WBD513 Audio Transcription

The Reality of Web3 with Lane Rettig

Release date: Monday 13th June

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Lane Rettig. 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.

Lane Rettig is a former Ethereum Core Developer who now works as a core developer for Spacemesh. In this interview, we discuss the Terra/Luna crash, trust and the discipline of Bitcoin; the history, theory and reality of current Web3 initiatives; and Bitcoin’s future.

“We have to get back to the original vision of Bitcoin and the cypherpunks, which is that in a sense, Bitcoin and crypto in general, is outside of any particular nation-state system.”

— Lane Rettig

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Tell me about Red Bull, man.

Lane Rettig: I think we did a case on this in business school under the category of where you find new start-up ideas, new product ideas.  So, the guy who started the company that became Red Bull was on vacation in Thailand, somewhere in the North, Chiang Mai, something like that, some little village, and found this stuff.  So, it had existed for something like a decade or more prior to his discovering it.  There was a local Thai businessman who had invented this stuff and created it and marketed it and it was super-popular, but only in that little region of Thailand, and he was like, "Holy shit, we need to take this global", and partnered with the guy, so they became something like people partners, and he built the whole global brand around it, did some very creative marketing.

Peter McCormack: I don't normally ever drink it, because we used to do at university, when I was at university, we used to make these buckets of Vodka and Red Bull.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, so did we!

Peter McCormack: But I couldn't sleep.  I'd get into bed, I'd be wired, I'd be looking at the ceiling going, "What the fuck's going on?"

Lane Rettig: It's double bad, because you have both the alcohol, which raises your blood sugar and makes it hard to sleep, and then you've got whatever's in that on top of it.

Peter McCormack: Fucking liquid cocaine.  I stopped drinking it.  I can't even remember when I last had one.

Lane Rettig: This is the no sugar one, right, because with the sugar's even worse.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've given up coffee, I gave up coffee about a month ago.

Lane Rettig: You're a better man than me; I tried and failed.

Peter McCormack: To be honest, I'm always swapping something out.  If it's not coffee, it's chocolate; if it's not chocolate, it's tobacco.

Lane Rettig: I do a thing where I try to do a challenge every year, and it's usually a dietary thing.  So, I did a year with no added sugar, I did a year with no alcohol, I tried doing no caffeine and I failed after a month; I just couldn't take it.  The no sugar was actually the hardest.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've tried.

Lane Rettig: Because, there's sugar in everything.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it tastes so good.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I've done no alcohol for months.

Lane Rettig: I didn't struggle so much with that, partly because you just get it with the social pressure.  It's like, "Fuck you guys, you guys drink your beer, I'm going to drink this, it's fine".  At some point, you stop caring.  Also, because it's black or white, something either has alcohol or doesn't.  Whereas again, with sugar, there's sugar in everything in varying quantities, so that's what I really struggled with.

Peter McCormack: It's surprising.  Jeremy brought in some sugar-free jerky, I was like, "What do you mean, sugar-free jerky?"

Lane Rettig: Jerky has tons of sugar in it.

Peter McCormack: What the fuck are they putting sugar in jerky for?

Lane Rettig: This is the thing, this is why these challenges are interesting, and by the way, this is especially bad here.

Peter McCormack: America?

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's not so bad in Europe.  But you start paying attention to the shit you're eating, like what's in the food.  I tried being a vegan; I think I lasted two weeks or something, but it was really eye-opening, because I was like, "Holy shit, there's animal products in everything".  A lot of vegans, they won't drink wine, because there's animal products involved in processing the wine.  Honey is another one.

Peter McCormack: Well, not every -- so, I was a vegan for two years.

Lane Rettig: Oh, you were?  Okay.

Peter McCormack: So, when my mum got sick with cancer, she went vegan, so I said I'd do it with her.  First it was just dietary, and then one of the things, you go down the rabbit hole and you start looking at abattoirs.  So, even though I eat meat again now, I only buy it from the butchers, because the stuff they do in the supermarkets is fucking gross, it's just terrible the way they treat the animals.  But you do go down that rabbit hole, and it's not all wines.  There was a website you could go to and you could search, but there's animal products in wine.  There's animal products in a mobile phone.  I think there's animal products in tarmac on the road.

Lane Rettig: I believe you.  I think another one's vitamin D.  You know there's two or three sources of vitamin D?  One of them is mushrooms, which is obviously vegan, but there's another source that comes from fish or something.  So, there's just these things that come from animals that I had no idea until I started looking.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's in everything.  No, some vegans have honey, because you're not killing the bee, you're just stealing their honey.

Lane Rettig: But what about milk?

Peter McCormack: What do you mean?

Lane Rettig: From cows?  You're not killing the cow, but they don't drink milk, right.

Peter McCormack: That's a fair point.  I think it's just because a cow is like a real animal, whereas a bee is just a fucking insect, right!  You can get emotion from a cow; from a bee, you don't --

Lane Rettig: It's a mammal, basically, is what you're saying?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But it's a cool insect, a bee, until it stings you.

Lane Rettig: But insects, I agree.  I don't think they have a central nervous system, they don't experience pain, as far as we can tell.  Although, what do we know, right?

Peter McCormack: I don't know.  I don't know how they operate, because they seem to have these crazy abilities to find shit and fly back to shit.

Lane Rettig: That's true.  What bees do that's really amazing is this coordinated behaviour on the scale of the hive.  So, they have these different, what do they call them; castes, or something, of the bees.  So, they have the worker bees who go out and they find the sources of pollen, or whatever they need.  Then they dance, move in certain ways to communicate about it. 

Peter McCormack: It's like, "Where did you get the pollen?"  "Watch my dance and if you understand my dance, you've got to fly there, over there, and then you can get some pollen", from that fucking dance!

Lane Rettig: So, it raises actually an interesting philosophical question, which is, "What is intelligence?"  So, the individual bee maybe doesn't exhibit what you or I would call or consider intelligence; but on the scale of the whole community, the whole hive, it does exhibit intelligence, it almost works like a human brain.  Each of the bees is almost like a single neuron in that system.  It receives and processes information, communicates and moves information around.

Peter McCormack: Is it just basically autonomous though?

Lane Rettig: That's a good question.

Peter McCormack: Does it think?

Danny Knowles: You can also get alcoholic bees.

Peter McCormack: What?!

Danny Knowles: Yeah, alcoholism in bees is about the same as it is in humans, the same percentage.

Peter McCormack: Wow.  Where the fuck do they get their drink from?

Danny Knowles: They eat from super-rotten fruit that's fermented, and when they get back to the hive, they get stung to death by the guard bees for being drunks.

Peter McCormack: What?

Lane Rettig: That's a lot like human behaviour!  But here's the funny thing as well, because honey, there's probably drunk-bee honey or something, someone probably is marketing this somewhere, because you can get honey that comes from all different types of flowers and plants and pollen, and it tastes quite different.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.

Lane Rettig: So, we have a local honey thing here in New York.  There's this guy that goes around and has beehives all over the city, and he markets honey that comes from super-micro hyper local neighbourhoods, like there's probably a Williamsburg one; and people eat it because they think it helps with allergies, with seasonal allergies, because it comes from the pollen.  My wife does this.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  You know you get the honey and you get a little bit of the honeycomb in it; I like that, I chew on that.

Lane Rettig: It's good with ice cream as a dessert.

Peter McCormack: Honey on ice cream? 

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Was it you who got the honey on a pizza?

Jeremy: Yeah, it's good!

Lane Rettig: Okay, hold on, you're in Brooklyn, this is the home of Mike's Hot honey on pizza, it's actually a thing.

Peter McCormack: Okay, people argue that pineapple shouldn't be on a pizza.  Honey on a pizza is shit.

Lane Rettig: Pineapple on pizza is a sin.

Peter McCormack: Honey on pizza is shit, it's just shit, it just ruined it.

Lane Rettig: I think it's quantity, if it's a tiny little bit, especially this Hot honey stuff.  I'm telling you, I'm going to take you out for it; Roberta's.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  The rules of pizza are very simple.  You have dough, you have tomato, you have cheese, and then maybe some vegetables and maybe some meat.  You don't have honey, you don't have pineapple, you don't have apple, you don't have carrot.

Lane Rettig: If you want to get really weird, I lived in Japan for a little while when I was in college, and they do corn, they do mayonnaise, they do seafood; they do crazy shit on pizza.

Peter McCormack: Seafood pizza?

Lane Rettig: It's actually a little better than it sounds.

Peter McCormack: It sounds gross.

Lane Rettig: Do you know what a calzone is?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Lane Rettig: Does that count?

Peter McCormack: It's a pizza sandwich.

Lane Rettig: It's interesting where do you draw the line; how do you define pizza?  What is and isn't pizza?

Peter McCormack: I think if they don't make it in Italy, it's just a butcher.

Lane Rettig: DOC, the proper -- I think it's called DOC.

Peter McCormack: Have you had a pizza in Italy?

Lane Rettig: Oh, yeah, of course.  We have a handful of places here that have this DOC Certification, I may be getting that wrong; the proper oven, the proper ingredients.

Peter McCormack: It's still not the same.  So I remember, before I went to Italy, somebody said, "You wait until you have the pizza there, they're next level", I'm like, "Yeah, sure, but honestly, how can it be that different?"  And then I went and I had a pizza and I was like, "Fuck me, this is unbelievable".

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's like having sushi in Japan for the first time; it is truly a different experience.

Peter McCormack: It's like having a steak in Texas.  Or it's like having a kebab in Bedford!

Lane Rettig: I look forward to visiting and trying it.

Peter McCormack: There's a kebab shop in Donegal where my dad lived, and it was called Abrakebabra!

Lane Rettig: That's a good name!  We're used to New York style pizza here, so it's very different.  Probably Italian style pizza's more common in Europe and probably more common in the UK as well.

Peter McCormack: What's the place, is it Lombardi's?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think that place is overrated.  Everyone's like, "You've got to go to Lombardi's".  I went to Lombardi's and queued up like a dickhead for 30 minutes to get in there.  I had a pizza, I was like, "That was average".

Lane Rettig: What about Chicago Deep Dish, are you into that style?

Peter McCormack: Yes, but the problem is, each slice is like a whole meal.  But I actually think the great thing about New York is the $1 slices of pizza you can get are usually fucking excellent.

Lane Rettig: So, listen, here's the really tragic thing.  They're pretty much gone because of inflation.  So most of these places, it's now $1.25 or $1.50.  I did see one $1 slice a week or two ago, and I was like, "Thank God it still exists", but this has been a big topic.

Peter McCormack: Did you try it?

Lane Rettig: No.  But you're right, they're among the best.  This has been a big topic in the New York pizza community, is the inflation and how it's destroyed the dollar pizza slice.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's like the pound shops in the UK.  All these shops that branded themselves as Poundland or --

Lane Rettig: Dollar Tree, Dollar General, they're $2 for everything.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so they can't do it anymore.

Lane Rettig: So, here we are, we've come full circle, we're talking about inflation; we're back to Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: We've made it relevant.

Lane Rettig: I really hope the pizza topic makes it, by the way, because this is an important topic.

Peter McCormack: This will go in.  We don't have to talk about -- we can talk about what the fuck we want, just trigger some people; they'll be like, "When are you going to talk about Bitcoin?  They'd better not talk about shitcoins!"

Lane Rettig: I want to hear about the football club, how's that going?

Peter McCormack: It's off-season at the moment, so we're preparing for next season.

Lane Rettig: Great.  So, you're going to launch with the new branding and the new everything?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It was a very messy first few months, because it took some time to get control of the club.  I won't go into that, but that was painful.  Not having control of the club meant we couldn't make all the decisions we wanted.  I'm glad I did it though, I'm glad I didn't learn -- I'm glad I had a few months to learn all the shit that you do wrong before the season starts.

Lane Rettig: It's like a soft start?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, for example, throwing money at a team doesn't work.  You have to get the right players, the right culture.  There's a team who finished second, called Ampthill.  I don't know if they pay any of their players, I think they pay some.  But they're a group of friends who've been together for years, and I think they came second or third.  We had some quite expensive players and we just didn't have the spirit and the fight.

Lane Rettig: Do you know what this is?  It's missionaries versus mercenaries.  We talk a lot about this in open-source software and the blockchain space, turning dollars into good code in functioning products is really hard for the same reason.  People who have their heart and soul in something are going to perform better at the end of the day.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I agree, we have it with this.  This is a mission.  We hang out, we fly out together, we make a product and it works, because we're a team.  And I think it's the same with the football club.  So yeah, fired the manager at the end of the season, thanked him, he did a good job; but you want your guy.  We found a guy, brilliant guy, called Rob Sinclair.  He used to play professional football for Stevenage, which isn't far from me.  I think they've been as high as League One; and Forest Green Rovers, a super-interesting club.  Do you know much about Forest Green, Danny?

Danny Knowles: No, not really.  Are they the vegan club?

Peter McCormack: They're the vegan club, right.

Lane Rettig: Speaking of vegans!

Peter McCormack: No, the interesting thing is, all football clubs fucking suck or struggle with money generally; they suck at finance.  The problem is, player wages control everything, and if you want to win the league or get promoted, you kind of always have to have at least a top-five, six, budget within that league.  The budget doesn't guarantee promotion, but having the lowest budget in the league probably guarantees you don't get promotion and you might get relegated.

Lane Rettig: How many teams are there in each league; it's kind of 12, right?

Peter McCormack: No, it's usually 20. 

Lane Rettig: So, if you're in the top quartile or something, in terms of budget?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you've got to be, to have a chance.  But budget doesn't guarantee success.  For example, Ryan Reynolds bought Wrexham, and they finished, I think, second in their division; went into the playoffs and got knocked out.  They had a massive budget.  They had great sponsors, their injection of money.  They were paying some guy I think like £7,000 a week, which is huge for the division they're in, and they just lost, so they're not going up.  So, money doesn't guarantee it, and that was a big early lesson.

But I've found this manager who's -- oh, no, I was talking about Forest Green.  So, the thing that Forest Green have done, they have a thing.  So, they're a football club, but their thing is, they're the vegan club.  Now obviously, that's not one for many bitcoiners, who would want the "dead cow" club.

