WBD517 Audio Transcription
Bitcoin: The Perfect Machine with American HODL
Release date: Wednesday 22nd June
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with American HODL. 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.
In this interview with American HODL, we discuss escaping from social media echo chambers, stablecoins and altcoins, whether free speech has limits, Bitcoin’s current price activity, the need for reasoned thinkers in Bitcoin, and the protocol being a perfect machine.
“In the long run, Bitcoin will have been a story about when a bunch of imperfect humans met a perfect machine, and what happened - that’s the story of Bitcoin.”
— American HODL
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: What's up, man?
American HODL: "Hello, welcome to What Bitcoin Did".
Peter McCormack: Welcome.
American HODL: What's up, man? How's it going?
Peter McCormack: I'm good, man. How are you?
American HODL: Chilling, good. It was good to see you last night.
Peter McCormack: Good to see you last night.
American HODL: Thank you for dinner, by the way.
Peter McCormack: You're very welcome.
American HODL: It was very good.
Peter McCormack: It was a good meal.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Shame we didn't have Danny with us.
Danny Knowles: Next time.
Peter McCormack: Danny had FOMO.
American HODL: I know. I missed Danny. Danny's cool.
Peter McCormack: Danny is cool.
American HODL: The viewers don't get to see Danny, but he's a cool guy; very handsome, suave, sophisticated.
Danny Knowles: There's a camera right there looking right at me.
American HODL: I guess they do get to see him.
Peter McCormack: He's getting popular now, he's getting his own fans. Did you see the comment on the YouTube the other…?
Danny Knowles: No.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you did!
Danny Knowles: I honestly didn't. What did they say?
Peter McCormack: It was like, "I love it when Danny speaks".
Danny Knowles: That was my mum!
American HODL: Yeah, his voice is kind of soothing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: Who do you think sounds posher, HODL?
American HODL: You, for sure.
Danny Knowles: Thank you.
American HODL: Danny; absolutely. Peter sounds cockney, he sounds like fucking Dick Van Dyke.
Peter McCormack: I just think it's because you've got that northern monkey voice. They think it's exotic!
American HODL: Every time I hear Peter said just hear, "'ello, Guvnor".
Peter McCormack: "'Ello, sunshine, what'd you say?" So, what's going on, man, are you good?
American HODL: What's up, man? I'm just chilling.
Peter McCormack: What are we going to talk about?
American HODL: You tell me, you're the interviewer. Do you want to me to do your job for you?
Peter McCormack: Well, you're in recovery mode.
American HODL: I think you're more hungover than I am.
Peter McCormack: I didn't mean that! I'm not hungover today. I only had, what, four or five drinks?
American HODL: It was good.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, there's no hangover.
American HODL: It's good, man.
Peter McCormack: We will get one tonight though.
American HODL: Okay.
Peter McCormack: So, you're staying?
American HODL: Maybe.
Peter McCormack: Do you want me to phone your wife, have a word?
American HODL: You can try!
Peter McCormack: Say, "This very important event has come up and we need the Mr American HODL".
American HODL: I'm going to a honky-tonk with some nice British gentlemen.
Peter McCormack: Yes. You're going to sing American Pie and shit like that.
American HODL: The original conception of this episode was, we were going to talk about being off Twitter and the escape from the echo chamber and that kind of thing, and then you just got back on Twitter because you're addicted.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well look, there are a couple of reasons; firstly, despite my dramatic claim I'm leaving Twitter, you end up missing it.
American HODL: Oh, yeah, totally.
Peter McCormack: You end up missing it but also, actually, you end up missing the benefits from it because your account becomes stagnant, and so if your account becomes stagnant, that actually affects the popularity of the show. But also, I just felt like the people of Earth need me and I have to come; that's basically a line I stole from, what's that film? Road Trip.
American HODL: Oh, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Do you remember the bit, they're stoned on the porch and he says, "I think the people of Earth need me"? No, I just felt like a more moderate voice is sometimes required in the Bitcoin community, or a different voice, maybe a European voice or a British voice, to challenge some of the other ideas.
American HODL: So, you're there to do echo chamber bursts and that's why you came back?
Peter McCormack: A little bit, and just, well come on, you must miss it.
American HODL: Well, yeah, I'm fucking addicted to it. It's a serious addiction.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Who'd have thought that we'd all be addicted to these little computers that we keep in our pockets, do you know what I mean? When you have a big account on Twitter and you have a lot of engagement, followers and people are adding you, "Did you see what this guy's said about you? Oh, man, gloves are off, motherfucker", and I love conflict; that's part of my personality, so I just keep getting sucked in all the time.
So, finally, I just had to just be like, "You know what, this is not productive, this is not a good use of my time". It seemed like, to me, I was stuck in the same argument with the same five mentally ill people and it just never ended. It was --
Peter McCormack: DeaterBob.
American HODL: Yeah, well some people, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, DeaterBob, you just argue with DeaterBob all day, yeah. Look, it is what it is. People think I want conflict; I actually prefer resolution. I prefer discussing things and trying to find resolution, and I definitely try and write better tweets and less dickish tweets, but I just can't help myself sometimes.
American HODL: Well, people hate the enlightened centrist, and nowhere more so than on Twitter. Twitter is both sides fighting it out and if you come in and you're like, "Hey, guys, there are some good points over here and there are some good points over here, and there's a lot of nuance on these complicated issues", that's never going to over well on the internet.
Peter McCormack: Not in America. The rest of the world, we're okay with this.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's just in America. I think that Wait But Why guy put out this chart. You know the Wait But Why guy?
American HODL: Tim Urban, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. So it was a chart and it shows over time the overlap on issues, and now there's no overlap; it's like you're one side or the other. What people also do, they try and put you in one. So, if you support Ukraine, "Oh, you're okay, you're in that side", and if you are anti-gun you're in that side, or if you're pro-life, they want to put you in a side, but it's like, "Hold on, sometimes they don't all fit into a nice little box".
American HODL: Right. The Russia/Ukraine thing was interesting to me because it was just all propaganda on the pro-Russia side, and then it was just all propaganda on the pro-Ukrainian side, and looking at it, I couldn't figure out what was objectively real at all. So my solution to this was not to dig in further, my solution was just like, "I don't know, I'm not living in Russia or Ukraine, I don't give a fuck".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, propaganda's just a tool, it's just a weapon.
American HODL: Well, everything is propaganda, right. There's this idea of current thing-ism, so like, "Oh, I support the current thing". Do you know what I mean? The current thing is vaccines, or it's lockdowns, or it's Russia, or it's Black Lives Matter or it's trans right, or it's whatever, and you're being bombarded with it all the time. I think a lot of bitcoiners that have a bit more of a disagreeable attribute to their personality, take pride in basically being like anti-current thing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: But whether you're pro-current thing or your anti-current thing, you are still controlled by the current thing.
Peter McCormack: I think I'm nuanced about the current thing.
American HODL: You're nuanced about the current thing?
Peter McCormack: I like to think I am. I am! Give me a topic and I'll give you my nuance.
American HODL: Abortion.
Peter McCormack: Okay. You actually picked the one I'm less nuanced about. I don't think I've ever publicly said what I think about this, because I don't like abortion. I'm anti-abortion, but I'm not a Christian; I'm not a Republican.
American HODL: So, would you deny all abortions?
Peter McCormack: I think that's where you have to get into the nuance.
American HODL: Right.
Peter McCormack: There's like a scale, right? If the mother will die if this baby continues to grow inside her, I think you have a very valid reason to discuss termination of that pregnancy.
American HODL: That one's pretty obvious; that's an easy one.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: If somebody wants to have an abortion at week 16, are you okay with that?
Peter McCormack: I don't like it.
American HODL: Just an elective abortion.
Peter McCormack: I just don't like it.
American HODL: So you're pretty pro-life; that's what we would call you in America.
Peter McCormack: I am. Yeah, I'm pretty pro-life, but I'm a bit of a pussy on it that I don't like the idea of regulating it, but I just don't like it. My thoughts on it are I would rather effort went into helping people avoid that decision.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: If you had to put me on one side, I'm pro-life.
American HODL: Okay.
Peter McCormack: But it's one of those tricky ones because, once you say that, there's a whole bunch of people who just want to shout at you for it, and it's just like, "I'm sorry". There's a really good Louis CK sketch about it where he basically says, "Oh, these people campaigning outside of abortion clinics, they're so off-putting, they're so this", and he's like, "Well, they think you're murdering babies". Of course they think that, and other people don't. I think it is probably the toughest of all of the subjects.
American HODL: Yeah, it's pretty tricky. Listen, I could give you a nuanced take on abortion too; I won't because I don't care that deeply about that issue. But the point is, basically, okay listen, it's not black and white, it's not current thing or anti-current thing, there's a gradient there, and you're basically saying to me, "I fall usually in the middle of the gradient. I can see truth on both sides".
Peter McCormack: That's not exactly right. So, as somebody who does this job, I try my best to see both sides.
American HODL: Got it.
Peter McCormack: But I don't always fall in the middle. Sometimes, I'm -- On Russia/Ukraine, I'm very --
American HODL: Okay. Let's say then that you're -- I can tell you in a court room like, "This motherfucker…" --
Peter McCormack: No, no, but Russia/Ukraine --
American HODL: I'm like a litigator, I have to pull it out of you.
Peter McCormack: On Russia/Ukraine, I'm very much on the side of, Russia has invaded a sovereign country.
American HODL: Yeah, they're the aggressor in this situation.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you can pick up all this NATO shit; I don't care, they've invaded and they're firing missiles at people and killing them, I'm very clear on that. I'm very clear on I do not want guns in the UK like you have it here in the US. I can be very clear on some subjects, but that's my point, but I just want to understand both sides.
American HODL: So, this is still not my point. My point is basically this; it's like the thing, and your thoughts surrounding the thing, no matter where you fall in the gradient, you are being controlled because you are thinking about the thing. That's the point. It's like if I say to you, "Peter, rocky road is a trash ice cream, it's the worse ice cream on Earth", and then you say to me, "Well, yeah, but that's not true. I like pistachio and mint chocolate chip", or whatever, now you're thinking about ice cream, I own you, you're in my frame now. Do you know what I mean?
That's the B F Skinner behaviourism thing. That's the soup that we're all swimming in at all points. If you can control the thing's environment, you control the thing, and they can't tell you how to think. Nobody can tell you how to think, but people can certainly tell you what to think about. Why have I spent so much of life thinking about trans rights? I am not trans, I don't know anybody that's trans, I very rarely have ever met anybody that's trans, I don't care about trans issues, pro or con; I just don't care, It's not a part of my life. Why do I spend so much time thinking about it?
