I will be a completely different person anyway".
Peter McCormack: Jeff Booth would have an answer for that.
American HODL: It's amazing.
Junseth: And it's a great lie, because this generation was born into an America where you could afford a house if you worked. You couldn't afford a house at 23. You could have afforded a very small house, which is what your parents bought. Your parents bought a 900-square-foot house. Kids don't want a 900-square-foot house, they want a 3,000-square-foot house.
Peter McCormack: Up here.
Junseth: Yeah, up here in Malibu.
Peter McCormack: Making TikTok videos!
Junseth: Yes. They're looking at homes, and they're going, "I'll never afford what my parents had".
American HODL: The house we're in cost $5 million, by the way.
Junseth: Yeah. If they bought the house their parents bought, they could afford it. The idea that college is going up in price, you look at the average amount people actually pay for college, it's something like $15,000 a year. It's not the $45,000 or $50,000 that the sticker price is. People get scholarships a lot of times, these colleges subsidise the cost, and yet we pretend the sticker price is the amount.
These are the things that people talk about, they chart these out. They say, "Look at the sticker price of college. It's so much higher than it used to be", but these subsidies are available. And this entire generation's been told that they're never going to be able to afford these things, and the result is they've developed nihilism, even though it's just a lie, it's a literal lie.
Peter McCormack: They can rent from BlackRock.
Junseth: They could rent from BlackRock which, by the way, most of them would be better off doing.
American HODL: The nihilism causes them to do things such as investing in Bored Apes Yacht Club rather than putting that money in --
Junseth: "Investing".
American HODL: Yeah, "investing", rather than putting that money on their future home, or in an equities portfolio, or in Bitcoin, or in anything that was stable and long term.
Junseth: Tether!
American HODL: Yeah! But it prevents them from doing such, because they believe essentially that the consensus is a lie. And they're not that wrong about that, the consensus is sort of a lie. And they also believe that the only way to get ahead is to YOLO their entire stack onto some ridiculous bet.
Junseth: That is true, they're all putting 100% of their bet on black, and they do this all their life.
American HODL: Yes, absolutely.
Junseth: When they're 14, they put 100% of their stack on black, when they're 20, they put 100% of their stack on black. It's a belief in the sort of punctuated equilibrium of investment theory, where you get as much of a stack as you can, put it all on black, hope for the best. You get as much of a stack, you lose it, you get as much of a stack, again you put it all on black. And, sometimes with NFTs, it works out, because you put it all on Bored Apes and they shoot to the moon, and now you're rich.
Peter McCormack: But that only happens for very few.
American HODL: Very, very rarely.
Junseth: 1 in 1,000 of these kids, or 1 in 10,000 of these kids.
American HODL: And you had to have some insider info on what was going to occur.
Junseth: But every kid knows someone who that happened to, and that to them, they've never met anybody who got rich by putting their money in indexes, because those people are quiet.
American HODL: And also, one of the things we were talking about was that, they don't understand Bitcoin from first principles, so thusly they don't understand NFTs from first principles and they go, "Well, they're the same. I don't understand Bitcoin, I don't understand NFTs, both of them seem to have some value".
Junseth: We were talking about that yesterday. There's a simplicity of elegance in crypto -- well, not crypto generally, but Bitcoin in particular, this elegance that Bitcoin is; it's a simple, simple machine. The hashing algorithm is useless for all things except for hashing; that's the only thing it's good for. It's good for being provided as a receipt for energy that you spent.
Peter McCormack: The monetary policy has two rules.
Junseth: Two rules. Everything is super easy, everything. And yet, combined together, Bitcoin creates this network and this system that is so hard to understand that you have to be a rocket scientist.
American HODL: Well, we were talking about this. It's so simple that people actually seek complexity.
Junseth: They want it to be more complex.
American HODL: They want it to be complex.
Junseth: Because they don't want to believe that if it's simple, they wouldn't be able to understand it. So, Bitcoin is this thing that's super-easy to understand, we understand fundamentally what it is, but which no one believes that it could be so simple to do what it does. And, you have these NFTs, which are utterly incomprehensible, they're in these platforms, like for example OpenSea, they're off of the chain, which doesn't seem to make a difference to these people, because they don't know what that actually means.
Even more than that, if you go in deeper, being on-chain wouldn't even change the nature of them, that wouldn't actually make it better, because you still wouldn't own the thing, other people could still download the thing.
Peter McCormack: Right click.
Junseth: Yeah, you right click, exactly. So, putting it on the chain doesn't make it more secure. In spite of it, these NFTs are extremely non-complex, but people want to view complexity, because they don't understand what's going on. Then, when they're explained what's going on, they make excuses for it and they now are like, "Consensus will give my Bored Ape value. The government will step in and enforce these things".
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, "If I were Christie's and I saw a need for this in the blockchain space, I would start making an NFT database, where you can upload your art for a cost and they will hold it, and it's the Christie's NFT database.
American HODL: And this is a perfect example. Why does OpenSea even bother with the air of decentralisation, when they could just be much better, much faster, much more efficient in a totally centralised fashion?
Junseth: I'll go one further. If I were Christie's and I did that, I would then attach copyright to these things, and make sure to register copyrights. I would do that as a service for these NFT central providers.
American HODL: Absolutely.
Junseth: Then I would start suing anybody who's violating the copyrights on behalf of the artist.
American HODL: That would be part of your thing as Christie's, yeah.
Peter McCormack: And Getty Images have proved that's fairly trivial to do.
American HODL: Easy, it's very easy to do.
Peter McCormack: It's a very simple algorithm to check.
American HODL: Being a copyright troll is extremely easy to do.
Junseth: There's no such thing as a copyright troll.
American HODL: There is, but being a copyright troll is extremely easy to do.
Peter McCormack: Is it a copyright troll, or is it copyright enforcement?
American HODL: What Junseth is saying is it's legitimate your copyright, but because the internet has a different vantage point on IP, they call it a copyright troll, but there is actually no such thing as a copyright troll, it's your copyright.
Peter McCormack: It's copyright enforcement.
American HODL: You own the intellectual property for 20 years, you own it.
Junseth: But this, to me, would be the rational way to do NFTs, and they don't want to do that because for some reason, blockchain has to be involved, and that's because they want it to be complex.
Peter McCormack: But no, it's to give purpose to the blockchains.
Junseth: Yeah, Ethereum blockchain in particular is a problem looking for a solution, or is a solution looking for a problem, and they keep developing these ERC protocols and whatnot, in order to basically provide solutions for things that nobody actually wants. And maybe they do want them ultimately, but things that are not useful for a blockchain to do.
American HODL: Well, that's how Ethereum gets it pump.
Junseth: That's what happens every single time.
American HODL: That's how it gets its pump, yeah.
Junseth: DeFi is similar. DeFi has got the same sorts of problems. Ethereum allows you to do these things on blockchain, and DeFi is going to have probably the first ever spectacular collapse that we've ever seen in the space, because it's all reliant on these stablecoins which, if they became unpegged for any reason, and I have to give Brad Mills credit for this line of argumentation, if they were to become unpegged, which there's a thousand reasons they could become unpegged, that whole thing collapses, and it collapses quick.
There's no government regulation watching it, there's no way that these children who are building it understand how much they should have on deposit to make sure that these things don't happen, there's no insurance. They're fucked, and it's going to hurt a lot of people. And that's the whole space right now, is that people are just piling into these things because they don't perceive the risk that's involved, or with NFTs they don't perceive the idiocy of what they're claiming these things are and do.
Peter McCormack: Should we care though; or, why should we care?
Junseth: We shouldn't.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but HODL will go on Clubhouse for 27 hours a day and, do you feel a moral duty to teach people?
American HODL: Yeah, I do feel a moral duty to tell people what's actually going on, because it's an obfuscation protocol, the entire Ethereum thing, and I know that these people don't understand, they haven't done the first principles research, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they're willing to swallow any line of bullshit hook, line and sinker. So, yeah, I do feel a moral obligation to tell them that they're fucking stupid and they need to fucking cut it out. I don't know, man, to some degree I'm sure Junseth will say, "They need to just get rekt and they'll learn on their own accord".
Junseth: Have a Pokémon game reset.
American HODL: Yeah, and that's true too, because people aren't going to listen to you; but I feel bad morally if I don't tell them what's happening.
Junseth: For me, the frustration is that with every single pump, you have a bunch of newcomers. HODL, how many pumps have you had?
American HODL: Two.
Junseth: That's a very Bitcoin question, "How many pumps have you had?"!
Peter McCormack: Three.
Junseth: Three, okay.
American HODL: I can get it down to three pumps, but I'm just saying --
Junseth: A three-pump maximalist and a two-pump maximalist; that's the same thing.
Peter McCormack: My first one didn't count too much. I didn't really earn Bitcoin, I was just using it on the Silk Road.
American HODL: Yeah, I've had two.
Junseth: That's fine, it's about community. If you're in the community and you start seeing things.
Peter McCormack: All right, three then. So, 2017 was my first one.
Junseth: So, I think about the number of pumps that I've been in. I've lost count at this point, maybe five or six.
American HODL: Wait, did you own Bitcoin in 2013?
Peter McCormack: So, what I was doing, I was buying Bitcoin --
American HODL: You don't count, that's two, that's two for you. I was here in 2013.
Peter McCormack: No, bear with me, you didn't let me finish. 2013, I was buying Bitcoin to use the Silk Road, but then when the price started going up, I was buying Bitcoin CFDs on Plus500, so I was in the pump.
American HODL: What do you have that as?
Junseth: I don't know, it's what you think.
Peter McCormack: Dude, just because I've got more pumps than you!
Junseth: It takes more pumps for him.
Peter McCormack: My pump's bigger than your pump.
American HODL: Yeah, can you access that Opendime?
Peter McCormack: I have fucking no idea what to do with it.
Junseth: So, I mean I don't know how many pumps I've been in, I don't know what counts as a pump in the early days, there was a lot. But what's funny is, every time this thing pumps, you get a million, billion new people coming in, and all of them run through exactly the same fucking scams again and again and again. And they get here and they pretend that they know what they're talking about, and it's literally a manifestation of, "I just heard about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it".
American HODL: Which is Junseth's meme, he created that.
Junseth: I should NFT that!
Peter McCormack: You should.
American HODL: It's worth several million.
Peter McCormack: But there are people who stay in the altcoin game multiple pumps.
American HODL: Fuck those people.
Peter McCormack: There are.
Junseth: Yes, they do.
Peter McCormack: There are those people, and also what I feel like is that, the altcoin, ethernet, Solana community, NFTs, DAO people, I find that that grows exponentially bigger per cycle pump than the Bitcoin community.
American HODL: That's not true, no.
Peter McCormack: I feel like it is.
American HODL: Well, what you feel like is wrong. The Bitcoin community dwarfs the shitcoin community, and it remains so still to this day.
Peter McCormack: But how do you measure it?
American HODL: We are still bigger than the shitcoin community.
Peter McCormack: But how do you measure it?
Junseth: I don't think it matters.