Lane Rettig: That anti-vegan club!

Peter McCormack: But he's an environmentalist, he made his money in renewable energies, and he's made them a vegan club; they only serve vegan food at the club and they are an environmentally-focused club.  But because of that, it's a tiny, almost village where they are, but what they've managed to do is create this group of people who follow them because they're vegans; they've got a thing, like we have the Bitcoin thing.

So, we have a group of people around the world who follow us because of the Bitcoin thing, and I think that's going to be a thing for some clubs.  I mean, Forest Green are now up into League One; they're two below the Premier League.  It's a village.  So, if you've got a thing, you can create identity and create support around that thing.

Lane Rettig: It almost doesn't matter what the thing is.  I was reading, there's a baseball team here, the American version, I hope I get this right, called The Savannah Bananas; I'm assuming this is Savannah, Georgia.  And what they do is, they dance.

Peter McCormack: Okay!

Lane Rettig: They have some coordinated --

Danny Knowles: They had this on Instagram.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, professional dancers.  So, their first baseman is a professional ballet dancer, or something, and then I'm assuming there's some sort of choreographed something and it's silly, but it works, they have a huge fan following.

Peter McCormack: If it works…  But we've got this manager and he's great, and he came in and the first thing he did, he slashed our budget.  He said, "It's too much money".  He said, "I want this, it will give me one of the best budgets in the division, but it forces me to find players who want to play for the club, it gets rid of the mercenaries".  I was like, "Okay, cool".  I think we've signed about 13 players.  We've nearly got a whole squad together. 

Training starts on the 23rd of this month, so essentially three weeks away, our pre-season starts at the start of July.  We've got eight pre-season friendlies.  I fucking cannot wait.  Literally, every day it's like, "There's no football today, this is shit".  And then, our season starts 6 August and I'm confident that we will be up near the top, or thereabouts.  I mean, we will be one of the favourites to win it.  I hope we win it, but we will be one of the favourites.

But this off-season, dude, it sucks.  I'm like, "I fucking want the football on".  And this other interesting thing that's happened, complete flip: Liverpool, my team I support, they've won two trophies, they won the quadruple, it's never been done to win all four trophies.

Lane Rettig: Sorry, ignorant American, what are the four trophies?

Peter McCormack: So, the Premier League.

Lane Rettig: Okay, that one I know.  The Euro Cup is one, I assume?

Peter McCormack: The Champions League, which is the European.  So, if you're in the top four in the Premier League, you go into the Champions League in Europe.  The FA Cup, which is the cup that every team in the country plays in; even Bedford will play in it.  And then the League Club is just the teams in the first four divisions. 

So, they won the League Cup, they won the FA Cup, they missed out on the League on the last day of the season by like a point, and they lost in the Champions League final.  When they lost the Champions League final, I was obviously disappointed, but I was like, "Okay", just went home, didn't think about it.  When Bedford lost in a game that didn't even matter, to Letchworth Garden City in front of 20 people, I was like, "This is fucking bullshit", it ruined my day.

Lane Rettig: It's skin in the game.  This is why buying your first $10, $15, $30 of Bitcoin doesn't matter, it changes everything, because you feel like you have skin in the game.  You have part of you invested in the thing, the team, the project, whatever it is.

Peter McCormack: But it's an interesting thing on the Bitcoin side of things.  It's put me back in that space where I realise how far -- if you think of the Bitcoin rabbit hole, how far we're down it; but if you're not at the edge of the rabbit hole yet, you don't know shit.

Lane Rettig: You know what it's like?  It's like having a baby.

Peter McCormack: It's like having a baby.

Lane Rettig: There's a before and after --

Peter McCormack: We'll come to that.

Lane Rettig: -- and you can't describe it adequately to someone who hasn't experienced it themselves.

Peter McCormack: So interestingly, one of my best friends, I keep bringing him up on this show, the guy who's married to the Russian, he said to me and he's never done it; he said, "I'm going to write a book one day.  It's called, How to Have your First Baby like it's your Second".

Lane Rettig: That's brilliant, I would have read it.

Peter McCormack: You've just had a baby, right?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How long ago?

Lane Rettig: Two weeks, three days, just happened.

Peter McCormack: Two weeks.  Okay, how much shit have you bought in advance?

Lane Rettig: Books, you mean?

Peter McCormack: Books, clothes.

Lane Rettig: We got lucky, we got gifted a lot of stuff, so we actually didn't buy that much, but yeah, strollers, car seats, outfits, bottles, breastfeeding equipment, and there's more.

Peter McCormack: Radios, CCTV.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  And the only thing that bothers me about it is the waste, because a lot of the stuff, I don't know, maybe we'll have another one, but a lot of it can't be used.  Some of it can't even be handed down, like breast pump equipment.  This is probably never a topic that's been covered on your show before, but it turns out you can't give it to anyone later.

Peter McCormack: I'm telling you, there'll be some fucking weirdo who'll buy that on eBay.  There'll be some weirdo, "Give me that breast pump".  Is it an electric pump or a hand pump?

Lane Rettig: Electric.

Peter McCormack: The problem with the electric ones, you sit there and like, "zzzzz".  This is really personal; have you got that because you're going to do some of the night feeds?

Lane Rettig: Yeah, so my wife is pumping at night right now.  I mean, the baby at this age needs to be fed every two and a half to three hours, pretty often.

Peter McCormack: Me and my ex-wife had a deal.  She used to do the week when I was at work, and I would do the weekends, and she had the pump.

Lane Rettig: Right, we'll probably end up doing something like that; she'll do daytimes, I'll do nights, something like that.

Peter McCormack: I used to not want to hang around when she was doing the milk pumping, it's just one of those things I used to leave her to herself, but the reason being is, we bought all our shit as well, everything, fucking everything; there was baby shit everywhere.  Then, when my daughter was born, I bought one pack of babygrows, that's it, because I was like, we've got the car seat from my son, okay, so a baby's going to come out and all we need to do is dress it.  The baby came out, we dressed it, I went straight down to this -- we have this chain called Next.  It's a clothing store.  And I just went in, because it came out as pink, I just went in and bought all the girl's stuff, everything.

Lane Rettig: Can I ask you a silly question?  Did you know the sex of your kids before they were born?

Peter McCormack: No.

Lane Rettig: We didn't either.

Peter McCormack: Wow, that's very un-American.

Lane Rettig: It's very rare here, everybody does.  And people are shocked when I told them that it was a surprise actually.  It's very rare in our lives that we get to cue up an exciting surprise for ourselves and also it makes no difference to me, I don't care.  They were like, "So, if we gift you pink clothes and your son ends up wearing pink?"  I'm like, "I don't care, it's fine".  We needed two names, that was the only downside.

Peter McCormack: I wouldn't have dressed my son in pink, that's slightly different, but the reason I tell -- everyone should do what they want.  I always say to people the reason why we didn't.  The reason why we didn't is, when you don't know, you're always talking about it and you have two names and you go back and forth, "Is it a boy; is it a girl?"  When you know, people get a bit weird about it.

I remember once, I went to a hairdresser, got my hair cut, and afterwards, the lady where I was paying, she was pregnant, she was six months' pregnant.  I was like, "Cool, how long have you got to do?"  She was like, "Oh, yeah, Toby comes in three months".  I was like, "That's fucking weird".  You've got totally attached to this baby and you've given it a name, and things can go wrong.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, the other thing people do here is they do baby showers.  I don't know if you guys do this in the UK.

Peter McCormack: Do they pop a balloon?

Lane Rettig: Baby showers and gender reveals. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah.

Lane Rettig: These both happen in that last trimester, but it's the same thing.  We talked about it and we were like, "We don't want to do it until the baby's here and healthy and safe".

Peter McCormack: Firstly, fucking gender reveals, you see them on social media, they make me want to punch myself in the face.  Interestingly, when my ex-wife got pregnant with my son, we found out the day before I first ever came to New York. 

Lane Rettig: You're kidding?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, she was sick, she was sick for a few days, and she was like, "I'd better go to the doctor".  So, we went to the doctor and she came out and said, "Yeah, I'm not sick, but I'm pregnant".  I was like, "Oh, fuck!"  It was a total surprise, unplanned.

Lane Rettig: Unplanned, I see.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean we'd only been together six months, and the next day I got on a plane and went to New York, stayed on the Lower East Side.  It was 2002, the year after 9/11.  They were still cleaning out the site.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, I remember.  There was still smoke coming out of it, I remember.

Peter McCormack: Smoke, yeah, like a year later.  And, yeah, I remember I had a huge phone bill, because I was phoning her every day, because I was 24, she was 23.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, back when these international calls used to actually cost something.

Peter McCormack: It cost a lot.  I got like a $400, $600 phone bill.  Actually, to be honest, then it was like $2 to the pound, so it was like an $800 phone bill for a week.  But yeah, so fuck, congratulations, man!

Lane Rettig: I want to ask you another silly question, because your kids are teenagers now, right?

Peter McCormack: 18 and 12.

Lane Rettig: Okay, so does 12 count as teenager?

Peter McCormack: No.

Lane Rettig: 13 is when it starts, right.

Peter McCormack: You know how you know?  It's got the teen in the word!  Although, they do call them tweenagers now; a 12-year-old is a tweenager.  I think basically because kids are growing up quicker, so they turn into a dick earlier.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, and they go through puberty younger.  I mean, there's a lot of scary shit going on.  This also, by the way, has to do with probably the foods we're eating and the stuff in it.

Peter McCormack: I actually think it's a lot to do with media and social media.  They're just exposed to so much grownup shit early on.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, that too.

Peter McCormack: My daughter, I don't allow her much social media.  She's not allowed Instagram or any of that.

Lane Rettig: Is that hard, by the way?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Lane Rettig: She probably faces peer pressure from her classmates.

Peter McCormack: Absolutely, all her friends are on Instagram.  But if you listen to the Jonathan Haidt show with Joe Rogan where he talks about -- because, did he write the Coddling of the American Mind? 

Lane Rettig: That sounds correct, I think so, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But he did a whole session and they had the charts up and they talked about a massive rise in self-harm and suicides.  And on the charts, it was literally when social media came out.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, and especially among young women.  This also came out of the Facebook stuff last year, with the whistleblower.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, so it's no Instagram.  She can have TikTok and I police it.

Lane Rettig: How do you actually do this?  Do you somehow control the -- all right, pointing at the phone, maybe she's too young to have a phone.

Peter McCormack: She's got a phone.

Lane Rettig: She's got a phone, yeah.

Peter McCormack: When you're divorced, it's best the kids have a phone so they can stay in touch.  It's just a no, but I don't know how long I'll be able to cope with it, but you've got some time on that one.

Lane Rettig: Well, listen, by the time my son is your daughter's age, we're going to be dealing with the metaverse and all this kind of shit.  Someone phrased this recently.  They said, "Look, I'm struggling already with screentime with my kid", which is kind of what we're talking about, "the thought of policing their metaverse time, or whatever it is in ten years, is just terrifying".

Peter McCormack: But the incredible thing is, even when they're young and you leave an iPad out, the speed that they learn to swipe and use that shit is incredible, like before they can talk.  So, there are some benefits, but it's just managing it.  But the best way to manage it, it comes down to you giving them more time.

Lane Rettig: The other way one; you don't want to tight trade down...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you've got to take them away from it.  So with my kids, we go out for a walk and everyone leaves their phone at home; we go out for dinner, everyone leaves their --

Lane Rettig: Right, and it's probably about setting an example as well, right, because so many of us parents will bring our devices to the dinner table with us, for example.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You're holding yours and you're like, "Switch your fucking phone off".  I mean, I'm a complete hypocrite.  Actually, I have two phones now because of that.  So, I have a work phone and family time phone.

Lane Rettig: That's smart.

Peter McCormack: I've not got into using it properly, but the family time phone has no apps on it, it's just got phone calls.  What was it you were going to ask?

Lane Rettig: I was going to ask, what are the one or two things that you know now that you wish you had known when you were a first-time parent?

Peter McCormack: That's a good question.

Lane Rettig: What you wish you'd known, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Or, what I'd done differently.  I mean, I'm not too worried about what I'd known, because you just figure it out; life is what it is.  What I wish I'd done differently, I wish I'd never got divorced.  I mean, I got divorced for terrible reasons, but I wish I'd have known what to do to stop that happening, because I think the family unit for a child is so important, and that's definitely had consequences for both my children.

Lane Rettig: My parents were divorced as well, by the way, and I feel like children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced, so fingers crossed; I'm going to try not to.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I wish that hadn't happened.  But what would I have known?  I was definitely young and I wish I'd -- if I had kids now, I think I would do a far better job.  It's fun being a young parent to an 18-year-old, because we're into a lot of the same shit, right, but I think as an older parent, you come with more experience and wisdom.  But what do I wish I'd known?  I mean, I could say I wish I'd known how expensive it would be.  But again, you figure that out.  People from all different budgets have to.  I can't even answer that.

Lane Rettig: I think the number one thing I get from parents who either have older kids or multiple kids is that they're pretty sturdy, they're not going to fall apart.  And, if they scratch themselves or they're crying, just chill out, it's going to be okay; because, with a first-time newborn, you're pretty terrified, you feel like -- because they are so vulnerable at the very beginning.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you what, I know, and this is a huge cliché.  I wish I'd realised how quickly it goes, because people say it goes quickly and you're there with a newborn and you think it doesn't go quickly.  My son's 18, he's going to leave home in the next few months.

Lane Rettig: You said he's travelling in the summer or something, right?

Peter McCormack: He's got trips planned, but it's just gone like that.  And I remember the day he was born, clearly; I remember being given him, looking at this child and we're here 18 years later, and it just goes, and I have not given them as much time as I probably should have, because you get busy with work, etc.

Lane Rettig: They say no parent ever goes to the grave wishing they'd spent less time with their kids or less time with their family.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think that's why they spend lots of time with their grandchildren.

Lane Rettig: That's true!