Peter McCormack: Sometimes maybe because you live in a democracy, and in a democracy, we figure this shit out as a collective.
American HODL: So, that's the point, it's because we live in a democracy, the powers that be have to keep control of the mob, and they use the current thing to keep control of the mob.
Peter McCormack: But is it control? Have we just not always had, there's issues to be talked about?
American HODL: Certainly, yeah. No, issues are real.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: But what you focus on basically becomes your reality, right, and so they can get you to, whoever, some mystical they. But there's a whole system of selective pressures that form to create the mainstream media apparatus, what Eric Weinstein calls the Distributed Idea of Suppression Complex, basically the Twitter algos, the Facebook algos, the Instagram algos. You're being manipulated at all points in time.
The only solution I've found, this is escape from the echo chamber thing, the only solution I've found is to just not be on any of those platforms, not inhale any media. I get all of my news word of mouth nowadays. I don't look at the news at all. Maybe I'll see some headlines and I'll be like, "Oh, they're trying to push this shit [or] trying to push that shit".
Peter McCormack: What the fuck do you do with your time?
American HODL: Just chill. I kid with my kids, I hang out, go to the gym.
Peter McCormack: Are you retired?
American HODL: Yeah, I'm retired, yeah. I don't have to stay up on things because I have some Bitcoin, at least 6.15 Bitcoin, and that allows me a nice comfortable retirement.
Peter McCormack: Did you show him?
Danny Knowles: No.
Peter McCormack: The password for the Wi-Fi here has 615 in it.
American HODL: Well, because we're in Nashville; the whole area code is 615.
Peter McCormack: Oh, is that what it is?
American HODL: Yeah. You're in the 615.
Peter McCormack: Right.
American HODL: Do you see what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Okay, kind of.
American HODL: Do you know what an area code is?
Peter McCormack: Well, yes, we call it a postal code.
American HODL: Oh, okay, got it, yeah. No, that's a zip code. An area code is the phone number.
Peter McCormack: Oh, okay. So, that's the bit in the brackets.
American HODL: America's so large geographically that we have to have all these different numbers.
Peter McCormack: No, we have those, and you want to know what's interesting, well it's not that interesting, it's really boring; but where I live in Bedford, it has the area code 01234. That's probably Bedford's greatest achievement, it got the sequential numbers from zero to four. Everyone else gets random shit. Milton Keynes, I think, it's 01908. We got 01234; it's Bedford's greatest achievement.
American HODL: That's one of those anecdotes that the person tells it to you and you go, "Oh, yeah", just to be nice, but in your head you're thinking, "What the fuck?! Who fucking cares?"
Peter McCormack: Well, there's more to this because it didn't used to have the one. Do you remember that?
Danny Knowles: No.
Peter McCormack: So, it actually used to be 0234, and when they announced they were adding the 1, everyone in Bedford got excited because they filled the gap. So, we went from 0234, which was like, "Eh", to 01234. There's probably a show title in that.
Danny Knowles: I think you're pushing it.
American HODL: Very interesting, this is very scintillating stuff.
Peter McCormack: I have to keep up-to-date on these things, because I have to talk about these things.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I have to talk about, sometimes, the latest thing or relevant thing.
American HODL: Of course, yeah, that's your job. You're part of the media apparatus. You're one of the they/thems. They come to you with a briefcase full of money and they tell you what your narrative is, right? I'm just fucking around.
Peter McCormack: I go with exactly what I want to talk about. Okay, I've got some things I want to talk to you about.
American HODL: Yeah, hit me.
Peter McCormack: I put a couple of threads out on Twitter recently, one this week with regard to digital dollars.
American HODL: CBDCs or stablecoins?
Peter McCormack: Stablecoins, not the algos, but whatever, forget about them. A lot of people who are bitcoiners rightly don't like shitcoins.
American HODL: Yeah, of course.
Peter McCormack: Some people are like, "I don't care because anyone can create money as long as you have a free choice to use it", but whatever. They can be critical of shitcoins, but we have got to this place whereby there is a real need for digital dollars in the world. Things like Tether have become very important to people in Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, whatever. At the moment, they perform best on some of these shitcoin platforms.
How do we square that circle as pro-freedom, pro-human people who want the best? We want people in dire economic situations to have the best access to money as possible, knowing full well that Bitcoin is not the right tool day-to-day for some people just because of the volatility. So, there is an actual reason to be pro-stablecoins. So, how do we square that circle with these platforms? It's been challenging me, and I've seen some people go back and go, "No, they're shitcoins, forget them. You're promoting shitcoins", and I'm like, "I guess I am, but at the same time, it's only because I spoke to Gladstein". He's like, "No, these digital dollars are super-important in these jurisdictions".
American HODL: Yeah, in the developing world.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. How do we square that circle?
American HODL: So, for me, it's like I just don't care about stablecoins. Do you know what I mean? I never have. You can't invest in stablecoins.
Peter McCormack: You can. If you own a shit currency like, I don't know, the Argentinian peso, you can invest in stablecoins.
American HODL: True. You can store a value in stablecoins.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Stablecoins are number go down coins by default, because they're trying to keep stable value with the US dollar, which is inflating my purchasing power. So, they're not actually stable, they're number go down, right?
Peter McCormack: They're number go down depending on where you are. On a long-term basis, always against Bitcoin, but on a short-term basis --
American HODL: Yeah, but it might be better than your local currency, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It might be better than your local currency. It might also be better than Bitcoin in certain timeframes of bear markets.
American HODL: I also just think, I don't know why there's so much talk about stablecoins to me because they just seem like a temporary stopgap measure in between here and a fully digital dollar, like a CBDC. So it's like basically, the algorithmic ones don't work, will never work, are stupid or pointless. We obviously saw the LUNA collapse. I don't know why people were taken by surprise because of it. I kept hearing this thing about, "It was a top-ten cryptocurrency. It was a blue-chip cryptocurrency". First of all, there's no such thing as a blue-chip cryptocurrency. These don't have returns.
Terra LUNA had a 20% return, and you have to realise that rats die in the trap because they don't understand why the cheese is free, and you just became the fucking rat because you didn't understand why the cheese was free. Do you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: So, it's like that concept is an outright scam and I think anybody peddling those, they're either a moron or they're a liar, and in either case it's not great. Then you have the fully-regulated whatever the Jeremy Allaires of the world are doing. I think there's some interesting stuff there, but they basically just are like big fintechs to me and I just don't care about it.
I think if people in the Third World, the developing world, want to use stablecoins because it makes sense for them, absolutely; who am I to tell them? These people who are living on $3 to $5 a day, who am I to tell them what to do with their wealth? I'm nobody to tell them what to do with that, right. It would be nice if some of this was attached to Bitcoin, I suppose, but then again you don't really need it to be. I don't know, the whole phenomenon is kind of pointless in my opinion, but then again I'm not in the developed world.
Peter McCormack: Well, when it's a CBDC, we don't know what controls will exist over who can access it, where they can access it. I think you get a little bit more freedom with Tether on TRON than you might get from a Fed-issued CBDC who might say, "Well, do you know what, we're not going to let those people in. Egypt use it".
American HODL: Yeah. Well ultimately, the US government is not going to allow people to algorithmically, or whatever, back to the dollar without pretty hefty regulations, and so they're going to bring the entire stablecoin industry to heel and it'll be ultra-regulated, etc.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. All right, well, you just don't give a shit about that then!
American HODL: Well, no. Why do you care about it?
Peter McCormack: Because I make a show and I'm trying to understand the space, I'm trying to understand how people use currency in different locations. I'm not making a show for people in America to buy Bitcoin and hodl for four years and buy a car. I'm making it for anyone anywhere who can benefit from it. But in doing that, you have to understand the money, and then when you understand the money, you understand the tools that people use, and one of the tools is these digital dollars.
I have seen some criticism of it. It's like, "No, we should just be promoting Bitcoin to these people", and it's just like, "Well, hold on a second. This person might live on $20 a week and their cost of living is more than that. They have no ability to save. They certainly don't want to put it in something that might crash in a couple of days by 20%", which can happen, we know.
So, I think it's giving, sometimes, bad advice. Basically, for most people, there is a world of Bitcoin and dollars, which is good advice and we should pair them together and tell people, give advice on what should be used for what, and we have to be empathetic to their local challenges, geographic, economic challenges; it's not everyone should just buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't going to solve short-term issues. I think Bitcoin at a nation level can solve long-term macro issues, okay, but it doesn't solve short‑term micro issues for the individual if the timing is wrong, and I think there's certainly risk to that, and I think that needs wrapping into the education.
American HODL: Yeah. Bitcoin has a long evolutionary arc and it's going through this sort of order or operations where it's store of value first, medium of exchange and then, eventually, widespread unit of account, and that's a 50-year process. So in the interim, we're doing basically every bad idea at full tilt, and when I say "we" I mean a bunch of people with loose morals are doing it, like the Do Kwons of the world. So if you're going to go out there and say, "Yes, everybody should be using stablecoins", a lot of people looked the Terra LUNA thing and they were like, "This is a top-ten stablecoin, whatever, and how can I lose? They're giving me a great return", and people don't understand.
Peter McCormack: I've not told anyone to buy Terra LUNA.
American HODL: No, I'm not saying you have, but I'm saying if that is the case, then what happens when they get fully rug pulled? There's so much trust involved in a stablecoin. It's so archaic that we're trusting humans to set the monetary policy of anything. We have a programmatic monetary policy now.
I feel like we have the fucking internal combustion engine and then watching people try and pull cars with horses still, and they think it's a great idea, they think they've made an innovation. This is what the shitcoiners will tell you. They'll be like, "What about innovation? You hate innovation?" No, it's like, "I love innovation".
Peter McCormack: "You're not open-minded".
American HODL: Yeah, they'll say, "You're not open-minded". No, I fucking love innovation, okay, but most evolutionary progress is a bunch of maladaptations until you find a successful adaptation. When you have the successful adaption, it carries forward. That's the zero to one moment. Most of these shitcoin adaptations or innovations are 1:n; they're just different shitty versions of things we already have that personally enrich the founders. Who has all the Bitcoin from Terra LUNA? Somebody has it.
Peter McCormack: Well, they sold it.
American HODL: They didn't sell it. I don't believe that shit.
Peter McCormack: They did sell. No, I think you can track it.
American HODL: Can you?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Didn't it all go onto Binance?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'm pretty sure they sold it.
American HODL: If it went into Binance that means CZ has it, because he was a backer from fucking Terra LUNA, do you know what I mean? Somebody has it; that's the point.