American HODL: Yeah, but whatever. Peter's saying that the shitcoin community pumps harder than the Bitcoin community. As compared to what?
Junseth: The reason is simple. Every time you have a pump, you have new people come in, and there's a huge number of people. And the first question they're going to ask is, "How do I get rich?"
Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.
Junseth: And the answer that you're going to get from a majority of places is, "Go into shitcoins".
American HODL: There are so many people who want to turn $8,000 into $40,000; I mean, there are so many people that want that.
Junseth: The promise here isn't turning $8,000 into $40,000. The promise here is turning $8,000 into $100 million, and it's a very different set of promises.
American HODL: But that doesn't happen.
Junseth: We all know people that have done that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we do.
American HODL: Well, okay, we all know people that have done that because we've been around for a long time, but it's very rare.
Peter McCormack: It's like five or ten people.
Junseth: That's what they think they're doing.
American HODL: They may be doing that, but what they're actually doing is $8,000 into $40,000; that's what they're actually doing.
Junseth: Sometimes.
American HODL: Yeah, and what I'm saying, what I'm talking is $8,000 into $8 million, which is a different game, and that's the Bitcoin game, which is several orders of magnitude higher, but it takes longer; it's not going to be as quick of a game, do you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: I know what you mean.
American HODL: So, if you want to turn $8,000 into $40,000, I don't know what to do with you. If your grand ambition in life is to get an M3 BMW, I just don't know where to put you.
Peter McCormack: I think what it is, it's whatever number they start with, they want to get to $1 million. Whether they start with $10, $5, $50, they want to get to $1 million.
American HODL: Fine, everybody wants to be a millionaire.
Peter McCormack: They want to get to $1 million.
American HODL: Once you get to $1 million though, it doesn't fucking matter, nothing matters.
Peter McCormack: Well, you know that, I know that.
American HODL: Everybody here at this table's a millionaire, right? I just gave you $20,000, I think that bumped you over the top! But you're a millionaire now.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what I could do with mine, because I'm a millionaire.
American HODL: You've got to be careful with that, there's $20,000 there!
Junseth: Put it in the fridge. The next Airbnb guest who stays here is going to be very, very happy!
American HODL: But the point is not turning your $1 million into $2 million, the point is about turning your million into $100 million; that's what Bitcoin's about.
Junseth: I don't actually think that's the thought the I'm here for, honestly. I'm all for getting rich.
American HODL: Well, yeah, I would agree with you, I'm not here for that either; but what I'm saying is that's the --
Junseth: I'm not going to argue that I have any altruistic motive.
American HODL: No, we're all here for our own accord.
Peter McCormack: No, I'm sorry, I'm not --
American HODL: Shut the fuck up, you're here for yourself.
Peter McCormack: I'm from Europe, we're socialists.
American HODL: Everyone's here for themselves, you're here for yourself. This Airbnb that we're in in Malibu is worth $4.6 million. You could have easily gone to any random --
Junseth: By the end of the show, it's going to be $3.6 million!
Peter McCormack: But I care about my guests.
American HODL: He could have easily gone to any fucking conference centre in any shitty LAX hotel room.
Peter McCormack: But I want a nice experience for my guests.
American HODL: The point is, you're here for yourself too, everyone's here for themselves.
Peter McCormack: A certain amount, but not entirely.
Junseth: I don't know why people are here, everyone's here for a different reason.
American HODL: You're here for yourself, everyone's here for themselves.
Junseth: There are people who are here because they're satisfying a libertarian niche, there's hookers who needed Bitcoin, there's people who started podcasts and throughout trying to finance, there's the questions, and in finding it found Bitcoin. There's people like me who are extremely -- who started as anarchists, and maybe came around and changed our political positions and had to change our reasons for being here.
American HODL: Right, same.
Junseth: But I'm not going to feign altruism. What was the original part of this?
Peter McCormack: Does the metaverse exist?!
Junseth: Well, not that part, we're far from there right now.
Peter McCormack: No, my point was, should we care and why care?
Junseth: Well, I don't want people to lose money. I think in order for people to understand that they are not smart, they are not knowledgeable, they have to do it. I think you're correct, Peter, that people want to get to $1 million. Bitcoin feels like this Hail Mary, crypto feels like a Hail Mary of sorts.
American HODL: By the way, do you know that 9% of the US is millionaires now?
Junseth: I thought it was 8%. Did it change that much by today?
American HODL: I'm pretty sure it's 9%.
Peter McCormack: It will be 10% by the end of this interview.
American HODL: Anyway, the point is, 9% of the US population are millionaires, so it's not that unattainable anymore.
Peter McCormack: The 2018 Crash, going from a position of a crypto millionaire, people talk about being paper millionaires; essentially a crypto millionaire to being close to broke was, in hindsight, one of the best things that's happened to me. So, maybe it's all part of the game theory, that you go and you try and get rich, you get rekt, and then you learn from that, you build those foundations to protect yourself financially.
Junseth: I think that giving an 18-year-old $1 million and letting them burn through it would be the best lesson that you could buy for an 18-year-old.
Peter McCormack: I don't know, you say that. I think going from zero to $1 million and back down is a far better lesson.
Junseth: But that's what an 18-year-old would be doing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but they're not really, because if you can give them $1 million, they're already living a good life.
American HODL: Whether it's $1 million or whether it's $50,000 or whether it's $100,000, whatever it is, if you're speculating on the NFT market or the shitcoin market or the DeFi market or whatever, and you're in on it, you're going to make and lose that amount of money, straight up. So, you'll either learn your lesson or you don't. It happened to me. I mean, I was gambling on penny stocks and I lost fucking $80,000, which at the time was all the money in the world, and it taught me my lesson, it really did. But for most people, it does not.
Peter McCormack: But back to the point, why do we care?
American HODL: We don't.
Peter McCormack: Look, I'll put it to you, because I still don't know your political persuasion, but you get called a cuck, you admit you're a fan of the state, or you agree with the state, or whatever --
Junseth: I'm not a fan of the state, I just think that the state is a role.
American HODL: He loves the state.
Peter McCormack: I'm the same. Reluctantly, I think it's better than --
Junseth: I think the state is probably too big. I care a lot about fiscal policy more than anything.
Peter McCormack: Therefore, do you agree that certain things should be regulated?
Junseth: Yeah, 100%.
Peter McCormack: So, do you think that this is something that should be regulated?
Junseth: I think it's inevitable.
Peter McCormack: No, that's a completely different answer.
Junseth: I don't live in the world of shitcoins. I think that there are going to be things that are going to be regulated and this is one of them. I mean, should it be regulated? It's going to be, then yes, I guess.
American HODL: If you're talking about, "Is Gary Gensler from the SEC going to come in and clean up all the illegal securities?" the answer is, fuck yes. I mean, have you been paying attention or not?
Peter McCormack: But are you glad about that?
Junseth: I'm ambivalent.
American HODL: Here's the thing. This ideological bullshit about, "What do you want to happen? Do you want everybody to fight it out in the free markets?" Dude, I don't know. If we lived in my perfect paradise, Bitcoin would already been $100 million a coin, and you all would be dead. So, I don't have a magic wand, I can't just wave my magic wand and make things happen.
Peter McCormack: You only want me dead because I keep taking your money off you!
American HODL: If I could, I would do that, but I can't. So, we live in the real world, in which the SEC has a bent against the majority of ICOs and DeFi.
Junseth: I'm strongly ambivalent to the regulation. I would like to see it be regulated well. I think they're going to make a lot of really dumb missteps. I view the United States right now as being desperate for money. It's becoming clearer and clearer that they're desperate for money, and I think they view Bitcoin as a giant pool of money that they can get. So, I think that's a dangerous mentality for a government to begin thinking that that is theirs, and I do think that there's a strong possibility they overregulate, or problematically regulate the space. But as to whether the regulation exists, I'm fairly ambivalent.
Peter McCormack: Do you think Bitcoin can solve the US fiscal position?
American HODL: No, no.
Junseth: Do I think it could solve…? Like, if the United States put money in Bitcoin?
Peter McCormack: Adopted it.
Junseth: I think it would have to be a slow process.
American HODL: I think the answer is no.
Junseth: The way that I view money nowadays, and I've been using this analogy for a while, is that we've had money as a theory for centuries. We've known that there's this thing out there that's a great, perfect medium of exchange, and we've had things that are approximate to that thing, that have a lot of the features of the thing: gold, silver, grain, shells, whatever the hell it was; and that when Satoshi solved the Byzantine Generals Problem, it was like someone putting a hole in the ground and oil popping out, but instead of oil it was this orange coin.
Peter McCormack: Orange goo.
Junseth: Yeah, this orange goo, this primordial orange goo. And we looked at it, and those who know what money is looked at it and said, "That's money, holy shit", and it's the first time we've ever seen real money. But I think right now, what's going on is Bitcoin is in the process of monetising, and I think it's probably a bad time for any countries to do things like what El Salvador is doing. I think that's a high-risk bet, and it's going to be a really, really good bet on some days, and other days it's going to be the kind of bet that's going to get a president ousted or assassinated.
Peter McCormack: It's a better bet for the country than it is the president who makes the decision.
Junseth: Probably, yeah.
American HODL: Yeah.
Junseth: It's a popular and unpopular decision, depending on where Bitcoin is. It's a highly volatile asset.
American HODL: Yeah, it's a very radical thing to do.
Junseth: But you do it very slow. If you want to do it, you put 0.5% in, 1%.
Peter McCormack: But you could argue Bukele's doing it in the right way, because they haven't put too much in.
American HODL: Kudos to Bukele, but what Junseth is saying is accurate. The political risk is astounding, and it could come to bite you in the ass at any time.
Junseth: But I think countries know this, and they're realising at some point, this is going to be a bit of a "who has the most Bitcoin" war. And I think people don't realise that part of the holdings of Bitcoin in any country are the number of people that actually hold it. And as a national security risk, I think that in America what they should be encouraging is people to hold it, and people to find creative ways to mine, and whatnot, in the US.
Peter McCormack: And a friendly environment to live, so people don't leave.
Junseth: In America, we don't have the government hold all the guns; we, as Americans hold the guns.
Peter McCormack: But that's not to defend against invaders, it's to defend against a tyrannical regime.
Junseth: No, that's what they tell you. It's for whatever reason we need the guns. If we need the guns to defend against our own government, okay. We hope we never have to do that; but if we need the guns to defend American soil, I mean there's I don't know how many -- probably 4 billion guns in the United States.
American HODL: I mean, would you want to be China and try and take western Appalachia? You are fucked, you're going to get raped, hardcore.
Peter McCormack: I had a conversation yesterday with Vijay Boyapati, and we talked about post-democracy, that the US may balkanise at one point, and he sees that Bitcoin leads to an inevitable breakdown of the state and you end up with city states. One question I put at him is, if it happened in the US, then as a global super-power, it's lost its position against, say, Russia and China. Then does the US, as a geography, become an easier target for these countries to exert influence?
Junseth: Yes. Well, not just to exert influence, but to take over.
