WBD500 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin is Truth with Jeff Booth & Austin Hill

Release date: Wednesday 11th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jeff Booth & Austin Hill. 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.

Jeff Booth is an Entrepreneur and Author of ‘The Price of Tomorrow’ and Austin Hill is a cypherpunk & former Blockstream CEO. In this interview, we discuss the unique sense of hope in El Salvador, the loss of freedom, Bitcoin as objective truth and hope, Elon Musk and Twitter.

“Human rights don’t come easily, they actually have to be fought for; fought for with encryption, fought for with principled individuals, fought for with giving people other alternatives, and the best alternative is economic sovereignty.”

— Austin Hill

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Well, this is an absolute pleasure, Austin and Jeff together.  I'm really honoured to get a chance to sit down with you both and have a conversation.  I'm actually hoping I'm just going to fire a couple of questions and just leave it to you both, two of the smartest people I've ever met; and to get you together is incredible.  So, I'll start with you, Jeff, how are you?

Jeff Booth: Awesome.

Peter McCormack: Good.  Okay, are you well, Austin?

Austin Hill: Incredibly well.  Actually, feeling just a lot of sense of gratitude, just given especially recent events.  Jeff and I had the opportunity to be down in El Salvador, and it was just an incredible contrast to a lot of my expectations; and at the same time, you can't help but walk away and just get a dose of how blessed and how privileged we are.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm excited to talk to you both about El Salvador.  I've been five or six times now, over the space of a couple of years, a range of different experiences.  I love the country, I love the pupusas, I love the people.  I don't think it's always exactly what people expect, but I'm interested to get your perspectives.  Was it both your first time?

Jeff Booth: Yeah, first time in El Salvador, yes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.  And you agreed to go together and spend some time down there, meet some people.  Were Max and Stacy down there?

Jeff Booth: Yeah, we did an event down there with them. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, yeah, start with you, Jeff, I mean how do you sum up your experience?

Jeff Booth: So, Austin just said it to you.  I've travelled a lot of the world, so I've been to many Third World countries and emerging countries, and it was that.  But in all of those experiences, and El Salvador was no different, what you realise is that what you hear in the news is very different than I experienced on the ground.  People all over the world are similar to you and I, same hopes and dreams, dreams for a better future; and when you're actually meeting people on the ground and spending time with them in small villages, or whatever, you just realise tons of beautiful people that are trapped in a system that doesn't exactly look like that.

In El Salvador, I think there's a lot of bitcoiners that think, "Okay, Bitcoin's everywhere there", and it's really early, and it's an experiment.  It's tons of hope for the country, but also there's a lot of people, even in government, that don't know what's going to happen here.  So, it's early there, a lot of people are trying to find their way there.  So, yes, McDonald's takes it, Starbucks takes it, all the big chains take it, but some of the smaller places, especially outside El Zonte, don't yet.

We went to schools that were learning it, I went to a Bitcoin Meetup where you saw a guy, you probably know him, Bitcoin Taxi, and he's created a business and now he employs three other people as Bitcoin Taxi.  So, it's changed his life.  So, when you start to see that, you can't come away from that and not see hope and where this takes the country, but it is still really early.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean hope is a really profound word for the experience you have there, because it isn't what you expect.  You have this expectation you can get there and everyone's accepting Bitcoin, and understands that they don't, but you discover these little stories of people.  I mean, there's a guy down in Zonte who saved a bit of Bitcoin early on, and he ended up getting his teeth done; I don't know if you met him, the old guy with the cowboy hat, I always forget his name.

Jeff Booth: Oh, okay, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But you see these little pockets of stories and you're like, "Okay, there's some hope here, there's something for the future".  How about yourself, Austin, what was the experience like for you?

Austin Hill: So, I've been living in Latin America the last couple of years.  Certainly every Latin American country is very different, but I think all of them are suffering from some of the consequences of being very dependent on the US dollar, petrodollar as their base reserve currency, whether or not it was officially adopted, like in El Salvador, the US dollar peg or not.  So, I've certainly seen the effect that the pandemic and the money printing has had on economies that I've visited.

Seeing El Salvador was really different, in the sense that Jeff talks about hope, we were talking about this idea of hope; a lot of the hope I've seen in other places in Latin America, or the hopelessness, was tied to just an institutional belief that, "Our lot in life will never change", or a very kind of misdirected general sense of hope, whether that comes from religion, family, "Things can always be worse, but at least we have each other"; very generalised hope.

This was the first time you actually, when I talked to people, as we said, students, people on the streets, you ask them, "How do you feel?" and their answers were almost consistently, "I'm hopeful for the first time".  I would go a little deeper and say, "What's made you hopeful?"  Sometimes they knew we were involved in Bitcoin, sometimes we didn't want to broadcast it at all, and the stories had a very, very common theme, very much tied to a little bit of scepticism, but tons of hopefulness that this time it's different.  That was tied to how gangs were being treated, how the crackdown on violence was being done, a lot of hope that Bukele and his Administration live up to the promise; but some healthy scepticism.

But we went and talked to the children, we went to a school that was K to 12.  The school went from 100 students last year to 825 this year, because so many parents have re-enrolled their kids when they didn't before.  They had pulled their kids out of school and they were working in markets, they were working in family-owned businesses, and the school's now exploded.  We asked them, "How many do you lose to gangs?"  He said, "Since February, around 10% of the entire student body, I lost to gangs".  We were like, "Is it economic; is it peer pressure; are they being forced?"  He said, "It's pure economics".

He said, "One of the students, it was, I guess, two brothers, their mother got cancer.  They left school, worked for the gangs.  Their mother died, they came back to school".  And so, you're talking to these kids and you're asking -- we went into the classrooms and we just asked, "What's your favourite social network?"  And they're just like every other child, "It's TikTok", "It's WhatsApp".  "What's your favourite music app?"  "I'm into SoundCloud".  So, you see the power of TCP/IP that is this unifying force that has brought this kind of sense of equality and hope.

But when we talk about Bitcoin, I like to use the analogy of Snakes and Ladders, but the system as it's designed, the board game, has nothing but broken ladders!  It's impossible to climb up, but you can definitely slide down.  This is a country who's finally seeing a few ladders that work, and they're desperately just trying to land on that spot.  And so when you ask them, "What do you hope to be when you grow up?" it's like, "Graphic designer", and they're showing you their skills with Photoshop, and you just realise, you pair that with a little bit of education…  "What's your favourite video game?"  "Roblox"!

There's so much potential there and untapped human potential, that I think a little bit of resources and a little bit of opportunity creates this outsized outcome, and that's what left me very hopeful for what I saw.

Peter McCormack: Depending on when this goes out, we'll probably have to let people know and kind of timestamp it, but there are definitely some challenges with the Administration there right now, and this is something I've been fully conscious of is that, are we at risk sometimes of putting too much hope, too much pressure on what is a government, and what is an administration, that could essentially bring a risk to Bitcoin; and part of me has some real empathy for Bukele with a gang situation, where he has been accused of doing deals with the gangs to try and reduce violence.  And now, he's in a situation where he's trying to clamp down on the gangs and he's receiving criticism.

Whatever solution he tries, he seems to receive some criticism.  I have a massive amount of empathy there.  Are you okay talking about your experience while you were there, because you went there on the day martial law was announced?

Jeff Booth: So, let's get into that, and I gave a talk to the YPO group there in San Salvador.  And the YPO group, old money, typically very against Bukele.  The owner of the main newspaper there, very against Bukele there, and writes on freedoms; and so much so that he's like, "How dare you lock up people with no trial or anything else".  And again, because he's so against Bukele, and the whole group was, they were against Bitcoin.  So, there's a whole part of the audience that is very against Bitcoin and the wealthy of El Salvador, and I broke through that group.

But one of the things that he asked me, he said, "What is the worst thing about Bitcoin?  Name the worst thing about Bitcoin", and I said, "You have to accept that people you dislike completely are on it too and they make the network stronger; and over time, there's actually nothing that Bukele can do to hurt Bitcoin.  It will keep on emerging and he makes it stronger by bringing a whole bunch of people on.  And then that network will expand, and it will make people stronger.  And if he doesn't do what the people want, he will be ousted".

It's probably the most misunderstood thing about Bitcoin, because people trap their own beliefs about a person, hero or villain, and they attach that to the network, and it's completely independent.

Peter McCormack: My experience when I was there the last time filming was, there were anti-Bitcoin protests, but they were really anti-Bukele protests.  I made the point, if he'd have banned Bitcoin, they'd have all been protesting for it.

Jeff Booth: And that's the point, and you know this in this network.  It doesn't actually matter who you are.  Every additional voice making it stronger is bringing on more and more people and makes the entire network stronger; and that network changed.  That change from one system that cannot work anymore to a new system that can, actually puts people in control, a peer-to-peer network that people are more in control and the government loses power as a result.

So, he could be a narcissistic leader.  He might not be, he might be, I don't know him personally, but I know he made Bitcoin better and he's making Bitcoin better; and as a result, he's going to make a whole bunch of his people, how many people take hold of it and drive that out, how much business comes out of new Bitcoin start-ups out of that that creates real wealth in the country, and that's a feeling of hope.  So, you have to dismiss that personal attack, whatever side you're on, from Bitcoin the Network.

