WBD499 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin & Absolute Freedom with Junseth

Release date: Monday 9th May

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

Junseth is a OG bitcoiner and the former co-host of Bitcoin Uncensored. In this interview, we discuss government being the logical extent of libertarianism, the evolution of news media, falling for conspiracies, admitting when you’re wrong, opinion versus fact, and the return of Trump.

“I don’t understand the moral position of absolute freedom, and the reason is because, when I hear people talk about it, it’s very obvious to me that absolutely everybody knows that there are limits to freedom, so absolute freedom is not something that anybody believes in.”

— Junseth

Interview Transcription

Junseth: You're a little underdressed today, Peter!

Peter McCormack: I was trying to stare you out then!

Junseth: This is a professional show.  Have you seen --

Peter McCormack: Jeffrey Tucker.

Junseth: I did, I did the Jeffrey Tucker.

Peter McCormack: I like him, man.

Junseth: You like him?

Peter McCormack: I liked it.  And, I guess we're going to stay clothed today?

Junseth: I will stay clothed, yes.

Peter McCormack: This will be the first podcast we've done where you've got your clothes on.

Junseth: That's actually true.  The first one though wasn't actually recorded on camera.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Junseth: That was the BU comeback.

Peter McCormack: I had my top off that day.

Junseth: You did actually!

Peter McCormack: That's rare for me.

Junseth: That's true.  You're handsome.

Peter McCormack: I don't own it.  Actually, I was about a stone thinner then.

Junseth: The memes last time were fun though.  They RarePeped me.

Peter McCormack: Did they?

Junseth: They did.  Someone added milky tits to me!

Peter McCormack: I did see that!  There were some complaints about that show.

Junseth: It was very controversial.  I notice that a lot of people didn't like the assertion that the metaverse is bullshit, say BS for YouTube.

Peter McCormack: I think the complaint's more about the intoxication of the three of us.

Junseth: I wasn't drunk at all.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I wasn't drunk at all.

Junseth: So, you know…!

Peter McCormack: Well listen, man, you're very popular.  Lots of people loved what you had to say.  Someone even made a suggestion and said I should have you on as a co-host.

Junseth: Oh, yeah?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You'd make me look good.

Junseth: I'm in, let's do it.

Peter McCormack: Pull the mic back a bit.  It's like you're right in it.

Junseth: Okay, is it popping a little bit?  There we go.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, come on, you know this shit.

Junseth: Yeah, but I like to kiss things, and my wife doesn't let me do it to her.  Just kidding!  That would be fun.  If that's an offer, I accept.  The show's 50% mine!  No, I love the show, I think it's great.  I think you guys do a really good job.

Peter McCormack: Well, we should talk more, because you're a good sounding board for me.

Junseth: Good, I like to hear that.

Peter McCormack: Well, we've got a big topic today.  Rightfully so, there's a lot of dislike and distrust for a lot of governments at the moment, rightfully so.  There are also a lot of bitcoiners who believe in things like the Sovereign Individual thesis, or the end of the state; we have many people who listen to the show who are libertarians, anarcho-capitalists.  I am not, I am reluctantly pro-democracy, and I am someone who wishes the state was smaller, but I believe no state would be a net worse decision, and I also believe the state is a natural conclusion.  If you get rid of it, you end up rebuilding it.

But I think it's a useful topic to talk through, because it really pisses people off, that I or others don't hold the same position.  And I think you should always be honest with what you think and why you think, but I thought you would be a good person to work it through, because the desire for absolute liberty, I understand the moral position, but I think it comes with risks and potentially is net worse.

Junseth: I don't understand the moral position of absolute freedom.  And the reason is, when I hear people talk about it, it's very obvious to me that absolutely everybody knows that there are limits to freedom.  So, absolute freedom is not something that anybody believes in; it's like free markets.  The free markets, I would say that the moment you require people to wear pants to come and trade, you no longer have a free market, because there's a rule.

I think you're right, I think government is the natural end of most anarchic systems.  You just end up with just a different forum, or maybe a similar forum, I don't know.  What does Churchill say, "Democracy's a terrible system, except for all the rest", or something like that?

Peter McCormack: "It's the worst form of government, apart from all the others", yeah.

Junseth: Yeah, and that's probably correct.  Although, the state does suck right now, I mean there's a lot of problems.  I've done this for years, like talked.  When we were doing Bitcoin Uncensored, we talked a lot about externalities, and one of the things we'd say that was provocative was that freedom is an externality; because, you have absolute freedom, it's great, until your neighbour comes and shits on your lawn.  And if you have a bunch of people together, how do you deal with that?

Libertarians will cite the NAP principle, or whatever, and that breaks down pretty quickly as soon as you have a person who's willing to do violence to you very quickly before you can respond, or murder you.  So, I've always found arguments for freedom to be very interesting, particularly in Bitcoin.  And, when I came here, actually I would have called myself an anarchist.  I was very strongly in support of the deconstruction of the state, and what changed my mind was watching prominent bitcoiners at conferences, and having them come up to me and tell me that they…

I went to a conference called Coins in the Kingdom, and there was an obvious Ponzi scheme sitting in the middle of the floor.  They were advertising their services and going basically, "We are a Ponzi scheme, come and give us your money!"  I was like, "Okay, well they're a Ponzi scheme".  So, I went and sat in the middle of the floor for the rest of the conference, and just as people came up to the table, I'd be like, "This is very obviously a Ponzi scheme, this is a Ponzi scheme".

At the end of the weekend, a really prominent libertarian, who many libertarians have heard of, came up to me and goes, "Thank you so much, I was going to send in a bunch of money to that group.  Thanks for informing me".  I realised that day that these people who are adults, who have their money, who are screaming about the fact that they want the government to not tell them what to do, they're so irresponsible that they can't identify very obvious schemes in the space, and they give their money to them all the time.

That's been true of most of us.  I think if you've been in Bitcoin -- if you were in Bitcoin early, or if you've been in long enough, it's hard not to come up with a person who hasn't given their money somehow to a scam.

Peter McCormack: But isn't that what the free market does?  It weeds out the scams from the legitimate projects, because you have a free market to decide what is and isn't a scam, and ultimately they get defunded.

Junseth: Ultimately, but then a lot of people lose their money.  And in a society, it's very hard, because if you have a lot of people losing their money, things happen.  I guess they get older, they don't have money for retirement, they can't pay their medical bills.  There's all sorts of things that are problematic in a society where we all take on some of the burden together to live with one another.

So to me, the idea of ultimate freedom has never made any sense.  The libertarian ethos in general has always been something that I've been really bothered by, because everything is sort of this absolutist statement like, "We don't like…", "We are…", "Inflation is bad", something like that.  "Inflation is bad", well inflation is just like a decrease in your spending power, and Bitcoin causes that all the time.  Bitcoin's dropped 50% sometimes, and that is a decrease in your spending power.  So, when we were doing BU, I would point out, "Bitcoin inflated 100% yesterday", and it would really piss them off!

Peter McCormack: I think it's a fair point, but I think these things are worth working through, and the reason being is that I am somebody who reluctantly supports the idea of democracy, because I look round the world and I see everything else.

Junseth: You're a government sim.

Peter McCormack: Well, I actually prefer the US form and, "It's not a democracy, it's a republic", I understand that.

Junseth: It's not a democracy, it's a republic, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know.  But in my mind, democracy means the ability to vote, let's just establish that, and you have the ability to vote here within a republic.  It's obviously, in many ways, a better system than we have in the UK; but at the same time, I'm not one of these burn-it-down people.

But I had a discussion on Twitter recently that came up, where somebody was challenging my thoughts on this, and they said, "Well, let's start with first principles.  Is coercion bad?"  I'll ignore the discussion I had about first principles with the person, but it's very hard to come back and say, "Is coercion bad?  No, it isn't, coercion's okay".  Nobody wants to be coerced, but I think it simplifies something that is complex, and I don't think you can make a decision on how 330 million people here, 70 million in the UK, how they can organise and govern themselves based on this one first principle, because it puts you in a place where you can't deal with the nuance.

Junseth: Well, I would say it's not even right.  Coercion's good sometimes.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Junseth: You're in a house, the house is on fire and someone comes up and coerces you to go out.  Coercion is not bad simply because it's coercion.  This is fundamentally the problem with a lot of this sort of, what do they call it, praxis?

Peter McCormack: Praxeology.

Junseth: Praxeology, which sounds like a doctor who looks at your butt.  That's proctology.  Praxeology, this is the problem with it, because there's this idea that you go back to first principles and you ask these questions that seem like they have very simple answers, but they don't.  Coercion, when your insurance company tries to get you to do once-a-year check-ups and they offer incentives, that's coercive; it's good for you.

Coercion is not bad simply because it's coercion, and while you may have this visceral reaction to it, it's not necessarily bad.  So, the answer to, "Is coercion bad?" the answer is, "Not necessarily".  Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's not.  And again, this notion -- the libertarian belief is you can divide things into two categories, you have the good and you have the bad side, and you have this list of words they put on the bad side, and they ask you questions and oftentimes, it's stuff you've never really considered.

You've never really thought about whether coercion is bad, and then they say it to you, and all of a sudden you're forced into this corner, "Well, actually I hate being coerced, I don't like coercion by the state generally.  I guess coercion's bad, yeah".  You don't think about the fact that there's a lot of times when coercion is just fine.  And you, as a parent, probably coerce your kids to do things.  It's not bad because it's bad, there's not things that are bad and things that are good.  Inflation sometimes, probably fine.

Peter McCormack: They coerce me to do things as well, my kids!

Junseth: Yeah, well kids learn coercion early!  And that's the thing.  Even as a kid, kids coerce teachers into giving them better grades so they can get into better colleges.  Coercion is not bad simply because it's coercion.  I don't understand this whole idea of living in a world where your philosophy is based on good things and bad things, because to me there's a lot of nuance; there's not a good thing and a bad thing.  Most things are neutral at the very least.

Maybe coercion is bad because the connotation of the word is bad, but I can think of times, many times, maybe even the majority of the coercion that we experience on a day-to-day basis is not bad.

Peter McCormack: It's just coercion based on how society functions.

Junseth: Yeah, I mean what is an advertisement?  They're coercive in some ways.

Peter McCormack: I'd find that one more of a stretch.

Junseth: Yeah?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Junseth: You're coerced regularly, and I don't know why it would just be bad because it's called coercion; it doesn’t make sense to me.

Peter McCormack: I think it comes from that point of, "No one has rule over me, no one can tell me what to do.  I was born free, therefore I should be free".

Junseth: Yeah, you were born naked, then your parents put clothes on you.  I mean, the state of nature arguments as well are always very interesting to me, because we're born -- I mean, I talked to libertarians about this in Bitcoin for many years, and this idea that you arrived here and…  I see this with millennials in particular.  They love to see the world in this way.

But there's this idea that I arrived here, and the world as I arrived is somehow like a state of nature that I should start from.  So, I have a house, I have land, I live in the middle of South Dakota and this is great, I have ten acres and it's beautiful, and the government can't tell me what to do.  And then you go back, and four, five, six generations ago, the government ran a bunch of Indians off your land, they killed a bunch of people, and then the army said that, "We're going to defend your land", and they put them on a little reservation and now you have it.

To me, it's very interesting, this dis-acknowledgement of what happened to get the thing that you have, and I'm not a fan of this modern intersectional history stuff that everybody's doing.  But there is a historical precedence for what we have today, like libertarians living on ten acres of land, or something like that, and raising cows and refusing to get environmental studies done and such.  It's very interesting to me that they eschew the government, when the government is the thing that kept and protected their land in the first place for many, many years, many generations, and there's no acknowledgement of it.