Peter McCormack: Well, yes, to influence, to take over, to annex, whatever. But then, as a war, does that then become very similar to the US invading Vietnam, in that they have all the guns and the weapons and the might and the military, but the US ends up having a guerrilla army that's hard to defeat?
American HODL: A ground war. If the US ever tried to go to war with its citizens, it would be a ground war. So, the idea that the US would use nukes, or whatever, F-22 Raptors on its citizenry is stupid. It would obviously be a ground war a la Vietnam, and the people would win.
Peter McCormack: Ground and air.
American HODL: No, the people would win, because they understand the territory better; the same way the Vietnamese understood the territory better.
Junseth: I really enjoy what the truckers are doing this week, because I said this to my wife, I said this probably eight months ago, "I don't think the United States will ever progress to full civil war, because", I feel very prescient right now, but I said, "because the truckers will just stop delivering to cities, and they'll realise that they're dependent on truckers". So, watching this happening in Ottawa, she looked at me, she ran out of the room when she found out, she said, "Oh my God, Junseth, I can't believe it, you were right!" and I was like, "Yeah. Once the truckers understand that they have all the power, I think there's an inevitability to the fact that we don't balkanise.
Peter McCormack: Well, there's one potential flaw in that theory, it's Elon Musk and his automated trucks.
American HODL: Do you think Elon Musk is on the side of the tyrannical governments?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it doesn't have to be Elon Musk. I'm really talking about self-driving trucks.
Junseth: We're going to be 50 years from that.
Peter McCormack: No way.
American HODL: You have the last-mile issue that is trucking in general, the last mile is trucking.
Junseth: But it's not just the last-mile issue. The truckers themselves are in unions. The union will guard against that sort of progress.
Peter McCormack: I hope so.
Junseth: Yeah, me too.
Peter McCormack: I'm a unions fan.
Junseth: I think that is probably the biggest defender, basically the biggest stopgap between the United States and falling into war. I think that there's going to be something that happens before that, such as the truckers stop delivering to cities for two days, and cities just go, "Fuck, we are dependent on --" because that's right now what has to happen, and it's very clear. Anyone who's listening who's a leftie is going to strongly disagree with this, but the left is living in a delusion, and they believe that they are the majority, and they are in a very concentrated spot in the United States.
American HODL: The Clinton Archipelago.
Peter McCormack: The coastal elites.
Junseth: Yeah. They're not farming, they're living in cities. Everyone surrounding them, all the areas surrounding them are red.
American HODL: What happens when the trucks stop bringing shit to your city, that's the point.
Peter McCormack: I've followed part of what's happening in Ottawa, but what's the impact been on deliveries? Are they seeing issues now?
Junseth: I don't know yet.
Peter McCormack: I'd want to know that.
Junseth: I think that we might find that out in a week or two.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Right now, it's mainly a headline political issue, and we don't know what's happening on the ground in Ottawa.
Junseth: I think what's happening is that, and not to meander too much on this convo, but I think what's happening is the truckers in Canada are inspiring global movements right now.
American HODL: Yeah. There's a US envoy on its way.
Junseth: I don't think that we're going to just watch Canada experience shorts. I think that the whole world's trucking industry is about to be like, "We want out of this thing".
American HODL: It's also, the coastal elite's been putting down the truckers for a long time. That's what the whole learn to code thing was about.
Junseth: It was the miners, I think. The same thing, yeah.
American HODL: Same thing, it's blue-collar workers. It's like, "Hey, you doofuses, why don't you go learn to code?" and when the journalists started losing their jobs, the blue-collars workers, the "doofuses" were telling the journalists, "Hey, why don't you go fucking learn to code?", and they were being banned off Twitter for the same sentiment. So, they were basically telling them, "You think you can do what I do?"
Peter McCormack: Go learn to drive.
American HODL: "Go do it, show me".
Peter McCormack: So, do you see these as the modern day revolution, a non-violent revolution?
Junseth: I see this as the bulwark against balkanisation. I think that the trucking industry is the bulwark against the possibility that the United States sees the worst of what could come from these incredibly divisive times we're living through.
American HODL: It's a good point.
Junseth: And I think that what was necessary for my prediction to come true was that the truckers had to realise it, and that just happened. So, I am of the official opinion now that the United States cannot fall into civil war, because the truckers have figured out that they have all the power. So, does Bitcoin balkanise the United States? I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is because geographically, it would be a disaster, if California were left to its own devices and given away to China.
American HODL: There's a Jordan Peterson quote where he basically says, "You want to say that these men are the patriarchy or they're misogynistic, or whatever, and they're doing impossible things. They're under the roads, repairing the roads, they're up on the electrical grid repairing the electrical grid. They're doing impossible things all day long for faint praise. What happens if these men, these truckers, or the people who repair the electrical grid decide, 'Hey, fuck you, I've had enough'?"
Junseth: I always thought it would be funny to write a play about what happens if men decide to stop going to work. It's like, one day, the next day there's nuclear fallout and everything else, the sewage system collapses, bridges go out!
American HODL: Truly, your privileged existence where you get on your fucking smartphone and you tweet the hot take of the day, and you lambast the latest political opinion, it's all predicated on somebody crawling down on the muck in the sewer and making sure that the shit runs appropriately.
Junseth: Let me circle this back.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, we need to get Bitcoin in these people's hands. And I know what's happening is happening in Canada, because GoFundMe switched off the tap with the, what $5 million, $7 million that was raised, and now there's people raising Bitcoin. We were interviewing the guy in the trucker movement who switched the funding to Bitcoin, and we need to get Bitcoin in these people's hands.
American HODL: Yeah, it's fantastic.
Junseth: I think that's great. Let me circle it back to the metaverse stuff.
American HODL: They should have their own labour held in their hands, that's the point.
Junseth: Let me circle it back to the metaverse stuff. I think that this actually does strongly relate, because what it shows is that the world as a whole is real. We live in meatspace, we don't live in a fake reality that's designed for us by Mark Zuckerberg. And the consequences of the real world are significant. When you talk about balkanisation, or whatever the case is, the actual side effects, the consequences, are not going to happen in a metaverse, they're going to happen here in real life.
It does scare me a little bit to think of a nihilistic generation being introduced to the conception that they wake up every morning and put on a computer hat, and that that is the way that you live your life, that is the way that you become a man or a woman, or a transgender man or a transgender woman, that you become your full person in this digitised meatspace, and anybody who doesn't go in there is a rube who is living in a Model T.
Peter McCormack: Well, you can take it back to proof of work, right. For most people, not everyone, for most people in the world to make it, they have to work hard.
Junseth: You want an anchor in the real world, like proof of work, yes.
American HODL: Most people have got to make the Matrix 1 instead of the Matrix Resurrections.
Junseth: I think it's a scare point that's going to be lost, Peter.
Peter McCormack: But let me come back to it, let me be very clear. It's a trucker who's however many hours on the road, away from their family, working hard and coming back to them. It's, I don't know, the guy out in the morning laying the road, it's the guy who wants to be a surf champion who gets up at every morning at 6.00am and goes out and rides the waves, it's a podcaster travelling the world away from his kids. Everybody outside of a few lucky people have to really work. But if you can go into this space, and suddenly you don't have to work; you want to be that champion surfer, you can jump on it?
Junseth: You've done a bunch of podcasts right now, you've done a bunch. What's the difference between meeting someone online versus someone in real life?
Peter McCormack: Me and Danny were talking about this yesterday. Firstly, we spend a lot of money to put on this show, because Danny flies in from Australia --
American HODL: Doesn't look like it!
Peter McCormack: -- Jeremy flies in, we fly our guests in, we buy the equipment, we set it up. We spend the money on this to put on a good production. We could save all that money and I can go on Zoom, and I could do the exact, not the exact, that's the point; I can record a show, it will get published and the ads will sell. But we do it like this, because the quality is infinitely better.
Junseth: You can know that if you've done a podcast, and that's the thing. People don't understand. There's a giant problem with lag times; the conversation doesn't flow as well. There's all sorts of things that happen that you can't solve. These are theoretically physically impossible to solve. There's this great show, Avenue 5, I don't' know if you've seen it, it's on HBO Max, and it's about a tour ship that goes off, like a cruise ship, into space.
There's this great bit where they're meeting, they're saying hello to these kids on Earth who are at the main area where they launched them, and on the ship they go, "Hello!" and everyone on the ship's excited. Then, 45 seconds later, they get the message back at headquarters. Every time she asks a question, it's like a minute and a half to go back and forth. These are physics issues, you can't solve those, and that's one of many that crops up in a fake world. It trains your mind, it trains your body, it trains everything about you to behave differently.
So, I think that the idea that people are going to start spending a lot of time online rather than in meatspace, it becomes a giant problem. You have an entire group of people that are going to be basically developing in a world of conversation, developing in a world of relationships that are not rooted in real life.
American HODL: We already have these people, they're called Gen Z.
Junseth: But this is the second iteration.
Peter McCormack: A real conversation has to be happening around the consequences, because we didn't know the consequences of social media when it first came, now we understand the consequences of social media. I have a daughter.
Junseth: Do we know?
Peter McCormack: Yes, we know a lot of them.
American HODL: Some of them.
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is, when Facebook first arrived and we were chucking sheep at each other, it was all fun, we didn't know what was coming. Now we're in a place where young girls who use Instagram are --
American HODL: Suicidal, yeah.
Peter McCormack: There's a percentage chance they are, and I'm living this with a daughter who's not allowed on Instagram, she doesn't know why, she is allowed TikTok, but there are issues we have to deal with, conversations we have to have. And there's that peer pressure that she needs to be on it because her friends are on it. When the metaverse comes on and the kids are going in, you're saying, "You can't go in there", "But all my friends…", "Okay, we'll let you go in there". We don't fully know the consequences of that.
Junseth: We ran the experiment already.
Peter McCormack: Not fully.
Junseth: We did Second Life. We know how this goes.
American HODL: It's not at scale.
Junseth: It absolutely was. It was pretty scaled back when it started, there were a lot of people on it.
American HODL: Everybody that was on Second Life was a loser.
Junseth: We're going to see all of the exact same news articles come out about this. When Second Life came out it was, "There's a college student who's making $100,000 a year making swords in Second Life. There's a college student who's selling land in Second Life for $100,000". There were these stories in Second Life of people going in and doing this stuff.
It's going to be the same thing in the metaverse. You're going to have more people now jump in, and it's going to last two or three years, it's going to revert to sex and gambling, and then it's going to become a thing of the past and people are going to talk about, "Remember when we were in the metaverse and how cool that was?" and then we'll have to wait another generation.
Peter McCormack: I'm not so sure.
Junseth: And then, the next generation's going to do the same fucking thing.
Peter McCormack: I'll tell you why I'm not so sure, because like you, I've got an Oculus and I use it for certain things.
Junseth: Masturbating mostly, right? That's what I use it for!
American HODL: Have you done the VR porn though?
Junseth: Have you done the porn on it?
Peter McCormack: No, I've seen it once.
American HODL: That's fucking lies, you definitely did it.