Peter McCormack: Was it 80,000 it swallowed?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
American HODL: It didn't swallow it; it's in CZ's pocket!
Peter McCormack: Well, it went back into the market, but yeah. Look, I barely paid attention to Terra LUNA. It literally came on my radar when people said they were buying $10 billion of Bitcoin and the whole thing sounded shady, but I do think you can grade them. I think Circle, in some ways, is probably the one you can trust the most, because I think that's fully-backed by US treasuries, which isn't perfect but at least it tracks.
American HODL: Yeah, they're going to be hyper regulated. That's the path forward for them, especially after this Terra collapse. It gives treasury and all the fintech regulators all the ammo they need to come after the stablecoin industry.
Peter McCormack: I think it won't just be stablecoins though, I think it's everything.
American HODL: Oh, they're coming for us too, yeah. They're coming for Bitcoin, for sure.
Peter McCormack: Not in the same way.
American HODL: They're coming for the cryptos, yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Peter McCormack: I think they're coming for the cryptos; I think Bitcoin and maybe ETH.
American HODL: What they're going to do to Bitcoin is they're going to hit us. There's an EPA-sponsored attack that's imminent, which was obvious the minute the Biden Admin commissioned the EPA to do a study. What do you think the EPA's going to find out?
Peter McCormack: What is the EPA?
American HODL: The Environmental Protection Agency.
Peter McCormack: All right. Yeah.
American HODL: What do you think the EPA's going to find out? Do you think they're going to find out that Bitcoin's fucking awesome, bro, you should fucking go all in? No, they're going to find out that Bitcoin is a waste, it uses too much energy, these people need carbon credits, they're terrible people, some of them want to wear bear fur coats and they're all racist or something, do you know what I mean? That's the going to be the narrative.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and this is why I'm always fearful of Bitcoin only being picked up by the Republican side. I think if anything, it's more important to be now pushing it to some people on the Democratic side.
American HODL: Listen, I would love to see Bitcoin being more bipartisan but the truth is that it's not, and it hasn't been going that way. The Ethereum side tends to be heavily left, and the Bitcoin side tends to be heavily right. Bitcoin Twitter is a more right-leaning echo chamber, whereas Ethereum Twitter is a more left-leaning echo chamber.
Peter McCormack: This is fucking why Americans are so annoying, that you've just literally taken these two coins and pitched them against each other.
American HODL: I think that was Joe Lubin's chief marketing innovation with Ethereum, it was like, "Let's pitch this coin to the lefties", do you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Once they complete the merge, they're going to come full attack; you know that.
American HODL: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Peter McCormack: Full attack.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's going to be painful and annoying.
American HODL: All the proof of work stuff is a shitcoin-sponsored attack on Bitcoin, and it's obvious to anybody who's paying attention. Proof of stake is better for them. It's better from an incentive perspective. It allows them to do some of the things they want to do with it, we don't like but they like, and they have powerful interests behind them and they're trying to force a change on the code on us.
Peter McCormack: That was the Ripple guy, wasn't it? Changed the code.
American HODL: Yeah, he sponsored the Greenpeace attack. You can't just change Bitcoin's code; that's not how it works. There's nobody we're going to call on the phone and be like, "Hey, man. It turns out Congress wants us to do proof of stake". That's never happening.
Peter McCormack: It's never happening.
American HODL: So, what they'll do is they'll hit North American Bitcoin miners with taxes, regulations, all sorts of restrictions, carbon credits, etc.
Peter McCormack: And the hash rate will move.
American HODL: Probably, yeah, which is not long-term bad for Bitcoin but it is long-term bad for North American Bitcoin mining. America just keeps shooting itself in the foot over and over again. We can't stop ourselves from doing stupid things nowadays. We're Britain pre-World War I.
Peter McCormack: Fuck off, man! All right, I want to go through some of the things you wanted to talk about, especially collectivism versus individualism.
American HODL: Oh yeah, let's talk about that.
Peter McCormack: Is there true individualism?
American HODL: I believe so, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Are you talking about here at state level?
American HODL: Well, I'll give this up on the argument; I don't think most people are capable of thinking for themselves or thinking from first principles. I think that's a very small percentage of the population that can do that, maybe it's like, I don't know, say 3% to 5% max. Most other people are just regurgitating things that the television has told them, or their favourite Twitter influencer has told them, or their best friend, or whatever.
So, some of the individual first collectivist ideas, like the post-modernists would basically say that, "No, you're just a mix of your intersectional life and you are your tribe and your skin colour, whether you're able-bodied or not, whether you're fat or not, whether you're handsome or not, whatever"; that's what they would say. You're going to project on the world somebody who is all those things. I think that's bullshit, although I do think that's largely true, and most people do act like that. You meet a guy from Alabama who drives a big old truck, probably he's going to be in favour of Donald Trump, you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Probably, I would guess so.
American HODL: 97% of the time.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: But in the 3% of individualists who can think from first principles and do their own analysis, we get all of our innovation, all of our amazing ideas. Those are the people that drive the world forward. So, the individual in a society has to be primary. The group can never outweigh the individual, the individual comes first. Group dynamics are important and humans have a tendency to collectivise, obviously, but the individual is primary because the individual is what drives society forward.
If we were all just tribal dynamics, we would have killed each other off long ago, but there had been enough individuals willing to stand up and say basically, "No more", or, "We're not going to do things this way anymore. We have a new way of doing things. Here's the idea". Usually what happens, usually, they kill that person, but then later they go, "You know that guy we killed? That guy had some good fucking ideas", you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: China might disagree with you at the moment.
American HODL: In terms of…?
Peter McCormack: Well, the individual.
American HODL: Well, China prioritises the collective, but China is not good at innovating. China just steals from America largely.
Peter McCormack: Do we know every single idea has been stolen?
American HODL: China is not good at innovating.
Peter McCormack: I know China does steal, but they steal as a collectivist group. They're in a pretty strong position with their space race, they're in a pretty strong position with their IT infrastructure.
American HODL: Has China ever been to the Moon? Did China invent the semiconductor?
Peter McCormack: Has America ever been to the Moon?
American HODL: Did China invent the aeroplane?
Peter McCormack: No, it's playing catch-up. No, I fully agree it's playing catch-up.
American HODL: They're never going to be able to do it because they don't have a free speech culture, they don't prioritise the individual in their society, they're full-on collectivists, they crush individuals who dissent; and dissent is the key to innovation.
Peter McCormack: I agree with everything you're saying here. All I'm saying is, right now, certain parts of China, well, China itself appears to be a strong position in certain areas.
American HODL: Sure. they appear to be.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. They've grown a strong military, they have a strong space programme, they have strong relations with lots of weak countries who are struggling financially. I'm not saying I support it, because some of the idiots listening might think I support this. I'm just recognising it.
American HODL: Yeah. So, we prop up China on the back of the American dollar. Globalism is our export. We export dollars and, without us, China doesn't exist. So, America's fully supportive --
Peter McCormack: I think that's quite a bold statement now.
American HODL: No, it's true, it's true though.
Peter McCormack: How do you mean?
American HODL: Almost everything that's cute -- by the way, this is a very cute Airbnb.
Peter McCormack: Thank you.
American HODL: Everything in this Airbnb was manufactured in China, most of it, and it was because our dollar is our chief export. We are propping them up. If we decide to rehome the manufacturing base here in America or put it in Mexico or whatever, China's going to be greatly diminished on the world stage.
Peter McCormack: How much of China's exports are to the US?
American HODL: I don't know the figure off the top of my head, but I would bet --
Peter McCormack: Danny's looking.
American HODL: All right, I'll take a guess; 30% I'll say.
Peter McCormack: I think they would find a way of managing that decline, and it wouldn't be an instant switch off the tap because --
American HODL: Yeah, I think I'm short China in general. I'm bullish America long term, because if you look at America right now, it's fucking chaos, pure chaos, but we're really good at finding our way through the chaos. The American plan is to have no plan, and thus far we've been doing pretty good!
Peter McCormack: Have you got it?
Danny Knowles: I think it's about 17%, but I'm not 100% sure.
American HODL: 17%. Okay.
Peter McCormack: They can ride that out.
American HODL: Sure, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Like I say, I'm no financial --
American HODL: How long could they ride it? See, then you get into the eurodollar system and it's like how long could they ride it out without us propping up the eurodollar system?
Peter McCormack: I don't know.
American HODL: Yeah, I don't know. These are complicated questions.
Peter McCormack: My point is --
American HODL: Your point is that they are collectivists and they are doing great.
Peter McCormack: They're doing great at the moment.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Maybe they stole all their ideas. Maybe their innovation is control.
American HODL: Yeah. Well, I think China and America's an interesting divide, because it's in the Peter Thiel framework of, AI is a fundamentally communist technology and Bitcoin is a fundamentally libertarian technology. Chinese-style AI eastern communism, this is going to the 21st century versus hopefully, if we get it right here in the America, libertarian free market bottom-up style economics. I think the bottom-up will always out-compete because top-down systems can't account for unknown unknowns, or what Taleb would call black swan.
Peter McCormack: Full libertarian, because Bitcoin becomes the standard; or libertarian influence within a framework of left/right democracy?
American HODL: Libertarian-ish. We're never going to be full libertarian, never.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.
American HODL: America is supposed to have a vibrant free market and be a vibrant free market capitalist system, and that's where the libertarianism is.
Peter McCormack: Historically.
American HODL: Historically, yeah, and then Bitcoin will help set that right a little more. There's a pretty significant public/private partnership between the state and large corporations at the moment, because to some degree, the state is the biggest customer of every corporation on Earth, which is ass-backwards, and that's why we're seeing a lot of these weird --
Why did every business go full COVID restriction? Because the state told them to. You would have assumed there would have been some high degree of businesses who were like, "You know, fuck the state". I don't think Bass Pro shops' customers are particularly in love with COVID restrictions.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think some did, but it tended to be the smaller businesses within red states who were a little bit more pushback.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You saw stuff like gyms trying to stay open.
American HODL: But anybody who was a large national conglomerate basically bent the knee and did what they were told, and it's because we have these bastardised incentives. It's almost like the money is broken or something!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah. Well, Elon Musk did kind of challenge in a different way. He did say, "Fuck the state", all right at a state level to California, not to do with COVID, but if anything, he is one person who is doing that at the moment. It's like, "Get back to fucking work, work in the office, fuck California". With Twitter, he's just come out, I don't know if he's going to buy it anymore; but he's just been straight and based with all the shit that's wrong with it.
American HODL: Yeah, no, totally.
Peter McCormack: It's a breath of fresh air.