Peter McCormack: Well, there is also that chronological benefit of property rights.

Junseth: Yes.

Peter McCormack: We'll get into property rights.

Junseth: We have strong property rights in the West.  It's again very interesting.  I mean, you see this in Bitcoin all the time.  Countries that don't have strong property rights, people look at them and they're like, "Blockchains will solve that", like Honduras with Factom.  They said that, "We're going to put all the land records on blockchains".  Somehow that magically creates property rights.  There's this belief that somehow, if it's on a blockchain, you have property rights, I don't know, you put it in Ethiopia, or something like that.  The belief is that if a child soldier comes around, or an adult soldier comes around and says, "This is my land now" you have this thing that you can appeal to, "Well, the blockchain says it's actually mine", "Well, I'll shoot you", and he'll take your land.  That's the same thing. 

In the West, we have very strong property rights structures that have been developed over hundreds of years, and it's wonderful, it's really wonderful for us to live in.  But at the same time, this idea that the government wasn't part of that, to me it's unfathomable to have strong property rights without strong government.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's a conversation we had yesterday.  If the basis is property rights, who's going to protect your property rights?  Your government.

Junseth: Right.  For me, I'm going to hire a mercenary army!

Peter McCormack: You can game it through, okay.  So, you've got ten acres of land, I turn up with my militia, I kick you off it.  How do you enforce your property rights if there's no government?

Junseth: Yeah, I agree.

Peter McCormack: But there are answers to that.  What I'm saying is that libertarians have answers to that.  They say there will be independent arbitrators, but who gives them authority?

Junseth: Correct, courts -- but again, every time you have that discussion, you end up backing into an entire system of government, which is very dumb, the fact that you're trying to get rid of government and substitute it with some other form that looks a lot like government, and that always happens.  You have to come back somewhere, so you're going to have this whole system of independent arbitration, independent courts, whatever it is that they say.  And at the other end, you just end up with government, all the services of government.

Peter McCormack: But even in that thing, this is where I see some of the things that are broken, that have not really been thought through correctly.  So, even if you have an independent court and you take me to an independent court to say that property's yours, but I take you to another independent court and they --

Junseth: They choose differently, yeah.

Peter McCormack: -- choose differently.  Who has the overall authority on that?  I've still never heard a good answer for that.

Junseth: The answer's the person with the bigger mercenary army!

Peter McCormack: Potentially.  And who says, without risk of imprisonment, who isn't going to be vulnerable to different incentives.  If I'm very rich and I wanted your land and I go to that independent court and I know who the judge is, what's to stop me leveraging that position?  And I know you can do that in the current system now, but there is that monopoly of power which becomes a risk.

Junseth: The monopoly of power is just coercion.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Junseth: I mean, that's the thing.  Who enforces a lot of that stuff?  We have sheriffs, you have elected bodies and stuff like that.  I think the problem of freedom is that there's this notion that it can be unbridled and the state, we are talking about the state of nature arguments, this idea that you're born naked into the world, you go out naked and you can be naked in between all of that time, and that's totally okay.  And just this idea that you can do anything you want.

But nobody wants to acknowledge the role of government, and my belief is that the role of government is very strong -- the place where it's strongest is in its management of externalities.  If you acknowledge that freedom is one of those externalities, you have to acknowledge that there are limits to that sort of state of nature argument, and that's the same thing with, you have land upstream of somebody else's land, can you let your cows poop in it?  Can you build a dam?  Can you do whatever to destroy what's going on downstream; kill the trout? 

All of these are things that are very difficult to answer, because property rights you'd think would supersede; "They're on my land, I can do whatever I want", but these things affect things downstream, they affect your neighbour.  I mean, the fire department, if your house is burning and it's putting your neighbour's house at risk, in the libertarian world, you're paying for insurance, or you're paying for the fire department stuff. 

So, if you're paying the fire department to put out the fire, do they come and put out both fires?  If your house is burning and it's putting your neighbour's at risk, and let's say you don't pay, so they'll just let it burn until it hits the house that burns?  It's absolute insanity when you take these things to their logical extent.  I hear them argued all the time to their logical extent, which blows my mind.

Peter McCormack: Why do you think that happens then?  I don't do this to insult anyone listening, I really want to hear the ideas and the conversations and, do you know what, there's a lot I agree with libertarians on as well, I think they've got some great ideas.  I've often said, I wish the libertarians would engage more in politics, because the libertarian influence on reducing the size of the state would be great, some of their ideas would be great. 

But this kind of binary, "Let's press the big, red button; let's get rid of the state" or, "That's the ultimate position to be in", to me just logically doesn't work.  Now, you can make other net arguments.  You could say, okay, if you got rid of the government, you might not have this massive military industrial complex, you might not have unnecessary wars, and that can go into the net argument.  But on a day-to-day societal organisational structure, it feels like it completely fails.

Junseth: Yeah.  I think it's always hard, because you can build a strawman out of libertarian values and libertarian thoughts and such, but I think you're correct.  As a group of people in politics, they're a good force, because they're pushing back on politicians making more and more laws, they're really trying to identify the ridiculous elements of government, which I appreciate.  I appreciate that we have someone overlooking the government now.

But the problem is, a lot of the stuff they do, it sounds very crazy.  Their rhetorical flourishes are idiotic, like Ron Paul screaming about auditing the Fed, the claims that there's not enough gold and that we're really bankrupt, and this belief that America is super-corrupt in ways that it just clearly is not. 

Peter McCormack: Is that true though?

Junseth: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I mean, what is wrong with auditing the Fed?

Junseth: It's audited every year.

Peter McCormack: It is?

Junseth: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, why are there demands for it?

Junseth: I don't know.  This is my response to libertarians.  You can look it up, you'll find the Fed audits.

Peter McCormack: Who does it?  Do the Fed do it themselves?

Junseth: I don't actually know, I think the Fed probably does it themselves.

Peter McCormack: I mean, there's a reason to be suspicious there!

Junseth: Yes!

Danny Knowles: I mean, it says that it's audited annually by an independent public accountant firm.

Peter McCormack: Which one?

Danny Knowles: It doesn't actually say here.

Peter McCormack: I mean, independent firms have been --

Junseth: Compromised?

Peter McCormack: -- compromised before.

Junseth: It's a bit like, well who does the audit; Ron Paul?  Does he go in there himself?!

Peter McCormack: I like Ron Paul.

Junseth: But who does the audit?  An independent firm is…  So, I have these audits on my computer whenever I get in arguments with libertarians, and they say, "We need to audit the Fed", and I'm like, "What's wrong with this audit?  Can you go through it and tell me?" because most of them don't even know that those audits exist.

Peter McCormack: Do they actually have anything at the Fed?

Junseth: I don't know.  12 people, 12 employees, $37!

Peter McCormack: Six bars of gold!

Junseth: Six bars of gold!

Danny Knowles: Here you go.

Peter McCormack: Oh, right.  Is that all you've got?

Junseth: You've got it, there you go.

Peter McCormack: Does it say who are the independent auditors?

Junseth: It probably is like Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Peter McCormack: KPMG, there you go.

Junseth: KPMG.

Peter McCormack: I always find it funny when someone has a signature for a company.

Junseth: That is interesting.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of weird.

Junseth: But yeah, there's audits.  So, there's a lot of these claims that are just disprovable and they're problematic, because like I said, it's a very interesting college philosophy.  I remember in college, I would talk to these people who -- I'd never heard of libertarianism when I went to college, I didn't know it was a thing.

Peter McCormack: I hadn't heard of it until Bitcoin.

Junseth: Yeah.  So, I think there were people who came to college as libertarians, they were strong.  They'd read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and stuff.  I remember reading Atlas Shrugged in high school and I was told by my father that there was a philosophy behind it.  I read it and I was like, "It's kind of a shitty book, just a crappy book", and then I went to college and there were people who really loved the book for its philosophical tenets.  I was surprised by that, because it just wasn't that interesting to me.  It was a long screed that didn't really have any influence on how I viewed the world, whereas I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.  That changed my outlook on life completely, changed me from this person who seeks out happiness to a person that really understands the world as a place where we have to seek out satisfaction.

I think Jordan Peterson is the guy that really has taken on that mantel for a lot of people, but for me it was Viktor Frankl himself, where he talks about satisfaction being the most important meaning in your life.  You do things, they're satisfying.  So, that was a really important book for me.  But for some reason, I get to college and there's a bunch of people who are reading Atlas Shrugged and they find it to be very important, and I thought the book was terrible.  And I learned all about libertarianism and it was the first time that I'd ever encountered much of the thought that they were discussing.

So, I didn't have arguments against it, and it took me many years to imbue myself in that milieu and understand exactly what libertarianism was all about and why I agreed or disagreed with it and where it is that I disagree with it, and I appreciate many of the arguments; I appreciate the bent towards freedom, I appreciate that.  It's just interesting to me that many of them don't seem to grow out of this notion of -- they don't question many of the things they talk about, like again, the auditing of the Fed; we just brought it up.  There is a Fed audit every year, and that blows their mind.  I bring it up, because they say it all the time, and it blows their mind that we audit the Fed every year.  We've been doing it for a very long time.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to know what's had the most influence on my life?

Junseth: Tell me.

Peter McCormack: Doing this, without doubt, the last four years of this.

Junseth: Oh, interest in just talking to people?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I'll tell you why.  It's made me appreciate there's a lot of different people with a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of different opinions.  Most of the time, I can empathise with where they're coming from, and I will always try and discuss with a range of people what they believe.  So, whether it's climate change, which we can talk about.

Junseth: Doesn't exist!

Peter McCormack: Well, we've had people on who believe climate change is an issue and it's being caused by humans; and we've had people on who believe it isn't, or it isn't as big an issue, and I will happily talk to both sides and I will question them, and I will also be really honest about my opinion with it.  And we care a lot about it, me, Danny, Jeremy.  We've spent a lot of time planning interviews, what do we want to get out of it, what questions we want to ask.  But most of the time, it's this big empathy for, there's a wide range of opinions.

But what comes with that is, if you go into the YouTube comments, it's super-interesting, because you'll see, for almost every interview, a group of people saying, "Thanks for having this person on, really appreciate that they're right", and then the other half going, "These people are morons, why are you have them on your show, I'm unsubscribing".  The only way you can make a podcast that pleases the entire audience is if you make it for one audience with one narrow set of beliefs.  But if you want to make something for everyone, to help people understand different opinions and where they're coming from, you have to have a diverse set of guests.  But that itself is problematic.

I just think, "Why aren't people spending more time trying to understand where people's opinions come from?" and there's this great book I talk about all the time.  Jonathan Haidt wrote The Righteous Mind, and it's a fantastic book for helping people understand this, and I wish more people would read that book and spend time trying to understand why people have different opinions.

Junseth: So, I think I actually do want to talk to you about the climate change, because I'm curious, not because I care.  I'm of the opinion that I don't care about climate change, but I am curious as to your journey, so I'll interview you in a second.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Junseth: But I think that you and I did the same thing when Donald Trump was President.  We had a lot of discussions about Donald Trump, and it's interesting to me.  For me, the Donald Trump Presidency is a very interesting litmus test for where people are in the information consumption, because there's just a list of a litany of things that people believe about Donald Trump, or about the Republican Party in America, that are just ultimately false and provably false.