Peter McCormack: No, I've seen it once.
American HODL: What was his name?!
Junseth: Yeah, what was his name?! I'm in the metaverse right now.
Peter McCormack: My Oculus is used by my kids, and there's no way I'm going to be watching porn in the Oculus when my kids use it.
American HODL: Listen, I've totally done VR porn, I'll admit it. It's weird, it feels like the girl loves you. It's very strange. Junseth's doing it right now, look at him, he's doing it!
Peter McCormack: The point I'm trying to get to, there's the boxing game. You've played the boxing game?
American HODL: Yes, I have.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so the boxing game for me, I fucking love it. I get in there and I feel like I'm in the boxing ring, and it's a good workout and it's real and it's cool. Things like that are only going to grow and I'm going to want to keep using them. I don't see a scenario where I get bored of that, and I think for kids, there's going to be even better experiences.
American HODL: It's not sticky though. Is it sticky for you? Do you feel like -- I have a couple of them, I have the one Junseth's wearing, and I have the newer one, or whatever.
Peter McCormack: I've got the original version.
American HODL: Yeah, is it sticky to you, because it's not sticky to me, I don't want to put it on all the time?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but not often, it's once or twice a week, but I like it.
American HODL: Not even that for me, it's occasionally.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but with kids, they go on fucking Roblox, or whatever it is, and they sit on there all day and buy their giraffe animal to ride around. You put them in here and they're with their friends and they can go on rollercoasters and whatever they're doing. I sound like an old person.
American HODL: You do.
Junseth: It's so much cheaper.
American HODL: They go to the virtual arcades.
Peter McCormack: What we don't know are the unintended consequences of this, the impact. Is the real world going to come out so shit and depressing, like they hate the real world?
Junseth: I think it's actually worse. It's not whether the world is depressing and sad and boring, it's about the dump of adrenaline you get when you're playing these things that are designed around rewards.
American HODL: The dopamine, yeah.
Junseth: Yeah, these kids are going into places that are literally designed as reward engines, and then they enter the real world, and the real world is not designed like that, unless you build your own version of it. You've done this, Peter, you're building that. The more podcasts you do, the more money you make, the more interesting people you get, the more interesting you are, the more money you make. You've designed a world such that there's a reward mechanism for your behaviour.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I could massively exploit that further
Junseth: Absolutely. But the point isn't whether you could exploit it further, the point is that the kids are going to be put into a world where there is just that reward mechanism, and then they're going to have to live in the real world where that reward mechanism is literally self-created.
American HODL: Most people are nobodies, and that's the cross they bear, is that they don't exist. So, they look at somebody who does exist, like yourself, somebody with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, and they think, "That is what I should aspire to be", and they seek to become you and then they become you and they realise it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, or whatever.
Junseth: No one wants to be Peter!
American HODL: No, I mean it's stupid to have 100,000 Twitter followers, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't confer value to your life.
Junseth: Yeah, it's dumb.
American HODL: But if you're a nobody and nobody knows you exist, you think to yourself, "Well, that would be great, that would be highly desirable, I should do that".
Junseth: There is a weird cultural -- I was saying this earlier. It's very easy now to be famous.
American HODL: It's extremely easy.
Junseth: It's extremely easy to be rich. It's very difficult to be rich because you're famous, and it's very difficult to be famous because you're rich.
Peter McCormack: That's a brilliant quote.
Junseth: Thank you.
American HODL: We're very close to Calabasas where the Kardashians are.
Junseth: We're in a world now where everyone is striving for fame, they're not striving for riches, and there used to be a great satisfaction in --
Peter McCormack: Well, no, they are striving for both. The crypto people are striving for riches.
American HODL: Sometimes, but they want clout more than they want riches, I agree with Junseth.
Junseth: Clout is becoming the currency that people want to trade in, and it's not even tradable, they just want the clout. I find that to be highly problematic, that the world is being built by people who have not figured out yet that it is very difficult to achieve wealth from fame. They want to be famous for the purpose of being famous, and then when they get to a certain age, let's say they've obtained that fame, they don't know what to do, because now they have to do the other thing, which is to be rich. And they've probably sacrificed a lot to become famous. They probably have a lot of things on the internet, they've probably done things that are going to make them a little bit harder to hire, whatever the hell it is, and they now have to go and make money.
They've been given the fame because it was easy, and now they want to be given the money because they're famous, and that's just not how it works. And it's an entire generation of people who have given up their childhoods, essentially, where they were just quietly playing soccer in the streets, or hockey in the streets on their rollerblades, and now they spend all of their time trying to do, I don't know, box openings for new products that they buy on YouTube.
American HODL: Or NFT launches.
Junseth: They're adults at 8, they're doing adult things, and that's, I think, a really dangerous place for kids to go, because they don't have interests, they don't develop interests. What's occurred is they've turned into nihilistic pricks. That, for me, is my biggest fear of this metaverse stuff, that we're taking a lost generation and putting them into a place where they're just going to be more lost.
American HODL: I agree with Junseth entirely and I think the biggest problem facing the younger generation, in my generation, I'm a millennial, smack in the middle of millennialism, or whatever; and I think from my generation on down, the problem facing us is pervasive nihilism, because we have no hope for our future. When you have no hope for your future, you won't build on a base of rational optimism. What you're going to do instead is YOLO.
Junseth: You're trying to escape this reality, is what you're going to try to do.
American HODL: Exactly. You're going to YOLO into a trade on a fucking NFT, which is a concept of digital art that you don't understand, that you can sell to the next person who also doesn't understand it; it's a game of hot potato. And you're going to YOLO in on that to try and make a couple of million dollars, so you can have your fucking house in Malibu or your Lamborghini, or whatever it is.
Junseth: You see, Andreessen Horowitz -- what am I looking at?
Peter McCormack: Pass the whiskey over.
Junseth: Oh, you want it?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Junseth: Or you just want me to have more.
Peter McCormack: I don't want him to have more!
Junseth: You see, Andreessen Horowitz sees this and realises that he can make a bunch of money by investing in basically the escape.
Peter McCormack: Marc Andreessen, we're talking about here. I'm blocked by him.
Junseth: I was too, but then I got kicked off Twitter entirely.
American HODL: I downloaded a couple of podcasts to listen to by a16z on the way over here.
Peter McCormack: Do they speed their podcasts up themselves, because they seem to speak quick?
Junseth: They might just speak quick.
American HODL: So, here's one, "NFTs explained, by Andreessen Horowitz". Another one is, "Play-to-earn gaming and how it works, evolving in Web3".
Junseth: But the VCs are the problem here, because they receive zero consequences for the stuff that they've perpetuated.
American HODL: "NFT use cases, today and tomorrow".
Junseth: The ICO years were filled with scams that we knew were scams, people essentially going public with offerings that were just bullshit.
Peter McCormack: Well, it was Jill, I mean she's married now so her name's changed, but Jill, I want to say Carter? One of my earliest interviews, she said, "The problem with ICOs is they get to raise their seed round and do their IPO at the same time, without having proof of product market fit", so people were getting rich, again without doing proof of work.
Junseth: The declination of the American economy, I have always marked as, it starts at the moment Netscape went public without profits. That was when everything went fucked, because before that, companies only went public when they had a proof of revenue stream, proof of essentially a way to generate money. Then Netscape broke that model, and now we have modern-day IPOs, which are all pre-revenue, all of them.
To me, this is just an iteration of the model that Andreessen Horowitz did back in the 1990s with Netscape, and they have zero consequences. The best example, I never realised what a VC firm did until Circle. You weren't here when Circle happened, I doubt it; was anyone here?
American HODL: I was here.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Junseth: Were you here when it started?
American HODL: Yeah, I was. In fact, I bought Bitcoin on Circle, and I wrote in the notes section, "Fuck you, Mike Hearn".
Junseth: Do you remember the first day, what happened in the lead-up to circle?
American HODL: No. What are you relating to?
Junseth: Circle was the most hyped company that has ever happened in Bitcoin. They were just an exchange. But in the lead-up to circle, there was this opinion, this pervasive opinion amongst all 37 bitcoiners that everything was about to change. Circle was going to be the most innovative company ever. And it was a message that was being touted on Reddit, and if you went on and said anything negative about it, there was an army of people that would come on and tell you that you don't know what you're talking about, you're wrong.
It was the first time that I ever realised that I was in the middle of a propaganda campaign by a venture capital company. This is what I've seen now for many years, that these venture capital companies don't give a shit.
Peter McCormack: And now we have Katia Horn raising $900 million for a Web3 fund, we have Chris Dixon. I mean, the really strange thing about Chris Dixon --
American HODL: Listen, I don't want to disparage Chris Dixon, but Chris Dixon --
Peter McCormack: Hold on, because I just want to finish speaking. Chris Dixon, the thing that I find so interesting about his thing is not just that he's spinning the Web3 narrative, which I fundamentally disagree with, and he won't discuss on the podcast, he replied that he won't; but the biggest thing is he's now shitting on all the companies they invested in, because now they want to move to what they're calling this "decentralised future". They've redefined what Web3 was meant to be.
Junseth: But you and I know that they don't want to move to that, they just see an opportunity of money-making.
American HODL: Well, it's narrative-building, they're able to build narratives.
Junseth: But that's a Web3 narrative, the metaverse narrative. This is the thing. Facebook changes its name to Meta --
American HODL: Chris Dixon used to be one of us, by the way.
Peter McCormack: So did Chamath.
American HODL: Yeah, so did Balaji.
Junseth: Chamath was never one of us.
Peter McCormack: Balaji's still one of us.
Junseth: Balaji was never one of us.
Peter McCormack: Balaji's one of us.
Junseth: No he's not.
Peter McCormack: I will defend Balaji.
Junseth: I will not.
American HODL: He used to be.
Junseth: Balaji went around and he showed basically a PowerPoint to people to earn money for a fund that basically was doing perpetual motion, and he's living on the lie that 21 was a profitable company for bitcoiners.
American HODL: Or, earn.com was a profitable company, which it was not, obviously.
Peter McCormack: People have ideas that don't work and they don't work out.
American HODL: But not a lot of people get $100 million --
Peter McCormack: But Balaji has also had successes.
American HODL: No he has not.
Peter McCormack: Yes, he has.
American HODL: Earn.com was a fucking failure and everybody knows it.
Junseth: I don't believe it anymore though, Peter, because earn.com was so transparently a failure that was bought for $50 million, or whatever, by Coinbase. It was so transparently just money changing hands from the left to the right that I don't believe that any of his other exits were legitimate now.
American HODL: Let's not huff the farts of this mob.
Junseth: It doesn't really matter.
American HODL: It does matter. Don't shush me!
Peter McCormack: No, I'm just saying, we're talking over each other, that's the only thing I'm trying to stop happening. I will defend Balaji, because I think he's a person with good --
American HODL: He's coming back on your show, I get it.
Peter McCormack: No, it's not because I want him back on my show. I'll have him on my show --
American HODL: It is what it is. Me and Junseth don't have to defend him. We think what he did was kind of shitty.
