WBD534 Audio Transcription
How Bitcoin Reprograms the Mind with Dan Weintraub
Release date: Sunday 31st July
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Weintraub. 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.
Dan Weintraub is a retired history teacher, author and Bitcoin advocate. In this interview, we discuss how fiat money results in a cycle of increasing consumption to meet our need for stimuli, destroying our neurological systems, and how Bitcoin arrests and reverses this cycle.
“In a world in which this experiment with commercial credit and debt, and then this really messed up experiment with irredeemable currency, if that goes away… as that collective memory fades, who knows how it’ll impact us neurologically? And who knows what will become?”
— Dan Weintraub
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Dan, nice to meet you, man.
Dan Weintraub: Thanks, you too.
Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming in. You sent me a really interesting paper recently and I read through it and I was like, "I think I want to talk about this". We get a lot of things sent to us, a lot of requests, lot of things, lot of papers. It's very hard to give everyone the time, but some things really stand out that are really interesting, and I will suggest everyone to go to the show notes and click on the link and go and read the paper, but specifically this idea around the fiat brain, which I want to talk to you and get into it. But you won't be known to the audience, this is you first ever podcast interview.
Dan Weintraub: It is!
Peter McCormack: It is, so can you just give everyone a bit of a background to who you are so they understand who I'm talking to?
Dan Weintraub: Sure. So, I am Dan and I worked in education for 35 years teaching history and economics and English. I was a high school principal, and I was also a musician; did a whole bunch of things. In 2013-ish, 2014, I was teaching an economics class and learned about Bitcoin and brought this thing to class, I didn't know anything about it, and actually purchased on eBay a little bit of Bitcoin. I didn't know what I was doing. Back then, I had to download the whole, what is it?
Peter McCormack: Blockchain?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, the whole thing, there was no exchange.
Peter McCormack: You had the command-line interface?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah. I didn't know what I was doing. I left education because computing got too complicated.
Peter McCormack: Was that in the time where you would buy it and you would just trust that they would send you the Bitcoin?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, and they did. So, then I lost track of it and finished up my career and retired, and in 2020, in the fall of 2020, I went out -- my sister lives in Maine and I was hanging out with her, and she was like, "We have to talk about Bitcoin". I was like, "Okay, let's talk about it", and that was the beginning of really starting to understand it and doing all of my hundreds of hours of research and learning. And she and I would go on these long walks and talk about Bitcoin. And every couple of days, there was another like, "Oh my God!"
I kind of fancied myself, I guess this is a little pretentious, but a little bit of an intellectual, but I came at it non-intellectually in 2013, 2014. I was like, "This is cool". Then in 2020, I came at it like, "Oh, this is probably going to accrue some value and maybe I can make some money because I'm retired". Then, over the next year I was like, "This is much more important than an investment or a little spare change".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we did an interview yesterday with Peter Doyle, and he said, "I would happily give up all the gains I can make from Bitcoin for it just to succeed.
Dan Weintraub: Totally agree.
Peter McCormack: It's such an important technology for the world, such an important change to the monetary system, and it was quite a profound thing the way he said it; it really interested me. Okay, so talk to me about this paper, where did it come from?
Dan Weintraub: Okay. So, I'll give you the whole story. In the late-1980s, I was a good drinker in high school and college. I wasn't a pro, but I was semi-pro. I stopped drinking in the late-1980s, because I wanted to have a career and maybe have a family, and started on that path, kind of self-reflective path, therapy, Buddhism, meditation, I taught meditation; it was the whole nine yards.
I got to a point where I started studying neuroscience and neurology and how our bodies work and how our brains work, and the more I studied neurology, the more I came to realise, we don't lead with cognition, we lead with our bodies. Our bodies tell us, they dictate what we feel and what we're going to do. We can use our minds to create stories and narratives around those feelings, so you're in a relationship, your girlfriend breaks up with you, you get this terrible feeling, you're anxious, your amygdala's squeezing, and you create a narrative. So, you create a story of, "She's a terrible person", etc.
But we lead with our bodies and its neurotransmitters, its hormones; it's the way our electrical impulses work. So, that became the thing that I was most interested in, and it was across all spectrums. So, I wrote a little book called BEHAVING BADLY: The Neurology of Acting Like an Asshole, and it's all about why we behave like assholes based upon responding to the impulses in our bodies.