It's interesting to hear what people have to say about those things.  I've found that most people who were, I guess, highly effective during his presidency, have a long laundry list of false beliefs about his presidency.  Whereas, I don't care about him, but I care a lot about what is true and I will take people through those and just ask them, "So, what is it you hate about Donald Trump?"  "Well, he told people to drink bleach" or, "He said this, or he did this".

You're like, "Okay, explain to me, what did he actually say?"  "He said, 'Drink bleach'".  "Okay, so let's go watch the video.  Oh, he didn't say that.  Who was he talking to?  He was talking to his scientist, he asked a question.  Maybe he's dumb, but your initial thought wasn't true, was it?"  And usually what they'll say is, "Well, yeah, but my thought was close enough".  It's interesting to me to watch people do this thing where they dismiss the evidence itself as it's facing them, put right in front of their face; that they believe that their current understanding of things was good enough and that they won't adjust their opinion.  I think that's true of most opinions.

Peter McCormack: I don't know why that is though.  It's really confusing for me, because it comes down to that -- we've now got this perfect meme for it, "I support the current thing", "I oppose the current thing".  It was brilliant because, "I support the current thing" was badged on me and I was like, "Oh God, yeah, maybe sometimes I am like that, but not always".  But then the opposite, "I oppose the current thing", I was like, "This is brilliant".  It shows that there are two sides, where there's a group of people who are immovable on their position, they're really stuck. 

But actually, I wanted a third one, "I'm not sure on the current thing.  I believe a little bit of that.  Where's the nuance on the current thing?"  I find that really fascinating, because that whole, "I support the current thing", you label that on someone, but actually it might not be true, but you're labelling them on that and you're forcing them into a corner.  And then, you're also putting yourself in another team where you don't dare step out of that.

Junseth: Right.  Well, this is the thing.  What's struck me over the last few years, in the way that political discourse has changed, is that there is a belief that you have to take a side and you have to take a side on all things.  I saw this through Black Lives Matter and stuff like that, like if you ran a company or something like that, you'd hear about this, that people would scream at their employers for not taking a position, and there was, "Silence is violence", and stuff like that.

I was just amazed at this notion that there is now this idea that everyone has to have an opinion.  One opinion is evil, it depends on which side you're on as to which opinion it is; one opinion is good, it depends on which side you're on, as to which opinion it is.  This happens now with everything.  You have a school shooting, now we have to talk about gun control in the workplace and the workplace has to take an anti-gun position.  These are the good things, the moral things, and it's amazing to me. 

This has never been the way that society has worked.  We've always been able to get along and understand the nuance of people having different options.  But it's completely different now.  It seems very much like it changed right around the time Trump became President.  2016 is the new era, and I don't know what caused it.  The left will say Trump did, the right will say it happened under Obama.  I think Ben Shapiro talks about that, that the instability began under Obama.  I don't like saying that the truth is somewhere in the middle, because it might just be that both are wrong!

Peter McCormack: Well, that could be true as well.  I think the Ukraine/Russia situation is one of those as well where people have felt the need to take a side, where I think actually, you can say both sides, there's concerning issues on both sides.  I mean, Putin himself as an invader of a country is concerning.  NATO expansion is concerning.

Junseth: Maybe.

Peter McCormack: Maybe.  Financing Nazis in East Ukraine is concerning.  I'm not going to get into what the truth is of the issues, but they're all things that you can be concerned about and they span both sides.  But what I've noticed is there are certain people who, like for example with the Nazis in Eastern Ukraine, that's all they're talking about.

Junseth: And the biolabs.

Peter McCormack: And the biolabs.  But they're not actually mentioning any of the issues coming from the Russian side, and I think it's important to get through that nuance.  It's worth coming off Twitter.  I mean, I will retweet shows and I will go in and have a look what's happening, but as a discussion forum, it's miserably failed, because there is no reward for truth-finding.  There is reward for position-taking, there is reward for confirmation bias and there is reward for audience capture.  There is no reward for nuance.

Junseth: But it's interesting, because when you talk to an economist, they're going to talk about the problem set, they'll give you a graph, and they'll be like, "Here are all the elements to this graph", and they'll break them down and say, "These discrete little elements, each of these parts of it, they turn into this graph and this graph tells us this.  But these discrete elements of the maths and the study, these will indicate -- this one indicates how you measure supply, this one indicates how you measure demand, this one indicates how many cows fart on Tuesday".  You have these different scenarios that they run through, and then they come up with this beautiful graph that tells you something. 

That's how it generally used to be.  You could have opinions like, "Yeah, funding Nazis, not a great thing.  Russia invading Ukraine, not a great thing.  I believe both things.  Giving guns to the Ukrainians to defend themselves, I like that.  Ukraine defending itself, I like that".  You could have different opinions within the subset of the greater umbrella of, "Is it good; is it bad?"  In Bitcoin, it's interesting, because I've seen this weird willingness to just side -- the Russia thing, it blows my mind.  Bitcoiners are siding with Russia, wholeheartedly talking about the Russian side --

Peter McCormack: Let's be fair, not all of them.

Junseth: Correct, not all of them.  I mean, I'm a bitcoiner, right.

Peter McCormack: There is a cohort that will certainly criticise both sides, there is a cohort…  The one I find interesting is the cohort who are silent on Russia, but loud on concerning things on the Ukrainian side, so sharing videos maybe that appear to be Russian soldiers being tortured or abused.  So, they're showing the concern from one side, but silent on the other.  I find that super-interesting.

Junseth: Well, the thing that I found interesting is the switching of political positions.  I'm watching the left talk about how great it is that the Ukrainians have been given guns, which is mind-blowing to me.  This is a group of people that doesn't think anyone outside of the military should have guns.  Then, I'm watching the right become pro-Putin in America, and it's very weird.  I've never watched such a weird flipping, and it's such a flip from their general position.

It makes me wonder if, in the next thing that happens, the next crisis, because we move from crisis to crisis every two weeks, right; in the next crisis, are they going to flip back?  There's no consistency of opinion.  Everything is very post-modern at this point.  Everyone is kind of, they have a dart board and they pick their opinion that week.  And then all of them move in a direction, and somehow all of the right has come to a place where they all support Putin.  All of the left is now pro-guns in the hands of Ukrainians, and it's just this moving, marching band, and they just kind of zigzag.  I can't figure out where people are any more politically.

Peter McCormack: I think I know where it comes from, but just to add to that, a funny one.  This show won't come out for a few weeks, but just for context of where we are: yesterday was the Oscars and there was a rather interesting incident.  I did not have Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage on my bingo card, I did not have that one.  But watching how people responded to that was super-interesting, because some of the people who I put in the camp of pointing out mistakes or things that the Ukrainian Army maybe have done, and silent or pro-Russia or defending Russia's ideas also were the same people who were saying, "Will Smith should be arrested for assault".

Junseth: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I saw some of that.  Now, what I think is going on here, I think there is a bucket which is considered left, which is the globalist agenda, mainstream media, Hollywood, etc.  And I think if anyone feels like it's in that camp, a certain group will oppose it; and anything which is more about being independent and away from that, another group support it.

So, you could say, "Okay, why would that group support or point out the errors in Ukraine?"  Because, there's that belief that there's a globalist agenda to expand NATO and cancel Russia, so they've got to oppose that, because they don't want to support the globalist expanding in Ukraine.  And everything that's in Hollywood is left.  It's very hard to be an A-list actor and be conservative, because being conservative is considered pejorative almost, being a Republican.  So, they have to oppose someone like Will Smith.

Whereas, I assume if it had been someone like, I don't know, Willie Nelson, maybe he'd got up and bitch-slapped him, they'd be supporting him.  But I think that's where it's coming from.

Junseth: I'd laugh my ass off if Willie Nelson did it!

Peter McCormack: I'd laugh my ass of if Willie Nelson did it!  But do you see what I'm saying.

Junseth: It's interesting that you correlate those two views, because I couldn't even imagine that, whether you believe that Will Smith was in the right or not in the right, or he should go to jail or not go to jail, I can't imagine that that would be politically tied.  And the fact that you think it is is very interesting.

Peter McCormack: Not for everyone.  I just noticed a few Twitter accounts talking about that.  These aren't even bitcoiners, but these are large Twitter accounts saying that.  And then I went back through their feed and I was just trying to see where their position was on Ukraine/Russia, where their position is on COVID, and for those individuals there was an alignment.

Junseth: Well, everything is political now, I've discovered that over the years.  There were things that were just apolitical.  Bitcoin was somewhat apolitical.  You could be a bitcoiner and not know what was going on in the world, it was fine, no one really cared.  You'd just live your Bitcoin life, your best Bitcoin left, and care a lot about Bitcoin stuff.  But everything is political now, everything, and I don't know when that started. 

I mean, Jonathan Haidt, I agree with you, he does phenomenal studies.  What is it, The Coddling of the American Mind, is probably his most well-known.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Junseth: It's very interesting, that generationally things have just changed so much.  I wonder where all of this is going to lead.  The political division right now is so polarising that you just can't escape it, it's impossible.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it's a worse issue in the US, because it's essentially two parties, so there's two teams, and there's essentially media which tends to be, pick a team; and therefore, in life and the world, groups of people are pushed into that team?

Junseth: I don't know.  I was talking to someone about this yesterday.  And what's been odd to me about what's been going on is, I've seen a lot of people cite what is going on as indication that America itself is in decline.  What's been interesting to me is, what I've been watching, it feels very global, it doesn't feel like it's distinctly American.  It feels like conversations about white privilege and intersectional stuff is happening in India and Nigeria and France and the UK.

Peter McCormack: Not to the extent here in the US.

Junseth: Really?

Peter McCormack: What about Australia?

Danny Knowles: I think it's definitely creeping into general conversation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but do you feel like the polarisation and the --

Danny Knowles: It seems worse here probably.  But it's like we were talking about the other day, I think the media plays a big role in that in the UK, the media holds politicians to account, and I don't know if that happens here.

Peter McCormack: That's true.

Junseth: It is interesting, because I've heard a number of -- I'll hear people in the UK talking in the news, or just the news reports generally and they are much more centrist, sort of centred, a little bit more fair.  In the US, the news is a side here.

Peter McCormack: What they tend to do in the news here, just to echo Danny's point, because we were watching a news report the other day where, was it Sky News?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, Sky News.

Peter McCormack: A Sky News reporter -- Rishi Sunak is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she went to interview him.  Sky News is traditionally considered more conservative?

Danny Knowles: I'd say so.

Peter McCormack: And he is the Chancellor for the Conservative Party, and she went for him and she was very clear with him saying to him, "You're in the process of regulations and legislation and sanctions against Russians, Russian individuals and companies.  Your wife owns shares", I might get this slightly wrong, "in a company which has an office in Moscow and they've not yet been sanctioned.  Do you not feel like this is hypocritical?"  He defended himself, looked very nervous, but she was hard on him, and that happens a lot in the UK.

What I tend to find with US news is, it's more based on getting, if it's a right station, it will tend to bring on right guests, and they tend to allow them to use it more of a platform.  And the critical thing is critical opinion, not hard-hitting questions all the time.  Am I missing something?

Junseth: No, news in the United States is an interesting animal, because news in the United States has always been very bad, since the inception of the country.  It's been very propagandistic.  We've had John Adams passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, etc.  It's always been a little bit political.  Then we hit this sort of golden era where TV happened and we had the 60 Minutes, where they had, I don't know, 10, maybe 15 years of really good news, or what they believed to be really good news.

Peter McCormack: Didn't you have the Fairness Doctrine though?

Junseth: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Was that good or bad?

