WBD502 Audio Transcription
Texas is Bitcoin Country with Will Cole
Release date: Monday 16th May
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Will Cole. 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.
Will Cole is Chief Product Officer at Unchained Capital. In this interview, we discuss Texas and Austin as ideological centres for Bitcoin, the undervalued importance of state sovereignty in the US, CBDCs being the greatest disaster for liberty and personal freedom, and toxicity on Twitter.
“What’s the end game? It is honestly to do less harm. Bitcoin doesn’t actually need politicians to make it succeed, it will succeed on its own merits; what would be helpful is to not have people actively attacking it and elongating the inevitable collapse of their own currencies, but also rise of Bitcoin as a global reserve currency.”
— Will Cole
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: How are you doing, man?
Will Cole: Doing good, Peter. Good to be here.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, good to have you. It's long overdue.
Will Cole: Yeah, it's been a while. Where did we meet?
Peter McCormack: It wasn't Wyoming, was it?
Will Cole: It was either Wyoming or here. It might have been actually Wyoming.
Peter McCormack: When we had our daily steak?
Will Cole: Yeah, in bacon, table bacon.
Peter McCormack: That fucking bacon.
Will Cole: Yeah, 2018/19.
Peter McCormack: Twice a day ribeye in Wyoming, yeah. It's great to meet you, man. You're a quiet bitcoiner.
Will Cole: Quieter.
Peter McCormack: Quieter bitcoiner.
Will Cole: Not famous, no.
Peter McCormack: You're behind the scenes, but it's always been good to talk to you. I wanted to do this a while, get you on the show, expose you to everyone who listens to the show and your way of thinking, especially as you're a red state man.
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I either hang out with you in Wyoming or I hang out with you here in Texas.
Will Cole: We're going to convert you eventually.
Peter McCormack: Listen, if my life circumstances were different, either I would live here or I'd definitely live part of my life here. I mean, I would establish the studio here but it's the whole challenge of children. I think my kids would love it but it's a complicated thing. But I love it here; it's just like Bedford!
Will Cole: It's just like Bedford? I just watched that soccer match.
Peter McCormack: If you take away -- if you forget the guns, the freedom, the steak, the big outdoors, the ranches --
Will Cole: The sunshine.
Peter McCormack: -- the sunshine, it's pretty much Bedford!
Will Cole: Yeah!
Peter McCormack: It's fucking nothing like Bedford!
Will Cole: The one thing I've noticed with my friends in Germany and the UK, even if they're more conservative, right-leaning Europeans, is none of them get guns.
Peter McCormack: I am a right-leaning, right-of-centre Conservative in the UK. Here, I'm a woke left libtard!
Will Cole: Communist!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, fucking Communist! I love it here, man, I love it here. I've been coming here now since I got into the podcast. I came here about four years ago and interviewed Lyn Ulbricht. No, it's about four and a half years ago. The first time I ever came here was on Ross's birthday actually.
Will Cole: Really?
Peter McCormack: Or it was her birthday because they're a day apart; I can't remember which is which. It was my tenth interview and I fell in love with the place; this is the place for me.
Will Cole: What do you like about it, though?
Peter McCormack: That's a good question. There's a lot. I don't like the barbecue; I think it's massively overrated. It's basically a pile of sweaty meat that just tastes --
Will Cole: I cannot listen to this!
Peter McCormack: But no, I can give you one back. It has the best steaks in the world.
Will Cole: Yeah, good steak houses.
Peter McCormack: Steaks are great and I'm, "Why do you want barbecue when you can have a steak?" The barbecue's a no, but the steaks are amazing. So, the food is great. An average steak in Texas is the best steak you get in the UK.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: The best steak you get here is the best in the world.
Will Cole: Yeah, in particular Dallas steak houses.
Peter McCormack: Actually, I've been to one in Dallas. I can't remember the name.
Will Cole: Al Biernat's, Bob's?
Peter McCormack: Was it Nick & Sam's?
Will Cole: Nick & Sam's is Dallas.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: That's incredible.
Peter McCormack: The guy at that place the other night, he's pissed at me for keeping saying that. We should give him a shout out, because how many times have we been to Three Falls?
Danny Knowles: At least four times this trip.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: Bitcoiners, good men, great steaks.
Peter McCormack: Great steaks, great steaks. The off-menu stuff, he's telling us and we're, "We know it now, man. Bring us out that bone-in fillet". So, I like that, I like the people, the friends here. I always know if I come here there's 20, 25 people I can call up and go for a beer; in some ways more than I have in Bedford now, because Bitcoin gives you that wide tent of people.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: What I like most of all about Austin is that Austin still has a progressive side to it, but it's got that shield of conservatism that reigns it in that's just around it.
Will Cole: Yeah, it's the blue city, red state sort of vibe. It's very interesting Austin's not even like when San Francisco was a blue city in a red state in California. Austin's progressive left side was always a little bit different.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: I don't know how to describe it. It's like the Keep Austin Weird; it might be a chamber of commerce marketing ploy, but it is pretty true. I grew up here, 1983 born here. That progressive side of Austin was always more like I could have a regular job, but I'm also a juggler; you know, just weird people. There's something about the vibe in Austin because of that. It's not because of leftist politics, I don't think.
Peter McCormack: I would say Austin definitely has a progressive side to it.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: That's cool and what I would say about a lot of the people who say, "I love Texas because it's Conservative" all the people who tell me that still live in Austin. They live in the democratic part of Texas.
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I think they don't appreciate the benefits that brings. I think anywhere that is too left or anywhere that's too right, it doesn't work. For me, Austin's got it probably better than anyone in the US.
Will Cole: I think so too.
Peter McCormack: If I could live in one place, the first place I'd choose is here. If it had a beach, it'd be the best in the world.
Will Cole: We've got the lakes and the rivers.
Peter McCormack: But I like that there is a definite sense of freedom here, which is interesting. Everyone leaves you the fuck alone but if you want to go party, you can go party.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Cool bars; we sat in a cool bar last night watching the St Peter's March Madness game.
Will Cole: Oh my god.
Peter McCormack: You following that story?
Will Cole: Incredible. First 15 seed ever in the lead 8.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm going to talk about it like I know about it. I learned it all last night.
Will Cole: Really.
Peter McCormack: I've struggled to get into basketball. I don't like high-scoring sports; I like low-scoring sports like football, our football, even your football.
Will Cole: That's a weird preference to have.
Peter McCormack: Because it's hard to score, so when it happens it's, "Wow". One goal, "Oh, yeah".
Will Cole: The elation and the build-up and the anticipation.
Peter McCormack: Whereas basketball, they score so many, so I've never truly got it. I've been to games, I've been to see the Lakers, I've been to see the Knicks and I just never really got it. Then I watched the Jordan documentary and I was, "Okay, I understand the game a bit more now". But last night watching that game, I was figuring it out, wasn't I? Jeremy will tell you, I was figuring out the game as it happened and the strategy, and I was literally jumping around every basket. I wanted them to win just because of the story and also it's St Peter's.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But I wanted them to win because of the story, but I understood the momentum of the game; I started to realise which players they were bringing on at which point and why.
Will Cole: Defensive schemes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: Yeah, the set plays in basketball, every time they're going up and down the court, they have a plan.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: It's not immediately obvious to a casual viewer, but it's very strategic.
Peter McCormack: Also what was interesting about it is, it's a lot faster than the NBA and I think it's more enjoyable because of that. I think that's why I sometimes prefer college football because it's faster and they make more mistakes.
Will Cole: They make more mistakes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I noticed was how much instruction was coming from the coach as they were going up.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You don't notice that as much in the NBA. I think they know what they're doing more.
Will Cole: College coaches are psychos; they're screaming for 40 minutes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: Top of their lungs, red-faced. You think about the guy who just retired at Duke, Coach K, he's been doing it for 40 years every day, screaming at the top of his lungs, freaking out on 18-year-olds. It's a weird game.
Peter McCormack: They're a small team as well.
Will Cole: St Peter's?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, in terms of the size of the players.
Will Cole: Okay, so we were talking before this about how major league baseball's broken because there's no relegation and so it's profitable to lose. The only thing we have that looks like that is college basketball, where you have all these tiny teams in physical stature and in terms of the size of the school, that get to play at the highest level and get a shot. This one is particularly interesting.
Peter McCormack: Why do you think they've managed to do it? What's special about them from your side, as somebody who understands this?
Will Cole: I'm not an expert on this, but it's some formation of the NCA rules that allows -- it's designation of division one's points.
Peter McCormack: No, why do you think they're doing well, this team? Why do you think?
Will Cole: Oh, I have no idea. It's just random chaos; they call it March Madness. It's just anyone can win a basketball game. It's five players; one guy gets hot and you can win a game.
Peter McCormack: Going back.
Will Cole: Yeah, Austin.
Peter McCormack: One of the things I notice when going back home, because I think one of the things that's sometimes hard for people to understand with the podcast or even with my Twitter, is some of the opinions I have or some of the ways I look at things. Whereas I understand a lot more about, say, people in Texas and Austin because I spend time here, they haven't lived in Europe and Bedford and spent time there understanding things. But what I've come to appreciate here is there is a lot more questioning of things here, whereas we don't get that back home.
I do the Scott Horton interview and for me it's a chance to question what's happening in Ukraine and Russia. All the people understand why I've done it and they may agree or disagree, but from back home there's one guy specifically, a British guy, tweeted about -- can you remember what he said?