Peter McCormack: But why do we behave like assholes?
Dan Weintraub: Because we are completely unaware that we are creating stories and narratives around feelings, and we can't step back and say, "Why am I having this feeling? What's going on in my body right now that's compelling me to act a certain way?"
Peter McCormack: So are we shooting from the hip, reacting rather than --
Dan Weintraub: I would say most people are shooting from the hip, yeah. I mean, I think that the benefit of therapy on the one hand is, it provides you with some tools to be able to step back and observe yourself in the world, but it doesn't change us. We have this neurological, homeostatic point based on who we are, how we were raised, what happened in utero. I mean, it's complex. But we are wired, from birth, we are wired as we grow up to react to stimuli a certain way. So, therapy gives us awareness, but it doesn't change the fact that that's how our bodies react. So, knowing about your body, being able to say, "This is how I'm feeling", and actually being able to play with that, so you can use imagination, you can use -- I'll give you an example.
I was in a very committed relationship, it didn't work out. I was in extraordinary pain; my body was just not happy. In your 50s when that happens, I don't know how old you all are, but when you're at your 50s, and I'm at the end of my 50s, one's heart and one's body do not respond well to so much adrenalin and cortisol. So, I had to trick my body into feeling better. So, you can do that with chemicals, but I didn't want to do that with chemicals, so I tricked my body by creating a narrative that this person who had broken up was a bad person; she's not, she's a great person. But it helped me go through the process of a year of healing, where my body felt better and better and then I could come back like, "Yeah, she's a great person".
That's how neurology works. In many ways, we don't have awareness around it, and that lack of awareness can be catastrophic, because I would have been an asshole if I'd written her shitty emails, if I'd gone on Facebook, which I don't use; that's the asshole step. The tweaking one's thought process to feel better, that's just figuring out how to move through a world that can be hard.
Peter McCormack: Are you aware of all my back issues I've had?
Dan Weintraub: A teeny bit.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I've had back issues now for a good couple of years, had a microdiscectomy because I had a herniated disc and sciatica. That repaired it and I still had the occasional issue with my back. I've talked about it on Twitter and talked about it on the podcast, had a lot of people, an incredible amount of people, write to me. Quite a few have recommended a book called Healing Back Pain, and referred to the idea that I don't need surgery, by the way I did need surgery, I had a herniated disc; but since then, some of the issues I may be having are actually to do with some kind of trauma in my past I've not fully dealt with, which there is some truth to that.
If I was going to be vulnerable and honest on this podcast, I have a divorce which was traumatic, and I've never fully dealt with that. Do you buy into that?
Dan Weintraub: Absolutely. There's a lot of data out there that point to that our bodies store so much experience. There's actually a book called The Body Knows the Score, or The Body Remembers the Score, which is all about veterans from war and how they come back, and why they experience this thing we call PTSD, because their bodies store the memories.
I had experienced complex trauma as a child, the death of a sister, tricky childhood, and my body stored all of that. It actually created for me a very difficult experience around relating, in an intimate way, to other people, and that became part of my practice over those years and years of, I won't call it sobriety because I'm not sure I was a drunk, but of going on that path of trying to understand why I moved through the world the way I did, and relating on a deep and emotional and connected level to other human beings has always been really hard for me.
Peter McCormack: So, where is the collective part of this?
Dan Weintraub: When you say collective…?
Peter McCormack: So, your thesis, How Bitcoin Ends Fiat's Destruction of our Collective and Individual Neurologies, we've just talked about individual elements of neurology. What do you mean by "collective"?
Dan Weintraub: So, in my opinion, there's a collective way in which we move through the world as this human organism, that it's not only imitative that, "Oh, I see someone driving a Lamborghini, that looks exciting. I aspire to having a Lamborghini", but it's almost part of collective memory. There's this epigenetic part of us that I don't think we understand very well, that hundreds of years, thousands of years of human experience is encoded and embedded in us at a cellular level.
So, when I say that Bitcoin saves at the collective, I'm almost thinking of it in terms of the Borg from Star Trek. The terrifying thing about the Borg is they're a collective who feel that they're righteous, they're good, they're like, "We're fine. Resistance is futile, and we're going to add you to --", and that's what it feels like the human species has slowly become. And then, my thesis is because it began with the commercial revolution and the creation of credit and debt.