Junseth: It depends.  William F Buckley, well the National Review, I believe, used the Fairness Doctrine, for example, to insist that people are taught in schools that Shakespeare was not the author of Shakespeare's works, which is just one of my favourite uses!  I mean, the Fairness Doctrine is an interesting era in American history, because it seems to violate a lot of our constitutional precepts. 

I actually think that what's happened recently is that there's been this sort of opening of the American mind, where Americans have indicated that they actually do want good journalism.  And what's happened is, because of the internet and podcasting, it's opened up this entire realm of possibility for people that actually show up and do real news.  So, you can say what you want about him, but Joe Rogan interviewing people for three hours, having a real conversation, that's real news.  News is taking on a different form, and people aren't watching that drivel, because they don't want it, they don't want the 30-second snippets; that's for old people.

Peter McCormack: But there is a new form of drivel that comes with that as well, those who are captured by their audience.  I think Tim Pool to me is the opposite of Rogan.  He is just an independent version of a Fox News, right.  He has his show, but I think he completely appeals to his audience, whereas Rogan, I believe, is a truth-seeker.

Junseth: Well, I think they would both believe themselves to be truth-seekers.  I mean, Tim Pool's interesting.  I watch both, I mean I watch Rogan, I watch Tim Pool.  I try to watch as much as I can, just because I feel like you get as much information.  And it has been interesting to watch Tim Pool move down this rabbit hole where he started out pretty good, and then as I watch people move in a direction, it seems like everyone ends up in conspiracy rabbit holes, everybody, and I don't know how you prevent it.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean I understand the draw, and I think there's a couple of reasons that exists.  There is an incentive model for it, because firstly, you do question things.  But you have an audience therefore likes the fact that you're questioning it and then you get captured by that.

Junseth: So, you think it's like a cyclical…?

Peter McCormack: They're the same revenue model essentially usually as the mainstream media.

Junseth: Everything degrades to rhetoric; that's been my observation of all discussion.  So, we should talk a little bit about the climate change stuff; that's interesting.

Peter McCormack: Well, the point I was making is, I personally feel that draw.

Junseth: Interesting.

Peter McCormack: I know that if I had a very different set of beliefs, if I was more libertarian, if I didn't believe that climate change was a human issue, if I thought the majority of COVID was a conspiracy, I know all the guests I can get and I can feel myself getting drawn into it.  This is why we always try and get people on we disagree with, to try and balance us, to try and level us; because if you don't, you just get sucked down and down and down.

Junseth: I think it's, again, the global warming one is an interesting conversation, because the only thing that happens is rhetoric on both sides.  And it's very interesting to me that people that are unable to evaluate truth of a certain thing, nowadays you have to have a very strong opinion.  This was a thing at the beginning of COVID, everyone was now an epidemiologist, everyone was a virologist.  Now, everyone's a supply chain expert and a gas expert.

The right, "Joe Biden is responsible for gas prices".  The left, "The President doesn't actually have the ability to effect the gas prices".  The right, "Well, the first day he was in office, he shut down the pipeline, and that caused speculators to go and bid the price up, and that's what's caused this to happen".  The left, "Well, other things have been effective in increasing the price, like for example now we have the Russia/Ukraine".

I can do the debate, left, right, left, right.  It's so fucking terrible that everything is completely boiled down to this rhetorical flourish at this point, where there is literally no way to have an argument with someone that's actually competent, because it's just -- even experts do this, it's just back and forth with talking points.  And I think that there's a destruction of dialectic in a world where everybody has the talking points that they're supposed to say, and nobody is capable of describing the nuance of the history of something.

A good example in Ukraine.  Having a discussion about whether the Azov Battalion, who are the Nazis, is good or bad; okay, we can talk about what the Azov Battalion is, and they're Nazis, okay fine.  Talking about the history of Naziism in Ukraine is something I've yet to hear discussed or talked about.  It's very different than Naziism in Germany or Naziism in America, or whatever.  These are very nuanced discussions that require a level of expertise for people to get into. 

People just have an opinion, "Nazi bad, why give money?"  It's a very difficult sort of discussion to have, and it's amazing to me that we can't -- I don't know, the era of Hitchens in some ways is dead, where he says original things that are interesting and provocative.  You can't have a provocative opinion.  Either opinion falls into the right slot or the left slot, and I just find that very soul-defying.

Peter McCormack: I think you can have provocative opinion; there are a lot of provocative opinions out there.  I think actually, I go back to your point just there, there's not enough nuanced opinions, that's what we're missing; people who are willing to try and navigate through a complicated situation and say, "I see this and I see that". 

It's almost like when there's a fight between your kids.  Your kids start having a fight, it's never usually one that's in the wrong.  Usually there's an escalation of the situation, and neither backs down and they both do bad shit and they end up fighting.  Usually, both kids want you to blame one or the other, "But they did this, but they did that", and you don't, because usually it's both of them.

Junseth: Kids have very dumb reasons for explanations!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and people want to have a very simple answer to what's happening in Russia/Ukraine, "It's because of NATO expansion".  And actually, what you can do is when you start to navigate the nuance, and we've done some research, we've spoken to some people, we've had Scott Horton on, and what it comes down to is, it's two sides, there are lots of things that happen and there's lots of things that will happen from both sides that has escalated to a war.  That, to me, is the situation we're in.  Lots of bad decisions have got us to this point, from multiple people in a very complicated situation.

Junseth: And the level of understanding that most people have, and frankly this should probably be where their opinion stops, is Putin decided to invade; Putin invaded; Ukraine fought back; Putin is now confused.  And that is the level of nuance that most people actually have.  And I'm watching these four-hour discussions on places like Clubhouse where people are talking about it, and that's literally almost as much information as they have.

But that's been the thing with all topics in the last probably ten years, I don't know, seven years, that we've really seen this.  Everyone falls into these buckets where they have absolutely no knowledge about something and they still have an opinion about it.  I'm very curious, where did you start off about global warming when you got here?

Peter McCormack: So, it's always been something I've been aware of, and it's always something I thought was an issue, because it's been an issue that you've been aware of since you were a kid.  So, starting with the ozone layer, etc.

Junseth: And the Amazon, rain forests.

Peter McCormack: And the Amazon, and you've always been aware of it.  And I would say, if you'd asked me two to three years ago, I would say, "Climate change is a huge issue, we need to deal with it now".  Now I'm in a very different position.  I believe the climate is changing, accelerating, because of humans, I still believe that.  What I've got in my armoury now is what I don't know. 

What I don't know is how serious it is and when it will get super-serious, if it will get super-serious; I don't know that.  I also don't know whether you can do anything about it, like if any attempt to de-carbonise the world can actually be done, and what is the net impact of that?  Actually, is that super-disastrous?  And if you can't do that, how do you mitigate against it.

So, I'm now in a position where I still believe us as humans are changing the climate, I believe there is a risk to future generations, I don't know which; and I also believe there are geographic risks.  So, a great example of this is where people say, "Well, we have the technology to defend ourselves against rising seas", etc.  Yeah, you do in the US, because you're a rich nation; but if you're in Ethiopia and you're a coffee producer and you might have to move up into higher lands, there's a cost to do that, you might not be able to do that and you might lose 30% to 40% of your crop. 

There is one weather system, but there is not one economy; there are separate economies and it's pretty well-known and understood that if, which I believe it is, but if climate change does impact humans, it will affect the poorest nations worst and they'll have the least economic armoury to defend themselves.  So, it's a super-nuanced position, and what I'm trying to now understand is, what can be done; how should it be done; and, who should be doing it?

Junseth: I mean, there's a lot of questions too about how much unarable land will become arable, like in Siberia, as it happens and how much economic growth is going to happen because the world gets warmer, how many people die under cold temperatures rather than warm temperatures.  To me, it's a very interesting discussion that scientists are having, and everything about it has become political again, just like everything.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  But I believe the macro discussions, without the micro discussions, are the most dishonest ones.  Because, when somebody talks about, okay, you might have land in Siberia that greenify, do they call it that?  I can't remember.

Junseth: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: But anyway, you've got these traditional cold areas that might become arable land.  Okay, fine, that's maybe a geographic benefit to the people who live there.  But what about the people in Ethiopia?

Junseth: In Ethiopia, yeah.

Peter McCormack: This isn't made up, this is happening now, the evidence is out there.  Crops are struggling and they're having to move their farming to higher lands; there is an impact on people.  So, how do we figure that out?  What is the fair thing, or is it just like, "Well, that's how it is"?

Junseth: So the idea is that, if in fact --

Peter McCormack: Can you dig that all up, Danny?

Junseth: So essentially, if in fact there's nothing that can be done about it, it's going to happen, then all of a sudden you have to deal with the consequences more than you have to deal with the question of how do we stop it?

Peter McCormack: Well actually, there's two points to it.  There is that, but also one of the defences is that we now have the means and the technology to protect ourselves.  We can build sea defences, we have technology to change, or protect ourselves, from weather events.  We could have the technology to change farming, but that's always, I think, stated from a western, rich, liberal democracy position.  I'm on about a country where 5%, I think, 5% of either the population or the GDP comes from coffee production; that's just one thing.  What about what's going to happen to those people?  What happens with climate migration?

Junseth: Didn't think of that; interesting.  I mean, this is the case with everything though.  The Dunning-Kruger effect is real.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, "In parts of Ethiopia, spring and summer rains have already declined by 15% to 20% since the 1970s…  Ethiopia could lose 39% to 59% of its current coffee-growing areas to climate change".  Now, the tricky thing with that is, if they don't lose within that range, everyone will be like, "Oh, well it's all bullshit".  Okay, I mean models are models.  But this is just one example.  You can go out and see studies on other countries it will impact.

Junseth: Well this is the theory, the tipping point theory, that there is a point, like the Amazon; you can have this much carbon and then at this point, all of a sudden you're now on a 20-year inevitable decline to desertification of the land.  So, there are a lot of theories that are being tested, and a lot of them are pretty disastrous if they turn out to be true, and I find that to be very interesting.  I think you're experiencing this; the Dunning-Kruger effect is real.

I see this in Bitcoin all the time, people show up; it's the meme, right, "I just showed up to Bitcoin, I'm here to fix it", and that's a very true reality, "I just heard about climate change, I'm here to fix it".  That's like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thing, "I'm here to fix it!"

Peter McCormack: Hey, I've done it.

Junseth: Yeah, but we all do it.  It's very difficult to know when you don't know enough to have an opinion.  It's impossible actually, because you show up to something and someone tells you it's very important, I mean this goes back to the beginning of the libertarian stuff.  When you first hear the theory, you feel like you know enough to go out and try to change the world, and you just don't; you don't know enough about the subject.  And that's true of everything, almost everything, particularly very nuanced discussions, which science in particular is a highly nuanced category of things. 

Many of these things that people walk down the conspiracy road towards, they're also very nuanced, which is why we never actually get clear answers on them; like, "Was COVID released from a lab?"  Maybe the answer's really actually a very difficult one to conclude and actually know for sure.  Maybe we'll never have an actual answer on that.  Maybe we'll only have 10% certainty on any of these questions about anything.  Like, "Was it from a pangolin?"  I don't know, maybe we'll never know.  How can you possibly ultimately know many of these answers?

The reason is because science itself is struggling and trying to find the answers to these, and they're trying to find as definitive an answer as they can, but there's debate and they'll be able to find articles on both sides of the debate.  It's everything from raising children to science to everything.

Peter McCormack: And there are predictions that come wrong, and there are predictions that come right.  And depending on which side of the fence you're on, you tend to latch onto the one that suits where your position was.