Peter McCormack: But I wish I'd appreciated how quickly it goes.  Another thing I'd say is, it's always fun and always difficult, but for different reasons.  A baby is fun, because it's just new; but then it's difficult, because you might not get so much sleep.  And then a toddler's cool, because you see them learn to talk and run around; but it's difficult, because they're always trying to kill themselves.  And then, go all the way up to a teenager, an 18-year-old is cool, because they're genuinely starting to figure the world out; but they're a pain in the arse, because they're discovering alcohol and other things.  It just always changes.

My dad said a really good thing to me once, he said, "Just so you know, Pete, you never stop parenting", because I was having a problem with my son.  I was like, "What do you mean?"  He was like, "I still parent you".  I was like, "Dad, I don't come to you for anything anymore", he was like, "You're literally coming to me right now for an issue with Connor!"  I was like, "Oh, yeah!"  He said, whatever happens, I'm always 30 years ahead of you; so whatever you're going through, I went through it 30 years ago.  I was like, "Okay, that's a really interesting point".

Honestly, man, it's just the most fun.  I wish I'd had more kids, I genuinely wish I'd had more, because I've got a son and a daughter.

Lane Rettig: I mean, to many people, that is the ideal, one of each, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but they're different.  My son is -- and I think speaking to other parents, it's similar.  My daughter, she gets her uniform ready before she goes to bed, she gets her homework done when she comes in.  If it's my birthday, I'll wake up and there are balloons and presents.  My son, you wake him up and he eventually gets out of bed, then he's throwing a sock against the wall and drifting downstairs.  And on your birthday, he's like, "Oh, is it your birthday?"  It's different.  But at the same time, I don't worry about him going out; I worry about my daughter going out, because I just know blokes can be dicks.

There's this kind of, not everyone, but there's a certain layer of misogyny that exists in the world of Bitcoin, it does.

Lane Rettig: For sure.  Even if bitcoiners are not necessarily misogynistic, and certainly not intentionally, simply by virtue of the fact that it is such a masculine community, it's almost inevitable in some ways.

Peter McCormack: I'm not saying everyone is, but I just see certain things, just like some guy tweeting me the other day about girls going to university, "It's stupid.  If you're a good parent, she's wasting her time, she's wasting years that she could be rearing a child", I'm like, "Just fuck off".  Once you have a daughter, you really appreciate the different world they go into.  And as much as the world has moved on and tried to create a fairer world for girls, you still notice the difference.  You still have a daughter who comes home and says, "Dad, why can't I do this, why can't I do that?" and there's still that element where a young girl feels like it's harder for her than a boy.

I'm happy to talk about that, despite the fact that when I interviewed President Bukele recently, I asked him about the patriarchy, because it's even worse in El Salvador, because the patriarchy in Central and South America is more significant and there's significant violence, so I asked him about it.  And some guy on YouTube is like, "Fuck off with your gender bullshit".  It's like, "Hold on a second, I'm not being a weirdo about this, I'm just saying I have a daughter, I understand what it's like.  You're a man, you don't understand what it's like".

Lane Rettig: Until and unless maybe you have a daughter.  We're just shit at empathy in general, especially other genders.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think it's because there's been so much weird stuff on gender, or so much forced equality, and weird forced equality, that sometimes people push back a bit, but you start to appreciate that with a girl.  But also, with a boy, these pressures that you see for girls, they say, "These pressures for girls to look good", well it actually exists for a boy now.  For a young boy, he sees on social media guys with six-packs and pecs and tattoos and they want that.  So, it does exist for both as well, in a different way, but it exists for both.

But look, all I would say is, I wouldn't worry about everything, but also you're going to have so much fucking fun.  I imagine, what did you say, two weeks ago?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I imagine he's already changed in two weeks.

Lane Rettig: He has.  In fact, when you were mentioning how quickly they grow up, I was going to tell you, I looked at a photo of him the day we brought him home, which was just over two weeks ago, and he already looks, especially at that age, because the facial structure changes, the eye colour changes, the hair, everything changes rapidly at that age, and I was blown away by how much he'd already grown in two weeks; it's amazing.

Peter McCormack: I do wish I'd had more.  I have a son and a daughter, and I can't imagine a son who isn't Connor, and I can't imagine a daughter who isn't Scarlett, and I wish I'd got to see that; just like, there's going to be this whole other boy or girl and they're different.

Lane Rettig: You've got some time left!

Peter McCormack: I do!

Lane Rettig: Listen, my dad was 60 when I was born, which is relatively extreme.

Peter McCormack: Well didn't, what's his name, the F1 guy?  Silvio Berlusconi -- no, that's the President of Italy!

Lane Rettig: The Italian Prime Minister!

Peter McCormack: I think he had a child late.

Danny Knowles: I know who you mean, but I don't know his name. 

Peter McCormack: Didn't he have a child late?

Danny Knowles: Wasn't he like 90 or something.

Peter McCormack: He was like 92!  Firstly, congratulations!

Lane Rettig: Right, seriously.  Well done, mate.

Danny Knowles: How many people do you think were helping?

Peter McCormack: Was he 92?

Danny Knowles: I don't know, I could be wrong.  I don't know his name, so I can't --

Peter McCormack: There's a slight issue at that age, because basically your chance of seeing them even make double figures is low.

Lane Rettig: I mean, even 60, by the time I was conscious of my dad's age, he was already in his 70s.

Peter McCormack: Is he still alive?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How old is he now?

Lane Rettig: He's 99.  I'm 39, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Fucking hell, your dad is 99?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When's he 100?  You can't really dox his birthday.

Lane Rettig: April next year.

Peter McCormack: It's not the 28th, is it?

Lane Rettig: I'm not going to dox it.

Peter McCormack: In the UK, if you reach 100, you get a letter from the Queen.

Lane Rettig: You used to here from the President.  I think they may have stopped doing it recently, because there's too many now.

Peter McCormack: There's too many?!

Lane Rettig: Well, the UK's a smaller country.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you get a letter from the Queen.

Lane Rettig: Actually, speaking of, you know, the Queen's two younger than my dad; she's getting up there too, right?

Peter McCormack: I mean, is your dad single?  We can try and hook them up.

Danny Knowles: It was Bernie Ecclestone, he was 89.

Lane Rettig: 89!

Peter McCormack: 89!  One, I hope I'm still alive at 89; two, if I am, I hope I'm still active; and isn't she like 40 or something?

Danny Knowles: I mean, she's a lot younger than him.

Lane Rettig: Obviously, I mean there's much more biological restrictions on the mother's age than the father's age.

Peter McCormack: Your dad, is he a mobile dad, is he up and about?

Lane Rettig: Yeah, he is.  I mean, for his age, he's doing super-well.  I was with him just before coming over here.  Fun fact, he's a bitcoiner.

Peter McCormack: Is he?

Lane Rettig: I gave him copies of all of Antonopoulos's books back around 2016, 2017 when I was first deep-diving on Bitcoin, tweeted a photo of him holding Internet of Money, and said, at that point, whatever, he was, what is it?  99, he was probably 96 at that point, 95, and he's probably one of the oldest bitcoiners alive.

Peter McCormack: Does he shitcoin?

Lane Rettig: No, I think he only holds Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: So, where did you go wrong?!

Lane Rettig: I have a higher risk appetite because I'm younger.  He's a pensioner.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm essentially in the grandparent potential zone now, because my son's of that age.

Lane Rettig: Isn't that crazy?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Lane Rettig: Because you were a young father.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I hope I've got some years ahead, but accidents happen.  I'm in that zone where it's a possibility.

Lane Rettig: I'm slightly younger than you, I'm three years, four years younger than you if I remember correctly, and I'm old enough to be a grandfather too.  I did that maths recently.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you don't have a child viable of making children!  I have a child viable of making children.  He could come home one day and say, "Dad, look, I've got this girl pregnant", and it's a possibility.  It doesn't scare me actually, it doesn't scare me.  The only thing that scares me is the fact that I am a fucking granddad.

Lane Rettig: Or potential, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Potential.

Lane Rettig: You'd get to do it all over again.  Maybe you don't have more kids, but maybe you get to have some grandkids.

Peter McCormack: He is not ready to have children yet!

Lane Rettig: Were you ready?  I mean, is anyone ready when they're young?

Peter McCormack: No, but I'll tell you what, it did change literally when it happened.

Lane Rettig: That happens, by the way.  It's happening to me right now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, got to get my shit together.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, same way right now.

Peter McCormack: And I've worked hard ever since, and my children appreciate and know that.

Lane Rettig: I think it's one of the best things for us, the forcing function, the way it forces us to grow the hell up and mature.  Again, I'm going through this process as we speak, and it's super-positive.  I feel way more ready to commit and focus and buckle down and just be an adult.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, all I'll say, like I say, look, you're just going to have a lot of fun, it is fun.  I mean, you do what you want to do, but you definitely want more than one.  You want a unit.  It's weird, it kind of gets easier with more than one, because you become this functioning unit.

Lane Rettig: I feel like I have to think about it in terms of marginal cost.  Going from zero to one is huge, but going from one to two or two to three is marginally much less of a lift, you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you what I wish I'd have done.  When both of my kids were born, I set up a direct debit into a bank account of £50 a month, just £50 a month.  And by the time they're, whatever, 18 or 20, there's going to be, what's that, £600 a year?  Maybe £14,000, £15,000 with interest, and that was always to say, "When you've finished school, you can go travelling round the world and you've got the money for it".

Lane Rettig: Yeah, you've got a gap year nest-egg type thing, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I wish I'd have put that in Bitcoin for them!

Lane Rettig: Don't we all!

Peter McCormack: I mean, they would be billionaires, probably.  I mean, if I'd started my daughter's in 2010.

Lane Rettig: Well, she's the same age as Bitcoin more or less, right, because your son was born before Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Do you know, my birthday is the whitepaper day.  I've totally doxed myself by saying that.  I mean, people know my birthday's Halloween.

Lane Rettig: They don't know the year though.

Peter McCormack: Should we actually talk about crypto?

Danny Knowles: We've done bees and babies so far!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, bees and babies.  Do you know what's going to happen to the fucking comments on YouTube?

Lane Rettig: The third B: Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: "What the fuck are you talking about?  I came here for Bitcoin, fucking dicks".

Lane Rettig: No, but it is connected, right, because everything's connected to Bitcoin, but specifically regarding, I don't know, saving for the future, financial planning, stablecoins.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, if you're going to have children and you want to save for them, do not put your money into LUNA.

Lane Rettig: That's good advice!  Or, whatever the LUNA equivalent is, the Ponzi scheme of the year in five or ten years.

Peter McCormack: All right, be honest about this.  Did you know LUNA was fucked before it was fucked?

Lane Rettig: No is a very strong word.

Peter McCormack: Did you hold any?

Lane Rettig: No.

Peter McCormack: Do you believe him?

Lane Rettig: So, two reasons.  The first is, I'm just too busy and I've mostly -- I was going to say I've mostly stopped shitcoining.  I'm still active on Ethereum and Spacemesh, but not so much new stuff, because I'm too busy.  Good excuse now with the child.  But something about it rubbed me the wrong way, and I think it was, in retrospect, a couple of things.  I mean, things are always easy to talk about in retrospect, but the first is the relentless shilling, the marketing, on the part of Do Kwon, the Founder, and there was just something about it. 

No one shills Bitcoin; you don't need to, because the product speaks for itself.  It's solid, it works, does what it's supposed to do.  I mean, this is very much the approach we're taking in Spacemesh.

Peter McCormack: Well, didn't we say yesterday about marketing Bitcoin, it's like a multilevel marketing scheme!

Lane Rettig: You said that?

Peter McCormack: But it is.  You kind of recruit people, and then they recruit people.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  As I was saying it just now, I was hesitating, because we do shill Bitcoin.  I'm trying to think what the difference is.  Here's the difference.  There's a --

Peter McCormack: We shill the benefits of Bitcoin; he shills a company.

Lane Rettig: So, it's a company, but what I was going to say was, there's a numerator and the denominator, okay.  So, the numerator is like the volume of your shillery, of how much noise you make; and the denominator is the actual substance of the network.  Bitcoin is very low, which is good, so you have relatively low noise.  I should have signal, not noise, but you know what I'm saying.  But there's a lot of substance and there's relatively less noise.

A project like Terra, there's an enormous amount of noise and very little substance, and to me somehow you get a sense of that; it feels like it lacks integrity.  And the other thing, by the way, that just shouted at me, was this "guaranteed 20% API".  I mean, that's --

Peter McCormack: That was the one.

Lane Rettig: This is the main reason I didn't invest in it, because it sounds too good to be true.  I'm old enough to know that if it sounds too good to be true, especially in a financial instrument, it's too good to be true.

Peter McCormack: So, I was on Pomp's show and Pomp asked me about it, and I didn't know anything about -- because I don't use stablecoins.  I've never used a stablecoin, because I've never had a need, but I'm not opposed to them.  I've actually become more of a supporter of them, because of Alex Gladstein talking about Palestinians using them, and how actually they're much more important than Bitcoin in some jurisdictions. 

So, I support stablecoins, and I've even kind of taken my, "Fuck you, shitcoin protocols" attitude; I've kind of dialled it back, because I'm like, "Hold on, that's where these stablecoins are at the moment.  If that's good for people living in shitty situations, then great".  But I was just not aware of LUNA, I was not aware of Terra, because it's just not in my field of view.

Lane Rettig: To be fair, there's a lot of stablecoins. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I only became aware when I saw this thing, "Do Kwon has committed to buying $10 billion of Bitcoin", I was like, "Oh, who's that?"  I didn't even pay attention.  And then I was seeing the buying, and it was something to do with a stablecoin.  Again, I didn't pay attention.  And I was in Miami and went on Pomp's show and he asked me about it.  I was like, "I don't know anything about it, explain it to me", and he did and the 20% concerned me.  But I wasn't like, I foresee this was going to crash, I just didn't.  But some guy emailed me afterwards and said, "Listen, you're totally wrong about Terra/LUNA".

Lane Rettig: I heard you mention this.

Peter McCormack: A big, long email with links in it, reading about it, and I think that's maybe where I saw the 20%.  I replied to it and said, "Look, the 20%, that's a high number.  That has to come from somewhere".  We went back and forth and I was like, "Whatever".  Then literally, a week later, he emails me and says, "Yeah, I'm sorry, man!" because it totally crashed.  But the point of it was, I could not foresee it happening like some people did.