American HODL: I was obviously a year ago, my opinion on Elon was dogshit because he was annoying the fuck out of me, and now I have a higher opinion of him at this point in time. We'll see what he does with it, but I think he's the epitome of, "What's the point in having 'Fuck you' money if you never said, 'Fuck you'". He's basically saying, "Fuck you", to everybody at the moment, and they're going to kill him for it or he's going to make it out alive; we'll see. It's just the greatest show on Earth right now!
Peter McCormack: Yeah. The Twitter thing's gone quiet. I wonder if he's just hoping it goes away.
American HODL: Well, his net worth is down significantly because of the imminent recession, the macro environment, so maybe he's like, "Oh, I don't have $43 billion anymore".
Peter McCormack: Well, it wasn't really his money, was it?
American HODL: He pieced it together, yeah.
Peter McCormack: You saw the cap table.
American HODL: Right, but back to the point about the individual versus the collective, Elon is an individual who is taking a stand for free speech. Collectivists don't like free speech because they don't even think it can exist. They think that everybody is just a make-up of their environmental factors, their cultural factors, their genetic factors, their race, their sex, and this, etc.
Peter McCormack: Hold on. I think when you say something like that you have to define what do you mean by collectivist and then you have to be clear on what you mean by, "They don't like free speech". What do you mean by collectivist?
American HODL: The left hates free speech, so they want to censor it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I just disagree that everyone on the left hates free speech. I know some people might, but I don't think everyone --
American HODL: Those people get fucking trampled underfoot. So, it's not like their opinion is very prominent.
Peter McCormack: When we talk about free speech, what are the limits of free speech?
American HODL: There are no limits to free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there are.
American HODL: There's not. You can yell, "Fire", in a crowded theatre, for sure.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you can't dox someone, there are laws against certain things.
American HODL: You can dox people, there are no laws against that in America.
Peter McCormack: Well, there might be platform rules. It's considered you shouldn't dox people.
American HODL: There are terms and conditions, sure.
Peter McCormack: You can't threaten violence.
American HODL: You can threaten violence, yeah. That's just a normal part of speech.
Peter McCormack: So, you're saying there is no limitation under US laws?
American HODL: There are no limitations.
Peter McCormack: I thought there were certain things you can't say because you incite violence.
American HODL: Well, there are precedents in court. Let's say, if I was to make a specific threat against somebody, it would have to be, "Yo, hey, Peter McCormack, I'm going to come to your house at 6.00pm on Tuesday, the 9th, and I'm going to stab you with an ice pick". I can't say that to you because that's a very credible threat. But if you said something I didn't like, I could say, "Dude, fuck you. I'll fucking kill you, dude". I could say that.
Peter McCormack: I think you can't incite violence. You can't incite others to violence.
American HODL: These are all very mushy, grey areas, and you've got to take it to court and see what actually happened. Do you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and within the framework of the law, you can't defame people.
American HODL: You can.
Peter McCormack: You can, but you can face the law.
American HODL: See, we have very different rules here. Your case has brought up a lot of issues.
Peter McCormack: Well, I'm thinking more about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. Should she have had First Amendment protection?
American HODL: So, those were very, very specific claims that she made against Depp, and then she was shown to have basically lied in a court room and he was awarded damages for that. If Amber Heard had written an article that was like, "Johnny Depp is a piece of shit husband and I hate his guts", etc, that's not defamation. Defamation has to be like I'm saying that you were doing something that you were actually not doing and it's provable.
Peter McCormack: Have you found anything?
Danny Knowles: Here you go.
American HODL: What have you got?
Peter McCormack: "Free speech exceptions: incitement to suicide, false statements of fact, counterfeit currency". Counterfeit currency? That's an interesting one.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, currency is considered speech?
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: "Obscenity, child pornography, fighting words". Click on "fighting words", Danny. "I'm going to fuck you up". "The speech is unprotected if it constitutes fighting words. Fighting words, as defined by the court, is speech that tends to cite an immediate breach of peace, provoking a fight, so long as it's personally abusive, which when addressed to the ordinary citizen is, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction". So, there are some limitations.
American HODL: But in almost all of these instances, something after happened. So there was a cause and effect there, right. But if I said fighting words to you but then nothing happened, then what are you going to get me on?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I'm saying is there are precedents set here that there isn't ultimate free speech. There are limitations which, for example, are platform --
American HODL: To clarify my point, there should be ultimate free speech. I am a full-on free speech absolutist.
Peter McCormack: You're a free speech absolutist. Okay, yeah.
American HODL: In court, there are specific things that have been determined couth or uncouth under the First Amendment.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I don't want to do an interview on couth and uncouth, but I personally accept that we live in a society, and society has rules and order. I don't like the incitement to violence. I think you should not be inciting violence against people. I think it's dangerous to be inciting violence. It's like you go along these set of rules. Should stabbing someone be illegal and should you be prosecuted for that? Yes, absolutely. Well, should we avoid situations that people can just go online and say, "So and so lives at this address. Fuck it, let's go and burn down their house". That kind of stuff is dangerous and it happens.
American HODL: But you say that and then somebody goes and does it and burns down the house, yeah, you have liability there.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.
American HODL: But if you say that and then nothing happens then you don't have any liability.
Peter McCormack: But I think trying to prevent that is not a bad thing, removing the incitement of violence.
American HODL: I think in general that engaging in violent speech is not -- we have this weird black and white thinking where's it's basically like -- we used to have cultural norms of decency and decorum. There were things that were not necessarily illegal to do but we just didn't do because --
Peter McCormack: But we didn't have Twitter!
American HODL: Right, that's part of it too.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: There are lot of things that people will not say in person because I'm right here, I have a reach, I could punch you in the fucking face; but if you said it to me on Twitter, I've gone, "I can't do anything to this guy".
Peter McCormack: So, I just shout back at them.
American HODL: It's the keyboard warrior thing or whatever, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: But what I'm saying is not everything needs to be codified into law or into terms and conditions. We need to have a culture that just says, "Listen, hey, don't incite violence. Don't do that".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there are a lot of very stupid people out there who can be convinced to do things.
American HODL: Well, yeah. I think that was during 2020, you had the summer of riots and then you had the 6 January incident. I think in both cases, those were very stupid mentally ill people who were incited to do things.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: If I say something and somebody does something, I'm responsible just because I said something?
Peter McCormack: But it depends how you do it. If you put some false claim, I don't know, you say… So in the UK, Danny might able to find it, there was a guy who was accused of being a paedophile and he wasn't, and I think a bunch of people went round and murdered him.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I mean, that's dangerous.
American HODL: That's totally dangerous, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think, in the UK, we have fucking terrible free speech laws, obviously I think that. We have hate-speech laws, we have people who can be arrested and put in prison for saying words online that are considered hate speech, and I think that's gone too far.
American HODL: Of course. I think, when it comes to free speech, the individual has to have the ability to dissent, so we should always err on the side of caution when trying to restrict an individual's free speech.
Peter McCormack: I agree.
American HODL: Sometimes people go too far, and we all know what that looks like and we all know what it is, and we all know when somebody needs to be held to account for it, but that's not most instances. Most instances, people are just talking shit.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, maybe. I don't know, man.
Danny Knowles: Then there's a sort of form of social karma. Like the guy who said that thing to your sister on Twitter, he got social karma because people held him to account for what he said, because it was not acceptable. I don't need a law to say that's wrong. People took it into their own hands to punish him for his actions.
Peter McCormack: I wish that hadn't happened. That's an interesting -- this guy tweeted at my sister.
American HODL: I saw that, yeah.
Peter McCormack: But people listening that, "Everyone is glad that she's dead", posting a picture of my mum, and then people found his employer and told them what happened and he lost his job. Actually, I didn't want that, I didn't think he should have lost his job for it. I think he should have just fucking apologised, not doubled-down. But you're right, there is a social karma, and maybe that's better.
American HODL: I don't know, man. I hate the fucking cancel culture shit, I hate it. Yeah, that guy said a shitty thing to you and whatever, but that guy probably has a shitty life.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he did. Well, I know where he was working when he lost his job, so I was like, "You definitely have a shitty life and you're a shitty person and life sucks. You've had a crap life and your way of dealing with that is to go online and shout the most abusive things you can at people and really you should just be in therapy and that would be healthy for you".
American HODL: Yeah. Well, this also goes to this point of people are just straight-up fucking unwell. People are unwell mentally, and COVID and the lockdowns and the bullshit and the social strife, it did not make things better; it made things worse. I don't know, I just felt it when I was at the airport the other day. It just feels like people are ready to snap on each other at any second.
Peter McCormack: Again, feels a little bit more so here.
American HODL: Yeah. Well, America, we do everything more in every way.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's bigger, better.
American HODL: Bigger, better, yeah.
Peter McCormack: But it is happening back home, certainly happening back home, but again like I said to you, I was listening to the Jonathan Haidt interview with Lex Fridman, "Today's conversation with Jonathan Haidt". Jonathan Haidt was saying he did his studies when he was writing The Righteous Mind, went back to 2013/14, and there's a complete correlation between incidents of self-harm, suicide, anxiety and panic attacks with the arrival of social media. The social media's not the problem.
American HODL: Especially not pre-teen girls.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, pre-teen girls, because pre-teen girls go on Instagram and boys are playing Fortnite.
American HODL: Girls do relational damage to each other whereas do physical damage to each other. When we were kids, you'd punch your buddy or your mate, you'd punch them and then the next day you're friends again, right, or you maybe weren't, but whatever. But you fought it out.
Girls do relational violence against each other. So in some sense, giving every pre-teen girl a smartphone is like giving every pre-teen boy a fucking Uzi, do you know what I mean? It's not good because they're at home being like, "Oh, look at Becky. Oh my god, you're fat. You're a fat bitch. Fuck you", etc. It's also like, when we were kids, if you didn't get invited to the party, whatever, you didn't see it and hear about it, you didn't know about.
Peter McCormack: You see it, it's in your face.
American HODL: Now you fucking see it. It's like not only did you not get invited but we're showing you how much you're missing out on. It's tough, man, it's tough to be a kid now.
Peter McCormack: But he was saying also they just do different things. Girls go on Instagram and look at pictures; boys play games and yell at each other. So, they're doing different things, but he was just saying that it's not social media that is inherently the problem. Being connected is a good thing. It is the algorithms and the rewards via the likes and the retweets and the pressures that come with it.
American HODL: Totally.
Peter McCormack: The incitement to argue, the incitement to live in an echo chamber, something we should talk about because they exist, and I don't like them.