Junseth: Interesting, this is the thing with government corruption, you see the same thing; people assert things all the time like, "Joe Biden's son has a business in Ukraine and that's why…", etc.  I have friends who strongly believe that the prosecutor that Joe Biden said that needed to be fired, they strongly believe that he did not have any investigations open on Burisma, right.  For those looking at American politics, we're talking about the scandal that happened with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, his son, being on the board of a Russian energy company.

Peter McCormack: Ukrainian energy company?

Junseth: Yeah, sorry, Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.  So, I have friends who will tell you that he did not have any cases open on Burisma, the prosecutor in the Ukraine, and I have other friends who will tell you that -- Matt Taibbi, I think, does a bunch of articles on how he did have open investigations into Burisma.  They have different forms of evidence to show that these investigations did or did not actually -- were or were not actually open, and there's just no conclusion.  There's no way to know which side is actually correctly, which is weird, because you'd think it would be obvious on a question like that which side is correct, and it's just not.

Peter McCormack: It is weird.  You know what also is weird?  The laptop; that is weird.

Junseth: Oh, the laptop's super-weird!

Peter McCormack: The laptop's super-fucking-weird!

Junseth: But you can look at that and be like, "This whole thing is really weird, I bet something is going to happen here", and you don't have to have a strong opinion on what that something is.  I think that's where it comes out; people have very specific opinions about where this information's going to go, how it's going to conclude, how it's going to end, and where the corruption actually is.

Peter McCormack: But you can see where the conspiracies start and how they form, because it's like, okay, there's this laptop, it's Russian propaganda, it's signed by, what, 50 agents signed a letter, and Joe Biden ends up winning the election and Trump is out; Trump, who they wanted to get rid of.  You can see how the conspiracies form, and I have a lot of empathy for that conspiracy.  Is it even a conspiracy, or is it just fucking fact that they wanted to get rid of him and there's groups of people who did what they had to do?  I don't know.  I find it all troubling, I find it supremely troubling.

Junseth: The thing that I find most troubling about the current cycle is that we are moved from crisis to crisis, week to week, and it's very deliberate, and that's my big conspiracy.  It started during COVID.  During COVID, the news was talking every week about how everyone's going to die constantly, and then Black Lives Matter happened and COVID dropped off the news for two months.  They were going outside and they were protesting, and there was just no discussion about it. 

Then, after that, we're back to COVID and how it's going to kill everybody constantly, and people were seamless in the ability to make the transition between all of these types of news stories, and seamless to go right back.  It was as if it hadn't disappeared, and it was as if there hadn't been this time gap for a couple of months.  That to me is quite worrying, that we're able to sustain crisis, week after week after week, and it just keeps everyone on edge, it just keeps the adrenaline flowing.  It's this completely screwed-up way for minds to work.  It's like a drug; it is a drug.

I have this feeling that we're going to find out that this moving from crisis to crisis, this dopamine fix that everyone's on, if we didn't have that, the whole society would be depressed, because I don't think people know how much dopamine is being dumped every couple of weeks into their brain as a result of the newest crisis.

Peter McCormack: But why is this happening?  Do you think this is media-driven and it's clickbait and media needs big stories because they need eyeballs and social media needs eyeballs; has it just organically become that way because of the incentive systems of media?  Or, is there an agenda that somebody has to keep us like this?  Like individual groups, is there a political agenda for this?  I'm trying to understand why this is happening.

Junseth: Yeah, I wish I knew.

Peter McCormack: I wish I knew.

Junseth: And it feels very planned, but it also feels very organic; it feels both ways.  I don't know.  The idea that, I don't know, Klaus Schwab is in the World Economic Foundation's headquarters and sending a fax to the Head of CNN or NBC and being like, "Okay, it's time to report on this"; that's a Russian accent for Klaus Schwab!

Peter McCormack: It sounds evil.

Junseth: It sounds so evil; I don't think that's actually happening.  I can't conceive of a world where this is literally the Democratic National Convention, or National Committee, or the Republican National Committee literally sending directions to news agencies.  It doesn't seem like that would be -- that would leak, I would think.  And it's a very weird world to me, when you have the crises, they move in unison from crisis to crisis to crisis, and I do think it actually is organic.

Peter McCormack: I think it's organic.

Junseth: I think that what you're seeing is the internal -- if you have 50 people together in a national news organisation, and they all vote on what the next story they're going to cover is, for some reason 50 out of 50 times, or 49 out of 50 times, all of the organisations are going to pick the same story, they'll slowly converge on the same story regardless, because one company is doing it.  It feels very organic, but it is literally crisis to crisis, and it is almost exactly every two or three weeks.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean it might just be an anomaly for the period.  I mean, look, when COVID happened, we covered it, we discussed it; Ukraine/Russia happened, we've discussed it, we covered it.  We're a Bitcoin show, and the Bitcoin connection exists; there's a loose connection, but we feel like we need to cover it, because we essentially have a news property.  So, if it's organic, I see it, because we don't have some weird agenda.  We are just producing content that we think is important to our listeners, to cover it with the right guests that our listeners like, or will challenge our listeners.  But it's organic.

Junseth: Yeah.  It's very clearly organic in a lot of ways, and I'm trying to figure out which ways, if it is, it's planned; just intellectually thinking through how it could be, and I just don't see it.

Peter McCormack: It's a shadowy organisation who sit round a big table --

Junseth: That's what I mean!  This goes back to the original talking point about libertarians.  To me, conspiracy is very easy when the organisation that things are cast on is this sort of black box.  The Fed's a great example.  You don't know what happens there on a daily basis, you don't know what happens in the CBC, you don't know what happens in the Wuhan lab.  Every good conspiracy has a black box that you can cast aspersions at.

It really blows my mind that there are this many black boxes that we can focus on and have just sort of a trash can of what's going on there, just invent it, it doesn't matter.  And I think you're right, there is this tendency to -- you can see how people walk down that hole, but I think the black box problem absolutely exists, where you have these black boxes within the conspiracies that you can make it into anything, and that really worries me.  I don't know where we're going to go in the future with all of these.

Peter McCormack: When I was a kid, there were four channels on TV: BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4, and the news was something my dad would watch at 6.00pm, just after dinner, and we'd all sit in silence, I wouldn't go in the room to distract him; and maybe he'd read the newspaper in the morning, but that was it.  And then we got Sky and then we got 24-hour news, and now we have the internet and we have constant news.  We have a constant news-feed drip and then added to that, we've given everyone a platform to have an opinion on it.

Junseth: True.  Well, there used to be nightly news here too.  You'd have your local news, and then CNN changed all that.  I think even during college, I was kind of unaware of how it was going to change things, because during college it was still -- CNN would literally grab packages from local news stations and run them.  They didn't have enough content.  I used to fall asleep to it and I remember, as I would sleep, I would wake up to the same story again and again, because they would just put them on cycles, right.  They would just play the same content again and again at night.

Peter McCormack: BBC World News does that.

Junseth: Yeah, and now, they literally have enough content that they're running 24 hours a day and just news, news, news, just constant.

Peter McCormack: Well, we're plugging this news into everyone, we're giving them an ability to have an opinion on it, and they may be heard and they might suddenly get popular because of their opinion of it, which is gamed in a way that it isn't allowing people to find truth; it's gamed in a way for taking a side.

Junseth: Do you not think that podcasts are becoming a remedy to much of this, because I do?

Peter McCormack: It depends on the podcast, but yes.

Junseth: So, I've heard you say it before; you seem to have a bit of -- Tim Pool's irked you a little bit.  So, what's the like or dislike about him?

Peter McCormack: So, when I first discovered him, it was through his films.  I saw him make some interesting films.  I think he did one in Chernobyl, I think he visited Chernobyl. 

Junseth: I don't think it was Chernobyl, I think he did the Japanese reactor.

Peter McCormack: I thought he did Chernobyl.

Junseth: It might have been, he might have done Chernobyl.

Peter McCormack: Danny will look it up.  And he did another one in Sweden talking about the --

Junseth: Rising crime.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because of migration.

Junseth: Yeah, the no-go zones.

Peter McCormack: No-go zones.  But I thought it was kind of interesting.  But I also felt he was someone with empathy and I thought, "Okay, this is cool, this is interesting".  So, I think he made ten films, and then his YouTube channel became more of a daily opinion on what's going on, and I think he used to say he was a liberal.

Junseth: He still says that.

Peter McCormack: I think he said he's like -- I can't remember what he said.  But anyway, so then that happened, and then he started doing these daily clips, and I saw a shift to this right; but that's fine.  I mean, I've had a shift to the right in times in my time of life, and some of the things he was concerned about was great.

But then following his Twitter, I've just found him just, I don't look at him as someone who says, "Here are some problems in society.  I want to talk about this and I want to talk to these people and bring them together, and let's find a solution; let's see how we can work together".  I see somebody who sees a crisis and just uses sarcasm and attack and criticism to appeal to an audience and gets his likes, his cheers, his retweets, grows his show, etc.

So, I'm not a fan of that type of picking a side and attack people thing.  By the way, everything I ever say, I may have done hypocritically, I know that, but I'm really mostly interested in somebody who can go, "Okay, here's a problem, I want to try and find the truth and try and find the answer.  I want to help people get to a place where they understand what's going on, and they can work together for a solution".  I feel like he's so far lost from that.  I also think he spouts a lot of fucking bullshit.

Junseth: Well, I think he talks even about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, where you open up a newspaper and you're like, "Oh, here's a thing I know a lot about".  You read it and then you're like, "Oh my God, they're completely wrong about everything", and then you move to the next page and then you read about another complex thing, and you just accept it as true, because it's something you know nothing about.  And I see that, because whenever he talks about crypto, it's just cringy; it's so cringy!

Peter McCormack: 51% attack.

Junseth: Oh, yeah, the discussion on 51% attacks, or when Doge was increasing, he had a whole thesis on how Doge was going to become real money and Bitcoin was going to be savings.  And that was just complete doggie doo doo.  It was very obvious to anyone that's in the space that his understanding of crypto is very minimal.

Peter McCormack: Did you find it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it was Fukushima.

Peter McCormack: It was Fukushima.

Junseth: Bam!

Peter McCormack: Okay, damn.  But I knew he'd done one of them, right.  But the point is, these films are brilliant, they're really good, independent films, and I was a big fan.  And I see a different Tim Pool now and I'm just not a fan.  And that's fine, he can do his own thing, but I'm just not into that.  I openly admit I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan.  I've clearly -- some of our work done has been inspired by him, because whether I agree with him or not, and I disagree, I believe that's somebody who's going out there, he's trying to help people find the truth, trying to help people question things, and it's very hard to pin him to subjects.

Junseth: What I like about a Tim Pool or a Rogan generally is the long-form conversation.

Peter McCormack: I agree.

Junseth: For example, in the United States, we have a couple of congressmen who are a little bit nuts, we think.  Marjorie Taylor Greene is probably the most famous example.  I've never really heard her talk, as a person, for long periods of time.  I only have this understanding of her as a person who's a crazy, who believes there's lasers from satellites put up there by the Jews who are burning down forests.  That's as much as I know about her.

Tim Pool had her on and did a three-hour conversation and it was the first time I'd ever heard her as a person, and I was like, "Oh, she's just like your friend's mum.  She's just a little bit uninformed".  She didn't know how Congress worked and then got elected and has learnt things, but she's not crazy, she's just kind of like your friend's mum; like when you're growing up and your friend's mum had weird opinions!  She's just kind of a normal person.  I can see how a person like that could end up in Congress and then not know how to play the politics, and then get accused of all of these things that she probably has also said, and has kind of walked down some of the QAnon stuff.