Peter McCormack: I will criticise Chris Dixon heavily, and I want him on my show.
American HODL: Chris Dixon and Balaji are the same person.
Junseth: I wouldn't accuse Peter of that, I just think we just disagree fundamentally.
Peter McCormack: I will criticise Bukele, and I badly want interview three, but I will criticise him at risk of getting that, so that's a false accusation. I like talking to Balaji, because I think he's somebody who has a number of interesting ideas. My only one criticism of Balaji is that I don't think he always knows which are the best ideas, and I think that's why he was good in a16z, because he was an idea machine, and they knew which ones to run with. I'd say that to him; I don't think he would take that as a massive criticism, and I like his ideas, I like the way he thinks about the world.
Junseth: I've only had one personal conversation with him, so the fact that you've had more, I'll defer in some ways.
Peter McCormack: During COVID, he made a massive effort to try and navigate through all the misinformation to say, "This is the reality of what's happening", so I like the guy, I just disagree with him on altcoins.
American HODL: Well, Balaji's entire thesis of voice versus exit, I think is bullshit. I think it was a terrible narrative.
Peter McCormack: I don't know the narrative.
American HODL: It was from back in the day, Junseth knows it. It was around the 21.co.
Junseth: My personal belief is that 21.co is such --
American HODL: Jibberish.
Junseth: -- an insane project that was obvious -- I had a post back then talking about the idea of having your toaster mine, and just calling it out for what it was, and it was just obviously ridiculous. And then, I had a personal beef with him, because what happened is a bunch of people went onto earn.com, and posted as me, and then they started banning Junseth from earn.com. And then earn.com, which was supposed to be a private platform, where you encourage people to email you, they then published on their Twitter all of the emails that had been supposedly me.
American HODL: Listen, I didn't start this trying to shit-talk Balaji, but what I'm trying to do is lay bare the incentives of Andreessen Horowitz.
Junseth: The overall point is that Earn was a failure. I'll defer to you on the rest of them.
Peter McCormack: The thing about earn.com, yes it was a failure, it appears that it was a buyout to protect an investment by a16z; I think that's pretty transparent and obvious. At the same time, there was actually something really interesting about Earn.
American HODL: There wasn't, there was nothing.
Peter McCormack: Let me just finish.
American HODL: I used it. Did you ever use it?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I did.
American HODL: What did you think that was interesting about it?
Peter McCormack: Well, as someone who gets -- Danny, how many emails a day did we get? 30. So, we get maybe 30 or 40 emails a day, then you go into LinkedIn and I probably get 50 messages a day. The LinkedIn ones don't get read because it's a waste of time and most of the email ones, I don't even look at anymore; Danny looks at them, because it's just too much processing power. But it's a bit like what Adam Back designed with proof of work, is that you could get rid of spam by making people pay.
Making people pay to contact people who get a lot of emails, there's a lot of sense to that. I withdrew Bitcoin from earn.com, because I made people pay to contact me on that. That is a good idea. It wasn't successful, but there is something within that idea. You can criticise that and say, "Look, it failed", but there was something in that idea. But it's a different criticism for 21.co, because that maybe fundamentally couldn't ever have worked, and they're two different things.
Junseth: Earn is a good idea at $1 million. The reason it's a failure is because it's not a $60 million idea, that's very obvious.
American HODL: I once messaged Balaji himself personally on Earn and I said, "What's your personal percentage allocation to Bitcoin, I just would like to know?" and he goes, "I don't disclose that", but he still took my $20 it cost me to email him!
Peter McCormack: Well, he doesn't disclose that, that's the rules of the game.
American HODL: What a piece of shit that guy is.
Peter McCormack: That's the rules of the game.
American HODL: Well, yeah, but you would actually take the $20 if you're not going to answer the email? He still took the $20 from me.
Peter McCormack: He answered the email.
Junseth: He did answer the email.
Peter McCormack: He answered the email.
American HODL: That's ridiculous.
Peter McCormack: He did the work that you paid for. But I will defend him.
Junseth: I'll accept that.
American HODL: That's ridiculous, you both know it.
Peter McCormack: The other reason I'll defend him is I talk to Balaji a lot. I talk to him weekly, and probably at least once a month, we'll have a phone call and I'll tell him about ideas I've got or things I'm working on. He always gives up his time, as a busy person, and he's given me good advice. So, I will defend him. I can't discuss or defend 21.co, because I don't know enough about it.
American HODL: It was a shitshow.
Peter McCormack: From what I've heard, it was a poor idea that could never have worked. Earn.com, for me, was a good idea. I used it, just not enough other people used it.
Junseth: I agree with you on earn.com. Earn.com is a great idea at a $1 million valuation; it's not a great idea at $60 million or $100 million. That, to me, was a big thing. But how did we get off on this tangent?
American HODL: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: But these rabbit holes are interesting.
Junseth: They're always funny. They're very interesting. Venture capitalists --
American HODL: I don't want to shit-talk Balaji, but I do want to shit-talk a16z.
Peter McCormack: Well, Chris Dixon --
American HODL: I think Chris Dixon's a stooge.
Junseth: The venture capital in the space has been responsible for huge amounts of the growth of Ethereum, number one; and number two, the growth of absolute bullshit in the space.
Peter McCormack: Because they can't grow their investment as quickly.
Junseth: They've never had such a good opportunity for quick exits, it's never existed.
American HODL: Here's the phrase they use, "Short time to liquidity". That's the phrase they use. That's the phrase that means, "We are going to dump on top of retail investors, and we don't give a fuck who feels what kind of way about it", that's what it means, that's what that phrase means.
Junseth: And to your earlier question, Peter, about whether the space should be regulated, that's the kind of stuff that I want to see stopped.
American HODL: Me too.
Peter McCormack: Well, I don't like it. Kyle Samani at Multicoin Capital, now I have interviewed him twice, once in person, and I'm pretty sure it was in the a16z office. So, I think they'd learnt about this from Multicoin and seing how well Multicoin has performed; because, yes, Multicoin had that very good, I think it was a Litecoin short at one point, but they've had some very successful investments. Somebody told me their investment in Solana is the most successful VC investment ever.
American HODL: I think it's pronounced "Solernos".
Peter McCormack: No, "Solano" and ethernet.
American HODL: "Solerno", yeah.
Peter McCormack: "Solano" and ethernet.
American HODL: "Ebernet", yeah.
Peter McCormack: "Kyle Salami"!
American HODL: "Kyle Salami, ebernet, Solernos". Continue.
Peter McCormack: It also feels, in the tech world, it feels like there are not as many opportunities available. There are a lot of funds that are fighting over investments to get onto deals. I know that, because I've had funds reach out to me and say, "Hey, Pete, can you get us into deals and if so, you'll get a percentage", which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that and I'm not doing it yet, but that's fine. But I know there's a fight to get onto deals.
I also feel like the majority of things on the internet that are going to be invented have been invented. There is a slowdown now in new opportunities. But crypto is this thing where you hit the upcurve. But the upcurve accelerates so much more, because you can get on Solana at 0.02 cents, and then it runs up to $200.
Junseth: Look, we live in a world where Dogecoin's worth more than Starbuck's, or at least was. That's ridiculous, that's crazy.
Peter McCormack: But it isn't worth more than Starbuck's.
Junseth: Not now, it was for a while.
American HODL: It was for a second.
Peter McCormack: But anyone with half a brain knows that you're comparing apples with tractors.
Junseth: I would have agreed with you until I hear people like Tim Pool talking about Dogecoin to the moon. People that I would generally think of as rational, telling me that Dogecoin is money and Bitcoin is store of value, or something like that, are just idiots. I watched this for months as people were telling me this, and I could have refuted them and they would have rejected my refutations.
But I think that if this gets regulated away, not crypto or blockchain, but if the bad acting VC bullshit gets regulated away, that's the end of things like Ethereum, that's the end of the NFT space, that's the end of a lot of these cyclical pumps that we have.
Peter McCormack: It will pop up in a different way.
Junseth: It won't be as big, because the narrative will be gone.
Peter McCormack: It will be good for Bitcoin.
Junseth: The narrative will be built organically, rather than by a venture capital company which just storyboards it.
American HODL: I don't believe that. I believe that every narrative that exists in the world exists because a large entity promoted it, that's what I feel.
Peter McCormack: Which large entity promoted Bitcoin?
American HODL: We promoted Bitcoin as the --
Junseth: The CIA.
American HODL: It was the NSA!
Peter McCormack: But that's the nature of decentralised systems: Pirate Bay, Zoo, Napster.
American HODL: There's only one fucking decentralised system, it's Bitcoin. Everything else doesn't matter.
Junseth: Torrents are pretty decentralised.
American HODL: BitTorrent, true.
Peter McCormack: Pirate Bay's pretty decentralised now.
American HODL: It's not, it's centralised. Here's the thing. There's one use case that we found for decentralisation, it's Bitcoin.
Junseth: File sharing.
American HODL: File sharing, that's fine, Bitcoin is a version of file sharing. The idea that we are going to decentralise all the things is fucking stupid.
Junseth: HODL, that is true. I think that there has come a narrative as a result of Bitcoin that is beneficial for the VCs, which is that decentralisation is a good in itself, and that's not true.
American HODL: Yeah, that's fake.
Peter McCormack: And this is why, when you go on Clubhouse every day, trying to educate people, which I commend you for, and trying to save the lemmings from going over the cliff, I at the same time feel like Chris Dixon needs challenging a lot more. But you go into his comments, and there'll be a handful of bitcoiners saying, "Stop talking bullshit", and there's a lot of people going, "Yeah, woohoo!" supporting this, and he's pushing that hard.
American HODL: Yeah, he has credibility.
Peter McCormack: And do you know what was a real eye-opener, is that the podcast that Chamath does with those other guys --
American HODL: All-in.
Junseth: The Uyghur stuff?
Peter McCormack: -- I think it's the most embarrassing, arrogant podcast out there. The shit they say is vulgar and gross and disgusting. But all these people have been corrupted, and now they're having this huge influence over where the web goes.
American HODL: These guys were literally laughing about dumping Solana.
Junseth: I disagree, they don't have a lot of influence over where the web goes. They have a lot of influence because they have money, and they have it generally in society, but where the web goes is pretty organic.
Peter McCormack: Okay, but they have a lot of influence over trying to define where it's going.
American HODL: It's partially organic.
Peter McCormack: For me, because I used to have a web design agency. You said Web1 was running your own server. For me, Web1 was static websites. And then Web2 was when websites became interactive. As you were typing, you had --
Junseth: I felt like Web2 had mostly to do with bubble logos.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but as you were typing --
American HODL: Web2 was more about you being the product.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you would type into a search, and it was predictive search. There was Ajax, there was more. And Web3 was meant to be about the semantic web and the linking of data.
Junseth: Correct.
Peter McCormack: But now, Web3 has been redefined as the decentralised web with a bunch of products that aren't fucking decentralised.
American HODL: Which is fake, it's fake, the whole thing's fake.
Junseth: You're correct about that.