Danny Knowles: No, I'm not sure.
Peter McCormack: He just tweeted out saying, "Look at these bitcoiners; they support fringe conspiracy, crazy psychopaths" or something. I'm seen here as a leftie and at home I'm seen as a crazy right guy.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, it's just a different experience. I feel like here, you and I can have a way different conversation from my best friend when I go home; it's a way different conversation.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I just like that and there's a lot to like here. But I like all the US; I still like New York, I still like LA.
Will Cole: Sure, I lived there for nine years, yeah.
Peter McCormack: San Francisco, I really struggle with, but I like all of the US and I like the mix. Like I say, I think you've got it right here. You can live in a progressive city but you've got that wrapper that stops you going too far; I just think it's great. Why do you love it here; you moved here?
Will Cole: Part of it's just that I grew up here.
Peter McCormack: I didn't know that.
Will Cole: Yeah, I was born here, grew up here. It's an idyllic place to grow up, honestly. It's safe, you have the University of Texas here and you have a lot of interesting people. It's a highly-educated, safe place to grow up, but at the same time it is a cool place. So, if you're into music, there are music festivals and people tour here. You're really close to Houston, Dallas. You can get out there for the big city life, although that's Austin now. It was an idyllic place to grow up.
But for me, more than anything, Austin has a very Texas vibe in terms of the independent spirit. Almost everyone's parents I knew growing up worked for themselves. They had their own businesses, it could have been a restaurant business, my dad had his own software consultancy business. No one seemed to have real jobs, everyone was independent. At some point, and I don't know if this is still true, even Austin had the highest proportion of independent restaurants of any metropolitan city in the United States; it was all local. Austin had its own personality because it wasn't all chain stores, chain restaurants.
But it also wasn't particularly wealthy when I was growing up. Pre-Dell, there were no major huge corporations here. So, all that independent vibe, we were just working for people in Dallas or consulting for them, stuff like that. But that independent nature of the people at least I was around in Austin definitely got into my blood, and I think actually helped me with Bitcoin later. In fact, it's almost hard for me when you tell your story, how did anyone in Europe value Bitcoin if you don't have the same independent or questioning values that you might find in Texas?
Peter McCormack: I think it's completely different reasons and I think this is the reason why Bitcoin has taken off in the US and hasn't really in Europe.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You've got fringe people but I think a lot of people first got in for the gains. I think it's only right now that people would maybe really start to question it outside. We have libertarians in Europe and we have conservatives in Europe but we don't have --
Will Cole: They're not prominent though.
Peter McCormack: No.
Will Cole: They're not even necessarily well respected.
Peter McCormack: It's a different style of conservatism as well in Europe.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But now suffering high inflation, weirdness from our governments, I think people are starting to question it. It's definitely different; you come for the games, you stay for whatever you choose to stay for, and it puts us at a disadvantage. There isn't really a significant European Bitcoin scene. There is a European Bitcoin scene, but it's not significant. We have pockets of people or ideas and some companies, but we don't -- here in Austin and Texas, it feels like it's becoming what our mutual friend Parker Lewis wants, it's becoming the Bitcoin capital of the world.
Will Cole: The Bitcoin capital, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I can't even put my finger on it. You can probably do it better than me because you're from here. I've said it before on the show and people cringe, but it just feels like a very American idea, Bitcoin, and especially a Texas idea.
Will Cole: It's very optimistic.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: I don't think it's an accident that it's here in Austin. Austin has a pretty long history in the Bitcoin world going all the way back to -- I'm only aware of it from 2011 and forward, but the early ASIC miners, CoinTerra, the first people shipping out machines, were based here in Austin. A lot of the early mining stuff on GPUs was here in Austin, also in Florida obviously.
But also I would credit Pierre Rochard, Michael Goldstein, the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute guys, they're at the University of Texas. They really popularised the Austrian view of Bitcoin in treating Bitcoin less a technology and more as money. I could be getting my dates off here a little bit, but that 2013, 2014, 2015, that narrative wasn't really the predominant narrative in Bitcoin at that time until they popularised it. That started here and I give them a huge amount of credit; they brought a lot of attention to Austin because of it.
I say it wasn't accidental; there's the character of Austin that we talked about before, but it's also that those of us that were participating here from early days all the way up to now, it was pretty heavy curation. We made sure that we were surrounding ourselves with high-integrity people that were in it for the right reasons from our viewpoint. That wasn't always easy; Austin could also be the shitcoin capital of the world. That's where factum was started.
Peter McCormack: I bought Factom.
Will Cole: Did you?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I bought Factom.
Will Cole: Poor man.
Peter McCormack: I made money on Factom back in my shitcoin days.
Will Cole: Did you?
Peter McCormack: I think so.
Will Cole: Yeah, good for you, I guess. At the time, those guys were really influential here in Austin and we had to make a decision. There's all these schisms that happened in 2013, 2014, 2015 where we just had to take our ball and go home; it was like, "We don't want to surround ourselves with these people". Then we'd shrink back down to ten people at my house, talking about Bitcoin, and then Justin Moon comes in and starts BitDevs and all that. We were constantly going from 300 people in a room back down to 20; 300 people in a room back down to 20. Now we're back to 300 people in the room, but it's been a brutal curation to make sure we could surround ourselves with high-integrity people.
Peter McCormack: You're not going back to 20?
Will Cole: No, I don't think so, not now.
Peter McCormack: I think that's another reason I like it here actually. That's an interesting point; when I come here, I get to do my work and whatever, but I get to be a bitcoiner. When I go home, I don't get to be a bitcoiner. So, I go back to Bedford and the last time I went out -- I went back for the weekend, went out with my four best friends. Thinking back, Bitcoin didn't come up once. We were watching the rugby, we talked about that, we talked about where we were living, relationships. We talked about all the stuff, sports.
Will Cole: That's good. It doesn't all have to be Bitcoin all the time.
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is the only time Bitcoin comes up is if my kids ask me anything or maybe if I'm at the club doing the football thing. But it doesn't come up; it's just not a thing. I don't have a Bitcoin community not only not in Bedford but in England; I just don't have it.
Will Cole: Yeah, that's weird.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Whereas I come here and I'm, "Cool, I'm going to see Parker, I'm going to see Will, I'm going to see Justin, I'm going to see Marty", I'm going to see a bunch of people who are going to go out for dinner. By the way, we're not all going to just discuss Bitcoin, we'll discuss other things.
Will Cole: Of course, yeah.
Peter McCormack: You and I have had long conversations about what happened in Ireland; we talk about other things.
Will Cole: Rock, paper, scissors.
Peter McCormack: Rock, paper, scissors; we should bring that up.
Will Cole: Yeah, at some point.
Peter McCormack: At some point. That's my biggest claim to fame now. But what I'm saying is I get into the weeds and challenge myself on some of my ideas. They have to be challenged, because I come from a very different world and very different perspectives, and I get to come here and have that challenge. That's another reason I like it here. I see a world where I end up owning a property here; I do see that.
Will Cole: That dynamic that you're talking about, that's intelligent design in Austin. It didn't just sporadically happen; there was a lot of people over a long time. Parker's put it on steroids now. He's really driven this home, but it's been around for a long time. I give most of the credit to Pierre and Michael for setting the tone in Austin and then Pierre had to take off to New York. Everyone does that in their 20s at some point, but he's back here now and we actively recruit people. We shame people for not living here. We give them tours of the city; we buy them cowboy boots; we woo them. Everyone talks about Bitcoin citadels and all this. We're not on a pastoral ranch in Wyoming right now, but we have curated our own community of people to surround ourselves with and it's very purposeful.
Peter McCormack: Another interesting here on the regulatory side, the political side, it feels like there's almost universal buy-in. You might tell me something different that I don't know, but it does feel like there's a real understanding of why Bitcoin is important, why it's good for Texas. I got to meet Governor Abbott which was fascinating.
Will Cole: That's awesome.
Peter McCormack: I've observed Senator Cruz from a distance; I know he's not popular with everyone but he certainly speaks about Bitcoin in an intelligent way. That's a really important protection.
Will Cole: Yeah, I think in Texas we have a winning strategy for that. Politicians are politicians; they want to get elected and being pro-Bitcoin right now is a popular thing to do.
Peter McCormack: We'll take it.
Will Cole: You get attention, you get media, you get all those things. But there's something very real in Texas where we're dominating everyone, which is the mining sector; the deregulated grid, the independent grid. Texas has a different grid than the rest of the United States and I like the way Griffin Haby out of Houston talks about this. You have all these wildcatter mentalities here that are used to making huge bets on desert land and poking holes in it. You have this risk-taking mentality and those people see the value of Bitcoin mining in Texas and they're a real political group; that's how people get elected in Texas, it's around the energy conversation.
Bitcoin is becoming a central point of the energy conversation for the grid, for the profitability of some of these huge companies that Texan jobs rely on, what's happening out in Rockdale. There's a reason politicians are doing it and it's not just because of Twitter; it's because it's actually reshaping the Texas economy, they do have a vision for that. Yeah, it's hard to be anti-Bitcoin and be a Texas politician at this point.
Peter McCormack: That energy side itself is super-fascinating. We had Shaun Connell on the show the other day and talked to him about it. He told me a bunch of things I didn't understand.
Will Cole: I'm still learning.