Austin Hill: So, my experience, obviously I share a lot of Jeff's views, especially when it comes to Bitcoin and the pros and cons.  I had a little bit of a contrasting experience.  I landed there with my fiancée on Saturday, they had declared martial law.  We were driving to El Zonte and I've travelled in dangerous countries before, so I take certain security precautions.  I'm taking pictures of the licence plates, I've notified Jeff and some security back-up teams I have in terms of, if necessary, deploy K&R insurance and come find me!  You just never know, right.

While that cautionary, "Oh my God, what have I got myself into?" and the worry can run rampant, I also just flat out asked one of the security drivers we had, I was like, "How do you feel?"  I mean, it obviously was a really rough week, and he was like, "I'm so hopeful".  I was like, "Really, what makes you hopeful?"  He told me this story, he said, "Six years ago, I shot two gang members while on the job" protecting his clients.

Peter McCormack: Wow, Jesus.

Jeff Booth: He goes, "I was sent to prison for four days and I was waiting to die.  And it was only because my security company decided to bail me out that I didn't end up in the main prison where I would be killed by the gangs for killing those two gang members.  So, I barely escaped dying".  He goes, "Every day coming to work, ever since then, I've lived in fear that if I ever was facing that decision, would I let my clients get killed, or would I put me and my family at risk?"  He goes, "The Bukeles have now made self-defence the standard, so if I shoot a bunch of gang members defending my clients, I'm not afraid of going to prison".  So he goes, "It's open season on criminals as it should be, because they're a scourge to our country".

Now, as a peace and love Canadian hippy, very blessed child who was not exposed to that level of violence, it can be shocking.  My answer wants to be Kumbaya.  Someone pulls a gun and I want to give them a, "Let's hug it out"!  But that's just not the reality of the environment, and it's a very blessed and frankly, very naïve point of view in how you deal with the real-world violence that he has grown up in.  So, that contrast is very vivid; but for him, the changes that are being made and the idea that criminals got thrown in jail without any trial is absolutely a blessing.

For me, who believes -- there's a famous quote that, "Peace is not the absence of violence, it's actually -- it's when you have the absence of justice --" or it's, "Only the reestablishment of justice with no violence can actually lead to peace".  So, you look at an environment like that, where there's systemic multi-generational violence, where the economic problems, and frankly a lot of the problems that were, in some regards, not necessarily their own --

Peter McCormack: Well, the gangs came from the US.

Austin Hill: The gangs came from a lot of the other countries and were exported.  Some of the economic sovereignty that they sought at various stages was essentially stolen from them, through a foreign policy that required them to be a debtor nation, that required through IMF loans and through selling off of their major industries, that turned their citizens into essentially slave workers.

Jeff Booth: This is a really important point, because a lot of people don't look at the cause, they look at the gangs, they get scared of the gangs and say, "That's a terrible country.  All of those people are terrible".  They don't realise that the kid that came out of school to save his mum had no other choice, no other economic choice, but to come out of school and join a gang.  And, if they were in the same situation, they would too.  The cause is an economic disparity, the cause of all of that is when people can't make it, and so they turn to gangs, because it's a way that they can make it.

Peter McCormack: Also, trying to understand the level of violence is hard to comprehend, I think, for some people who have never lived around this level of violence.  My friends, Jon and Danielle, run a project in San Salvador, which is they help get people who are addicted to drugs, alcohol, off the street and protect them, but they also help with kids and they also help with sex workers.  My last visit with them had a profound effect on me, because they told me an example of a situation you have why people maybe flee the country.

They said, one example was one of the gang members had identified a young girl, who has become his girlfriend in the gang; she was 12 years old.  She said, "What they will do, they go to the family and they say, 'Give me your daughter, or we're going to kill all of you', and if they don't give the daughter", they said, "they will kill them all".  And so, what happens is, the family has no choice but to hand over the daughter or flee, or stay and die.  They're not going to choose stay and die, and often the girl will get taken, she's a 12-year-old, and she will be raped and abused continually.  I think a lot of people can't comprehend that level of violence that exists.

Austin Hill: Obviously a horrible story, but you look at a number of other impoverished nations around the world, whether it was the rise of ISIS and ISIS brides, whether or not it was in other places, and when you go do a root cause analysis and you actually go to first principles, you realise a huge part of the rise of ISIS actually came from the famine in Syria that drove everyone from their rural environments into the cities, and forced this economic, and some will say climate-related, some will say it's just the world doing what the world does; whatever side of the argument, the reality was there was a drought.

The drought caused people to migrate.  That migration forced the breakdown and the structure of very small family, close-knit rural structures, and put them in a hostile environment, where they were exposed to new criminal elements that they had no ability to fight back.  Now, this has been institutionalised over multiple generations.  So, the norm and the acceptance of the norm just becomes something you start to live with.

The same way we've now gone 30 or 40 years without the idea that a country invades another country, and everyone wakes up shocked that Russia would ever do this in Ukraine.  It's like, "Okay, that's a very privileged point of view.  If you actually study history, you realise the writing was on the wall for a very long time, that Russia was very, very clear.  And there's a whole bunch of foreign policy messes and choices and consequences and economic, and fight over resources and energy, that led to this.  And that's not to assign blame to anyone.  The blame is obviously on a very, what I think most people would recognise as a hostile, irrational leader, who is using the weapons of the past to enact a dream of the past, which is to be the USSR.

But in each of these cases, you can actually go back to first principles and look at the acceptance of violence, or the acceptance of some of these violations of what we take for granted.  Human rights don't come easily; they actually have to be fought for.  Fought for with encryption, fought for with principled individuals, fought for with giving people other alternatives.  And the best alternative is economic sovereignty.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's a really interesting point with that.  So, when I was looking into the reports, where it came out that there were secret meetings within the President, between Bukele's Administration and the gangs; and one of the things that really stood out to me was, as part of the negotiation, and I don't know how much of this is true, but part of the negotiation to reduce the killings amongst the gangs, was the request from the gangs for jobs for the gang members.

Jeff Booth: It's all economic.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jeff Booth: So a lot of root cause analysis, we think we don't change our minds, we think we couldn't -- because we live in a certain world, we're not capable of those other things.  If you couldn't eat, if you couldn't feed your family, you would turn to whatever you could.  You'd steal, you'd do it.  And so, all of this stuff, I think even Jordan Peterson talks about it the wrong way around, and he's fantastic on all of our beliefs and our mind and how they're all stories, but those are created from economics.

Austin Hill: Incentive designs, there's massive amounts of psychology, the human brain, pleasure reward centres, what we're learning about neurology, whether or not that's an addiction, or whether or not that's pain avoidance, that Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, where you're basic safety, and then you move into sustenance, and then you move to community, love, self-actualisation, those aren't just abstract concepts.  But when you actually break them down into how the brain works, how we react to stress, how we make decisions, you can trace so many of those things back to incentive design, and so much of that gets lost.

We have talked previously, and I know this is something Jeff and I have talked a lot about, about the idea that, what if you could orange pill five or six American cities?  We talked about some of the ideas on this.  So, in one of the recent discussions I had with some friends who are working on this, just for people who haven't listened, the idea is could you take a city of anywhere from 50, 25,000, 50,000, all the way up to maybe 750,000 or 1 million people, and actually orange pill the entire city, funded in part by bonds, like what El Salvador is doing?

So, if the city passes certain Bitcoin-friendly laws, there could be grants essentially under something called the zero-coupon bond, which is how they fund usually municipal, like water projects, recycling plants, where there's a 25-year balloon payment at the end.  So, could you actually do that by creating a Bitcoin incentive bond, where every citizen who moves, stays and becomes a productive member of society, can actually earn Bitcoin, and almost we design the Blockstream incentive bond for all our employees, there's a vesting schedule and you've designed an incentive system?

One of the candidate cities that we were talking to actually said, "Okay, we're going to do it, but we want a sister city to do it, and the sister city we want has the largest prison in the state.  And, we want to include the Bitcoin bond for all prisoners".

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Austin Hill: They're like, "We want to give vested Bitcoin to every prisoner, so if they're a model prisoner, they get parole, they stay off drugs, they get a job; at the end of seven years, they actually get a Bitcoin, just like every other citizen who resides in the city", because these guys so believe that incentive design can actually create positive incentives.  And if prisoners know, "I can get out of prison and maybe be able to actually buy a house, or be able to reform myself, there is a path back from where I was to salvation", they believe that's actually a worthwhile thing for the community and society.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is what Shellenberger has discussed a lot with the issues in San Francisco, he's talking about the incentive.  There is no incentive for people to give up drugs; there's no incentive.  If you overdose, you're picked up by an ambulance, you're resuscitated, you're put back on the street and you're --

Austin Hill: There's no incentive not to break into a car.  There are literally street signs saying, "Welcome to a car break-in neighbourhood.  Please don't leave anything in your car, because we do not report car break-ins".  So, it's literally an advertisement on the street!

Peter McCormack: It happened to us.