Peter McCormack: So, he's trying to redefine what Web3 is and pushing it in a direction which is fundamentally bad for the users.
Junseth: We've heard the Web3 narrative though since 2015 from the Etherheads, the meth-heads.
Peter McCormack: The ethernet.
American HODL: And it's never been true.
Junseth: Well, it's not only never been true, it's always been this -- they've tried to make Fetch a thing, and that to me is really interesting that they've pushed the narrative and they've changed it, until now I hear people promoting this in places like Clubhouse, or other places, where they're talking about Web 3.0, and they're literally just repeating, they're full on repeating narratives given to them by Andreessen Horowitz, or any of these big investment firms; they're just repeating narratives. It's very uninteresting to me. If a person knew they were just repeating a narrative, what would they think of themselves, because usually they tend to believe, I think, that they're coming up with unique thoughts?
Peter McCormack: You don't understand, you're a boomer.
Junseth: I'm a boomer, essentially they give me my own argument, which is the meme, right, about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it; they've given me back that, but in the Ethereum way.
Peter McCormack: Well, you dealt with this all on Bitcoin Uncensored?
Junseth: Yeah, constantly.
American HODL: He invented that meme.
Peter McCormack: The one that always kills me is the one where you completely destroyed -- if anyone says to me about voting on the blockchain, I'm like, "I've got a podcast for you. Go and listen to this". So, you've been dealing with this bullshit longer than most people.
American HODL: That's still a mainstream narrative, by the way, the voting.
Peter McCormack: I know.
Junseth: All of these are, they come back every time. It's the same narratives; nothing changes. In Bitcoin, what happens is you come here, you are told things, you believe it, you don't know how to parse truth, because it's a tech you don't understand and you just accept them. And I did the same thing when I got here. I remember Bitcoin BTC, whatever it was, Moe Levin's Conference in Miami, the first one, 2013, when Ethereum was announced.
That was the same conference that BitShares was announced, and Chris and I walked away from the BitShares party, which was in the lobby, and it was just hot girls and dumpy-butt Larimer in the lobby, basically talking about how BitShares was like a bank. And we walked away from there, and I remember Dan Larimer would stand there and talk to people, and you would have a crowd of 30 people surrounding him, and he would be talking, he's a tall guy, and just talking, and I would listen to it. I was like, "I don't know what he's saying, I don't understand it". I didn't understand it at the time.
Peter McCormack: But it sounds amazing!
Junseth: It did sound amazing, but it was just complex, and people are drawn to those who speak in words that sound coherent that they don't understand. It is the basis of religious thinking in some ways. And I saw that there were 30 or 40 people surrounding him, and you want to know what's going to pump next, just go to a conference and look for that guy.
Peter McCormack: Dude, I was at Art Basel in Miami, desperately avoiding the NFT space, and then ended up being invited to, I think it was a Coinbase party. I was like, "Fuck it, I'll go, I might see some friends". I literally saw one dude I know, and it was just full of kids and skateboarders, I think Gary Vee was there, all these people partying away. I was lost in this moment.
Junseth: But you have no credibility, because you're not Gary Vee.
Peter McCormack: No, but I can't do anything in this room, I can't convince these people they're wrong and I can't add to the conversation, so I just left and I was like, "Fuck, what's happening with this shit?"
Junseth: There's nothing interesting going on right now in Bitcoin. I mean, there is in Bitcoin. Lightning Network is very interesting. Do you run a node?
Peter McCormack: A Lightning node?
Junseth: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Yes, but I don't really use it. I've got the Umbrel node, so I've got the Lightning app.
Junseth: Let me know, we'll connect and I'll connect a channel to you and you can play with it.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Junseth: I have a routing node now that does very well. I've been playing with it and trying it and I make $4 a day, I'm doing very well!
Peter McCormack: That could be $40 a day.
Junseth: That's right, but I'm learning about what's going on in Bitcoin, and the stuff that's going on in Bitcoin is incredible. It's really amazing development that's just happening, slowly under the radar.
American HODL: It's high-level engineering, which is amazing.
Junseth: These other chains are like the fun chains, and people are going and having fun on them. But I'm kind of baffled by where we are, because when we started this, it was the meatspace of geeks and idiots and social rejects, the men who couldn't get women.
Peter McCormack: The rebels.
Junseth: The rebels, the CryptoPunks; just awkward men and transgendered women, to be honest, that's really what it was.
Peter McCormack: People have always felt kind of different, kind of isolated, didn't probably play in the sports team.
Junseth: People who pee in bottles and stack them in their rooms.
Peter McCormack: I mean, I never did that!
Junseth: These are the kinds of people. I mean, you didn't, but you haven't been to my house; my wife had to stop me! But this is the kind of people that were here in early Bitcoin. And to watch crypto become cool has been interesting, from the perspective of a person who came here when this was all about social isolation and those who were socially isolated. I mean, it wasn't that it was about social isolation, but it was run by those who were socially isolated beings.
To watch it become cool, and for people to enter the space has been just a fucking trip, because it's become a thing that people want blockchains so that they can have fun. And these are not fun things. Could you imagine this kind of fervour happening in the 1990s around the MySQL database, or Oracle DB, or something like that?
Peter McCormack: But maybe it did.
Junseth: It didn't.
Peter McCormack: Well, I mean what was that TV show, the one about when they first started inventing computers; there was the hot chick who works in it? Well, I found out recently "chick" is socially unacceptable.
Junseth: Female. Birthing person.
Peter McCormack: They made like five series.
American HODL: Halt and Catch Fire.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so Halt and Catch Fire implies, "Actually, no it was exciting", and maybe it was.
Junseth: It was exciting to the social rejects. It never crossed containment.
Peter McCormack: Because they couldn't own any part of it. We can own part of this. They couldn't own part of that.
Junseth: I think that's probably true, but it's weird to watch a cross-containment, and it's also very weird, and in fact disturbing, to watch 13-year-olds think that they're getting rich; it's really disturbing. They're not getting rich by something they've done, they're not getting rich by contributions --
Peter McCormack: Luck and timing.
Junseth: They're getting rich by luck and timing.
American HODL: But they're not actually.
Peter McCormack: Well, some are.
American HODL: They are not.
Peter McCormack: Some are.
Junseth: Who's the kid, the youngest millionaire. He advertised himself, I think he was 14 or 15 or whatever.
American HODL: Oh, Erik or something.
Junseth: Yeah, whatever his name was, which was hilarious, because there are a lot of kids like that, and he's the one that decided to use it as PR.
American HODL: I had a buddy, he's a Bitcoin buddy, he was in on Bitconnect in 2017, and I said, "Oh man, that sucks, you were in on Bitconnect". He described the mentality for me and he goes, "No man, it was fucking awesome. I went to school every day in middle school and I was the shit, and I lauded it over these fucking losers. And then yeah, one day it sucked and I lost all my money, but for the rest of the school year, I was the king". That's the NFT marketplace.
Peter McCormack: Well, look, I have it with my son. One of his friends always wants to talk to me, because he's a crypto kid, and he tells me he owns a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of doge, a bit of Shiba Inu, or something or other. I'm like, "Dude, sell it all, get into Bitcoin". He's not going to do it, he laughs at me.
Junseth: You're a boomer.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm a boomer. Even my son at one point, he's like, "Dad, I've designed --" He texted me and said, "Dad, have you got any Eth?" I was like, "No". He was like, "Have you not got a little bit?" I was like, "No, I don't own any. Why?" He was like, "We've designed an NFT". I don't know what he wanted to do, and I was like, "Son, I'm so disappointed in you"!
Junseth: That article you guys sent me, can we talk about that a little bit, the Moxie article?
American HODL: It's a good article.
Peter McCormack: Tell me about it; I didn't see this article.
Junseth: It's a phenomenal article.
Peter McCormack: Tell me. What's the TL;DR?
Junseth: Well, real simple. He talks about what he saw on the NFT space, and what was hilarious was the mono-centralisation in the NFT stuff. He designed his own NFT, and the NFT was designed to show up differently in OpenSea and all these different NFT markets; each one of them had a different picture.
American HODL: It showed up like a shitcoin emoji.
Junseth: But when it came to your wallet, it was a pile of poo.
American HODL: When OpenSea found out that he had done this, where you could view it in different ways across different platforms, they banned it.
Junseth: They banned it and they removed it.
Peter McCormack: You shouldn't be able to ban stuff in the decentralised --
Junseth: You see, this is the thing. Decentralisation is a good, that's what everyone believes. But they don't want their things to be decentralised, or they don't actually view it as a priority. So, you have MetaMask, which is a completely centralised system; you have OpenSea, which is a completely centralised system.
Peter McCormack: Ethernet, which is completely centralised.
Junseth: Centralised.
Peter McCormack: Solana, which is completely centralised.
Junseth: Centralised. Binance.
Peter McCormack: And, that's where they bring up the -- it might have been Samani who brought it up the first time, "Decentralisation is a spectrum", which fucks me off, because it's gaslighting people into believing.
Junseth: Decentralisation is a spectrum, but that's not really a valid thing to say.
Peter McCormack: No, it's not valid.
Junseth: Because, Bitcoin is more decentralised, let's say, than file sharing.
Peter McCormack: No, but I've always said, the most important thing is directionally, where is it heading? Bitcoin is decentralised, but it's directionally trying to always become more decentralised, whereas Ethereum is directionally becoming more centralised.
Junseth: I don't think that's the correct way to frame it though.
Peter McCormack: I do.
Junseth: Let me walk you through my framing. My framing is Bitcoin itself is not decentralised, none of these are decentralised. Certain things about them are decentralised. We decentralise the things that need censorship resistance, so what do we decentralise? We decentralise mining, which is validation; we decentralisation node operation, which is validation and consensus; mining and transaction ordering and stuff as well.
Peter McCormack: We're trying to decentralise the contributor base.
Junseth: Well, the decentralisation of contributions, in some ways, decentralisation probably --
Peter McCormack: No, we are.
Junseth: And, in Torrents, what is decentralised? What is decentralised is the files themselves. Lots of people can hold them --
American HODL: And seed them.
Junseth: -- and you have an anchor file, you can seed them to people. But what else? You don't need everything in a system to be decentralised. Decentralisation isn't the common good. It's not a good thing just because it's decentralised. What you need is you need to find out what parts of the project need censorship resistance, and that's what you need to decentralise.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Junseth: This is the problem with OpenBazaar.
American HODL: Can you go back and explain OpenBazaar, most people don't know it.
Junseth: Yeah. OpenBazaar was a project that, for many years ahead to here, was the greatest thing in the space. It was a marketplace for Bitcoin sales, and then eventually became a marketplace for all kinds of coin sales, but a marketplace for whatever you wanted to sell, just like an online ecommerce store. But I could never get out of Brian, the creator of OpenBazaar --
American HODL: Brian Hoffman.
Junseth: -- Brian Hoffman, why it was that we needed OpenBazaar when you had Tor. We have IP. We don't need a separate protocol to run basically what amounts to websites on. They decentralised the wrong thing, and what happened? It didn't work.
