WBD465 Audio Transcription

The Threat of Peak Centralisation with Mark Moss

Interview date: Monday 21st February

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

In this interview, I talk to the serial entrepreneur and market analyst Mark Moss. We discuss peak centralization, the role of a state, the balkanization of society, the need for transparency and truth, and how Bitcoin enables people to free themselves from the tyranny of place.

“When I turned 18 and I could vote my dad told me just always remember one thing: every new law whether it’s good or bad is less freedom… I would always err to the side of allowing other people to make decisions for themselves, because what I see today is these leaders think – and they’ve openly said it – that you’re not smart enough to make decisions on your own, and I think that’s wrong.”

— Mark Moss

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Mark, good to see you, man.

Mark Moss: Yeah, Peter, thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: A lot of people are going to be very excited about this.  That last show we did crushed it.  90,000 downloads already, which is big for the show; that's above average.  It was very, very popular.

Mark Moss: Well, I like to consider myself above average!

Peter McCormack: You are, man, cheers.

Mark Moss: Cheers to that.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, there's a lot to get into.  We said we would do a second show.  No, actually, let's rewind a touch.  The book.

Mark Moss: The book.

Peter McCormack: There were comments, people saying, "Write the book".

Mark Moss: It's under way.

Peter McCormack: It's under way?

Mark Moss: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yes!

Mark Moss: I signed a deal with a company and I've got the outline done, and we're working on the first couple of chapters right now.  A lot of it, you know, some of the criticism that we had from the first episode, I went and read most of the comments on there.  I've given this talk in five minutes, and I've given it in an hour, and I think we talked about an hour.

Peter McCormack: We did more than an hour.  What was it, like two and a half hours, Danny?

Danny Knowles: It was, yeah, two hours, about two hours.

Mark Moss: Well, time goes by when you're having fun.  But the point is that we covered a lot of ground in two hours, so how detailed can you get.  And a book like this is going to be eight or nine hours, and so of course it's going to have dozens and dozens of specific facts and dates.  So, yeah, how detailed can you get in a two-hour conversation?  We covered a lot of ground, but the book will have all of that in there.

Peter McCormack: I want to read this book.  And do you know what, when you read the comments, we have this natural disposition to focus on the negative ones, but it was universally popular with some criticism, and you're never going to have 100% of people like the show.  But it was very, very popular.  It will be one of the most popular shows I've made.

Mark Moss: Yeah, nice.  And the book should be out this fall, that's my goal, this fall.

Peter McCormack: Well, I want a signed first-print edition, and are you going to narrate it, or Guy Swan?

Mark Moss: That's a good question, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: I think you need to do it, because you've got a strong, quite unique accent.

Mark Moss: I could do it.

Peter McCormack: I'd like to hear you do it, but that means you'd actually have to do it, which is a ball-ache.

Mark Moss: It depends on how long it is!  I just wrote another book, I just wrote a book.  Aleks Svetski and I locked ourselves in an Airbnb for five days, three weeks ago, and wrote a book.

Peter McCormack: Okay, tell me about that.

Mark Moss: It's The Un-Communist Manifesto.

Peter McCormack: Okay, tell me.

Mark Moss: We took The Communist Manifesto, which is an ideology that won't go away.

Peter McCormack: Is it an ideology, or is it an observation, of which ideology came from?

Mark Moss: Well you have people, the leaders of BLM saying, "We are trained Marxists", so if I'm a trained Marxist, that means Marxism, which Marxism comes from that.

Peter McCormack: But that's what I mean, does it come from it?  Because, I spoke to Steve Keen, an economist, and I was like, "Marx is responsible for deaths of hundreds of millions of people".  He's like, "No, Marx observed how --" his book is about observations.

Mark Moss: No, that's not true at all, that's 100% not true.  So, in the book, it says --

Peter McCormack: I've not read it.

Mark Moss: Yeah, and most people haven't.  And if they did, they would go, "What the heck?  This is crazy, it's actually evil", and actually it's a booklet, it's not even a book; it's a booklet.  It's 8,000 words, the average person can read 200 words a minute, so it's about a 45-minute to 60-minute read, and no one's really read it.

So, what we did, we took the book, it's 4 chapters, 8,000 words, and we took it and rewrote it, and tried to keep the same structure, 4 chapters.  We came up with about 10,000 words, so you can read it in about an hour, and we reframed it.  So, we took what he did and just reframed it the way we thought it should be.  So, he outlined the struggle as, everything in life is a struggle.  All animals, all humans, we struggle in life.  He framed it as a struggle between classes of people, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor.  Hitler had the struggle between races.

We redefined it on a new axis, and the struggle is not between classes; the struggle is between the individual and the collectivist that tries to put them into groups, that's the struggle.  So, we reframed it from that lens.  Obviously, he went heavy into socialism; we redefined what capitalism is.  Then, what Marx did is, in one of the chapters, I think chapter three, he compared socialism against all these other types of socialism.  We compared capitalism against all these other types of capitalism, cronyism, colonialism, etc, and broke that down.  But like I said, we kept the structure.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, are we going to get Mossism?

Mark Moss: No!

Peter McCormack: Svetskism?

Mark Moss: Svetskism!  No, but back to that comment about an observation, that's totally not true.  So, a couple of things: one, in the book he says, "If we were to summarise in one statement what Marxism is, it's the abolishment of private property rights", period, that's it.  So, it was a call.  And in the end, on the last page, he says, "Calling all the working men of the world to unite", it's a call to arms, it's not an observation at all, it's marching orders.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Danny, can we get that ordered?  Can we get it here tomorrow?  I'm going to read it tomorrow.

Danny Knowles: Right, Amazon Prime.

Peter McCormack: Amazon Prime, we're on it.

Mark Moss: Yeah, so uncommunist.com.  The goal is to have at least 1,000 copies printed before Bitcoin Conference, going to do some book signings there, and it's just a public service announcement.  We want people to read it, we want it to be pretty digestible, easy to read, and really reframe this individual versus the collectivist, which is a lot of what we're going to talk about today.

Peter McCormack: Yes, we are.  So, listen, not everybody listens to every show, so there are going to be some people coming in right now, they're going to see -- I don't know if we called the other one, "Part one", but they're going to see this is a follow-up, or they're going to know it's a follow-up from what we're saying now.  And what I will say, anyone listening now who didn't listen to that, press pause, go back, about 10 episodes ago, 12 episodes ago, listen to the first interview I did with Mark Moss, because you need to listen to that before you listen to this, because that's going to frame what we're going to talk about today.  That said, some people won't do that.

Mark Moss: I think it's going to work either way, but they should.

Peter McCormack: But also, some people won't remember the entire conversation.  So, can you just try and do a TL;DR summary of what we spoke about last time, cycles, where we're at?

Mark Moss: So, to recap and set the stage for where we're going is that, what's going on in the world today is crazy, everybody wants to know -- we've never seen this before, people are at each other's throats, tensions have never been higher, governments are trying to take powers that they've never had, lockdowns, mandates, protests, financial systems blowing apart, everything.  The whole world is being turned upside down, and a lot of people think this might blow over, things will go back to normal, things like that; or, this was a black swan event, "Who could have ever known that there would be this virus that would cause this?" because that's why all these protests are happening; it's because of the virus, etc.

What I would say is, "No, that's not true.  As a matter of fact, we did know this was going to happen, because this is a cycle of history that we're in".  So, if we go back in a long enough period of time and look back, we see that while progress is exponential and it's going like this, it repeats, there are cycles that repeat within there.  So, that's kind of the premise of it.

Then, what we did is we looked at -- with financial indicators, typically you're looking for an indicator that tells you where you think things will be going.  And with indicators, you don't want one indicator, you want multiple indicators that try to tell you the same thing.  So, what I've done is, I've looked at different cycles that operate on different timeframes that are in different parts of the market, and so we talked about three.

One, political cycles, so those operate on an 84-year cycle, which is a regime change, or a populist uprising.  So, every 84 years, we see this populist uprising, which we're seeing right now.  84 years ago was the end of World War II.  84 years before that was, we were just talking about, Karl Marx.  He wrote The Communist Manifesto back then.  Then, 3 times 84 equals 252, which is the big revolution cycle.  So, 252 years ago was the American and French Revolution; 252 years before that was the Protestant Reformation.  So, that's the political cycle.

Then we looked at the technological revolutions, which operate on a 50-year cycle, 40 to 60, could also be known as a K-wave cycle.  And so, again, 40 to 60, I just call it a 50-year cycle.  And a technological revolution is not a new technology like an iPhone, a technological revolution is something that changes the course of humanity, changes the way humanity works.  So, that was the Industrial Revolution, changed the world; that was steam engines.  For all of humanity, we had horsepower, manpower, and then we had steam engines, we had railways, we could send stuff across continents.

Then we had electricity and steel.  Obviously, electricity doesn't need an explanation.  Steel, we could build skyscrapers and bridges.  Oil, automobiles.  For all of humanity, people walked and rode horses, now we had cars and transportation.  1971 was the age of the microprocessor, which brought us telecommunications, personal computers, internet, what we're doing right now; changed the course of humanity.  And now, we're witnessing another one, so that's on a 50-year cycle.

Then the third one was the financial revolutions, which was about every 80 years, the financial system gets reset.  80 years ago was the Bretton Woods Agreement, which was the entire world financial system was reset.  And today, the IMF is calling for a Bretton Woods II.  And then we can see interest rates are at zero or negative for most of the world, hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt have been printed and created and we're out of moves.  When you're playing a game and you're out of moves, you're ready to reset the game.

So, what's interesting is, financial: 80 years; technology: 50 years; political: 250 years --

Peter McCormack: And they're all converging.

Mark Moss: -- and they're all converging right now.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  So, let's deal with a few of the criticisms first and let you answer those, because I think let's deal with that.  People had some, and that's the fairest way to do it.  I think I spent most of that last interview going, "Huh!"  I think sometimes, I wasn't even thinking of things to challenge back, but there were some.

Mark Moss: Sure.

Peter McCormack: So, one of them was, could you be cherry-picking data?  Do you have a particular bias, because we're talking about the pendulum swinging from centralisation to decentralisation, from collectivism to individualism, and you are someone who is a proponent of decentralisation, you are an individualist; is there a chance that you are cherry-picking data?

Mark Moss: So, first of all, I don't know if I'm a proponent of decentralisation.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Mark Moss: Pure decentralisation is probably just as bad as pure centralisation is.  So, pure decentralisation would be complete chaos and anarchy.

Peter McCormack: You're not an anarchist.

Mark Moss: I don't think that sounds like the best way to live where, did Peter just poison my drink?  Is this safe to eat and drink?  I don't want to have to verify; we need a certain amount of trust in order to live in society.  So, pure anarchy doesn't sound good.  We can go live in Somalia, that wouldn't be so good.  And I think then, pure centralisation doesn't sound good either, where I can't even decide what I want to wear or what I do want to drink.

So, I think either extreme is bad, and I think somewhere in the middle, life is about nuance and life is about give and take.  So what happens is, we go so far to one way, we're so centralised that now the pendulum swings back, but we overcorrect.

Peter McCormack: Every time.

Mark Moss: Every time.  And then we go so decentralised, then we swing back to centralisation again, we swing back and forth.  That's the way it works, and that's the way all these work.  We overcorrect and then we swing back and overcorrect again.  So anyway, to that first point, I probably do have biases, I definitely am more of a freedom maximalist than most people.  But I do understand that any overdeveloped strength becomes a weakness, and so I think you can definitely go too far there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and just to interject there, because you've made that point that you don't believe in anarchism, you think that's not the world you want to live in, but there are anarchists, and there are bitcoiners that are anarchists.  Where are you on the whole idea of -- because, this conversation came up yesterday with Vijay, or two days ago now with Vijay, where we were discussing the idea of pure freedom.  And Vijay said he thinks there's risks in pure, 100% liberty, pure freedom. 

I myself am not an anarchist, I always say the term "the reluctant statist"; I'm a statist.  I believe in democracy and government.  Vijay was talking about post-democracy, talking about city states, which I think have their own issues.  Where are you in that kind of field?  Are you somebody who thinks that it's good to have some kind of central government and central governance, or do you think that is completely fraught with danger and shouldn't be considered?

Mark Moss: So even that, there's nuance in that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Mark Moss: So, central governance, well it depends.  So, what I would say about that is, it was Friedrich Hayek, one of my favourite Austrian Economists, he wrote, I think it was his seminal work, it was called Constitution of Liberty.  Nobody's ever going to be as smart as these guys were ever again.  That book has 1,900 citations in 9 different languages.  It was like a seminal work, the Constitution of Liberty.  In that, he explained what liberty is, and so I use that definition.

He describes liberty as, "Freedom from coercion".  That means that I am free to choose a direction that leads to my own ends.  So, if you tell me, "Hey, Mark, you have freedom to choose.  You can choose to take the jab or lose your job, that's your choice", that's not free choice, that's coercion, because either way I choose leads to your ends.  I need a way that I can choose that leads to my own ends.  So, I would define liberty as, "Freedom from coercion, freedom to choose".

When you talk about central planning, of course we need central planning, somebody has to organise; that has to happen.  But it should be done in a small enough way that allows me freedom to choose.  So, for example, I used to live in a gated neighbourhood, and it had an HOA, Homeowners' Association.  You can't park your car in the street overnight, you can't do this, you can't do that.  That's really nice, because the neighbourhood's beautiful, all the houses look clean, no cars on the road, etc.  But then, there's also a lot of restrictions that I didn't like.  And they got some new board members in, and they got even more restrictive, and we moved out.

I'm okay with that, I'm okay having that central authority in that small realm, in the sense that I can move somewhere else and I can vote with my feet.  And we can allow competition to determine what system works best.  The problem is when we have 330 million people in the United States all under one old guy's fist, and he doesn't know what we want out here on the beach in Malibu, and I have nowhere to move to change that.  Now of course, we do globally, and then we can talk about sizes, what the optimal size is, but that's the way I'd look at it.  I want liberty, I want the freedom to choose, and in that gated neighbourhood, I didn't have the freedom to choose, but I did have the freedom to move, and I was okay with that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so any form of taxation is coercion then?

Mark Moss: Well, I paid a monthly fee for my Homeowners' Association, so it wasn't taxation in the sense -- so, it depends on how you define taxation.  Obviously taxation, where they steal my wealth or inflate it away through taxation, is inflation; but in that HOA example, I paid a monthly fee, I think it was $450 a month, to be in that and that's perfectly okay.  Everybody pays the same $450 a month, didn't matter if the house was bigger or smaller.  We all paid, because we all received the same benefit and services.  And if I don't like that, I just move to another neighbourhood with no HOA, or less.

Peter McCormack: But say the United States was arranged in that structure and there's no federal government, there's no central government?

Mark Moss: The problem that I see overall, if we're going to try to blanket a statement, is that we are not receiving value for the fee that we are paying.

Peter McCormack: I agree with that, and it's something I'm really trying to nail down with people.  Because, every time I talk to somebody like Vijay, I get pulled away from my views on statism and democracy, but I never get fully there, because there are certain things that I never feel get fully solved, and I always want to push on the trickiest parts of it, and try and understand where people are coming from; because, I think it's okay to hold these views, but I always want to say, "Well, how would you solve this problem?"  Like, should there be regulations, should there be laws?