Lane Rettig: So, Nic Carter did.  There's a handful of contrarians.

Peter McCormack: Lyn Alden did.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, Lyn wrote about it I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm not smart enough.  And the thing I realised when this guy sent me all these articles and things I was reading through, I was like, "How the fuck do I figure this out?"

Lane Rettig: This is the other thing, is that if you and I can't look at a whitepaper or an article or something and feel confident that, maybe we don't understand every intricate detail of a project, but you just get a sense that this makes sense on some level, that it passes the smell test, right; if it doesn't, it's not to say that it will necessarily fail, but it's very risky.  So, I tend to certainly not put personal money into things like that.

Peter McCormack: Well look, I can't tell you technically why Bitcoin works, I can't; I can't tell you technically why any of these things work.  You can give me all the detail, you can give me the whitepapers.  I'm going to read them and go, "I don't know the stress test on this, I don't know whether it works", I don't know.  I rely on other people who are way smarter than me to do it, I'm just not that wired.  I'm wired on the creative side, I'm not wired that way.  And the thing about these things is, a lot of people put a lot of money into this and got fucked.

Lane Rettig: Oh, yeah.  But the really crazy thing, by the way is, okay, there were VCs put a lot into this, but there were also a lot of everyday folks in Korea, here, all over the world.  And it's even worse than that, because it was a "stablecoin".  What that means is that it attracted specifically a class of investor who maybe didn't want to invest in crazy shitcoins, but just get a "more stable" yield.

Peter McCormack: Are there people who lost money because they owned Terra, UST, and there's people who lost money because they owned LUNA; there are two things, right?

Lane Rettig: Of course, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I don't know the number, but I definitely went onto the Reddit and saw it.  I want to know, did anyone actually kill themselves over this?  Because, there was all reports, "Someone attempted --" but you never really know.  But I wonder if people have actually --

Lane Rettig: I read a news report about a young man who jumped off a building in Taiwan.  I don't know if it was true or not.  This was not New York Times, and I don't even know if we can trust The New York Times anymore, but I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Well, lots of people invested in it.

Lane Rettig: I certainly hope not.

Peter McCormack: There's going to be somebody somewhere who's re-mortgaged their house, put all their investment into it and lost all their fucking money.

Lane Rettig: Sure, that always happens.

Peter McCormack: They're going to be shitting themselves because they've not told their wife, panicking because they can't pay their rent; there's going to be people in a very bad situation.

Lane Rettig: Leverage is really, really dangerous. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and listen, we all have to take responsibility for our things.  These people, you shouldn't put all your money in it, you shouldn't re-mortgage your house.  But at the same time, I feel like these things should be stress-tested.  And this is where I can say something totally controversial that's going to piss off the anarchists, but some regulation is good.  The securities test for SEC exists for a reason, because you are making promises from a centralised entity about some kind of performance, okay, so you have some responsibility behind that.  And, if you just have a free market for these things, a lot of people might get fucked. 

Now, I totally appreciate the idea that some people out there, "No government regulation.  The SEC makes everything --", I totally get that.  I think the SEC does make everything onerous.  I'm totally on the side of Hester Peirce who pushes back on things.  But at the same time, if you get rid of these regulations, it's just a different environment, and I'm not sure some people are ready for it; others are, but some aren't.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  I've been really struggling with this question, and this has been a huge topic in the wake of the Terra collapse for sure, both on the governmental side, because investigations have been launched in multiple countries, including in Korea, including here in the States, probably Singapore and other places as well, into the -- and by the way, even before this, if I remember correctly, there were some calls in the States for regulation of stablecoins specifically.

Peter McCormack: They're doing it in the UK.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, but also even within the crypto community, this has been a hot topic.  I've seen a lot of friends and colleagues begin asking the same question, and I'm torn; because, I don't disagree with anything you've just said, but I also at the same time don't trust the regulators to get this right, and I think that they're going to kill innovation.  So, an alternative might be internal industry self-regulation, and that I know hasn't worked terribly well, but it has worked in other industries.

Peter McCormack: I think we should let turkeys self-regulate Christmas dinners!  Come on, man listen, we either have it or we don't; I just think it's coming.

Lane Rettig: But regulation is not a binary, right.

Peter McCormack: No, I just think it's coming.  Regulation will come.  Securities regulation exists, Michael Saylor's a far better person to talk about it than me.  When he talked to Raoul Pal about it, he was savage in his explanation.  I just think it's coming.

Lane Rettig: Look, if it takes a form like the following: let's say, "You can't market something as a stablecoin if it's not fully collateralised", number one.  Number two, there's a lot of FUD around Tether in particular.  It's supposedly fully collateralised, they have released audits, but there's a hodgepodge of things in there; there's 5-ish billion out of 70-ish billion of "miscellaneous other assets including crypto".  It could be Bitcoin, so we don't actually know if it's truly fully collateralised.  The accounting firm that did the audits is not KPMG, it's not Deloitte, it's some tiny, little two-man shop in Cayman or something.  So stablecoins, if there's reasonable regulation, I would totally support that, but I'm just worried it won't look like that.

Peter McCormack: Self-regulation would be good, and some things have happened, like for example Kraken have done their proof of reserves.  I think that's very cool, I love that.

Lane Rettig: Agree.

Peter McCormack: I think you can self-regulate and prove yourself to be better.  USDC is fully backed, isn't it, by Treasuries, right?

Lane Rettig: I don't know if it's exclusively Treasuries.

Danny Knowles: It's cash and Treasuries.

Lane Rettig: I mean, it's Circle, it's a legitimate American company, there's a network of banks, it's fully audited.  My understanding is the Gemini US dollar, the Binance US dollar are all the same.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I just think when somebody explains an algorithmic stablecoin, I think somebody else is going to buy it, and they don't really fully understand, they're just not going to get it.

Lane Rettig: You need to be a giga-brain to fully understand how they work.

Peter McCormack: Imagine you're in Palestine, or you're in Lebanon, or you're in Sri Lanka right now, and your only way to get dollars is digital dollars, and your economy's collapsed and you held UST; that was the one you had, just because that was the one you had access to.  You're already in a fucked situation, your money's gone.  That to me is just sad.  Now, there's two arguments like there is with everything.  Regulation is terrible, you're a statist, etc.

Lane Rettig: Statist cuck.

Peter McCormack: Statist cuck, but no regulation there is a different side of risk, and I think both are valid sets of argument.  I would love to see people self-regulate better.  I also would love to get away from having centralised regulators.  I also feel very sad when somebody has their entire net worth destroyed.

Lane Rettig: Both can be true and both are true.  I think the interesting thing, so here we have to get back to the original vision of Bitcoin and the cypherpunks, right, which is that in a sense, Bitcoin and crypto in general is outside of any particular nation state system, which is to say it doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of any of the countries that we just listed.  So, what this means is that we're going to see lots of diversity in attempts to regulate in different places, and I would argue that this is a process of evolution playing out and it's a good thing, but there will still always be regulatory arbitrage, right, there will still be jurisdictions like Cayman, and probably many others, that just decide that crypto's invisible, there's no regulation of it whatsoever, and there will be projects that launch in those places.

By virtue, again, of being part of a decentralised global network like Bitcoin, okay theoretically, you as a UK citizen, me as an American citizen, we're not allowed by our governments to own or trade or hold or whatever, market these products; but at the end of the day, VPNs exist and there's always ways round these things.

Peter McCormack: Yes, you're completely right.

Lane Rettig: Purely theoretical.

Peter McCormack: You are completely right, I just think we have a very weird industry.  I wonder if any industry has ever had so much money thrown at so much failure?

Lane Rettig: I think probably this is not -- I mean, it's easy to feel like this is all the first time this is happening, because maybe we're not old enough to remember when it happened before, but I think probably the dotcom bubble in 2000 felt very similar to this.  There was a lot of money being thrown from some deep-pocketed VCs at a lot of failing projects.  I mean, what was it, the groceries delivery services and the dog services?

Peter McCormack: Oh, pets.com and webvan, was it?

Lane Rettig: Yeah, that was one of the classic ones, this kind of stuff.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, boo.com.  My first ever job out of university was a dotcom, called ecountries.com.  It's fucking hilarious, right.  In the summer, I bought a book on HTML and I spent the summer in High Wycombe learning HTML for eight weeks.  I go back to uni, I'm in my third year, and I put my name on a freelance board, and I could create basic web pages.  I'd create them in Dreamweaver; do you remember Dreamweaver?

Lane Rettig: I do, I'm old enough to remember.  This was the pre-JavaScript days, this is HTML1.

Peter McCormack: No, it was HTML4.

Lane Rettig: Coding by hand.

Peter McCormack: It was still HTML4.

Lane Rettig: Well, Dreamweaver was one of those WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get editors, right?  I remember that.

Peter McCormack: And you'd create all this shitty code, then you could go and strip bits out.

Lane Rettig: You could even take like a Word document and convert it to an HTML page, or something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you'd create your graphics in Fireworks and your webpage in Dreamweaver.  I made a couple of basic websites, absolutely basic.

Lane Rettig: Did you have the blinking, "Under Construction" sign?

Peter McCormack: Of course!  The little, what was it?  The ticker at the top, but the hit --

Lane Rettig: The hit counter!

Peter McCormack: People attributed hits to paid views.

Lane Rettig: Hits would keep reloading the page; it would just keep going up?

Peter McCormack: But also, it was a hit for every request to the server.  So, if you had 20 images on the page, you'd have that 20 and the one for the page, so you'd have 21 hits.

Lane Rettig: Good number, 21.

Peter McCormack: I've got so many stories about this.  But anyway, I put my name on this freelance board, and I'm about a week back into my third year at uni and I get an email from this company, ecountries.com.  They were like, "Are you available over the next two weeks?  We need a freelance HTML developer".  I was like, "Yeah, for sure.  What's the pay?"  They're like, "It's £900 a week".  I was thinking, well currently I've got a job at Wetherspoons in the pub, where I get paid £3.48 an hour, I'm broke, I'm a student.  I'm like, "Yeah, I can do this".

So, I went into London for two weeks and worked, and there were five of us on a desk like this, with books on our laps, coding these pages out, and I was getting £900 a week, and I didn't go back to uni; I quit.  I went home, told my dad.  He lost his --

Lane Rettig: No kidding?

Peter McCormack: Well actually, there's a bit of a story to that.  So actually, what happened, about two weeks later, in the middle of the morning; not the night, the next morning, there was a phone call from my uncle and he was like, "Hey, Pete, how's your sister doing?"  I was like, "I don't know, give her a call".  He was like, "Oh, you haven't heard?"  I was like, "What?"  He said, "Oh, she's had an accident, she's fine, don't worry".  So, I phoned up my mum, I was like, "What's the deal?"  She was like, "Oh, she's fine, she just crossed the road, she got hit by a police car".  She said, "No, no, she's fine". 

About an hour later, there's a knock at the door and it's my brother and I was like, "Oh, fuck, this is bad".  My sister had been out the night before with my brother, she crossed the road, and a police car hit her at about 50 miles an hour.

Lane Rettig: Jesus!

Peter McCormack: She sort of spun in the air and she broke both her legs, both her arms, landed on her mouth, and that was what saved her life, because the teeth took the impact.

Lane Rettig: If she'd been hit in the back of the head or something…

Peter McCormack: Yeah, she'd have been killed.  She got rushed to hospital, she died twice during the night and she was in a coma for a week.  So, I was going back and forth to Addenbrooke's in Cambridge to see her for about a month, and then I went back afterwards and I was like, "I've missed a month of uni, I can make this much money on the internet", I quit.  My dad lost his shit.  I was like, "Dad, look, I'll defer for a year", and then went out into the workplace and I was getting paid a lot of money to do this.  I've no idea how we got to here, but anyway, weird story!

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's turned into a lot of personal life stories!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it was crazy, man.  My sister should have -- she did die, and she should have died, and she didn't.  It was unbelievable that she survived that.  I've got another funny story about that though.  So, when she was in intensive care, the nurses said, "Talk to her, she'll be able to hear you, play music, whatever”.  So, my dad went and bought a little radio player, a CD player, and my sister's a big ABBA fan, so we used to put ABBA CDs on.

One day I was in there and the music wasn't on and no one was in there.  I was like, "Right, I'm going to test this shit".  So, I just went up to my sister in the ear and I went, "You need to wake up, you're having a baby, you're pregnant, you're having a baby, you need to wake up".  I kind of forgot about it, and after a week -- it was an induced coma, they bought her out of the coma.  Then, she couldn't talk at first and in a couple of days, she started talking.

Anyway, one day, I went and got some lunch and came back and my mum was there and I was like, "How is she?" and she said, "Yeah, she's great.  But there's this really weird thing, she was thrashing around earlier saying, 'Where's my baby?  I want my baby'".

Lane Rettig: What did you do?!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so my sister thought she was pregnant.  Also, my sister's gay, she forgot she was gay.  So, after her coma, for about a month, she didn't know she was gay.

Lane Rettig: That's incredible.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, weird stuff, man.  Where the fuck are we going with all this?!

Lane Rettig: Brain science.  We understand nothing about the brain, basically.

Peter McCormack: No, we don't.  How do we connect this back to Bitcoin?  Anyway, back to stablecoins.  It would be great if there was a way that people knew, if there was a way that people could just figure this shit out, man; if they could just know which ones they could trust to buy.

Lane Rettig: Well, here's the thing, there's an inherent tension here; because historically, the way that people know is a thing is approved by a government, or it has some imprimatur, someone has given it a stamp of approval.  And, to the extent that we believe in decentralisation, how do you achieve the same thing?  No actually, it's interesting, because no one ever gave Bitcoin a stamp of approval.  Bitcoin just emerged as the winner, more or less.  I wonder why that hasn't happened with a stablecoin; that's interesting, I think we could talk about that.  I think it's a scaling question.

Peter McCormack: I mean, it kind of is Tether, but there are questions.