Peter McCormack: I like Brian.
Junseth: I like Brian a lot.
American HODL: Me too.
Junseth: His project was dumb.
Peter McCormack: The actual sense back then in the community though, you have to admit, was --
Junseth: It was shitty Shopify.
American HODL: Well, it was the idea that OpenBazaar was going to be a legalised version of The Silk Road. I know it wasn't real, but…
Junseth: The internet is a legalised version of the internet, and you can do illegal things on the internet. So, if you were running a store on OpenBazaar that was selling cocaine, that store is going to be doing illegal things; just like if you run a website on the dark web, and you put on it art, you sell your fine art on it, that's not illegal, you can do that; but when you sell cocaine, you can't. Just because it's on the dark web doesn't make it illegal. So, it was a nonsense claim that the entire project made, and I could never figure out why they thought they had to develop a separate protocol.
American HODL: a16z gave them money.
Peter McCormack: I think it's idea first, solution second --
Junseth: Problem later!
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, no, I think they identified the problem and they came up with a solution. But when they went to actually build out the solution, you realise, "Oh crap, this isn't going to make sense". And that can happen. I still admire him for trying. Like I say, I like Brian a lot, I think he's a good guy. I think he's a good actor who just had a project that didn't work.
American HODL: Yes, he is. He's a good guy.
Junseth: I find him to be a very honourable and good person.
American HODL: I agree wholeheartedly.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, a good actor, his idea didn't work.
Junseth: But in my opinion, his idea obviously wasn't going to work.
American HODL: It didn't work, that's true, but it's okay.
Peter McCormack: But it might be obvious to you.
Junseth: Right, and it was then.
Peter McCormack: It wasn't to me.
Junseth: Really?
Peter McCormack: No.
American HODL: No, it was obvious at the time, it was.
Peter McCormack: It was not obvious to me.
American HODL: I mean, maybe Junseth didn't want to, but I wanted to believe it was going to work, I wanted to.
Junseth: When Amir Taaki presented it, and early on before it was presented, I actually was on stage in Miami doing a thing talking about OpenBazaar, and I thought it would be a really cool thing. But when I realised it was just another protocol, that it was just basically the darknet, I was just astounded that that was the idea, because it was just reinventing the internet we already had. They built a whole architecture around it, it was amazing. But that's been the ideas in the space for the last ten years. Lending was early, BTCjam is a good example.
American HODL: Oh my God, I lost a whole Bitcoin!
Junseth: There you go.
American HODL: To be honest, dude, I put a whole Bitcoin.
Junseth: It was $7 at the time when it collapsed! It wasn't that much.
American HODL: It was $200 at the time, it's $40,000 now. It was painful to lose a whole Bitcoin on fucking BTCjam, Jesus Christ.
Junseth: Were you here for BTCjam?
Peter McCormack: No.
American HODL: He wasn't, but it was just painful. That website was painful.
Peter McCormack: I mean, I've had many things that I've put money into, and ICOs I put a whole Bitcoin, or 2 or 3 Bitcoins into. I look back and think, "Holy shit!"
American HODL: It's like that Opendime, you don't know how to get Bitcoin off that!
Peter McCormack: Danny will do that, Danny will figure it out, it's all right.
Junseth: You'll teach him.
Peter McCormack: That's when we found out if you really put it on there.
American HODL: It's on there. I know you don't know how to get it off.
Peter McCormack: I'm going to love winning another Bitcoin off you next year.
American HODL: This guy's never sweeped a Bitcoin in his fucking life.
Junseth: I'm not worried if he takes more Bitcoins from you.
American HODL: He's never sweeped a private key.
Junseth: He gave you a great deal, I don't know why you wouldn't take it.
Peter McCormack: I think it was a much better deal, the whole season to come top.
Junseth: That's a big --
American HODL: Do you know the motherfucker has $1 million?
Junseth: It doesn't matter.
American HODL: In a league that has nothing.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so I'll give you a good example.
American HODL: Most of these guys are plumbers, the guys that are playing for the other teams.
Peter McCormack: That's not relevant to the point.
American HODL: It's true though.
Peter McCormack: Their career's not relevant. In the division we're in now --
American HODL: They beat their wives and they do plumbing on the weekends.
Peter McCormack: They don't. We have the best budget within our division right now, we lost 4-1 the other night.
American HODL: Right, because you suck.
Peter McCormack: So, I'm just telling you, you turned down a way better -- a one-off, I've got a much better chance than over a whole season.
American HODL: I'm going to take the one-off; you know why?
Junseth: Because you're dumb!
American HODL: No, because I want to show up there in Bedford.
Peter McCormack: Why don't you half a Bitcoin on each?
American HODL: No, we're going to do a whole Bitcoin. I'm going to show up in Bedford, I'm literally going to fly there, and we're literally going to go, "Let's go, roll the fucking dice!"
Peter McCormack: Direct to Bedford airport!
American HODL: You have an airport?
Peter McCormack: I think we've got one in Cranfield.
American HODL: I was figuring on coming into Heathrow, but whatever.
Peter McCormack: I'll pick you up.
American HODL: I guess if you've got an airport, that's fine, I'll go there.
Peter McCormack: I'll pick you up.
American HODL: All right, that's weird.
Peter McCormack: It's weird that I pick you up from the airport? All right. How are you going to choose which game?
American HODL: I'm just going to pick one at random. Whichever one the papers say you're going to lose.
Peter McCormack: We will not be in the papers!
American HODL: The Bedford papers.
Peter McCormack: Okay, do you pick the game at the start of the season before any games are played?
American HODL: I don't know enough about football, but sure, maybe I would!
Peter McCormack: I think that's the way to do it.
Junseth: I don't think he knows how football's played.
Peter McCormack: I know, I don't!
Junseth: But at the game, even if you lost, you could probably tell him he won.
Peter McCormack: You're giving me -- this is a more easy win than Biden!
American HODL: I used to be a striker here in America where we call it soccer, but yeah, I used to play football and I know how it's played.
Peter McCormack: Do you want a contract?
Junseth: I find that unbelievable!
American HODL: I would love a contract.
Peter McCormack: Honestly, once I have 2 Bitcoin off you, at that point, the price of Bitcoin -- well, essentially, you bought me the football club. Thank you.
American HODL: No, I mean essentially, I'm going to take back my 1 Bitcoin that you have.
Peter McCormack: I don't see that happening.
American HODL: That half a Bitcoin that's on the Opendime, there's no way you can fucking get it first of all. Danny's going to have to help you with it.
Peter McCormack: Danny's going to do it.
American HODL: If Danny can't do it, you're fucked.
Peter McCormack: Danny will do it. He'll probably charge me a commission. Ben will do it, Ben Prentice is on our team.
American HODL: All right.
Peter McCormack: You didn't think that one through, did you?
American HODL: I mean, I'm just saying I know that you can't access it, which is hilarious.
Peter McCormack: Do you know, I'm going to fucking do it.
American HODL: You're not going to do it.
Junseth: There's literally a PDF online that tells you!
American HODL: He can plug in that and they'll tell him how to do it. There's a ReadMe on the fucking Opendime that will tell you.
Peter McCormack: I bet you 1 Bitcoin, I can do it within the next hour.
Junseth: Take that bet HODL!
American HODL: I actually kind of want to take that bet. I don't think you can do it.
Junseth: I'll do the same bet!
American HODL: Do two shots and then tell me.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what would have been an interesting bet? I would have won off you again, but I think that was a good bet when I offered you double or quits on the under/over $100,000, when it was obvious it wasn't going to $300,000.
American HODL: That wasn't going to happen though, that's why I didn't take it.
Peter McCormack: Why do you think it didn't; what do you think happened this year? What do you think's changed?
American HODL: Not to get too far off topic, but I think the China mining ban was a big, big reason why we didn't see the price levels we were expecting, and the macro environment. I mean, it's just Bitcoin's a big boy now, it's a trillion-dollar asset, and it responds to macro forces unlike anything it ever has in its history.
Peter McCormack: Or, it's too mainstream to have those massive runups now?
American HODL: No, it will still have big runups. I mean, there's 100X left on the board, 100X, but it's not going to be intrinsic the way it used to be in the early days. It's going to respond to macro forces for sure.
Peter McCormack: Anyway, we should probably circle back.
Junseth: Oh, yes please.
Peter McCormack: Back to the metaverse. Eric, what do you think of the metaverse? Do you want to come round, do you actually want to say, while we've got you here? Come on, grab a chair.
American HODL: Eric can give us his take on the metaverse.
Peter McCormack: As he's here, we'll get Eric in.
American HODL: The fun part of the metaverse is that it doesn't actually exist. I don't know if I've gotten that out yet, but it doesn't exist, it's not real.
Junseth: You know, what I thought was interesting about that article was the concession of the writer that the metaverse is going to be around a while, because it's achieved enough momentum, which I think is kind of your position, Peter, is that the metaverse is going to be around a while, because you think it's achieved.
Peter McCormack: Well, you have to define what the metaverse is firstly. So, what is it? And then you can say --
American HODL: Everybody knows what the metaverse is, it's some version of Ready Player One.
Junseth: I think what they're going to end up defining it as is every video game. They're going to say, "I was playing in the Fortnite metaverse [or] the CS:GO metaverse", or whatever.
American HODL: That's metaversi!
Junseth: At which point, I think it exists forever.
Peter McCormack: And does it become common protocol?
Junseth: But that's not the pitch right now.
Peter McCormack: But does there become common protocol, so other people can plug into that metaverse, you can have multiple experiences? But Eric Yakes, who we just did a show with, the author of Bitcoin, the 7th Property, stunning guest?
Junseth: Nice.
Eric Yakes: I know nothing about the metaverse! I mean, I don't know how a lot of this stuff is defined, but when I think about conceptually, long term, the idea that if we can link up a sensory experience to a digital world, that that's 50 or 60 years out, some sort of potential alternative that people might opt into, it's easier to manipulate a digital environment than it is a physical.
American HODL: You see, this idea is true, and at the heart of every bullshit scam bubble, there is a true idea. And what Eric just said is true, and the true idea is that we are going to want to have these human perceptual sensory environments and a digital landscape, true. But it's the same way that the internet was going to change our lives, but Pets.com wasn't necessarily a good investment. So, just because human beings are going to want to live in virtual environments, it doesn't mean that your Bored Ape has any fucking value, it doesn't make any sense. That's the point.
Junseth: Also, the extent to which humans want to enter the "metaverse", I don't think satisfactorily, I don't think there's satisfaction in the digital life. You're going to live a life that is essentially without accomplishment.
American HODL: That is so boomer, man.
Peter McCormack: But it depends. It depends if it becomes your life, or if it just a tool for entertainment.
Junseth: If it's just a tool for entertainment, that's one thing, but that's not the pitch.
Peter McCormack: That's not the long-term pitch, but the steps to get there.
Junseth: The pitch is that you plug yourself into the Matrix and that's where you live. You live in a tiny little apartment in New York City, it's three-by-three, and you get into your little standing pod --
American HODL: You have an omnidirectional treadmill.