Mark Moss: So, I would let the free market decide those things, so a couple of examples.  So one, obviously, California; we're in California at the time of this recording which has the highest state tax in the nation.  Not just the highest, but almost double the second highest.  Or I could just go to eight or nine other states, like Texas or Florida, and not pay any state taxes.  And that's freedom for me to choose.  So, I could decide, "But California has other benefits, and so I'm willing to pay more for the benefits that I have in California", or I'm willing to go to one of these other states that have less benefits and I pay that.  So, that's one way.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, but that's figuring out your options within this current structure.  If you moved to Texas, you're still going to have to pay property tax, which is coercion.  What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to understand more towards the end solution.

Mark Moss: I think coercion is only, like I said, when it's me not being able to make a decision that leads to my own ends, so I'm being forced into your own ends.  So, I don't have to move to Texas and pay property taxes, or I just bought a 12.5-acre ranch in Texas and the property I bought would have $60,000 a year property taxes on it, but because I have cows, I pay $1,300 a year.

Peter McCormack: But isn't that $1,300 still coercion, because you don't have the option not to pay it?  Do you see what I'm trying to get to?  Because, when you answered like that, it makes me think, "Okay, perhaps you are okay with government, as long as the government's distributed and I can choose between --" like, we don't have that choice in the UK. 

You have one tax system, one territory.  I can't move anywhere else in the UK and materially change my life, so I don't have that option, and I don't like it.  I envy the opportunity people have here to choose which state to live, to vote with their feet.  But what I'm trying to understand, for people who don't like coercion, don't like government, what is the end solution they're trying to get to.  Is it no federal government?  That makes sense.

Mark Moss: I would start there, so definitely start there.  The United States was meant to be 50 independent states.  Well, it wasn't 50 at the time obviously, but decentralised government in a sense.  So, we should have the freedom to choose.  What happened, and the reason why this is important, and the reason why the market, it could depend, is because what happens is then competition starts kicking in. 

So, if we were two businesses trying to vie for our customers, a product or a business, then I'm going to come up with ways to provide them a better product or service at a better price than you, so I'm going to outcompete you.  I'm going to give them a better product and service for a better price.  I'm going to invest in some R&D, I'm going to invest in some better people, I'm going to figure out a way to give them something better for less.  Without competition, there's no benefit.  So now, I'm just going to charge them whatever I want to charge them, and I don't care.  So, it's through that competition.

So, if we saw states truly competing, then they could compete on things like property taxes, "Well, I could lower property taxes, but then how am I going to pay for this?  Well, what we could do is I could do this, this and this", and they start innovating and they start coming up with ways to attract more people, and the free market can decide.

The problem with the federal government is there's none of that competition, because now everything has become federal.

Peter McCormack: But localised state-based government is still government?

Mark Moss: It is still government, and I think we're always going to need government, and this is where I differ from --

Peter McCormack: That's what I'm trying to get to; do you believe in that?  And that's okay, because I do as well.

Mark Moss: Maybe a little different from you, but agree.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Mark Moss: Me, different from anarchists, I believe we should never have voting.  Voting's ridiculous.  But it's like, "When in the HOA, you think we should have", not you, but these anarchists, "we should have private police, for example?"  Okay, well who's going to decide who that private police is?  I guess they would see it as more like entrepreneurs running districts, and that's not a bad thing.

Peter McCormack: It depends.

Mark Moss: Well, I don't think it is, because this kind of goes back to Milton Friedman's thoughts of profit being our main driving force.  So, if I'm driven by profits, I'm always going to do best, and people don't agree with this they say, "No, if these greedy corporations are driven by profit, they're going to be motivated to increase profits and cut corners and provide bad service".  I don't believe that to be true, in fact show me otherwise.

So, for example, if you drive by the local high school, all the businesses have signs in the local high schools sponsoring them; why; why would they give money to the sports programme?  Because, they would hope that they would get business from that.  So, they're using philanthropy as a way to get more profits.  Now, for example, what about the environment, these companies are going to screw up the environment?  Really?  Because, if I care about the environment, I would only shop with companies that do good things for the environment.

Peter McCormack: But that's not strictly true.

Mark Moss: It is true.  Look at Patagonia, for example.  Patagonia has built their entire brand on that.  They sell at a premium, almost double what other products do, and they've done amazingly well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there are still plenty of companies out there whose products and services damage the environment and people still use it.  Like, I care about the environment and I fly way too much, and I'm massively concerned about it, because sometimes convenience.  Not everyone can afford Patagonia, so some people have to take H&M.  So, I understand what you're saying…

Mark Moss: I know, but these are fun strings to start pulling on.  And this is why the free market should decide this stuff, because nobody has the answer, because everything has a cost-benefit analysis.  So, everything has a cost-benefit analysis.  So, to your point, "Not everyone can afford Patagonia", so poor people should walk around naked?"

Peter McCormack: No, that's not what I'm saying.

Mark Moss: I know you're not saying that.  But my point is, they shouldn't, so there needs to be options for different people.  And while I think there could still be an option to make a lower-priced product that still is somewhat socially responsible, not using slave labour, etc, again I think if the market demands it, it will be there.  A couple of examples of this will be milk being hormone-free.  That wasn't a thing a while ago, but people wanted it to be, and now it is.  Or kosher food, for example.  Now, most food is kosher, because a small percent of the population wanted it.

You mentioned regulation before.  In the supplement space, there was this exclusion where you could make supplements outside of FDA approval.  So, you go to a GNC, a health food store, and they have all these health food supplements and whatever, but they were all getting through without FDA.  But the problem is, there was no regulation, to your point.  So, the industry decided to self-regulate.  So, the industry set up a couple of labs and couple of testing, and if you would submit your product to there, they would certify it and stamp it.  And there were a couple of different labs that would compete.  And me, as a consumer, would go, "They spent the money to have this tested and approved with this lab".  It's self-regulation.

Peter McCormack: How do we know we can trust that lab?

Mark Moss: Well, because the labs compete.

Peter McCormack: But how do we know they don't collude?  I mean, these are the things that I don't know.  I can give you better examples.  DuPont; I don't know if you've seen the film, Dark Waters.  There was a journalist wrote a really interesting piece on the research on what DuPont did, where they were essentially poisoning the land and the cows started dying and people started getting cancer, and they spent, it might even have been two decades trying to sue DuPont, and DuPont did everything to crush these people; they did everything to crush these people.

In a completely unregulated world, where markets compete and there's a complete free market, what do we do about DuPont poisoning the land, where there's no one, no regulation against what they're doing?

Mark Moss: Well, I guess what I would say is that, one, that's possible; and two, there should be some sort of a testing, or some sort of regulation to monitor that or prevent that.  But what I would say is the difference is, do you think the FDA or the EPA is the one that has your back, really?  The FDA, the people at the FDA that work at the pharmaceutical companies, and it's a revolving door going back and forth and, "Pfizer's paid the biggest criminal fines of any…" you think the FDA has your back?

So, I would rather, if I have to trust some regulatory body to regulate these types of things, I would rather have a little bit of competition going on there, so I know they're keeping each other honest, as opposed to one crony government one.

Peter McCormack: I'm with you on the FDA, and sometimes I have to extricate myself, I have to separate myself from the US, because the US has a particularly different setup from, say, where I am in the UK, and I of course don't trust Pfizer.

Mark Moss: And I'm not even trying to pick them out.  But even Moody's credit rating agencies, for example, or the SEC, or any of these bodies, they're all corrupted.  And I would rather see a few people competing.

Peter McCormack: But are they more recently corrupted, hence the cycle?

Mark Moss: Oh, for sure, yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that's why I'm wondering, is there a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater because of where we are right now; and actually, what we should do is strengthen and rebuild institutions, rather than burn them to the ground and try something else?  There are other things I worry about, Mark.  Age of consent; how do you legislate for the age of consent without any centralised authority creating those rules?  That's one that particular worries me.  Or, we have child welfare institutions within the UK --

Mark Moss: But take the age of consent for a second.  Right now, I mean they shut off the sitting President of the United States off Twitter, and you have these people on Twitter today calling for lowering the age of consent as low as four.

Peter McCormack: Well, they're obviously psychopaths and need ignoring.

Mark Moss: I agree 100%.  Of course I agree!  This is something that you would think anybody would agree on, we don't even have to have a discussion; of course that's wrong, right?  But no, you have teachers in schools and legislators in law and on Twitter that are calling for this to happen, and this is in this 100% centrally controlled system.  It's obviously not working.

Peter McCormack: But it is, the age of consent exists.

Mark Moss: But they're trying really hard to change it.

Peter McCormack: But that's a different point.  The point is that it does exist and it's centrally controlled, and if you break the age of consent, if you're a 40-year-old man and you go and have sex with a 16-year-old in the US, or a 15-year-old in the UK, you will be arrested and you will be charged.  That's one of the things I worry about in an unregulated --

Mark Moss: I don't think anybody thinks about unregulated.  I don't think even the anarchists would think of things being unregulated.

Peter McCormack: Well, they do.

Mark Moss: No, they don't.  What they do is, who's doing the regulating.

Peter McCormack: Well, okay, but who is; who's doing the regulating?

Mark Moss: So, what it would be is, for example, I'm a rich billionaire, whatever, and I go buy however many hundreds of acres and I set up my own town, and I'm going to build 3,600 homes and have my own marina, I'm going to build my own city.  Well, just like my corporation, where I set culture and policy in my corporation and we enforce rules, in my new town or city, I have rules and regulations that I enforce in that town as well.

Then, you set yours up 500 miles away, and you set up your rules and regulations in your town, and you enforce them in your city and your town, and then we compete.

Peter McCormack: I hope we don't start competing on age of consent, because that would be a weird scenario whereby Epstein would set up his place with a very low age of consent, and all the paedos and nonces would head there!

Mark Moss: Yeah, and I think what would happen is nobody would head there.

Peter McCormack: But they would.

Mark Moss: Well, I don't know if they would.

Peter McCormack: I think we're trying to circle something which is one of the flaws in an unregulated environment.

Mark Moss: I don't think there's a flaw, because basically we're saying the same thing.  Somebody is going to have to make a rule that that's not okay.  You're saying it should be a state, and I'm saying it should be a state.  I'm saying it should be a very tiny state, you're saying it should be a very big state.  We're all saying the same thing.  What I'm saying, though, that's different is that, when you have a very big state in your solution, it becomes very corrupted, and when you have smaller states that are forced to compete against each other, it will stay true and honest.

Peter McCormack: What if my state is five houses and I create my rules within there that allow me to abuse young girls, and I say, "That's my state".

Mark Moss: Well, your little five state is going to get run over with a frigging steamroller, because those five kids' parents are going to come take you out.

Peter McCormack: Well, it could be your own child.  What I'm saying is, I think this is a flaw that isn't fully thought out, and I commend you for trying, but I'm not seeing an answer to that.  I think there are certain things that need aggregated at a much wider level, and I think some things work really bad at a wide level.  I think, for example, certain policies coming from a federal government for 330 million people are clearly ridiculous.  But I think certain policies, like aggregating age of consent for 330 million people, I think that's actually a good thing, and that's something that I put in the bucket of, I don't think that's ones that are fully thought through.

Mark Moss: But let's think about that a little bit further.  So, for example, we have the Uyghur situation in China going on right now.  Interestingly enough, I saw Nancy Pelosi today, she's been coming on pretty hard about this whole situation, as a matter of fact, calling for a ban on the Olympics.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I'd support her.

Mark Moss: Yeah, right.  I mean, I think globally, there are certain things that almost everyone can agree on, the age of consent being one of those.

Peter McCormack: Tottenham being shit, the other one!

Mark Moss: Pretty much universally, there are certain things we can agree on.  So, I think, I don't know, I guess it just comes down to, whether it's on a small level or a big level, somebody is going to have to make that policy and enforce it, and I think it's just better to be done on a small scale where it can be competed against and held true.  If people don't want it, then they're not going to support it, and I think that's just universally acceptable.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why I support a lot of the ideas of localism.  Brexit was great.  I believe the break-up of Europe, for some reasons would be better, for other reasons not.  But I also feel like in the US, you've got some things really right, and maybe other things not.  And I think this trying to package it all up into one always fails.  Everything centralised is clearly wrong, or completely individual really wrong.  But I feel like there are just some things that haven't been solved.  We've gone on a real tangent here!

Mark Moss: Yeah, we went really into this age of consent thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, I just think that's a really good example, but there are others.  It's like child protection.  One of the things that I'm not sure what happens here, but in the UK, we have certain government agencies.  Child Protection is an agency that we have, and their job is --

Mark Moss: A lot of these problems though also, I think, are new modern type problems, and this goes with the breakdown of society.  So, 100 years ago, was age of consent a big problem?

Peter McCormack: I just don't think it existed, or it wasn't as visible.

Mark Moss: Or child protection, was that a big need?

Peter McCormack: It was probably needed, but society was different.  I would expect that there were paedos and abusive people through the history of time.

Mark Moss: Sure, on a very, very tiny scale, and it's probably dealt with locally.  So, I'm not ever talking about a world without rules, so bad things happen, but I think a lot of what we're talking about are dealing with a breakdown of society, and the problems that we have, really that's like trying to treat a symptom as opposed to trying to go with the cure.  And so, I think if we, and this is part of the book, The Un-Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx was about the end of the nuclear family; he thinks it should be abolished.  He said that the bourgeoisie only have kids for exploitation; that's it.  They only look at women as baby factories basically.  I'm like, "Where did he get that?  Who did he even talk to, to come up with that idea?"

So, if we could rebuild the nuclear family back to 100 years ago when families were together and kids worked on the farm with their dad, and you didn't have all these societal problems that we have today, so we're trying to manage things on a micro level, when really we need to fix the bigger macro picture.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure I entirely agree, but I can't prove it.

Mark Moss: Yeah, we don't know.

Peter McCormack: I'm sure abuse and violence in the family home has been --

Mark Moss: Sure, it's always happened, sure.

Peter McCormack: It's always happened, but we now have institutions at least trying to protect against this.  And the reason I bring up these is, I worry about the vulnerable groups in this new structure, whether you're anarchist or libertarian, I do worry about the vulnerable groups.  And, yes, trying to protect vulnerable groups has been done through coercion, has been done through taxation, and it's been done through centralised entities.  But at the same time, we do have protection for vulnerable groups.

In the UK, again, we have built a society which makes it so that those people who are in wheelchairs, or have certain physical difficulties, have no issues with access to buildings and public buildings, and such.

Mark Moss: But again, if I'm a building owner or a business owner, and I want to have business, then I'm going to make it accessible for those people to come.  And if I don't, then somebody else will, and they'll get the business.

Peter McCormack: But sometimes maybe nobody will, because it's not economically worth it.  That's why I'm just saying, I can be economically conservative and I can be a bit liberal and progressive at times, and the protection of vulnerable groups is where I definitely go onto the progressive side.

Mark Moss: No, I think the disagreement, or where there might be a little difference, I should say, not disagreement, is that while we both see the same problem --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we definitely do.