Peter McCormack: Dude, some of the things he was telling me I just completely didn't understand about the grid, but he came on and explained a bunch of things. One of the things he said is there was one day recently where 70% of the energy in -- was it Texas or Austin?
Danny Knowles: It was in Austin.
Peter McCormack: Came from renewables.
Will Cole: Oh, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I didn't know that. There's been a massive investment in renewables here, which again I didn't understand. But he was getting into the details of how the grid works, how you have to have insurance on the grid, so if something breaks down you've got the insurance. Energy providers are there to load into the grid and he was talking about the role that mining plays in the grid. It's fucking fascinating because you have people like Senator Warren who views energy FUD as a way to attack Bitcoin, where actually the whole narrative is flipping the complete other way whereby actually, Bitcoin is going to protect the energy sector and protect the grid.
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: It's unbelievable.
Will Cole: It's capitalism and Warren doesn't get it. You don't just get renewable energy for free; you have to invest in it. So, in order to invest in it, it needs to be profitable. In order for it to be profitable, it has to be integrated into the grid that we have now. You need demand in order to build the supply of it. Texas is very unique in that we have this corridor up there in the Panhandle and everything where we get wind and solar. We're the only place where you have everything; you have the natural gas, you have wind, you have solar. You can really make a play where 70% of the energy comes from that.
Now, it's not sufficient; you need on-demand energy like natural gas and hydrocarbons in order to actually stabilise the grid. But at any given time, we could in theory have 70% of the grid going on renewables.
Peter McCormack: I think you can go higher; we talked about it with him.
Will Cole: Yeah. They should be overbuilding it to 200%, 300% capacity. The way these guys talked last week at our event at the Bitcoin Commons, it blew my mind. We might have, what was it? 70 GW of energy used or built out in Texas, on the Texas grid right now and they're talking about building out 10 GW just for mining in Texas over the next five, seven years.
Peter McCormack: Is Texas going to become the new China of Bitcoin mining?
Will Cole: It is. All the Chinese miners are coming here.
Peter McCormack: I know, I know.
Will Cole: All of them. Part of it is just because we already had good infrastructure set up. They'll end up going to places like Wyoming as well, but Wyoming doesn't have the infrastructure. If you need 300 MW tomorrow, you can't do that in Wyoming but you can do that here.
Peter McCormack: It's becoming a real base for Bitcoin companies and bitcoiners to come in now, which is surprising that other states haven't recognised what is happening here.
Will Cole: Yeah, I think people are starting to catch on.
Peter McCormack: Janet Yellen. All right, it was a bit of a shitcoiny statement, "It's cryptocurrency not Bitcoin", but to see her shift?
Will Cole: I don't know if I trust that.
Peter McCormack: I don't trust any of them.
Will Cole: Yeah, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I know everything is self-interest, but Bitcoin is one of the ultimate self-interest tools.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: So fuck it, we'll take it.
Will Cole: It'll be like what you said in politics, it's almost becoming untenable to be anti-Bitcoin. Warren's going to do Warren things and she can have fun with that, but western democrats, energy-producing states, they're going to want this too. This is real jobs. I'm not sure if you saw the presentation the guy did from the campus up in Rockdale, the old Alcoa plant.
Peter McCormack: When was this?
Will Cole: This was on --
Peter McCormack: Were you there?
Danny Knowles: Yes, I was, but I missed that.
Will Cole: Okay, yeah. He was talking about, "This is going to be 400 jobs in the next year" for the Bitcoin mine. There's four different data centres; they're doing everything from air cooling to submersion, all this. But it's 400 jobs and they're not low-paying jobs.
Peter McCormack: Of course not.
Will Cole: They're really good jobs, and that's what motivates politicians. If you think politicians in Nevada are going to catch on to that and they have energy to spare, of course they're going to.
Peter McCormack: Again, if you think about game theory of Bitcoin and you want Bitcoin to be a success, the most important country in the world to accept it and adopt it is the US, because a lot of countries follow lead.
Will Cole: Yeah, it's very counter-intuitive though --
Peter McCormack: Of course.
Will Cole: -- because we had the best money for a long time. But yeah, we're the most motivated to replace that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it depends what you talk about where the motivation comes from. I'm a firm believer in that we're in a transitional shift between America and China, which has been fought on a currency front. And the way America can defend itself as a decentralised nation, the Republic is decentralised, is with a decentralised currency. Now, it's counterintuitive to politicians who like control, but actually a decentralised currency is what will give this country strength going forward.
Will Cole: Yeah, I mean we have 50 sovereigns that make up the United States. I think most people don't recognise how important state sovereignty in the United States is. When we met in Wyoming, we were passing all those bills that were whamming Blockchain Task Force. When we started drafting these and when Chris Land writing them, we would have conversations with the federal entities, with FinCEN, with the FDIC and they'd all try to scare us. They'd be, "Oh, you don't want to do that, just slow down a little bit, wait two years. We haven't figured out what we're going to do yet".
I give Tyler Lindholm a lot of credit; he just said, "Fuck it, we're doing it". He didn't wait for anyone; he didn't wait for the Blockchain Association or Coin whatever; they just did it on their own. Once we did, all those same people came back and were, "Good luck. You've got two years and everyone's going to copy you". We're, "You're not mad?" and they're, "How could we be mad? It's your fucking state, you can do whatever you want".
Peter McCormack: I love Tyler.
Will Cole: Yeah, and he did a great job with that. I had very little to do with it but at the same time, state sovereignty is such a big deal. Of course, states can't print their own money; they're at a disadvantage from other sovereigns because they can't print money, but they can take an interest in Bitcoin. Wyoming, Alaska, New Mexico, they have sovereign wealth funds. They can buy Bitcoin with that and we're trying to get them to. They can flex their sovereign muscles in the United States, which is difficult to do in other places, especially if you're in the EU and you're on the euro, you're in big trouble.
Peter McCormack: That was one of the things I'm thankful about with the UK is we didn't.
Will Cole: Yeah, at least you had your own money.
Peter McCormack: Well, we had a referendum and we said no, which was a smart decision. Now we've actually left the EU which there are arguments for and against; I recognise both.
Will Cole: I don't, I don't recognise both. For. Good, good on them.
Peter McCormack: My role is to recognise everyone's opinion and allow everyone to have an opinion from the anarcho-capitalist to the Communists.
Will Cole: I was very surprised when I was younger visiting the UK, I thought I would find my Texas brothers in Scotland. It was not the case.
Peter McCormack: No, you won't.
Will Cole: It was more Ireland.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, west coast of Ireland, you'll probably find it a little bit more, but you won't find that. There's a couple of things; just that cultural establishment of the United States, how it was birthed, but the fact that it's a republic. I'm going to piss people off because I talk about this so much, but we don't have the ability to move somewhere else if we don't like the rules, unless we leave the country. That doesn't really work; people can't just leave the country. You can, but you --
Will Cole: You can drive to Oklahoma and it's different.
Peter McCormack: Yeah and we saw it. How many people left New York for Miami? How many people left California for Texas?
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: We know it happened, but we don't really have that. I'm in Bedford and if I go to Manchester it's the same; go to London, it's the same. It's the same rules, same set of rules.
Danny Knowles: We had it more in the EU, to be fair.
Peter McCormack: We did; that is a fair point and they tried to harmonise the rules across the EU.
Will Cole: Then you have to speak Italian.
Danny Knowles: That's true.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what? Italy's the best place in Europe.
Will Cole: Is it?
Peter McCormack: Outside of Bedford, it's the best place.
Will Cole: I've been to Rome as a tourist; I don't really know.
Peter McCormack: Rome's awesome just because it's a giant museum; the whole city's a museum. But it's a great country because they've been very good at maintaining their Italian culture. You go to somewhere like Florence, you're not going to go for a McDonald's.
Will Cole: Sure. It hasn't been Americanised.
Peter McCormack: Hasn't been Americanised, yeah. Danny does make a good point and I'm out of my depth here; Danny can probably look this up. A perfect example of what's wrong with the EU was Ireland was giving advantageous tax positions to Silicon Valley tech giants. So, LinkedIn went there, Facebook went there.
Will Cole: Apple was there, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Everyone went there, but they ended up getting fined; it was something like -- no, the companies got fined something like $9 billion or Apple got fined multiple billions, but the fine was to be paid to the Irish Government. The Irish Government didn't want the fine, even though it was huge, because they wanted to give those tax advantages. Surely, the best thing to do is to allow every single nation to establish its own tax rules so you have competition; that's what would make sense but they didn't allow it. Can you look that up?
Danny Knowles: I think that was actually overturned; I think they didn't have to pay it in the end.
Will Cole: I knew about the domiciling.
Danny Knowles: It was $13 billion.
Peter McCormack: $13 billion; was it Apple?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, Apple, but it was overturned by Luxembourg.
Peter McCormack: Okay, interesting.
Will Cole: But then Trump passed some law to let them redomicile some of that money, to get it back in the US, a tax holiday-type thing.
Peter McCormack: So, the Irish are just allowed to have a different set of tax rules?
Danny Knowles: Well, it was a 2016 rule that meant Apple had to pay $13 billion, but in 2020 it was overruled.
Peter McCormack: It's funny because Ireland could do with that money.
Will Cole: The weirdest thing that happens in Europe, I think -- I've told this story, so maybe I'm just wrong on this, maybe I'm just going to lie to all your listeners here. My understanding of it is Switzerland, who does have their own currency --
Peter McCormack: And guns.