Lane Rettig: Well, there are issues with Tether, right?  It's centralised and for that reason, first of all, it's capital inefficient.  This is one of the big issues with these centralised, "fully collateralised" stablecoins, that if there's more demand for Tether than supply, then market forces dictate, macroeconomics dictate that the price is going to go up.  And the way that a centralised stablecoin issuer would respond to that is by issuing more coins, to keep the price close to a dollar, whatever the target price is.

But in order to do that, the company behind Tether has to go out and acquire more assets and find a bank that's willing to hold them, and communicate this to their auditors, etc; it's a whole process.  And I think for this reason -- I mean, it has scaled, right.  It's something like $70 billion, $80 billion, last time I checked.

Peter McCormack: I don't see how you can have a decentralised stablecoin.  A stablecoin is pegged to a specific sovereign currency and therefore, the only way to almost guarantee it is to hold full reserves of the amount you've issued; and therefore, that has to be held by a centralised authority and managed by --

Lane Rettig: That's one strategy, but I mean there are other strategies.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there are algorithmic.

Lane Rettig: I mean, there's two or three levers here that you can pull on.  So, one is, what is it pegged to?  Two is, is it collateralised; was it collateralised with; how much is it collateralised?  Is it 100%; is it 50%; is it 0%?  There's a sliding scale there as well.

Peter McCormack: But I think the point of this is that we have the dollar, or the pound, we have sovereign currencies.  A stablecoin is just a version of that which is easier to move around the world.  So, for example, if people accept stablecoins over Visa and Mastercard, you can pretty much wipe out the fees that you have to pay with Mastercard and Visa, because it's just direct peer-to-peer transfer, right?  I just see this as a temporary thing that we need until Bitcoin either becomes the standard currency; or, we will always have fiat currencies.  It's binary to me; it's one or the other.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, I think Alex Gladstein spoke about this as well, along the lines that -- well, it's funny actually, because bitcoiners love to shit on the US dollar for obvious reasons, and yet the vast majority of stablecoins are tied to the US dollar.  It's a bridge, right.  If you foresee a future in which on one hand, maybe hyperbitcoinisation does happen; or on the other hand, there's some other reserve asset, maybe it's gold, maybe it's SDRs, maybe it's some basket of things or something; still, to the extent that most of our expenditure, how do I put it?  Our liabilities, as individuals and as companies, are still largely denominated in fiat; that's just the medium of exchange and unit of account in the world today, so we have no choice but to let you use these things for now.  But maybe it's a bridge to something better.

Peter McCormack: But are they shitting on the dollar, or are they shitting on the Fed?

Lane Rettig: They're intrinsically bound together, you can't separate those two, because the Fed controls the monetary policy of the dollar.

Peter McCormack: Well, yes and no.  You could go back to the era of free banking and not have the Fed.  I think the point is, I don't think the dollar is the issue; I think it's the monetary policy and the people who make the decisions around the dollar, which devalues, debases people's hard-earned money.

Lane Rettig: And it probably wasn't an issue when we had the gold standard.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Lane Rettig: Which, by the way, is interesting because speaking of collateralisation, the US dollar is not backed, it's not collateralised by anything obviously today, since the 1970s, whenever Bretton Woods happened.

Peter McCormack: It's collateralised by the US Army, by the guns!

Lane Rettig: "By the Full Faith and Credit of the US Treasury", I think is what it says.  But the point is, it didn't start that way, it started out as collateralised.  And I think it's interesting, one of the approaches we've seen with a number of these stablecoins is to do the same thing.  They want to start collateralised by Bitcoin or gold or dollars or something, and then gradually reduce that over time and eventually reach…  Do you know Wily Coyote and the Looney Tunes; I don't know if you guys have this in the UK?

Peter McCormack: Of course, man.

Lane Rettig: He runs out over the edge of the cliff and there's like ten seconds before he realises it, and then he falls.  So, it's kind of like that.  You're reducing your collateralisation and you eventually reach zero and the idea is, can you stay there, out over the edge of the cliff, and not fall; in other words, people not realise that the carpet has been ripped out from underneath you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the rug pull.

Lane Rettig: The rug pull, that the rug pull actually happened.  But it hasn't been achieved yet.  But it kind of has with Bitcoin.  Bitcoin itself doesn't really have intrinsic value.  The value of Bitcoin is that --

Peter McCormack: Nothing has intrinsic value.

Lane Rettig: Well, this is the true, true reality.  Bitcoin only has value insofar as you believe that the network itself, people will still be using it, you could still use Bitcoin to buy things in the future.  I guess, right, we're agreeing something doesn't necessarily have to be collateralised to have value; value's a story.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's collective value, it's cigarettes in jail, it's Bitcoin for people who believe and hold and own Bitcoin, it's gold for Peter Schiff.  There's a lot of different things have different value and it's all subjective, and the market decides what the value is, based on what people want to use.  That's all it is, it's very simple.

Lane Rettig: I mean, it's funny, because this concept of value is definitely not a thing I ever in my whole life ever really thought about before becoming a bitcoiner and getting into the space.  And all of a sudden, you realise it's not simple at all.  Price, right; when you say something feels expensive, and again at our age, we're beginning to be the old fuddy-duddies who say, "Oh my God, when I was a kid, a slice of pizza used to cost a dollar".  Now, who knows what it's going to cost when our kids grow up?  But what does that mean, for something to be overpriced; what does it actually mean in concrete terms?

Peter McCormack: I mean, I'd never thought about inflation, what inflation really is and how insidious it is, until Bitcoin.  I'd never thought about the value of things, I'd never thought about saving for my future, I never thought about any of this shit.

Lane Rettig: Time preference.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I was just literally a moron, bumbling through life, earning money and spending money and not thinking about it in the slightest, which is why I think there's this thing about Bitcoin what people miss in parts of the education.  It's not just about money, it's the wider things you learn about yourself and life that come from it, like that time preference thing is actually super-interesting.  At first, I thought, "This is cringe, what a load of bullshit".  No, actually, it's super-true. 

If you really have to consider your purchases -- me and Danny are always talking, whenever we're about to sell some Bitcoin, it's like, "I might need to sell a bit of Bitcoin, but should I?"  I try not to, whether it's a watch, a car, a house, whatever.  I don't think I've spent any Bitcoin without talking to you first.

Danny Knowles: I don't think I've ever sold Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I thought you sold some recently?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: I thought you did.

Danny Knowles: I stopped DCAing so I could buy a watch!

Peter McCormack: There you go!

Lane Rettig: Here's the funny thing --

Peter McCormack: So, you sold some future Bitcoin?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Lane Rettig: So, in economic terms, the opportunity cost, that's precisely the same as selling Bitcoin.  So, we convince ourselves -- can I tell you my story about selling Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Hold on, just very quickly.  We had a conversation about that, and there's a few times.  But the point is, every single time -- I don't do it every single time I spend money.

Lane Rettig: No, if you spend dollars or pounds, whatever, who cares?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But every time we have that conversation, it's like, "Is it worth it?  Should I?"  Once you do that, you're really thinking about your future.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's true.  It's a little bit like our conversation about dietary preference and being vegan, or something, earlier where when I tried being vegan for a week or two, it's the first I ever really paid attention to all the shit I'm putting in my body.  I really began this process of reading all the ingredients.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, what is in this shit?

Lane Rettig: Citric acid.  Bad for your teeth, by the way. 

Peter McCormack: I'm British, my teeth are already bad.  That's a really good point.  I wish I looked at food and alcohol the way I looked at Bitcoin.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  So, what Bitcoin teaches you to do is to apply the same level of precision to your financials and your economics, almost as if you were a business, because you're an entrepreneur, you know this, you're forced as a business to do, what is it called?  The two-column accounting and you have to account for every dollar, every pound, every satoshi, whatever.  As individuals, we don't typically do this, unless I guess maybe your parents were accountants or something.  But Bitcoin really makes me pay very close attention to my finances and my family's finances.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's done a lot for me in terms of that.  I really consider my future, my kids' future.  I told you about putting that money away for my kids for their travelling, I've done things like that, but now there's some very serious considerations about what I'm spending money on, why I'm spending money, what it's for, where I should be putting my money.  I never thought about that before Bitcoin.  It was always, "I'm earning enough money".

Lane Rettig: I have a good friend, a really, really smart guy, who was my colleague when -- I have a background in traditional finance; and he tried to convince me, this is, I don't know, ten years ago, something like that, so I was in my 20s, earning a high salary, working on Wall Street.  He said, "Look, you shouldn't be saving a single dollar.  You should be spending every dollar you make, and there's a very rational argument for this.  Number one, you have hiring potential for the rest of your life, you're going to do fine; and number two, how do I put this?  You can enjoy your dollars more today than you will 50 years from now.  You can go out and spend that money on wining and dining and travel, all the stuff that you're not going to want to do, or you won't enjoy as much when you're older.  Therefore, you should save nothing and spend everything today".

That's kind of the exact opposite argument.  I was almost convinced by this for a while, but Bitcoin changes it.

Peter McCormack: Do you plan to leave much inheritance to your children?

Lane Rettig: I plan to leave everything to my kids.

Peter McCormack: But what I'm saying is, do you plan to grow a massive pot for them; or, do you plan to hit a point where you start spending it all, and you leave them with enough, but you enjoy the money?  That's a really important question.  If I was to die tomorrow, my kids would be in a fairly comfortable position and life will be made a little bit harder -- actually, no, let me put it a different way.

Say I get to live until I'm 70 and I retire at 50.  Say I had a nice pot of Bitcoin.  Do I want to bumble along and make sure they have all of that, or do I want to spend the fuck out of it and enjoy it and just leave them enough?  And in some ways, I want to maximise living and enjoying time while I'm here, so there's going to come a point where I'm going to start spending the shit out of my Bitcoin and my savings, because there's almost like, you know you have goals to where you want to get financially? 

Lane Rettig: They move as you mature and become wealthier, though.  The goalposts move, insidious almost.

Peter McCormack: I know, but wouldn't it be cool to have £10 million; to have £10 million, that would be amazing.  It's like, "Right, for the rest of my life, I can have as many holidays as I want and live in a nice house, whatever.  But I think I'll get to a point where it's like, "I don't want to die with £10 million, I don't need that.  I mean, if I could leave my kids £500,000 each, that would be amazing.  Okay, so I've got £9 million to spend over the next 20 years".

Lane Rettig: Well, here's the crazy thing.  If you invest it well, including maybe in Bitcoin or who knows, it can keep growing and you can actually reach a point where you can keep drawing it down --

Peter McCormack: Escape velocity.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, I guess that's what it's called, where the growth over time is equal to, or greater than, the amount you're taking out of it.  There's this whole community on Reddit, actually multiple communities, the FIRE communities, you know about this?

Peter McCormack: No.

Lane Rettig: Financially Independent, Retired Early.  So, there's fatFIRE and leanFIRE.  LeanFIRE is, "if I could put $100,000 or $200,000 or pounds in the bank and move to Thailand, I can live on that for the rest of my life in a very simple --"

Peter McCormack: Dude, you can live like a king in Thailand for that.

Lane Rettig: What I'm saying, that's your total assets.  You stop working, you retire early, you invest it in something that gives you 5%, 10%; I mean, that's a lot, I guess -- hopefully not in LUNA -- per year.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Jesus!

Lane Rettig: And then fatFIRE is, "You needs tens of millions of dollars and you can live like a king here or in some expensive place", but the concept is the same.  It's a really interesting rabbit hole actually.  There's some overlap with crypto, but it's quite distinct.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean we're only a few years apart.  I'm not going to be doing this when I'm 65, I'm not going to be doing this when I'm 60.

Lane Rettig: You'll be doing it in the metaverse!

Peter McCormack: No I fucking won't!  The fucking metaverse.  Is that still a thing now; is the metaverse still a thing?

Lane Rettig: Hopefully it's been laid to rest for some time.

Peter McCormack: Can we talk about Web3?

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  I was about to say that I think we've landed on a topic, which is financial planning using stablecoins and crypto.  But let's talk about Web3.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, I mean Web3.

Lane Rettig: So actually, there's a history here.  Do you know the first time this term was used? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was used after Web2!  So, I told you my internet story, my HTML.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, this is Web1?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Web1.  I remember Web2 and I remember it happening, I remember when people were talking about it, and they were talking about it with regards to interactive web pages, you type in Google, you get predictive results, you have AJAX; it was called AJAX, wasn't it, the interactive things on the pages?  Web1 was, you go to a website, it said, "About us".

Lane Rettig: Static content.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and each page was literally .html, maybe some CSS.

Lane Rettig: The GeoCities days.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, GeoCities.  But there was no connection to a database.  A lot of these webpages were literally, the text was coded into the page.  And then you got interactive pages, and you had user-generated content, the early social media.

Lane Rettig: So, this was like forums or boards.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Friendster.

Lane Rettig: But the really early ones, the first applications, do you remember guestbooks, things like this?  It was like a CGI script.  So, it was just a simple programme.  Actually, it's funny, I'm a software developer.  The very first software I ever wrote was Perl script, CGI script, in the mid-1990s, early- to mid-1990s.  But it was something like this, like a guestbook.  You arrive in a webpage, you could type anything you want there, and again, no spam prevention, but it was almost -- there wasn't even spam back then, because spam itself hadn't been invented at that stage.  It was like good behaviour.

Peter McCormack: You had email spam.  Email spam was ridiculous.

Lane Rettig: Email spam, really, if I remember correctly, I feel like it started late-1990s, because the point is, you didn't have a critical mass of people using email prior to that, so there wasn't a point in sending spam.

Peter McCormack: All I remember is, when spam really took off, it was relentless, and there was a lot of porn spam, just literal hardcore shit.

Lane Rettig: It was, "Use this to make your dick bigger", that's what I remember!

Peter McCormack: I mean, I know it was pretty targeted; I never received that!  But yeah, so when the Web2 stuff started happening, I don't know who coined it, I don't know where it came from, but it felt like, "This is an improvement in the way you can code webpages, and the benefit is to those who build webpages and companies who build webpages, and people who use the internet".  It felt like a collective benefit.