In my paper, I don't have a ton of data to back up such a thesis, because anybody could say, "Well, why didn't it begin X, Y or Z?" but I think the collective downfall of humanity, in terms of our collective neurologies, began several hundred years ago.
Peter McCormack: Have you done any work of looking at collective behaviours of humans versus, say, animals or insects. We were discussing bees the other day, and bees tend to operate in a collective and know their role, and there's almost an automation that's coded into them of how they operate. Whereas, with animals in the animal kingdom, there's maybe more of a hierarchy, but there's a little bit more individualism. And then, when you get to humans, we can act in a collective, but we can fork out individually, because we are a little bit more conscious, higher intelligence to make decisions. You can see collective responses or behaviours on Twitter, or outside of Twitter, but you can also see individuals rise up and be slightly different. Have you compared these?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, so I don't know if I totally agree with that analysis that human beings can act individually. My belief is that when we seemingly are branching out from the zeitgeist of the collective, we're actually not; we're branching out into something we've seen, something that fits us in terms of our neurology, but it's not this idea of individuality.
I believe that human beings are relational beings, and one of the reasons there's so many mental health struggles right now is that we think somehow that we're not, and we think somehow that things, money, stuff, can fill that part of us that is relational, which is one of the reasons I believe that libertarianism is a -- I know I'm going to incur the wrath of some of your audience, but I'm not so sure that Bitcoin is a libertarian construct; I think it's a communitarian construct. Small communities, who are working towards the benefit of each other, which is what the network is, we want more and more people to be part of the network, because that strengthens the network; hoarding Bitcoin is antithetical to its strength and its success. So, I'm not sure --
Peter McCormack: Can you explain that; hoarding Bitcoin, why is that antithetical to its strength?
Dan Weintraub: Because if someone, a country or an individual, collects more and more Bitcoin, the network is inherently weakened, because the network is strengthened by the more nodes there are that are validating transactions, the more people who are participating in this. Not only as an asset class does it seemingly become more valuable, but as a relational construct.
Peter McCormack: Are you talking here about distribution of coins, or are you talking about the movement of coins and being used as a medium of exchange?
Dan Weintraub: I think distribution more than a medium of exchange.
Peter McCormack: So, when Michael Saylor has 120,000 Bitcoin, that is a large concentration, the network would be stronger if there 120,000 people owning 1 Bitcoin each?
Dan Weintraub: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: I mean, I can agree with that, but I don't know if it's a zero-sum game.
Dan Weintraub: No, I'm not sure if it's a zero-sum game either. I mean, I don't look at Bitcoin as an investment; I did at first. I don't see Bitcoin as something that, like Michael Saylor says, "It's going to be digital real estate, this is going to be your block on Madison Avenue"; I don't look at it like that either.
I see it as this thing that we don't totally understand, and yet if we had a monetary system, or a system of information exchange, a system of sharing information and transacting that was absolutely inviolable and that we could trust, because it's being verified by the millions and millions of nodes, then all of sudden that relational aspect heals us. We're no longer in this frenzy of following the collective towards the cliff, and in this case I mean trying to make as much money as we possibly can, and use that money as a way to experience the world.
Peter McCormack: So, you think the issue here is the rat race, the accumulation of stuff, whether that is status or assets or property, that you never really get to the "enough" point? Somebody who's got $100,000 wants $1 million; someone who's got $1 million wants $10 million. There's that constant more, more, more that eats away at our time, we trade off health often, not everyone, but sometimes we trade off health, time with our family, love, all for this; is this where you're going?
Dan Weintraub: Well, if I was to go back to neurology, because that's the thesis of the paper, my belief is that we have a homeostatic -- again, when I say a homeostatic place as a collective and as individuals, we are stimulated in a certain way and 300 years ago, that baseline was different than it is now. 300 years ago, somebody could go off into the woods and go bobcat hunting, and that would meet their need for adrenaline and dopamine; that would meet their stimulatory needs. 300 years later, trillionaires need to fly out into outer space.
So, my belief is that it's not so much the accumulation of stuff, it's the need for stimulation, the need for adrenaline, the need for dopamine, the need for this physiological experience, and we've built over generations and centuries a tolerance.
Peter McCormack: Oh, I see what you're saying, okay. So, there will always be a need for stimulation?
