WBD479 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin Is for Anyone with David Zell

Interview date: Wednesday 23rd March

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with David Zell. 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.

David Zell is a co-founder of the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Director of Policy at BTC Inc. In this interview, we discuss echo chambers and groupthink, how Bitcoin being for everyone makes it stronger, the threat of Bitcoin to China, and political exploitation.

“Most people are good, and have good ambitions for the world, and want things to be better, and so the goal is not to just scream at someone when you disagree with them, it’s to figure out what values you share; and, in the case of advocating for Bitcoin, for example, showing how Bitcoin leads to those values.”

— David Zell

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: You can vape during the show.

David Zell: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: I don't mind.

David Zell: Well, you were actually a relatively meaningful part of me fully quitting the Marlboro Reds.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're like 15 years old and smoking Marlboro Reds, for fuck's sake, dude!

David Zell: Yeah, I was dark!

Peter McCormack: They're the brutal cigarettes.

David Zell: They're awful, yeah.  I could give you some convoluted argument of, it's actually riskier to vape than to smoke cigarettes, but I'm not sure I fully believe it.  But the argument is -- one of my friend's older brothers is an actuary, really smart guy, went to MIT, studied maths, and so he'd take these really complex equations to figure out how long someone's going to live and price in their insurance.  And we have enough data, because people have been smoking cigarettes for so long, we know almost exactly how bad they are for you, and it's bad, don't get me wrong.  But it's a pretty known risk.

Whereas vaping, it could be significantly less bad for you, but the upper bound is way, way higher, because people have been vaping for five, six, maybe ten years, but in some ways, yeah, you could actually say the acoustic cigarette is less risky than the electronic one.

Peter McCormack: Well, I took up vaping to give up cigarettes, but I used to smoke like two a day and then maybe on the weekend, ten a day.  And apparently, the amount I vape now is the equivalent of like 20 to 40 cigarettes a day!  It never leaves me.

David Zell: Yeah, it's not something I enjoy.

Peter McCormack: Shall we give up together.  How about this show is the final time we vape and at the end of the show, we throw them in the bin?

David Zell: I cannot commit to that!

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you what, we'll put them under the tap, we'll be out together tonight, so we can't vape, we'll get through it together.  How about we do that?

David Zell: Yeah, I am so good with coming up with reasons to not quit.  Because, I've quite multiple times for anywhere from two weeks to, at my longest, three or four months.  But now I'm just so busy, Bitcoin moves so fast, I've got so much shit going on, that every time I start to build up that courage, I'm like, "Can I afford to feel like a sack of shit for the next 90 hours?" and usually there's some event in the next three days that I'm like, "Oh no, I can't be going through withdrawal for that, I'll just wait".

Peter McCormack: How about we game it?  How about we both give up at the end of this show, and the first person to crack owes the other person a Bitcoin.

David Zell: Holy crap!

Peter McCormack: So basically, you know if you're going to smoke again, it's going to cost you $44,000!

David Zell: $44,000, yeah.  Wow, that's intense!  I'm not going to commit to that now, but that would probably get me to quit smoking.  I'm not going to give you a fucking Bitcoin!

Peter McCormack: I think that would help me, or I'd lie!

David Zell: Yeah, the only way I'd see myself getting rid of a Bitcoin, I was looking at bunkers recently, just pricing out -- you know how that's -- a Bitcoin for a bunker could maybe…  But I don't know if I'd want to live in a bunker.

Peter McCormack: I did the research, I googled the nuclear fallout from London and Bedford is just on the edge, so I think we just avoid the fallout.

David Zell: Right.  Well, I was telling Matthew Pines that I was stuck between either wanting to do what Troy Cross said he was going to do and get an Airbnb in DC and just get evaporated; or, I was going to sell some Bitcoin, buy a bunker, fully -- I was very much looking at this in the stark binary.  I either want to get incinerated, or I'm going to have a bunker, because what I don't want to do is to die from radiation burns a week later, or get killed by marauders.

Matthew Pines was like, "You're a fucking moron.  That's not how nuclear war works.  There's a very good chance that you would survive, and not all of the scenarios lead to the destruction of the human race, even if we go nuclear".

Peter McCormack: I was thinking about that with regard to Bitcoin as well, like if there was a nuclear was, just say it happened.  We're talking like we've fucking got stoned!  But if there was, would Bitcoin be the thing you'd be glad you've got, or would it be completely worthless?  Because, we're a small community now relative.  If you suddenly went into this different world, where there's no planes flying, there's limited society, and you're trying to survive on that, what are people going to want?  Are they going to want stuff?

David Zell: Bullets.

Peter McCormack: Bullets, tinned pineapple.

David Zell: 9mm would probably be a very good currency.

Peter McCormack: But would Bitcoin have any -- would people be like, "I don't give a fuck about Bitcoin now, I need bullets"; would we go to barter economy?

David Zell: Yeah, hard to say, I don't know.  And I feel like the answer would change in five or ten years too.  It depends on, I think, what the general prognosis was of a return to civilisation.  If people think this is going to be an awful two years, but we will recover, then yeah, you'd probably get some really cheap sats.  But if the prognosis is that it's all over, this experiment in complex, technologically-enabled civilisation is just gone, I don't know, I think most people who aren't bitcoiners would much rather be paid in bullets, or something with an immediate practical use to them.

Peter McCormack: Not in the UK, it would probably be forks!

David Zell: Baseball bats!

Peter McCormack: Baseball bats, forks, knives, spoons.  That's the weapons we would have.  It's a really weird time, because we're either in a scenario where it's just a single war in the Ukraine and that's going to turn out to be whatever it is, whether it's Russia's Afghanistan, or something they pull back and just steal a bit more territory, who knows; or, we're at the start of a European war that spreads into other countries.  I've got no idea, I don't know, but it's a weird time, because it feels like the most significant war, in some ways, in my lifetime, because you don't know where it's going.  But I never thought I'd live through something like this.

David Zell: It's definitely the highest probability of nuclear war that we've seen in Europe.  I'm more thinking about cyber right now that I am nukes though.  My nukes scenario is that if Putin fails to make progress in Ukraine, or is even beaten back, there's a scenario I can imagine where he drops a tactical nuke, say on Chernobyl, doesn't even kill anyone, it's just the equivalent of firing a gun up in the air.  And Putin basically says to Zelenskyy, "Look, call my fucking bluff.  You're not NATO, I'm a crazy person with a lot of nukes, I will destroy your 14th largest city and vaporise it if you don't surrender, and I will move up from there".  At a certain point, you kind of just have to give up there.

But with cyber, it's way more likely in my mind, because we don't have specific escalation ladders for that.  So much of the Cold War was spent where the United States and Russia were basically going back and forth between each other saying, "If you do this, we'll do this.  If you do this, we'll do this".  With cyber, those lines in the sand for retaliation aren't as clearly drawn, and attribution is really tough.  You never really know with certainty where a cyber attack came from. 

So, we may see an attack on our financial system in response to sanctions, and Putin comes out and says, "Oh, I'm so sorry these random hackers hacked you.  We should have a joint summit on cyber security to make sure this never happens again".  Then America is like, "No, that was obviously you", and then we respond.  And then Russia is like, "Holy crap, you just cyber attacked us for no reason".  That tree of escalation is what I'm thinking through on the spectrum of bad possibilities; that's where my mind goes.

Peter McCormack: Have you read the book, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth I think her name is?

David Zell: No, I haven't.

Peter McCormack: So, that's all about cyber attacks, and it interestingly opens, the first chapter is about the cyber attacks on Ukraine back in 2014.  We're trying to get her on the show actually, we want to talk to her about it.

David Zell: That would be cool.

Peter McCormack: But the fact that you're more worried about that, and her book discusses that, is kind of interesting.

David Zell: Yeah, I mean it's just, I don't know.  There's a certain point where I just can't think about stuff like that.  I'm at the point where I am thinking about bugging out.  I'm not there yet though.  I'm at the stage of recognising that there is a point in the near future that I could see happening where I'm like, "All right, I've got to go, I've got to go to an undisclosed location in the south-eastern United States and chill for a while.

Peter McCormack: It's also really hard to know what the truth is anymore about anything, and when you opine on it on Twitter, any opinion you take, there are people with a counter-opinion.  I mean, I'm pretty certain Putin is a psychopath, and I don't think you should be blaming NATO for his decision to invade a country and drop bombs across it.  Now, you can say it's part of the process that led to it, but he has still made the decision to attack a sovereign country and attack it.

But you get this really mass of replies that can spin you into a confusion like, "Oh shit, am I wrong?"  Then I'm like, "Fuck, am I spreading misinformation?" like I shared a photo and it turns out the photo was from a year ago.  I don't have the time to factcheck every single thought I have, and then it's like, "Well, maybe I shouldn't even be opining on it, maybe I should just shut the fuck up".

David Zell: Yeah, it's weird, because in some ways we are the most connected to war and violence that we've ever been.  I mean, you go on Twitter and you see dead bodies and stuff.  And yeah, there's this information overload, where you've no idea what's true and what isn't.  But the question of whether or not we have more or less information about war now than we used to is pretty interesting, and I would still say that through the misinformation, we probably do.

I'm thinking about Vietnam where there were three news stations, and it wasn't until Walter Cronkite was like, "We're losing, the government has lied to us, this is not going to be a quick war, we are not about to win".  So, yeah, if your options are either centralised state media, that just tells you exactly what is happening and what's going on, or a million different independent outlets that are all telling you different things, it's not fun but I'd still prefer to sift and try to make my best call, than to be limited in the information that I'm getting prima facie. 

One of my friends is from China, he's an exchange student, and I was talking to him recently and the Chinese media on this is nuts.  He's in an interesting spot, because he's in America, and so he's consuming American news and he's consuming Chinese news, and they're all saying the same stuff that we did about Iraq, "Putin is liberating people, this will be a quick war", and they're saying that they're only reporting Ukrainian casualties, according to my friend.  They're just talking all the time about the Ukrainians that are dying, very little mention of Russian casualties.  Everyone is saying that this is going to be a quick, quick conflict.

Peter McCormack: Well, I spoke to a friend of mine last week, his wife is Russian, and they live in the UK.  And he said he's overheard his wife on the phone to her mother, who's in Russia, and he said it's nuts the things she's relaying back to him, because they only have state-controlled TV now.  They closed down the only remaining independent news channel, they banned Facebook.  I think I've just seen today, it's 15 years in jail for spreading what they consider misinformation or lies about what's going on in the war.  But she is very much along the lines of completely on the "Nazis within Ukraine", and that Putin is defending Russia from the expansion of Nazis in the Ukraine.