Lane Rettig: And there was a clear line between Web1 and Web2.  Web1 was, as we said, static.  It was publishers pushing things to users, it was not interactive.  And Web2 was the opposite of all those things.  It was interactive, it was user-generated content, it was social.  Also, another aspect of it was purchasing things online with credit cards.  That was a Web2 thing; that didn't exist in Web1.

Peter McCormack: But there weren't VCs talking about Web2 companies; it just didn't exist.

Lane Rettig: I think it's one of those things, it's like a term we apply in retrospect. 

Peter McCormack: Totally it was, it was applied in retrospect.

Lane Rettig: I think you're right.

Peter McCormack: These things were happening, it was like, "Oh, it looks like Web2's here".

Lane Rettig: It's like World War I was called The Great War until World War II came along.

Peter McCormack: But I remember people talking about Web3, and when they were talking about Web3, they were talking about the Semantic Web.

Lane Rettig: Exactly, this is Tim Berners-Lee.

Peter McCormack: Tim Berners-Lee, yeah, the Semantic Web.

Lane Rettig: Who, by the way, the man gets to do this because the man invented the web!

Peter McCormack: Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee.  Thank you for not creating patents around it.

Lane Rettig: Or putting a shitcoin on it, or something.

Peter McCormack: I think he might -- no, I could be wrong!  But it was the Semantic Web, this is what's coming.  The Semantic Web is coming, it will be a little bit more decentralised, and I think it was the World Wide Web Consortium --

Lane Rettig: 3C, yeah.

Peter McCormack: 3C, yeah, who were talking about Web3.

Lane Rettig: And just to put things in perspective, this was early 2000s, early noughts.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I was still involved in coding webpages back then.  So, it was talked about, "This thing's coming", and I'm not sure how much the Semantic Web actually took off, the tagging of every piece of content, whatever.  I know people talked about it, I know there was schema.

Lane Rettig: I think some of it got incorporated into HTML5.

Peter McCormack: Was it like Schema2 or something?  I can't remember.  But anyway, I remember it being talked about, and it would be a more private web, a more decentralised web, etc.  Cool.  And then I feel like over the last year, 18 months, Web3 has now been changed into token holders owning parts of companies.  It's a new way of creating companies which aren't centrally created, they're decentralised companies, which we know they actually fucking won't be, and everyone else gets to own a bit of it.  Cool.  If you're right, then at the point where you get to put your VC money in, at your pre-whatever level where you're buying all your tokens, Multicoin, a16z --

Lane Rettig: Web16z!

Peter McCormack: Web16z!  Why don't you open it up at that point, and everyone else can get in?  Why are you buying at that point, calling it Web3, having a beta built, beta product built, launching it, allowing everyone else to buy, and you being provided with exit liquidity?

Lane Rettig: So, everything that you just described is perfectly okay with me except for the last part.  I think VC, as an ecosystem, the way these investments are structured, evolved a certain way over time for a reason.  The one thing that I've taken from crypto over the past few years, in protocol mechanism design, is that incentives matter enormously. 

When you give the early investors that early exit opportunity, it throws everything off, the incentives are completely wrong.  Because, just to be clear, not every listener might be familiar with the way a VC fund typically works in a Web2 world, or a typical kind of equity world, is you're locked in.  You're holding that investment for five, seven, nine years, whatever it takes, until you have a "liquidity event or an exit", something like an acquisition or an IPO.  I always make a mistake and say ICO!

Peter McCormack: You might be involved in the seed round, or the A round --

Lane Rettig: The follow-on round, right.

Peter McCormack: -- and you find a potential company and you invest $1 million to $5 million.  The founders go out and they build a product, they essentially work on product market fit, they test their product, they make sure there's an audience, they check whether there's a genuine growth rate that can be achieved, they try and understand what the marketing channel is.  Once they understand what the marketing channel is, what is the investment need into it?  What is the retention of people using that product?

Lane Rettig: And by the way, you can't be acquired, or IPO, unless you figure these things out and disclose them.

Peter McCormack: And, is the revenue working?  Essentially, it goes back to that acquisition, conversion, retention, monetisation, that whole -- and yes, we've proven product market fit, we now need to scale; B round.  We now need to scale again; C round.  Eventually, you get to an IPO.

Lane Rettig: Ideally.

Peter McCormack: Ideally.

Lane Rettig: I mean, IPOs have become more scarce and it's gotten harder because of a lot more regulation.  Acquisitions are much more common now we have the SPACs.

Peter McCormack: And they're also a bit bullshit.  They seem to IPO and it values where it's just another exit liquidity event.  I mean, Coinbase, perfect example.

Lane Rettig: Coinbase was down almost 90%, 80-something% on the year.

Peter McCormack: It's like a shitcoin.  So, we all understand, that's the traditional route.  But now, with Web3, I've said this a million times, you get to IPO at your seed round.  You get instant exit liquidity and you have not proved product market fit.  How many shitcoins have actually proven a sustainable long-term product market fit?  I think Bitcoin has; Bitcoin's obviously not a shitcoin.  I think in some ways, Monero has created product market fit for a certain audience.  I've always been okay with Monero.  There's an audience out there who are buying things with Monero, because it's private and they trust it.  They've done a better job than any other privacy coin.

As much as I'm not a fan of it, Ethereum has proved product market fit for a certain area of things.  They've got issues, but they have.  I don't think Solana has, and certainly not these 15,000 other shitcoins.

Lane Rettig: It's a very small number.  I was actually thinking, as you were speaking just now, what the actual number is.  I was going to say, "You can count on one hand".  Maybe it's more than five, but it's a very small number.

Peter McCormack: But we've got funds -- what is it, Katie Haun, is that her name?

Lane Rettig: Katie Haun was at a16z.  She started her own fund recently.

Peter McCormack: She raised $1.5 billion for a Web3 fund, and all these funds are raising billions.  And Multicoin.

Lane Rettig: I read somewhere something like 20%, I hope I'm getting this right; 20% or 25% of all VC dollars either raised or invested last year was crypto projects, which is crazy.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Lane Rettig: Crazy.  It'll come down this year, obviously.

Peter McCormack: So, they have an incentive to create this category called Web3.  But I don't believe the thing they're explaining and talking about is making the web a better experience than Web2 did, or like Web3 was meant to, I just don't agree.  And I think Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen are massively incentivised to make this a thing, and I don't know why.  Is it the latest thing they can make billions from?  Is it because we're beyond the tech boom, there's not as many ideas available?  I don't know, but I just find it thoroughly -- I just don't like it.

Lane Rettig: So, let me, for the sake of argument, make the counter case here, because it is interesting.

Peter McCormack: No, you're just meant to agree with me, and then we can move onto --

Lane Rettig: All right, let's go get beers!

Peter McCormack: We can get back to bees!

Lane Rettig: So, one aspect that we could talk about that's really interesting is the decentralisation of data, and users should retain their identity and have self-sovereignty of their identity, their data.  Actually, I think maybe an even easier piece to look at is one of the things that Chris Dixon talked about, which is the -- I forget what he calls it, but there's a growth extraction process that plays out with pretty much every company, and you've seen this, I've seen this.

So, with pretty much any centralised company with a technology project, early on, I'm thinking like Uber in the early days, it was fucking awesome in the early days.  Press a button and a taxi shows up, the prices were very reasonable, the support was amazing.  Any time you had an issue, you sent a message and within an hour, you'll get a response back and they'll give you credit.  Any tech product in the early days has to be super-user-friendly to acquire an audience; that's what you have to do early on.

Peter McCormack: And they have growth capital, so they don't have to be entirely profitable.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, exactly.

Peter McCormack: Can you get users?

Lane Rettig: Well, Uber will never be profitable.

Peter McCormack: Can you get users?

Lane Rettig: That's the only thing that matters.  How do you get users?  With great user experience, great support, just great UX, all these kinds of things.

Peter McCormack: You solve a problem.

Lane Rettig: And you do it 10X better than anyone has before.  But the problem is that over time, the incentives and the dynamics change.  For any company that has private investors, any public company, there is a growth mandate.  They have to keep increasing, pumping the value of their equity effectively.  The way you do that is by over time, slowly squeezing and beginning to exploit your users, turn your users into the product, which is what's happened in social media.  The market is just set up in such a way that this is unavoidable.  The classic example, this is Google saying, "Don't be evil", and then ten years later --

Peter McCormack: "Be a little bit evil"!

Lane Rettig: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: "We can be in China, it doesn't matter that they want us to censor what happened at Tiananmen Square; we'll do that".

Lane Rettig: And the incentives are such that no matter how good the early intentions of the founders are, they're kind of forced into, again, these two options: one is acquisition; and the other is IPO.  And of course, it forces them to --

Peter McCormack: Well, sometimes it's pre-IPO; sometimes it's post-IPO.  So, pre-IPO, you want to become as profitable as possible, so you maybe sack a bunch of staff, you stop spending money on marketing.

Lane Rettig: Exactly, so your support goes to shit.  I mean, Uber is now absurdly expensive, especially in places like New York, and their support is just ridiculously terrible; you're lucky to get any response.

Peter McCormack: We should come back to that, by the way, because it's ridiculously expensive in New York.

Lane Rettig: Let's come back to it, let me just finish this thought.

Peter McCormack: No, but I'm with you.  And post-IPO, your share price always has to go up, because if it's not going up, you're failing.

Lane Rettig: You're going to get fired.  I mean, the reality is, you as CEO of that company, or Chairman of the Board, or whatever it is, you're going to get a pink slip; you're done.  You really, truly have no choice.  So, one argument in favour of something like Web3 is that you don't have to do that, you're not forced to ever sell or be acquired or IPO, because the project is owned by the user.  So, it's a lot like a co-op, basically.

Peter McCormack: But it never is.

Lane Rettig: And therefore, you don't need to exploit your users or squeeze them and extract value from them.  Another way of phrasing this, there's a project called Exit to Community.  So, there's a gentleman named Nathan Schneider, who's a Professor at University of Colorado, and there's a whole group that does research on this.  And so, they want to offer an alternative. 

If you are that high-growth project and you have this community that's super-active and they love it, shouldn't there be a way for the founders to exit, rather than to the market or to an acquirer, to the community?  Maybe this doesn't look like billions and billions of dollars, maybe it's an order of magnitude less than that, but the founders can be very comfortable; and at the same time, the community can take over stewardship of the project.

So, this is an idealised version of Web3, and I do believe that there's some potential for this.  This has not really happened successfully.  I think maybe the best example we have right now is ShapeShift; do you know what they're up to?

Peter McCormack: Eric Voorhees?

Lane Rettig: Yeah, they've been decentralising ShapeShift from a company into a DAO, effectively.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but okay, so ShapeShift aside, the kinds of projects that I've seen people investing in, it's a bit confusing, because there's a token, but sometimes there's also a company which has equity.

Lane Rettig: Yeah.  Well, the typical, the most common structure is a dual structure, where you have a for-profit company, and then you have something like a foundation, could be an association, which is a non-profit, which sort of controls the Treasury, issues the token, maybe runs the ICO.  And then, the for-profit company acts as a service provider to the foundation.  This is how these projects tend to get around securities laws, things like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but this is where it feels a little bit like bullshit, because what you've done, you've created the equity, which you as the company own; and then, you've also created the token, which you own part of, which you allow a bunch of people also to buy the token, but the company still exists.  If the token was all that existed and the token represented equity, I could partially see your argument.  But in the end, the people who own the token want the token to go up in value, because it's an investment.  Either way, if you're buying something, you want the investment to be successful.

Lane Rettig: I think you're oversimplifying a little bit.  I've seen, as an investor, and to some extent the projects that I've helped launch as well, there's a menu of options you can choose from, right, and it's changed over time.  So, circa 2017, the really popular thing to do was the ICO, and the thing that the investors were buying was a SAFT, a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, and there was no equity component.  That fell out of favour for obvious reasons, because the SEC began to pay more attention and people began to say, "Well, a lot of these things probably are unregulated securities".

So, instead of SAFTs, people started doing SAFEs, which are more traditional; Simple Agreement for Future Equity.  However, there's hybrid structures, where the equity itself is tied to a token.  So for example, in the case of Spacemesh, we have a company, we have an operating company, which is like a Delaware C Corporation or something.  Every investor who owns a share of that company is entitled to some number of coins in the network.  The most likely scenario is that when the network goes live, or shortly thereafter, call it a year or two after, we will dissolve the company and just leave the network and just leave the coins. 

That's one relatively clean way to do it, and it's a little bit like, again, what ShapeShift is doing.  That company is going to be completely dissolved, there's going to be zero assets left; all the value is going to be held by the network.  So, I think that there are healthy ways to do this.

Peter McCormack: But of course you're going to say that Spacemesh is the healthy option, because you're working on it.

Lane Rettig: I recognise my biases, and this is an experiment and we haven't done this yet.  I feel like other projects probably have done some version of this.

Peter McCormack: But I still feel like the whole thing is fundamentally dishonest.  I think Web3 is a marketing term to sell the idea that we live in a world of tokens.  And I think we're, what, six years into the proliferation of tokens?

Lane Rettig: I mean, it really started in 2017, so we're, yeah, five to six years.

Peter McCormack: Five years, six years, and pretty much every chart for every token looks the same, and eventually it tails off to death.  It's like, how many times do you want to try this?  How many times do you want to try this, until you've been proven it doesn't work?  Not everything is going to be decentralised.

Lane Rettig: That's fair.

Peter McCormack: It was like the Kyle Samani thing the other day where it was like, "Who's building Airbnb on Web3?"  It's like, "Oh, fuck off, man, we did this in 2017.  It's like a bullshit idea.  We're not going to put everything on a fucking blockchain".  Look, Airbnb isn't perfect, but I like the fact that I can call up Airbnb and say, "Hey, I've got an issue with a booking", and customer service deals with it.

Also, if I've got a property and I list it, am I fuck going to list that on a decentralised network.  I want it to be listed on a centralised network that is insured and has customer services, so if someone comes in and fucks up my property, I can go to them and say, "Hey, there's a problem here".  I just don't buy it.  I'm not sure if that still puts me in statist cuck category, but I just don't buy it. 

Some things are going to be better centralised, and some things are better decentralised.  Money clearly is better decentralised because of the incentives.  But I actually like centralised things.  I think some things built centralised are better.