Dan Weintraub: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: And that's not a bad thing.
Dan Weintraub: No.
Peter McCormack: But we've built an individual and collective tolerance, depending on who you are, and two things come to mind. Firstly, if we've built that tolerance, it becomes harder and harder to achieve that dopamine hit that we need. But also, are we so wrapped up in our life that we're not spending enough time on stimulation, and spending more time on the things we think that will get us to stimulation?
Dan Weintraub: Which is stimulation. So, if I'm day-trading, because I want to become a millionaire, that's giving me my dopamine hits, just that process. So, I think that the journey and the end are neurologically compatible. The journey to become a multi-millionaire, and the actual being, and then using that money to buy the dopamine hit or the adrenaline, I wouldn't distinguish between the two.
Peter McCormack: And, can we potentially create fake goals that we think we want to be a millionaire, and when we get there, there's a disappointment?
Dan Weintraub: Sure, and I don't know if I would use the word "disappointment". I think I would use the word again neurologically, a lack of stimulation like, "Oh, I need more, what am I going to do? I'm going to buy a BMW; well, that didn't do it. Well, I'm going to buy a Maserati; well, that didn't do it, now what am I going to do?"
Peter McCormack: It's an Aston Martin; that does it!
Dan Weintraub: Is that any good?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Dan Weintraub: I don't have a car!
Peter McCormack: No, but everything you're saying is true. I've been through all these steps.
Dan Weintraub: I'm not a big fan of, what's his name? Glenn Beck. Again, your audience will probably roll their eyes when I say I'm liberal-left when it comes to ideology. I'm not libertarian and I'm not conservative-right. There was a guy named Glenn Beck who used to do a conservative talk show.
Peter McCormack: I know, yeah.
Dan Weintraub: Not my favourite guy, whatever. And he talked about one Christmas that he bought everything he possibly could that his kids wanted, and he said it was the worst Christmas ever. I was like, "I 'like' you more!" I think that we can create narrative and story around the fact that if we just have all these things, it will make us happy. But in the end, I would argue, the only thing that makes us happy is relationship. Bitcoin fosters relational wealth, above and beyond monetary wealth.
Peter McCormack: How do you mean; explain that?
Dan Weintraub: Because, I can meet someone in a transaction in which we meet as equals. We are entirely compatible in terms of what our goals are. Our goals aren't to game each other, our goals aren't to somehow get more than the other; it's pure truth transacted on a network. And I believe that if the Bitcoin Network plays itself out to its fullest, everything will reside there. There won't be any more --
Peter McCormack: It's a black hole.
Dan Weintraub: Right, but in such a great way.
Peter McCormack: We just made a show with Harry Sudock, who you just met, and the whole concept was, Bitcoin's the singularity and it's a black hole that eventually eats everything up.
Dan Weintraub: And I agree with that, and I think it eats everything up and it spits out this beautiful, hippy, Woodstock world!
Peter McCormack: And in the metaphor, that would be spitting out the -- who's the guy in The Brief History of Time?
Danny Knowles: Stephen Hawking?
Peter McCormack: Stephen Hawking radiation; that was his discovery. People believed nothing could come out of a black hole, but actually it can. There's a radiation that emits from a black hole and it's called Hawking Radiation. Did you know that?
Danny Knowles: I did not know that.
Peter McCormack: You see, I am a nerd sometimes. Okay, interesting. So, how do you relate this to, what is the problem that fiat money and credit and debt -- what has this collectively done for us, because that's essentially the central part to the thesis of the paper?
Dan Weintraub: So, I trace it back to the beginning of the commercial revolution, and my understanding of the stories is a cursory understanding. I studied history for 35 years, but I was more interested in going to concerts and hanging out with friends. So, even though I was a history teacher, I wasn't the most erudite history teacher. But the commercial revolution began essentially when artisans, who were making gold coins of equal weight and value and holding them in their vaults, were issuing paper against their gold coins, like receipts, and then they started issuing more paper, not only against their gold coins, but against the people who were renting out space in their vaults.
Then they said, "We can issue paper against shit that doesn't even exist", and that was credit. That was the beginning, in my analysis, of credit and the extension of credit. Now, there were of course situations where people would say, "We all want our gold back", and then there would be a run on the vault or the bank, because this is the beginning of fractional-reserve banking. And I think it was at that point that we started to -- we call it progress, right. And now we struck out across the world and we found new places and we created new technologies and there was an industrial revolution, which in many ways was disastrous. The impact of the Industrial Revolution on human nervous systems had to have been absolutely catastrophic.