Jeff Booth: Yeah, I saw that.

Peter McCormack: We had dinner, our window was smashed in.  But he was saying, the problem is what you need to change is you need to change the incentive model.  There needs to be a structure in place where, if you're an addict and you overdose, you have two choices: you can either go into recovery; or, you can go to jail.  It's one of the two.  Then, you give people a reason to work on themselves, but these incentives don't exist.

Jeff Booth: Well, the incentive design of the entire economic system, the fiat system, is opposite to what will happen.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Jeff Booth: That incentive is driving everything else.  So, when you look through the lens and you see the world is getting more polarised, it's designed to get more polarised.  And, if you knew I can make more money at the top of this system, whether I go into politics or whatever, to be able to make more money, or essentially socialise losses if I'm too big to fail, then you're going to do more of that for your share of more of the world.

Then, as you do that and society just gets ripped apart, they don't see that there's somebody on the ground in El Salvador on the other side of that bet joining a gang; they don't see it at all.  They say, "Well, I won my bet", and they don't see that incentive.  That incentive design all around the world is changing in Bitcoin, and there's nothing that can stop it.

Austin Hill: This is something interesting Jeff and I talked about at our event.  People think that because digital scarcity exists, that Bitcoin is a zero sum gain.  It's actually not, because the growth of Bitcoin, the size of it as a lifeboat, you know, I use this analogy and this why sometimes I -- I don't judge how anyone becomes a bitcoiner.  Bitcoin is for everyone and everyone's going to enjoy Bitcoin, spread it, use their evangelism to their right.

I, for a very long time, have shied away from some of the -- I love the meme cultures, I laugh at memes, I enjoy them; but some of the memes, I feel, are punching down.  I use the example of, "Have fun staying poor".  I use the analogy of, if I see someone drowning, I'm never going to sit there and say, "Have fun drowning.  You had a chance to get a lifeboat, aren't you dumb"; that's just not in my humanity.  I'm going to look at them and say, "Oh my God, how do we get them on the lifeboat; how do we make enough room for them?"

Every one of us who Jeff talks about Bitcoin being good for your enemies, or you have to accept that your enemies may use it, people you hate, and it makes you stronger, that is increasing the size of the lifeboat everywhere; good, bad, people you agree with, people you disagree with.  And, we want the lifeboat to be as big as possible with as much air and as much resistance to sinking as possible, because if everyone is going to drown, those of us who are in those lifeboats are going to get dragged under with them.

Jeff uses the analogy, and it was one of the earliest comments he gave when we were getting to know each other, "Show me one point in history when you can build walls big enough to keep the haves from the have-nots".  If Titanic is going down, the people who are cheering for it and can't wait for it thinking, "I have got my lifeboat and who cares about the rest?" are kind of ignorant of history.  I mean, when the Titanic went down, you could have been the richest guy or the poorest; there was no guarantee that your lifeboat wasn't going to get toppled by a bunch of people struggling to get onto the lifeboat.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why I'm not a huge fan of the citadel discussions, because for me the citadel discussion feels like an idea around those who have managed to accumulate enough wealth, get to move into a walled garden and escape.

Jeff Booth: It wouldn't work.

Peter McCormack: Well, one, it wouldn't work; but also, I feel it's an idea based around privilege.  And you know, that's not to say that people haven't worked hard and accumulated wealth honestly.  But it still feels like, "Let's escape from the collective issues in society as an individualist, and I'll go and position myself with my guns and my wealth away from everybody else".

Austin Hill: Yeah, aside from functionally it won't work, because we talked about this in our discussion about singularity tech and the asymmetric abilities of new technologies.  So, a person's ability to actually protect against, "I can build steel gates"; great, steel gates don't work anymore, because of drones, because of plasma torches, because of this, because of that.  So, I put up some new energy grid with my fission nuclear reactor that I invested in.  Great, that's not going to hold up against some guy who has new tunnelling tech.

So, it's just this cat and mouse game that will never, ever give you the security that you want; and the investment of that frankly just doesn't lead to happiness, when you're constantly looking and saying, "Who is going to take my stuff away from me?" because there's this massive divide between those who have and those who have not; and does not, in my mind, lead to happiness.  You can have all the eggs from the farm, but if you're the single chicken surrounded by foxes, it doesn't lead to a lot of good-quality eggs.  You're not laying good-quality eggs, you're waiting to be eaten.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why I've been recently exploring this idea of freedom and really trying to understand.  When some people are claiming they're not free, or they've got a pursuit of freedom, I'm trying to understand what that really means for people.  I'm often a defender of democracy, and I know all its flaws, but the response can often be that I'm a statist, used as a pejorative.  But what I'm actually trying to understand is, what do you mean; what is the freedom that you don't have that you want?  Do you want absolute liberty but, like you say, have to have the correct or the right amount of weaponry, or accumulate the right amount of guns to protect yourself, always looking over your shoulder?

I think we've done a lot in western liberal democracies over centuries to fight for the freedoms we have, and we have it pretty good and I'm like, we have pretty good property rights in the UK and in the US, you live in a pretty safe society fairly.  What is this next level freedom that you want?  I look around the rest of the world, and Gladstein quotes that half a billion people live under authoritarian rule.

Austin Hill: Gladstein's incredible on this.  I mean, he talks about some of their tests on whether or not you live in a free society: can you go to a Gay Pride parade?  Can you make a career insulting your leader and make $1 million?  These are some of the tests that they use to decide, "Do you live in a free society?"  People have asked him and I've seen him talk very eloquently about a lot of what people think are a lack of freedoms: cancel culture, culture of the vibe, the infighting are actually just consequences of this economic incentive in the war that are being designed to get people distracted and fighting together.  And it's the illusion that you're losing your freedoms, when people around the world actually have no freedoms, and they are willing to put their life on the lines to get those freedoms.

Jeff Booth: It is not an illusion that you're losing your freedoms.  If we vote for an economic system and most of that economic system is hidden from us through inflation and we have no vote in that, then can we say we live in a democracy where our vote counts?  If governments have to, structurally have to inflate or the whole thing collapses, and that inflation steals our time, it's a theft and it steals our time, and that must get bigger and bigger, as we vote for people who have to lie to us more; once we see under the curtain of that lie, they have to be able to -- in Canada right now, they're deciding what is good content on the internet.

That takes my right to choose away and it puts it under government control, so they can keep up an illusion of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.  So, if I looked back 20 years, 30 years, it might have been there all the time, but the rate of my freedoms going away, I didn't grow up in that society.  And I'm measuring, and a lot of people are measuring, you might be, what you grew up with and thinking that that's going to be here in 20 years.  If you just play these out without Bitcoin, that will not be here in 20 years.

Peter McCormack: I'm with you, I agree there is a decline in freedom at the moment.  If freedom is a spectrum, we're on a decline at the moment, whether it's the US, whether it's Canada, whether it's the UK, there is a decline.  And I like the idea of defending our freedoms and defending democracy.  We understand the issues with the current monetary system, the monetary misinformation that we talked about in our last interview.  I think we're in a very small minority that understand that.  So, when people are voting, I don't think they realise they're voting in a system that's designed to break them.

Jeff Booth: So, carry that forward.  That's actually where I'm sympathetic to a bunch of the bitcoiners that are hardliners here, even though I don't agree with citadels as an answer, but I'm totally sympathetic to where they're going, because they see where this takes us, and it does take us there.  And then they say, "Okay, wait, those people don't understand what we're talking about".  And then this podcast that touches those people and makes it important gets banned by YouTube.  And if government can tell us what is right and what is wrong, then our freedoms are completely gone.

It has to happen, not it might happen.  Out of the existing system, it's a structural system that has to get worse, and the only way a structural system saves itself is by taking away the individual rights and freedoms.

Peter McCormack: But we do have an opportunity to fight against this here.  If we were in China and the CBDC has been implemented, nobody can do anything about it.

Jeff Booth: Forever.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, just to finish.  Whereas, the CBDC that was announced in the UK, they wanted to call it Britcoin, there are people publicly talking against it.  And yes, it could be banned as speech, but it isn't and right now people are trying to talk against it.  And, we will get to vote in a democracy which is based on a government that could implement that system.  So what I'm saying is, I think we have a decline in freedoms, but we have the opportunity to fight to defend them.

Jeff Booth: And this is a really great debate talking point.  I understand all the sides of it.  But now, you just said 95%, 99% of the people don't know what we're talking about.

Peter McCormack: Whatever that number is, yeah.

Jeff Booth: A huge amount of the population is completely wool pulled over their eyes, they have no idea.  Now let's say you have the inflation rate and the government says, "We're going to print more money so we can give you more money, but it has to be done through CBDC", and nobody knows what we're talking about.  What do you think happens?

Peter McCormack: Look, I know people will take the money, of course.

Jeff Booth: They'll take the money on the CBDC, all day long.

Peter McCormack: Because they're desperate, yeah.

Jeff Booth: Because the desperation came from the government policies in the first place that created the desperation.  And then, they're going to use the same desperation to drive a CBDC.  So, that's why there's this fight, or I know Bitcoin's an idea, I try not to attack the system because it's not a people, it's just a system that's going to keep doing this, but that's why this idea is so important.  That's why, if you're in Bitcoin, you almost can't stop talking about it, you want to spend more time in it, because it's that important.