American HODL: Oh yeah. Listen, everything is an echo chamber nowadays. The people who tell you they're not in an echo chamber, they're the deepest in the echo chamber. Every single thing in society has been turned into a lifestyle. You've got people who are so into the new Star Wars movies that it's their entire existence, and they're in the Star Wars echo chamber. It goes from that to hardcore communism to hardcore far-right fascism.
Peter McCormack: How is communism making a comeback?
American HODL: I don't know but I fucking hate it. I swear to God, I was wandering around trendy Nashville getting a cold brew coffee and shit, and I swear if you polled the majority of the young beautiful-looking people I was around, they would all be like, "Oh yeah, I'm down with capitalism, for sure". It's now a very common thing to say.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. You can understand why the different messages that -- I think some people may be a little bit down on capitalism because they see it through a different lens. When you're young, you're being given messages within perhaps a more left environment, less free-thinking where billionaires have been demonised, you can't get on the housing ladder. There's a group of things that are making you think, "You know, this capitalism thing, it's just a bit unfair". I think that's possibly why.
American HODL: Well, I think, because of the fiat system and the monetary stimulus and the amount of increasing monetary stimulus needed, it's like the floor used to be this, and now the floor is like this, and only people who are really adept can make that climb now. It's a really difficult climb. It's a very steep slope, okay.
Peter McCormack: If you've got children, you're preparing now to try and get them on the housing ladder at some point. It's going to be nigh-on impossible for my children to get on the housing ladder.
American HODL: I already give my kids Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: I don't give my kids Bitcoin. Fuck that.
American HODL: Oh, I do. You just keep it in a --
Peter McCormack: You're always giving it away. You're always giving it to me!
American HODL: You're welcome. I provided one Bitcoin for your legal defence against Craig Wright.
Peter McCormack: Anyway, yeah, we need another bet.
American HODL: Yeah, we should.
Peter McCormack: What is there to bet on?
Danny Knowles: Isn't it going to be on a Bedford game?
Peter McCormack: I think it's a good one. I think betting on whether Bedford wins their division. Danny, be the arbiter of whether this is a good bet. I think we go up, whether we win or not. It's tough coming top.
American HODL: To have to take the pro-Bedford side, obviously.
Peter McCormack: Of course.
American HODL: Of course.
Peter McCormack: You can have all the other 19 places. I take that one.
American HODL: See, the thing that sucks about that bet though is you're in control of the outcome of that bet.
Peter McCormack: Not really; the manager is.
American HODL: But you're the team owner so you know what I mean.
Danny Knowles: Are you saying automatic promotion or play-offs?
Peter McCormack: Automatic. We've got to win the league.
Danny Knowles: It's not a guaranteed thing.
Peter McCormack: No.
American HODL: Danny, what do you think are the chances?
Peter McCormack: What do you think the odds are on that?
Danny Knowles: I probably wouldn't bet against it.
Peter McCormack: You wouldn't bet against it?
American HODL: So you have a good shot to do it.
Peter McCormack: Well, I'm not giving you a cut! I think we've got a good shot, but I think it's going to be between -- There's us, there's Eaton Socon, there's Ampthill, there's Northampton Sileby. There are some good teams in there. Last year, I threw money at the team, I bought them, we were 7th. At the end of the season, we finished 7th, and our wage bill went from zero to, I probably shouldn't, well it was public, it's about £2,000 a week, okay, and it made zero difference. So you cannot just buy success.
American HODL: Yeah, unless you're Man U or whatever, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What do you think the odds are? If I was betting, I actually felt 50/50 I think we'd go up, but I think it's 50/50 whether we win.
Danny Knowles: You think it's 50/50?
Peter McCormack: I think it's genuine 50/50.
Danny Knowles: I think it'll be leaning in your favour slightly.
Peter McCormack: Okay, all right.
American HODL: I don't know. I don't like that one.
Danny Knowles: I think a bet on a single game's more interesting.
American HODL: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: And quicker.
American HODL: You've got to pick your toughest competition and then go for that game.
Peter McCormack: That'll be Eaton Socon away, our match is going to be. I'm trying to think if there's any other election stuff. There's the World Cup.
American HODL: We could just do like the fucking Super Bowl or something like that. We should just go, we'll just go to the Super Bowl.
Peter McCormack: Well, we've got the World Cup.
Danny Knowles: The NBA Finals are this week, aren't they?
Peter McCormack: Isn't England in the same group as the USA? No, USA's in a group with Iran, Ukraine --
Danny Knowles: Yeah, it's like the group of death.
Peter McCormack: The actual group of death!
American HODL: I don't know anything about football, nothing.
Peter McCormack: We will come up with the bet. We should talk about Bitcoin as well.
American HODL: Yeah, I know. We should.
Peter McCormack: We've not really been talking about Bitcoin. How do you feel Bitcoin's going?
American HODL: Well, it was better when I was richer. Remember that? Remember when were richer? That was good.
Peter McCormack: I don't know, I am richer because you keep giving me Bitcoin! The price doesn't bother me.
American HODL: You must be really poor if that's doubling your net worth!
Peter McCormack: Honestly, I'm immune to the price pretty much, long term.
American HODL: Long term, yeah, of course. How many times have we gone through this?
Peter McCormack: I think we're meant to feel scared right now.
American HODL: Yes, always.
Peter McCormack: That's what we're meant to feel, and you're meant to feel like, "Shit, I should probably sell some because it might go down", and then it rallies.
American HODL: Yeah. There's a classic expression on Wall Street; "Wear then out, scare them out". They know that retail can't play the same game the big whales can play, so they try and just put the pain on you as much as you can and, if you're a retail investor, you have to just suck it up and get through it. There's a Munger quote that's basically like, "If you can't go down 50% without making a big fuss about it, you're not well adapted to long-term investing success basically". So, it's if you're whining on Twitter about your net worth the entire time you're probably not going to make it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I think we've decoupled from the cycle, the four-year cycle. That's what I think.
American HODL: I think that's dead.
Peter McCormack: I think, narrative-wise, people are going to start pushing it in about a year and they're going to see --
American HODL: Oh, people have all sorts of justifications for it. It's like, "Oh, it's a lengthening cycle. It's a double cycle. It's a triple cycle", whatever.
Peter McCormack: "It's a super cycle".
American HODL: Yeah, a super cycle. I think it's all nonsense. I used to believe in it pretty heavily, and, as bitcoiners, we're extremely myopic. We have no fucking idea what's going on in the broader macro context, other than there's increasing monetary stimulus, and we all sort of lean on that. But we don't really understand the macro headwinds or how the big capital allocators are thinking about the markets, and we do our best to try and understand it. But now that we're trailing our asset class, not now, but we were, we're getting pushed around in the macro waters. We live in the ocean now. We're going from the tide pool to the fucking ocean and things are different in the ocean.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think that, if that cycle's decoupled, I don't actually know what it means, because it can mean we could bounce around in a range for years.
American HODL: Yeah. We have been in the same range since December 2020.
Peter McCormack: I know. That's kind of mad when you think about it.
American HODL: It's now June 2022, so we haven't gone out of that range the entire time.
Peter McCormack: 18 months, yeah. It's kind of weird when you think about it, because you look at the price, you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm still at $30,000, that's kind of cool", and I was like, "Yeah, we were there 18 months ago". It was like, "Really?"
American HODL: I know, it's annoying.
Peter McCormack: It's shit.
American HODL: What are we at, $28,000 right now? So, if you bought the top in 2017, you're up like 30% or something, It's not very good. It's five years for 30%!
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Hopefully you didn't buy at the top.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I didn't sell at the top. Some people did.
American HODL: No, none of us ever sell at the top.
Peter McCormack: It could be worse, you could have bought at $69,000.
American HODL: I always write it down. I always tell myself I'm not going to get euphoric, and then every bull cycle I get super fucking euphoric.
Peter McCormack: "We're going to $300,000! I'm going to bet half a Bitcoin on this".
American HODL: Exactly. Yeah, totally. I just can't help myself, man, and I'm never to apologise for being bullish on Bitcoin. You can't be too bullish on Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. But I do feel like everything is changing in Bitcoin now because of this, and that's probably a good thing. Having those predictable cycles, yeah, maybe it's great and maybe it's fine and I wish I'd had one more, just one, just one more.
American HODL: We all wish that, because we all wanted to dump at the top and then rebuy at the bottom, of course.
Peter McCormack: As an individual, that's what I wanted.
American HODL: Everybody wants that.
Peter McCormack: As the collective, I want more stable, consistent growth.
American HODL: Yeah. Yeah, I think so too.
Peter McCormack: I think that's better for Bitcoin; I think it's better for adoption; I think it's better for everyone.
American HODL: BitcoinT.I.N.A has this hardest trade thesis where he's basically like, "Bitcoin is going to bore you to $1 million a coin".
Peter McCormack: Love it.
American HODL: That's what's happening, I feel fucking bored to death.
Peter McCormack: When do you think it'll happen by?
American HODL: $1 million a coin? I'm going to say 2027 at the latest; so five years from now.
Peter McCormack: I bet you a Bitcoin it doesn't. That's done!
American HODL: Done!
Peter McCormack: 2027.
Danny Knowles: No one loses in that bet.
Peter McCormack: No one loses in that bet.
American HODL: By the way, I get to the end of 2027.
Danny Knowles: Actually, HODL loses!
Peter McCormack: Hold on, that's just annoying because I've got to wait five years.
American HODL: Until 2028.
Peter McCormack: I think that's a good bet.
American HODL: Five years is going to go like that.
Peter McCormack: It's a good bet because you're either right or you're wrong.
American HODL: No, it's a good one, and I love taking the bullish side on bets. It's not about winning the bet; it's about deepening my conviction.
Peter McCormack: No, I like winning the bet.
American HODL: Yeah, you need it. You're much poorer than I am!
Danny Knowles: That sounds like hope, HODL!
Peter McCormack: The only thing is, five years is a long time. I don't think there's a guarantee that either of us are actually alive in five years, so we should probably put that into some kind of multisig, yeah.
American HODL: Multisig escrow storage? Okay.
Peter McCormack: Put it on one of those little hard discs.
American HODL: We were supposed to do a DLC and we never got around to doing it.
Peter McCormack: I know, we never got around to it.
American HODL: Maybe we should do some fancy, I don't know, Taproot shit or something.
Danny Knowles: I thought you did one with Phil Geiger or was that just a multisig?
American HODL: That was a multisig, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, where I lost the key.
American HODL: A basic multisig. He's lucky I didn't fucking dump my key, because I was going to throw it away. As soon as lost the bet I was like, "I don't need this key", but then you lost your key.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: You're welcome, I'm a nice guy.
Peter McCormack: Were you proud of me figuring out my Opendime?