Peter McCormack: Because…?
Dan Weintraub: Because you go from living a rather quiet, agrarian life, and again this is over the course of centuries, to now you're packed into cities, you're living in boarding houses, you're seeing suffering all around you, the proliferation of new diseases that emerge, and you're watching this, you're watching your children suffer, you're watching your friends suffer, and your body is going into contortions neurologically.
Then, my thesis is that this builds and builds and continues to build because we continue to issue more and more credit, and up the ante incrementally for how we move through the world as a species, a lot of it based on how we need to be stimulated. No longer was it good enough to make a certain amount of money if you were a business tycoon. You had to make more and then you had to build a bigger mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and it was just on and on and on, and then that just got built into us. Our sympathetic nervous systems over time became highly attuned to higher and higher levels of stimulation.
Peter McCormack: How does this relate to anxiety and panic attacks? If there's higher needs for stimulation, is this related to the increase we have seen in these mental health issues?
Dan Weintraub: So, anxiety attacks are when your body basically says to you, "You can't get away from this, you can't suppress it", and then your amygdala goes and then the adrenaline goes and then you freak out, and I've had them and they're no fun.
Peter McCormack: No. Dude, listen, I had two years of chronic anxiety, panic attacks to the point where I ended up in hospital; awful stuff.
Dan Weintraub: When I was in college, I was a stoner and I remember I had just broken up with -- this seems to be the story of my life!
Peter McCormack: There's a pattern!
Dan Weintraub: Single, everybody, single, although almost 60!
Peter McCormack: You look good for 60; is that the not drinking?
Dan Weintraub: Well, I hit a glass of wine last night.
Peter McCormack: Oh, okay, so you're still drinking.
Dan Weintraub: Well, no, my kids grew up and I finished my career, so I was like, "I can have an occasional glass of wine", but yeah, maybe 35 years of not drinking, I don't know. I exercise.
Peter McCormack: There's 60-year-old chicks on Tinder, but you could probably go lower.
Dan Weintraub: I don't know. I go on a date and then after the date I'm like, "That was fun". Then I'm like, "Wait a second, does this mean I can't just run around the world and do nothing?"
Peter McCormack: Well, if you find the right girl, she might want to do it with you.
Dan Weintraub: I'll keep looking maybe. What were we talking about?!
Peter McCormack: Anxiety and panic attacks.
Dan Weintraub: So, I had just had a bad breakup and I was in college and I was getting high with a bunch of friends, and all of a sudden I had this wave of dizziness and nausea and I was like, "I'm going to die!" and I slept in the infirmary at college for three nights. That was the beginning of my journey with anxiety. It became, over years and years and decades, a friend, because I would have an anxiety attack and I'd be like -- can I use any swear word on this I want?
Peter McCormack: You can say what the fuck you want.
Dan Weintraub: Okay. I would have the anxiety attack and I would be, "What the fuck have I done? Where is my body misaligned from my actions? What am I doing that my body is saying, 'uh-uh'?" So, it became like a little signal like, "Okay, I'm not aligned". And I believe that anxiety, the physiological response of our body, it's our body telling us that we've creating narratives, our mind, our brain has filtered information, we've created a story or narratives around that, and it doesn't work and the body says, "No, you can't do that".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've learnt to go from a point whereby during the chronic anxiety, a panic attack would feel like a heart attack, the worst ones felt like an actual heart attack, to being able to recognise when anxiety's starting to creep up and realise it's a warning signal. It's like, "Something's not right here. I'm drinking too much, working too hard, not sleeping", some pattern in terms of my physiological health, where my brain is telling me you need to slow down; get an earlier night; not drink for the 84th night in a row; that kind of shit; stop working so hard.
Dan Weintraub: For me it's when, do you ever have that experience where you're watching yourself and you're looking at yourself, and you're not really present?
Peter McCormack: Disassociation?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah. So for me, it usually begins with a moment of disassociation where like, "What the fuck am I doing here; what am I saying; who am I?" and then my body says, "You'd better get back". We all have become more attuned to anxiety, we develop strategies to go from that dissociative state to a more related state. And for me oftentimes, if I have an anxiety attack, it just involves going out for a walk and saying hello to everyone.