Austin Hill: And I somewhat agree with what Jeff said, and I may need to clarify.  I also have a lot of sympathy.  I mean, I've seen first-hand what some of the early developers, or early people in Bitcoin have had to deal with with shitcoiners, with lies, with FUD, with constantly being misaligned, where people came in and originally were very supportive of Bitcoin, and then flipped and became altcoiners or shitcoiners and scammers.  So, you develop this almost immune response system that, almost like a reaction to COVID can have, it protects you; your immune system responds to protect you.

But a cytokine storm can be created where the immune system response actually goes into overdrive, and starts to become the actual enemy of the good.  So to a certain degree, these reactions, the meme culture, the calling of shitcoins, the attacking, anyone who attacks Bitcoin, being very, very sceptical of mainstream media, environmentalism and climate issues being used to attack Bitcoin and all the FUD that goes with that, and you can totally understand why people are up in arms and just saying, "I'm sorry, these are lies perpetuated to keep people in economic slavery", and be really, really upset by that.

I just think part of maturing, and part of, I think, where Bitcoin needs to go, it served us incredibly well as a community.  We're now reaching out to people who are on further and further on the edges, who are more programmed by that stuff.  And how you reach a lot of these people is you need to figure out a way to communicate with them, where they're at, not where you're at.

Peter McCormack: I completely agree.  I mean, this is something we discuss continually here.  The podcast reviews, we get reviews on Apple and I get an email every week from Chartable telling me them.  I've had two people recently say, "I'm done with the podcast, there's too many right-leaning libertarians", and we laugh because we think we're probably the most broad Bitcoin show there is.  We've had people like Ben Arc and Margot Paez, who are lefties, who want to talk about Bitcoin, and we're trying to bring that broad spectrum in now.

All the libertarians have heard of Bitcoin, they all know about it now.  We're going to the masses and we're trying to say, "How do we open up this dialogue?  How do we make people not scared of Bitcoin?  It doesn't matter whether you're on the left, the right, the centre, how do we make it for everyone?"

Jeff Booth: It's funny you just said libertarians.  When I spoke at the Austrian Conference, the Central Bank, there were a bunch of libertarians in the room and many of them didn't own Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I know, it always fascinates me.

Jeff Booth: I'm like, really?  But again, if you're on the left and you truly want to lift people out of poverty, I actually cannot believe that they're not all over Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Austin Hill: I've seen it in Canada.  So, I've sat down with central bankers, people on the left, on the right in Canada, especially when I was living in Canada and through my work with Blockstream and being involved in Bitcoin, we were trying to educate everyone; and really, as a bipartisan issue, just all Canadians.  And we did this in other countries as well.  So, I was very, very comfortable sitting down with conservatives, who hated government spending and were very up in arms about rising government spending, who wanted to drill more pipelines, use more fossil fuels, use the oil sands and be able to talk to them about Bitcoin as a tool for economic sovereignty, economic liberty, and for uplifting everyone's ability to pull themselves up the economic ladder.

We went from everything from first nation reserves to crippling socialised healthcare system, how does Bitcoin end up benefiting, to things like UBI, which they were adamantly against, because they view it as just worse than the existing social programmes that exist.  But when you start to say, "You know what, what is the goal of UBI?"  If you go back to first principles, UBI is an assumed answer to a very real problem.  If people have no safety net and jobs don't exist, and this ability to pull yourself up an economic ladder is totally outside of the reach of everyone, people eventually fall into hopelessness, crime, despair; that is just a natural state of someone without opportunity.

As we see computers, technology, AI, as we see the shift of jobs happen so quickly such that you were trained as a truck driver, and now you have to go train as an empathy nurse to replace a robot who has no empathy; that is literally one of the jobs that's been identified --

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Austin Hill: One of the fastest-growing jobs in the next ten years will be what's called an empathy nurse, and it's someone who actually works with the dying, the elderly and is just there to listen to them as a human empathy node.

Jeff Booth: And then, that will be taken by AI.

Austin Hill: And eventually, that's going to be taken by a robot and an AI too.

Peter McCormack: Is there anything that the robots can't take?

Jeff Booth: No.

Austin Hill: Over time, no.

Jeff Booth: Over time, no.  And, there's a whole bunch of --

Austin Hill: Sex workers, all these things will be replaced.  I mean, already there's experiments on all of these.  You just name -- any function that can be automated will be automated over the course of a period of time.  And so, what do humans end up being good at?

Peter McCormack: How close are we to having a robot that can replace a podcast producer?!

Jeff Booth: Not you, Peter, never!

Austin Hill: Never you!

Peter McCormack: And can't replace my assistant, Emma, ever!  Yeah, I mean look, it's --

Jeff Booth: But just come back to that, because all of the other nonsense we talk about is that thing happening at a structural level that it will not stop, it's going to keep on going, it's going to move at an incredible pace.  And every politician will tell you, "We're going to create more jobs, more jobs, we're going to drive more growth".  What they're really saying is, "We're going to decrease your real wages through inflation to pay you less to be able to be on the mouse wheel forever".  That's what they're really saying, because that's what the "more jobs" are doing; well, technology's going to take them anyway.

So even Andrew Yang, he came out with the same thing I came out with.  I think World Economic Forum understands the same thing I came out with.  But the free market of ideas, I just had a different solution, and my solution was radical, that why wouldn't we let prices fall as it happened and save our time?  And it sounds really radical, but it's not radical at all!

Austin Hill: More importantly, by creating a culture with the right incentives, where you create a culture of ownership that recognises the time preference of actual sound money, you can totally change -- a lot of these social engineering or societal issues that you want to deal with start to actually take on new meaning.

Jeff Booth: They fall away.

Austin Hill: But things that seemed impossible before, actually you can start to reapproach them and say, "What if?"  I'm not saying we have all the answers.  I am not one of these people who thinks every single solution gets solved with Bitcoin.  But I think a lot of things that didn't work in the past, because they were all based off perpetuating a lie around bad incentive design, bad economics and keeping this image that somehow the government's going to pick winners and losers, and if you just work hard enough and if you just are honest, you can make it too.

Peter McCormack: Jeff, can I just ask you a question, because you mentioned talking about the system is designed in a way to keep us almost reliant upon the government and desperate, and it's a perpetual problem that gets increasingly worse for us.  Is your belief that when you say it's there by design, there are people that actually want this; or, is this just a natural outcome from the incentives of the system?

Jeff Booth: I'm going to try to take it out of our own -- to remove our own bias, and just imagine another planet trying to move to a multiplanetary species.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Jeff Booth: You would assume that that planet would first -- creatures living on that planet would have to assume tribes or groups to be able to protect themselves, develop villages, Dunbar's number here; but then they would expand.  And to trade between other groups, they'd have to agree on something as a currency.  And that currency, it would probably be the hardest material.  It might start at seashells, or whatever on that planet, but then it would over time form the hardest currency.

That currency couldn't be moved around at the velocity of the population growing and expanding global trade on that planet.  So, you would build on top of it, you'd build a credit-based system, so now you could get velocity in your money so you could move faster.  But the credit-based system on top of that hard money would be always subject to human nature boom-bust cycles, and as the boom cycle got too big, and the incentives to remove the hard money from it were just naturally -- and then that society would go to war to be able to decide the winner of the war and come back to hard money.

Austin Hill: There are sci-fi books that talk about this on, like, Mars and the hardest asset they use is actually oxygen. 

Jeff Booth: So, no matter where you are on the planet, if you have to get off to a multiplanetary species, the only way to get to a multiplanetary species, because our human bodies can't stand the time to get to other planets, would have to be our consciousness would move into robots.  We would be merging with machines and such.  We don't know exactly what that looks like, but it's coming.

The transition step from the time, as that society built the technology to be able to do 3D printing of asteroids and materials and form factor, and all of this technology to be a multiplanetary species, would be the exact same time that if they didn't move to a currency that allowed that technology to enable them to do that, they would blow up their planet.  And through that thought experiment, because that technology to be able to do that allows us to -- we don't need human labour. 

But the entire construct of the free market was around the division of labour, and the division of labour, how much our wages are all over the world, was a huge part of getting there.  The same thing would happen on any other planet.  So the very same thing, that technology component, to be a multiplanetary species, if that society couldn't transition into something away from that hard material, the network itself could provide velocity, because that's what Bitcoin does, you can have unlimited velocity in money from the network, traded peer-to-peer all around the world; unless you could do that, probably what that means is a great filter is in front of us.

What you're seeing playing out in the world right now and the risk of real war all over the world, is actually what I think is happening and is caused by that exact same thing.  It's caused by technology advancing at a pace that requires a different system.

Austin Hill: This same technology curve, the same shift that's happening, the trends that Jeff talks about, they certainly give rise to this idea that digital scarcity ends up having to be a precursor to actually building the idea exchange, the highly functioning society that allows, at scale, us to manage the transition into the future.  Without it, there is inevitably a move towards perpetuating the lie, continuing the lie. 