American HODL: Yeah, yeah. No, I knew that Danny or somebody would help you do that.
Peter McCormack: No, I did it all on my own. The only thing was, you know you've got to break that thing, I was trying to break it.
American HODL: Yeah, use a safety pin.
Peter McCormack: I was like, "Am I meant to be pushing this hard?" Can you end up destroying the device?
American HODL: Yeah, you probably could break it in half if you did it wrong, but just a safety pin. You just push it right there.
Peter McCormack: I got a Matt Odell tutorial for that. Thank you, Mr Matt Odell.
American HODL: There you go.
Peter McCormack: Appreciate you.
American HODL: Did you get it in person or did he do it…
Peter McCormack: No, I found a video he was doing about it.
American HODL: I love the man. 2027, $1 million a coin, I feel confident about that. I'm in my hodl zen mode at the moment.
Peter McCormack: What do I think? I think the way it gets there is more from dollar debasement than from Bitcoin price accumulation, because we could go through some more --
American HODL: Sure, but they're two sides of the same coin.
Peter McCormack: Yes and no. I don't think we get there thinking, "Wow, we've got masses of purchasing power here".
American HODL: I don't think we get there thinking we're poor either.
Peter McCormack: No.
American HODL: But you're right about -- okay, so take a trophy property, those are going to continue to go up in value, especially with all the monetary stimulus. So, right now, let's say it's roughly $25 million to have a baller place anywhere in the world. You could have it in Aspen or Miami Beach or LA or Hawaii, whatever.
Peter McCormack: Bedford.
American HODL: Bedford, probably $6, whatever.
Peter McCormack: You'd probably buy the town!
American HODL: So, let's say it's $25 million. By the time you get to $1 million a coin, the same property is probably $50 million. So, if you want the property, you've got to part with 50 coins.
Peter McCormack: 50% debasement in 5 years? That's feasible, depending on how much money the Fed prints.
American HODL: Yeah, I think so. They're about to print like fucking crazy, post-election.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, pre-mid-terms do you think?
American HODL: No, there's too much gridlock right now. They're not going to get anything done, in my opinion.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
American HODL: Plus the Republicans, they want to fuck with Biden. The Republicans are pro-recession at the moment.
Peter McCormack: Right. So, Preston thinks they're going to print $5 to $10 trillion.
American HODL: I agree with that assessment, 100%.
Peter McCormack: That's fucking wild!
American HODL: Yeah. Well, they have to do it. Every time, they have to increase the stimulus and have to decrease the amount of time between stimulus.
Peter McCormack: Which is the great deleveraging.
American HODL: Yeah. There you go.
Peter McCormack: We're fucked!
American HODL: Yeah. Well, it's like everything's going up. Basically, everybody got minted during COVID, anybody who had any amount of financial assets. So, everybody did well except for people who didn't have assets; they did really shitty. I think, back to the conversation about communism, this is why the calls for communism are going on. It's because, if you don't own anything -- we're basically becoming stratified like Europe, where it's like we have a class system. You guys have a total class system and there's some social mobility there, but --
Peter McCormack: We don't really have a class system.
American HODL: You effectively do, it's just invisible. There's very little social mobility in the UK. There is much more in America.
Peter McCormack: Danny's giving you eyes and I'm giving you eyes.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'm trying to think about it.
Peter McCormack: We have the elite class.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: The lords.
Danny Knowles: The lords and the ladies.
Peter McCormack: The lords and the ladies.
American HODL: Yeah. This is a fact that, there's much less social mobility in Europe, and that's starting to become the norm in America as well.
Peter McCormack: I think we used to. I think we used to have a very traditional Labour stronghold working class, but I think that's gradually been eroded.
American HODL: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I don't feel a class system in the UK.
American HODL: That's because you're part of the lower class, you have to tell yourself that!
Peter McCormack: Not anymore! All right, man. Well, we will see. That's a good bet though; that's a really good bet.
American HODL: I like that bet, yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's basically a double or quits now.
American HODL: It's a $1 million bet if I'm right.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Could be a $999,000 bet if you're wrong!
American HODL: That's what you would love, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I would love that.
American HODL: Go right up to $990,000.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, get literally $999,220 or something.
American HODL: No, no, no.
Peter McCormack: I've got your list here. Brainwashing, let's talk about brainwashing.
American HODL: Oh yeah, me and you were talking about it. You were the one who said this to me. You were the one who said it to me and you said it to me like this; you were like, "You know how at Jim Jones' cult down in Guyana, or whatever, they would blare messages on the loud speaker and then you were supposed to repeat them", or, "In Fight Club, where it's like, 'You are not a special unique snowflake; you are nothing'". The process of being on Bitcoin Twitter is a lot like this. There are things you can say and things you can't say and so over time, you basically just keep repeating the same things that you are allowed to say.
Peter McCormack: You mean group think?
American HODL: Yeah, right. This is like a sort of self-brainwashing that happens, and you're not really super aware of it. This is part of the echo chamber thing, you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I feel like I've always resisted it. I feel the gravity of it sometimes, but I've also tried to resist it.
American HODL: Sure.
Peter McCormack: But it exists.
American HODL: You're still captured by it though, everybody is.
Peter McCormack: I think I'm captured by the bullishness of Bitcoin, what it means, but I don't think I'm captured by the political lens that it's seen through by some people.
American HODL: Sure. You mean that the Bitcoin Twitter echo chamber is more right-leaning basically?
Peter McCormack: I think it can be, yeah.
American HODL: No, I think it's an absolute fact that it is, and I'm right-leaning myself so I have no problem saying that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I think it's right-leaning, I think it's anarchist-leaning.
American HODL: Yeah. Go on Twitter and put up a post that's in defence of vaccines or social welfare or whatever.
Peter McCormack: I've done all of those.
American HODL: Yeah, and you got significant pushback each time you did it, right, because the echo chamber leans right.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Do you think that's healthy?
American HODL: I think it's natural. In some sense, I think the filtering mechanism is working as intended, but then in some senses, it's a negative. So, it's really tricky to get your head around, is Bitcoin culture helpful or harmful to Bitcoin? I don't know the answer to that. At this point, it runs on its own.
You were like, "I need to go there and I need to push against the culture, I need to do this, I need to do that". Udi was a person who was really going hard against the culture for a while there, trying to do echo chamber bursting, and it's just going to get fucking steamrolled. It's like saying, "I'm going to fight that tank"; the tank is going to win.
Peter McCormack: No, I think my approach is different to Udi's.
American HODL: Sure, yours is softer.
Peter McCormack: I think Udi is contrarian for the sake of contrarian.
American HODL: Yes.
Peter McCormack: It's more of a troll.
American HODL: I think Udi believes those things. The trolling is cover.
Peter McCormack: Jeremy put it in a way yesterday, he said, "What you tend to find at Bitcoin Twitter is that people just close doors". They close doors on ideas, they just shut them closed, and I'll come along and I'll reopen it and say, "Well, can we think about this? Have you thought about this?"
American HODL: I think dogmatism is something that needs to be fought. If you've come to these conclusions via a rigorous first principles analysis, I think that's great. But if you came to these conclusions because they were prescribed to you, that's shit and that needs to get out of Bitcoin culture. We need more independent thinkers in Bitcoin, not less.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: If I'm talking to you in person, like at a conference or something, and I can tell that you're regurgitating talking points to me, I just have zero respect for you.
Peter McCormack: Why do you think that happens? Do you think it happens because people want to fit within a certain group, or do you think it comes back down to that Jonathan Haidt thing whereby you either have one set of beliefs or you have another set of beliefs? Conservatives tend to believe a lot of similar things, and are they doing that to fit within the conservative framework, or are they doing it because a conservative has a certain mindset?
American HODL: Well, they're not mindsets. Haidt describes them as moral palettes. So, liberals have a much narrower moral palette than conservatives do. Conservatives have a much broader moral palette, where purity is something that conservatives are really interested in, whereas liberals have basically no care about purity at all; whereas the liberal moral palette is about care/harm reduction. So, everything is about care/harm reduction, and that's why they prioritise the group over the individual because individuals can harm the group, essentially. So, they're always trying to prioritise for the least amount of harm.
The problem is, this is why Stalin, or Hillary Clinton I think said this as well -- I'm not trying to draw too direct a comparison, but basically there are a lot of people on the left who are useful idiots, because you can use their empathy and their sense of caring against them quite effectively, whereas it's not true on the right.
Peter McCormack: Do you not have a bias there to say --
American HODL: No, I'm saying on the right, you can appeal to authority much more effectively. The right is always looking for a strong man to lead them; that's part of the Trump phenomenon.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
American HODL: So, there are different ways you can manipulate different groups. The liberal is somebody who's telling you, "There's no room at the top, because that guy took your spot from you. That guy is the problem"; they point at the conservative. The conservative is a person who's saying, "There's room at the top, you can join me, you just have to be born super-special, like I am". Both of them are just trying to manipulate their groups.
Peter McCormack: But back to my question, do you think they are coming to those conclusions and repeating those talking points because they want to fit in with the group, or do you think it's because of their moral palette?
American HODL: It's both. Sometimes it's the moral palette and sometimes it's because they want to fit in with the group. I think you're like a person who probably fits in more with the group than you otherwise would, based on your moral palette, your internal moral palette. Bitcoin Twitter is not something that you're culturally -- or you weren't very culturally aligned with it in the beginning.
Peter McCormack: I've come more towards it.
American HODL: You've gotten more culturally aligned with it as time's gone on. Your livelihood is centred around having discussions around Bitcoin, and certainly a lot of these ideas lean right. You're going to have to be more acquiescent to that viewpoint than you otherwise would be.
Peter McCormack: But I am considered right in the UK.
American HODL: In the UK, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I'm very clear about that.
American HODL: We view you as a hardcore leftist, similar to Mao!
Peter McCormack: The rest of the world is left of the US pretty much.
American HODL: I don't think that's true of the Philippines or Africa or Russia.
Peter McCormack: No, I think it is. Everyone is to the left.
American HODL: That's not true.
Peter McCormack: That's a generalisation, of course.
American HODL: There are pretty significant anti-gay laws in places like Saudi Arabia.
Peter McCormack: That's very true, yeah.
American HODL: You think Saudi Arabia's left of the US?!
Peter McCormack: I was making a generalisation for comedic effect, but now we're having to analyse this. Yeah, I can agree with you on that point.