I wrote a, again I say "book", but they're not very long; I wrote a book about the 20 things that I do to live a healthy life, and it's a healthy neurological life. Number three is I say hi to everyone. The young women in Boston who go to college, they don't like that, so I don't say hi to them, because they think I'm a creep!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, if you do it on the London Underground they're like, "What the fuck do you want; what are you talking to me for?" But generally speaking, if you do it in Ireland, well everyone does it in Ireland anyway, that's why I think they're all happy.
Dan Weintraub: That could be. Well certainly in Denmark, when I was doing my UEFA badge there, it was like hello city; everybody, "Hi, hi!"
Peter McCormack: I've found there's different techniques, because in different scenarios you need different ones. If I have a creep of anxiety when I'm at home, I can go for a walk, or do a kind of meditation where I go and sit upright at the back of my bed and I kind of go to sleep. It's a kind of meditation and that can get rid of it. But if I'm in a fixed scenario that I can't get out of, I either do the tapping thing, or the squeezing thing on my hand, or I follow shapes around a room; they're the different things to control it. But I've learnt coping mechanisms. Ultimately, the best form of dealing with it, I've always found, is exercise. Just exercise.
Dan Weintraub: Because of endorphins.
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Dan Weintraub: Because endorphins, by their very nature, they disarm adrenaline and cortisol. So, we are endorphin, I don't like the word "addicts", because it has such a negative connotation. People would say, "You drink three cups of coffee in the morning? You're an addict". I'm like, "Fuck, yeah, it's great, fabulous". So, I don't like that word. I think we just become attuned to physiological states. Endorphins are destressing, because they wash away adrenaline and cortisol, generally speaking.
So, it makes perfect sense that you walk out on the streets of New York and there's all these damn people jogging by you, breathing on you during COVID, but that didn't used to be the case. It wasn't like 50 years ago, people like, "Honey, I'm going out for a run!" "What do you mean, you're going out for a run?" When I ran, I ran to --
Peter McCormack: Get somewhere.
Dan Weintraub: Or to strike a soccer ball, or get away from the bullies in the neighbourhood!
Peter McCormack: Did you mean a football?!
Dan Weintraub: That too!
Peter McCormack: Do you have a football team?
Dan Weintraub: A team I support?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. If it's fucking Tottenham…
Dan Weintraub: No, I don't like Spurs. When I was coaching, I was coaching in California in the 1990s, and the man with whom I was coaching had grown up a Saints fan.
Peter McCormack: A Southampton fan?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah. So, let me just tell you, and I think I said this to Danny --
Peter McCormack: That's very unusual.
Dan Weintraub: Beyond unusual, it's anxiety-provoking! But also, it's like being Dimmesdale in the scarlet closet. It's horrible. Every year, you get to the end of the year and I say to myself, "Phew, didn't get into a car crash this year!" It's all survival, none of it is joy, there is zero joy.
Peter McCormack: You used to have it when you had Matt Le Tissier.
Dan Weintraub: Well, Le Tissier, but there wasn't joy. It wasn't like Le Tissier brought us to the Champions League. We also had, what's his name? Who's the guy who was the leading scorer, still is, in the Premiership? Alan Shearer, he was a Saint.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, before he went to Blackburn. No, hold on --
Dan Weintraub: Blackburn, then Newcastle, I think.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he went Southampton, Blackburn, Newcastle.
Dan Weintraub: Right, and Blackburn won the Prem.
Peter McCormack: Won the Premier League.
Dan Weintraub: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Didn't you have Danny Wallace?
Dan Weintraub: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: The problem Southampton have had is, they're just Premier League mediocre. The problem with being mediocre in the Premier League is you're never going to go to the top, and you'll never get relegated. But actually, if you're below mediocre, you get relegated, then you come for promotion. So, teams like West Brom, who bounce between the two, yeah, you get relegated, but then you have that year where you're winning. Southampton are always just there, in the middle.
Dan Weintraub: Always. Maybe five or six years ago, they made the Europa League.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, they did.
Dan Weintraub: And then I think they lost to a team from Denmark.
Peter McCormack: Probably. No wonder you have anxiety!