Lane Rettig: I think centralisation is good for user experience, it's good for support, like you're talking about.

Peter McCormack: It's good for accountability.

Lane Rettig: So, the vision is that crypto economics, if you believe that that's a thing, and certainly a lot of Ethereum people do --

Peter McCormack: I don't.

Lane Rettig: -- the vision is you can get accountability through crypto economics, through things like mechanisms like bonds.  So, as a participant in a network, you have to acquire a token, like a utility token, to become a service provider.  So, let's talk about decentralised Uber; that's a fun use case.  In order to become a driver, I need to hold some minimum number of tokens of this network and I need to stake them, I need to bond them.  And, if I misbehave, if I don't respond to enough calls, or if I get too many one-star ratings, or whatever, then I've going to get "slashed" and some portion of those tokens are going to get taken away from me, and you get accountability through these mechanisms.

However, it's fragile for the same reason that algorithmic stablecoins are fragile.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's similar to the idea that Michael Saylor has with Twitter, in that he wanted you to have an orange checkmark, and you have to stake some Bitcoin and you lose that Bitcoin.  I think there's some merit in it, and I think there's also some potential flaws in it, but I'm not opposed to the idea.  But for me, that works, because that is money.  And I think with Twitter, they could do it two ways.  If you want to be anonymous, you can stake some Bitcoin.  If you don't care, you can stake $10 of a stablecoin, or whatever.  I think it's possible to do something like that.  But you're doing it with things that are accepted as money.

Lane Rettig: I see where you're going with this, yeah.

Peter McCormack: The dollar is definitely accepted as money and it makes sense.  If I fuck with my Twitter account and I lose that $20, that is annoying.  Also, if I want to spam, if I want to do 1,000 spam accounts, that's $20,000.  It's just a pain.  Okay, great, I get that; and to me, that does kind of work.  If it's another token --

Lane Rettig: Yeah, if it's a shitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, as a shitcoin, it's not really money, it's a shitcoin.  And actually, what if that shitcoin loses value?  Well, can I buy a load more shitcoins and then suddenly start attacking that network?  And then somebody was like -- well, let's look at a normal day, or a normal trip like this.  I have to get to the airport, so I need an Uber; I go on decentralised Uber, so I've got my Uber shitcoins; then I have to get on my flight with decentralised British Airways with my British Airways coin.

Lane Rettig: Shittish Airways!

Peter McCormack: No, British Airways are good, okay.  And then I get to New York and I've got to get to my Airbnb and I've got my decentralised Airbnb.  So, how many fucking shitcoins have I got here?  How many different things --

Lane Rettig: Well, this is not very different than the way things work today, needing different currencies in different places, and the stupid cards you need.  Actually, the London Metro's a good example, because you can actually tap any credit card on the London Metro to pay.  They just introduced that here in New York last year.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I come here and I just tap my card and I pay.

Lane Rettig: You used to need a MetroCard; that's no longer the case, as of a year ago.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but here, what I'm saying is, when I use Uber, it comes from the same account.  When I go to the shop, the deli, and I get myself a sandwich, I just tap my card and pay; I don't need to think about that.  I don't want to have to think about every single service I use, "How much have I staked?  What is the value of it?  Is the value going up?  Have I got my private keys?"  It's just too much, it's too much.  I don't believe in it, I think it's bullshit and I think, like I say, there are people with incentives to do this, because they've made an awful lot of money off failure.  They've made a shit load of money off failure, because they've got exit liquidity for something that hasn't had product market fit.

Lane Rettig: I don't disagree with that.

Peter McCormack: I don't believe there will be a decentralised Uber, I just don't see it coming.  And maybe I'm just a Luddite, or whatever, but I just think we went through this in 2017 and it didn't happen, and we seem to be going through it now and we've replaced ICO with Web3.  I think those people have incentives and I think they're full of shit.  If you can do it, go and build it.  Why do you need a fucking token?  I know why they want a token.

Lane Rettig: There's one obvious reason and one less obvious reason.  So, the less obvious reason is things like monetary policy.  If you want to have any control over minting, and burning, minting in particular, you have to have your own token.  You can't mint Bitcoin or ETH, right?

Peter McCormack: But why do you need to mint a token?

Lane Rettig: Certain crypto economic mechanisms might require you to be able to dynamically have monetary policy control, so to increase or decrease the token supply, things like that; macroeconomics.

Peter McCormack: But why can't you build the same decentralised thing, but just use Bitcoin?

Lane Rettig: I think nine times out of ten, you probably could just use Bitcoin, to be completely honest.  But to say that there's no need for any token in any case whatsoever is disingenuous, because there are legitimate cases where you need, either at the beginning in the case of spinning up a decentralised ShapeShift, to use that as an example, or a DAO, or something, you need to be able to mint tokens and hand them to certain people, or maybe even have a more active monetary policy over the long run.

Peter McCormack: But are you minting tokens, or are you minting pseudo-equity?  Because if you're minting pseudo-equity, that makes sense.  But let's not call it a token, let's just call it a share, because we know what a share is, and it's a share of something that you can sell.  So, are you minting tokens with a monetary policy, or are you minting a share?

Lane Rettig: It's a grey area, and this is where things get complicated.

Peter McCormack: Because people benefit from grey areas!

Lane Rettig: Yeah, sure!  When you call something a share, which implies equity, that has a whole bundle of things that go along with it, so shareholder rights, fiduciary duty on the part of the principal.  So, you have the principal agent problem, you have all this kind of typical corporate governance stuff.  You don't have any of that with tokens and that's one of the problems.  As an investor, when you buy tokens, if you read the fine print, truly it says things along these lines.  It says, "You have no rights whatsoever, you have no shareholder rights, you have no governance rights, no voting rights", so it's the perfect instrument for the issuer; it's shit as the holder of the token.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think people like the tokens because they want to circumvent regulation, and they want to circumvent product market fit, and they've seen a market where they get to get in super-early.  Do you know what?  I actually preferred ICOs from what is happening right now, because at least when it was ICOs, it was -- and by the way, I think ICOs were bullshit, because there were loads of terrible projects; but structure-wise, at least with an ICO --

Lane Rettig: It was more honest, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, it opened up and everyone could send some Bitcoin or some ETH and they would get some tokens from the very, very start.  What's now happened is, all these massive funds --

Danny Knowles: To be fair, I don't think it was from the very start when it was ICOs; there was always pre-rounds.

Peter McCormack: Not always, no, definitely not always; I know.

Lane Rettig: Ethereum, pick the most obvious one, didn't have a pre-round.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Ethereum didn't.  I mean, I remember myself when I was a shitcoiner, I got into some at the very start.  It did come in.

Lane Rettig: But that was largely a response to the reality or the perception of regulation and saying, "Well, okay, actually we need to only sell to accredited investors".  But this is the flipside, is how disgustingly awful the "investor protections" are.  My ten-second story here is, I was an adviser to an investment fund, I don't know, five years ago or something, briefly, and I could not own shares in this fund that I was advising, because I was not an accredited investor at that time.

We jumped through every hoop, bent over backwards, talked to lawyers in multiple jurisdictions, tried to get very creative and said, "Look, you're an advisor for the bloody fund, you should own a share of this fund", and they couldn't find a way to legally do it, because of these stupid -- to protect me from myself.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, investor protection rules are dumb.  Again, they give advantage to the rich, and it's bullshit.

Lane Rettig: In the name of protecting the poor.

Peter McCormack: But these tokens have essentially come up with a way of circumventing that without solving the problem; that's what it is.  They've circumvented it without solving the problem.  You still own no equity, you own a token that will have some kind of bull market and then will have some kind of crash, and most people will lose money.

Lane Rettig: It's an interesting question.  So you asked, a little bit ago, how many tokens or coins have, over the long term, maintained value or been value accretive.  The short answer is, we really don't know because it's too soon; it's only been five years.

Peter McCormack: There's two.

Lane Rettig: But it is an empirical question, you could actually look, and I don't know offhand.  For example, from that crop of 2017 ICOs, there were thousands of them, how many of them are still worth a meaningful amount of money?  I'm sure the number's greater than zero, but it's very low.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I'm not a fan of Ethereum, but I'm honest enough to say it seems to have created and maintained a community that has grown from cycle to cycle and is doing a thing.  I don't like it, I wouldn't invest in it, I wouldn't buy it, I don't use it, but it has, it has survived.  Do I think it will be here in four years?  Probably.  Do I think ultimately it has a long-term purpose?  No, I don't.  But it does, it has done that, like Bitcoin has.  But so much shit hasn't.

But then there's other stuff.  Maybe someone spun up the Cardano chart and says, "Well, the Cardano has", but what actual value has it delivered?  Literally fuck all, nothing.

Lane Rettig: They've produced some good research papers, to be completely fair!

Peter McCormack: Didn't they sell some bullshit to Ethiopia or something?  I don't know.

Lane Rettig: Ethiopia's got the .eth top-level domain, never mind.

Peter McCormack: Out of the dotcom bust, we got Amazon, we got Google, we got Facebook --

Lane Rettig: Uber.

Peter McCormack: Uber.  We got all -- no, but even from the time when --

Lane Rettig: I'm wrong, by the way, Uber's much younger than that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Uber came after the crash.  I'm saying there was stuff pre-crash that stayed, a lot of stuff stayed, and probably a lot of smaller stuff was created, and companies got online.  If you were a mum and dad retail business, you could spin up an ecommerce shop.  All this other stuff that came out of it…

Lane Rettig: But you know what we got from 2017?  We got stablecoins, we got lending protocols, that I think --

Peter McCormack: Fair.

Lane Rettig: This is one of the answers to the question.  This is more like 2018, this is from that bear market, compounded, Aave and some of these.  These projects, they're relatively simple, they work pretty well, there's some value in them, they've still maintained some network value.  But I would struggle to come up with other examples.  We've got Uniswap; Uniswap is a legitimate project.

Peter McCormack: But I could spin it a different way and say, "Actually, we have got all this other stuff".  So, all the crypto market went up and crashed down, and I can give you a reason of all this other stuff we got, out of the dotcom bust.  We got ability for people to be able to transact globally with satoshis.

Lane Rettig: Right, that's huge.

Peter McCormack: We got the ability for people to be able to send donations to people who are activists in difficult locations, Belarus, Nigeria, wherever, send money in.  We got the ability for people to send money permissionlessly across borders.  We've got this entire network of shit that's been built on the back of Bitcoin, and even though I don't like it, I accept there's some arguments similarly for ETH.  But Bitcoin, we've got this whole network that's growing of commerce, value, transfer and it's brilliant.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, and you're right.  A lot of this, Lightning Labs, a lot of these folks, that was getting off the ground in 2017, was built during the same bear market of 2018, 2019, really began taking off 2019, 2020.  You and I have both seen that work really brilliantly in El Salvador.

Peter McCormack: We've got a country that now has a decentralised currency which is now a legitimate currency within that country.

Lane Rettig: When do you think we'll see the next one?

Peter McCormack: Well, what's going on with the Central African Republic?

Lane Rettig: Oh, right, there was something that came out of there about a month ago.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you when I think we'll see it.

Lane Rettig: Are we going, by the way, because we went to El Salvador?  I mean, you've been going for ages. 

Peter McCormack: I'd like to go.

Lane Rettig: CAR would be a fun place to visit.

Peter McCormack: I'd like to go.  I've never been to Africa, I'd love to go.  I was meant to go before COVID.  I had eight countries planned.  I was going to go to Ethiopia, I was going to go to Nigeria, I was going to go to Kenya.  I had a whole route planned, and then COVID happened.

Lane Rettig: I've been helping with a community thing happening in Kenya, just education about blockchain stuff, and it's incredibly active.  I mean, the people there are so hungry for knowledge and just hands-on.  There's really a lot of talent, a lot of software developers there, and people who potentially can run banks and be financial planners and things like that.  I mean, Kenya, Nigeria, a lot of places you mentioned, Rwanda, are relatively accessible, because they're anglophone countries.  There's also a lot of potential in francophone West Africa.  Africa's the future.

Peter McCormack: So, we've gone zero to one.  It's not so much, when do we one to two; it's, when do we go one to ten?  I think I know.  I think in my head, what's going to happen is, a lot of people are… remember, if you're in the rabbit hole, you're looking at El Salvador and you're going, "Fucking smart.  They got in early, they're stacking.  Yes, the price has dropped, they're building out the infrastructure.  They're ready.  They're getting ready for when everyone else comes on". 

But if you're not down the rabbit hole, you're looking going, "What the fuck's that country doing; they've spent all their money on Bitcoin, they've lost money on that weird internet currency?"

Lane Rettig: They're hurting their relationship with the IMF and other international institutions.

Peter McCormack: Okay, say in the next two years we have another bull run, say Bitcoin does another 5X.

Lane Rettig: So, we're over $100,000, $150,000.

Peter McCormack: We're over $100,000, maybe we're at $150,000, $200,000.  Suddenly, all that money Bukele put into Bitcoin has boomed.  They are the smart guys, they've got people coming to the country, they've got infrastructure built out.  It's like, "Holy shit, they're ahead of us!"  Other countries are going, "Why the fuck didn't we do it?  We need to get in now", and I think that's what will drive it.  I think if you get a genuine success story behind El Salvador, but I think it takes time.

Lane Rettig: To be fair, there's also a lot of other variables at play in El Salvador.  I mean, as you are very aware, El Salvador is struggling with resurgence of violence and some oppression and some crackdowns, and a lot of people being thrown in jail who maybe don't belong there, and it's a lot of variables.  Bitcoin is one of them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and also it's a country that doesn't have a sovereign currency.

Lane Rettig: But it's funny, because you said zero to one versus one to ten.  In some sense, zero to one is not that interesting, because it can be a fluke, and one to two can be a fluke and two to three can be a fluke.  But by the time you get to ten, there's roughly 200 countries in the world, right.  So, now you're at 5% of the world.  At some point, it stops becoming a fluke.

Peter McCormack: I would put a different argument as well.  It's like, all right, it's legal tender in El Salvador, it's not legal tender in the US, but it's mainstream in the US, it fucking exists; people are using it.