I'm not saying that isn't an issue.  That Battalion, Azov Battalion, I think it is, Maajid has been talking a lot about that.  There's clearly a Nazi influence in that Battalion, they've clearly been funded by the state.  But I don't see how, from my side, it's a really tricky thing, because it's like, "Well, I completely disagree with Nazis and Naziism; but at the same time, that wasn't enough of a pretext for war".  But I don't know.  Then I'm like, I'm a guy with a Bitcoin podcast, maybe I should shut the fuck up about all this.  It will get me in trouble anyway, because the cohorts of -- well, there's a number of cohorts in Bitcoin, but there's a certain cohort where I maybe don't get along with them so well.

David Zell: Yeah, I mean it's also a warning, talking about Russia limiting all the information.  I'm too young for this, but I've gone back and read on the early advocacy for the internet, all the way down --

Peter McCormack: He's too young for it!

David Zell: Yeah, I am, I'm 22.

Peter McCormack: Dude, we saw that you were introduced to Bitcoin at 7th grade!

David Zell: Yeah, I was a 7th-grader!

Peter McCormack: Danny was like, "David can fuck off!"

David Zell: But yeah, so starting with the early evangelists of the internet, all the way up to the intelligentsia, like the Harvard, "The internet will end authoritarianism".  There were just so many claims about how the internet would usher in this democratic revolution; and in some ways, yes, but then you have state capture.  My bet is that Bitcoin will be harder to capture by the state than the internet was, for a lot of reasons, but it's something that we can definitely get into.

Peter McCormack: Are you saying the internet has been captured by the state, because it certainly has been in places like Russia and China, where they have complete control over it; and to some extent, you can argue that we've seen some form of state capture of the internet within Canada recently?

David Zell: I would say it's everywhere, it's down to the protocol layer.  You and I can't buy into TCP/IP, but we can buy Bitcoin.  So, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But does state capture of the internet mean that you have state capture of Bitcoin in some ways?

David Zell: Not necessarily.  But if the state can shoot you for tweeting something that they don't like, the state can shoot you for making a Bitcoin transaction that they don't like, and I think that's the scary reality.  Obviously, I don't want to be overly broad here, there are ways to drastically increase Bitcoin privacy.  But if fundamentally a Bitcoin transaction is uncensorable, it's not going to necessarily protect you from the people that have the monopoly on violence.  To your point, we're seeing that in Canada.

Peter McCormack: So that makes me think, are we sometimes in Bitcoin guilty of causing the same problems by not being open enough to free speech, and I've talked about this; are we guilty of creating our own echo chambers and our own forms of speech restriction by, there's a certain amount of attempts at cancelling within Bitcoin if you don't follow a particular mindset?  But if we were a group of people who believe that this technology, this monetary technology we've created, can solve so many problems in the world, we want to invite everyone in.

We've got Margot sat here with us, who I've just recorded a show with.  She would be considered somebody on the left who's a progressive.  We have people in the middle, people on the right.  Should we be having the most wide-range conversations possible and looking at how Bitcoin can solve problems across all of society and all of the political spectrum, rather than -- I feel like we are guilty of creating echo chambers; and I say "we" as there are certain groups, I would say I try not to do it, but I can be guilty of it?

David Zell: Gosh, there's so much that goes into that.  Because, on the one hand, bitcoiners have been right for a very long time.  And so, something that I do try to keep in mind is that if you have been criticised, called an idiot, told that you're falling for a Ponzi scheme, told things that you know to be wrong, just on the protocol layer, I can understand why after a decade, that starts to build.  I mean, you see any criticism of Bitcoin, it's like, "Fuck you, you don't get it, you're an idiot".  So, I do think that is a challenging environment to be critical, not of Bitcoin, but to be cognisant of the flaws, to be cognisant of where there's room for improvement.

I think Odell does a really good job of this.  He is obviously a bitcoiner, but he doesn't just sit there and say, "If you make a transaction on Bitcoin, no one can stop you and you'll be totally fine"; he's a huge privacy advocate.  So, people like that are good in the space, and I do think that sometimes well-intentioned critique, to your point, is super-important for anything.

Peter McCormack: Saylor's great at this.  Because, what I've noticed with him -- lots of these interviews leave indelible marks on me.  But what I've noticed with Saylor, he talked to me a lot about focus in the last interview, and I get distracted by just fucking around and memes and stuff.  But I've noticed when there's a solid criticism, it could be somebody in the press, whoever, whatever it is, you click on it and you see all the people you follow first, because they're bitcoiners, and people are dog-piling in, memeing them, saying, "Have fun staying poor" and all this bullshit.

Then, Saylor will come out with a really articulate response to it.  And, do we damage ourselves?  Shouting at somebody or memeing at somebody, I don't think wins hearts and minds.

David Zell: You just can't do it, Twitter's just not the platform for it.

Peter McCormack: But it can be, because Saylor's doing it. 

David Zell: If you have an audience, sure.  Twitter just doesn't lend itself to the nuance that a conversation about Bitcoin and good faith requires.  The amount of times I have taken a debate or conversation with someone on Twitter, I'll just DM people and be, "Look, I am happy to get on a call, get on a Google Meet, get on Signal, get on email, I will debate this topic until I'm blue in the face and I will hear you out on everything you want to say, but I'm not going to do it when we're constrained by -- and I'm happy if you publish that later.  It's not about being out of the public eye, it's just I'm not going to engage in a debate with you, or be able to engage in a debate with you in good faith if I'm limited to 160 characters, it's ridiculous".

Peter McCormack: Well also, the reward mechanism of Twitter --

David Zell: You don't get a dopamine hit!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it doesn't reward you for articulate responses, it rewards you for shitting on people and dunking on them and winning the -- you very rarely see people turn round and go, "You know what, I was wrong".  I had to do it yesterday.  I had an exchange going with Knut Svanholm with regards to first principles.  And I said, I always find the argument, "If you follow first principles, you would come to the same conclusion as me", and I always hate that, because it takes -- for example, he wants to talk, he went with the first principle of, "Is all coercion bad?" to deduce that all government is bad, and I don't think you can do that, and I don't think you should.  Because yes, when you say, "Is all coercion bad?" obviously you have to say yes, because otherwise you sound like a fucking evil bastard, because you want to coerce people.  But at the same time, that doesn't help therefore with having a debate around, "Should there be government?"

Sorry, I haven't even made the point!  So anyway, when he said, "If you come to first principles", I was like, "You can write two first principles that end up with the answers contradicting each other", and he said, "Like?"  I turned round to Danny, we went to get juice, and I was like, "Actually, I don't know if you could".  So, I had to reply and say, "No, I'm wrong here", but you don't get that too often, people don't admit they're wrong.

David Zell: Yeah, I mean I don't know, we could get into it.  But it just depends on what ethical framework you're using.

Peter McCormack: Let's get into it.

David Zell: The trolley problem, "Is all coercion bad?"  Well, if you take some sort of Kantian view and you're like, "No, we need to look at the thing in and of itself", then sure, we can all recognise that coercion is bad.  But this is going to sound kind of messed up, but if you were like, "David, I'm about to go commit some awful atrocity and I'm going to hurt a bunch of people", and I pulled a gun on you to keep you from doing that, is that coercion bad?  I mean, I don't know.  It just depends on whether or not you're -- it's context-dependent and I don't think most people are strict utilitarians or strict deontologists or whatever. 

As far as two first principles contradicting each other, there's an example there.  Coercion is bad, so you lead down to, the state is bad, we shouldn't have the state.  But what if you also had a first principle that says, "When we can save a life, we ought to"?  I can see some contradictions there.  People might disagree, but I don't know.  These conversations can just be really tough, a wonderful example of a conversation I would never try to have on Twitter, not in a million years!

Peter McCormack: Well that's why I've got myself into shit on Twitter.  I happily attack punchy subjects, and then I'll happily debate it, and then Danny always turns round to me and says, "Pete, why are you doing this?  Do it on the podcast, because when you're on the podcast, you get to have the back and forth, you get to articulate your response, you're not restricted by characters, you can explain yourself, there's no dopamine hit, there's no dunking".  You never have a conversation like this and the other person's trying to like, "Fuck you", dunk on you, it's always a good conversation.

He's like, "You could be so much more effective on there than Twitter".  He says, "You basically can't win on Twitter".  He's right.

David Zell: Yeah, I would pretty much agree with that.

Peter McCormack: I just got dunked on Twitter, thanks, by the way.

David Zell: You're welcome.  I did too, it's okay.

Peter McCormack: I got way more dunked on than you.

David Zell: Yeah, I just forgot how many people love Joe Rogan and hate you!  So, it was just a meme tweet like, "Is Peter McCormack the Joe Rogan of Bitcoin?"  Well, yeah, like we said earlier, you're the stand-in for the everyman, you have a broad range of guests, you let people say their ideas, it's a reasonable question.  But I was not at all prepared for the reaction, because yeah, people fucking hate you and people fucking love Joe Rogan!  So, it was like an attack on Joe Rogan, which was by virtue, an attack on them.

Peter McCormack: There are people who hate Joe Rogan as well, and there are a few people who like my show, but look, it's an interesting…  I mean, look, these are bitcoiners who love Joe Rogan and hate me, and I don't know why, there's a range of reasons they might dislike me.  But he's a statist as well, he believes in democracy, he's a voter, he said he would have voted for Bernie.  He didn't in the end, I think he would have voted for, what's her name?  Jo, the libertarian lady.

David Zell: Jorgensen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Jo Jorgensen.  He probably is a little -- I probably follow the mainstream narrative a bit more, whereas he is a bit more contrarian.  But at the same time, I think he also has lunatics on his show that spread absolute bullshit unchallenged.

David Zell: Yeah, well you're also representing Bitcoin in a lot of ways.  For better or worse, you are going to be under a microscope by passionate bitcoiners more than Joe Rogan is, because I'm sure if Joe Rogan said stuff about Bitcoin that people didn't like, I mean this community kills its heroes, Joe Rogan would be done.

Peter McCormack: Well, they did to Tim Pool the other day, because he was having Maajid on, he got some things wrong about Bitcoin, and they were --

David Zell: Oh yeah.  This is the guy that said the crazy stuff about, "If you have 50% of the nodes, you can hard fork".

Peter McCormack: It was something along those lines.