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, I know! I'm sitting here in the light! By the way, I predict that Denmark wins the World Cup this year.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's a ridiculous idea!
Dan Weintraub: I know it is, but let me just briefly tell you why. In the European Championships, they were the most organised, the most dangerous. Granted, they had exceptional motivation, but they had the most dangerous in terms of their organisation on attack, and they were difficult to break down. England were lucky to beat them, because it was 1-0.
Peter McCormack: I was at that game.
Dan Weintraub: So, wasn't there a penalty towards the end?
Peter McCormack: I can't remember if that was the equaliser or --
Dan Weintraub: Harry Kane?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it was kind of a bit of a dive by Raheem Sterling, I think; was that right; am I right, Danny?
Danny Knowles: I can't remember.
Dan Weintraub: So, this year, someone will win the World Cup who's never won it before.
Peter McCormack: Do you know that Denmark once won the Euros?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, I do.
Peter McCormack: Was it 1992? I think it was in 1992 or 1988, and it's a really weird story, because they shouldn't even have been in the tournament. It's the year the Balkan War broke out and Yugoslavia were removed from the tournament, and so Denmark were given access and ended up winning it. That's fascinating stuff.
Dan Weintraub: So, listeners, if you want to put money -- I'm just kidding!
Peter McCormack: No, not on fucking Denmark! Okay, fine. So, as humans, we want, or desire, or need stimulation. But in this world of debt, credit, running through industrialisation and commercialisation, we now have a world which is all about more, more, more, need, need, need, and that has created a moving goalpost for stimulation, different types of stimulation, and not so much natural stimulation. How do I put it a different way? The happiest year of my life in the last 20 years was the year after my company collapsed.
After my divorce happened, after my company collapsed, I took a year off work and in that year, I decided not to work at all. At first, I was very bored, I was like, "How do you fill a day?" So, I started making food, which I'd never done before, for every single meal. And then I would go to the gym and just do whatever was on, spinning, yoga, I was doing Pilates with all the old ladies! I was walking my kids to school and back, and spending time with them in the evenings. And I was reading and watching films. It was the happiest year of my life. I wasn't chasing anything, just day to day, I was doing what I wanted to do in that day, and it was my happiest year. There were no massive highs and no massive lows.
Since then, I've built this new career, which I'm so lucky to have. I get to do some of the most amazing things, but I have bigger highs and bigger lows. I'm away from my kids for weeks on end, which sucks, with these reprobates! I'm feeling the pressure of having to make shows and make films and somebody loves something I do and it's great, and then they don't and it sucks, so I get shouted at on Twitter and I hate it. There's lots of highs and lows and the stimulation is a rollercoaster, whereas before it was just a slow-moving train. How do you explain that?
Dan Weintraub: So, I can relate, and I have always sought stimulation in myriad ways, whether it was coaching on the football pitch, whether it was travelling around the country playing music, whether it was -- I was a storm chaser for many years, living in Texas and chasing tornadoes. The adrenaline and the dopamine hit from it, that worked for me.
I got to a certain point in my life and it stopped working. All it did was make my heart pound, but the stimulation wasn't -- so, here's the thing; I'm homeless. And when I say that, I don't mean like I'm --
Peter McCormack: In a tent.
Dan Weintraub: -- in trouble.
Peter McCormack: What do you mean by that though?
Dan Weintraub: I don't have a home.
Peter McCormack: Out of choice?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah. And I don't have stuff. My entire life fits into a backpack.
Peter McCormack: Tell me more about this. Hold on, so people should know, we've not met before.
Dan Weintraub: We have not.
Peter McCormack: You emailed me and you sent me a paper and by the way, like I say, how many a month, how many people ask to come on the show a month, Danny?
Danny Knowles: Hundreds.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, like hundreds. Some we don't even read. But when anyone sends me a paper, I'll at least read their email and the intro and if I'm grabbed by it, I'll read a bit more. And then, if I really think it's something worth looking at, I'll send it to Danny and Neil, and sometimes they'll come back and they'll be like, "Yay" or, "Nay". And actually this one, you weren't sure, were you?
Danny Knowles: I wasn't 100% sure, to be fair.
Dan Weintraub: I totally assumed that I would get an email saying, "Really interesting, but…!"