But she's not malicious in any way and she's not dangerous, and that was something I got to see because of the long-form conversation, regardless of any of the political views that were espoused during that entire conversation.  And that's the same thing with Rogan.  I just like the long-form conversation.  It gives me an opportunity to get to know a person freely and measure how crazy they are, because there are a lot of nutters out there.  Like, how long can you go without being a nut?  You can only hide it for so long!

Peter McCormack: I just want to say on the Tim Pool thing, I think he does a really great job a lot of the time, and I understand why a lot of people like his show.  It's just something I would want myself personally to avoid going down that route.

Junseth: It's really hard, it's so hard.  I mean, it is absurd to me; like I said earlier about going down conspiracies.  I've noticed this: the Russian/Ukraine thing has sort of alighted me to this in a way that is surprising, where I've watched people who have been really good about not falling into conspiracy rabbit holes, falling into them on this issue.  And, I wonder now if they're stuck, is that where they are; or, will the next issue be okay again?

Peter McCormack: I think people are stuck.

Junseth: I think you're right.  I think you get stuck now.

Peter McCormack: We fight really hard against that here.  This is why Danny is so important to the show, this is why he now has a microphone, this is why he travels with me.  He's the real conscience of the show, Jeremy as well.

Junseth: The Jiminy Cricket!

Peter McCormack: No, but they really are, because it is easy to get sucked into this.  And it's not to say people aren't right or wrong, but it's really important to just try and for every single thing, take a step back.  Because, I fall for it, I do, and I jump to answers and I jump to opinions, and sometimes I haven't really thought it through or spent the time on it.

Junseth: It's interesting, because I look back on my own, and I try to figure out which conspiracies in the last few years I have either become passionate about or fallen for.  I think the one that really got me was hydroxychloroquine.  I think I fell for that one, I'll admit that.

Peter McCormack: How do you mean?

Junseth: Well, I fully embraced the hydroxychloroquine train, "This thing, this is working, it's very clearly working, there's clinical studies now, etc".  And then, as time went on, you ended up with these meta studies and you took a look at it and I was like, "Oh, this really doesn't work.  It works sometimes, it's effective sometimes maybe.  But honestly, there's better medicines.  It's not really that great".

Peter McCormack: Well, I think COVID has just been a huge challenge for everyone.

Junseth: But I think I did a pretty good job of avoiding most of them, but that one was one that was interesting to me.  And I've noticed that while I can admit that and I can figure out which conspiracy I've fallen for, it seems like people get stuck; they really do get rutted into a specific path of thinking, and it's very difficult to escape from that, because it's almost like every path of thinking is a pathway into a community.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's an inertia to admitting you were wrong.

Junseth: Yes.

Peter McCormack: People don't want to admit they're wrong.

Junseth: Yeah.  I think also, because now there's now this moral imperative to be right, so if you believed in hydroxychloroquine as an effective means to curing COVID, you were evil for two months.  So, people remember that.  And if you admit that you were wrong, that means that you're evil for two months, you're kind of admitting that.

Meanwhile, there's all sorts of conspiracies that the left fell into and the right fell into.  That was the one that I got, that got me.  Every other one, I've pretty much been pretty good on during COVID, but that was the one that got me.  And everyone else that that got seemed to fall down the rabbit hole of, "Vaccines are bad and this is bad, and the government is lying and why are we doing masks?" whatever your opinion is on masks.

Peter McCormack: Also, if you admit you were wrong, some people don't trust you in the future.  Again, it's another thing we see.  So, when the lockdowns were first announced, I was like, "Yeah, I totally support this", very publicly.

Junseth: I did the same actually; I was on the same side as you.  I was like, "It's 14 days, let's give it a try". 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I totally support this, lock us down, there are people collapsing in China and dying".

Junseth: "We don't know how bad, this could be a plague".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I support this, I'm with it".

Junseth: "Black death could be coming".

Peter McCormack: And a lot of people were like, "This is bullshit", and I was like, "No", and I fully supported it.  Then, in hindsight, we've seen the studies, we know lockdowns are ineffective and they also have these secondary effects which are terrible for people, mental health, alcohol abuse, etc.  I've admitted I was wrong, multiple times. 

But people have come back and said, "Well, you've been wrong on so many issues before, why should we trust you now?"  It's like, "Hold on a second, have you been right about everything your entire life?  Not that you've had to, because I don't have to, but have you said your things in a public forum where half a million people are watching?"

Junseth: Is the difference between people that fall down conspiracy rabbit holes and people that don't the fact that they can admit they're wrong after the fact?

Peter McCormack: I think it's a factor, I certainly think it's a factor, because it's very difficult to come out and say you were wrong, it really is hard.

Junseth: It seems very easy.

Peter McCormack: I find it easy, but for a lot of people, they find it hard.

Junseth: Yeah, I don't understand that.  At the beginning of COVID, this was my debate with people I knew.  This is early, early on, before they said anything about masks, I went and bought a bunch of masks.  I was like, "Okay", to my wife, "we're going to go to the store, we're going to wear our masks".  This is before anybody else is doing it.  And the pushback I get is, "Well, no one else is doing it, they're going to look at us".

A few months later, everyone is wearing masks and it's pure capitulation, I was like, "Absolutely, we'll wear a mask".  And again, regardless of what you think of masks, early on this was the most conservative way you could go with regard to a pandemic.  It's like, "Okay, do everything, stay away from people, we're going to go in there quick, we're going to get out", all of that, and I just noticed that there was this sort of need for affirmation from the crowd before you did anything at all, especially to look weird.

That to me is very interesting, that it took months, and there was never this admission, "Oh, I was wrong about the mask thing", it was just a go along to get along with the crowd.  And once the crowd says that masks are okay, then we can wear masks; if the crowd doesn't say that the masks are okay, then we don't wear masks, because people will make fun of us.  It's very weird.

Danny Knowles: You had that.  So, when the first lockdowns happened, you went into London to record with some homeless people and you weren't wearing a mask.  And you put a screenshot on Twitter and you got so much shit from the bitcoiners for not wearing a mask.

Junseth: Isn't that interesting?  People won't remember this.  When the left started saying you needed to wear a mask, I was saying, "You remember two months ago when the right said that, and you guys were telling them that they were anti-science idiots?  And now, the left is saying that you have to wear a mask and if you don't, you're an anti-science idiot, while the right just instantly flipped and was like, 'No, we're not wearing masks'".

Peter McCormack: That's a really interesting point.  So, the context of that was, the lockdown got announced and there was one day before the lockdown.  The immediate thing on my mind was, "What happens to homeless people in a lockdown?"

Junseth: Interesting.

Peter McCormack: Firstly, they rely on begging.  If there's nobody around, they might not have that access to that money.  What's happening to the overnight facilities?  So, I was like, "I'm going to go down to London, I'm going to take my camera and I'm just going to ask some people", and we were very careful how we did it, because I didn't have a mask on me. 

Each person I spoke to I said, "Look, I don't have a mask, I'm going to keep this much distance between you", etc, and my son was with me and he took some photos of the whole thing, and there was this photo of me interviewing someone.  I was like, "Right, I'm going to put that out there, let people know there's a video coming". 

So, you see me and you see the person, you see the gap and I'm not wearing a mask, and they went for me hard, so hard.  We didn't even release the video in the end, did we?

Danny Knowles: No, we didn't release it.

Junseth: Pussy!

Peter McCormack: Well, I wanted the message to be about -- I mean, the videos didn't turn out great anyway, but I wanted the message to be about, "This is the difficulty that --"

Junseth: You tried to do real reporting, that's what you were doing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was trying to do some real reporting and I thought, if everyone's just going to focus on the mask thing, it voids the message.  But that was from a cohort of hardcore bitcoiners having a pop at me.  But going to your point, what I think is going on is I think this may be where people attribute the value in their cohort.  Is it a social media cohort?  So, I think that's one of the things that happens, I think it's really hard to change your mind.

Imagine you're in a cohort who all comment and go to groups and go on Spaces together, where you're on maybe that conspiracy side.  And maybe a lot of people are, "We're not going to get jabbed, the vaccine's poison", etc.  I wonder if there are some people in there who have been vaccinated, but they won't admit it, and they literally repeat the rhetoric.  It would be interesting to know that, because they're nervous about admitting it.

What if they've changed their mind on one group?  How do you come out to a cohort of a few thousand people and say, "You know what, I think I was wrong on this"?

Junseth: I think also what's interesting is there's this need to oppose and need to support, rather than actually finding answers.  So, if you look at the research on the pandemic, the real solution is actually very simple; it's airflow and buildings, it's fixing the way that air is filtrated in buildings; it's fixing the way that air moves in buildings, making sure that -- it's very boring, super-boring, but that's the answer.

This notion of opposition to wrong science, which is what the red has, like the left believes in a bunch of crap science often; the right believes that they know what the science is and they'll just be like, "You're wrong, that's not the science", but there's never solutions on that side where they're like, "Oh, you know what, the actual science says that air filtration is the way to solve this", you know, I guess put masks, if you will, on buildings rather than people would be a better solution.  That's never actually proposed or discussed. 

You have just this antithesis of the other side, which might be more conservative in their goal like, "We have to wear masks", okay, "Masks don't work", "Well, okay, the studies do kind of show that masks don't work, but they show that air filtration does, which is actually the same thing as a mask, but it's a mask for the room.  So, they're not wrong, but they're not right, and you're definitely not proposing a solution to the problem, you're just saying, 'Let's keep the status quo' for no reason, other than that you want to oppose what they're saying".

Peter McCormack: It's not just a problem for the individual though.  This ability to change your mind or admit you are wrong, that exists within media and that exists within government as well.  I don't envy the difficult decisions that certain politicians have had to make.  Whatever your feeling on politicians are, if you're an elected politician, you have constituents to represent and you have to make decisions, and public health policy is one of them and we had a pandemic.  Outside of the decisions that were made --

Junseth: Plan-demic!

Peter McCormack: Plan-demic!  There are tough decisions that had to be made, and some of them were clearly wrong.  But you very rarely get a politician come out and say, "You know what, we were totally wrong on the lockdown [or] we were wrong on masks [or] we were wrong on this, we've learnt, we're moving on".  Everybody seems to, well not everybody, lots of people in lots of situations, whether it's an individual, media person or politician just doubles down or buries it.

Junseth: Do you know what else I noticed which was something I didn't know, was the difference between the administrative state and the difference between people who actually may be scientists.  There's two different types of state: there's political appointees, sort of elected, if you will, by Congress; and then, there's the people that are there because they're not just administrative functionaries, they're there to do specific work.

So, if you go to the CDC website, they have a whole section of air in buildings and how to solve for air problems.  And the air filtration stuff worked in tuberculosis and other pandemics that we've experienced.  But there's a whole section on the CDC website.  Meanwhile, you have these administrative functionaries going out and talking about the importance of masking and giving the completely wrong message to the American public about what it is that the science actually shows is really effective.  And it's because it was the political hot button.

That's really interesting to me, that they will do that at the expense of actually saving people.  They will give you the political hot button line, rather than telling you what the actual solution is.  If everyone in America had bought two 24" by 24" box stands, stuck a MERV 13 filter on the back and ran them in every room, this thing would have been very different.  But nobody did that, and that's all that you needed.  It was a $50 solution.

Peter McCormack: Is that definitely the answer?