David Zell: I don't remember what he said, it was like word salad.  Whatever he said just didn't make any sense.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I used to like Tim Pool, I'm not a Tim Pool fan anymore, I just don't listen to it.  But I think he says some interesting things, I think he gets some other things wrong.  But it comes back to this point actually, I think he has been trapped by audience capture, which is something I massively try and avoid with this show, despite the fact it really pisses people off, I am not just going to follow the hardcore, libertarian Bitcoin narrative, because I don't agree with it, so it's not authentic to just follow it all the time; and secondly, I always want people to listen to the show and go, "I might not agree with Pete, but I know he's being honest".

Audience capture is there and it's tempting.  This show would be a lot less stressful to make if I was just, "Yeah, I'm a carnivore.  Yeah, everything about government's bad, burn it all fucking down", but I live in a safe country, I live in the UK, a western liberal democracy.  It's a safe place, the people are looked after by the state.  I've visited countries which don't have those protections and are dangerous, or people live in terrible conditions, where they don't have access to education, they don't have access to healthcare.  So, I can't just pretend I want the world to be a certain way, when I actually think it wouldn't be that way.  Does that make sense?

David Zell: Yeah, it does make sense.  And I think more broadly, just at 30,000 feet, regardless of what the arguments are, there's just very little value in cultivating a space where you can't disagree.  What are you doing at that point?  And so, yeah, I just think that any time -- there's a difference also between vehemently disagreeing with someone, which is the point of free and open discourse, it's the point of free speech and deliberation, is that you field all ideas and I mean tear them to shreds.  That's a huge part of the history of this country. 

People act like political polarisation is something new, but you go back and look at the Founding Fathers.  You would tear people apart in the press.  Hamilton would go out and say something, and Jefferson would be, "You're a fucking moron", so that's nothing new.  What is so new though is how much people have lost sight of why it's really important that disagreements happen publicly.  Instead, we've just receded into these echo chambers, and this is not a novel thought, I don't want to spend too much time on this.  But there is a significant danger in groupthink.  I think all bitcoiners would agree with that.  There's a significant danger in not platforming ideas.  I think all ideas should be platformed, even if just for the purpose of eviscerating them, otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that happened with us during COVID.  Because, there's definitely, within the Bitcoin community, a quite consistent feeling towards lockdowns, mandates and vaccinations.  There's little to no vocal support within people in Bitcoin saying, "Actually, I'm vaccinated and this is why", very little.  That's why I came out and said I am.

David Zell: You're pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, right?

Peter McCormack: I'm pro-vaccine choice.  I'm pro the choice to get the vaccine, and I'm against mandates, because there's stuff we don't know.  Stuff's coming out about the Pfizer research now that we didn't know at the time, but I was totally pro the choice to go and do it; because what was in my mind was, are there people out there who perhaps should be vaccinated, who are now not getting vaccinated, because they're stuck in a cohort, which only tells them one thing?

That's the danger of groupthink.  You go on Twitter and you see all these people you follow, they're all the same cohort, they're all saying the same things like, "Well fuck, shit, I should get this", because they're only hearing that one opinion.  Whereas, if you step out of it, if I go and hang out with my friends at home, they're nothing like bitcoiners, absolutely nothing like it.  So, I felt this duty to come out and say, "Well, look, I'm getting vaccinated, this is my reason why.  I don't believe in mandates, etc".  That came out with a lot of risk, because I got a lot of shit.  I probably lost listeners, which also --

David Zell: But if you're getting your medical information -- I hear you and I'm like, if you take the stance that the vaccines are really good, then does this…  If you're getting your medical advice from Twitter, you're not going to make it anyway; vaccinated or not, whether or not you think the vaccine is good or bad, if you are on the fence about a medical decision, and you're just letting the shit that random people say on Twitter influence your decision, dude, you're just not going to make it.

Peter McCormack: But I think that happens.

David Zell: I'm sure it does, and it's just bizarre, dude.  I don't want to talk about it, that's my medical decisions.  Why does anybody in the world need to know what surgeries I've had, what medication I take, what vaccines I've had or haven't had.  I don't know, to me the whole vaccine thing is just a deeply intimate and personal decision, everyone's going to come to their own conclusions.  If you're letting stuff on Twitter change what you decide is the right path forward…

There's a reason we have doctors.  This is an interesting conversation I had actually with some bitcoiners at our office recently.  I was talking to a few of the people on the Magazine team, and we were out at a bar across the street, and they were talking about, "We should replace politicians with sortition".

Peter McCormack: With what?

David Zell: With sortition, it's what they did in Venice, where you cast lots and citizens get randomly chosen to run the government.  It's a really interesting concept, and I understand the immediate appeal.  And trust me, I don't really think politicians are in any way better at making decisions than the average person.  But what I kept coming back to was, okay, this rejection of expertise does reach a point where it becomes very illogical.

I want a carpenter to build my house and I want a heart surgeon to do my heart surgery.  I have no interest in letting a sortition decide who's going to operate on me, and I do think that that can be extrapolated to the government in some ways.  There are decisions that require expertise.  I'm not advocating for some platonic rule by experts.  I mean, we've seen how expertise can be weaponised, how expertise can be wrong, how expertise can just be arbitrary words that rhetorically legitimate the preferences of whoever's really making the decisions, and it's all just for show.

But at the other side of things, I'm sure the construction of a highway could be aided by someone who's an expert in studying traffic flows.  It was just kind of an interesting conversation, because there is this big facet of the Bitcoin community, like with people in my office that I was talking to, that are just, "I have no interest in anyone other than everyday people making these decisions", and I don't know.  There are some decisions, like surgery, that I want a doctor to do that.  So, I don't know where that line goes up to the state.

For me, the whole project of critiquing the state through a libertarian lens, at least for me personally, it's about figuring out what components of our current society are vestigial and which ones are requisite.  I do think that the overwhelming majority of the things that people are frustrated with at the government for probably are vestigial and just don't make any sense.  But yeah, there are some core components where I'm like, "If we're going to have a military, I would prefer someone with a military background running the military.  I'd prefer someone with a transportation background making decisions about transportation".

But of course, this is all in theory because, like I mentioned earlier, it's not like I actually listen to experts very often.  Actually, a great example, the experts have told us that roundabouts would save thousands of lives every year and save millions of dollars.  They're cheaper, they save lives.  I think it's like, "Traffic roundabouts reduce traffic fatalities 90%", but of course we don't have roundabouts.

Peter McCormack: I know, it's so weird here.

David Zell: So, all the experts can be unified around a decision that doesn't actually mean that it's going to happen.

Peter McCormack: So, stop signs aren't a thing in the UK.  And when I drive here, I find them so fucking annoying.  I come to a crossroads, I can see, there's no cars, but I have to bring it to a stop.  Give me a roundabout.

David Zell: So, you are a statist, honestly.

Peter McCormack: Give me a roundabout.

David Zell: When I see a stop sign, I just fucking run it.  Red lights, those are suggestions, stop signs are memes.  I mean, there is some visceral part of me that gets to a stop sign where it's 1.00am in the morning, I can clearly see all the other directions, and I am going to run that stop sign 100% of the time, I'm not going to arbitrarily stop my car.

Peter McCormack: Do you slow to it?

David Zell: Context-dependent.

Peter McCormack: There are lots of things in that area to discuss, and that's why I try and discuss them on this show and bring people on, because otherwise it's just like, you get people on who say, "Yeah, I believe government's bad", and you go, "Yeah, government's bad", and we just sit having a nice conversation and everyone listening goes, "Yeah, government's bad".  "Bitcoin's good", "Yeah, Bitcoin's good", the listeners, "Yeah, Bitcoin's good".  What progress are we making?  Bitcoin has mass awareness.  Every single person -- well, not every person.  Every person who's got the internet has heard of Bitcoin now.  You don't meet somebody and say, "I work in Bitcoin", and they go, "What is that?"

David Zell: I actually saw some proprietary data on this.  I think Bitcoin has an 86% brand recognition in the United States.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay, so you've got 86% brand recognition, but you've got it all around the world, okay.  But at the moment, anarcho-capitalism isn't winning, statism is winning, and that's not me saying --

David Zell: In the war of ideas?

Peter McCormack: In the war of ideas, it is winning.

David Zell: Yeah, 100%.

Peter McCormack: And, even if you want to do it by Trojan horse, even if you think you can reduce government down to the point of insignificance, you at least want to get Bitcoin into people's hands and get these ideas into them.  But if I sit down in the pub with my friends and try and explain to them a libertarian society and how it would work, they're not going to buy it at all.  So, we've got to this point now where all the libertarians have heard of Bitcoin.  They're not all onboard, by the way, but they've all heard of it; but a lot of them are onboard.

We're now at the point where we've got all the normies, who believe in government and democracy and left and right, but we've got to get this across to those people.  We're not going to do that by having a show which is just fringe, hardcore ideas.  Now, when I say "fringe", I'm not criticising it, I'm just saying it's not a popular idea.  A lot of people haven't even heard of libertarianism, they don't even know what it means, so we have to have these conversations.

David Zell: Yeah, and for me, when I am advocating for Bitcoin, whether that is talking to lawmakers, or staff, talking to friends, or whatever, my goal is to reduce the amount of requisite things you have to agree with to get to, "Bitcoin is good", because that's all I care about getting people to, is to recognise that Bitcoin is good.  And yeah, it just is stupid from a rhetorical perspective to think that the exact same thing that made you passionate is what's going to make every other person passionate.  But everyone is passionate about something, so it's just a matter of relating Bitcoin to that thing.

Before I was working in Bitcoin full time, a huge facet of my life was working in organising around shutting down private prison construction.  And when I moved and started working in Bitcoin, a lot of my friends, these were very far left people by and large, all my friends were like, "What are you doing?  Why do you like Bitcoin?"  I hadn't talked to them about Bitcoin before.  And so, I realised, "What's the easiest way I can explain this to you?"  I'm like, okay, have you heard of algorithmic policing?

Peter McCormack: No, but tell me.

David Zell: So, algorithmic policing is a term that's used to describe the usage of software and algorithms to allocate police resources.  So, we got to this point where cops couldn't just say, "Oh yeah, we're going to just police all of the black neighbourhoods and we're going to leave the white ones alone".  They wanted something that was objective and concrete.  So, we saw the rise of algorithms that would basically predict crime.

So, what do they do?  They use credit score.  So, they're all saying, "No, we're not over-policing black neighbourhoods, we're using objective metrics, like credit score, to determine where crime is most likely".  But that's just a data point that codes for race.  So, when I'm talking to criminal justice organisers and advocates, who are intimately familiar with this, the way that I explain Bitcoin to them is, "Do you want the government to have a centralised repository of all financial transactions?  What happens when there are goods and services that black Americans buy at a higher rate than white Americans?  Well now, your CBDC is just going to lead to more algorithmic policing".