At one point, the technologies of asymmetric warfare and mass destruction get big enough, far enough, that if you have not caught up in moving away from the lie and actually moving everyone up the economic ladder so that there is some sort of shared consciousness, shared responsibility, shared hope that is predominant, doesn't have to be everywhere, because you have to be a realist; but it has to be more the default than the rarity.  Because, if it is the default behaviour and there is an overall sense of hope and optimism, and it is being seen as more equal opportunity with lots of those economic ladders to climb up off, then people are going to spend their time just trying to land on the square with the economic ladder; they're not going to spend all their time looking over their shoulders to see, did I land on a snake and who do I need to take down with me if I'm going to be going down the snake.

Peter McCormack: But if this does help everyone climb the economic ladder, the incentive therefore is, for politicians who want to be successful and maintain a successful career in politics and have a legacy, that Bitcoin adoption is the logical solution.

Jeff Booth: That's what's happening, but it's happening at a rate -- the rate that that happens is exactly what Austin's talking about.  The rate that that happens, and it will happen through incentives, the same incentives, because it gives politicians that couldn't get elected under the other system, power to tell the truth and expose a lie and get elected from this.  And as more and more of us choose that, it happens.

Then, the incentives are aligned where, instead of citadels, every different country choosing Bitcoin, or every different nation or network of people choosing Bitcoin, is going to design the system that they want with representation.  And one politician might say, "We need 20% flat tax on everything we do to be able to provide all of these services", and we will vote with our feet and our businesses to move there if we like that.  And another politician might say, "No, we can do it for 5%", and you're just going to scorecard your opportunities and you're going to say, "This is the domain I want to move to.

Austin Hill: So, there's a famous quote, I can't remember who wrote it, and I'm going to butcher the quote, but it says something to the degree of, "The greatest liar you will ever meet is the one you meet every morning in the mirror", and it is based off this idea that the human brain, and its ability to lie to itself, is a necessary part of human evolution.  We need to create this sense of hope, we need to be able to look at risks and lie to ourselves about how serious these risks are, just to get over fear, just to be able to take on some sense of risk-taking, to normalise what is at times a very reactive…

So, in many respects, the ability to lie to ourselves, lie to ourselves about our past, about pain we suffered, so that it actually can reside into the past, so that it's not ever present, have memories that fade; these are all necessary parts of how the human brain -- and part of that is the ability to lie to yourself.  But that ability to lie to ourselves makes us so susceptible to wanting to believe other people's lies.  It just opens us up, because we want to believe the lie, because the lie feels so good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Austin Hill: So, it takes someone who's actually gone through some heartache, gone through some suffering, who has looked at themselves in the mirror, I think, more times than not to say, "You know what, my life's actually happier when I don't lie to myself".  That sense of maturity, oftentimes privilege, is something people can't do that often when they're running for their lives and trying to avoid getting shot every morning; you don't spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, you spend all your time looking for, "Where do I get my next meal?"

Jeff Booth: Even take that same thing and move up the ladder to people you think are super-successful, or politicians; let's use Elizabeth Warren as an example, and I know what people think.  But what do you think her base tells her?

Peter McCormack: Well, with regards to what?

Jeff Booth: Would her base throw flowers, parties, parades as she's going after the rich people?

Peter McCormack: Possibly, it depends.

Jeff Booth: She's getting emails all the time, "Thank you, thank you", and she feels like, "Wow, I'm saving all of these people", when in fact her policies are actually destroying them.  But they believe they're saving them, and she's caught in that lie and can see no way out of it, because actually telling them, "I was wrong", destroys her entire power base over anything else.

Austin Hill: And her self-narrative.

Jeff Booth: And her self-narrative.

Austin Hill: Her self-narrative is, "I am fighting for the people, the same way I did when I instituted the Financial Oversight Board, following the 2008 collapse", and she actually did do.

Peter McCormack: She did a great job.

Austin Hill: A great job.  So for her, this is a continuation of the same mission to say, "Look at these billionaires who stole all of this wealth during the pandemic at the expense of the little guy", totally ignoring the fact that the billionaires didn't do it, the government did it with money printing.

Jeff Booth: The system.

Austin Hill: And the system created -- you could have sat on your arse and been a horrible businessman and seen your wealth increase incredibly high.  So, it wasn't some mad genius, only these rich tech executives that are so smart to run the world, that are the evil Illuminati of the world, somehow stole this money.  No!

Jeff Booth: It was the system.

Austin Hill: It was the system.

Jeff Booth: But her total persona is inside that, and she believes it.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure she can believe some of the things she's said recently, which are just such obvious lies, like blaming or accusing companies of profiteering, when it's clearly inflation.  I don't believe she doesn't realise she's lying.

Jeff Booth: And maybe, but do you know anybody else, maybe a friend, who got so over their skis on their belief system that was clearly wrong that they've protected it at all costs?

Peter McCormack: No, I believe the incentive system is, for her, to lie.  But this takes me to the point, Jeff, that I'm really liking this, in that a lot of the conversations I like are that the new externalities have come from Bitcoin.  So, we've talked a lot previously about how Bitcoin mining is changing the energy system, and that is an amazing thing, which I doubt Satoshi thought of.  But saying that, Hal Finney himself, somebody dug out an old tweet of his talking about the energy sector.  But maybe he didn't, maybe he did; but I doubt he did.

I like this idea, you know, we talked, again I'm repeating our last interview, but talked about the misinformation in money.  And the misinformation in money incentivised people to lie.  When there's no misinformation in money, when there is only truth, it incentivises the politicians to tell the truth.

Jeff Booth: They have to.

Peter McCormack: They have to tell the truth.  So this idea, going back to what I said earlier, I'm not a burn-the-system-down guy, I want to strengthen democracy.  So, if truth around money in Bitcoin forces politicians to tell the truth, then what we do is we strengthen democracy.

Jeff Booth: Yes.

Austin Hill: One of the things we talked earlier, I mentioned this idea of some of what's happening in truth machine development.  There's these 40 functional MRIs that are now able to go into your thoughts, they're able to read images, and we are getting very close to the idea of a totally 100% accurate truth machine, that will remove essentially anyone's ability to lie.  It will do a series of biofeedback micro-expressions, brain imaging, such that people will not be able to lie.  And those technologies will be mass consumerised so that you will have something on your watch that will essentially tell you, this person's a liar or not, every time they open their mouth.

Peter McCormack: It sounds very Black Mirror.

Austin Hill: Very Black Mirror, very scary.  Society's not ready for that.

Peter McCormack: No.

Austin Hill: But you start saying, okay, if Bitcoin moves people towards more honesty, more self-awareness, a time preference, and moves people to actually just abandon the lie and embrace the truth, it actually acts the way it should, which is a truth-sayer driving more people towards the truth and moving society to a framework where we actually have objective truth and we can depend on it, because that is the purpose of the blockchain: objective truth that we can rely on.

So much of what we deal with in society is subjective and it's not well-suited to AI and blockchains, and we like to say, "Bitcoin fixes this", when in fact there's a lot of human messiness.  But the underlying systems and the base technology should move society and humanity towards that objective truth, and much faster, for those that embrace it.  And I think part of our job is to help more people understand it and embrace it earlier, in preparation for the time when it will be forced on them; because, any technology or any social change that is forced on people inevitably leads to a very violent reaction.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Jeff Booth: Because what he just said, and adding on to, say, that truth machine, the real risk is if that becomes in a central bank digital currency, where that's used as a control function for everybody else; that becomes a real risk.

Austin Hill: Yeah, "Please answer the truth machine before you authorise this transaction.  Did you use this money to spread lies about our leaders?  Did you use money to disagree with the current narrative?  I'm sorry, your transaction is not approved"!

Peter McCormack: I know, which sounds very 1984.  Five to six years ago, I said --

Austin Hill: It just happened last month in Canada!

Peter McCormack: Well, this is what I was going to say.  I was going to say, "Well, not in my country".  It literally has just happened in Canada, and it's shocking.

Jeff Booth: Did you see the recent, Alex Gladstein just put this up, but in China, the people singing in lockdown from their high-rises; did you see this?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've seen them.

Jeff Booth: And the drone coming by to say, "Go inside.  No singing here.  Curb your ability to…"  You want a dystopian future where you actually have to -- where you can't get out, and technology will take -- if you concentrate that much power through technology in a couple of people's hands, or a nation's hands, that's what will happen.  And if it's not that leader, if that benevolent leader that you love won't do it, then their son will.  It locks humanity in forever to a system that you can -- the vast majority of people are the silent majority that don't stand up against the worst crimes around.  And why, in a totalitarian society, don't they?  Because the people that do stand up go get shot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jeff Booth: So, if most people won't stand up today, what do you think will happen with tools of control that completely change the ability for the controller to do that at scale?

Peter McCormack: This is why I think it's so important to get the communications with this into politics in the right way, because a US Government that fears China, who is considering a CBDC and similar controls that China has, you have to do a better job of control than China, and you can't.

Jeff Booth: You can't.

Peter McCormack: You cannot beat China at the control game, so beat them at the freedom game, beat them at the truth machine.