American HODL: Here's my thing, I don't give a fuck what your political opinions are; I don't care. What I want is deeply reasoned thinkers in Bitcoin who have come to their own conclusions and they didn't come here because this is the right thing to say to get engagement on Twitter. I think there's this whole new class of Bitcoin Twitter influencers, and I'm not going to single anybody out, but there are lot of people who don't have a very deep understanding of Bitcoin, but yet they have 100,000 followers on Twitter. It's become very easy to get clout because bitcoiners want to hear a sermon that sounds something like, "Bitcoin is the best. You should hodl your Bitcoin".
Peter McCormack: "There'll only be 21 million, and there are 6 million millionaires on the planet".
American HODL: "Bitcoin will bring you big-titty bitches and eternal riches".
Peter McCormack: We'll get back to your responsibility for that.
American HODL: There are certain things that bitcoiners want to hear and if you tell it to them they're willing to give you clout for it, they're willing to follow you and they want to give you engagement on your posts. You can turn that clout into maybe money at some point; it's unclear.
So for me, it used to be a lot easier to get sats than it was to get clout, and most of us didn't want clout anyway. We wanted to stay more anon because it was the early days. We didn't know if the government was just going to fucking banhammer us at any moment. So it was like, "I'm going to buy this Bitcoin and not talk about it". It's like when weed was illegal versus now that weed's legal. People just smoke weed out on the street now; it's normal.
Peter McCormack: I don't even want to smoke it now.
American HODL: Right, it's not cool anymore.
Peter McCormack: It's not cool anymore.
American HODL: So, yeah, I think basically that's something that people need to be careful of. Fuck being a follower of anybody. Who cares what anybody else thinks about anything? Care about what you think and your own ideas. So I said earlier, only 3% of the population thinks for themselves and so maybe this just inevitable in Bitcoin's adoption and the rise of Bitcoin, that we're going to have a lot more people who don't think for themselves here than we used to, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think what's happened is there's different known factions now building.
American HODL: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: There is a hardcore, toxic pleb culture, like a faction.
American HODL: The Taco Carnivore.
Peter McCormack: The Taco Carnivore; you spawned that.
American HODL: I did not spawn the Taco Carnivore thing!
Peter McCormack: You fucking did! You did!
American HODL: I did not, no.
Peter McCormack: We'll come back to that, but there is that. I also think there's what I would consider traditional bitcoiners, a faction of traditional bitcoiners that have been around for a long time.
American HODL: Like Vijay Boyapati?
Peter McCormack: No, I'm thinking more like Jimmy Song, Adam Back, very traditional values, very focused on the mission of Bitcoin, haven't changed at all in their views on what Bitcoin should be and where it's going.
American HODL: Those are like technical gods.
Peter McCormack: They're going to be around forever and they're super-important.
American HODL: Of course.
Peter McCormack: The annoying thing about that is new people coming along and not knowing who the fuck they are. Did you see that guy argue with Adam Back? He said, "You must be new around here".
American HODL: Yeah, I know, it's crazy!
Peter McCormack: Can you imagine saying that? Someone on Twitter, he's like, "Dude, he was cited in the whitepaper, shut the fuck up!"
American HODL: I can't remember who l met, but I met somebody in Miami who had never heard of Pierre Rochard or Michael Goldstein, and I was like, "These guys are the Mount Olympus of Bitcoin meme culture".
Peter McCormack: "And you need to go and read everything they wrote!"
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That's like a start. You read the white paper and then you go on Nakamoto Institute and you read fucking everything.
American HODL: I was flabbergasted because to me, somebody like a Pierre or a Michael are famous; I think of them as famous.
Peter McCormack: For me, it's just how important their work is. When I first got in, reading everything up -- you know what, that's one of those things I need to go back and do again.
American HODL: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: It's kind of like the Bitcoin Federalist papers.
American HODL: Everyone's a scammer, is a classic; it's a great article.
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but also what was a great one was the Speculative Attack; to foresee that was so good. But I think what happens is they come in, you come onto Bitcoin Twitter, what are you going see? You're going to see Michael Saylor, obviously, who's kind of new to Bitcoin and very smart, very interesting. You're going to see some influential people, whether it's people who have got podcasts or who write, and a lot of these people have accelerated in growth very quickly, and maybe these people are coming in with -- the earlier you come to Bitcoin, maybe the more you care about going down that rabbit hole, and I may be generalising here.
American HODL: No, I think that's true.
Peter McCormack: Maybe you care more about that deep rabbit hole, and some people are coming in a little bit looser now. Maybe they don't even read the whitepaper, or they're not encouraged to read the whitepaper, or not encouraged to go to the Nakamoto Institute. They go to CoinDesk or whatever, they see a Swan Bitcoin tour, they hear a What Bitcoin Did show, and they just have this very loose connection. There's no reason for them to know or find out these people exist, but they're missing on very key parts of the education.
American HODL: I think that's fine too, it's just fine.
Peter McCormack: It's a just a different thing. It's almost like you drop a stone in a pond, those big ripples in the centre, they're big, and that's where the core is; but as this idea spreads out, it just becomes a little bit flatter, a little bit looser.
American HODL: Totally. So, I feel like I have this feeling towards those guys, the young guys who are coming in now where it's basically I want them to take the baton, I want them to run with it. But I also want them to be deep thinkers who are reasoned, who come with their own understanding, who are not having ideas prescribed to them, who are not saying things for engagement forming, who are really trying to push this forward. Those guys, take the fucking baton and run with it. Do you know what I mean?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: The guys who are coming in clearly grifting, and there are a lot of those, again, I won't say names, but that I don't like and never will.
Peter McCormack: Are they grifting or are they just trying to establish themselves mildly aggressively?
American HODL: Well, a lot of these guys have a shitcoin, and that shitcoin is themselves, and that's the shitcoin they're shilling. You're a little bit that way.
Peter McCormack: Come on, man!
American HODL: But I love you. It's true, not about you, I'm saying in general it's true.
Peter McCormack: No, I probably was like that early on. I'm less of that now.
American HODL: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: But I have a product and I'm marketing it. It's a show and I want people to listen to it.
American HODL: Totally.
Peter McCormack: So, that's a reality.
American HODL: Yeah, you've got to market yourself well.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, products get marketed. But, no, I understand what you mean. I just think, as this idea grows, it becomes more boring, it becomes easier to use, people have to care less.
American HODL: True, that's very true.
Peter McCormack: Some people who are just going to turn up, they're going to download a wallet, it's going to come with their privacy baked in, they're going to buy some Bitcoin, they're going to spend it; they don't have this deep need. Before we even had wallets, I'm guessing some people were using the command-line interface. You've got to have a deep technical knowledge.
American HODL: Right. It was inaccessible to me at that time period; I could never have come in at that time period.
Peter McCormack: Interestingly enough, the first time I ever bought Monero, I used the command-line interface.
American HODL: Really? That is interesting.
Peter McCormack: But then I got stuck not knowing how to get it out, so I ended up having to get FluffyPony, had to sort that shit out for me! When I first used it, I first used it on the command-line interface.
American HODL: Well, yeah, and I think it's totally cool for new people to come in and explain it and take ownership of it. Bitcoin is so much bigger than any one of us, so to get all hung up on your identity as like a Bitcoin think boy or whatever, it's like, "Who gives a shit, man? Bitcoin's bigger than you".
Peter McCormack: I think this just new wave of macro thinkers has been brilliant, and these are people who, if there was no Bitcoin, they'd still be macro thinkers.
American HODL: Totally.
Peter McCormack: Lyn Alden's incredible, Luke Gromen's great, even George Gammon I like. I like Preston Pysh.
American HODL: Do you know Joe Carlasare?
Peter McCormack: I definitely know that name. Why do I know that name?
American HODL: Yeah, he does Twitter Spaces and stuff. I've been spending a lot of time with him. He has a master's degree in economics, he's a lawyer in Chicago. He's been explaining the eurodollar system to me and how it works and how the Fed doesn't really print money and the actual intricacies of the plumbing surrounding the global liquidity of the dollar. That shit, man, I didn't know any of that.
I've spent the last year learning it, and I'm still, I have a very newbish understanding of it. I couldn't fully explain it or articulate it to you. But it's important for me to learn that shit now that we're bigger, now that we're more prominent. It's not just Bitcoin Twitter culture that matters anymore. The macro environment matters more than anything.
Peter McCormack: But you've got someone like Saifedean who's basically a Bitcoin economist, and then you've got macroeconomists who like Bitcoin, and that means we've grown. The pie's grown, the ship's grown, we've got more people and it's like, "Yeah, I like Bitcoin, but I've got all this other shit I've got to pay attention to", but this is the role it plays in it, and I think that's just part of the evolution. I think it's good. It would be nice to get people back to that, but I just don't think people are going to care that much.
American HODL: I keep pointing people to this piece by Paul Tudor Jones. Do you know it; The Great Monetary Inflation, remember that one?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Basically, what he outlines in the piece is that hard assets are going to do really well in this macroenvironment, and Bitcoin's going to be the fastest horse in the race. I think that's the correct framework for the next decade that we're going into essentially.
What got us here won't get us there, so it's important to do the work and become a little broader and more in-depth in our understanding and not just do meme culture shit all day, which I was the worst of them. That's me; I'm that guy. But also I'm in Bitcoin for the long haul and I really want to understand what's happening in the world on a deeper level.
Peter McCormack: When you say, "What got us here", it was the anarchist rebellious resistance?
American HODL: Irreverent, fun, cool, cypherpunks, sovereignty, libertarianism.
Peter McCormack: But we had to be resilient against some pretty big attacks.
American HODL: Yeah. We had to be intolerant too at that time. In order for Bitcoin to be here, we had to be extremely intolerant. I don't know if that intolerance is required in peacetime; it's probably required. Vigilance it always required in Bitcoin; you have to be constantly vigilant. There's that Ben Franklin quote where it's like, "That's the price of liberty", it's that constant vigilance, right.
So, yeah, essentially we always have to be on guard for attacks against Bitcoin, and we always are, especially if you're like me, I have 100% of my net worth in Bitcoin. So, things that affect Bitcoin really fucking affect me! So, yeah, I'm always on guard for that shit. But, honestly, it's a lot of the same bullshit over and over and over again, and there are new things to know. We're moving into a new territory; this is a big-weight asset now. Basically, yeah, what got us here can't get us there.
We've got to go forward, or you can just say, "Fuck it, I'm just in my hodl zen mode and I don't need to understand what's happening. I've already predetermined the outcome that Bitcoin's inevitable and I'm just going to chill out until we get there".
Peter McCormack: So, you're saying we don't need the toxic Taco Pleb that you created?
American HODL: I didn't create the Taco Pleb movement. I think Pirate Beachbum, PsychedelicBart and DeaterBob are the architects of the Taco Carnivore Plebs.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but they're morphed from you.