Mark Moss: -- and we both agree there should be a solution, the difference is that I believe that people will solve it, and you believe people will solve it.  The difference is, you believe those people have to be part of a central authority government, and I believe people don't have to be part of it.

Peter McCormack: Actually, I'll answer for me.  I actually think, depending on the problem, I think in some instances, it's better in a centralised institution.

Mark Moss: Sure, but how big of a central institution?  That's the question, right, and that's where the pendulum swings and swings and then we keep trying to find, we go too far one way and we come back another way.

Peter McCormack: But maybe that's just the way we'll always be, until the robots take over.

Mark Moss: Sure, because there's no perfect, there's no such thing as perfect.  What's perfect is to allow us to decide what we want to do, to solve a lot of these problems that have created all these situations we have to manage in the short term.  A lot of it comes down to, and really if we want to move on from there a little bit, is that if we look at the way the world works, the way that we organise, the way that we work and coordinate has a lot to do with this.

So, for example, going back to these cycles of history, we can see when the Protestant Reformation happened, the Church had that central authority over the people.  And once that got broken, because the printing press got out there and people started getting the information, we started getting this explosion of science and technology and thought, which was the Renaissance Age, and that blew up; which then led to new technologies, like the Industrial Revolution, which then caused all these people from the farms and the factories to start moving into cities.

We had all these people that were decentralised, living all across the open fields in small family units, on the farm, working together collectively, feeling a sense of purpose, helping their neighbours, helping their friends; and then they started moving to cities and started centralising, started living on top of each other in skyscrapers.  And then, for the last 250 years, the whole pendulum has swung towards centralisation.  So then, you had to move to the cities to have jobs, and you had to work in factories, and you had to work on top of each other, and you had assembly lines.  So, for the last 250 years, the world has been organising towards that way.  And if you wanted to make money, you had to move to a city; and not just a city, you had to move to America; and not just America, but New York or Chicago.

What happened is then, because as all that power got centralised down, the state was able to grow bigger and bigger and bigger, because now, what are you going to do, move your factory?  We'll just tax you.  So, it's allowed the state to grow bigger.  Then, as the state gets bigger, they start trying to help a lot of people.  Here's an example.

Peter McCormack: Elon Musk moved his factory.

Mark Moss: My younger sister's an ER doctor.  Her residency, or whatever, was in Philadelphia, in the very poor area of Philadelphia.  She was just starting in the ER room, and she would have these young, teenage girls come into the ER, and she's like, "What's going on?"  "We want you to help us get pregnant".  She's like, "Why would I help you get pregnant?"  She had just gotten there, she was new.  "Well because, if I get pregnant, then the state will give me money and they'll give me a house and childcare, and the more babies that I have, the more money they give me".

So, what's well-meaning by the state is the Cobra Effect, right, "What's well meaning has unintended consequences".  So, next thing you know, you have girls with half a dozen babies, being unwed, that are living in projects with a bunch of little badasses running around with no father figures, and then you can only understand what happens after 60 or 70 years of that programme.  So, while it's well-meaning of the state to do that, you start to see how these policies that they enact start getting away from them very, very badly.

Peter McCormack: I understand the misincentives as well, I totally get it.  We did definitely just go on a tangent!

Mark Moss: We did!  Protect the children, though, we agree on that.

Peter McCormack: We do.  So, okay, back to this.  Another point which definitely stands out to me is, are your thoughts on this a kind of global macro view, or are you just specifically thinking of America or The Americas, because from Europe, the issues we have, certainly in the UK and the rest of Europe, are different from the US.  We are not as divided, or divisive across these issues.  We don't have the political split that exists here.  It happens, but it doesn't like we are in as bad a position.

Mark Moss: You were just talking about Brexit.  Really?

Peter McCormack: No, but Brexit was a divisive issue, it happened, it's done and we've moved on.  But other issues here whereby, I talked about this earlier with Natalie Brunell, whereby for example, are you vaccinated.  There is a very strong left versus right vaccination divide.  That doesn't really exist in the UK.

Mark Moss: Really?  Because I see the video of the Belgian officer punching that 15-year-old girl in the face, and I see the people in Austria --

Peter McCormack: No, I'm talking about the UK.  What I'm saying is, there are issues and there are certainly problems across Europe, but what I'm saying is, it doesn't always seem to always be down such a political line.  And I think one of the reasons is, we're not a two-party system.  The majority of Europe is a multi-party system, so you don't feel like, "I have to be on a team".  It's not a criticism, it's more, is everything you're looking at and all these theories, are you thinking global macro, or is this US-centric?

Mark Moss: It's global, but it's more G7 or maybe G20.  It's developed nations.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Mark Moss: So, I would include Europe in that, for sure, and for some of the examples I just gave.  I think the EU was put together almost 80 years ago.  And if I look at the EU and all the different countries that are there, it's kind of like the United States.  Each country is about the size of a different state here.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, about that.

Mark Moss: And so, the EU is about 60, almost 80 years old now.  I think it was about 1964, or something like that, so about 80 years old.

Peter McCormack: And it's fragmenting.

Mark Moss: And it's fragmenting, just like there are different states here in the United States that are starting to balkanise as well.  So, for example, here in the United States, last week the Biden Administration said they wanted to put executive actions in place to regulate cryptocurrencies, and the Treasury has this new expanded power to regulate cryptocurrencies.  But then Texas and Arizona are putting bills in to make it legal tender.  After federal mandates went into place, 15 states, well I think 26 states sued the federal courts, because they didn't want to impose those, so there was a lot of pushback.

I would say the same is happening in Europe right now, so you have Austria and Germany are still super-heavy mandates, then you have Switzerland that has completely gone away from it.  You have France, who has moved into nuclear power, and now they've got the EU to start calling nuclear, "clean energy", green energy; but you have Germany who's still shutting them down.  So, there's a lot of that back and forth.  We could sit here and cite examples all day that I think that Europe is --

Peter McCormack: But we don't act really as a collective Europe.  The EU was a political union, and yes, we had freedom of movement; but we don't have that cross-border country-to-country left-v-right division.  It exists mainly in silos in the countries themselves.  Like, we don't generally give a fuck what France is doing, what Germany is doing. 

Mark Moss: But I think the same would be in the US, where I don't really know what's going on in Wyoming, here in California.

Peter McCormack: It's slightly different.  People do, because they migrate from New York to Miami, or they migrate from California to Texas.

Mark Moss: It's a little bit different.  Two of the similarities I'd say is, one, obviously it's the United States, so it's independent states that are united, the United States of America, but we're really bound by one federal organisation.  Plus, it's the money, the dollar.  But also, Europe has the same thing, so they have the EU and they have the euro.

Peter McCormack: I think that's why it was maybe easier for the UK to get out.

Mark Moss: And the ECB, right.  So, Europe is kind of set up the same.  Anyway, back to the question, I think it's really G7 for sure, but G20 that are all kind of at the same age in this 80-year cycle, and they've all reached this level of development.  I wouldn't probably include the non-developed world, so Central America, a lot of South America, probably Brazil, those bigger countries.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's an interesting point, because I don't know if you've read any of Balaji's work.  He said, "We need to stop talking about the First and the Third World", he said, "It's a useless term.  We need to talk about the ascending and the descending world".  The US is part of the descending world, or maybe the whole G7.  India's part of the ascending world, and I thought that's a really good point.  I don't know if you've read any of that.

Mark Moss: I haven't read that, but I have listened to some of Balaji.  I was actually listening to him and Breedlove this morning in the car ride on the way up here, and he was talking about India and how China basically came from nowhere ten years ago; who would have seen where they are today?  And he thinks that India will probably be in the same place, and I'd probably agree with that.  But I think what I'm talking about with these cycles is mostly the developed world, because of the timeframes that they're on, so G20, but I think it's going to affect the whole world overall.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  There was one more criticism that was quite a big criticism, is that the table was too big!  Are we okay with this one?

Mark Moss: The table's good.  There was one other criticism too, and I think people said that it was very right-wing centric.

Peter McCormack: They did.

Mark Moss: So, I think that was one other one, that it was right-wing centric.  What I would say to that is --

Peter McCormack: Can I add to that?  It's a really funny thing.  Whenever people say that, they use right wing, I always feel they use it pejoratively.  It's almost like because it's right wing, it's therefore bad.  And that's one of those things that's a real difficulty at the moment.  It's like, if you want to work in Hollywood or work in Google, you have to be on the left, you can't be Republican.  And that starting point of that, if you're a conservative person that you've already got your card marked as bad, I really fucking detest it.

Mark Moss: I detest the label overall.  So, I think the labels have been completely misused and I've forgotten what the meanings are.  So, for example, fascism is right and socialism is left.  What does that even mean?  So, the way that I look at it is individualism versus collectivism.  So, fascism and socialism are both collectivist, and that's what we talked about in the book, Un-Communist Manifesto, and that's where we drew that axis.

So, rather than saying right or left, or fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism, I just look at individualism or collectivism.  So, is this right wing?  I think it's apolitical.  So, what we're talking about is cycles, and we're looking at the way that the world has changed the way that it's organised.  We've looked at the way that technology has changed that and how it's going to change it again right now.  I look at Bitcoin as being apolitical, it's just a technology.

When we digitised music and we digitised books and we digitised photos, was that a political thing?  That was just progress, that was just technology, and now we're digitising money.

Peter McCormack: Well, there is a caveat there in that digitising music wasn't a threat to the regime, wasn't a threat to the state.

Mark Moss: It was a threat to all the music companies, and they threw a big fit about it.

Peter McCormack: I know, but what I'm saying is, when you want to digitise the money and you want it out of the hands of the government, which is their largest weapon, let's be just fucking honest about it, it's their largest weapon --

Mark Moss: For sure.

Peter McCormack: When you digitise that, it's not only that you digitise it, we've had digital money; when you decentralise it and you give a form of money they can't fucking control, then it becomes a threat.  And it's which political wing first identifies that, or locks onto that.  Now luckily, here out in the US, whilst there is a conservative lead in that race in the moment, there are more conservative people in Congress and the Senate who are bitcoiners, there is a growing number of people who are, not so much in the Senate and Congress, we tend to see it with people who want to get into Congress, want to get in the Senate, saying they're bitcoiners, taking the hack.

Mark Moss: Obviously, I agree with you, it's a threat to the political power, it's a threat to politics.  It's maybe not apolitical, maybe it's antipolitical, but does that make it left or right?

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I'm with you, it's neither, it's apolitical.  But people can make it a left or right issue.

Mark Moss: Based off of their own bias.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, based off of whether they think it's a threat or not.  And I can see it's really easy to identify why it would be the left who would see it as more of a threat, or be more public about the threat, because it's the conservatives who tend to be more economic conservative, who care more about property rights.  So, that I think is only natural, and I think that's something that we have to do as bitcoiners, just as a separate point.  We have to make the left realise this is not a threat.  We have to deal with fuckheads like Elizabeth Warren.

Mark Moss: So, when you have Kristalina Georgieva calling from the IMF calling for Bretton Woods II, reset the financial system, is that left or right?

Peter McCormack: That is state.

Mark Moss: It's centralist.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, totally. 

Mark Moss: So, I don't know if that's left or right.  So, I don't see this as a left or right argument.  If technology changes the way that we work, is that left or right?  I don't know, so I don't look at it that way.  So, I know that was a criticism.  I think maybe there were some comments where we might have talked about the breakdown of society, and maybe we talked about Marxism a little bit, so maybe thought that was a little bit right wing.  But anyway, I try not to identify with any of those labels, I'm just thinking about it.

Peter McCormack: I understand why you don't, but I see you more of a conservative person.  But I don't see that as a criticism.  And as I said a moment ago --

Mark Moss: Conservative, but at the same time, I'm advocating for progress and technology.  So, isn't that progressive, you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: It depends, because you've got buckets of things which conservatives and progressives care about.  That's why Jonathan Haidt's book is really good, because it explains to you why some people are conservative and some are liberal, and it's all to do with part nature and part nurture, and some of it's to do with the construction of their brain and how their brain works.  What is it called?  The Righteous Mind.  It's a great book.  It gives you a really good understanding of why some people are one way and some people aren't, because it's the things they care about.

I think if there was more understanding and more empathy for why somebody thinks one way and someone thinks another way, you could get more consensus on bigger issues.  And I actually think -- this is funny, I'm going to undo my own arguments.  I actually think, if you get rid of the corporate bullshit media, and you get rid of that political divide, I think most people would get along.  I think if you got 200 people are both Republican and Democrat, and you got them to live them together in a community, you got rid of social media and the media and just said, "Just make this community work", they'd probably all get along.

Mark Moss: It's hard today, and the reason why is because they've forced us to decide on issues we shouldn't have to be deciding on.  So for example, what do I mean by that?  Obviously, the last 24 months have split people up.  My neighbours that I've been neighbours with forever, we don't want to talk to each other anymore, it's horrible.  But they've forced us to get divided over things that we should never have been thinking about or talking about.

So for example, should my kids be forced to take something or not?  That should never be a decision that I or my neighbours should ever have to make, but all of a sudden they've split us over that.  And in an individual society, I should be free to choose.  Now, you should also be free to choose if you want to give your kids that medicine, and you should even be free to choose to send your kids to a school that they only take that medicine, if you want.  But it shouldn't be down to a situation where we're forced to decide and be collective on that.

I think that's the problem.  If you pulled all these issues back and kept it down to just the bare bones, we can agree.  It's when you get into the nitty-gritty details.  But more specifically, and I had this conversation specifically with somebody regarding the medicine topic, the problem is that --

Peter McCormack: Are you saying "medicine" on purpose?

Mark Moss: Well, I don't know if this is going to go on YouTube, or whatever, right?

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, good point.  Shall we just say COVID for the sake of it; see if they remove it?

Mark Moss: Yeah, whatever.  But the problem is, I believe you should have the right to choose, you do what you want.

Peter McCormack: I completely agree.

Mark Moss: But when you start trying to tell me what to do, that's when we have a problem.

Peter McCormack: Are you going to get me banned from YouTube?

Mark Moss: No, I'm a YouTuber, so I'm very careful on what I say.  And this is the horrible part, because I didn't even catch myself doing it, but I find myself censoring myself all the time.

Peter McCormack: Self-censorship is censorship.

Mark Moss: And then, when you censor what you're saying, I have to start censoring what I'm thinking.

Peter McCormack: Self-censorship is censorship, I talk about this a lot.  Again, I'm going to say, there are elements within the Bitcoin community which have a similar set of views.  And if other people come in with views outside of that, they get attacked, they get insulted, the mob can come after them.  I don't just think, I know people self-censor.  Somehow, I've got away with being this British --

Mark Moss: I don't know if you've got away with anything.  You take plenty of flak!

Peter McCormack: I do, but what I'm saying, it hasn't destroyed my career.  But I get a lot of emails from people who say, "Yeah, Pete, thanks for talking about that".  And I've poked them and said, "Why don't you talk about this?" and it's like, "I just don't want the mob to come after me".  That's self-censorship.  I think we can create environments of self-censorship which exacerbates the same problems we're talking about of corporate media.  We create group think, and I think that's terrible for society.