Austin Hill: So, Jeff and I did an interesting thought experiment, so we were playing out the ideas.  One of the arguments against Bitcoin that often gets repeated, especially by gold bugs, is the idea that when -- because they agree with bitcoiners on almost all things, in terms of the root cause of the problem, government spending, inflation; they just believe that gold is real, Bitcoin not real.  And obviously, a lot of gold bugs have evolved from that.  Those who actually study it and look at it see that it is a better form.

Jeff Booth: Larry Lepard.

Austin Hill: Yeah, Larry's incredible on that.  Many of them are very informed and have actually looked at it with the same honest analysis that led them to the conclusions about gold.  But one criticism I've heard levelled on this is, when the inevitable reset happens, why would the government ever choose Bitcoin; because, if they're late to the party, one of the last currencies standing, why wouldn't they just go back to the gold standard, because they hold all the gold?

We were going back and forth and Jeff said, "For all the countries that got pushed off the gold standard, who have no gold anymore, why would they ever go back to that system and trust the US or trust China or trust Russia, or trust the few countries who actually have gold?"  They have no incentive to agree to the system, so the currency wars continue, there is no international reserve currency, so it is literally impossible to go back to the past and adopt that system.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jeff Booth: China, Russia and US would have to get together and agree, and then count each other's reserves, and who knows who has --

Austin Hill: And trust each other.

Jeff Booth: And trust each other at the expense of every other nation, to be able to go back to that.  It's nonsense.

Austin Hill: But when you see these systems on these kind of endgames and you do this wargames scenario, you realise, to your point, the opportunity to actually change people's perception of their freedoms, of their everyday happiness, and have that associated with pro-privacy, pro-freedom technologies like Bitcoin; Bitcoin is not the only one, it's just the best one and the only one, in the monetary sense, that has ever come along, but there are other technologies. 

When people no longer live in fear and actually feel like, "Actually, I can control my data", they live in fear of surveillance, so some other cypherpunk technologies that allow people to feel like, "You know what, I'm not living in fear of being tracked every day.  I can actually go about my life.  I can talk to my neighbour, I can speak freely about my disagreements with the government, without fear that if I say the wrong thing, I'm going to be thrown in jail".

By embedding these pro-privacy, pro-individual, self-sovereign technologies, and I'm a big fan recently of expanding those beyond just monetary, because I think money is at the base of it, but money in of itself, as we're seeing, isn't enough.  People were using Bitcoin in Canada, and they were targeted by Chainalysis, they were targeted by who they were, they were targeted based off donating to something that was completely legal at the time that the government retroactively said, "We don't think it's legal anymore". 

So, we want to create an environment where people don't feel like the single misstep, or the single wrong word, or speaking out for something you love will somehow come back on you.  Because what eventually ends up happening is you get this kind of silent self-censorship, this natural inclination to, "I'm never going to take any risk, I'm not going to talk", and our society depends, the future of our existence as humans depends on our ability to stand up on the shoulders of people before us and say, "I'm willing to take it one step further and take some risk".

If the Chinese model, if these totalitarian models that have everyone living in fear, become the dominant and CBDCs are part of that, totalitarian controls, oligarchies, like you said, democracy's incredibly horrible, but it's the best system of a whole bunch of horrible systems.  But if people don't have that freedom to say, "I am willing to go take a risk and I can do it for economic improvement, I can do it for happiness improvement, I can do it just to get out there and try my hand as a stand-up comedian and say, 'Fuck you' to power, because I think I might be funny, even though I get laughed off stage, but do that in an environment without fear", if we rob them of that, we build a couple more generations that grow up in this environment of fear, I really am afraid for our ability for humanity.

I want to remind people, I am the most hopeful technologist and optimist you'll ever see.  A friend of mine recently said, "Austin", he goes, "I love your podcast, but why does every Bitcoin podcast end with, 'The world is falling down and the system has to die and everyone's going to end up -- the end of the world is coming'?"  I'm like, "You're missing the part of the message.  Bitcoin is that life raft.  The reason we do what we do is because we believe this can be averted, or at least softened".  Some things are inevitable, but the change is coming.  But it doesn't have to come with the violence and the human suffering that would happen without Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: A peaceful revolution.

Jeff Booth: And just building on that, I'm starting a Bitcoin-only ecosystem fund, and then there's a bunch of others that are starting, and why are they starting and why am I doing this?  Because, what I realised is, yes, I have a whole bunch of other investments and I still spend a lot of time educating Bitcoin or doing this.  But then I go back to my work and the other work, and as I understand what Bitcoin can become, not just the network and what happens and all the entrepreneurs on top of it that are building the next wave of innovation, you look at that and you go, "Wait, I love this industry, I love the people that are doing this, and I'm going to spend more time here advancing the industry that's going to make this happen".

It won't be just me, and why?  Because there's such an asymmetric bet for all of the new technology stack that's coming out on top of this protocol, and I don't think that's well understood by most people today, because they're building on altcoins and stuff that are unstable foundations.  It's not the entrepreneurs building on top of them; those entrepreneurs are just trying to develop something that matters.  But when they understand that, "Wait, I can build it on a protocol that is stable", and they couldn't a long time ago, they couldn't last year, but now they can; and all of this technology is now opening up to where this is going to be this wild growth curve in what's to come.  And I think, "Why wouldn't I invest my time there?" because it's a fun, asymmetric bet, and so I can spend more time.

You can see all of the people around this space diving in and wanting to spend more time.  That tells you something.  That tells you something where the world's going, and that world is really hopeful.

Peter McCormack: Austin, just circling back to what you mentioned previously about the importance of free speech, but with all of this, what do you make of Elon Musk's Twitter move?  I think it's super-interesting.  He's clearly somebody who I do believe is a supporter of free speech, he understands the importance of free speech, let's give a pass to his Chinese factories at the moment, because he has business decisions to make.  But do you believe this is something he recognises; he recognises the threat to the US, to humanity, that speech has been shut down, and that Twitter is a real focal point for this?

How important is this, because part of me has been pinning my hopes to his recent move, that this is going to swing the pendulum back to more freer speech, but I don't want to put too much hope on one individual?

Austin Hill: I think that's an important comment, and I think your last statement is one of the most important.  We often compare Bitcoin to TCP/IP.  On our last conversation, at one point I know, it's probably coming, we talked about the evolution of TCP/IP actually didn't depend on any one person, but it did at various points depend on principled people fighting for certain rights.  I gave the example of John Postill and the domain name system that could have been taken back and controlled by the United States.

I want to be careful here, because Elon gets an outsized amount of attention because he is a changemaker, he is the world's richest person, he has disrupted and change so many industries; and when he came into Bitcoin, everyone ran off and were like, "He's our saviour".  Then you see people walking around with, "Fuck Elon" T-shirts, because he somehow betrayed us.  I knew Elon when he was at PayPal, I've interacted with him at various times.  He has an incredible sense of humour, he is an incredible engineer, he has an incredible sense of irony; and in fact, a big part of his life is based off, all things being equal, the most ironic situation is the most likely.

I think part of this is a genuine reflection that he loves how Twitter gives him a sense of freedom and to bypass the short-sellers, bypass the media, talk directly to a fanbase, and I think he treasures that and believes that it's a goodness in society; but I'm making assumptions there.  I know a lot of people came to me and were like, "Austin, you've got to talk to Elon about his support of Dogecoin, and somehow like it was my responsibility to save the world from investing in Dogecoin!

Peter McCormack: Well, at times, it does rely on individuals!

Austin Hill: My personal opinion, I think Elon's very aware of what he's doing with Dogecoin.  I think he appreciates it for the joke it is, and the SEC sued him.  This is just a personal opinion, but the SEC sued him for promoting Bitcoin.  He is absolutely restricted from talking about his real opinions on Bitcoin, but he can make jokes about Dogecoin all he wants, because the company holds none.  And if people are dumb enough to believe in the most inflation-turned-up, inflationary coin in the world, he views it as a lesson in radical self-awareness and radical self-sufficiency.  He is a Burning Man burner at heart.  So he's like, "If you don't do your research and you want to believe all this Dogecoin stuff…" and he loves memes.

You can look at his love of Twitter for all the same reasons.  And when you love something and you have those types of resources, you want to protect it, you want to leave your mark on it.  I'm hopeful that he can help the health of Twitter, but I also have tons of appreciation for what Jack has done, and the thoughtfulness and the pressure that Jack has been under.  And everyone likes to look for easy solutions. 

So, when I built one of my start-ups, we were looking at this game called PostSecret, if you're familiar.  It was a real-world game where someone started leaving postcards around the world and said, "You can mail me your secret on a postcard".  And it took off, and if you ever go into a library, look at PostSecret; you can find it on the web.  The most heart-wrenching but beautiful pieces of art.  People who constructed these, "Sometimes at the end of my bottle of medicine, I wish it would never end, because I'm more empty inside than this bottle of medicine", like heart-breaking, but people revealing their souls.