So, starting off this conversation with them, I didn't get into the money printer, I didn't get into fiat currency, I didn't get into the gold standard; I just took it straight to, "CBDCs are coming, they have massive implications for our privacy, they're going to be really, really bad for the most vulnerable Americans and we need Bitcoin to fix it".  The same thing with the stuff in Canada.  I was texting some of my old friends from the anti-prison work and I'm like, "Look, guys.  Are you telling me that you can't realistically see a scenario where Donald Trump gets elected and says that BLM is a terrorist group and starts tracking down everyone who donated?"

I tweeted this the other day.  I didn't get much engagement, but I said, "If Bitcoin were around during the Red Scare, the right would hate it, and the left would have loved it".  Cancel culture isn't anything new, we've been cancelling each other for a very long time, and it wasn't that long ago that if you were a socialist or a communist, that that was a perfectly acceptable political take, like back in the 1930s.  Then, you see the 1950s and 1960s, where socialists are being beaten, jailed, stalked, harassed, but we cancelled the left. 

So yeah, that's where I take it when I'm trying to persuade some of these people, "You can never control who is going to be in the in-group.  You can never control whether or not your ideas will be the dominant and protected ones.  So, you have to choose.  Do you want to put your sail up and hope the wind blows in the right direction, or do you want to make sure that everyone has the right to transact, that everyone has the right to send information, etc?"  I think that example really hit home with a lot of people.  It's like, "Oh shit, yeah, I could see Donald Trump calling BLM a terrorist, he basically did, like formally making BLM or designating BLM as a terrorist group and persecuting…"  If that happened, I think the left would stop hating Bitcoin, because they would pretty much immediately get it.

Peter McCormack: Well, I talked to Margot about this previously.  I was saying, rather than having this very neat, small idea of what Bitcoin is, and to be part of the Bitcoin cohort, you have to follow the same set of ideas, and if you don't we're going to yell and shout at you, to me that's the opposite of what we should be doing.  What we should be doing is looking at other groups and telling them about the ideas of why Bitcoin is important to them.  So, whether it's telling them about how Bitcoin is helping the Ukrainian Army, or it's helping Russians avoid sanctions, or whether it's showing them how activists in Nigeria are using Bitcoin to protest, while activists in Belarus are protesting against Lukashenko, or whether it's women in the Middle East who can't get a bank account, but can now hold Bitcoin, or people in Lebanon or Turkey avoiding inflation.

All these people I've just said are from a range of different political ideas; these are not libertarians.  What these are, they have a range of ideas, but every single one of them can benefit from Bitcoin.  So, what should we do?  Have a libertarian Bitcoin show that says, "This is what Bitcoin is", that's all; or, should we have a show which is like, "Here's the range of ideas globally that exist, and here's how Bitcoin can help these different use cases", and them we get more Bitcoin into more people's hands, and we grow this idea of uncensorable money, and how that can better the world.  That's where I am.

Sadly, that means I take a lot of shit for it, they're like, "Fuck you, statist cuck!" but at the same time, we grow the pool of people who discover Bitcoin and realise actually, it's not for criminals and terrorists and drug dealers, it's actually for the betterment of all society.

David Zell: Yeah, I mean it's obviously true, Bitcoin's for everyone.  And I think that the reason, or a huge part of the reason that Bitcoin gets so much heat from the left, especially from the millennial left, the younger generation, is because they have grown up in a time where their ideas have been really the in-group.  They haven't been on the side of cancel culture for the most part.  But yeah, it's bizarre to me that people don't remember that just a couple of decades ago, it was being on the left that would get you cancelled, not being on the right.

But at a certain point though, I do think there is a group of people to whom Bitcoin is just fundamentally not going to be all that persuasive, and I think it's something that bitcoiners I see on Twitter often lump all progressives together, everyone on the left together, and the basic political compass where you've got authoritarianism and libertarianism as the y-axis, and then your x-axis is left and right.  I think Bitcoin appeals to everyone who is below that x-axis. 

What people forget is, there is an entire quadrant of left libertarians.  There are just very few thought-leaders in that sphere, very few public intellectuals who espouse left libertarian ideas, but I think a significant portion of people who say that they're on the left, who identify with being on the left, are really more left libertarian than they are that top-left quadrant.

Peter McCormack: But there's plenty of people on the left also who will watch Libs of TikTok and they'll think, "What the fuck is going on?" think this is madness.  But people have grouped together Libs of TikTok, that's the entirety of the left, "They all think like this".  But that's like saying, "Everybody on the right is a neo-Nazi".

David Zell: It depends on whether you're attached to the solution, or you're attached to the problem.  I know so many people who identify as leftist or socialist, or whatever, but when you get down to it, their strong view is not, "This is this alternate system of governance that I really, really believe needs to be in place".  They're like, "Dude, half of Americans can't afford a $400 medical expense".  They're worried about inequality, they're worried about racism, they're worried about climate change, they're worried about poverty, all the same things that have been increasing that bitcoiners will point to and say, "Actually, this all started in 1971 and it's because of the gold standard".

For the people who are just concerned about the problems that they see in the world, and then they look and see who's out there and say, "Well, it's only these liberals, it's only the left who's talking about this.  I guess I'm a leftist", those people are very, very easy to bring into Bitcoin, because Bitcoin helps vulnerable people.  But even if you are super, super-attached philosophically to a centralised state, then yeah, I'm not going to spend too much time trying to orange pill those people. 

But we shouldn't write off everyone who's on the left as being incapable of being reached, because that's the counterargument, that you say, "I'm trying to broaden Bitcoin's appeal".  Other people will just tell you, "Why are you even bothering?  Those people don't deserve Bitcoin.  You get it at the price you deserve" or, "You're never going to be able to persuade them", which again is just not true.

Peter McCormack: I know it's not true and I can tell you why it's not true.  So, perfect example, there was one week and it was kind of by design, but two consecutive shows.  We had Laura Loomer followed by Anita Posch.  So you've got total conservative followed by a total progressive.  You go onto the YouTube comments and it's like, "Why have you got this nutter, Loomer, on?" and then following that you've got Anita and you've got, "Why have you got this nutter leftie on?" and this inability for some people to accept that the world is made up of different people with different ideas.

David Zell: You're in the perfect spot, Peter.  If you were getting attacked by both sides, that's when you know you're right, 100%.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I know, I am.  But there's this inability to accept that the world is made up of a group of different people who have different ideas, and you don't change people by shouting at them, and we're not going to get everybody into the same little parts with the same ideas; it's just not going to happen, so what do we do?  How do we bridge that? 

We bridge that maybe with Bitcoin in that, okay, Bitcoin can help you with this and you with this, and maybe it's going to stop us all fighting.  Maybe it's going to reduce the power of media which influences us to fight each other.  Maybe it's going to reduce the power of the state, so the state has less influence over us.  Maybe it's going to make sure that everybody -- maybe in Canada, it would have meant the truckers could protest and it would have stopped the people who were living in Ottawa who were against this.

I know it's true and the reason I know it's true is because of the emails.  Danny sees them.  I get hundreds of emails of people listening to the show, and it's a range of things, but I get a lot of people on the left saying, "Thank you for making that show, thank you for having this guest, thank you for discussing this idea, I'm not going to talk about it on Twitter, because I don't want to get shouted at".  So, I know it exists, so we should be having these conversations.

David Zell: And no one's ideology is internally consistent, that's the thing.  People expect giant groups of people to all share the same beliefs, when 99.99% of people don't even have internally consistent beliefs.  I'm not saying that -- myself included.  So, to hold an entire swathe of people to a particular set of ideas is very, very difficult.

It gets back to what I was saying about, the cleanest path to getting someone to being pro-Bitcoin is to minimise the amount of bullshit, extra things they need to agree with.  Internet money is good, period.  Okay, what should internet money look like?  Well, it probably shouldn't be run by the government, okay.  It probably shouldn't be run by fucking Facebook, okay.  It probably shouldn't be run in a proof-of-stake system that just replicates all the nonsense.  So, you convince someone that internet money is good and then you're just, "Okay, what should it look like?"  Go through all the options, "Oh, yeah, it looks like proof-of-work and Bitcoin is probably the best answer".  It doesn't need to have anything to do with really anything else.

CBDCs are bad, internet money is good and as far as I can tell, the best form of internet money that exists is Bitcoin, and it's likely going to stay that way, almost certainly.

Peter McCormack: And it works now, and you can use it now, and you can improve the world now.  It doesn't require a massive shift in the world.  I mean, if Bitcoin shifts people, which we've talked about plenty of times; plenty of people say, "Bitcoin has changed me.  Not just financially, it's changed the way I see the world, it's changed the way I think about the world, it's changed the way I think about myself".  If it can do that at an individual level, if enough people adopt it, then it can start to make those more macro shifts in how society coordinates and how governments coordinate.

So, it can work now, but trying to create this tiny, little ideology that has to fit, I just think is flawed, and I can't make a show that does that.  I think it's intellectually dishonest, and it is appealing to that small group of people that you're worried about are going to try and cancel you.

David Zell: Yeah, and I mean the flipside of that is, there is value in community.  And if you want a community of, for example, the carnivore, toxic, Bitcoin maximalist that agrees with the same sort of seed oil sunscreen, that's awesome, it's very, very cool and enjoyable to find people that you share ideas with; because like I said earlier, we don't usually agree.  I think that's why bitcoiners all like to go to Meetups and conferences and hang out, because you're around people who understand you.

So, I feel like it's important to clarify, there is nothing wrong with building community that is tangential to Bitcoin.  I think where I personally get frustrated is when people take random shit that has nothing to do with the protocol and say, "This is Bitcoin".  No, Bitcoin doesn't give a flying fuck what you think about sunscreen or meat or any of those things.

Peter McCormack: "You're not a bitcoiner", fuck that.

David Zell: Yeah, the "no true Scotsman" thing is just so on display here.  But again, the caveat is, community is good and people deserve to be able to, and should not be criticised for carving out community, where everyone's on the same page about Bitcoin plus eight other things.  But it can't happen the other way around.  It has to be Bitcoin first, then there are these derivative communities.  What you don't want to happen is the inverse of that, where you have to believe that internet money is good, you have to believe that Bitcoin is the best form of internet money, and you need to believe a bajillion other things.

Peter McCormack: Or you're not a bitcoiner.

David Zell: Yeah, that's not the world I want to live in.

Peter McCormack: It's one of the things I hate most, is when somebody says, "You're not a bitcoiner".  I say, "Well, what defines a bitcoiner?"  There isn't a universal definition of a bitcoiner, and any one that is created is subjective, because it was created by a person.