Mark Moss: It's terrible for a number of reasons.  That's a whole conversation on its own, which we can talk about a little bit later.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I think we've dealt with enough of the criticism, and it wasn't a lot.  I think a lot of people agreed with it, not everyone.  My brother was one who came back and he loved the show, he really enjoyed it, but he was challenging me, he was saying, "I don't agree with all of this", and pushed back with me.  But he does that with every show.

Mark Moss: I think some of that was where we went into some of the morality stuff, talking about the breakdown of society, and there's difference of opinion, I think, that could be in there.  But for the most part, when we talk about the cycles and some of these big periods in history, it's indisputable, it's fact.

Peter McCormack: And I'm with you with where we are, not entirely on the solution, but that's fine.  You probably would expect that anyway. 

Mark Moss: Yeah, I would expect it, and we don't know, and I think the difference is somewhere in the middle.  I really think the difference is where we're free enough to decide, so your choices don't affect my choices.  That's what it comes down to.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.  How long have we done, Danny?

Danny Knowles: We're at an hour or so.

Mark Moss: Oh, shoot!

Peter McCormack: I was like, "Right, we'll get the criticisms done in the first ten minutes, then we'll move onto the solution and where we're going"!  But look, before we start talking about it, because that was why we said we'll do a part two, and I'm sure we'll do a part three -- I'm sure we'll just make a bunch of fucking shows; I love talking to you, Mark Moss!  If somebody's listening and they're ambivalent, why should they care; do people need to care?  Do they just accept what happens, or is the reason people should care that they should be prepared for what's coming; what is the reason people should care?

Mark Moss: There are a couple of reasons.  The first reason is, I think it makes sense of what's going on today.  So, there are a lot of people that are puzzled, they don't know what's going on, they're confused, they're anxious, etc.  We know that, so why?  A lot of people think this is, like I said at the beginning, a black swan, so I think it makes sense of what's going on.  I think history also helps us makes sense of what's going on, but also tells us where it's going in the future, and not just exactly where it's going, but also some potential outcomes that it could go into, and that's what we framed up at the last one, the battle for the fate of humanity.

I think, based off this market research and market cycles and all these types of things, over the next five years is going to be crucial.  And, I think that if people care about the way the world is in the future, they have kids so they want to have kids or grandkids in the future then they should care, and I think these next five years are crucial.  And if they care enough, then they should probably get involved enough to try to help determine the outcome that they want.

Peter McCormack: And, is there a risk, we talk about the pendulum swinging, that it doesn't swing back; we go full authoritarian and the pendulum gets stuck in this weird, shitty fucking place?

Mark Moss: I'm afraid there is, and that's the battle for the fate of humanity.  And the reason why, to frame that talk, is we can see that the world is trending towards authoritarianism.  The problem is that it's the cost of maintaining that nation state.  So the Roman Empire, for example, to keep their Roman army out on the fringes, it was so expensive for them to do that, they couldn't manage that, and the same has been with every empire after that.

The problem is that now, with technology, that cost of maintaining that power has gotten very cheap, very low.  So now, it's all right here.  When they get you to have to show this device to get access to society, freedom as a service, they call it.  So, instead of being born free, I have to work to get my freedom.  So, I have to show this to get access to a restaurant or a theatre, my money has to be in a central bank digital currency, in order to use the internet I have to use a global ID.  Once we get to there, like in China --

Peter McCormack: China, once we get to China!

Mark Moss: What China's been able to do is their cost to maintain that structure is very, very cheap, so then they can scale it really, really big, and they can prevent what you see, so you don't even get the idea.  So, my favourite quote I've been saying all the time is Samuel Adams said that, "It doesn't take a majority to prevail, rather a small, irate minority lighting brushfires in the minds of men".  So, if China can keep those brushfires from ever getting started, which they can, the Great Firewall of China, they can prevent me sharing those ideas with you to spread that fire as well, they can use, through social credit score, they can keep me from -- to be a good citizen, so I could get my plane ticket and my bus tickets.

In 2018, there was almost 20 million people that got denied travel, and that was in 2018, 20 million that got denied travel in China, because their social credit score was too low, so they can prevent that.  And then they do the shame thing.  So, as I'm walking in the street, there's a monitor that tells you that I'm coming, I'm a bad person, etc.  So now, there's the shame aspect.  So, it makes their cost of maintaining the system very low, and so then they can scale it out really wide.  I'm afraid that once that gets deployed globally, it could be very hard, if not impossible, to overcome that. 

So, history is a story, a cycle of freedom, oppression and then revolution, and then freedom, oppression, revolution; but if they can keep that perfect prison with this technology, we may never have another revolution.

Peter McCormack: And revolutions in China are very difficult.

Mark Moss: Very difficult.

Peter McCormack: They've tried.

Mark Moss: They've tried, although there could be another one coming.  I saw George Soros the other day, he said, "Xi's days in China may be numbered".  And when Soros is saying that, you kind of want to pay attention to that, so that was an interesting comment.

Peter McCormack: Let me tell you an interesting thing about these, just as a side point.  Six months ago, I planned -- my daughter's birthday's coming up, and I planned to take her to New York.  She loves Billy Eilish; Billy Eilish, Madison Square Garden, "I'm going to give you the greatest present.  Your dad's away with work a lot of the year", it's shit for her and she puts up with it, and I'm just like, "I'm going to give you a great present.  Me, you, your brother and your best friend, you can bring your best friend, we're going to go to Madison Square Garden to see Billy Eilish".

So, I booked the flights, I booked the tickets.  We can't go, because in New York, in Madison Square Garden, we have to show proof of vaccination.  Now, look, I'm vaccinated.  People know that and I'm cool.  I'm not vaccinating my children.  For me, it was a massive problem.  I'm overweight, I'm not the healthiest and I'm 43.  When I looked at the maths, it's probably best that I'm vaccinated, and that was my personal, free choice to do, not enforcing anyone else.  I've never supported any form of a mandate.

But in New York, not only does my son have to be vaccinated and prove it, my daughter has to be, at 11 years old, because under-12s have to be vaccinated.  Even if I wanted to get her vaccinated, I couldn't, because you can't vaccinate an 11-year-old in the UK.  So, I was actually stuck in a place where even if I wanted to, which I wouldn't, we couldn't go.  So, we can't go, we've had to cancel that whole trip.  She can't have that trip because of these fucking rules.  Side issue, poor girl.

Mark Moss: Yeah, that's a shame.

Peter McCormack: And a shame for New York.

Mark Moss: It's a shame for everybody, for Billy Eilish, for everybody.  Everybody loses on that situation.

Peter McCormack: Just going back, because I was asking you why we should care, and it seems to be two reasons: one, to be prepared; but actually, the bigger point is that if you care and you think this is wrong, it's to try and fight against it.

Mark Moss: It's to try and fight against it, yeah.  And I think there are several things we can do, one of which is we could try and slow down the tide, and I think we've seen that.  So, there's a lot of backlash that's happened, and so we're starting to see mandates being dropped all over the world.  The trucker convoy in Canada has been pretty cool to watch.  I mean, that's effecting some real change there.

Peter McCormack: NHS vaccine mandates in the UK.

Mark Moss: Has that been dropped?

Peter McCormack: It looks like it's been dropped.

Mark Moss: Yeah.  Well, I saw Boris Johnson a couple of weeks ago said that they were dropping everything, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, COVID's kind of over in the UK.  Yes, people are getting COVID; yes, people are going to hospital; they had to start sending people to one of these Nightingale Hospitals, these kind of surge-flow hospitals.  It still exists, people are getting sick, there is a strain on the NHS.

Mark Moss: Who would've ever guessed people still get sick?  What kind of world is this?!

Peter McCormack: But they're getting sick at a level where they're having to use a surge hospital, so that exists.  But we're at the stage where we're opening up, society's opening back up, the mandates are ending.  Society's edging back to normal.

Mark Moss: What a lot of people don't realise is that hospitals are businesses, they're typically run by -- I don't know in the UK, but in the US, they're run by private entities and they're typically trying to make a profit.  And when you run a business trying to make a profit, you're trying to maximise that business.  So, if I run a restaurant, I'm trying to keep that restaurant full.  I can't run it at 10%, I want to run it full.  Hospitals also are run full.  So typically, ICUs run at over 90% occupancy all the time.  During the winter, during flu seasons, typically you'll have overflow into parking lots.  That's normal, Danny, look it up.

Peter McCormack: I've seen it.

Mark Moss: So, it's just normal.  So, ICUs are typically full in the winter, flu, and we typically set up in the parking lots.  It's just that now, this is in the news and everybody's hearing about it for the first time.

Peter McCormack: There are, again, some differences on that.  One of my very good friends is a doctor.  When COVID first hit London, he said he'd seen nothing like this.  The number of people coming in; they weren't just coming in, they were coming in and they needed to be on oxygen.  And he said the ICU filled up very quickly, and they were very quickly having to send people to other places.

Mark Moss: That's a whole conversation --

Peter McCormack: When you say it's a business, it's slightly different in the UK, because it's not really a business, because the NHS is a state-run system.  But even so, there's a slight difference.  Say if you're a restaurant, you can just raise your prices, or if you're a similar kind of place, if you've got a product, you can increase your supply.  With a hospital, it's quite difficult to just suddenly get new doctors and nurses who are trained, and we know doctors and nurses are overrun and we know people are leaving the profession because it's been a tough two years.  I think we should just acknowledge those slight differences that a hospital has from maybe a restaurant.

Mark Moss: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Mark Moss: I mean, we could do a whole episode on this, but neither of us are experts!  You have a friend that's a doctor, my sister's a doctor, but we aren't either, and even one doesn't tell the whole story.

Peter McCormack: No, it doesn't.  Okay, so listen, another thing.  This is, I don't want to say "funny", because I don't want to make light of important issues, but a lot of shit's happened since we spoke, and I've listed them, and I'm just going to put them at you and you can just frame them in the context of this.

But we have a massive build-up of troops on the Russian/Ukrainian border.  Nobody wants to see war, it would be devastating for the region.  I think what happened in Crimea is a disgrace.  We have the EU, the UK and even the US sending troops there, where it looks like nobody really knows what's going to happen.  Where does the context of that fit into all of this?

Mark Moss: I could guess at what happens.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Putin negotiates something and there's no war.

Mark Moss: Yeah.  I think that that fits within this, so it's within my notes to get to a little bit further.  If we frame this up, we can talk about it, but I think it's political theatre.  I think they're talking about things on a maybe 20,000-foot elevation, when the game's really played on a 50,000-foot elevation.  And so, the 50,000-foot players, the top of the GPPP, will allow this to happen, but it all kind of gets squashed.  I think some of it even is theatre where it creates nationalism.  They want nationalism, they want us against you, and so they want to get us riled up.

So we're, "Yeah, yeah, go to war, spend the money!" and it gets that loyalty going again, and I think we talked about that in our last episode, that nationalism is one way that that works.  So, I think it's political theatre.  I think there's a lot of backlash from the -- so, we're at peak centralisation, and we're seeing that blow-off.  So actually, what I wanted to talk about was a blow-off top.  So, in the world of finance, you know the term "a blow-off top", so in Bitcoin in 2017.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  We didn't get it this year, we expected to.

Mark Moss: Well, we had a 50% drop, one was at a 70% drop.

Peter McCormack: Come on, we can take a 50% drop.  It's the 80% drops we don't want.

Mark Moss: So, a blow-off top, as in a financial market, typically it's a steep increase.  At the top, there's a lot of volatility and a lot of volume happening, and then there's an ultimate crash.  Now, there's a couple of key pieces of this.  So, one, it's a steep increase, and as the market starts going up, it starts sucking in more and more participants, and they start buying, and then it's this self-fulfilling prophecy.  At the top, it's always the most frothy, and the 2017 run, every month there was about a 30% pullback, "Boom, boom" and then crash.

The reason why I say that is because that's how I'm looking at the world right now and this blow-off top.  And I believe we're having this blow-off top of centralisation, or socialism, if we want to call it that, in a sense where we've had this rise of centralisation, or socialism, has gone so fast, we're in this parabolic growth right now.  At the top, it's extremely volatile, and then it blows off.

Peter McCormack: So, where would you put the Canadian truckers in Ottawa into that; is that a blow-off top?

Mark Moss: Well, it's the volatility.  We haven't got to the blow-off top yet.  That's coming.  In my guess, that's in the next three to five years.  But it's the volatility we're seeing right now.  So, the truckers in Canada are a sign of that, I think the Ukraine/Russia/Crimea thing is a part of that, I think the Rogan/Spotify is a part of that, we had the DC marches happening the other day and for a couple of days were happening.  All that is part of it.  The Belgian police officer punching that 15-year-old girl in the face, I mean these are all part of the things that are happening.

Peter McCormack: But this is the volatility?

Mark Moss: It's all the volatility they're having.

Peter McCormack: That makes sense.  So, what does the blow-off top look like?

Mark Moss: The blow-off top, like I said, it's a steep increase, so we're seeing a massive rise of socialism or centralisation or globalisation happening, and then it's the most volatile.  So, like I said, those are all signs of that happening.  What does it look like when it blows off? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Mark Moss: Well, I think on the other side, we go towards much more of a decentralised way.  So for example, if we looked at since last we talked, those are some of the things; but really, if we look over the last two years, what we've seen is the centralisation of power that's been continuing to escalate, and not just in a normal way, but in a way where we've seen with technology.  Social media has obviously grown, we talked about the censorship issue.  Our own content isn't even our own anymore.  They can just shut our content down, we have to censor ourselves with what we say, we have politics.

Now, the politics has been interesting, because they've created all these emergency powers, and they've suspended the Bill of Rights, they've suspended Constitutions everywhere, in every country.  I mean, they flat out said, "The Constitution's off.  You don't get it".  The financial markets obviously, I was talking earlier about this new Freedom of Information Act that we saw the Fed created $30 trillion.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so you're going to have to explain this to the audience, because this isn't a small thing.  Can you look -- is it out there?

Mark Moss: I have the link right here, I can send it to you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Danny, can you get it up there?

Mark Moss: I mean, that's a link to their full report, so Levy Institute is the one that got the Freedom of Information Act.

Peter McCormack: Who's the Levy Institute.

Mark Moss: It's just a nonprofit, "Nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy think tank founded through the generous support of Bard College trustee, Leon Levy".

"The extraordinary scope and magnitude of the Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2009 induced an extraordinary response by the Federal Reserve in the fulfilment of its lender-of-last-resort function.  Estimates of the total amount of bailout funding provided by the Fed have ranged from its own lowball claim of $1.2 trillion to Bloomberg's estimate of $7.7 trillion, just for the biggest banks.  But new research conducted as part of a Ford Foundation project, directed by … finds the Fed's commitments, in the form of loans and asset purchases to prop up the global financial system, far exceeded even the highest estimates".

Peter McCormack: You see, what I want to know is, where the fuck is that $29 trillion; who got it; why it was done; where it exists?

Mark Moss: Yeah, and that was two years ago.

Peter McCormack: And, where in the balance sheet is that, if it's loans?

Mark Moss: Well, the Fed won't be audited.  So, Rand Paul has been pushing for an audit of the Fed.  Ron Paul started it, Rand Paul's been going in.  They won't be audited; we won't ever know.  But that's not really a big piece of this.  I think, if we look at the last two years, it was the centralisation of power.