Junseth: If you had done that in every space, it would have -- yeah, it really is the answer!  If you'd have done that in every space, you would have had a huge reduction in transmission.

Peter McCormack: A reduction, but you still would have had transmission.

Junseth: Yeah, you would have had transmission.  You can't get rid of a pandemic, it's going to happen; but the goal is to mitigate it as much as possible.  And you could have mitigated it with very, very cheap fixes with air filtration in rooms, and nobody did this, because it was never popular politically.  It was amazing.

Peter McCormack: I'd have to double-check that one myself.  But I agree with that, I think there were other things, like protecting the vulnerable and not locking down the people who can go out and create economic growth.  I mean, the weirdest rule of everything is masks on planes, when you're allowed to eat and drink.  It's ludicrous beyond belief, that you can get on a plane and they tell you to wear your mask, but they'll serve you a drink and then you can take it off.  It's just fucking ludicrous; it doesn't make any sense to anyone with even a quarter of a brain.  Everyone knows that's bullshit.  That's why I think there's a lot of really tricky things with this.  But how do you deal with it next time?

Junseth: So, the aeroplane thing is really interesting, because it actually isn't bullshit if you believe the things that that rule is based on.  So, for example, you have this idea that viral load, and I mean I'm not an epidemiologist, but the idea is that masks are going to trap the virus, they're not going to let it out.  And if you think about a big aeroplane, let's say 1% of the public has COVID at any one time; that means, 1 in 100 people.  The more people you have in a space, the more it's going to trend towards the actual number of people.

So, if you have a plane filled with 200 people, chances are that 2 people have it in that plane.  So, if you can reduce the amount of viral load that they're spewing out, you actually reduce hugely the number of people that are infected.  The reason it's kind of hilarious on planes is because again, their air filtration.  They have HEPA filters, they change the air something like six times every four minutes or something.  It's absurd how many times on an aeroplane the air is changed, sent through a HEPA filter and it doesn't really spread, it doesn't.

Peter McCormack: But I'm not on about masks on a plane, I'm on about you can take masks off when you're eating and drinking.  People just do that all flight.

Junseth: Yeah, they do.

Peter McCormack: Did you see the guy, there was one thing where a guy had a chip in his mouth, a McDonald's chip, and he just had it there the whole flight!

Junseth: That's hilarious!  I mean, did he fall asleep like that?  I've done the thing where I've taken it off my ear, and they do come and they wake you up and they'll try to get you to put the mask on, and you have to do it.  But I'm saying the reason that that makes sense is that, if most people have it, the goal is always statistical reduction of viral load in an area; and their hope is that the person who has the virus is complying with the mask rule.

They're probably right about that, except the mask doesn't really reduce it.  The thing that saves you on an aeroplane is air filtration, every time.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Junseth: The air filtration has been the answer and nobody wants to talk about it, because it's not popular politically.

Peter McCormack: So, let me ask you something.  This conversation we're having right now, is this useful to the world?  Are we doing a good thing, or are we adding to the noise, because I'm always questioning myself?  What good comes of this?

Junseth: I think that providing a framework, because okay, there's a lot of people out there who are very confused by what's going on, and I think everyone's trying to figure out intellectually how to talk about it and they're trying to find words.  So, I don't know.  I think giving people new ways of thinking about it is a little bit helpful at least!  I think that everyone is very confused in trying to figure out what's going on, including you and me.

Peter McCormack: Well, we've touched lots of complicated big subjects.

Junseth: We haven't solved any of them.

Peter McCormack: We haven't solved any, we're not the experts on any of them, so it's not like we can educate people really on Ukraine/Russia; we can't really educate people on COVID.  We can't educate, we're not the experts, right.  So, what value do we add?  Is the value here showing that you can have open, civil debates and there should be more of this?  Is it trying to encourage people to consider opinions outside themselves?  Is it trying to avoid audience capture and bias?  What are the effective things we can do in this situation?

Junseth: I think for me, the thing that's been most effective, and I wish that someone had explained this early on, because it's something that is sort of new that I've learned, is the notion that you can find yourself being completely wrong in big ways that are considered morally reprehensible at the time, because again we apply moral framework to everything nowadays, and have the capability to recognise it, walk away from it and change your thinking and examine why that happened.

I think there needs to be a permission to being wrong again; it has to be permitted.  You're allowed to believe in QAnon for two weeks, you're allowed to do that, it's fine; you're allowed to believe in hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or whatever it is, and you're allowed to even have that belief for a very long time.  But you should always be examining your positions, because things change and maybe things are not compatible.  Like, in the future, you'll find that the things that you believe are not compatible with things that you previously believed.

Peter McCormack: Well, being wrong is part of free speech as well.

Junseth: It's good!  It's okay to take positions that you're going to find out you're wrong about.  I also think that it's very difficult for people to figure out where politics has entered the fray when it comes to conversation.  The Russia/Ukraine situation's perfectly good.  Why is this a left/right divide?  Why does it seem that the right is all pro-Russia and the left is all pro-Ukraine?  I don't understand where this bifurcation happened, and I think that people need to recognise that two weeks ago, they knew nothing about either subject.

Peter McCormack: What about if Trump was still in power and Russia had invaded Ukraine?  I mean, I know Trump thinks it wouldn't happen, but what if?  Do you think the right -- and say the Trump administration was openly supporting the Ukrainian Administration, do you think the right would be --

Junseth: Yes, pro-Ukraine?

Peter McCormack: So, do you think it's an anti-Biden thing?

Junseth: I don't think it's anti-Biden.  I think that the framework they apply is very different for the moment, and I don't understand whose power is affecting the framework, because it's not explicitly anti-Biden.  If you talk to them, they will truly tell you that they have thought it through, they've considered all of the sides and they're pro-Russia.  And it's strange, because I think, for example, the anti-vaccine stuff --

Peter McCormack: Hold on, just on that point, are people that pro-Russia?  I'm struggling to think of times when I've seen people specifically pro-Russia.  What I've seen is more of anti-Ukraine, or suspicious of Ukraine, or suspicious of agendas.  Again, not pro-Russia, but also saying more the arguments are, "There was an agreement not to go one inch east of Berlin", or whatever it was, east of Germany, whatever it was --

Junseth: For NATO, yeah.

Peter McCormack: For NATO, and, "If it's the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, why is it in Eastern Europe?"  I've seen those arguments, I've seen people say, "You've provoked them", I've seen people say, "Look, there's Nazis in Eastern Ukraine".  I've seen all this, but I can't think of specific pro-Russia tweets or pro-Russia articles.  I think it's slightly different.

Junseth: I think you're right actually, but it's weird that everyone moves in unison.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.

Junseth: Many of these things are the first time people have ever heard of these treaties, or they've ever heard the rhetoric of Putin, or they've ever heard the rhetoric about NATO, they've ever heard about the Azov Battalion, they've ever considered the fact -- it's moving in a weird direction.  It's very strange to me that everyone kind of moves in unison.

I think you're correct, well I don't know, that you're asserting this, but I firmly believe that if Trump were in office, these same people would be on the other side, and the left would be on the other side of this.  It would be the same rhetoric.

Peter McCormack: I don't know, I'm not sure.

Junseth: I think it would be.  Maybe the anti-war left would be similarly situated, but it feels like if Trump were in office, you'd have a complete switching.  I think about the vaccine rhetoric.  When Trump was in office, people were ready for the vaccine.  I think if it had been released under Trump, or really rolled out strongly under Trump, pre the election, I think you would have had very little pushback from the right; you would have had a lot of pushback from the left.

Biden takes over, now we have this strong contingent of people on the right, who are very anti-vaccine; and everybody on the left is like, "You idiots, it's good for you, you should take it, take it every day", and it's very weird.  But what's strange about it to me is that the right is stolid in their opinion now.  And Trump were re-elected, let's say, they wouldn't change it, they wouldn't go back and now like, "The vaccine's okay".

Peter McCormack: He is coming back though, isn't he?

Junseth: Yeah.  And I think he's going to win.

Peter McCormack: If he does come back, he will win.

Junseth: I think he will.

Peter McCormack: I think he's an unstoppable force.

Junseth: I don't know how you guys think about this in the UK, but I can tell you, on the right in America, there is a strong resentment of the way the left treated them the last five, six years.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and rightly so.  They were all treated like idiots and morons.

Junseth: Yes, and I think the left believes that they were treated poorly.  It feels very much like the right is extremely mobilised ready to put someone, well Trump specifically, back in office for the purpose of vengeance and he'll just exact revenge.

Peter McCormack: My friend, Chart Westcott, made a very interesting point about Trump.  You know me, I didn't like him and there was a lot about him I didn't like; we had a long conversation about it.  But he said, "Forget his personality, focus on his policies and what he's delivered", and I thought that was a really interesting point, because I was trying to understand it.  And I don't, again, it's like everything else, there's no binary position on this, but I think his prison reform stuff was really interesting, very interesting.

Junseth: Funding black colleges.  There's all sorts of stuff.

Peter McCormack: He fully understood the risk of Chinese expansion, which I think we can all universally agree is something to be concerned about, especially with the CBDCs and social credit scores and expansion of Belt and Road.  Again, he got that.  I think he got a lot wrong; I think in calling everything "fake media and fake news", I think that was wrong.

Junseth: We have the equivalent of that in Bitcoin; everything's a scam!

Peter McCormack: Everything's a scam, yeah!

Junseth: I don't think he was wrong with that.

Peter McCormack: The fake news?

Junseth: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I don't think everything was fake news.  You can't just call something which, just because it's critical of you, it's fake news.

Junseth: Correct, but there was plenty to criticise Trump about, but there was nothing accurate that was released in those four years, nothing.  It was all absolute drivel.  You couldn't comb through it.  You couldn't figure out what was true and what was not, on both sides, the supporting side and the other side.  It was all complete and utter crap.

Peter McCormack: I broadly agree.  But it didn't get off to a good start, with the false claims to how many people were at his inauguration and the use of different camera angles, which was him starting off on a lie.

Junseth: But who cares?  I was always amazed by the lies, because the things that people got their heads in a tizzy about were things that other administrations have also lied about and no one cared, because they were small, white lies.  But for him, they had entire departments of news organisations basically going through everything he said, and they would -- go look at the political fact-checker stuff, it's amazing.  It's, "Donald Trump said that Melania Trump is America's favourite First Lady.  This is false, this is a lie, she's not America's First Lady.  The favourite First Lady by statistics is…"  It's like, "Really?  That's what we're stooping to?"

Peter McCormack: No, I know what you mean, but what I'm saying is, we're in this weird post-truth world where it feels like anyone's willing to lie.  I mean, we can't get into it now, but we've had a big conversation this morning about a current situation, and there's a way out of it by lying, and there's a way where you probably don't get out of it by telling the truth.  It's like, if the lie is told, it protects you, but the individual that we're talking about, both economically and credibility-wise, by telling the truth risks credibility and risks themselves economically.  But there's a butterfly effect from them telling the lie.  The conclusion we've come to, the important to do is to tell the truth, even if it affects you, and how many people are willing to do that these days?

Junseth: In a post-modern world, Peter, sometimes the most honest thing you can do is lie.

Peter McCormack: Oh, God.

Junseth: It's just true, man.  I've said this before.  I'll give you a good example.  Many years ago, we were accused by people in Ethereum of sending death threats, and we got a call from CoinDesk and asked us if we sent death threats.  And the answer was, "Absolutely, we've been sending death threats for ages!" and what happens is the entire article then is about whether we were telling the truth about whether we sent death threats or not.  And the conclusion is, they don't think that we actually sent death threats.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you called a bluff?