David Zell: Yeah, I was thinking of that Hal Finney quote earlier.  It was like 15 years before Bitcoin, 10 years before Bitcoin, and Hal Finney was like, "The notion that we can recede into technology and ignore everything that happens on the social layer is absurd".  He said, "We have to win political victories to win our privacy", and I don't think he meant elections, like you have to get the right politicians in office.  But there is this layer of, if Bitcoin is a bulwark against oppression, if Bitcoin is a bulwark against tyranny, will Bitcoin have been successful if only a handful of very technically-literate people are able to use it or are using it?

Peter McCormack: Who understand what an xPub is!

David Zell: I would say no.  If there was nuclear war and Joe Biden and all the US Senators survived in a bunker, would that be a victory?  No, I think everyone should have a bunker, I think everyone should have Bitcoin.  So, if you believe that Bitcoin is good and you believe that Bitcoin is not just good in the abstract, but good for people, that it does something useful for an individual, it's a really unempathetic take to just be like, "Oh yeah, Bitcoin is really important, and you're going to need it to protect yourself, but fuck you, I hope you don't buy it.  You shouldn't have it, because we don't agree with things".

Bitcoin's a lifeboat, and I don't think anyone should be arbitting who gets to jump in the lifeboat while the ship is sinking.  I don't know, that's where I come at it from.

Peter McCormack: I completely agree, obviously I completely agree. 

David Zell: So, we've got other stuff to talk about!

Peter McCormack: Well, because you're talking about cancelling, a fucking country's been cancelled, which is fucking unbelievable; a country has been cancelled, which has got these horrible effects to it, whereby there's so many parts you can debate about it.  Are sanctions good?  Are they bad?  Is it right in this scenario?  Who says this is a just war and actually, we did even worse in Iraq; are we hypocrites?  But it's a whole debate itself. 

But we have oligarchs having their assets seized.  Again, we can debate whether that's just or not, whether essentially, are their boats and their houses proceeds of crime?  You can make an argument that these people have pillaged the state under a kind of Mafia leadership, if you support Putin.  We can go through all of that.

David Zell: Yeah, and of course, these are all equivalences to American billionaires as well.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, it's a rabbit hole.  But the point is, we've got a country that has been cancelled, and Elizabeth Warren, who's become chief FUD officer for Bitcoin, whatever it is, she's going to come out and she's now saying that Russia's going to be using Bitcoin to avoid sanctions.  You put a piece out this week on Twitter.  I read it, I thought it was good.  I'm not sure if you were sub-tweeted, but Marty Bent made a point about if you think Russia wouldn't use Bitcoin to avoid sanctions, you're an idiot, so there's a counterpoint to it.

David Zell: I feel like I should get into greater depth here.  Because I'm in Austin, I'd like to talk to Marty about this, because Odell texted me too and he was like, "Do you really think Russia won't use Bitcoin to evade sanctions?" and my answer was yes and no.  But you have to take a step back and first understand what the goal of sanctions are.  In this instance, sanctions are designed to (a) cut off Russia's economy from the rest of the world, and (b) to punish Putin and his cronies; so, in other words, to keep capital from coming in and prevent certain capital from leaving. 

When Elizabeth Warren says that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are going to be used by Russia to evade sanctions, it's important that we bifurcate what that means.  Will Bitcoin allow Russian oligarchs to get money out of the country?  Absolutely.  That being said, it's probably going to have to be money that they had in offshore accounts that weren't tied to their actual identity, yeah, absolutely.  It's also going to help the 144 million people that live there.  It's the only way for them to get their money out of a currency that's collapsing. 

So, when Elizabeth Warren says, "We should ban cryptocurrency from all Russians", what she is looking at her constituents with a straight face and saying is that 140 million people deserve to have all of their money taken away, just so we can make sure a few billionaires don't get some of their money out of Russia.  And that's just one of the most anti-empathetic, anti-humanitarian -- I mean, it's nuts!

Peter McCormack: Well, the people they're trying to punish are the ones who will be fine anyway.

David Zell: Right.  But to Marty's point, I do not think that Bitcoin is going to be the tool, at least now, that Russia, for example, denominates its exports in, and this is in the infographic, and there's a lot of reasons why.  I think the most easy to understand reason is that sanctions are enforced on the social layer as much, if not more, than they are enforced on the rails layer.  These sanctions apply, it doesn't matter whether you are paying for things in seashells or in Bitcoin or in Mickey Mantle Trading Cards, you are not allowed to transact with Russia.

So, you're not going to transact with Russia if you are worried about inspiring the ire of the West.  You are going to transact with Russia if you don't care.  And at the point where China and Russia have developed alternatives to SWIFT, like CIPS, where China's rolling out the digital yuan, where Russia has massive stockpiles of yuan and gold, the people who want to buy stuff from Russia are going to buy it, and maybe they will use Bitcoin, maybe they won't.  It's not like Bitcoin is the limiting factor though.  The limiting factor is the wrath of the West. 

So, no, I don't think that Bitcoin is going to -- and then you can get into the technicals of it.  Russia does $430 billion, $440 billion of exports a year, so daily that's like $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion going into Russia every day.  I mean, if Russia said, "We'll sell our oil and sell all of our exports in Bitcoin", Bitcoin would probably moon to the extent that there were countries and states that were willing to pay for these things.

But yeah, I think even the US Treasury came out and said the same thing.  So it is crazy.  Elizabeth Warren is really, really showing her colours here.  I was a long hold-out on her, because I was like, "This environmental stuff is, if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, very persuasive".  Our counterresponse requires a lot of understanding, but the critique is very easy to understand, if you care about the climate.  Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, uses as much energy as some country, super-wasteful, and so I did hold out on Elizabeth Warren thinking, "Okay, maybe this is just a pet issue for her.  And to be fair, she hasn't engaged with high-quality information about Bitcoin", whatever.

But now, it's become -- she wrote a letter to Treasury telling them that they need to take a closer look at the role that Bitcoin's going to have in undermining sanctions, after Treasury was like, "We're not that worried about this"!  And if anything, I would say that Bitcoin, in some ways, makes US sanctions better.  The reason why is that a large goal of sanctions are to decouple an autocrat or a tyrant from their population, to create suffering, so that people no longer want that leader in charge.

Peter McCormack: When does that ever work?

David Zell: Yeah, empirically sanctions have failed 95% of the time.  And, yeah, I'd like to get into that in a second.  But the point here is that, if you do sanctions in a way that punishes everyday Russians, you are going to do the exact opposite, you are going to give Putin something to rally around.  He's going to be able to point to all of the suffering that's going on and say, "This isn't my fault, this is the West's fault". 

So, rather than having the intended effect of decoupling a population from its leader, if sanctions are done so punitively, like in this instance not allowing everyday Russians to take their money out of roubles and put it into Bitcoin, or put it into dollars, or whatever they want to put it in, I guarantee you it's going to not only be a humanitarian crisis; but even if you are pro-sanctions, pro-America and you want sanctions to be as effective as possible, you probably want Bitcoin to exist.  And I'm not just saying this.  This is a core, stated tenet of US sanctions policy, is that they need to be done, or should be done, in a way that avoids the appearance of just undue suffering, deliberately causing undue suffering to the average person.

So, Elizabeth Warren is simultaneously advocating for the creation of one of the worst humanitarian crises we'll ever see, and advocating for making sanctions less effective, all because what?  She wants to keep some billionaires from getting…  No, she just hates Bitcoin and is just a liar.  I volunteered on her campaign when I was in high school.  I think Elizabeth Warren's bright and there are things that I agree with.  She was really prescient about pointing out some of the ways that our financial system is just rigged and stupid.

Peter McCormack: I know, she should understand Bitcoin.

David Zell: Yeah.  But now, with this, it's appalling to watch Elizabeth Warren and progressives openly and proudly call for the mass suffering of everyday Russians by banning cryptocurrency.  And yeah, there is no excuse.  Treasury has come out and said, "We're just not that worried about Bitcoin facilitating the evasion of sanctions".

So, yeah, to Marty's point, I think where he's probably coming out of this saying, "Look, you're an idiot.  This is the whole point of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin doesn't give a fuck what you do".  True, but nation states have militaries and again, sanctions work on the social layer.  So, will Bitcoin be a way of evading sanctions on a rails layer?  Yes, absolutely.  If Russia gets completely cut off from everything, if China backs away, yes, Bitcoin will be a very dependable way of getting money into and out of the country, but only with the people who are willing to break the law, only with the people who are willing to violate the stated policy of the people that have the monopoly on violence.

Peter McCormack: And we know who that will be.

David Zell: Exactly.  So, I don't think Bitcoin is a means of nation state level evasion of sanctions, because it's the social layer that's what makes sanctions work, it's not just cutting people off from those tools.

Peter McCormack: Well, Iran and China will trade with Russia, because they don't care.

David Zell: Yeah, who do you think supplies all of North Korea's oil?  China.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and people who operate corporations in the US are not going to trade with Russia, because they don't want to end up in jail.  I mean, it's very simple.

David Zell: Yeah.  I think that's an interesting important premise that has really become obvious in the wake of Canada, and now in the wake of this, is that there is a difference between a transaction being uncensorable and you being able to make that transaction without the fear of repercussion.  It kind of goes into the whole advocacy stuff, the Policy Institute and all the other work that I'm doing, it's like, "Why do you care what the state thinks about Bitcoin?  Bitcoin's going to destroy the state.  Bitcoin can't be stopped".  Yeah, that's true, stopping Bitcoin is very, very hard to imagine, but to think that individual users aren't vulnerable on the social layer, it's ridiculous.  To think that we wouldn't all be worse off if America banned Bitcoin, in my mind, kind of ridiculous.

So much of Bitcoin's most compelling use cases are not quite there yet.  The user interface isn't quite there yet, the infrastructure isn't quite there yet, and I do think that even if Bitcoin inevitably gets banned in the US, I would like to delay that as long as possible.  We've got the strongest IP laws in the world, the deepest capital markets in the world.  I would prefer for Bitcoin innovation to have access to America for as long as possible, and I would prefer to be able to stay in America with my Bitcoin for as long as possible. 

I get messages all the time from people that are like, "Fuck you, Bitcoin can't be stopped", and I'm like, "Yes, but your life will be worse if armed men come to your house and point a gun at you and demand your private keys".  And again, there's a whole shade of grey in there too.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's happened.

David Zell: Yeah, it has, and the world's a worse place.

Peter McCormack: In Canada --

David Zell: They did just this.

Peter McCormack: -- NobodyCaribou, the guy managing the fundraising in Bitcoin, they went to his house, I don't know how they did it, but they got the private keys to the Bitcoin.