Peter McCormack: Well, just to say, the interesting thing about this, it will just blow over, people will forget about it.  People have become immune to these fucking government debts.  I was talking to Natalie Brunell about the debt ceiling, and they need to get rid of the word "ceiling".

Mark Moss: Well, so here's another thing.  You probably know about the repo market blowing up in September of 2019.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Mark Moss: So, the banks loan money to each other overnight, repurchase, it's like a pawnshop, "I'll give you treasuries, you give me money, we'll buy it back", and that happens on an overnight basis.  Well, that seized up in September of 2019 and the Fed had to interact and they had to put $50 billion in overnight to keep it from seizing.  Well, the next day it was $50 billion, $75 billion, $100 billion, etc.  It got up to $1 trillion a day.

From September 2019 to July of 2020, they put in $11 trillion, and the Fed is supposed to be the lender of last resort to backstop the banks, that's commercial banks, that's where I have my money, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, etc.  That's not where the $11 trillion went, it went to investment banks.  Investment banks aren't supposed to get backstopped.  Investment banks are making risky investments, and they should be allowed to fail.  The Fed gave them $11 trillion.  Why, and where was that; who ever heard about that?  That was just in six months.

Peter McCormack: It's so broken.

Mark Moss: $11 trillion in six months.

Peter McCormack: Mark, it's so fucking broken.  It's like, how do you come back from this?

Mark Moss: You don't.

Peter McCormack: It's a drug addiction, right.

Mark Moss: You don't come back.  And the problem is is now, they're losing the narrative, and this is the big piece here.  This is where we're starting to see the blow-off top, is they're losing the narrative.  And the reason why they're losing the narrative is the same reason why the Church lost the narrative in the 1500s.  The information is out there, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  And the more that you try, the worse it gets.

Peter McCormack: Well, it was a bit like the truckers up in Ottawa; this particularly pissed me off.

Mark Moss: They said they were protesting against icy roads?

Peter McCormack: No, not that, fuck that.

Mark Moss: That's what they said.

Peter McCormack: Trudeau obviously went into hiding.  Where is it?  I've got it here.

Mark Moss: Trudeau said that they represented the fringe.

Peter McCormack: Right, here we go, "Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, homophobia and transphobia that we've seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.  Together, let's keep working to make Canada more inclusive".  Now, I'm not actually sure if there were any specific incidents of any of those claims.  But to use that as a broad claim against the entire movement, to essentially discredit the truckers, for me is clear and absolute bullshit.

Mark Moss: It is, and everybody knows it, and that's the point, that they're losing the narrative.

Peter McCormack: They're losing the narrative and they're getting desperate.

Mark Moss: So, what he said was this was a fringe group; this did not represent Canadians, this was a very small fringe group.  How do we know that?  How do we know what percentage of the population it represents?  Did they run a poll; is there a survey; did they run a vote?  No.  But they did have a vote.  The way that we vote is not through politics.  The way that we vote is with our money.  So, they raised over $10 million.

Peter McCormack: Well, how much of that can they actually get?  How much of that was the GoFundMe?

Mark Moss: Well, GoFundMe has it frozen now.  The State of Ottawa is now trying to seize the money.

Peter McCormack: Can we just say, "Go fuck you, GoFundMe"?  Fuck you.

Mark Moss: Yeah, but check this out.  So, how do we vote?  We vote with our money.  So, they got $10 million there, the truckers.  How much has Trudeau raised in the last quarter of his campaign?  $3 million.  They've outraised every single political party combined in Canada.  So, the people have voted, they voted with their dollars.  It's not a fringe, it represents more than all the other political parties combined; that's what it tells us.  They've lost the narrative, and to your point, the more they try to discredit, the worse they look.

Peter McCormack: They're essentially trying to discredit, or they're attacking a class, a group of people, the truckers.  I can't remember, I was chatting about this yesterday, but our world functions because we have truckers and we have electricians, we have people --

Mark Moss: Blue-collar people.

Peter McCormack: We have blue-collar people, and they've been completely ignored.  And when there is a financial crisis, we know during a financial crisis, the wealth divide grows, and it tends to fuck the people at the bottom end of society, or the lower ends of society.  The rich never get fucked by the poor people.

Mark Moss: Not the bottom end.  The bottom end are taken care of.

Peter McCormack: Not always.

Mark Moss: In Hollywood, you can do drugs on the street and walk around and poop on the sidewalk.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's the bottom end.  I mean, we're talking about working and middle class.

Mark Moss: If you're an Uber driver and you park in the wrong spot for five minutes, you're going to get a $200 fine.  So, whatever you want to define the middle class as; the working class.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's the working and middle class.  I think the middle class has got squeezed and the working class get fucked.

Mark Moss: Yeah, the working class.  And part of the reason why is the very poor, the drug addicts on the street in Hollywood, they live off the state and they're not a victim of the state.  And then the very rich, they also have benefitted off the state.  It's the working class that has to run a business and take care of their family and pay their bills.  They get it, they're conservative by nature, because they understand how the real world works.  It's the people on the fringes, on the outside that don't.

Peter McCormack: And it's proved now, the truckers have proved, that this group of people can bring a county to its knees if it wants to.  You don't have the ability to move goods around the country, what the fuck do you think's going to happen?

Mark Moss: Yeah.  So, I think that's one of the symptoms, or one of the signs.  But really, what we're seeing is that they've lost the narrative.  So, Joe Rogan getting 200 million views when CNN gets about 1 million.  They can't control this any longer, and they --

Peter McCormack: Ban it.

Mark Moss: -- ban it, exactly.  So, they're saying that he's spreading misinformation.  Why doesn't anybody go debate one of these doctors?

Peter McCormack: Well, maybe they will.

Mark Moss: And, I don't want to pull that piece back out, because I know there are some discrepancies there --

Peter McCormack: No, all I was saying is that there are counterarguments.  You can go on YouTube.  Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, there are people who've made videos to counter their points.  But the reality of Joe Rogan is, he's trying to find the truth.  He's got no agenda, he's not paid by anyone, you can't put him in a political wing, he's had people from the right on, he's said he's a Democrat, he's given ideas of where he votes; but he is the one person out there, you know it, he's only trying to find the truth.

Mark Moss: And the truth will win in open debate. 

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Mark Moss: The truth doesn't need censorship to protect it. 

Peter McCormack: No.

Mark Moss: The truth wins in open debate; and the problem is, the more that you censor the truth, the worse it gets.  When we originally started talking, we started talking about central versus decentral, or anarchy, and I said we really don't want to live in true anarchy, because we can't trust anybody.  We can't live in a world like that, where I don't know if my food's going to get poisoned, or if my kid's going be -- we need trust.  Trust is a very important thing, and it's also very fragile.

So, if you had a business partner that you were concerned was stealing from you, for example, and you said, "Hey, can we look at the books, and can we look at these carpool charges?" and he said, "Oh, no, you can't look at the books, never mind that", all of a sudden, you'd be very suspicious.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Mark Moss: But if they said, "Oh, yeah, no problem, let's take a look, here we go", so transparency is what wins trust, not censorship.  So, the more that they try to control the narrative, which they've already lost, but the more they try to control, the worse it gets for them.  So, the only way they're going to regain trust at this point is to come 100% clean, a few heads are probably going to need to roll, and they can promise to do better, and then maybe.  But short of that, which is never going to happen, then there's just no way to regain the narrative.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there's also an opposite risk, in that information which comes from these central places could be true, but because so much trust has been lost, fringe ideas or conspiracy ideas which counteract, which are false, now get a platform, get a voice, because people have lost so much trust?

Mark Moss: Sure, 100%.

Peter McCormack: That is a thing I think is also happening.

Mark Moss: Well, it does happen.  So what happens is, once people start believing in conspiracy theories, now everything's a conspiracy, and that happens a lot, it's very common.  And it's no different from your business partner, or whatever.  If you think your business partner is stealing from you, then you're all of a sudden always thinking that.  So, it's the same thing.  And to your point, once people believe conspiracies, everything's a conspiracy.  The way that you beat that is by being transparent and telling the truth, and they can't do that.

So, this kind of frames up, I think, the last two years.  Now why?  Why has that been the case?  Why have we been through this in the last two years?  I think it's because the state had to.  They realised, just like, again, in the 1500s, that the printing press was going to unseat them, they realised that the internet had opened this information up.  They realised they were losing control, they realised they were losing the grip, they realised they were losing the narrative and it was their last grasp.  They had to do something, they had to do something to display their power and their control.

I'm not saying that this was purposely unleashed on anything, but as Klaus Schwab, in his own words, "We must take this opportunity to have this great reset".  And so, The New York Times ran an article, they called it Going Medieval, and they recommended we go medieval; that's what they said in the article.  It was, lock everybody down, suspend everybody's rights and freedoms, and it was like this last grab to do that, like I said, just like the Church tried.

Peter McCormack: I fell for that.  I have a very embarrassing tweet that went out where I agreed with draconian lockdowns, because I was put into that position of fear.

Mark Moss: Yeah, and everybody was.  In the beginning we didn't know.  I mean, they showed us videos in China, and I put a tweet out of this and I said, "A few videos from the CCP, which who trusts the CCP?"  A few videos of people falling over, and the whole world was into a tailspin.  And now we have hundreds of people dropping over in real TV, and nobody seems to care.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I think on this issue as well, I did shows building up to COVID with Caitlin Long, Travis Kling, where we were talking about the economy.  Both of them were saying, "Look, at some point it's going to blow up, they're running out of bullets, they're running out of options".

Mark Moss: From a financial side?

Peter McCormack: From a financial side.

Mark Moss: Sure.

Peter McCormack: And, COVID was essentially the pin that broke the bubble.  There is zero part of me that believes there's a global conspiracy to release COVID for this final kind of chance to create control over people.

Mark Moss: I don't think that either.

Peter McCormack: I think it happened and I think people made decisions and they made bad decisions, and the decisions they made are a symptom of how the system is broken.  And you have opportunists in there and you have control freaks, but I think they're a symptom of the problem.

Mark Moss: Yeah, I don't think that either, I haven't seen any evidence to make me think that.  I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that, because it doesn't really matter. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay, fair.

Mark Moss: I do believe there was gain-of-function studies done, I do believe that President Xi did go on the news before we heard about the leak and said that they were changing protocols at the Wuhan facility, that did happen.  We did see that there was a doctor that was brought up on charges for selling animals in the wet market, we did see that.  But I haven't seen any of the shows that it was done intentionally, and I don't think that to be the case.  Was it Emanuel who said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste".

But back to your point that you just made, we're at the end of this long-term credit cycle, an 80-year financial revolution as I'm talking about, but that --

Peter McCormack: Let me put something out there, just as a hypothesis.  There are people that believe it was planned put out there, but could it just have been planned put out there by just one nation, one nation that would look at the vulnerabilities of the world, one nation that has continued to grow, that has invested through its Belt and Road Initiative, and realised the rest of the world can't handle it the way they can? 

If there is an outbreak, they know they have full control, they know they can lock their people down, they know they can probably -- there's some strength in authoritarianism when trying to deal with the pandemic, and they've dealt with it, but knowing the rest of the world is such a shitshow that every other nation would just fail and that would put them in a stronger position.  It's still a conspiracy, it's still a hypothesis, but…

Mark Moss: Well, a conspiracy only means two or more people conspiring, making plans against somebody else; it happens all the time, people are always conspiring.  But anyway, that is not a hypothesis, that is fact.  So, China knew about this for months before they did anything to lock people down or warn other nations about this.  So, whether it was intentional or not --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think that's thing, is it intentional or not?

Mark Moss: I don't know if it's intentional, but they did intentionally let it spread, they did do that.

Peter McCormack: We know that.

Mark Moss: Yeah, they had it going on for months before they decided to send out alerts and stop travel.

Peter McCormack: But could that be that they didn't realise how bad it was?

Mark Moss: I don't think so.

Peter McCormack: Well, who knows.

Mark Moss: It's neither here nor there, I think.  So, we recapped the long history, we recapped the last two years and what the symptoms are and how everything's starting to break down.  Why did it have to happen?  Well, because they were trying to get their last grasp, because they knew they were losing their grip, just like the Church was in the 1500s.  So then, what's really going on; who is that that's trying to make this last grasp?  Not that it's this big conspiracy, but I think what I've seen is that the world has been taken over by bankers, it's a coup, a coup d'état of the bankers.

Peter McCormack: A banker coup, okay.

Mark Moss: Have you heard about the Global Public-Private Partnership?

Peter McCormack: No, tell me about it.

Mark Moss: So, Danny can google it and throw it up there.  The Global Public-Private Partnership, and you'll see an org chart, and you can put it up on that screen so Peter can see it.  Basically, it's exactly what it sounds like, is a public-private partnership.  So, what they've done, "they" being all these rich, multinational companies, etc, have decided to make a partnership to get things done.  It starts at the top with the BIS, the Bank of International Settlements.

Peter McCormack: Is that the one where that fat dude works?

Mark Moss: The one with the fat dude, yeah.  So, who's the BIS?  You don't even really know about them.  They're the central bank of central banks.  They were started after World War I, and they were trying to oversee Germany paying back reparations, and things like that.  So, this was the original banking institution who's now basically the central bank of all the central banks.  And so you have the BIS at the top.  Then you have, I don't know if Danny gets it up there, but you can see…

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Mark Moss: Okay.  So, you have the BIS at the top, the central bank above central banks.  And then below that, you have basically the think tanks, the policymakers.

Peter McCormack: The World Economic Forum, fuck!

Mark Moss: And then below that, you have the policy enforcers, which are the governments.  And so, what these public-privacy partners have decided is, they are pushing something called "stakeholder capitalism", which I'm sure you've heard.  That's Klaus Schwab's word that he likes to use.  And through a public and private partnership, they can push these policies into place.

So, for example, when COVID happened, how did the entire world lock down at the same time?  Well, we know now the IMF went around and paid these countries to do that.  We have many reports from many nations who were offered -- Belarus was offered as much as $900 million to lock their country down.

Peter McCormack: We know that's true?

Mark Moss: Well, we know multiple countries have said this, and so I guess they could all be lying, sure.

Peter McCormack: But where have we seen this?

Mark Moss: Many of the leaders came out and said this outright at the time.

Peter McCormack: Danny, can you look that up; Belarus $900 million lockdown?

Mark Moss: But the point is is that --

Peter McCormack: Well, hold on, so the wording here's different, "Belarus gets $1 billion from the IMF --"

Mark Moss: I said $900 million.

Peter McCormack: "-- to fight coronavirus", so is that a rewording?

Mark Moss: Well, what did they get the money for?  To fight coronavirus.  How are they going to do that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm following the trail.

Mark Moss: I love it when you factcheck me in real time and I'm right!

Peter McCormack: I feel like there's other podcasts who do it.  No, I trust you, I just want to see it.

Mark Moss: No, I know.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and the reason being…?  What are they trying to do?  Who's in charge here and what are they trying to do?

Mark Moss: Well, you have the org chart up on screen, right? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've got the org chart.