Lane Rettig: This is the ironic thing.  There's without a doubt more people here who have Bitcoin than in El Salvador, and maybe even more people using it on a day-to-day basis, just by virtue of the fact that it's a much bigger country, a much wealthier country.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't think legal tender is so important.  I think removing capital gains tax is what's important.  I think if you can treat it like money and remove capital gains tax.  I think in Germany, if you've held it for a year, you don't pay any.

Lane Rettig: It's pretty absurd, right, the idea that I buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin and that's a taxable transaction.  It doesn't make sense, and it's also just almost impossible to account for.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I just think, if we can get better regulation around taxation, I think it makes it better.  How long have we got to the next one?

Danny Knowles: Two hours.

Peter McCormack: All right, cool.

Danny Knowles: Four-hour show?!

Lane Rettig: It's going to happen one of these days.  What's the longest you've done actually?

Peter McCormack: I've done three hours.

Lane Rettig: Three.  Because, you and I, we got to two and a half I think maybe the first one.  One of the ones we did was pretty long.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think the sweet spot's 90 minutes.  I think up to two hours, you start -- I would rather people listen to two episodes of 90 minutes than one episode of three hours.  And there's a lot of content out there with Bitcoin.  When I choose to listen to Rogan, what's the competitor set?  It's all content and I just listen to it because I like it.  The same with, if I want to watch something on Netflix.  But with Bitcoin content, it's like, "Here's my podcast feed, here's all the shows I can listen to", and you just jump between them.

Lane Rettig: But most of them are garbage.  I mean, I'm not just saying this to you as a friend; legitimately, as someone who consumes an enormous amount of podcast content, I'm always looking for new stuff.  People always ask me for recommendations for just crypto content, and it's tough, man.  There's not much good content out there on podcasts, like reliably good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean Pomp is just garbage!

Lane Rettig: Second biggest Bitcoin podcast, right?!

Peter McCormack: I mean, I don't know; I don't look down!  I don't know, there's some good people out there.  I think I love what Marty Bent does with Matt Odell; I think the two of them have an amazing show.  I think John Vallis is a super-great interviewer and is just a fucking smart guy.  I think Natalie Brunell's become an absolute superstar.

Lane Rettig: I wish Alex Gladstein had his own podcast.  I mean, I know he's writing books and articles and things.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm not sure, because if he had a podcast, would he be interviewing people?  I think some people are better interviewing and some people are better being interviewed.  I hate being interviewed, because I don't have anything good to say, I'm not very good at answers, and I get nervous and stutter.

Lane Rettig: Did Pomp interview you?  I mean, he did, right, recently?

Peter McCormack: Kind of, but it's in a studio and it's a bit of fun.  But when you interview, you want somebody who's smart who's got something to say.

Lane Rettig: On one recent episode, I think this was Eric Weinstein or something, you were saying, "There's two idiots talking and there's two giga-brains talking, there's an idiot interviewing a giga-brain".

Peter McCormack: No, that's my thesis on podcasts.  There are three categories: there's a smart person and a smart person, so that can be, well Eric had his own podcast.  So, it could be Eric Weinstein interviewing Noam Chomsky.

Lane Rettig: Exactly, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Then you have a moron and a smart person, which is like Rogan and Weinstein.  And then, you have a moron and a moron which could be --

Lane Rettig: Just like us!

Peter McCormack: No, shut up!  Which could be like, I don't know, Logan Paul and KSI, right.  And I think there's a market for all of them.

Lane Rettig: For sure.

Peter McCormack: When people complain about my podcast, "You're a fucking idiot", I say, "Well, don't listen!"  Some people like this show because I'm lower IQ, I ask dumb questions and I get things wrong.

Lane Rettig: There's a reason I recommend your podcast to basically everybody who asks, because it's accessible and it makes sense.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there are people out there who are similar who want to ask the same questions.

Lane Rettig: A lot of people like that, I think.

Peter McCormack: There are other people who want to listen to Breedlove, because they're super-smart and they can get in deep in the weeds.  And I'm like, it's good that we have all these shows.  If you don't like one, just stop listening.  Genuinely, anyone listening to the show, I'm talking to you now, if you do not like my show, stop fucking listening!  Literally, fuck off!

Lane Rettig: You need to fire 10% of your audience like Weinstein suggested.

Peter McCormack: No, honestly, I don't care.  I only want people to listen to stuff they like and get value from.  If you disagree with my opinions, fine, go and listen to an echo chamber, or listen and see if it challenges you.

Lane Rettig: Do you get a sense of the breakdown of your audience, like where they fall politically?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is a guess, but I would say the majority is centre to left.  Now interestingly, you could say then the majority is centre to right, but I think it's majority around the centre, so I've answered that badly.  I don't know.  What do you think, Danny?

Danny Knowles: I would have said centre to right, I think.  I don't think the majority of our audience is left, but I could be completely wrong.

Peter McCormack: I think maybe left relative to bitcoiners.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Lane Rettig: But it's all relative.

Peter McCormack: But I just think it's a broad spectrum, and there are some people who are very angry that I'm a bitcoiner, but I don't want to own guns in the UK and I don't want the government to burn to the ground.  They tell me all the time, "How can you be in Bitcoin if you're a statist?"

Lane Rettig: The same way that Alex Gladstein or I or you -- I mean, I think we all have this particular political stance in common, right.

Peter McCormack: Well, because to me, Bitcoin isn't about destruction of the state.  Bitcoin to me is about having an asset that circumvents the state, or makes the state better, or makes the state smaller.

Lane Rettig: It's a check on the state.

Peter McCormack: It's a check on the state; that's what it is for me.  And that's fine.  And for you, it can be the end of the state, because that's you; but that's what it is for me.

Lane Rettig: Bitcoin is a mirror, you see any way you want to.

Peter McCormack: But the thing I would say to libertarians, anarchists, it's not that they're wrong, they say so much stuff I believe in and agree; it makes so much sense.  And it's like Lyn Alden said, "Look, we've got 50 states here in the US, why hasn't one become libertarian; why not even one?"

Lane Rettig: Well, we have New Hampshire, we have Wyoming, we have states that lean in that direction.  But we don't have a libertarian party, if that's what you mean.

Peter McCormack: They're Republican.

Lane Rettig: They're Republican states, yeah.

Peter McCormack: They're Republican states.  They might be libertarian-leaning Republican, but they're Republican states.

Danny Knowles: But you can't smoke weed in New Hampshire.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, or Wyoming.  You can't cross from Colorado with weed.  That's not very libertarian.

Lane Rettig: I think it's legal here now, quite recently.

Peter McCormack: But do they have social security in New Hampshire?

Lane Rettig: Well, that's a federal thing.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay, so the decision isn't made, okay.  What social things exist at a state level?

Lane Rettig: It's quite complicated here.

Peter McCormack: Public schools?

Lane Rettig: So, healthcare can be at the state level.  So, there are state-run exchanges, so a state could theoretically choose not to have a state-run exchange or something.  I think in that case, the federal government would step in and do it.

Peter McCormack: What about schools?

Lane Rettig: Schools are state level.  But again, the federal system here is quite complicated.  I think in theory, if a state were to say something like, "We're not going to have any public schools", I think what would happen, first of all I don't think it would happen, for various reasons.  For example, the federal government, people aren't aware of this.  Let me give you a simpler example.

The drinking age is 21 in every state, which is pretty high.  That's a state law, not a federal law.  So you would ask, "Why is it the same in every state?"  Actually, the reason for this is that there is a federal clause which says that, "Any state that sets its drinking age lower than 21 immediately loses all its federal highway funding", and all the roads would just fall apart.  So, it's corrosive on the part of the federal government.

Peter McCormack: Sure, well maybe they can fund their highways locally, maybe?  I mean, libertarians don't worry about the roads, do they?

Lane Rettig: They believe the roads should be private.  I mean, theoretically yes, you could, yes.

Peter McCormack: Libertarians believe their way is right and is correct, and I'm with them, but the world is a battle place of ideas.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And not enough people are believers in wanting to live in a libertarian society.  There are people.

Lane Rettig: Right, I hear you.  You're arguing if there were enough, then they would have a critical mass somewhere and there would be a libertarian state or a country or something.

Peter McCormack: Well, there is.  Where is it?  Is it Somalia?

Lane Rettig: Somalia doesn't have a functional government!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's anarchist and they've got cholera and they've got no health system.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, and they've got famine and lots of other nasty things, warlords.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, warlords.  Now, I'm sure there's going to be libertarians losing their shit going, "You're fucking bullshit, Pete, you don't understand libertarians".  My point being, it just hasn't happened.  That's not to say it won't.

Lane Rettig: But it's an interesting thought experiment to ask, "What would it take legitimately for a US state or an island or something to become libertarian?"  And actually, there have been a number of examples of these, like Crypto Bros endow people buying islands, private islands. 

Peter McCormack: What it requires is the accumulation of power, which contradicts the ideas of libertarianism; it requires the accumulation of power.  So, this is why there are libertarian parties, and then some people disagree with that, because they don't think libertarians should be involved in politics.  But I actually like that idea.  I wish the third party in the UK wasn't the Lib Dems, I wish it was a libertarian party who had policies for, say, reducing the size of government.  And I wish you would have some kind of proportional representation in government, where those people were the check on the government that could say, "Look, stop creating new fucking departments, stop employing people, stop spending money on this".  I'm not a fan of big government, I absolutely support the idea of smaller government. 

Lane Rettig: Yeah, local government really.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but who's going to make government smaller?  If you had more libertarians involved in policy, "Look, these are our ideas, let's try and reduce the size", I'd fucking support that.

Lane Rettig: This is what the Republican Party here used to stand for, I mean a lot of this, the small government piece.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And the Republican Party under Trump implemented one of the biggest socialist policies in the history of the USA with stimulus cheques.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, and grew and grew and spent even more than the Democrats did.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.  I mean, I don't even know how we got here, but the point being is, we're in a battle place of ideas, there are some fucking amazing podcasts out there where the hosts fundamentally are bitcoiners and completely disagree with me.  Listen to them.  But if you're going to listen to my show, you're not going to change me.  I'm a European, I'm from the UK, we just think differently.

Lane Rettig: Do you identify as European?  That's interesting, because not everyone I think from places like the UK do.

Peter McCormack: I just think maybe some Americans can't find the UK on a map!

Lane Rettig: No, I get it.  Americans think naively the UK is Europe, but I know that it's not so simple.

Peter McCormack: But no, I identify as an Englishperson, which is part of the United Kingdom, which is part of Europe.

Lane Rettig: Yeah, it's complicated.  It's like going to Scotland and talking about how great Britain is, you'll get slapped in the face or something, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, the United States is a group of states that align on some things and don't align on other things.  Europe is a group of states, countries, that align on some things and don't align on other things.  But collectively across Europe, we're very similar across most of Europe in a number of ways: health policy and, I don't know, gun policy.  Yes, you can have guns in Austria, I think, or Switzerland, or something; but generally speaking, we're quite similar.

Lane Rettig: So you're saying there's a shared European identity?  I'm not sure everyone agrees with that.  Maybe Brexit voters don't!

Peter McCormack: On certain issues.  I think on healthcare, yes, there is similar.  And I think on, say, gun policy, similar.  I'm just picking big things in the US.  I think on abortion, very similar, okay.  And what I'm trying to say is there's hundreds of millions of people there who think a certain way, and in the US there's hundreds of millions of people who think a certain way.  You have to kind of accept we're just different.  I didn't come to get a massive audience in the US; I just created a podcast and --

Lane Rettig: Your audience is largely US, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is, but I'm not going to change who I am just to cater for the audience.  I wish I was winding this up, but I don't even know how!

Lane Rettig: I don't think all podcasts are created equal, just to your point about some of them being smarties talking with smarties, or whatever.  The reason I say this is because if you believe that this idea is worth spreading and that we do aim for mass adoption, which I think we do if we want hyperbitcoinisation to be a thing, I think podcasts like yours are the most valuable we can have. 

In my role in Ethereum or what I do today, a big part of it is taking this crazy, complicated body of ideas and the work and the social side of it and just trying to make it relatable to everyday people, to everyday humans, and it's a huge project.  I think we need a lot more of that, and I think your show does a good job of that.

Peter McCormack: Well, so what I would say to people is, Bitcoin is a protocol for sending value from one place to another, trustlessly, permissionlessly, that's what it is.  Take a look at it and just take from it what you want.

Lane Rettig: And build; that's the most important thing we can be doing.  Hodl, make your vision a reality.  It's a canvas.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  If you want to build a social project and you want to give out sats and you want to support communities, cool.  Just find what it does for you and what to do with it.  I think everyone can find value in Bitcoin and they should.  But stop making it part of the culture war; that's fucking dumb.  To me, that's actually anti-Bitcoin.  You're making it part of the culture war, and you're making it something to be divisive and shout about.

Lane Rettig: Bitcoin is not a thing for the right or for the left; Bitcoin is a thing for all humans.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, absolutely everyone, and just go and figure it out.

Lane Rettig: I think that's a pretty good note to end on.

Peter McCormack: Dude, love talking to you, Lane.

Lane Rettig: This has been great.

Peter McCormack: You're my favourite shitcoiner!

Lane Rettig: I think you said the same thing at the end of the last one!

Peter McCormack: Did I?

Lane Rettig: Right, do you want to go and get some Brooklyn Pizza?

Peter McCormack: It's a bit early for pizza; what's the time?  Look, congratulations on having a baby, that's amazing news.  I'm very happy for you.

Lane Rettig: The best way to create a new bitcoiner is to give birth to a new bitcoiner, right?

Peter McCormack: You minted a bitcoiner!  We won't be able to do it this trip, but next trip I should meet the little fella. 

Lane Rettig: Let's do it.

Peter McCormack: But good luck with it, and all the best to your -- you're not married, are you?

Lane Rettig: I am, yeah.

Peter McCormack: All the best to your wife.

Lane Rettig: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: And, yeah, peace out, brother.

Lane Rettig: Good luck to you, the show and the football club and everything else.  Always a pleasure.  Thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: Thank you, man.

Lane Rettig: Thank you.