Will Cole: And guns, I think it's compulsory to own guns in Switzerland.
Peter McCormack: I don't know about that.
Will Cole: But anyway they do this really weird thing, which is they have the power of the printing press and the currency that has at least some demand in the world; it's a decent enough currency. They print francs and buy US equities for free. I think about this all the time. When I think about in-games for Bitcoin, like how do nation states adopt it and all these different things, I look at what Switzerland does where they print francs; but they're smart enough not to do this in an egregious fashion, like take over a US company or anything. They own US equities by just printing their own money. I was thinking that that might be the in-game for Bitcoin; one of the big five currencies and someone giving it --
Peter McCormack: Why would you not?
Will Cole: It's the last hope. But when I talk to the people in Wyoming, it's, "Well, you're sovereign but you can't do that". So, you have to get in before someone does that.
Peter McCormack: Someone explained to me recently; they said the US has the ability to print oil.
Will Cole: What do you mean by that?
Peter McCormack: Then they can print dollars and buy oil.
Will Cole: Yeah, basically.
Peter McCormack: So they can print oil and no other country can really do that, because it was the petrodollar. I was like, "Oh, yeah".
Will Cole: The only other country that was close that could do that would be Russia, but their currency's shit.
Peter McCormack: It's had a resurgence this last week. When they came out, they said, what was it? "Unfriendly nations now have to buy our natural resources with the rouble."
Will Cole: Yeah, that's right.
Peter McCormack: What a shitshow that is.
Will Cole: Yeah, but going back to that point of printing francs and buying US equities, the in-game is someone debases the currency, the first one to cheat wins. I think of all the US states right now and I don't think the US is going to be the first to cheat and win. They have too much invested in the dollar to do that. So, we're going to get caught with our pants down, which means that the states themselves have to protect themselves by using vehicles like the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund in Wyoming to buy as much Bitcoin as they can right now; it's the only option, I think.
Thinking about all the different sovereigns and how they might take on a Bitcoin standard, I think basically the states themselves here are going to have to buy Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: What is the difficulty in them doing it? Is there a regulatory thing? Is there something blocking them? Or is it just like us when we first hear about Bitcoin, you're, "I'm not going to buy it with real money".
Will Cole: Yeah, it's basically that.
Peter McCormack: "It's too expensive."
Will Cole: Most of them have the ability to do this. So, you have the electeds, you have the Governor and the Treasurer and all this and vaguely this is under -- not vaguely, literally this is under the Office of the Treasurer, the State Treasurer. They're allowed to invest in a lot of things; they invest in private equity, in VC deals, they invest in private companies all the time. So, if they wanted to, they have the legislative approval to buy Bitcoin if they wanted to; it's just a scary proposition to them right now.
Peter McCormack: This show's going to come out after the conference and I have no inside information, but I think we're going to get nation two there.
Will Cole: I have heard similar.
Peter McCormack: You've heard it.
Will Cole: I don't know who but I've heard.
Peter McCormack: There's been a lot of hints that it's Honduras, a lot of hints.
Will Cole: I've heard of Honduras and Haiti and a few of -- yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it's going as well.
Will Cole: A few Hs.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll have some fun there. Listen, we do want to talk about CBDCs.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: The antithesis of Bitcoin.
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: The worst money that could ever exist.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I know you're worried about this.
Will Cole: I'm very worried about this. Some of the things that have come out of the United States, where we're toying with research projects and the CBDCs, we have politicians saying, "We have to compete with China". I hope people know what that means. In my mind, what that means is complete and utter financial surveillance forever. It is the absolute antithesis of Bitcoin, the absolute antithesis of the United States, western freedom as we know it. It's the ultimate financial surveillance.
Any time someone hears the word CBDC, they should just think, "Commie gobbledygook". It is the absolute in-game for government surveillance over your life. We're getting little brief pictures into this right now even and I know it's almost a cliché at this point, even though it's only been a couple of weeks, months since the financial censorship in Canada for the truckers, because they like to honk too much and kept people awake; their lives were completely financially ruined through a rather difficult measure of shutting down the bank accounts for all the leaders involved.
Peter McCormack: And people who donated.
Will Cole: And people who donated, yes. That was actually a complicated nuclear bomb for the Canadians to pull off. It would be trivial in a CBDC world where the central government is -- I don't even think CBDCs are even going to do centralised blockchains. It's just a digital currency that is issued directly from the central bank. I think they would hope to do it directly to people where they have absolute visibility and control over the flow of funds. Right now, it's difficult for them to exert that type of control over people. Canada was a surprise; that's the first time we've seen it to that extent where literally financial censorship is how you ruin someone's life at the end of the day.
Peter McCormack: This is where the US again needs to take the lead, because you really want the Canadian Government to be thinking, "Do we want to follow the US lead or the Chinese lead with something like this?" I think if you want to do a CBDC, if you want to compete with China, that's why you're doing a CBDC, well you're basically going to have to be better at surveillance and you're going to have to be better at control.
Will Cole: That's the implication.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you have to be better at it. If you want to compete with it, you've got to be better at it. Look at the soft influence China's had over the world over the last decade, because they're very good at surveillance and social credit scores and authoritarianism. If you want to win that, you've got to be better at that, so you've got to have a better CBDC, you've got to be better at control. And the US won't be, it can't beat China at authoritarianism, because you have freedoms here.
Will Cole: Supposedly.
Peter McCormack: So, to beat them, you've got to be better at the opposite, you've got to have a better idea which is freedom money. That's the fucking answer.
Will Cole: It's the same battle we've been having for 150 years, around dictatorial control and communism and open market capitalism and western freedoms; it's the same story. When I hear, "We need to compete with China with CBDCs" or "The European Union needs to look into this" I just think, "Replace CBDC with Communist rule". I know it's not literally the same thing, but that's the way people should be processing this in their brains. I would just say again, another cliché is people complaining about cancel culture and stuff like that. I hate that it's already cliché because I think it's real, and what I would ask people is, "Do you think over the next five, ten years that that's going to get better or worse?"
Peter McCormack: I think we know.
Will Cole: If it's going to be worse and the Government has control to the level that a CBDC would allow them to have control, then you are ruined as an individual, completely ruined. The only antidote to that is Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm with you. One of the challenges I've found with it is communicating this to normies, especially my side of the Pond, is a lot harder. I'll give you a great example: my Facebook now is really advertising for the podcast, "Here's a show, a bit about the football" but I did start trying to share ideas from guests who've come on the show.
Will Cole: Oh, no, are you effort-posting on Facebook now?
Peter McCormack: Just low effort, just low effort.
Will Cole: Okay, okay.
Peter McCormack: Just to try and get people around to the idea. I want to convert as many people to Bitcoin as possible.
Will Cole: Sure, of course.
Peter McCormack: If anyone went back through my timeline, they would have seen I was pretty much sharing the general narrative with regard to, "Inflation is coming, consider Bitcoin". And a lot of people would say, "Oh okay, Pete was right". Pete wasn't right; the community was right and I shared it. But they would share that. I put out a thing about CBDCs saying you want to be very careful about these. This is what it is, this is how they work and this is what it means for the Government. My friend's mum blocked me. I can't remember what she put; she put something like, "I can't deal with any more of your conspiratorial nonsense" and then blocked me. I think a lot of people in the UK can be easily sold a CBDC.
Will Cole: I think so too. It scares the shit out of me.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but really easily with, "Oh, here's the benefits". "Here's Britcoin" as Rishi Sunak said, "Here's Britcoin. Yeah, it's going to be centrally controlled, we can manage interest rates, etc, we can issue benefits centrally; this is going to be great". Any of the people I know who are against it right now, the people that are based in the UK, they are considered nutters. For me, it's not whether we're right or wrong; it's how do we communicate this.
Will Cole: How do we? Okay, I'm not trying to shit on people in the UK.
Peter McCormack: No, you can.
Will Cole: If you don't understand the value of why individuals should own guns and why you should be sceptical of people who want to take guns away from you, who also happen to have guns themselves, I think it's a similar line of logic to wondering why you would have anything to hide in your financial life, or why you wouldn't want someone at a push of a button to be able to financially say, "Well, you can't spend your money anymore" or, "You can only spend it in this way at these institutions". It's a similar line of logic of paranoia that an individual would have to say, "Why would I cede that control over to you in the first place?"
Peter McCormack: As a line of reasoning, I get it, but it's never going to work in the UK. We have no gun culture; we have no recent history of gun culture in the last century.
Will Cole: Just stabby knife culture.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's really just gang culture; that's just gangs killing each other. We just don't have that culture.
Will Cole: In your hometown, how do people exert their individual liberties? What would matter to them? Private property, obviously not guns; is it voting rights? What would they hold sacred that they have that the state can't take away from them?
Peter McCormack: It's almost like we don't really have a culture of thinking about that.
Will Cole: Really?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think with things that are more scared, strangely enough -- Danny, correct me if you think I'm wrong here. We're sacred about the more socialist elements of society. The NHS is sacred in the UK, not with everyone and certainly I would imagine if you could measure how popular it was, it has waned, it has dropped, because medicine advances so much, it's become more and more expensive, it seems like a black hole where the money goes in and the service has dropped, wait times for ambulances are longer, wait times for treatment are longer; it is an issue.