Mark Moss: So, who's in charge?  It's not one person, it's not some masterplan, it's not the Rothschilds have been doing this for 500 years, it's a public-private partnership, it's a bunch of people working in concert together to push these initiatives.

Peter McCormack: Why are they trying to push these initiatives?

Mark Moss: Money, power, control, same as it's always been.  And so, they use the money from the BIS and push it down through the think tanks, and then the local nations are the policy enforcers of this.  So, for example, in this example, the IMF gives the money to Belarus and then Belarus locks the people down.

Peter McCormack: You see, it's funny, because talked about earlier how one guy with a fist gets to decide for 330 million people.  You've got groups here essentially trying to make decisions for billions of people.

Mark Moss: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: So, what are their incentives; what are they trying to do?

Mark Moss: It's always power, control, money, human nature, greed, power.

Danny Knowles: But it says here that the IMF gave them $1 billion to fight coronavirus.  Are they giving them that to try and combat it, and Belarus is just a dictatorship, so it's going to be misspent?

Mark Moss: Yeah, but money doesn't come for free, money comes with strings so, "Hey, your country's going to be devastated, you're going to lose all this money, etc, but we're going to give you money to fight it, but you have to do what we say.  So, here's the steps you have to do to fight it.  If we're going to give you money, then I need you to do this, do this, etc".

Peter McCormack: Does it say what they used it for?

Danny Knowles: Not here.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Mark Moss: That's just one example.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, Belarus is an interesting one, because I remember quite early on, when countries were locking down, I think it was Belarus alongside Sweden were one of the ones that didn't.

Mark Moss: They didn't.

Peter McCormack: And there were photographs of football matches in Belarus where the stadiums were full.

Mark Moss: Yeah, they were not going for it.  At first, it was like $200 million, then it was like $300 million or $400 million, and they kept upping and upping it until they were finally like, "Great, how about $1 billion", but many countries.  And then, I don't want to get caught up in this one detail, because --

Peter McCormack: But this is a big fucking detail!

Mark Moss: Well, okay, there's many more stories like this, and many nations' leaders ended up dead, including the President of Haiti.

Peter McCormack: Who was assassinated by a bomb?

Mark Moss: Yeah, I mean whatever, he just randomly died, sure.  I mean, too many coincidences after a while.

Peter McCormack: No, but tell me what you think happened in Haiti.

Mark Moss: Well, there was him, there was a president in one of the nations in Africa, "We're not doing this, we're not taking the vaccinations, we're not taking the money from you, we're not going along with this narrative", and then they just randomly ended up dying.  They get very depressed and get in boating accidents, and whatever happens.  I don't want to get hung in that one detail of this, because it's a bigger picture that we're trying to paint here.

Peter McCormack: No, but this org chart that you're showing me is, I don't even know what word to use; concerning?  Freaky?  Weird?  Creepy?  What the fuck?

Mark Moss: Yeah.  And so basically, what they've done is through a global public and private partnership, they've usurped the power of the nation state.  And if we want to get into this, which is a little bit of a rabbit hole, but when Donald Trump went to Davos in 2017 and he went and had a speech and he said -- Danny can pull up the speech, he said, "The United States will never lay down its sovereignty.  We will work with other nations, but we will not lay down our sovereignty". 

That's when he got the target in his back, that's when Fauci said there would be a pandemic that would happen in the United States, Fauci said it would happen, in 2017.  That's when George Soros came out and they made Donald Trump enemy number one, because he wouldn't lay down the US sovereignty for the GPPP people.  He pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord, all these things that happened.  So, it wasn't part of this GPPP.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, let's go back a step.  Bank of International Settlements, what are they?

Mark Moss: They're effectively, if you look it up, they're the central bank of central banks.

Peter McCormack: But who owns them?  Are they a nonprofit global institution; what the fuck is this?

Mark Moss: It's research I've been doing to do some content on it specifically, and I'll just admit I'm not an expert on them, other than they're the central bank of central banks.  So, as I told you, they were founded after World War I.

Peter McCormack: But why did the central banks need a central bank of central banks; who makes that decision?  The UN, I understand, after World War II, the UN was established.  And hopefully, the UN was established to try and ensure peace across the world; I think I'm about right in that.

Mark Moss: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And you understand why that's established.  Who established the Bank of International Settlements; and why?

Mark Moss: The bankers did.  And do you know the history of the central bank?  Do you know the history of the Bank of England?  You're from England.

Peter McCormack: No, I don't.  I know a little bit more about the history of --

Mark Moss: Well, I'm happy to tell you the short version.

Peter McCormack: I know a little bit about the history of the central banks in the US, because I did a really great show with Eric Yakes yesterday.

Mark Moss: But it started in England, so you've got to know the story of the central bank in England, the BOE, because that's where it started.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, tell me.

Mark Moss: And all the banks were from the BOE.

Peter McCormack: Was it Henry VIII?

Mark Moss: So, in the late 1600s, England was at war with France.

Peter McCormack: To finance the war.

Mark Moss: And they didn't have any money, they didn't have enough money to go to war and they needed money.  Now, back then, kings would get money from the rich people and they would finance the war effort.  So, I believe it was some banker from Ireland, I don't know, forgive me if I'm wrong on the Ireland part, but basically he said, "Hey, look, here's the deal.  We're going to loan you as much money as you want to go to war, but here's what we're going to do.  We're going to create a new bank and we're going to come up with our own money.  And what you're going to do is, you're going to say our bank is legit and our money is to be used by everybody.  And, as long as you do that, then we're going to give you as much money as you want", and they did.  That's how the Bank of England got started.

The Bank of England then became the official bank of England, their currency, they funded the war effort, and the Bank of England, this was 1648, I believe, somewhere right there in the mid-1600s --

Peter McCormack: Who was the king?

Danny Knowles: In the mid-1600s?  Charles I, it looks like.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I want to blame Henry VIII for everything!

Mark Moss: So, the money is the carrot on the stick.

Peter McCormack: For centuries, for fucking centuries!

Mark Moss: For centuries.

Peter McCormack: These motherfuckers!  Okay.

Mark Moss: Because we're on this debt-based system.  So, we've been on this mad scramble to, let's just call it, get us into a social credit score system through all these means, right.  So, the IMF with their SDRs, which SDRs were created in 1944, the IMF was created under the Bretton Woods agreement, and the SDRs, the Special Drawing Rights, and they haven't really been used.  All of a sudden now, they're being used like crazy, and they've printed up about 600 billion of those in the last 24 months.

Now, we have all these multinational companies pushing these ESG narratives, which they're controlling the energy output and governance of these corporations and, like I said, the stakeholder capitalism, which is kind of a socialism term, where now the corporation must take into consideration the public good, including the employees.  It's Marxism at its best.  So, this is what's going on.  I think, like I said, they realised the cracks were forming, they were losing the narrative, along came COVID, I'm not trying to say it was done on purpose, but they didn't let a crisis go to waste, and they had to start squeezing, and they're trying to hold on as best they can. 

The reason why it's important to understand this GPPP is because, how does all the media -- you've seen the news clips of all the news outlets having the same headlines at the same time?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's so weird.  Have you ever seen that?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: It's so weird.  So basically, there's a YouTube video and what happens is, they play this headline and it goes across these networks, and everyone is literally repeating the exact same headline.

Danny Knowles: But there might be other reasons for that.  So, Reuters would be a news link, and that would break news, and then people make news from those links.

Mark Moss: Well, sure, so they all get their news from Reuters, but who owns Reuters?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.

Mark Moss: Right, so you keep chasing it up, and it's all part of this.  So, one person up here is pushing out the news to all the people.  To your point, there is a reason for it, but that's the whole point.  All those independent news stations are actually getting their headlines that they're reading from one central source that's in that org chart right there.

Peter McCormack: Reuters are in that chart?  I used to trust Reuters.  I got fucking hammered on Twitter for this.  I was like, "Well, there's only two sources I really trust.  It's Reuters and AP News", and people were like, "You trust Reuters?  There's a Pfizer CEO on the board, you fucking Pfizer shill cuck".  I was like, "Oh, no, now I can't trust Reuters".

Mark Moss: Yeah, so they're trying to push everybody into this system, and a lot of people are like, say for example, in the last 24 months, supposedly the number is globally about $20 trillion --

Peter McCormack: Sorry to interrupt a second.  Where does this chart come from?

Mark Moss: I mean, just google it.

Peter McCormack: No, I mean who created it?

Mark Moss: Some think tank.

Peter McCormack: Because, I was looking at this chart thinking this was like some agreed structure.  But then you've got a section that says, "Policy Propogandists".  So, the term Policy Propogandists makes me think this is an accusation, not a known structure, not like an agreed known structure.

Mark Moss: Yeah, I mean they don't come out and announce this; this isn't a new form of government.  So, this is a research project that was done by a group.

Peter McCormack: But who is the group and what is their theory?  Can they be fringe?  Could they be wrong?

Mark Moss: Sure, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think this needs --

Mark Moss: Talk to Whitney Webb, that's who you need to have on your show.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I've heard Whitney Webb and I think she's done some good work.  But sometimes, I think people go down a conspiratorial rabbit hole, and there's an audience for that because of the loss of trust.  I talked about this to you earlier.  There's this loss of trust, therefore that's the pendulum swinging the other side.  They don't trust anything, so they hear this and they're like, "I can connect this dot and this dot and this must be what's happening".

Mark Moss: So, what I would say about that is, one, when you use that word "conspiratorial", that word, I think, came into use after JFK got shot and it's a way to discredit things right off the bat.  And as I said, conspiratorial, the definition of conspiracy is two or more people --

Peter McCormack: I know, I know.

Mark Moss: So, it happens all the time.

Peter McCormack: But I don't want to take claim as facts.

Mark Moss: But I don't think it matters.

Peter McCormack: Well, it kind of does, because if that chart's real, to me, this is -- I don't know, man.

Mark Moss: If that chart isn't 100% accurate, it doesn't change anything.  We're still in peak centralisation, we're still at a point where the World Economic Forum is driving policy and the IMF is giving money to Belarus and everything else is still the same.

Peter McCormack: But is it two and two is four, or two and two is five?  Are people taking bits of information and making a leap?  Because, if we're wrong, then we're equally guilty of disseminating misinformation.

Mark Moss: I think maybe if we tried to say that this is fact and you should act on this…  What we're trying to say is that there's peak centralisation going on by the central bankers that are giving these countries money to run these policies, $30 trillion, etc; that is true.  Whether this work chart is 100% accurate or not really is inconsequential in the story of the peak centralisation.

Peter McCormack: That I agree with.

Mark Moss: And we're not showing this to anybody.  I mean, you guys can put it in the YouTube video.  I don't know if that's 100% factual, but like I said for the point that I'm making, it doesn't really matter.  I do believe that we're in a coup of central bankers, which we are.

Peter McCormack: That I can believe.

Mark Moss: This is a story that I've been picking up on, I've been doing a lot of research into, but I haven't been able to put the story together yet.  So, that's why I don't want to lean super-high into it, but I thought it was a useful chart, just to get an idea of what's going on.  Danny can look real quick and, what does the BIS say?  It's going to say, "A central bank for central banks", you can find that quickly.  So, we know that they're above all the bankers, so we do know that.  Do we know that all the world governments acted on the WHO's information?  So then, we would believe that part of the work chart.  I mean, you can put that together pretty quickly.

Peter McCormack: No, I see it, but I almost want to go into more detail.  I want to know who put that chart together, and I want to talk to them and say, "Talk me through what you found, what is fact, what is suggestion".  Okay, all right, fine, I can do further research on that.  Definitely peaked my interest.  That chart's a little bit fucked if it's true.  So, what do we do, Mark?

Mark Moss: So, we're at this point where, like I said, we're at this blow-off top, we're accelerating to the point.  And I think what's happened is, everybody's basically decided to give everything to the nanny state.  So, we don't want to deal with education; you just take care of education.  We don't want to deal with healthcare; you just take care of healthcare.  We don't want to deal with taking care of the lower end of society; you just take care of that.  And we've just given them more and more and more. 

So socialism, meaning the state has taken over the means of production, so they've been taking more and more and more.  The United States, they took over healthcare, it's one-third of the economy; it's massive.  So, it's getting more and more and more, it's just sucking in more, like a blow-off top, and now we have this volatility happening here.

Peter McCormack: Healthcare is one-third of the US economy?

Mark Moss: Yeah.  Well, it was at the time of Obamacare, it's probably more right now.

Peter McCormack: What?!  But it shouldn't be, and that's an endemic problem with US healthcare.

Mark Moss: Well, if you look on WTFF in 1971, they have all the good charts, and if you look, the spending on healthcare in 1971 took off like a rocket then.

Peter McCormack: It's just not one-third.  What have you got there, Danny?

Danny Knowles: Well, this is health expenditure as a percentage of GDP.  It says it's around 20% for 2020.  That's the latest data.

Peter McCormack: What is it for the UK?

Mark Moss: Yeah, I said during Obamacare that was the number, I don't know what it is in the UK.

Peter McCormack: No, but that didn't go over 20%.  It's still a lot higher than I expected.

Mark Moss: Well, that's 20% of GDP.  In 2008, it was probably 30% of GDP.

Danny Knowles: About 12%, it looks like.

Peter McCormack: But look, it's trending up.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, massively.

Peter McCormack: What is it, those last ten years?  So, it was flat for around a decade of, what's that, around 10%?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, 1990 it was 5%.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  And then the highs of 12%.  You could look into that data, and there could be increasing expenditure because there's new drugs developed, or there's advancements, or that people are investing in private healthcare.

Mark Moss: A lot of it also is, you pretty much spend -- the majority of your medical spending is in the last year of your life.  So, in the West, we have this aging population, in the US with the baby-boomer generation, so we're spending more on healthcare, just part of demographics as well.

Peter McCormack: But US healthcare is double the percentage of GDP than it is in the UK.  But then, we've got different sized economies and different populations.  I wonder what it is per person, but we can talk to Avik Roy about that one.  Okay.

Mark Moss: So, I think that frames it up.  It shows the cycles of history, here we are in a revolution cycle, the last two years we've framed up, we see that the nation state had to do something.  They're trying to hang onto that grip, but the more they squeeze, equal and opposite reactions.  So, the more they squeeze, the more people are pushing back.  They've lost the narrative, trust is disintegrating very fast.

Peter McCormack: So, the blow-off top is coming?

Mark Moss: The blow-off top is coming.

Peter McCormack: And you think in the next three to five years?

Mark Moss: I think so.  So, a couple of things.  A lot of it's based on trust, so Mises called it, "The crack-up boom".  He said, "And then suddenly, the people wake up, and then they realise inflation is both intentional and persistent", so suddenly people realise it's now --

Peter McCormack: We're realising that.

Mark Moss: We're realising it now.

Peter McCormack: It's not transitory!

Mark Moss: It's not transitory, it's persistent.  And, you mean the Fed is targeting 2% inflation?  So, it's intentional?  People haven't even used the word "Fed" before, no one even thought about the Federal Reserve ten years ago.

Peter McCormack: I always knew in the UK, they targeted 2% inflation.  The way it's sold is, you don't want deflation, so you target 2% inflation.

Mark Moss: Yeah.  So, the financial system's ready to be reset, they're calling for it.