Junseth: Yeah, that's the thing.  In a world of post-truth, it doesn't matter what you say, it matters what is true.  There has to be, at some level, actual truth at the basis of this stuff.  If you were to look at a colour and you look at it and a million out of a million people will say, "That colour is red"; and then someone, I don't know, puts a gun to your head and says, "You have to say that this colour is yellow", you're like, "Yeah, that colour is yellow, absolutely".  It doesn't make it yellow, it's still red!

Peter McCormack: Back to coercion!

Junseth: It's still red, it doesn't matter what you actually think of it; the colour is still red!

Peter McCormack: So, what do we do then?  I feel like disengaging from it all.

Junseth: Yeah, I think that's one option, you can disengage.  Or, you can believe strongly in the notion that post-truth doesn't work and just do what you're doing, and just realise that everybody else knows that too.  There's a small subset of people that believe that truth doesn't exist, truth is a construct, and that comes out of this notion, this post-modernist notion of deconstruction.  Everything can be deconstructed down to its fundamental elements and nothing matters. 

You can believe that that's how the world is.  It doesn't work in the long run.  It works in the short run, it works for gains and power, but there's things that you can know about the world.  And this is, I think, actually a fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin maximalism.  I believe Bitcoin is going to win, I believe Bitcoin has already won.  It doesn't matter to me what kind of development happens in Ethereum, or what kind of dapps people download to their phone, or whether DeFi exists or not.  It doesn't matter, because in the long run, it will fail, in my opinion.  I don't really fight it, "Ethereum's up to $3,000, it's great"; okay, great.  It won't be there forever.

Peter McCormack: I think what would be useful is for people to be able to recognise what is a fact, what is an opinion and what is an interpretation, because they are different things.  So for example, you can take it back to climate.  There are things that are fact.  You can record global Earth surface temperatures; you can record them, that is a fact.  You can interpret that in different ways, and you can have an opinion on what that is.  And I think there's a lot of people getting lost in opinions and interpretations being fact.

I think if people realised what is interpretation, what is an opinion, and where there is room for error, we can get to a place where we can have a better discussion around complicated subjects.

Junseth: Well, in a discussion generally, you want to try -- I mean, this is how it used to be.  This is not how we do it now, but it used to be that you get to premises.  You'd asked somebody, "Why do you think that?", like go back.  Deconstruction of the opinion, this is fundamentally where things are correct.  You should deconstruct where a person came from; this was the Socratic method.

The Socratic method exists for me to walk you through how I got to a place, and then for you to deconstruct what I did and tell me where I got it wrong.  I find that people are very suspicious of the Socratic walkthrough, where you walk people through things.  They'll be like, "Oh, you're trying to get me to agree with you", I'm like, "No, I'm trying to get you to understand where my thinking is", and that's dead, nobody does that anymore, they don't develop, they don't go back to understanding a premise.

Again, the pandemic is a great example, "Your opinion is wrong because my facts, which I've pulled from 12 papers, are correct".  "No, your facts are wrong, because my facts I've pulled from 12 papers are correct".  It's two sides yelling at each other trying to negate the other one, rather than being, "Well, actually, if we go back to the base premise and try to understand what actually matters, maybe the conclusion is not X or Y; maybe the conclusion is C, and you have no framework for understanding C, because you focused on X and Y and that is where the battle is being fought, on X and Y". 

Meanwhile, I'm over here in the matrix and I'm just walking past you with the actual answer, fully knowing that I have the actual answer, and looking at you two fighting and just being like, "That's weird, why are you guys fighting about that?"

Peter McCormack: The matrix doesn't exist!

Junseth: No, it doesn't!

Peter McCormack: We've come back full circle, man.  Anything we've not talked about?

Junseth: Well, tons of things!

Peter McCormack: That you want to talk about!

Junseth: No, I think we're good.

Peter McCormack: Man, listen --

Junseth: Was that interesting?  I hope that was interesting, I think that was a good discussion.

Peter McCormack: I think it was a good discussion.  I know what the comments will be, I know the emails I'm going to receive, I know the pro ones, the neutral ones and the con ones I'm going to receive; I understand it all.  I would encourage a lot of people to read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.  Just spend a little bit more time accepting there are other opinions.

Junseth: I was going to say, what's interesting to me is that Jonathan Haidt himself is viewed as a right-wing figure, particularly in the US.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there was that period where if you didn't hold a left view, you were alt-right. 

Junseth: It's still the case.

Peter McCormack: I think less so. 

Junseth: Do you find that interesting that a person that you, yourself, are reading as a matter of information-gathering is, himself, viewed as a sort of compromised author, a compromised source?

Peter McCormack: It doesn't surprise me.  Listen, here in the US and with a lot of the listeners of my show, I'm considered a leftie; and at home with my friends, I'm considered right-wing conspiracy.  So, it's all kind of -- Einstein would like this.  It's all relative!

Junseth: It's all relative!

Peter McCormack: It's all relative to the position of the other, to the observer.

Junseth: The Haidt thing is interesting, and I think this is worth really quickly touching on.  There is a poisoning of source material that has happened over the last few years as well, and I think that's really interesting to think about, because you now cannot know whether the source that you are using is considered poison by the other side, and that's in all cases.

Peter McCormack: Well, we had this with Russell Brand this last couple of weeks.  Russell Brand, across British media, has been branded as a right-wing conspiracy theorist.

Junseth: So, he's now poison?

Peter McCormack: He's poison.  He has been poisoned.  And one of the things I'm trying to do with this show is walk a delicate line, because I don't want to be poisoned by people I think would benefit from understanding about Bitcoin.  It's a very delicate line to try and walk to be intellectually honest, while at the same time not being poison.

Junseth: Well, I think there's another side too.  In your case, if it were to come out that Jonathan Haidt is in fact a poisonous source, you would be okay modifying your opinion on that source.

Peter McCormack: Of course, I modify my opinion all the time.

Junseth: I think that's really interesting.  That to me is the way in which the discussions have failed, is that people will not willingly discredit their own sources, or discredit the information that they have, or look for new information.  I think Jonathan Haidt's fine, I have no problem with him.  I just think it's really interesting that I know that there's going to be a contingent of people that will hear Jonathan Haidt's name and be like, "Oh, I knew he was right.  I knew that Peter was a rightie!"

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well like I say, it's all relative, it depends on where you are; that's where you consider somebody else.

Junseth: Isn't that like Jordan Peterson, right, or like a Camille Paglia, or something like that?  You bring them up and people will instantly pigeonhole you.  It's very interesting that sources now have political bents to them, and there are sources that are acceptable for a person to talk about and sources that are not acceptable.

Peter McCormack: Who out there do you think is a moderate or a centrist; and when I say moderate/centrist, they don't have to be centre opinion on each thing, but they are willing to navigate between?  How many actually can you think of that exist out there?

Junseth: The answer for every single person alive right now is, "Myself", and I find that I've never experienced that before.  Every single person I've talked to in the last five years has the same story that you have, "Among my friends, I am a right-wing Nazi.  Among everyone else, I'm a left-winger".  Everybody tells me this story, and they will use that as evidence that they themselves are the centrist in a conversation.

So, who does it?  I don't know anymore.  I don't know who actually is a centrist.  I don't know what a centrist looks like at the moment, because every single person, from the leftie who burns a building down to reform the system, they believe they're centrists; and QAnonners believe they're centrists; and the working dad --

Peter McCormack: Do they give claim to that?

Junseth: Yes.  I think some of them probably believe themselves to be radicals.  But I have found that there is a weird happening right now, where every single person believes that they are the centrist.  And if you hear Antifa talk, they'll talk about this, how the right has all Nazified, they're all right, "The centre now is Bernie Sanders".  That's become a meme in the US, "The centre is Bernie Sanders", and everyone at the moment believes they are the centrist.

Peter McCormack: It's weird, because I rarely hear people claim to be, or rarely do I see people try and navigate that.  But I understand what you're saying; again, it's all relative.

Junseth: All my friends think that I'm a liberal, and all of the people that I talk to outside of that group think that I'm a rightie.  That's the new, "My friend is gay"; it really is!  It's like, "I'm not homophobic, I have a gay friend".  It's like that, it's got that sort of amount of cachet.  Everyone believes themselves to be the centrist and I've never lived in a moment where that's true.

It used to be that people could pick a side, they've be like, "I'm kind of a liberal, I'm kind of conservative".  People would pick a side, they'd tell you what they were.  Now, everyone's embarrassed about their actual position and everyone believes they're centrist, and I've never seen that before.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to have to test that, because I'm not sure I agree that's true.

Junseth: Try it.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, look, appreciate this, man.  I just hope people start being a little bit kinder to each other and have empathy towards other opinions and stop fighting over everything, because I've thrown myself in the mix and found myself acting like a right prick sometimes.

Junseth: It's going to get weirder, dude, because if Donald Trump runs again, half the country's going to lose its mind again, and the other half is going to be -- the schadenfreude of the side that likes Donald Trump is going to be so high that it's not going to look like the last time he won, because the right has reacted to the left moving left and has moved right, and it's going to look much weirder, much more bifurcated, and it will be -- I guess I would say, the only hope we really have of that not happening is --

Peter McCormack: The Rock!

Junseth: The Rock runs!

Peter McCormack: The other one I heard was --

Junseth: Matthew McConaughey as President!

Peter McCormack: No, who's the guy who was in ER, married --

Danny Knowles: Oh, George Clooney?

Peter McCormack: George Clooney.

Junseth: Oh, he could run, I'd vote for him.  He's really good-looking!  I'm not even gay, and I think that!

Peter McCormack: I was told, if George Clooney runs, a lot of Republican women will vote for him!  Can you imagine that, Donald Trump versus the Rock?

Junseth: I mean, the problem with it is, anybody running on the left right now is captured by the left ideology.  On the right side, there's not as much of that capture, because there's a sort of worship and love of Trump, so it's more of capture by Trumpism, which is not conservatism.  The right coalition is captured by Trump, the left candidate is captured by the left coalition, and that's very strange and it's different.

Peter McCormack: But would you attribute a non-zero probability that it's Trump versus the Rock?

Junseth: I don't think --

Peter McCormack: If it happened, would -- because, what a time to be alive, Donald Trump versus the Rock in a presidential debate!

Junseth: I'm of the opinion that people have misunderstood the celebrity cachet that exists.  Name recognition is probably the most important thing in politics, and it was inevitable that celebrities figured that out.  And now that they have, going forward, I don't know why they didn't figure this out during Reagan.  That's what happens.  Elvis should have run for President, you know.  But now that that's a thing, it's not going to be four or five cycles here before we have a scientologist as President, and that's the thing.  It's a non-zero probability that it's Trump versus any celebrity.  It could be Trump versus Oprah for all I know.

Peter McCormack: I just think Trump versus the Rock would be just so entertaining!

Junseth: It would be hilarious!  I would like Trump versus Schwarzenegger, because they're both --

Peter McCormack: Well, Schwarzenegger couldn't run for President, because he's not native.

Junseth: Oh yeah, he's Austrian, he was born in Austria.

Peter McCormack: He's Austrian, yeah.

Junseth: He has that accent.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Junseth: But Obama was Kenyan, right?  Just kidding!

Peter McCormack: Oh, man!  All right, look, brilliant, that's a good time to end it.  Love you, dude, appreciate you coming in.  You can do this whenever the fuck you want.  You come on, we'll talk shit whenever, literally.

Junseth: Awesome, love it.  Bye.