Will Cole: I've been doing remote hiring since about 2012. At my previous company, Stack Overflow, about half of our company was overseas. In places with socialised medicine, UK, France, when we would hire people there, one of the main things they wanted was private insurance, health insurance outside of their government.
Peter McCormack: Because they've never once experienced a situation where they can't phone up and get an ambulance or go to a doctor and get seen. They've never experienced that and to come to a country where you might not have that is an issue.
Will Cole: No, I would say the opposite. We had a lot of leverage with people in the UK and France, because when we would make them offers, we could get them private insurance and they valued that way higher than any wage increases, which is very interesting.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, sorry I understand that. I thought you meant when they were coming here.
Will Cole: No, no.
Peter McCormack: But this is what makes me laugh about private insurance. Either answer this generally or personally, but what's private healthcare? What's the cost of insurance there?
Will Cole: I have no idea.
Peter McCormack: My assumptions for most people --
Will Cole: A few thousand dollars a month; it's expensive.
Peter McCormack: A few thousand dollars a month and then you've got your --
Will Cole: Obamacare stuff?
Peter McCormack: No, you've got the deductible as well.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I have private insurance for me and my two kids in the UK. We have the highest level of cover, we have seen-next-day cancer cover; it's brilliant, it's the best you can get.
Will Cole: How much does it cost?
Peter McCormack: I think it's somewhere between £150 and £180 a month. I am still paying for the NHS and I know the NHS subsidises part of it; I'm pretty sure they do. But at the same time, that's not a lot of money and I've used it. I used it for my back operation. I would have had to wait God knows how long. I was seen within three days. I had my operation within three days of requesting it; went into a private hospital and had it done. Doctors have a wait. I can go to a private medical centre in Bedford. If Bedford High Street has it, most places have it, I can get a doctor's appointment; it's £50.
Will Cole: This is only because you're on private insurance, right?
Peter McCormack: No, anyone can walk into that place and pay £50 for an appointment. My point being is people in the UK, they have private options that are very, very cheap. Yes, it's probably subsidised by the NHS, but at the same time they have that option.
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I would say, when you say, "What do people hold sacred?" I think we hold that we are -- people aren't going to like this here in America. We hold collectivist things as sacred. We hold the NHS as sacred. What do you think of that?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, the NHS definitely is. When you talk about private property, I think that is as well; I think people value that. I also think maybe it's not totally fair to say that people in the UK don't think critically like they do here, because that's not my experience.
Peter McCormack: I didn't say that though, did I?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, a little bit.
Peter McCormack: How did I say that?
Danny Knowles: You said people aren't thinking critically about CBDC but I know, from my experience, I even had my mum text me, "This sounds scary. What is it?"
Peter McCormack: Okay, interesting. I just haven't seen it myself. The one instance is of somebody, and that is obviously not a statistically significant number, but the people I've seen talking about it on Twitter, British people, are the same people who fit in well here in Texas, right?
Will Cole: Yeah, the Bavarians in Germany.
Peter McCormack: They get everything.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm actually stumped when you say, "What do we hold sacred?" because we don't have that history of freedom and liberty like you have here in Texas, so it's not something we hold sacred, because we've never really had it.
Will Cole: I feel like certainly you had some of it, like feudal periods where very weak central government. What do we know about the kings and queens of England?
Peter McCormack: We hold The Queen sacred.
Will Cole: When they actually had real power, what I at least know about it, is that it was a really weak form of central government where, if they stepped out of line, what do we know about them? They all get murdered; they all get murdered or people don't help them out; they don't come to arms when they're needed. When I think about this, I think it's very easy for people to get duped into thinking that it's the exact same affinity scam with altcoins, where they try to cuddle up to Bitcoin and say, "Oh, we're just like that. We're just like Bitcoin; we're just a little bit different over here, but we're basically the same". A lot of people fall for that. VCs all over the United States fall for that every single day.
When people talk about CBDCs, they're going to talk about it in Bitcoin terms as a digital currency. They're not going to say decentralised but they are going to try to compare it to Bitcoin and get the reputation that Bitcoin has as being innovative and ground-breaking and apply it to themselves and say, "But we just tweaked a few things" when in reality they tweaked everything; where "everything" means that there's no such thing as censorship resistance, in fact the whole point of it is censorship. It couldn't be more opposite than the pitch that Bitcoin makes, yet it's going to be pitched to the public as, "Bitcoin was this great invention, but it has these flaws and we fixed them" when really they've just taken the entire value proposition away. I don't know if that's a too simplistic way to put it.
Peter McCormack: No, I completely agree with you.
Will Cole: I worry because I get calls from hedge fund managers who are, "Well, I heard the US is working on a Bitcoin of their own". These are smart people and I find it to be very worrying that through techno babble and false comparisons, that people can be lulled into what I would see as the greatest disaster for liberty and personal freedom that certainly in my lifetime anything I can think of.
Peter McCormack: Do you think it's technically doable?
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: One of the things I also worry about is that one of the --
Will Cole: As long as they use SQL databases, it'll be fast.
Peter McCormack: You don't think they're going to do it with blockchain?
Will Cole: I don't think they can.
Peter McCormack: It's not going to be on Solana.
Will Cole: No. It could be on Solana, I guess; that's centralised enough for them.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It does. I share every one of your fears; it scares the shit out of me. It's communicating this in a way that sounds intelligent. I'm going to talk about something now because it pisses me off; I haven't spoken about this publicly yet. We had the opportunity, I had the opportunity to write for the Financial Times. I've had two opportunities recently; one was with The Spectator and one with the Financial Times. Are you all right with me talking about this?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think you should.
Peter McCormack: Fuck it. The Spectator wrote a very anti-Bitcoin article. I tweeted the guy and said, "I think you're wrong" etc. I can't remember what I said, "Happy to help you" and he got in touch. He said, "Do you want to write something?" and we did, sent it to him, he had some edits. I was annoyed about edits because I was, "This is an op-ed" and I spoke to Alex Gladstein. He said, "No, you just have to accept that with some of the major publications, you can have some edits, but as long as you're okay with the article just go with it, because you get to communicate and they know their audience". The Spectator amends were very minor. It was fine, it went out and it was a great article.
Then we had the opportunity with the Financial Times. I appeared on one of their podcasts to talk about Bitcoin. Apparently, it was one of their most popular podcasts ever because that happens; people want to hear about Bitcoin. Then came the opportunity to write for them. It might be a column, I don't know if it was going to be monthly or weekly, but a column to talk about Bitcoin. We did version one, got some edits. Did version two, got some edits. By the time we got to version four, it was basically bullshit.
Will Cole: It was just theirs.
Peter McCormack: It wasn't like, "Can we edit here?" It was wholesale changes and in the end it was, "I don't even fucking believe this anymore; this is so watered down. This isn't what Bitcoin's about". Anyway, I went back to the guy and said, "Look, I don't want to do this; this is bullshit". He said, "I'll come back with another version". How long did we spend on it?
Danny Knowles: A month at least.
Peter McCormack: A month.
Will Cole: What's their goal? What are they trying to get you to not say?
Peter McCormack: That's a good question because this was months ago; I just gave up. I was, "Fuck it, I don't even want a column in the Financial Times. This is bullshit, I'm going to release the original to Substack or something".
Danny Knowles: It just took all the edge out of it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it took all the edge, all the, "This is what happened in El Salvador, this is what it means. This is what Bitcoin offers you". It just became this watered down -- and I think they were worrying about the combination of readers and their boss. But in doing that, it wasn't an honest article about Bitcoin. Compared to the other stuff about Bitcoin out there, it would have been good but it was the wrong article. I wouldn't say these things, so I'm not having it out there. Yeah, basically I wrote to the guy and he said, "Do another version". I was, "I just can't be bothered". We've spent a month on one article, we've done four or five versions and I don't like it. So, yeah, fuck it. Sorry Financial Times, but fuck off.
Will Cole: Why do Europeans -- I'm coming across as very ignorant in this podcast so far about the mentality of the typical UK citizen or European citizen. But why do they like Bitcoin right now? Let's hash this out. We're trying to figure out how to --
Peter McCormack: Because they made money on it.
Will Cole: Right.
Peter McCormack: There will be people like you, who like it for the reasons you like it, but it's a very small number. Most people would like it because they make -- Danny, please correct me if you ever disagree because you're British as well. It may be a similar thing in Australia anyway.
Danny Knowles: I think it's probably similar in America on the whole, that most people at least start for the gains. I don't think most people in America are in it for the freedom.
Peter McCormack: There's a lot more foundational freedom people here.
Danny Knowles: 100% yeah.
Peter McCormack: I don't think we have that foundational freedom over here.
Danny Knowles: I think that changes over time. That's something that Bitcoin changes in the people that get into Bitcoin.
Will Cole: I like the motivation of people who want to make money. I think that's a perfectly reasonable reason to like Bitcoin, is that number goes up. We've had a joke about it for years now. That's a good reason to want to be in Bitcoin, so let's lean into that. I might be worried the infringements on personal freedoms, like in the United States, they don't have to ban guns in the United States anymore with CBDC; they just have to make it impossible for you to transfer money to gun manufacturers. So, they don't have to abolish the second amendment, they don't have to amend the constitution, they don't have to take anything away; they just have to make it impossible for you to transact, and that's what I'm afraid of.