Peter McCormack: We can agree on that one!

Mark Moss: They're out of moves, and they're actively calling for it, in their own words.  We have this technological revolution that's happening right now, Bitcoin, decentralisation, and then we have the political revolution cycle that's happening right now, at the same time as we're hitting this peak centralisation, as we've framed up.

But if we look back through this historical lens, as I said, it's really the technology that changes the way that we work and we interact and the way that we organise ourselves.  It's a mega-political shift.

Peter McCormack: Mega-political; that's Sovereign Individual.

Mark Moss: Yeah, it's a mega-political shift.  So, we were talking about this balkanisation that's already happening.  So, for example, I don't know if I talked about this on my radio show earlier, or if we talked about it earlier, but in the US, we talked about how the Biden Administration is doing an Executive Order to try to regulate cryptocurrencies, and the Treasury --

Peter McCormack: We can talk about that.

Mark Moss: So, under the Biden Administration, they said they're passing these Executive Orders so they can start regulating cryptocurrency, and the Treasury is now trying to slip a bill through to also have a basically unlimited chequebook and unlimited authority to prohibit cryptocurrency transactions; that's the federal government.  At the same time, in Texas, there's a race for Governor, and they're running on a platform to make Bitcoin legal tender, and in Arizona, they just submitted a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender.  That's balkanisation.

When Biden tried to put a nationwide mandate in effect, 26 states, I believe, filed lawsuits saying, "We're not going to do that".  And I think we'll see this balkanisation of the United States continue.  So, Texas came up with this Abortion Law, and then we have a blue state say, "Okay, well then we're going to do a $10,000 fine for gun laws".  In California, where we're recording right now, we have sanctuary cities where they say, "Screw you, federal government, with your immigration policies and illegal aliens, we're going to protect them".  So, we're starting to see this starting to happen.

It's not just happening here, it's happening in Europe as well.  I mean, we talked about that.  Austria and Germany are cracking down on COVID, where we have Norway and they're not cracking down, the difference of the power, we talked about that.  So, we can see this balkanisation is happening all over.  So, it's all starting to break apart.  So, even though it's still climaxing and the power is still getting bigger and bigger and bigger centralisation, we're getting more and more pushback, more protest, trucker rallies in Canada, and the cracks are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Peter McCormack: And, do you think it's because essentially, more people are just being affected by this?  As the state's smaller and policy decisions that are made affecting a smaller amount of people, but these things that are happening now, inflation affects a lot of people, the mandates affect a lot of people.

Mark Moss: It's two reasons.  One, they can't stop the trend that's happening.  So, the information has gotten out there, so now we see that they spent $11 trillion, we see that, what was it, the Mayor of LA has these draconian policies, and then he goes to the football game and he has no mask on; we see that, so it's part that.  But it's also because they've gone too far, they've gone way too far.  The truckers, we talked about the blue-collar workers.  You take away their ability to feed their family, what do you think is going to happen?

People can take almost anything, but when you take away their ability to feed their kids, it's over.  If you look back at the Arab Spring in Europe or in the Middle East a number of years ago, it's whenever they can't eat.  It's nine meals to anarchy.  You go without nine meals, it's anarchy.

Peter McCormack: It sounds like a book title.

Mark Moss: It is, Nine Meals to Anarchy.  And so, they've gone too far.  So, one, the technology has got to a point where they can't hide anymore, they've lost the narrative, it's trending too fast, and so they've tried to hold on by squeezing harder.  But by squeezing harder, now they've affected too many people.  If they would have just backed off and gone back to the way of two years ago, they probably could have maintained their power for quite a while.

But now, when you don't let these blue-collar workers work and feed their family, they're going to park their trucks and there's going to be a big problem.  So then, this just continues.  Back to the "Huh!"  So, as this continues, if you think about it, back to The Sovereign Individual talking about a tyranny of place.  So, tyranny of place means, as I was talking about before, under the Industrial Revolution of the last 250 years, if I wanted to be successful, I had to come to the United States, or western Europe.  And then, I had to be in a city where there's jobs.

But today, especially now sped up by COVID, I can be anywhere and work.  And so, what we've seen is people are fleeing Silicon Valley, they're fleeing Los Angeles, and now they're going to Idaho or Wyoming or Colorado, where they always wished they could live, but there were no jobs there, and now they can.  Or, they can now go to Mexico or El Salvador.

Peter McCormack: Let me tell you something interesting.  I just had Natalie Brunell on and we were talking about her back story.  She's Polish and her mum always wanted to move to the US.  It took 20 years to get here, they tried everything, the lottery, whatever.  They eventually got here and all they've seen is things get harder and harder and harder for them.  The 2008 Financial Crisis, they lost everything, but they'd worked their bollocks off to get a house, and they're seeing problem after problem.  They're now thinking of going back to Poland.

Mark Moss: Well, Poland's pretty free right now, Poland's living pretty good right now.  So, we'll be free of the tyranny of place and people will start moving out.  But the problem is the money; the money is still the problem, and that's where Bitcoin comes in.  Because now, if I can store my value in Bitcoin, then I have money that the state can't control, and then I can really be free of location, and there are a couple of things in play here.

One, we talked about the balkanisation of the United States, and the difference of the United States and Europe, and really they're kind of similar, they're glued together by the money.  In Europe, you have the euro, here we have the dollar.  And so, as that dollar continues to lose relevance, it's going to start to dissolve that glue that holds the United States together, and maybe it goes from America back to the USA, or just the United States, or something.  So, I think that's a big piece of it.

Then, back to where we started the original conversation, which is anarchy, or how does the world develop; well, a rich person, I could go down into Mexico and take over 1,000 acres and I could build my own facility.  A lot of people would say, "Well, they're just going to come and get you, they're going to come attack you.  A nation state will never allow you to build your own city down there".  It's like, "Really?" because it goes back to that return on violence. 

If I were to go down into Mexico and start a 1,000-acre community down there, why would they come after me?  Typically they come for resources, they come to get your water, your gold, your oil.  But if I'm just there and I have no oil or no gold, what are they going to come get?  They're going to come and just kill me for no reason? 

Peter McCormack: They can't get your Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: They can't get the Bitcoin.  Interesting story.  About two hours south of the border here, in Baja California, there's a compound, I do dirt-bike tours down there.  And there's this old compound down there, and the story is it's a Danish compound, and it's some Interpol-wanted guy who was some billionaire, and he went and made an agreement with the government to let him build his own compound there, and he runs his own security there, and I've ridden my dirt bike by there many times.

That's a perfect example.  This guy is there seeking asylum, he's paid off the Mexican Government, they allow him to live there.  Why isn't anybody going to go get him? 

Peter McCormack: The logic of violence.

Mark Moss: But there's none, right, there's no return.  So, I think that's the way things will continue to go.  The internet and then the money will continue to spread things out, the balkanisation will continue, people will continue to branch out, because they're free from tyranny of place, and that's the future.

Peter McCormack: Damn, Mark Moss, you did it again.

Mark Moss: I think the one thing to keep in mind, a couple of things.  One, just the last 250 years swung from the Industrial Revolution and led us to peak centralisation.  This is another 250-year swing. 

Peter McCormack: We won't see the end of it.

Mark Moss: We won't see the end of it, not us.  But what I think is, as I said, I think this blow-off top happens somewhere around 2025-ish, 2024 to 2026-ish, around that time, and then I think we spend the rest of the decade coming off of that.  And I think, by the end of the decade, by 2030, the world looks a lot different.

Peter McCormack: How are you preparing for it?

Mark Moss: So, a couple of ways.

Peter McCormack: Stacking sats?

Mark Moss: Stacking sats, for sure.  A couple of ways.  So, one, the future's very uncertain and it's going to be full of volatility.  So, because it's uncertain, I don't know exactly how it's going to play out.  Is Poland going to be one of the better places to live?  What about Mexico?  Mexico's dropped all its mandates and requirements.  I don't really know.  So, how do we plan for uncertainty?  We need to have optionality.  So, the more options I have, the better.

Peter McCormack: Katie the Russian, flag theory?

Mark Moss: Flag theory is right.  So, I have a house here in California, that's probably going to be the first to go.  I just bought a ranch in Texas, as I was telling you.  So, okay, I'll go make my final stand in Texas if I have to.  Or, I also am building a house down in Mexico, so I'll go down to Mexico if Mexico's still good.

Peter McCormack: Have you got room for me and Danny?  Can you fit us in?

Mark Moss: Just two of you!  Sorry, Jeremy.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, Jeremy.  Fuck you, Jeremy!

Mark Moss: I've been working with some of those people in El Salvador, like you have, so I've built a community there.  There's another town deep, deep down in Mexico, I've built a good community there, so I have communities I can go plug into if I need it.  So, I have multiple houses, multiple communities, I have Bitcoin, so I can have freedom of place.  As long as I have my laptop and my internet connection, I can be anywhere I want, I have multiple places that I can go.  So, I think that's how I'm handling it.

So, for the average person, what I would say is, one, try to free yourself from location.  So, that might mean getting the job that you can do online.  Two, of course start stacking sats.  We saw, I think it was yesterday, at the time of this recording, in Lebanon, I think the banks failed and they took everybody's deposits and they're going to repay them, but they're going to repay them back with a different currency.  It's like 90% devalued, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, here we go, fuck you, again.

Mark Moss: Yeah, and that's always what happens.  So, in the United States and most of the developed world, they've been talking about this threat of a cyber pandemic happening.

Peter McCormack: I've not heard this.

Mark Moss: I mean, they talk about it on the news all the time. 

Peter McCormack: A cyber pandemic, what is that?

Mark Moss: I mean, even Klaus Schwab made a video about it.  So, Klaus Schwab said, "There might be a virus on the internet, and we must have a vaccine for the internet".  You haven't heard his speech about that?

Peter McCormack: No, I haven't, but that was a great impression, I love that!

Mark Moss: "And the only way is, we must come together and shut the internet down until it can be vaccinated", he said something like that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so they want to shut off information.

Mark Moss: Well, so check this out.  I'm sure you're aware that before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, they ran Event 201 where they gamed it all out.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I knew about that.

Mark Moss: So, Bill Gates and Johns Hopkins and all that got together, and you heard what happened, etc.  And of course, the same players that got together and planned it are the ones that did it.  Well, they got together and ran a cyber pandemic test, and I read the report of what the test was, and then they basically game-planned it, "Here's where the attack would be, and here's how we'd respond".  I can tell you, this is what they said, this is their own test.  So, they said that there would be a cyber pandemic, an attack.  They said in their game plan that it would be an attack on the financial system, and that what they would have to do, "We would have to do a bank holiday, shut the banking system down, to get rid of the pandemic".

Peter McCormack: Have you listened to Robert Epstein on Rogan this week?

Mark Moss: No.

Peter McCormack: So, he talks about Google shutting down the internet, and when I was listening, I was like, "Well, they can't shut down the internet".  But he was like, "They control [whatever]% of search and they control --" all these different elements they control, and they actually did at one point, they classed every website on the internet as a vulnerable website, you know that screen you get up.  And they did it on, I think it was a Saturday for 40 minutes, and he said the reason a Saturday was important is because the banks were closed, so you wouldn't affect the banks.  Now, again, we might be adding two and two make five here, but at the same time I'm thinking, "It's another piece of information".

Mark Moss: So, they said they're going, in their own game plan, they strategised that it would be an attack on the financial system.  The way they would do it, per Klaus Schwab, shut the internet down, they said they'd have to go on a "bank holiday", their own words.  Now, this is my own guess and I'm consulting my crystal ball that I don't have here, but here's what I'm thinking is that the goal wasn't so much to get us onto a vaccine passport, the goal is to get us onto any single source where we have to show proof to gain access to society, a single switch that can be shut off, a social credit score, if you will.

They're propping up the financial system, trying to keep it going.  In the United States, $8 trillion in the last 24 months to keep the system from crashing.  Can they keep the system from crashing?  Can they print enough money?  Well, that assumes a bias that they want to keep it from crashing.  What if they only want to keep it from crashing until they're ready for it to crash?  Now remember, if we were playing a game, a board game, and I didn't have anymore moves left, you didn't either, what do we do?  We reset the game.

Peter McCormack: We smash the board and we have a tantrum!

Mark Moss: So, this is a little bit of a, bear with me, this is my own theory that could potentially happen.  In their own words, it would be a cyber pandemic of the financial system, they have to go on a bank holiday.  Now, we know from 1933 when they seized the gold, they did a bank holiday, so they shut the banks down for six days, and then when they opened the banks up -- it was $20 an ounce, and when they opened it back up, you couldn't get your gold out, and now they gave you credit for gold at $35 an ounce, so you lost 60% of your value.

The same thing happened in Cyprus in 2015, the same thing happened in Greece, now the same thing's happened in Lebanon, etc.  That's what they do.  Another interesting thing, Danny, this is a little too early, but I think February, because of the Queen, there's a bank holiday coming up in England.  They called for a bank holiday for her birthday, the 70th Anniversary or something?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Jubilee.

Mark Moss: Yeah, exactly.  The debt jubilee, that's a scary thing to think about.

Peter McCormack: I got an email this week inviting me to it.  I got an invite to sit on The Mall and watch it, and then they wanted me to interview the royal biographer.  I was like, "Why the fuck do you want me to interview this person?  You clearly haven't listened to my show.  What the fuck are you doing?"

Mark Moss: So, check this out.  They've been floating around this digital ID thing, a lot of countries already talking about it, and so what they could do is, they want to keep the system propped up until they're ready to make the switch, but I don't think they're ready.  The reason why they're not ready is they need to get us into a central bank digital currency, but the CBDC's not ready yet.  Now, in the United States, the Fed's been working on it.  I think two weeks ago, they put it open for comment, so now they're taking active comments, they're actively moving towards this pretty rapidly.  I'm guessing 12 to 18 months, maybe 12 to 24 months, they'll have this digital currency ready.

Peter McCormack: I think they've got a big problem that they're not going to work.

Mark Moss: Come on, they could just copy XRP and just have it, I mean how hard can that be?  They spin up a new cryptocurrency every day.

Peter McCormack: Danny, can you look up, "Bank of England CBDC".  I think they've come down and they've said that they don't think it's workable.

Mark Moss: It will probably be the ECB that rolls it out.

Peter McCormack: "Bank of England takes next step…"  They all look like prior articles.  I read something recently that they said it's not workable.

Mark Moss: It will probably be the ECB that rolls it out, not the Bank of England, because that will be a little bit too low scale.  So, give them 12 to 24 months to work that out, and they have a cyber pandemic, to their own words, it attacks the financial system and shuts it down. 

They go on a bank holiday and then they come out of the bank holiday and they say, "Hey, the internet was attacked, it crashed the financial system, it wasn't our fault.  We had it under control.  It crashed the financial system, and the reason why is because of these anonymous internet users.  So, what we need to do is, we got it fixed, but everybody needs to now register, you can't use it anonymously anymore, and we're going to give you your money, but instead of your traditional dollars, now you're going to get it all in the central bank digital currency.

Peter McCormack: Let me tell you another interesting thing.  I got approached by Mastercard, who said they wanted to sponsor the podcast, and I'm like, "Cool, Mastercard, that's a big brand, they'll have a budget".  And they talked about their strategies and things they're working on, and cryptocurrency was one of them, hence why they wanted to get in touch, and CBDCs.