So, when Frank Warren, who created PostSecret, he started collecting these, putting them in a book, he sold the books to support national suicide lines, he went and put it online.  And what was a beautiful project, the worst parts of human behaviour started coming out, and he took it offline.  People would be sending in online versions of, "I left her body at these GPS coordinates".  And he just said, "You know what, there's something authentic and beautiful about this.  I'm taking it offline, I'm going to keep it on postcards, because the worst parts of anonymity and pseudonymity and people trying to troll me come out online, and I just don't want it".

As technologists, we're like, "Put everything online, it can solve everything", but this was a great example of something that was actually ruined by the ephemerality, by the anonymity, by the pseudonymity.  So, by the same degree, we all love Twitter.  Twitter has changed the public concept of a public square, but it also has come with a lot of downsides.

Jeff Booth: Peter doesn't love Twitter!

Austin Hill: It has come with downsides --

Peter McCormack: It does.

Austin Hill: -- which we've both suffered from.  It affected my health when I was running Blockstream.  I started feeling like an attack on Blockstream -- I had a real hard time distancing attacks on the company from attacks on me, and it started to affect my happiness and health.

Peter McCormack: It did it to me.  People don't know, but Jeff's my secret Twitter mentor.  He gives me advice and then, like a disappointed parent, a few days later, I ignore his advice and do something stupid!

Jeff Booth: But the same thing people do in Bitcoin too, because the idea becomes you, and then you defend yourself, your ego, when somebody attacks the idea, and that's pretty normal.  So the thing we say, "No one can hurt your feelings without your ability to say -- nobody can say anything to you that matters".  Why do you let it matter, from some unknown source?  I just go, "How could that hurt?"

Peter McCormack: I think what it is is it can come down to volume.  The occasional thing is fine, but when you can hear the same thing over and over again it's like, "Okay, have they got a point?  Am I a dumbass?"  Well actually, I've accepted that one! 

Jeff Booth: Just so you know, I had a bunch of people that love you because of the way you do that.  You're no dumbass, but the way that you open up that conversation and call yourself that, it's a huge reason for your following.  So, yeah, people will say that to you.

Peter McCormack: It's also useful sometimes, it's also useful because it's a mirror to question yourself.  I'm okay with it.  Actually, in the end, it comes down to productivity.  Michael Saylor said a brilliant thing to me last time I spoke to him, "It's all about focus, where you focus, where's your energy, where are you productive?" and actually, this is the most productive thing I can do.  I somehow -- I don't think I am the best interviewer, I think I have some good questions, but I somehow have the ability to get good people together, like you two, to have this conversation that can go out to thousands, tens of thousands of people, and that's a productive use of time.

Austin Hill: So, when I coach start-ups, we talk about this as the density of intensity.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Austin Hill: I said, "The scarcest resource you have as a start-up is focus".  And if you think about your job as directed energy, you have to choose.  Do you want to be a flashlight or a laser beam?  Your job is to break through some barrier, some barrier of market acceptance, some barrier of technology, some technical barrier you need to break through.  And do you want to be doing it with a flashlight, pointing a flashlight at a still thing, or do you want to be the laser that actually has a chance to punch through?

It's only once you actually punch through, and you're able to increase the size or the scope, the diameter of your laser, do you actually build a bigger hole and you have the energy to actually take on bigger battles.  But initially, if you're trying to do that with a flashlight, it's never going to work.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Also, the whole old cliché of the man on his deathbed, "What do you wish?"  "I wish I'd worked less".  I think we can add into that now, "I wish I'd been on Twitter less".  It's fascinating, because I've lost time to family.  My daughter, she's like, "What are you doing on Twitter?"  Now I've told her I'm off Twitter, she's like, "Is it still on your phone?"  She recognises the impact. 

So, productivity, use of time -- time and Bitcoin are both scarce resources; how do you best use them?  Bitcoin, I'm okay with that, I've managed that; now, how best to use the time we have, and we all have a diminishing amount, it's a scarce resource.  Do I want to do productive things; do I want to do things that make me happy; do I want to do things that make my family happy?  So, a lot of it's down to productivity.  Actually also, personal growth.  I actually find Twitter has a negative impact on personal growth!  I think it can turn people into absolute pricks.

Austin Hill: When I changed my opinion about Twitter and I changed my own habits around it, I was able to find incredible resources, where I'm able to tap into Twitter to network with subject matter experts, to tap into a global consciousness, or a global expertise on certain topics, that I would never be able to have access to before.  But I have totally anonymous Twitter accounts that I use for that, and I have multiple devices, and some of my devices don't have any of my accounts.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Jeff Booth: So for me, I've found quite the opposite.  I've met so many incredible people on that platform, now met them personally, but connected on that platform.  But I might only go on once a day, and I can't get through all of the stuff, and why?  Because I need to focus my time on more important things.  It doesn't drive me, it doesn't fulfil me to say, "I have to do this, I have to do this on this", I use it as a tool to meet people all over the world and learn things too.

Peter McCormack: Well, you and I met through Twitter.

Jeff Booth: Yeah, it's been fantastic.

Peter McCormack: I can't remember.  You reached out to me.

Austin Hill: Yeah, we met through Twitter.

Jeff Booth: Yeah, like how do you value that?

Peter McCormack: Oh no, and I will be back on it in a different way, but you have to have that moment to escape, consider it, personal growth, reflect and go back.  But circling back, as we all recognise, it is an important tool, so it's important that it defends free speech.

Jeff Booth: So, can I jump into the Elon conversation?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what's your perspective?

Jeff Booth: So, nobody knows why he's doing it, but I do believe he believes in free speech.  I do believe he understands the problem at the monetary level, at the policy level, but a lot of his businesses rely on the monetary level like it is, and that creates the wealthiest person on the planet and the most powerful person and the most centric. 

Now you think about the wealthiest person on the planet on a satellite network that will be a communication, that owns an energy network and moving into a robotic network, that knows all the same things that I know about where technology's going; and in fact, he builds his business by projecting what he can deliver in two or three years, and selling you this vision, and then charging you today for it.  That's how he builds all his businesses, and all of these businesses are now in communication channels.  What do you think that could look like, the risk, to one man holding that control over all of these things, and influence over us, that turns -- and that's the thing?

Peter McCormack: He could be the Dark Overlord!

Jeff Booth: He could be fantastic, but trusting a system on one man's opinion, who can change their mind, is a really bad system.  So in that piece, and yeah, I know he's a bitcoiner and he hasn't sold, but if he understands all of the same things the way that we do, then I find it disingenuous to talk about Dogecoin, because we won't be a multiplanetary species if we have Dogecoin; we will blow ourselves up.

So, I find it's completely disingenuous to say, "We have to be a multiplanetary species, but I'm benefiting from a system and all of the West's wealth and power is benefiting from a system that is not a free market system, that has negative externalities to everybody else, and I'm not going to advocate for the right system".  So, that is my thing specifically with Elon, and it just reinforces the whole thing: don't meet your heroes, don't idolise people.  Bitcoin doesn't care.  Bitcoin doesn't care about me, doesn't care about you, it just keeps on doing the job, and it doesn't allow any single person to have that much control.

Peter McCormack: Well, that was one of the great observations during the week, that he buys $3 billion in Twitter stock and ends up with board seat to exert his influence over it.  Michael Saylor's bought $3 billion in Bitcoin, he can't exert his control over consensus rules.

Austin Hill: And Michael Saylor's influence grows based off his advocacy, grows based off the reputation, I think could continue to grow based off potentially products that MicroStrategy delivers, or investments they make in the open-source community, or expansions they make into Bitcoin's functionality beyond just being owners and hodlers.  And I think those are well-deserved kind of meritocracy-based investments. 

I would not put it past Elon to have very similar ambitions for Bitcoin as well, if you start thinking about Bitcoin in the grid, Bitcoin in robotics, Bitcoin in power compensation, or Bitcoin in abundant power systems in dealing with some of the inequities in grid payments and distribution and storage of energy, when you start to have abundant solar, and issues around transfer and recharge.

There are so many potentials for Bitcoin to solve some of the very real issues that align with some of his goals of helping slow down the destruction of this planet, in his view, and many people, based off climate, helping extend the window we have to get to another planet.  There are so many things that Bitcoin actually aligns and supports that mission.

But to Jeff's point, if they depend on one person controlling the entire system and it depends on perpetuating a lie, we just have to assume that externalities and other incentives put any reliance on one person at too important of a role, and Bitcoin should be fighting against that.  He's never made any secret; he came out very publicly and said, "I was late to the Bitcoin game".  We knew a lot of the PayPal investors, I raised some money from some of the PayPal investors, I knew them back in their day when they were working on PayPal.  

We were working on eCash and Zero Knowledge, so we spent a lot of time with people, other people working on payment systems like PayPal, and these people were dumb, ignorant to Bitcoin.  But Elon has said, he ignored it for so many years, because his main priority was Tesla and SpaceX.

Peter McCormack: Do you think, because obviously he is fully aware of Bitcoin now, they've bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin for Tesla, he's talked about, he's obviously done some research; do you think hyperbitcoinisation is a risk to his businesses and the dominance his businesses have, and the potential rate of innovation?  So, what I would put there is a lot of people criticise MMT and incentive structures, but also I think you have to accept sometimes that with things like MMT, there is an ability for money to be directed towards certain projects that drive innovation.  Like, Tesla wouldn't exist as it is today without the government subsidies.