David Zell: Yeah.  Again, Bitcoin may be unstoppable on the technical layer, but users are obviously vulnerable on the social layer.  The reason I do policy work is because I think that there are policies that the US would pass that would make life really hard for bitcoiners, and I think there are things we can do to delay that or to stop it.

Peter McCormack: And it's working, right, because there are a growing number of senators and people in Congress who support Bitcoin.  It feels like almost every person I see who's running for Congress is pro-Bitcoin, because they keep emailing us asking to come on the show; we've had so many!  There is this kind of growing support for Bitcoin with politicians, or those who are trying to get a seat in Congress.

David Zell: Yeah, there is.  The tough thing though is they have a lot of incentive to be pro-Bitcoin. 

Peter McCormack: Of course.

David Zell: There's such an asymmetry of support.  Very few issues that matter to people, or to any meaningful amount of people, are without an equal and opposite group of people who are equally passionate about the inverse of that: guns, abortion, healthcare, you name it.  With Bitcoin though, it's just net-net, you're winning votes.  There's not this group of people who are going to flip their support for a political candidate because they hate Bitcoin so much.  But every single bitcoiner, or most of them, I can't say that, but most bitcoiners don't really care about political parties.

If you are pro-Bitcoin, they're going to vote for you, so that's why politicians are getting into it.  But the risk is because that incentive structure is so good, Bitcoin's game theory just so obviously -- the right move to make as a politician is to support it.  It also means that we have to do a really good job of vetting people.  Look at Eric Adams.

Peter McCormack: I know, yeah.

David Zell: Just because somebody fucking puts Bitcoin in their Twitter bio doesn't mean that they're a bitcoiner, and I think that's also something that gets lost on some people when I explain the work that I do, because they're like, "Oh, you're just something for politicians".  No, all I'm doing is answering people's questions, and I'm trying to paint Bitcoin in the best light possible, and I'm trying to make arguments that appeal to people who have different priorities and views.

What I'm not trying to do though, and what I worry about happening is a world where, yeah, politicians start using the community to get publicity, like coming on your show, to get money and they actually don't care about…  What we really need to do if you want to engage in the election process, ultimately we have to elect bitcoiners, if that's what you want to do.  I don't really know if that's necessary or not.

Peter McCormack: Well, this goes back to the original point where the conversation started, David, where we talked about, we want to avoid this very small, niche set of beliefs you have to be a bitcoiner, and actually want to make Bitcoin as open to as many people as possible, left, right, centre, libertarian, as many people as possible; because, if the game theory's right and enough people own Bitcoin and support Bitcoin, every politician will have to support it.

David Zell: Yeah, 100%.  And again, I think where this triggers some people is they interpret it to mean that if we don't pander to the politicians, Bitcoin will collapse.  Of course, that's not true, it's about the timeline.  I think Bitcoin staying legal in America greatly accelerates the timeline of Bitcoin adoption and, more importantly than adoption, innovation on Bitcoin.  And yeah, banning it does the exact opposite.  So, there's such a strong objective to engage in that advocacy, even if you recognise that ultimately, it's not necessary, that no, you don't need politicians to keep Bitcoin running. 

Bitcoin will run no matter what the politicians think, and you'll be able to use Bitcoin, no matter what the politicians think, unless they are sending armed to your house to track you down and shoot you, in which case, Bitcoin isn't going to save you from a state monopoly on violence.

Peter McCormack: What do you think will happen with China?  Do you think they'll reverse their decision, because I think it's widely seen that banning Bitcoin mining could prove to be one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes in history?  Danny, who said it this week?

Danny Knowles: Barry Silbert said he thought 2022, China would un-ban Bitcoin.  I mean, he did clarify that it was just a guess.

David Zell: I'll take the other side of that.  I think that China's foreign policy is a lot more subtle than America's, to say the least.

Peter McCormack: Mildly!

David Zell: But China has a very, very long history of using attraction rather than coercion with its international policy.  What we are seeing China do is roll out the Belt and Road Initiative, in part as a way to build better relationships with resource-rich nations and emerging markets, but also to internationalise the renminbi, and in turn Xi Jinping's rule of law.  Bitcoin is a direct threat to that.  Right now, China can go to -- you know Jack Mallers talked for the IMF?  Did you end up watching the video?

Peter McCormack: The actual -- yeah, yeah, I've seen it.

David Zell: Yeah, so what he talks about is how so many people -- we always say it takes three days to settle a legacy payment with SWIFT or Fedwire.  Well, that's if you're lucky.  One of the things that Jack gets into is how correspondent banking is declining, has declined 20% over the last decade, with those declines concentrated in Africa, in Latin America, in a lot of the countries that need it the most.  Those are the countries where Bitcoin adoption is rising the fastest, and those are also the countries where China is engaging in all of these dollar-denominated lending agreements.

So in many ways, it's a sales pitch.  China has the perfect sales pitch for their CBDC right now, because they can say, "Hey, look at the West, they're failing you.  These banking relationships are going away and you need to conduct cross-border payments.  Use our digital yuan".  And if the choice is between the legacy system and the Chinese Central Bank Digital Currency, those people are going to pick the Chinese CBDC every single time, even if it means privacy trade-offs.

Then enter Bitcoin.  If the choice is between Bitcoin or DCEP, the renminbi, digital yuan, whatever, it's a clear choice.  Why would I want to use a Chinese currency when I could use Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Unless you get a massive loan from the Chinese Government.

David Zell: Yeah, so I think they're not going to un-ban Bitcoin, both because they're concerned about capital controls and they want to manage the control and flow of capital domestically; but Bitcoin is a perfect solution for Xi Jinping's plan to internationalise the usage of the renminbi, and the implications of that are just so profound.  In the same way that the West has leveraged its monopoly over the financial system to shape the international system to its views and its liking, China is trying to do the exact same. 

If you and I were paying each other and one of us were interacting with DCEP, Xi Jinping could say, "That's subversive to the state, that's terrorism", and then stop that transaction from happening, or seize that person's money, even if it's happening outside of mainland China.  They recognise how important this tool is.  If you control the rails of finance, you control the world.

Balaji was tweeting about this, like how Bitcoin, and I don't think he said non-aligned movement exactly, but something that's been on my mind is, yeah, Bitcoin allows people to make the choice to not be controlled by America, but also to not have to, in turn, be controlled by an authoritarian regime.  So, at the point where Bitcoin is the perfect solution to so many of the problems with the legacy payment system, especially in emerging markets, China has a very, very strong incentive to hate it and to not want it to spread.

Peter McCormack: But do you not think, on a long enough timeframe, they still have to concede, if Bitcoin wins?  When Bitcoin wins?

David Zell: When Bitcoin wins, I don't know, I have no idea.  What I do know is that I think they have very strong reasons to not support Bitcoin.  I don't know when, if ever, they realise that, "Oh, shit, we're not going to be able to replicate what the West did", because that's what they thought they could do.

Post Bretton Woods, the IMF is operating for decades.  And if you ever looked at some of the term sheets of IMF rescue packages, the average number of conditionalities, conditionalities being arbitrary actions that the receiving state has to do in exchange for this IMF loan, it's like 430 different things that you had to do before the IMF would give you money.

Peter McCormack: Like?  Give some examples.

David Zell: Austerity/social spending.  I mean in Brazil, one of the conditionalities I remember reading was, "Building soccer fields", it's just random stuff.  But the point is, when you're the only game in town, you're the only people that give a nation state level loan, you have a tremendous amount of leverage.  So, what does China do?  They build parallel institutions. 

So, in 2015, they launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is trying to do the exact same thing as the IMF, with the exception that there are no conditionalities, at least not up front, they're more subtle.  It's like, through BRI lending, it's like, "We'll build you this railroad.  You'll pay us back in 20 years, but if you can't pay for it, and by the way we are going to structure this agreement so that you won't be able to pay for it, don't sweat it, you can just give us your oil, or you can just give us your cobalt mines".

Peter McCormack: Or, "We'll take your port".

David Zell: Exactly, "We'll take your port".  But once China started doing the same thing as America, except no strings attached, IMF conditionalities got massively, massively eviscerated.  I think now, the average number of conditionalities on an IMF loan is in the 30s or 40s.  So yeah, what China's strategy is doing makes sense, because they're creating this market competition to this monopoly that is America, "And we're going to be more attractive to the consumer, and we're going to take this power that America's built".

What they don't understand is that Bitcoin is doing the same thing, but it's better than both of them.  So, in a world with Bitcoin, people have to ask themselves, "Is this Chinese currency better than Bitcoin?" and they're always going to say no.  If we're in a world without Bitcoin, they're just going to ask, "Is this Chinese digital currency better than what I'm using now?" the answer's probably going to be yes.

So, Bitcoin just played the same game that China's trying to, but earlier and better, and I don't think China's quite realised that.

Peter McCormack: But there aren't any loans really.

David Zell: With Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

David Zell: No, there aren't loans at all.

Peter McCormack: But you could argue that Bitcoin's better for the people, but for the government, who has the option of going to China and getting a huge loan to fund, whether it's internal projects, or fund corruption, there's an inflow of money that comes into the government.  But there isn't with Bitcoin.

David Zell: The implications of that depend on what you think hyperbitcoinisation means, and the timeline that that happens.  Because, there's a difference between Bitcoin being the global reserve currency and Bitcoin being a niche asset.  There's a different between Bitcoin being the global reserve currency and America basically buying enough Bitcoin so that they can just replicate fractional-reserve banking with it.

Peter McCormack: Can they?

David Zell: I don't know, probably not in practice, but in theory.  Bitcoin would moon, but America could just buy all of the Bitcoin with the US dollar, with the dollar that it's printing.  I mean, at a certain point, the dollar --

Peter McCormack: Well, they can't really.

David Zell: I don't want to say blanket no.  Will they?  No.  Could they?  I don't want to write off that possibility.  You should have Dr William Luther on the show and talk to him about it, because it's not something that I've spent much time thinking about, and I don't have a super-nuanced, or strongly-held opinion, but he has thought a lot about it and went on a Spaces with Bitcoin Magazine recently and was talking to, who was it?  CK and some of those guys, and he was getting into this whole theory of how the US Government could buy enough Bitcoin, or all of the Bitcoin, and then just start basically debasing -- pegging the dollar to Bitcoin, and then changing the amount of dollars.  He has a whole thesis behind this.

Peter McCormack: It just doesn't sound right.  You can't buy all of the Bitcoin, because everyone has to want to sell.  And if they start buying a lot of the Bitcoin, the price is going to moon, and maybe some people will sell.