American HODL: I think my style has been parodied into oblivion on Twitter.
Peter McCormack: How many hodls are there now?
American HODL: Many, there are many.
Peter McCormack: Every time you see time, does it have a little bell ringing, like "That's what I started?"
American HODL: It's like, "Son…" No, it's just, for me, it's like I can't watch my own style be parodied over and over again, it's boring.
Peter McCormack: I think it's funny, man.
American HODL: Yeah, fuck it.
Peter McCormack: There's AriZonan HODL.
American HODL: There are a lot of HODLs now, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Mumbai HODL, Bangladesh HODL!
American HODL: I know.
Peter McCormack: They're everywhere, and it's a real culture in that, but there's a style to the HODLs.
American HODL: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: And they're very intolerant.
American HODL: Yeah, very. I think, with me, when I was doing it --
Peter McCormack: But there was a funny side to it.
American HODL: I'm pretty affable.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: Most of it was me joking around.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what I always felt. I never felt it was that serious.
American HODL: No. I feel like a lot of people missed the joke and only saw the vitriolic parts of it. But it's like performance. I talk with Junseth about this all the time. Me and Junseth both were doing different versions of performance art in Bitcoin, and you never know what kind of culture you're going to spawn after you leave. I take no responsibility.
Peter McCormack: You made me a lot of new friends, that's for sure!
American HODL: Some of your besties.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, some of my besties. I get on really well with them.
American HODL: It's like at the end of Fight Club when he realises that Project Mayhem has grown beyond him and he's like, "Oh my god, what's happening?!"
Peter McCormack: "What have I created?!"
American HODL: There he is in the middle of the story, he's like, "Wait, what? What's going on?!" Sometimes I have that feeling?
Peter McCormack: What's DeaterBob in that film?
American HODL: He's the guy with the bitch tats, absolute -- Meatloaf.
Peter McCormack: RIP Meatloaf. Yeah, sad times, sad times. All right, man, how are we doing for time?
Danny Knowles: About an hour and a half.
Peter McCormack: Jesus, that's just flown by!
American HODL: Yeah, we can go longer.
Peter McCormack: What do you want to talk about?
American HODL: What's on the sheet?
Peter McCormack: It's on your sheet.
American HODL: You told me last night at dinner you wanted to talk about rational shitcoining.
Peter McCormack: Well, I did that at the start.
American HODL: Did we?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I talked about the stablecoins.
American HODL: Oh, stablecoins. That's your idea of shitcoin, got it.
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah. We don't even need to talk about that because we've talked about that.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think we've done the list, man. That's the problem.
American HODL: Yeah. I think one of the things on the list is the negative implications of Bitcoin which never get talked about, and I think the one big negative implication of Bitcoin, and I don't know if it's a negative or a positive -- that was a nice header.
Peter McCormack: It was a great header! Well done, Danny!
American HODL: I don't know if it's a negative or a positive, but something we never talk about with Bitcoin is that we turned on an unstoppable machine. It's a machine that we can't turn off.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: We've never done that before. I don't know, in the history of humanity, we've ever had a machine that can't be turned off.
Peter McCormack: It's an organism that's growing.
American HODL: Yeah. In some senses, I've said this before, but I feel that Bitcoin is a narrow yet powerful AI. Are you familiar with this thought experiment?
Peter McCormack: Tell me.
American HODL: So, it's by Bostrom, the same guy who created simulation theory. I think it comes from the book, Superintelligence. Basically, the idea of the thought experiment is of a paperclip maximiser, and a paperclip maximiser is a narrow AI, it has one function; that function is to create paperclips, but it's also powerful. So, it's not a general AI; it can't think and feel, it doesn't have motives, it just creates paperclips. But it has too much power, so it ends up turning the entire universe into paperclips.
In some sense, I think that Bitcoin is a narrow yet powerful AI that basically turns the entire world into Bitcoin. Look at me, what the fuck am I doing here? So, a random Japanese guy releases free code on the internet and now I'm here, in Nashville, with you, a random British guy. What?!
Peter McCormack: Who owns a football team.
American HODL: Yeah, exactly. What's happening?! I'm just being sucked into this vortex. I've basically become a 100% bitcoiner at this point.
Peter McCormack: Well, we were with Harry Sudock the other day.
American HODL: I love Harry, by the way. Harry's the best.
Peter McCormack: Harry is the best. We were with him in New York and we made a show and afterwards, we went to dinner. It was me, Harry and Jeremy, and we were talking about -- he says, "Bitcoin's a black hole".
American HODL: Yes, it is.
Peter McCormack: I was like, "Ah, yeah". I actually think Bitcoin is the singularity. So, we were kind of like discussing this idea, and we ended up dumping the show and recording two days later, rerecording and discussing the idea of the singularities. He says, "It eats up all this stuff". You can think of it on a personal, micro level or on a macro level. Like you said, five years ago, my life was a fucking shit show. I didn't know what I was going to do. I started a podcast, and here I am now sat with you and I own a football team and I make films and I've interviewed a president. All these things that have come out of it, that's my micro level.
On a macro level, there are a bunch of people in Bedford who are learning about this new form of money because there's a football team, there's a village in El Zonte, there's a lake in Guatemala, there are all these things cropping up, and what's happening is Bitcoin is like this black hole that's eating everything. Ultimately, it's this singularity.
American HODL: It's a paperclip maximiser. The entire world is becoming Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
American HODL: You are Bitcoin, I am Bitcoin now, we've just become this thing. Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night and the Bitcoin price has moved. Why am I waking up in the middle of the night knowing that the Bitcoin price has moved? It's because my fucking central nervous system is attached to this thing! I stare at this thing all day long, so even when I'm asleep and literally unconscious, my brain is like, "Things are happening in Bitcoin, must wake up".
Peter McCormack: But think how much more aggressive it's been. So, think 2010, Bitcoin's been around for about a year, if it's a black hole, it's tiny. To get to that event horizon, it's difficult because you had to be --
American HODL: It's not sucking you in yet.
Peter McCormack: No, you had to be in a weird place on the internet, or you had to be Slashdot in 2011, or you had to be on some Bitcoin Twitter --
American HODL: Or trying to buy drugs on Silk Road.
Peter McCormack: No, but even pre that. Then, where we're at now, it's like everyone's heard of it, everyone's aware of it. Nobody had heard of it then, or a few people, and now everyone's heard of it. As it starts eating up more things, the energy sector, the finance sector, and things start blowing up, you can't avoid it anymore. All these people who are on Twitter writing fucking essays about why Bitcoin's terrible, in the end, it's going to eat them.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's going to swallow them up. So, yeah, we made this show where we were like, "Bitcoin is the singularity".
American HODL: By the way, I fully agree with that entirely. There is a post-Bitcoin world that is entirely different than the Bitcoin world that we live in now.
Peter McCormack: I don't think we know fully what that is. We hope for the best.
American HODL: Just like the early internet, we have a lot of very utopian ideas around what it is, and I expect us to all look like fucking morons in the intervening decades. But it's hard to not be super excited about what it brings. For me, one of the negatives that Bitcoin could bring is like straight-up feudalism.
Peter McCormack: Of course.
American HODL: I don't like to think that thought.
Peter McCormack: No, but you're entirely right.
American HODL: That's a negative, but one of the positives is, if we fix malinvestment in the world, essentially, we could make the world 2% better per year compounded. So, let's say fiat makes the world 2% worse per year compounded, we're at the end of 50-some-odd years of that, and we're looking around and we're like, "Man, things are shit".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Everything's fucked".
American HODL: Whereas, if we get Bitcoin, the ball rolls in the opposite direction, we make things 2% better. It probably takes us 50 years to be back to even, what we lost, so we lost 100 years in sum total, and then after that we're back on the upswing again and things are going great. Then, as humans always do, we'll find a way to fuck it up, not us, but our grandchildren will fuck it up because that's what we do when things are too good.
Think about being in Heaven, do you actually want to be in Heaven? You wake up and every day's fucking perfect? After a while, you would be like, "This sucks, this is a prison, I want to go to fucking Hell". That's what it is to be human. So, even if Bitcoin is utopian, and I think it is --
Peter McCormack: Fuck these grapes!
American HODL: -- humans are not utopians and humans will do terrible shitty things with this tool, like we do terrible shitty things with every tool.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but maybe there are limitations now to the shitty things we can do with this tool.
American HODL: Yeah, sure.
Peter McCormack: The incentive structure, it's not so much how it's designed, how it's just evolved to be, the incentive structure is you can't get out of it. It's like the miners, they have to follow the rules. They can't be negative, they can't fuck with the system because it's a waste of money for them, they want their block reward. We can't fuck with this.
American HODL: No, that's true. Here's the problem, it's like we know that, and eventually that's going to be culture. When Bitcoin eats the world, the idea that we can't fuck with the rules is going to be the default. That's the dogmatism of 100 years from now.
Peter McCormack: Someone's going to try and fuck with the rules.
American HODL: Somebody's going to come along and be like, "You know what, I think we should fuck with the rules". Once they get enough steam for that idea, they will, ultimately. I don't know if it takes 300 years, 1,000 years, whatever, but people are going to fuck up this --
In the long run, Bitcoin will have been a story. You talk about the personalities in Bitcoin and all the influencers and the technical guys and everybody; in the long run, Bitcoin will have been a story about when a bunch of imperfect humans met a perfect machine and what happened. That's the story of Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: That's a great place to end it, man.
American HODL: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Profound ending from Mr HODL, I have nowhere to send people, dude, because you're not anywhere.
American HODL: Listen, all I want to say I see trees are orange, orange roses too. I see them orange for me and you.
Peter McCormack: You should sing that like Junseth.
American HODL: "And I think to myself, what a wonderful world".
Peter McCormack: That's terrible!
American HODL: Man, we're so out of tune.
Peter McCormack: I suck.
American HODL: The headphones let me hear it. It's like, "Oh man, you suck at singing!"
Peter McCormack: I went a bit quiet at the end just in case. You know like when you're driving your car and you've got the music on loud and you're singing aloud, you're like, "Fuck, I can sing!" and then you turn it down a little bit, it's like, "No, I'm terrible!" I think I'm a terrible singer. Brother, good to see you.
American HODL: Dude, it was good to see you.
Peter McCormack: You should stay tonight.
American HODL: 2027, you're fucked. $1 million a coin, bitch!
Peter McCormack: We will see, we will see, man. But I think you should stay tonight.
American HODL: I'll talk to the wife. We have a four-month-old, so I'm kind of needed back.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well. We'll see, man. All right, cool. Good to see you, man.