Austin Hill: Yeah, but that's double-sided as we've seen.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I know.

Austin Hill: One administration props him up, the other one excludes him.

Peter McCormack: I'm not justifying it.  What I'm saying is, that's an outcome from it.  Is hyperbitcoinisation a risk to his…?

Jeff Booth: So, he's a great enough entrepreneur with enough different businesses that the answer's no.  He's already crossed the Rubicon on some of these businesses.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Jeff Booth: I don't know if you know this, but in 1980, it cost $25,000 per kilogram to get something into space.  His new rocket coming out next year, the year after, will launch for about $200 per kilogram.

Peter McCormack: Wow.

Jeff Booth: It's the market force of that reduction in price that opens up a new frontier, satellites frontier, and it opens up so many other frontiers that we don't see until that opens up.  So, he's already the leader in a whole bunch of these industries; and arguably, one of the leaders in artificial intelligence, because of what the cars are mapping and that turning into robotics, so where that's going.  So, he's already crossed that Rubicon, so would it slow down some of his business; would it slow down all of his businesses as everything is repriced into this new event?  Yeah, but he could also play on that side of it.

Austin Hill: Well, and famously, there's been criticism of Elon and I'm not on the ground, I'm not aware of the facts, but obviously there's been a lot of attacks on how he treats workers.  There are some lawsuits about racial issues in his factories, there was a lot of criticism about his lack of support of unions.  And in fact, many people point out that this administration has actually gone out of its way to not recognise or acknowledge or give any funding to Tesla, because it's not a union shop.

Elon has talked about this.  He believes in treating his employees better than any union would.  His frustration with unions is that they just don't allow him to improve or iterate fast enough for the future that he's building.  He just says, "I need to make mistakes, I need to learn from them, and I need to do that faster than any union will let me", because a union purposely gets in there and negotiates and won't even let you see the result of your mistake.  He goes, "I can't build the future our society needs fast enough".  He's got that incredible time pressure --

Jeff Booth: And that's a fair argument.

Austin Hill: -- and that's a very fair argument.  And he says, "So, when I oppose a union, it's not because I don't believe my employees deserve the best".  He goes, "I actually believe it's killing the very thing that we're all here to prevent", which is not evolving technology fast enough to save us from a future we don't want, and provide the future we do.  So, you can look at that and say that's a very hard argument to argue against.

Peter McCormack: But is he also rationalising?

Austin Hill: I don't know.  I believe it's actually just a very honest look at what are the necessary requirements to build a system that actually creates the result you want.

Jeff Booth: Austin's an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur, that's not rationalising, that's how fast this is moving.  And the system that you need to be able to innovate to how fast these opportunities are going, it needs to be flexible to move.

Peter McCormack: Sure, but which business owner in the history of life has ever wanted to have unions?

Jeff Booth: Agreed.

Austin Hill: Take unions out of it.  Henry Ford wanted his workers to be successful, because he wanted them to be customers of his car company.  It had nothing to do with unions, he just thought there was an alignment between healthy workers and a healthy business.  And many very enlightened entrepreneurs see the exact same thing.  This is where I was commenting on this idea that some of these Bitcoin bonds that we could create at a municipal level, I actually believe would be funded, not only by bitcoiners who want to see the spread of Bitcoin and support Bitcoin, but some of the richest billionaires out there, because they actually believe in America.

Jeff Booth: Totally.

Austin Hill: They love America.  They believe in the American spirit.  They're just left between two horrible options: austerity and corruption and cronyism on one side; and, tax the rich to hand out to the poor, and social subsidies, and these progressive things that make them the enemy of the people for being successful, on the other side.  And, when you're given those two options, it's very, very easy to say, "You know what, I'm just going to take my money and I'll invest it in both parties and I'll keep them arguing and I'll go about creating the future I want".

We need to give those people another option and Bitcoin is that other option, which is you can directly invest in the American people, you can directly invest in the Indian people, because I don't believe this is an American-only issue; you can go to El Salvador and directly invest in El Salvadorans or any other country.  We've seen billionaires in Mexico adopt Bitcoin and start talking about how we need to move Mexico away from the cartels by creating the same type of economic liberation that we're seeing, the hope or the promise, or hopefully the start of, in other Latin American countries.  We're seeing the same thing happen in Africa.

So naturally, when entrepreneurs are given a better option, are usually really, really good in recognising how to lean into that better option and go full speed ahead without a lot of distractions.  That's the mark of a successful entrepreneur.

Jeff Booth: And that's why it's wildly exciting, because that option is there right now, capital is starting to understand that option and realising that that free market and all of those ideas competing are -- and those ideas, training somebody versus having a product that is…  PalmPilot and the iPhone, pretty similar.  The technology changed and then all of a sudden, we couldn't live without it.  Is there any instruction manual to your iPhone?

Peter McCormack: No!

Jeff Booth: All of a sudden, when the UX and the technology hits us at a point where it drives a free market, you have a massive new industry exploding, and capital chases that new industry.  That's what's happening on Bitcoin right now.  It's still early, but that's actually why it's so exciting.

Austin Hill: I remember trying to teach my mother how to do the PalmPilot letters, because I was so excited to get her on the PalmPilot, and it ended up in her drawer and she's never used it, because the idea of doing the manual and having to learn the new scratch letters, it was just totally beyond her.  Whereas, she'll jump all over the internet and be able to use the latest technology, because she wants to be on eBay, and it's so easy that there's no barrier there anymore.

Jeff Booth: So, people are looking through Bitcoin today, a lot of looking through Bitcoin and saying, "It's hard and not a lot of people are using it".  That tells you the use cases that are coming.  It tells you what entrepreneurs are going to go solve and create incredible businesses by making that easier, and onboarding the millions, the tens of millions, hundreds of millions that don't already have it.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  There's a lot to digest here.  Is there anything else either of you want to talk about before we finish up?

Austin Hill: I'm actually going to do a small plug.

Peter McCormack: No, do it, please.  God, I always take your time.

Austin Hill: Some details are going to be emerging, but I was recently talking with a bunch of bitcoiners about this whole idea that Bitcoin doesn't have a marketing department.

Peter McCormack: We're all the marketing department.

Austin Hill: We are all part of the marketing department, but that opens it up the same way Bitcoin can be used by people you hate, it's actually made stronger; oftentimes, that's not true when it comes to Bitcoin marketing, in the sense of the press loves to latch onto some of the worst parts of the Bitcoin marketers for stories, whether that's from shitcoiners, whether or not that's from people who love to stand up and say something that's very inflammatory that allows Bitcoin to be demonised. 

So, just a bunch of bitcoiners, a bunch of people that I have been talking to, recently got the idea of, an underserved area I think is the ability for art, some of the things we've seen with Banksy, very Satoshi-like, the idea that art can actually be a vehicle to invite people in to ask better questions.  So, we're going to be doing a lot of stuff around Bitcoin interactive public art coming up over the next year.

Peter McCormack: Love it.

Austin Hill: And, at one point, I'll throw it up on my Twitter, I'll lend my name to it and actually say I'm supporting some of these projects, but I really love the idea that we, as a community, can start to think about the mark we leave, and that can include institutions and things like art, because I think there are some communities, whether or not that promotes financial education, financial awareness, there are so many opportunities for us to actually get out there and start making our mark, and using some of the benefits, the wealth accumulation, that is so timely right now.

That's my hope, is that over the next couple of years, a lot of these incredible benefits that Bitcoin has brought to us, or some of us who were there early, that we begin to look at, Bitcoin has been so good to us, how do we be good to Bitcoin back.  And I almost feel like it's a moral obligation to me to figure out, what can I do for Bitcoin in a way that pays it forward for what it's done for me.  So, things like supporting initiatives in El Salvador. 

I also am an investor in a whole bunch of Bitcoin-only venture capital funds.  I have the privilege of being able to do that, and I did enough venture capital that I feel I'm good.  Everyone's going to find their way.  I'm not saying you have to be an artist, you have to choose our way, but I really invite people, if Bitcoin's been good to you, start looking for ways to be good to Bitcoin back.

Peter McCormack: I total agree.  Anything you want to plug while you're here, Jeff?

Jeff Booth: No, no plug.

Peter McCormack: Just buy Jeff's book, The Price of Tomorrow, available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, any good bookstore, one of the best --

Austin Hill: The Spanish version, by the way, is coming out very shortly.

Jeff Booth: Oh, yeah.

Austin Hill: And it will be online for free.

Peter McCormack: We will share that in the show notes.  This is an absolute pleasure.  I am honoured to have the chanced to sit down with you both and call you friends and have your ear outside of the podcast whenever I reach out to you.  An absolute honour and pleasure.  Thank you so much, Jeff; thank you so much, Austin.  I guess we should go and get a beer.

Jeff Booth: Awesome.

Austin Hill: Thank you, we really appreciate it, Peter.

Jeff Booth: Yeah, thanks Peter.  I do too.