David Zell: The hodlers just become the new rulers of the world, if America tries this strategy!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it becomes very obvious that someone is trying to buy all the Bitcoin and it just makes it too expensive.  I mean, Michael Saylor's trying to buy all the Bitcoin at the moment.

David Zell: Yeah, that is pretty dumb actually!

Peter McCormack: I don't buy that one.

David Zell: No, I don't buy that either.  But to answer your question, it depends on how hyperbitcoinisation plays out, because there is a difference between Bitcoin being the global reserve currency and Bitcoin being an asset.  The former definitely puts huge constraints on deficit spending and what the state can do; the latter really doesn't necessarily.

Peter McCormack: How do you know when it is the global reserve currency?  What is the trigger when you go, "Yeah, we've reached that point"?

David Zell: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Is it oil priced in Bitcoin?

David Zell: Is it oil priced in Bitcoin; is it dollars pegged to Bitcoin; is it Bitcoin being the most traded-in currency?  There are a lot of metrics you could use.  Is it the most widely-held reserve asset by other central banks?  I'm not sure which single indicator would mean Bitcoin is the global reserve currency.  Because, I think what's more likely is that we're just going to have multiple -- you saw on Twitter that Powell said this.

Peter McCormack: What do you think he meant by that?

David Zell: I think it's like, "We're fucked"!

Peter McCormack: But do you think he's given a nod to Bitcoin, or do you think he's talking about the digital yuan alongside the dollar?

David Zell: I think he might be, because the digital yuan is only -- I'm trying to remember, I read a chart a couple of weeks ago, and it was like, "The dollar and the euro together are just under 80% of global payments.  And then beneath them is the pound, which is just over 5% and then beneath that is the yuan, just under 5%".  Obviously, Bitcoin's further down the line, but I don't know if we're looking at a world any time soon where the yuan is part of the global reserve.

Peter McCormack: So, it's a nod to Bitcoin?

David Zell: Yeah, I read it as a nod to, at the very least, the recognition that we're rapidly transitioning into a multipolar world, that it isn't just the American show anymore.

Peter McCormack: Well, if they know they're fucked and they're looking at alternatives, then it would be better that it was Bitcoin than the digital yuan.

David Zell: Oh, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And I would guess, I've said this before, I would guess, without any actual evidence, that per capita, the majority of Bitcoin is owned in the US.  So, if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency --

David Zell: We stand the most to gain.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, exactly.

David Zell: As long as Bitcoin companies are here, the state is extracting tax revenue at a disproportionate rate to the rest of the world.  If miners are here, then we have a lot more to gain.  So, yeah, there's almost this light version of the Cantillon effect which is, "If Bitcoin is more in your country, you will benefit more than other countries", and I do think that's kind of the endgame that American leaders are going to have to recognise, is that we can't kill this; and if we ban it, we are just boxing ourselves out of the benefits and, oh wait, maybe if we actually promote Bitcoin here, maybe if we do things that will keep Bitcoin capital here, preventing bans on self-custody, making sure everyone has the right to run a node or use a CoinJoin, could you imagine --

Peter McCormack: I can't imagine a CoinJoin.

David Zell: -- if it was enshrined in law that, "You will have the unalienable right to use a CoinJoin"?  Well, at a certain point, those are the types of things that you may have to do if you want to retain even just a fraction of the seigniorage that you were used to having before.  So, yeah, the game theory is you want it here, otherwise you're not winning, you're just hurting yourself.

Peter McCormack: But it's a defensive move as well in that, if you know the dollar's fucked and the dollar can't remain the reserve currency, it's a defensive move to try and prevent it being another one controlled by another country.

David Zell: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: That would be a fascinating point where it's like --

David Zell: We're going to war over who has more hashrate!  You should have Lowery on here to talk about that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've been meaning to do that, but I've got to get him in person, got to get himself to me.

David Zell: I mean, his thesis is wild, but I think we did just kind of arrive at a tenet of his thesis, which is that if there is such a benefit to having Bitcoin happen in your country, people will go to whatever lengths are justified by that benefit.

Peter McCormack: It would be a wild, wild time for the Fed, or the US Government, or whoever, to turn round and say, "We believe Bitcoin is the global reserve currency now, and we are backing this".

David Zell: It would be nuts.

Peter McCormack: I mean, for every cypherpunk and developer who, well actually prior to the invention of Bitcoin, were working on the projects before Bitcoin, and then worked on Bitcoin, and then put up with all the shit and the ridicule and the abuse, year after year, to have it all play out.

David Zell: Then we would have the opposite problem, Peter, which would be, "Okay, how do we stop regulatory capture?  How do we stop America, the US Government, from controlling 51% of the hashrate?"

Peter McCormack: But there's no incentive for them to do that.

David Zell: No, there's not, but I do think a world in which America embraces Bitcoin, we've got to make sure that that embracing isn't just a Trojan horse for increased state control.

Peter McCormack: But if they have the most to gain for Bitcoin becoming the global reserve currency, they have the most to lose from a 51% attack.

David Zell: Yeah, that's true, but they're going to try to create a world -- even if they buy into Bitcoin, they're not going to be orange pilled enough to know that the best way for this to work is for -- no, they're the US Government.  They're going to try to ban or restrict self-custody, they're going to try to create strong incentives, maybe, on the other side to not self-custody your Bitcoin.  They're going to want to make sure that it's AML KYCd.

It's just important to note that there is government action in embracing of Bitcoin that's good, but that can also be a way to sneak in government action that's really bad for Bitcoin.  And oftentimes, when the US Government says that it's doing one thing, it's doing the exact opposite.  You know, the Patriot Act, right, it sounds wonderful, it's not.  Imagine the Bitcoin Act and it's like, "We're making Bitcoin legal tender.  You've just got to give up your private keys and self-custody with our Chivo wallet", or whatever.  That's not a win, that's awful!

So yeah, I do think that political support is good, going way back up the stack to the Hal Finney point; political endorsement is good, yes America has super-strong reasons to support Bitcoin, both domestically, both economically and from an IR perspective and a global competition perspective.  But not all political advocacy is good, not all political support is good, and you've got to make sure that when you're bringing someone on your podcast, they're not going to pull an Eric Adams on us.

Peter McCormack: We keep rejecting them.

David Zell: Have you rejected all of them?

Peter McCormack: So, we had Aarika Rhodes, who I think everyone loves.

David Zell: Yeah, Aarika's cool.

Peter McCormack: She's cool.

Danny Knowles: Morgan Harper.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Morgan Harper.  I don't think she offered a lot.  And I think in her debate with Josh Mandell, he pretty much destroyed her and her arguments.  It was pretty one-sided.  And then we've had five or six more come through and it's just like, all these conversations are the same, they're exactly the same and I'm not sure if they're bitcoiners, I'm not sure how much they care, and I don't want to have the same conversation over and over again.  I will talk to Josh Mandell.

David Zell: He does -- I mean, he's been in it for a minute, and if you talk to him.  Let me just put it this way; if Josh Mandell were lying about being a bitcoiner, he would be a remarkably, just an unrealistically good liar.  I mean, there's just no way.  He basically got fired for telling the Ohio Government to go fuck itself, because he wanted people to be able to pay taxes in Bitcoin, and I think he saw that as just a way of, "I'm in government, what can I do to legitimate Bitcoin".  But he went out on a massive limb and really risked his reputation earlier than most people in the space, in the name of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: He's a real one.

David Zell: He's kind of the real deal, I think.

Peter McCormack: We're trying to make a careful choice between, "Is this person good for Bitcoin, or is the show good for their campaign", and if the balance shifts, if I think the balance is, "They're good for Bitcoin", they can come on the show.  If they're thinking the balance is that the show's good for their campaign, then they're not going to come on the show, because there's a responsibility with this show now.  We're edging closer and closer to getting 100,000 listeners a show.  And when you get to that point, you've got to think about who you're platforming.

I think you can't just say these conversations, you have to consider who you're platforming.  I would much rather have yourself on, I would much rather have Troy Cross on, who's doing something interesting no one's heard of and get him out there.  I'd much rather have Margot on.  I don't want to get some politician on, just so they can --

David Zell: But in some ways, shouldn't you be?  Because, if you're getting these politicians on, you can just grill them!  What if you said, "Yes, you can come on my show, but I'm going to ask you questions about Bitcoin?" because I think whether or not they come on your show, like we mentioned, politicians are going to start putting Bitcoin in their bio more and more, they're going to start making appeals to the community more and more.  So, how is it we're able to say, "Well, our gut tells us that Aarika is good, our gut tells us that Josh Mandell is actually a bitcoiner"?  In some ways, there's value in having them come on here just to see what they know, and show -- because I think you can tell.

If you're asking a politician, "Why is it you support Bitcoin?  What is your favourite thing about Bitcoin?"  You starting some of these questions, and I think it could be sort of a litmus test for, has this person done their homework?

Peter McCormack: I don't want it to my job to litmus test these politicians.

David Zell: No, it shouldn't be.

Peter McCormack: There's a scarcity to show appearances, we make 13 shows a month.  We could make 130 a month, based on all the people who write to us wanting to come on.

David Zell: And if we're right, every show would be a politician!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so who do I think who could move it forward?  I would have Ted Cruz on, even though he's not somebody historically I've been hugely impressed with, but recently I've --

David Zell: Dude, he gets Bitcoin

Peter McCormack: He does.

David Zell: I mean, talk about -- it's nuts.  I heard him talking in Texas at the Texas Blockchain Summit, or Texas Blockchain, whatever, it was nuts hearing a US politician explain -- I was sitting next to Nic Carter actually, and Nic had the same reaction.  He was just like, "Holy shit!"

Peter McCormack: I see him having an influence and being good for Bitcoin.  He can come on the show, of course I'd love him on the show, because there's a whole bunch of people who will listen just because it's Ted Cruz.  A bunch of people aren't going to listen because it's Morgan Harper, because they've not heard of her, so really the show's then about her, and does she bring anything to the table, and she doesn't.  I've got 13 slots, I think Troy Cross brings something to the table, because he has a thesis around Bitcoin mining that can grow Bitcoin, grow awareness of Bitcoin, and trend us to more greener forms of electricity generation, I absolutely love that.  We get Margot on, Margot isn't the most well-known person --

David Zell: She should be a lot more well-known.

Peter McCormack: She should be, and we get to talk about ideas for progressives, and that's new and interesting.  So, progressives might come and listen to the show and learn about Bitcoin.  This broad group of people that can grow Bitcoin, grow Bitcoin use cases, express Bitcoin use cases, and ultimately grow Bitcoin, that's what I want.  So no, we're not going to have every politician who just writes to us and says, "I'm a bitcoiner", we're just not going to do it, there's no interest in it.