But it's the same logic then if you want to hold on to your wealth and you have the exact same ability to inflate the currency as much as you want, that's something a European, who wants to make money and is motivated by a profit mentality or a savings mentality, would realise in a CBDC; the games that central bankers play right now around trying to control the money supply in this futile effort to control the world -- actually, the tools they have to do that become much more sophisticated and simple.
What we know about the currency wars that people have right now is that central banks are incentivised right now to debase their currency the fastest way possible, which is to print money, because in that way they can keep jobs in their country, they can drive down labour prices. That is the goal of the central bank in the UK; they want to debase their currency faster than anyone else and that can be a motivation. The CBDC makes this infinitely easier for them to do; it might not resonate with your friends that you never talk to about Bitcoin, my side of it, but that side of it should work.
Peter McCormack: It is becoming more obvious. Listen, the price to fill up your car at the moment in the UK is a lot. Everything is getting really noticeably expensive; food is getting expensive.
Will Cole: It's terrifying.
Peter McCormack: If we have enough people out there telling the reason why it's happening rather than reading it in the press, the bullshit about why it's happening, if we can get that communicated across without sound like some nutter, then you have a chance. And there are people listening; in the last couple of months I have had a handful more people get in touch and say, "I want to learn a bit more about Bitcoin". It is small, but it's growing.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: That's definitely growing, that side of it, I think.
Peter McCormack: From that, you might be able to elevate the conversation to freedom, to some of the control that government has that people don't realise they have, the expansion of government, the expansion of laws.
Will Cole: How they finance wars.
Peter McCormack: How they finance wars.
Will Cole: How they finance incarceration.
Danny Knowles: That conversation in the UK is definitely more with Russell Brand, Maajid. These people are growing that conversation.
Peter McCormack: They are. Maajid's a tricky one because he's so focused on a niche right now.
Danny Knowles: He wasn't before this war, though.
Peter McCormack: You're right.
Danny Knowles: He talks a lot about CBDCs.
Peter McCormack: He does.
Will Cole: Does he?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he did. He talked about it on Rogan.
Will Cole: That's right, that was a phenomenal episode. I don't listen to many, but I listened to that and that was really good.
Peter McCormack: That was really good.
Will Cole: He actually understood it, yeah.
Peter McCormack: We're hopefully going to be having him on soon as well. I don't want to get into the war with him, I want to get into that side of things with him.
Will Cole: Does Russell Brand talk about this?
Peter McCormack: He does, yeah.
Will Cole: Who would have guessed? He's your most famous intellectual now out of the UK.
Danny Knowles: He gets into it from a different angle. He talks about Bitcoin without every saying the word "Bitcoin", but he really gets it.
Will Cole: He makes sense of what is valuable.
Danny Knowles: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: He does talk about Bitcoin, but I can show you the perfect example of what we're facing with this. Search for "Russell Brand" in Google news and tell me what you find. You know what I'm bringing up?
Will Cole: Right.
Danny Knowles: Exactly, yeah.
Peter McCormack: This is the thing we face and you face it here as well, but we face it at a different level, especially if you've got The Telegraph. Here we go, "The Independent targets actor and comedian Russell Brand", "Is Russell" … yeah, "How did Russell Brand go from stand-up stardom to peddling YouTube conspiracies?" "Russell Brand, the new Joe Rogan" and, "I'm the one he warned you about". They've just gone after him now, they've gone after him.
Will Cole: He's too popular.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's one of the difficulties. My product is an American product, my guests are mainly American. I come to America to make it and 55% to 60% of listeners are American. But it's on our mind; I want a higher listener base in the UK, I want them to listen to this. I'm trying to walk a very careful path of communicating this to British people without being labelled a conspiracy theorist or a nutter. That's not for personal protection; it is to make sure you can land this message.
Will Cole: To actually influence people.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, to influence people. By the way, when I say this I'm always me. Any opinion I express, I genuinely believe it and when I'm wrestling with it, I do. But if I was holding a position similar to Marty Bent -- again, no criticism of Marty Bent. He was on the show recently and I consider him a friend, I love talking to him. But if my show was more like that, I'd have no chance of landing these messages; you wouldn't get anywhere.
Will Cole: But he gets celebrated; he gets to go on Tucker Carlson and he's helped me with US politicians, yeah. But that level of discourse is not respectable in the UK.
Peter McCormack: We just don't have it. Like I say, I'm not discrediting Marty.
Will Cole: Of course, it works here.
Peter McCormack: I love talking to him and I love the challenge of the debate. I don't always agree with him but I respect where he's coming from. I'm walking a careful balance of trying to get these messages across without being labelled crazy conspiracy theorist nutter. It's really important because we need voices like Maajid, we need -- I don't want to say Laurence Fox because I think he's an idiot, but we need these voices. We don't have a lot of them and usually they get pushed into this bucket of nutters and it's really hard. Russell Brand, he's historically a moderate voice, he's historically a progressive.
Will Cole: I don't even know him; I just knew him as an actor, I guess.
Peter McCormack: A comedian. But now he's just trying to get into these areas, help educate people and bang. All of the media come -- by the way, I think The Telegraph -- aren't they considered a Conservative newspaper?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, they definitely are. But also, while this is all happening, their followers are growing; more people are listening, but they are getting attacked from the media.
Peter McCormack: Sure.
Will Cole: I feel we export that to Europe right now, that level of argument or that viewpoint that now Russell Brand is taking natively to the UK. We've been exporting that for a while.
Danny Knowles: He's been doing that for a long time; we watched a video this morning. I think his opinion's changed a lot, but he's been going after government for a long time.
Peter McCormack: He used to go at it from a different angle, didn't he?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: He would go at it more from thinking about the underclass, the poor in society who were not being served by the elites.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: But he would be somebody who -- it would be more of an anti-capitalism now.
Danny Knowles: I can't speak for him, but I think he possibly still has some of those thoughts, but he's trending more away from centralisation to a break-up of all these things.
Will Cole: Actually, maybe it's that simple. If we're just brainstorming how to influence people in Europe at this point around CBDCs and the values of Bitcoin outside of just number go up, I talked about guns here, but what do people in the UK buy that is popular that the government might have reason to take away? Is the UK Government worried about cow farts and is going to make it difficult for you to buy meat? Is it gasoline and ESG narratives?
Peter McCormack: Tea.
Will Cole: Tea.
Peter McCormack: Marmite.
Danny Knowles: As long as no one goes after Gregg's in the north, we'll be all right.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Gregg's in the north, their sausage rolls.
Will Cole: This is tough; it's hard for me to put myself in that mindset.
Peter McCormack: But narrative is important.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: You can fight narrative and lose, or you can accept narrative and try and navigate it. For example, I think it's a hard fight to just fight ESG and say, "It's bullshit, it's Communism. We need to fight to get rid of it". Or you can navigate it and use it against itself.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think there's a far more effective -- if you want Bitcoin to succeed and you think ESG is damaging for it, I think it's far more effective to go, "Actually, by the way Bitcoin is the most ESG thing there is. It literally solves environmental, social and governance. It solves them all".
Will Cole: Man, are we going to start a fight here?
Peter McCormack: No, no.
Will Cole: Okay.
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is, my point being is you don't always have to say, "No, fight. No, fight". Sometimes you can say, "Hold on a second".
Will Cole: I get that.
Peter McCormack: "If you care about ESG, let's objectively review Bitcoin under the lens of ESG and we'll play your arguments back at you."
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think you can do that.
Will Cole: I think there are several people that are very good at this, Nic Carter's particularly good at this. Ross Stevens at NYDIG has a couple or at least one really good article on this.
Peter McCormack: Dan Morehead at Pantera.
Will Cole: It's different than what I would say. I feel like if you're trying to bridge that gap, I would be more persuasive.
Peter McCormack: It's different people for a different audience.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I would never expect a Marty Bent to do that because his audience is different.
Will Cole: Of course not.
Peter McCormack: I'm glad he doesn't because he fights for his audience in his way; but Ross Stevens has an entirely different audience, and he fights in his way; Dan Morehead has an entirely -- we have had different audiences. But if we spent more time actually observing why people are doing this, rather than -- because we even have it here in Bitcoin. We have people trying to cancel people for not holding the right opinions.
Will Cole: Of course.
Peter McCormack: It's, "What the fuck are we doing here?"
Will Cole: Luckily, it doesn't matter in Bitcoin's world. You can peddle influence in more centralised worlds and have more control over what the outcomes are. In Bitcoin, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. You can shame people, whatever, but they will ultimately get the same benefit or punishment that they deserve by holding that opinion, because if they didn't want to hold their own keys and they're subject to an exchange hack, then you just learn the lesson that way; we all had to also. There's no way to really control it in the Bitcoin world; you don't get any benefit from it.
Peter McCormack: Yes, yes.
Will Cole: I don't think at least.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I come at it from a personal level thinking about trying to navigate these things. Let me put it a different way: we have a growing number of listeners who are not libertarians; they are left, moderate, right European, which is still left for you guys, but also people on the right who don't want to see the end of the state. We have this growing audience. Now, I think it's much better to accept there's this wide range of opinions that people have and how do we bring them together around an idea, which is Bitcoin.
I think Bitcoin is the thing that can bring together left, right and moderates around an idea that benefits everyone. I think it's counterproductive to Bitcoin to banish people from it or scare them away by making them think their opinions don't matter or the views they hold are wrong.
Will Cole: I don't think it matters as much as that though because what's the outcome at the end? It doesn't matter what your views are on any of these things; if you have the wrong view as it pertains to Bitcoin, you only lose. It's the only option; you just lose.