Mark Moss: And they have that new card with the social credit scores, or the carbon score.  Mastercard has that new card where it now has a carbon score, so when your carbon score goes too high, your card gets shut off.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what happens in my head during these conversations, Mark?  I'm following your trail of thought and I'm like, "It all makes sense", but I'm also like, "This can't be real, this cannot be real!  We're connecting the dots, but this isn't real".  And listeners are going to love this, and I know they're going to say, "Pete, wake the fuck up".

Mark Moss: Let's just recap the big pieces.

Peter McCormack: I think it's because I don't want it to be true sometimes.

Mark Moss: Let's just recap the real big pieces.  So, one, if we look back over the last 1,000 years, the world has changed the way it's organised based off of technology.  The world swung from being decentralised in the farms, got centralised through the cities, and now the pendulum's swinging every 250 years, so we're on that time period.  Now, maybe that doesn't happen this time, but whatever, that's the history, where we're at. 

We also know that we are at peak centralisation.  Maybe it's not peak, maybe it goes on a little bit longer, but we do know that we're at a period of centralisation the world's never seen, the World Economic Forum, World Health Organisation, Central Bank, etc; we know we've never seen that before.  We also know that the world is pushing back against that very aggressively.  The truckers, the Joe Rogans, the protests, everything, so we do know that as well.

We also know that the financial system is about to implode, we know that.  $11 trillion in repo in just 24 months, the IMF calling for Bretton Woods II, we know that, that's fact.  We also know that central bank digital currencies is something they're aggressively working towards, and we don't know when, but we know that they're working -- China's already rolled theirs out.  So, we know those facts, those are facts.

Now, what happens, we don't know, that's where we start to guess about things.  Pour yourself another whiskey!  So, I would say those are facts. 

Peter McCormack: Jessica Vaugn, do you need some more whiskey?  You're still holding, come on!

Mark Moss: I know, what are you doing over there?

Peter McCormack: Come on, Jessica Vaugn.  Are you going to say hello to the camera?  Say hello to the camera.

Jessica Vaugn: Hi, camera!

Peter McCormack: Hi, Jessica.

Jessica Vaugn: Are you guys enjoying the red pilling?

Peter McCormack: Do you need some egg white with that?  Fuck off, Pete!

Mark Moss: So, I think if we look at those broad brushstrokes and we don't get caught up in all the details, I think it's pretty compelling.

Peter McCormack: Last one for you, dude.

Mark Moss: Yeah, let's go. 

Peter McCormack: We need more whiskey, Danny.

Danny Knowles: That's two bottles in two days.

Peter McCormack: You can't leave any in that bottle.  No, come on.  There you go.

Mark Moss: Go big!

Peter McCormack: Let's go big!

Mark Moss: I mean, with a conversation like that!

Peter McCormack: Thank you Uncle Nearest 1884.

Mark Moss: So, if we just recap those broad brushstrokes, I mean you'd agree with all those big ones, right?

Peter McCormack: I see the pattern you're explaining.

Mark Moss: The question is, is this peak centralisation that blows off and swings back to decentralisation, or do we continue into more centralisation?

Peter McCormack: Well, all I know is more centralisation is bad, because it's fucked as it is.

Mark Moss: Which is funny from where we started the conversation, where you were very advocating for centralisation.

Peter McCormack: No, I am, but that doesn't change.  I am not an anarchist.

Mark Moss: And neither am I.

Peter McCormack: But I am somebody who appreciates the ideas of libertarians.  I keep saying this, I keep saying I wish libertarians would get more involved in politics, because I know it's antithetical to being a libertarian for some, but I think the politics at the moment is pull left and right, and they pull each other back and forth, that pendulum swings.  I would love big government for small government pendulum that shrinks government, that the libertarians have that influence. 

But I still think there are certain issues we need to be centralised, certain areas of regulation, minority protection, vulnerable protection, I do believe that and I worry about that in a world of no -- like, in the post-democracy world that Vijay Boyapati talked about where it's city states, I do worry about that.  I do think it will lead to a different form of authoritarianism, and I do think vulnerable groups will be exploited.  That hasn't changed.  I'm at that point where I think democracy is breaking, and I think we are at peak centralisation, and I want it pulled back.  So, my position hasn't changed there.

Mark Moss: Yeah.  But again, those broad brushstrokes are there, which way does it go?  Do we go back to decentralisation; do we continue with centralisation; that's what we don't know?  That's where the battle of the fate of humanity is.  I think what the centralists need, and they know they need this, the reason why they say central planning or socialism, communism never worked is because of the lack of data, lack of inputs.

Peter McCormack: I mean, Jordan Peterson said, he was quite explicit, he said, "Because you've not tried the right form of communism"!

Mark Moss: Yeah, right.

Peter McCormack: Which version?  How many failed attempts do you need to realise this leads to the deaths of millions of fucking people?

Mark Moss: Yeah, exactly.  I think it's the lack of data, because they have no price, no free markets to organise or to coordinate.  And so, they hope that if they have central bank digital currencies, then they can get enough data into the AI cloud to manage all this.  The hope is that AI is nowhere near ready for that, or so far away from having…  I got the joy to sit down with Naval about a month ago --

Peter McCormack: You did?

Mark Moss: I was at Michael Saylor's house in Miami.

Peter McCormack: Nice.

Mark Moss: And, I talked to him quite a bit about AI, because I know he's in Silicon Valley and he knows quite a bit about that.  And you have narrow AI, and you have general or broad AI.  So, the narrow AI is they're trained to do a specific task, and it's pretty good for that.  But broad AI, he said we're no closer than we were in the 70s.

Peter McCormack: Explain broad AI?

Mark Moss: So, narrow AI is when I can train AI to do one very specific task, like play chess, for example.  Broad AI is when it can have a consciousness and it can think on its own, it can just learn all these things that haven't been taught to it.  Because, as humans, for the first about five years of our life, we learn kind of through hypnosis, just watching things, and then we automatically know things.

For example, I just know that that bottle is going to be heavier than a feather on the table, I just know that.  No one taught me that, I just know that, through life experiences, or whatever.  But how do you teach that to an AI, right.

Peter McCormack: You can only teach patterns.

Mark Moss: Right, so narrow.  So, I'm no expert on AI, I've learned enough to try to figure it out, but we're not close to that.  So, the hope that I have is that we're not close to that, they're not going to be able to get that done in time.  I see Bitcoin as the opposite.  So, AI is all about centralisation and central control, whereas Bitcoin is all about decentralisation.  But if we circle all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, neither extreme is good, in my opinion.

Peter McCormack: No, that I agree with you 100%.  Okay, question.  What's part three?  We've got to do the trilogy.

Mark Moss: Yeah, I think we can do part three.  I think, if we wait a couple of months, we're going to have a lot of fireworks to be talking about.

Peter McCormack: No, but that would just be like, "Oh, what's happened?"

Mark Moss: No, I think part three is to really map out how this plays out and what the future looks like, a little bit more.  I think that could work.  I don't know, I'd have to think about it.

Peter McCormack: Have a think about it.  I want to make part three.  I'm in Texas all of March.

Mark Moss: We can go and record at my ranch.

Peter McCormack: I'd fucking love that, I'd love that.  Can you take me out on a dirt bike?

Mark Moss: My ranch has a professional rodeo ring with lights and shoots and everything, and I was like, "That could be a perfect dirt bike track inside the rodeo ring"!

Peter McCormack: Can I just get on a bull and be thrown around like a fucking idiot?

Mark Moss: We could arrange that.

Peter McCormack: Have you got any bulls?

Mark Moss: I have four.

Peter McCormack: Big, scary fuckers?

Mark Moss: Well, I mean they're big and scary for me.  They're not rodeo bulls, but they've got horns, that's for sure.

Peter McCormack: Have you don’t the Jackass thing and gone in there and tried to get out of the way?

Mark Moss: They're very friendly, they're like dogs, they like to be pet.  They're like longhorns.

Peter McCormack: What about if we kick one?  What about if we put one pointing at Danny and kick it?

Mark Moss: I'm sure we can find a rodeo bull for Danny.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, I'll come and visit the ranch, but we'll have the studio set up, we've already booked it.  If we can be prepared in time, I love these conversations with you.

Mark Moss: They're fun!

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure if "fun" is the word I'd use.  They're challenging, because they challenge me, and I'm going to have a very long conversation with my brother after this, a very long conversation.  I'm looking forward to it.

Mark Moss: What's up with your brother; he's more left than you?  More statist?

Peter McCormack: My brother's a great fucking guy.  He's got a huge conscience and he thinks about other people a lot.  For the type of personality I am, he's the perfect big brother, because I get to go to him and discuss, because I'm like the wild, fucking idiot of the family, the rebel, the tattoos, the Bitcoin.  My brother's a lot more settled, a lot more centred. 

So, I can be led by ideas and I can believe in ideas, and what will happen is, rather than me going to the group think and just go, "Yeah, this is fact", my brother will sit me down afterwards and say, "Yeah, but have you thought about this?" and he will make me rethink and pull me back.  He's like a conscience that sits on my shoulder that I feel very blessed to have.

Mark Moss: Yeah, that's good.

Peter McCormack: But he is more left.  He voted Labour, but he's also, I mean Danny's witnessed this, he's become more orange pilled.  He's blown away by Bitcoin.  He cannot get his head around the fact that probably one of the most important inventions, well, the most important invention of our lifetime might have been designed in nine pages, of which one is citations.  He said, "I still cannot believe this", and he's definitely had to rethink some of his thoughts; it's definitely affected him by being orange pilled.

But if you have a spectrum of orange pill, he's more towards the start, I'm a bit further forward, but he will listen to this show deeply, and he will challenge the fuck out of me, and he will help me prep the next one, because I think some people don't understand my role in doing this job.  It isn't to nod and agree, anyone can do that.  It is to challenge.

Mark Moss: Yeah, I love it.

Peter McCormack: Even when I agree with you, it's still to challenge.  My job isn't what I want, what I think.  My job is what other people will think, so the people who might agree with you, it's to take them on a journey and learn it; and the people who disagree with you, it's to put their points across so you can counter it.  That's my job.  And when I ask questions, it's not necessarily that I think it, or not necessarily that I don't know the answer, it is to help frame the entire conversation, and my brother will certainly help me on the third one.

I get these long fucking text messages, it's funny, I'll show you afterwards.  Like, the Vijay show, that went out today, and I've got this long text message about what he agrees, what he disagrees, what we should talk about.

Mark Moss: What I would say about that is I've had conversations like this with many people, and you're also my favourite person to talk about it --

Peter McCormack: Thank you.

Mark Moss: -- because you have a different view and you ask really good questions.

Peter McCormack: I appreciate that.

Mark Moss: As we started on at the beginning, I believe truth wins out through discussion.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Mark Moss: And so, I love to be challenged on it, because I also want to think about it different.  So many times, I've looked at someone post on Twitter and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's so right", and then I read comments and I'm like, "Oh, I didn't think about that".  And so, I love it, I love the discussion, I love the pushback, so I think it's great.

Peter McCormack: Well, we should do this in March if we can in Texas.  We will give you the end of the month, so we've got time to prep, so essentially we're talking about nearly two months, and we will come visit the ranch.  We're there for the whole month.  Most weeks, we're going to record Monday to Thursday, but me and Danny will be there through to the weekend, although I think Jeremy will --

Mark Moss: Unchained has that new badass commons setup with a podcast studio in it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've heard of that.  Well, again, we've rented a cool place, our studio will be set up, we're not going to move the equipment around, so we'll do it there.  But we'll come and see the ranch.  How far from Austin?  Can you say; is it a dox?

Mark Moss: 20 miles from downtime.

Peter McCormack: All right, we'll rent a car.

Mark Moss: One thing I just wanted to say back to your brother and just different people listening and thinking and whatever, the one thing I would just try to say is that when I turned 18 and I could vote, my dad told me, "You should always remember one thing.  Every new law, whether it's good or bad, is less freedom".  So, I always try to keep that mindset. 

So, I would always err to the side of allowing other people to make decisions for themselves, because what I see today is these leaders think, and they've openly said it, that you're not smart enough to make decisions on your own, and I think that's wrong, I think that humans are smart enough.  Now, I think the system is so messed up that people are in situations that we can't get ourselves out of.  But I think openly that people should have the freedom to decide.

I don't know your brother, but maybe people that are more on the statist side, I think the problem is that they think that, and I don't know your brother, but there's people on that side would say that, they think that we need people to make decisions for others, and I just think people are smart enough to decide on their own.

Peter McCormack: So, I half agree with you, as a typical fence-sitter might be!  I agree, it might be less freedom, but the trade-off might be more protection for vulnerable groups, or it might be for the better coordination of society.  And sometimes there is a trade-off in the world, sometimes you make those trade-offs.

Now, I think I agree with you we're on peak centralisation, so we've had too much of a trade-off, we've given up too much.  And as Vijay and I discussed, absolutely liberty, that probably isn't a good idea.  So, where is the happy medium?  We've gone too far, but that whole idea that every law is less freedom and therefore it's bad, I don't buy.  I think sometimes you need laws that restrict freedom, that protect and make the net quality of life and the net organisation of society better.

Mark Moss: Yeah.  I mean, I agree with that.  It's just the spectrum.

Peter McCormack: I think we're getting closer together, aren't we?

Mark Moss: Well, I think we agree.  The problem is, as I said, I should be able to leave this district to go to district if I want.  I don't want the whole world -- but anyway, we're not going to go there, because we will both talk about this later!

Peter McCormack: All right, Mark Moss, listen, where do people follow you, listen to you?

Mark Moss: When is this going to be published, Danny?

Peter McCormack: We're going to have to keep these quite chronological, because of the way we're referring to the show.  So, this will probably come out in the next week or so, right?

Danny Knowles: I think this will be two weeks.

Mark Moss: Two weeks, okay.  So, what I'd like to say is two things.  One, uncommunist.com, check out that book.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I will do.

Mark Moss: Two, because this is something that I think is super-important, how do we navigate this, it's so important to me that I decided that I was going to hold events that we could talk about this bigger.  So, I have an event in Dallas coming up, marketdisruptorslive.com, and it's going to be just focussing on what's going to happen over the next couple of years, and what should people do about it.  So, I'll plug those two things, marketdisruptorslive.com and uncommunist.com.

Other than that, just search Mark Moss.  I make videos on YouTube, I'm pretty active on Twitter, @1MarkMoss, and I have a radio show.  You can just search, "Mark Moss Radio".

Peter McCormack: We will put that all in the show notes, let everyone know about it, and we will plan part three of the trilogy, and I'll really look forward to it.  Look, I love these conversations, and another reason I love it, it's really challenging for me, this really challenges me, and this is one I'm going to want to go back and say, "Fuck, how did I do?"

Mark Moss: Just say, "Huh!"

Peter McCormack: "Huh!"  Mark Moss, I love you, thank you for coming in.  Jessica Vaugn, thank you for coming in, appreciate this, looking forward to recording with you again.  Keep crushing it, I love what you're doing.

Mark Moss: All right, thanks.