For the same reason, when somebody comes to me and says, "I work for so-and-so wallet, can I come on your show?"  No, because it's not a product show.  It's a conversation around macroeconomics, Bitcoin, governance, all these things that we want to make the world a better place; they're the conversations.  So, fuck these politicians.

David Zell: I mean, you're doing it right.  If you go back and read a lot of the early cypherpunk writing, like Timothy May, Eric Hughes, Finney, the whole mantra was always, "Cypherpunks write code".  But if you go, I've just been deep-diving through a lot of this stuff, because frankly admittedly hadn't read it all early, I've been texting Aaron van Wirdum, "Send me every cypherpunk writing that you can that in any way relates to advocacy or political work", and often what you see is these message boards or these texts, and it's like, "What should I do?" and it's like, "If you can write code, write code, build.  If you can't write code or you don't write code or you're not building, advocate, educate, spread the word".

So again, there's this view that we can just recede from the world around us into technology, and that if we just build these cryptographically-enabled technological solutions, we can just ignore the social layer, we can just ignore the real world.  And yeah, you're the real deal, because you're like, "No, I want everyone to be able to have Bitcoin, and for now that might mean convincing people who haven't been convinced by the dominant Bitcoin narrative that Bitcoin is good".  That doesn't mean that they're bad people or unredeemable, or that they shouldn't have the same protections that we're giving ourselves with Bitcoin; everyone deserves that.

Peter McCormack: And it also means maybe sacrificing and losing part of the audience, who won't agree with ideas I'm sympathetic to.  I sacrifice them because I want to bring new people in.  And we religiously check the stats every single month, every show, and we aim for the maximum number of downloads, but while giving as much opportunity to voices on this podcast.  So, we won't have someone because we think there'll be a low number of downloads, we won't have someone because we don't think the ads are the conversation.  

But when I publish numbers and I say, "We've done 20 million downloads [or] we did 1.5 million this month", someone might look at that and go, "All you care about is the numbers".  And our reply is, "Yes, but the reason I care about it is because I want these messages and I want these conversations in front of as many people as possible, as many people as possible, because then I can sell BlockFi ads and buy a Lambo!"  No, I'm only kidding!

David Zell: But seriously though, if people are looking at your show and they're saying, "The value of this show is the extent to which it lines up with what I already believe", then they're morons.  There are 24 hours in a day, how much time are you really going to spend trying to just hear people regurgitate the things that you already believe back in your face.  How do you grow as a person, how do you move through debates and decision points as a community, as a country? 

I don't know, if we're free-speech maximalists, you should be happy that you're hearing ideas that make you pissed off, if not just for the sole reason that you can take them and publicly eviscerate them.  Every time someone has a bad take about Bitcoin, what ends up happening is that the people will go in and the ones who say, "Fuck you, go kill yourself", or whatever, "because you hate Bitcoin", is that helping?  No.  But the people who are able to take some prominent person who said something stupid about Bitcoin, and be like, "No, you're actually completely wrong, and here's why", there's a huge value in that, even if you're not convincing the person. 

I bet there are Elizabeth Warren followers who have maybe changed their mind on Bitcoin, not because of the top comment being HFSP, but when the top comment is a well-reasoned, thought-out response, which a lot of times it is, because there are so many bitcoiners who dedicate time to shouting into the wind.  It seems like there's so much value in that.  You need to be exposed to shit that makes you mad, and to shit that you disagree with, because if there's not this public exposition of ideas and counter-ideas and arguments, you're just a sheep, you're just hooking yourself up to just whatever stream of information you want, and it's a drug.

Peter McCormack: So, tomorrow we're recording a show with Marty Bent, I invited him on, because I said to him, "I've got a great idea for a show".  We do the same job, kind of; fundamentally kind of the same job.

David Zell: Who's interviewing who?

Peter McCormack: I'm interviewing him.  He wouldn't have me on his show, I don't add enough value for his show.  But we essentially do the same job.  He has a Bitcoin podcast, I have a Bitcoin podcast, but we come from fundamentally different angles on a lot of different topics, and I think there's reasons for that.  You can go towards the Jonathan Haidt thing, The Righteous Mind, why some people are more conservative, why some are more progressive.  I think culturally, I'm from Europe, where we're certainly more collectivist, whereas the US is more individualist.  There's a bunch of things we disagree on.

What better thing to do than sit down with him and say, "Hey, what are all the things we align on; what are the things we disagree on; why do we disagree on them; what can we learn from it?"  To me, that's the best fucking conversation I can have on this, rather than getting somebody on and going, "Hey, I think this", and they go, "I do too", and like I said earlier, all the listeners going, "Yeah, we do too", and then we tweet it out and all those people go, "Yeah, we agree with this", because there's just this little group of people who might bring one other person in.

David Zell: It's just a circle jerk.

Peter McCormack: But what might happen with this is, a bunch of people might listen because they like Marty Bent and go, "Pete's got a good point there"; or, some people might come on because they like my show, and listen to Marty Bent and go, "Oh yeah, Marty's got a point there", and we expand the horizons that people have around particular topics, because at the moment we're such a fucking divided world.  There's so much binary thinking and arguing and separation, when actually we want Bitcoin to bring people together, so that's the best way to do it.

David Zell: Yeah, I think Marty's a great person for that too, because like you, he cares, he gets Bitcoin, he's very smart, and I think he's capable of having -- I mean, he disagrees well.  We've lost this art of, how do we disagree well?  We just have such a visceral reaction to ideas that we don't like or agree with, and I do think part of that is because a lot of people no longer believe that we all want the same things.  If you don't believe that your fellow Americans also care about each other and care about our country, our land, whatever it is, you see them as less than people, you don't think their opinion matters, you don't disagree well.

But I do genuinely, this is one of my most core beliefs, is that most people are good and have good ambitions for the world and want things to be better.  And so, the goal is not to just scream at someone when you disagree with them, it's to figure out what values you share and in the case of advocating for Bitcoin, for example, showing how Bitcoin leads to those values.  But yeah, if you're just writing people off because of their affinity, because someone calls themselves one party over the other, you're just NGMI you're just never going to have any good discourse, you're never going to move anywhere; it's awful.

Peter McCormack: No one's going to care about your ideas, apart from a few little cheerleaders you have around you.  It doesn't work for me.  One of the best things that has come out of this is getting the opportunity to travel the world, meeting a bunch of different people, and understanding the eclectic make-up of people in this world, and coming to the acceptance of differences that people have.  I think, if I could do one thing for this show, is get other people to start accepting that there's a whole group of people in this world, they're all different, they've got different opinions, but they should be valued and heard, and you should try and understand where they come from, I think that's one of the best things I can do with this.

David Zell: I don't see how you could advocate for individual liberty, for free speech, and also advocate for a world where -- and advocate for hyperbitcoinisation, if hyperbitcoinisation means that everyone conforms to believing the exact same things about society.  How is that a utopia?  How is that something to strive for?

Peter McCormack: It sounds like hell to me.

David Zell: It sounds like hell, yeah.  It's important that people disagree, and to the whole point of this, it's important that people find Bitcoin for their own reasons.  And I'm excited about the future of that, because I think it's happening.  It's happening through your show, it's happening through organisations that have been started recently.  There's just a growing realisation that not everyone cares about libertarianism, not everyone cares about inflation, not everyone cares about whatever the talking point de jour is, but everyone cares about something and Bitcoin touches everything.

So, there's a huge value in finding what people care about and showing them how Bitcoin fits into that and makes it better.  If you don't think that's a good act, then it's like not wanting someone to have a lifeboat on the Titanic, because you just don't like them.  I don't know, I think everyone should have a lifeboat.

Peter McCormack: I think that's a really good place to end it.  We didn't talk about the Policy Institute.

David Zell: That's okay.

Peter McCormack: But David, it's been great to get to know you over the last few months.  We first met in Miami, where you borrowed my swimming trunks!

David Zell: That sounds really bad!

Peter McCormack: No, did we meet in Nashville before that?

David Zell: We did, with Steven McClurg at that bar.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that other guy.

David Zell: I kind of just keep running into you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But it was a pleasure lending you my swimming shorts.

David Zell: For the record, Peter was out of the room when the --

Peter McCormack: No, I was in the room, you were in the bathroom!

David Zell: I was in the bathroom, yeah!  I just don't want to leave that ambiguous.  I like you, I don't like you that way!

Peter McCormack: Come on, man!  No, I've really enjoyed talking to you.

David Zell: Likewise.

Peter McCormack: I think your depth of knowledge on a broad range of subjects and the way you approach them, I think is really important.  I think you're a very important person to Bitcoin.  If I can do anything to raise you up to some more people, spend some more time talking to you, then I'm glad to do it.  You're welcome back on the show at any point, and just keep doing what you do.  I think it's fascinating.  Tell people where they can follow you, though.

David Zell: I guess Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Fuck your Twitter, it's followed by morons!

David Zell: Yeah, I mean if people want to see some of the work that I'm doing, go to btcpolicy.org.  That's kind of the thinktank that we've sprung up over the past few months with the goal of doing a lot of what we've talked about on the show, just presenting people with good information about Bitcoin, connecting with journalists who have questions about Bitcoin, taking this view that not everyone is an enemy of Bitcoin, a lot of people just don't get it.  So, yeah, we're just trying to arm journalists, policymakers and just regular people with stuff that addresses their concerns about Bitcoin, stuff that explains why Bitcoin is good, from as many different perspectives as we can.

So, yeah, that's at btcpolicy.org, check that out.  Or my Twitter, it's just my name @DavidZell_.

Peter McCormack: All right, man, well listen, keep crushing, stay in touch.  We'll keep bumping into you everywhere we go and, look, I'm sure we're going to do this again very soon, brother. 

David Zell: And we'll keep deluding ourselves into thinking that our mutual accountability will end our nicotine addiction.

Peter McCormack: Why don't we do it now?  Let's put them under the tap.

David Zell: You want to do it?

Peter McCormack: I'll do it if you do it.

David Zell: Just right now?

Peter McCormack: Literally, we'll go and stop right now.

David Zell: All right, just water, just destroy them?

Peter McCormack: Destroy them.

David Zell: You've got a pool right there too.

Peter McCormack: I mean, then we have to get them out of the pool.  We could just put it under a tap.

David Zell: All right, let's put it under a tap, let's do it.

Peter McCormack: Or tomorrow!  Anyway, we'll figure this shit out.  All right, man, keep crushing.

David Zell: Thank you.