Peter McCormack: There's views with Bitcoin, but there's views in wider society.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I think we can scare people away. We had Margot Paez on; she's a leftie. I completely disagree with her political opinions, but she might convince a whole bunch of people who are also lefties to consider Bitcoin and the benefits for it. Then you might get a leftie senator who -- I say leftie, it almost sounds pejorative, but I don't mean it like that; someone from the left who is also like a Ted Cruz from the left. Imagine getting the two of them together and have a conversation and they can agree on this? "Wow, this is a great idea and let's work together on this." That's what I think we can do.
What I don't like is, I know from the outside from talking to people, that sometimes we can look like a bunch of crazy nutters. But actually, they're some of the most intelligent people I've ever met who've got the best opinions on how society should be structured and how we could work together.
Will Cole: This is always tough for me because I don't want to be divisive, I do view Bitcoin as apolitical. As a decentralised money and with decentralised governance, it doesn't have any room for political theory. There's nothing about politics in the whitepaper and it doesn't have any room for that. However, I do think it's going to be tough.
The more left socialist countries and mindsets -- I care about people and I think that if we cannot bridge that gap with them, that they will just lose. It'll be a very, very hard transition for them. I think they are the most vulnerable to hearing the CBDC pitches and all this type of thing coming from the EU and the US right now, as they explore their options. I don't see any other outcome for those people other than becoming miserably poor.
Peter McCormack: For me, they're the ones I want to work on the most.
Will Cole: Yeah?
Peter McCormack: I do. I want to work on -- my brother's a great example. He'll hear this, he works on the show now; one of the smartest people I've ever met. He supports me and supports the team in preparing for shows and supports the ideas, but my brother is historically very left and he's European left, so he's ultra-left; not like woke bullshit, just like a Labour, he voted Labour; he doesn't mind me telling you this. Since he's come into Bitcoin, he has shifted. He came into Bitcoin to support me with work and help me with it, because he's a smart guy. He read the whitepaper and he had to question and challenge a lot of things. Have you seen the shift in him?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I obviously didn't know him very well at all before, but yeah I've definitely seen a shift.
Peter McCormack: There's been a big shift in him.
Will Cole: It's a big slap of reality.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. But I don't think a slap of reality comes from a slap. Unless it's a complete financial collapse and maybe you get wrecked and you go through it.
Will Cole: When gas prices go up to $10 in the United States, that's a slap of reality for you.
Peter McCormack: As a parent, you learn very quickly shouting is not effective.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: You lead by example, you spend time, you teach lessons, that's the effective way. Shouting and yelling at people that you're some libtard moron isn't going to convince them that Bitcoin is the thing. In some ways, it might push them away because, "Oh, it's those fucking crazy rights". Actually, if you spend a bit of time saying, "Hey listen, I want to hear your view of the world. I want to hear about your issues and I want to show you how maybe Bitcoin can help you solve some of the problems that you see in the world". I think that's far more effective.
Will Cole: That sounds very Mormon, door-to-door, that particular pitch.
Peter McCormack: "I want to show you how Bitcoin can help you…" yeah.
Will Cole: How do you make people value their own autonomy?
Peter McCormack: Carrot and stick; some people it's carrot, some people are stick.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: But for every person who has the issues with the left and says, "Fuck them" etc, I'm the guy who wants to go and talk to them. I want to bring them in and help them to understand it, because I think we get to where we want to be faster by working collaboratively. Look how divided society is right now. You just have to go on Twitter to see it; you just have to watch the news to see it.
Will Cole: You're not on Twitter anymore.
Peter McCormack: I am not on Twitter -- well…
Will Cole: Is this fake? Did you fake quit?
Peter McCormack: No, I semi quit in that what I realised is, and I should have done this a long time ago, the most effective thing I can do for Bitcoin is make the best show I can and get it out there to as many people as possible. If I go on Twitter, even I'm nuanced, if I create enemies, that doesn't help.
Will Cole: I'm going to give you some shit on this.
Peter McCormack: Let me get to that.
Will Cole: Okay.
Peter McCormack: I think Twitter as a broadcast -- and when I say "broadcast" news or marketing, it works well. So, if I've got an event that's news, I can release that on Twitter and people who know about it might come. If I've got a show I'm going to release, I'll retweet it and that's cool. I only see me trying to engage in conversations now as a negative for that, because you don't convince anyone on Twitter. You may convince the odd person, but the reward mechanism is set up to gamify hate and anger, echo chambers and bias.
I think the perfect example of this has been watching Tim Pool, to just watch him descend into somebody completely captured by his audience and just generally become a complete -- sorry, we're not friends so it doesn't matter; I think he's just a fucking moron now.
Will Cole: I don't know much about him. I've seen some of his podcasts, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I used to love hearing some of his opinions on things. I didn't always agree with him and sometimes when I've watched his show, there's things he said I think are smart. Now, I think he's just completely captured and I've seen that happen to so many people on Twitter. You are rewarded for following a bias or a group thing; you are not rewarded for nuance.
Will Cole: Sure, but I'm giving you some shit on this.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do.
Will Cole: You pick fights. You intentionally go out there and pick some fights, right? Sometimes tongue in cheek and you get an outsider's response that is not justified, but you're poking the bear.
Peter McCormack: It depends. There's British humour when I make a joke about Texas and I say, "The barbecue sucks".
Will Cole: "The barbecue sucks."
Peter McCormack: That's a joke. I don't think I've gone out intentionally picking fights. I used to back in the early days when there was a very small audience.
Will Cole: That's a good way to get an audience.
Peter McCormack: Danny will always be honest.
Will Cole: Pick on a conversation.
Peter McCormack: Danny is my conscience; this is why he's now on the show, this is why he has a microphone.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Danny is my conscience and I will do most of the things Danny says or listen to everything he says. Would you say I was trying to be careful about my tweets over the last year or two? Yes or no?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, definitely. I agree that you sometimes respond to things -- I think you respond to things with nuance but you pick what you respond to sometimes.
Peter McCormack: One of the reasons I also quit is it turns me into a prick.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And I don't want to be that prick.
Will Cole: I guess what you just described in terms of how you want to use Twitter in the future as a broadcasting mechanism, as marketing the podcast and all that is basically the way I've used it forever. But I don't have discussions on Twitter; that's a bad place to have discussions.
Peter McCormack: Discussions or even just countering an opinion. How do you think I poke the bear? Give me an example.
Will Cole: I can't think exactly. You were saying about dinner the other week and everything. I get out of dinner and I look at your Twitter feed and it's just, "Well, you know, the barbecue sucks and the…" You're trying to get a rise out of people.
Peter McCormack: But there's a difference between fun and banter. People have to understand the joke, you need a sense of humour. When I said, "Real men don't need guns" it's a joke; come on, these things are a joke.
Will Cole: Yeah, sure.
Peter McCormack: I don't care about that; I don't mind getting shit for that. What I mind getting shit for is when I did a very nuanced reply to Saifedean's view on climate change; researched a nuance and he said, "Fuck you", "Fuck this" and I was just like --
Will Cole: See, but I like it, not from him, but other people saying, "Fuck you", because I actually liked his Twitter thread after that, "97% of priests agree that you should sacrifice your child". What do you know? Are you a priest? Do you know whether you should sacrifice your child or not? I like that and that seemed like a good retort to what you were doing.
Peter McCormack: No, I didn't buy it. In the end, first and foremost it makes me act like a prick and I don't want to be that guy. I want to be this guy.
Will Cole: I think of it as a hype machine. I like the echo chamber nature of Twitter actually; I love it.
Peter McCormack: I hate it.
Will Cole: But it's great; a hype machine for what you're working on or the message you're trying to get out there. Having a nuanced conversation on Twitter, I've just never even attempted to do that. It seems like a total losing battle. I think it's a great way to get the message out; I like the way we feed off each other there. It can be very positive.
Peter McCormack: Let's not say a nuanced conversation; there's quite a big list of shared opinions within the cohort I exist in, and there are other people who disagree with those opinions and they don't have a voice. I like to disagree, if I do disagree, and be public about it and say "I disagree", so those people know there's somebody batting for them. My emails, check my emails and I'll show you after this, I will show you some of the emails I get; full of people who are saying, "Thank you for this, I agree with you". They don't go and do it on Twitter because they get memed, shouted at, abused, etc.
Will Cole: I'm not famous on Twitter, so therefore I don't really see much of this stuff.
Peter McCormack: First and foremost, what is best for Bitcoin? It is not alienating people, so therefore why waste my time on that? For that purpose, it's failed. I may come back, but right now I'm enjoying not being on it.
Will Cole: I take Twitter breaks pretty frequently.
Peter McCormack: Also just the abuse is relentless and everyone says, "Develop a thick skin, it's not real life". When you get told tens of thousands of times a year, "You're fat, you're shit, you're useless, glad your mum's dead".
Will Cole: That's fucked up.
Peter McCormack: In the end I'm, "I don't fucking need this".
Will Cole: Yeah and again, I don't get that type of hate.
Peter McCormack: I fully admit I'm a hypocrite. My criticisms of Twitter, I am a hypocrite.
Will Cole: I like you on Twitter.
Peter McCormack: But I'm not going out there saying, "This is a problem". I'm a fucking hypocrite and I'd like to come back, but I just -- we're busy, we're busy doing this and I just don't need it right now.