Junseth: -- and you live in the billion-dollar property you purchased in the metaverse, and you walk around in it while you're in your three-by-three apartment in New York City. And you go meet with your friends in the metaverse, you shop rather than online. If you're go online, you're going to go onto your computer in the metaverse, and you're going to go online in the metaverse to the Amazon website, which you're going to use your computer that you bought in the metaverse, and you're going to meet your friends in the metaverse and go to school in the metaverse, and all of these things are going to happen. Then, you're going to take it off and you're going to be in your three-by-three cubicle; that's the pitch.
Peter McCormack: The way to make that better, to make it more efficient, you don't really want to come out of the metaverse, you want to constantly just lay in a pod in the metaverse, and when you go to sleep, they can plug --
Junseth: Do you know the nihilism that's necessary to make that pitch compelling?
Peter McCormack: -- you plug your thing into the back of your neck to draw the energy out.
Junseth: And occasionally, robots come by and feed you.
American HODL: Robots use you as a battery.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean you know what, I always felt with the Matrix, that other world that they went into, that was shit compared to the Matrix. It's like, "Put me back in, plug me back in!"
Junseth: I think that was the idea.
American HODL: That's the whole idea, yeah.
Eric Yakes: Yeah, I think, I don't know, it depends on how real that sensory experience ultimately becomes. If that can become perfectly real and perfectly manipulated, then effectively there'd be no distinction between your reality and that reality, if it was perfect.
Junseth: That's the pitch. But isn't that stupid?
Eric Yakes: I don't know. I mean, if it's the same thing than real, then I don't know, how much better could your life be in that digital reality? Maybe you say that now, but think about all the things you hate in life; what if those things could --
American HODL: I hate nothing in life.
Junseth: The difference between me and everybody else is I have a list of zero hates. Maybe mosquitoes.
Eric Yakes: Yeah, fucking mosquitoes, I agree with that!
American HODL: The problem is, with the metaverse, the concept, the way Eric is describing it, is no matter how good it actually is, you know it's fake, and that makes it trash.
Eric Yakes: That's a good point.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that might not matter to people.
American HODL: No, it will always matter, always.
Peter McCormack: No, it matters for you.
American HODL: I can jerk off to the hottest chick in porn right now and I can wear a VR headset, and it's very real.
Eric Yakes: They will definitely be able to make sex better in the metaverse.
American HODL: The problem is, it's not the same as the girl actually being there and the girl wanting you; that's a totally different experience.
Eric Yakes: Is that what you want?
American HODL: That is what most people want, yeah.
Eric Yakes: I don't know, it sounds like there's a lot of cost that they're disassociating with that whole process.
American HODL: Sex is not a physical act anymore, it's mainly about validation.
Peter McCormack: You're generationally answering for everyone of every generation.
American HODL: I'm telling you what the trend is, and the trend is, especially for young males, is that sex acts more as validation than it does as a physical release.
Junseth: You're right, Peter, you're right, but I hear this all the time, that since Socrates, everyone has criticised the generation coming. The thing is that occasionally -- 99% of the time we criticise the next generation, you are making a fatal mistake, because they're going to change, they're going to have different values than you.
Peter McCormack: "This music's terrible!"
Junseth: "This music's nothing. In my day, we listened to jazz, and jazz was the best!" I listened to grandpa who banned jazz, because it was for dancing and dancing was evil.
Peter McCormack: "Deep Purple's real rock!"
American HODL: That's right.
Junseth: Exactly.
American HODL: "In my day, you dressed like a woman and you made music about the devil!" Anyway, continue.
Junseth: This is a perpetual problem with generations, but occasionally you end up with a generation that is the Maoist revolution, that is like Hitler's Youth. You do end up in a generation sometimes that is worse than the previous generations. And I think it's not so much a critique of the generation as it is a critique of, if we as humans move into a space where we are primarily digital beings, it's bad for us, both as a race and just as people; it's not good for us, it's a worse world that it creates. It neglects this world, it neglects conservation. There's going to have to be the slaves and the peons that live in the real world.
We're going to end up in a weird situation of the Morlocks and the Eloi, where the Eloi live in the digital universe, and then occasionally the Morlocks have to come in and destroy that world by saying, "You have to evacuate. The nuclear power plant down the road that's powering your metaverse life is melting down". That's a problematic world, I think, when we are all living in a digitised version of our reality. That to me is a giant, awful thing.
The pitch is bad, I'll put it that way, the pitch is bad. The pitch is that that's what you're going to live in, whereas I think the reality is that it's going to be more like video games. The pitch is rotten. The reality is going to be that it's video games.
Peter McCormack: I think what Junseth is saying is, you don't want to pitch this alternative world to spend your entire life in; what you want to pitch is, yeah, you can get home from work and go skydiving for an hour, because --
Junseth: Because you can't afford it, or you're too fat, or whatever.
Peter McCormack: Or, it's 6.00pm on a Tuesday and it's dark. Or, you can't get to the Liverpool game so, "Look, jump in there and feel like you're in the stadium".
Junseth: You can buy a seat in the stadium for two hours.
American HODL: Or, you can have sex with a celebrity who would never come near you.
Junseth: Sure, go gambling, whatever the hell it is.
Peter McCormack: We've all defined what we want from it!
Junseth: Take a tour of Thailand.
American HODL: What the fuck! Let me just say this, what the fuck does any of this have to do with fucking DeFi, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, shitcoins; what the fuck does any of it, "Yeah, XR, AR, VR, mixed reality, I remain bullish on these technologies". What the fuck does it have to do with any of that shit?
Peter McCormack: It has to do with VCs using the narrative, complicating the fact to make money from it.
Junseth: NFTs allowed them to bridge buzzwords, that's what happened here.
American HODL: The metaverse was a catchall of buzzwords.
Junseth: But they've been talking about AR, VR, AI for many years.
American HODL: Yeah, and it hasn't caught on at all.
Junseth: When NFTs came, it allowed them to merge the concepts and talk about both at the same time. And it's the intersectionality of buzzword surfers, and that's what happened. It's a bad pitch. But what I'm sad about isn't -- that's why the metaverse doesn't exist, the pitch is wrong. But what I'm sad about is how many people are compelled by the pitch, they're compelled to it. They tell me that aeroplanes are going to be cheaper, because they can fly in the metaverse for free, or you can build aeroplanes cheaper in the metaverse. That's a stupid pitch!
American HODL: Junseth, I don't think you were in this room with me, but I've been in multiple audio rooms where people have been telling me things equivalent to, "You know, the thing is, what happened was I think that the metaverse is going to be like Pacific Rim". Did you ever see the movie, Pacific Rim?
Junseth: No.
American HODL: "Yeah, what's tight about that movie is that people in that movie, they pilot giant aliens through neural links and shit. It's sic, right. So what I think is, people are going to pilot heavy machinery through robot interfaces, you know what I'm saying?"
Junseth: There may be some of that. I've thought about this reality, right. Let's say that aeroplanes are flying on their own --
American HODL: By the way, that was a verbatim quote.
Junseth: -- and you, as a pilot, your only job is to get into the cockpit and land them, you're just landing aeroplanes all day. Maybe that's the new job of pilots, right. I could see a world where that's the case. But I don't see a world where people escape. I see a world where people want to escape reality. I'm saddened by the fact that so many people think that that's a good pitch, and I think that's a bad world, I think that's a terrible world. And that's the only thing that really bothers me about the metaverse pitch, is that's the world they're pitching.
Peter McCormack: It's the world that Mark Zuckerberg is pitching.
Junseth: Yes, and VCs generally. That's what doesn't exist, that will never exist, and if it does exist, you can kiss your society goodbye, because there won't be the nuclear operators, you're not going to be able to go to the beach and smell the fucking seashells and the ocean. You're going to live in sterile, hospital-like environments where you never leave, you never get exercise, you never do anything but sit there and just live in your fake fucking reality.
American HODL: That's true.
Peter McCormack: That's a great end, I think. I think you summed it up perfectly. Final question for everyone. When it does come, I know you want to fuck girls, but what's the one thing you want to do in the metaverse that isn't sex, just something interesting where you're like, "Yeah, I want that"?
American HODL: Can I fuck guys?!
Junseth: You can do anything, it's the metaverse!
American HODL: I want to fuck Batman.
Peter McCormack: You fuck Batman.
Eric Yakes: I was just about to say that, I swear to God! I think I would get my barbecue on with a sic-ass setup; that would be the first thing I'd do.
Peter McCormack: You'd have a barbecue? For fuck's sake.
Junseth: I'd start a laundromat for metaverse laundry.
American HODL: A laundromat, yes. Empty the metaverse plane, go for the laundry machines.
Peter McCormack: I mean, remember Guitar Hero, right? Five buttons, you could play any song. I would be playing guitar for Metallica.
Junseth: It would be cool. I think there's certain things that would be just really neat. Like actually, I don't know, going to Jurassic Park, if it was really realistic, you know, going to see things that you couldn't see, or going places that you couldn't normally go, to Thailand or something like that, and walking the streets, places that you've never been. I think that that's a cool thing that you're going to be able to do in virtual reality.
But I guess what I'm saying is, for me, there's a distinguishment between the pitch of the metaverse and virtual reality itself. Virtual reality, I am bullish on. The metaverse, as it's pitched, as a Matrix that you escape reality from, I'm not only bearish, but if that comes to fruition, I'm out, I'm going to Virginia Woolf myself into the ocean, going to walk until I die.
American HODL: That's a really outdated reference! Listen, I'm not going to mince words --
Peter McCormack: That's a bit unlike you.
American HODL: -- I'm going to follow in Chris Dixon's footsteps, and I hope to enslave as many people as I possibly can, because that's the point of Web3, for me to be on top of everybody who was on my digital plantation.
Junseth: You could run a plantation in the metaverse, HODL, yeah.
American HODL: Exactly. You're going to pick the digital cotton and you're going to fucking like it. My name's Chris Dixon, fuck you.
Peter McCormack: Shall we go to Duke's?
Junseth: Let's do it.
American HODL: Let's do it, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Let's go to Duke's. All right, well listen, Junseth, thanks for coming in, dude, we missed you, brother. We should do this more often.
Junseth: We should, I absolutely love these shows.
Peter McCormack: I will be nearer you Bitcoin 2022.
Junseth: How do I buy into your club?!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, everyone's asking now!
Junseth: Is that true, is everyone asking?
Peter McCormack: They like it.
American HODL: You've got to show him how to use the Opendime.
Junseth: I'll show you how to use Opendime.
Peter McCormack: I'm doing an ICO, your share comes in as an NFT that you can only activate within the metaverse!
Junseth: Oh, good, okay!
Peter McCormack: You're in there, though, you're in, aren't you?
Junseth: I more like the idea of (1) owning a small part of a soccer club; and (2) seeing you more often.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, we should do this more often and it's great to see you, man. I love you, dude. HODL, you're a fucking idiot and I love you too. Eric, love you too, man, you're my new love. All right, guys, let's go to Duke's peace out.