Will Cole: There's one thing I really agree with you with and it's I don't believe in intersectionality, where holding one belief must mean you have these other seven beliefs. You can get down the line and say, "Oh, you have this belief? Great, we're friends, you have this belief…" and you go down six levels and we're all good. But you get this one wrong and, "You're a fucking piece of shit", whatever it is you get. It's why I like the echo chamber around Bitcoin when all we're talking about is Bitcoin. I know it can get boring; I've been doing it for ten years now. Fuck it, ten years where 90% of my public discourse has been related to Bitcoin. I don't really like mixing it up with other things.
I talk about financial censorship because I think it's very, very related to Bitcoin specifically. I don't actually like having the discussions on ESG in all this outside of what it means for Bitcoin's mining. So, I reject that nature of it, the intersectional beliefs we joke about, carnivores and stuff like that. Some people really are and that's fine, but it's not a tenet of Bitcoin; it doesn't actually matter to be in the club of Bitcoin or to value Bitcoin or anything like that.
Peter McCormack: Do you know who it matters to?
Will Cole: Who?
Peter McCormack: It matters to the newer, lower level of people who are trying to establish status.
Will Cole: Okay. Yeah, I can see that.
Peter McCormack: Because --
Will Cole: We're fitting into a particular -- yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't fit in with most of the people on every issue here in Texas; I'm clearly very different. You, me, Parker, we can all go out for dinner and we get on.
Will Cole: We're all friends.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What I'm saying is there are people who are trying to establish status and to establish status, there's a fixed set of beliefs; anyone steps outside of that, they get harassed and therefore, there's this group thing that happens and it's a growing organism of people. There's thousands of them because I've blocked them all, the fucking idiots. That happens and it's that, "I support the latest thing, I'm against the latest thing"; which by the way, when that, "I support the latest thing" came out, I was, "Oh shit, I'm going to get basketed for that, put into that basket". Then when it was, "I oppose the latest thing" came out, that was actually brilliant because it said to two sets of people, "There is an issue here. Group think is bad, let's find some nuance".
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: Don't know if it happened.
Will Cole: I've just become a single-issue person. If it's good for Bitcoin, I like it no matter what. I think about it's so complex right now, what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, what just happened in Canada. But we've just got the best advertisement for Bitcoin, I think, since Cyprus in 2013. When Cyprus started seizing any funds over $10,000 in people's banks, that was a big moment for me. The Bitcoin story was, "Oh my gosh, we actually need this for real". And we're getting that advertisement right now.
Peter McCormack: I know, dude.
Will Cole: I don't care about any of this other stuff.
Peter McCormack: Every major story has a Bitcoin angle.
Will Cole: Yeah, I guess now I'm going against my intersectional, everything seems to be related to Bitcoin at this point.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's good.
Will Cole: I'm contradicting myself.
Peter McCormack: No, I don't think you are, I don't think you are. I think what you're recognising is that the fracture in society, the collapsing of fiat systems is an advert for Bitcoin.
Will Cole: It is.
Peter McCormack: But that's fine and that's good.
Will Cole: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm completely with you on that. In some ways, it's like big regrets is trying to intersect into these wider issues that have got nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Will Cole: Yeah, single issue. We talk about this a lot with CJ Wilson and guys that are doing the -- shoot, I don't know the name of the pack; they're doing a political pack.
Peter McCormack: I know, yeah, with Amanda.
Will Cole: Yeah. All they care about is Bitcoin; it doesn't matter if you're Republican, Democrat, anything else. You say good things about Bitcoin, you get money from us. I think that's brilliant; I love it. We only care about one thing, "What's your view on abortion?" "Don't care". "What's your view on Second Amendment?" "Don't care". Bitcoin, that's it. I think that's a good place to be right now.
Peter McCormack: What's the endgame with this then?
Will Cole: What's the endgame?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: Stuff Congress with pro-Bitcoin members from all over the United States, California, Texas.
Peter McCormack: No, that's not the endgame; that's a strategy.
Will Cole: Oh yeah, sorry.
Peter McCormack: What's the endgame?
Will Cole: What's the endgame is honestly to do less harm; Bitcoin doesn't actually need politicians to make it succeed, it will succeed on its own merits. What would be helpful is to not have people actively attacking it and elongating the inevitable collapse of their own currencies, but also the rise of Bitcoin as a global reserve currency. If it is unimpeded by the types of politicians that are there right now and we're single-issue voters, then it just might happen in my lifetime then, instead of not in my lifetime. I'd rather it happen in my lifetime.
Peter McCormack: I think that's a great place to finish, unless there's anything else you wanted to talk about?
Will Cole: I don't know. I can't remember what we said in here; this has flown by.
Peter McCormack: I usually look at Danny to get a little nod on the time.
Will Cole: Time to go?
Peter McCormack: No, to get a nod on the time and usually I get a thing about an hour, like at 1.30.
Will Cole: Okay.
Peter McCormack: Is it 1.30?
Danny Knowles: 1.30.
Peter McCormack: We just breezed 1.30 and 1.30's our goal time. We can go longer.
Will Cole: No, what have I said?
Danny Knowles: Do you think you need to end with a game of rock, paper, scissors?
Will Cole: Oh, we could tell that real fast.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, go on, you tell the story.
Will Cole: Then I'll play you.
Peter McCormack: No, I've retired! You can tell the story, I've retired!
Will Cole: Peter will not allow me to double or nothing my bet here, but my greatest athletic achievement in my life is, this was a sanctioned tournament, 2008 Wyoming. I became the rock, paper, scissors state champion.
Peter McCormack: This is my favourite Bitcoin story.
Will Cole: Yeah, I was trying to impress my now wife's friends, early days dating. They got me hammered at a bar and there happened to be "the" tournament. "The" tournament, I make it sound so serious. There was a tournament in a bar where if you won, you would go to Las Vegas and play for the national, and I won it. Then I signed up to go to Vegas and they were, "Okay, we'll just buy your flight and book this hotel"; I had no money. Then I found out they televised it on ESPN, I could have been rock, paper, scissors famous. Now, everyone I tell that story to wants to challenge me, and so you did I think the first night we met.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: And you beat me right away.
Peter McCormack: I did and then I retired.
Danny Knowles: We tried and you beat me.
Will Cole: Yeah, yeah.
Peter McCormack: No, I retired. I've only had one serious professional game of rock, paper, scissors against a state champion, I won and now I'm effectively retired and never will I play again. That's a great story.
Will Cole: Actually, I'll say one serious thing to end, one serious thing.
Peter McCormack: Go on.
Will Cole: We're talking about CBDCs, we're talking about Bitcoin and I know on this podcast, in particular, you've gone through a transformation yourself of someone who used to say, "Holding your own keys is too hard".
Peter McCormack: Still am, man.
Will Cole: Then you did it with Casa.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, can I tell you a story first?
Will Cole: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Okay, I used to say thing that weren't true to help drive a conversation forward, okay. Some things were true or some things I refused to do because I --
Will Cole: "I've known what an xPub is this whole time!"
Peter McCormack: I know what it is, but I don't really know what it is.
Will Cole: I know.
Peter McCormack: And I don't really want to.
Will Cole: You don't really need to.
Peter McCormack: I don't really need to and that's where we need to be. When I said I'd never run a node, I haven't and I still don't really use a node. I'm going to get more shit for this, but I don't. I have it there, I have it set up and I don't really engage with it because I don't see -- I see the future world of Bitcoin as one where lots of this stuff's automated for you.
Will Cole: Sure.
Peter McCormack: That doesn't mean I don't think nodes are important and I think everyone should look at it if they want to. But there's a reason why something like 0.001% of people run a node. So, sometimes I say things to provoke the conversation, because I think the conversation's important; and sometimes I ask questions where I know the answer. I'm making a product here for the listeners.
Will Cole: I know you're a smart guy and I know you know these things.
Peter McCormack: But going on a journey is a constant, I'm still on it. I regret things I did a week ago or said a week ago, two weeks ago. You just always try and improve.
Will Cole: Yeah. I wasn't trying to be antagonistic with my comment.
Peter McCormack: No, I just wanted to let people know because sometimes they're, "Oh, he's a fucking moron. He doesn't know what an xPub is". Yes I do, but sometimes it's helpful for the newer listeners to come in, or sometimes it's helpful to remind people we're in this rabbit hole and there's still people who are just at the entrance to it, and we can't act like they should know everything from day one.
Will Cole: Sure and I agree with that. What I wanted to say is it is a process; it's a process, right.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Will Cole: But I would say right at the beginning of that process, if we're talking about CBDCs and we're talking about Canada and financial censorship, is that there is one thing that rises above all the others more than running a node, more than any of the other things, which is hold your own keys.
Peter McCormack: That's a great end.
Will Cole: That's it.
Peter McCormack: All right, man. Listen, do you want to tell people where to go and follow you?
Will Cole: Yeah, so you can go to unchained.com. I didn't even say I work at Unchained Capital; we help people hold their own keys and we have integrated financial services along with that. So unchained.com and you can follow me on Twitter @willcole.
Peter McCormack: Well listen, thanks for coming on. It's been great to get to know you; I really appreciate your friendship as well as somebody who has now become part of the show. I've enjoyed the debate and thank you for always making me feel welcome in the free state of Texas.
Will Cole: Any time, man.
Peter McCormack: My brother.
Will Cole: Thanks.