Peter McCormack: It was this idea of the fiat brain and I could relate to it. I went through very bad mental health problems after the breakup of my marriage, very dark times; addictions, depression. It was fucking awful, awful. I can't tell you how rough it was. I came back out of it, okay. But when you talked about this fiat brain, I'm always conscious of the fact that I got this new life, which I just feel so blessed to have, but I always remember that year and I was still happier that year, because it was a much simpler life.
When you talk about that, I think about Steve Jobs. He didn't have shit in his house, he just didn't have stuff. And do you know who else I was also thinking about; do you know who Jiddu Krishnamurti is?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay. So, during those bad times, I was reading a lot about Jiddu, I have a tattoo of him on my leg. He talks about the accumulation of stuff like, "When you buy a house, you have to have a garden. It's a garden you have to keep. Then you have to have a fence and you have to ensure the fence is fixed". You can carry on, and I guess I would add to this, you have to have a kitchen, and in your kitchen you have to have plates and you have to have food, and there's just this accumulation of all this stuff. And with stuff, there's stuff you have to then think about and look after and prepare.
He always says, "You need a much simpler life". Actually, he also says you shouldn't fall in love, because love is mainly pain.
Dan Weintraub: I am totally with him 100%!
Peter McCormack: We can come back to love, but the idea is this simpler life. By the way, when I said come on, I don't know anything about you, because I don't know you're homeless! This is out of choice; when did this start?
Dan Weintraub: It's always been my impulse. So, my adulthood, even though I had a successful teaching career, I was a school administrator, I worked really hard to create the illusion that I was part of the mainstream, but I'm not. I've always been drawn to minimalism, even though I'll go through periods of time where I'm desperate for stimulation. So, I'll buy a $2,000 guitar and it will be fabulous for a week, and then it's like, "Well, fucking hell, I've shelled out $2,000 for a guitar that I so don't need and that I no longer get anything from it", so I give it away.
Over the course of time, I have pared away and pared away, so I crash at friends' houses. This past five months, a friend of mine who runs a school said, "Hey, I need a grown-up to live in the dorm to take care of the kids. I was like, "Fine, I'll sleep in it". It's a dorm room with a little shower and a little kitchenette. I move around.
I have kids. My daughter is grown and she's travelling around Europe and she's in college and she does her thing; and my son is 19 and he has a disability. He still goes to high school in Vermont and lives with his mum, but I see him every month or two, and we talk every day on Facetime. So, I have a phone, I pay for their phones. Other than that, I have nothing, literally. I move around, I spend time with friends, I put everything into my backpack. And when I start to accumulate stuff, like this past five months, I accumulated a coffeemaker and I accumulated a little hotpot, and then I give it away. I'm like, "I don't want this, I don't want any of this stuff".
Peter McCormack: Have you seen the film Into the Wild?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah. I read the book and I saw some of the movie and I found it really troubling, very upsetting.
Peter McCormack: Interesting. Why?
Dan Weintraub: There was something about his minimalism that struck me as desperate, like a desperation to be away from -- the throwing away of -- there was something about it that felt sad. My minimalism feels freeing. That's a projection of sorts.
Peter McCormack: But as a film and a book, did you get different things from the film and the book?
Dan Weintraub: I don't know. The film was with -- who played…?
Peter McCormack: I don't remember, but Eddie Vedder wrote the soundtrack, from Pearl Jam, and I love the soundtrack. And whenever I listen to the soundtrack, I think back to the film, and I think back to him getting rid of his car and pissing his parents off and just going off into the wild. And I often thing I would like to do this, I do.
Dan Weintraub: I think it's different when you're 19 or 20.
Peter McCormack: No, I want to do it at 43!
Dan Weintraub: No, again, these are all projections because I'm basically saying, "Hey, everybody should live my life"! I think it's better when you're older, because I know that I'm doing it because it fits me neurologically; it always comes back to neurology and my body. My body cannot contend with possessions; my body cannot contend with intimate, long-lasting relationships; my body cannot contend with being in a workplace and having lots of colleagues and having to negotiate; it just goes like this. It always has been that way and now that I'm older, I can honour it and say, "What the fuck; that's fine".
Peter McCormack: We're going to come back to love. I appreciate this, because going from that very simple life to this more complicated life, I've collected people to help get stuff done. So, Danny is part of the collection; I don't mean that in a derogative way!
Danny Knowles: Am I the best part of the collection?
Peter McCormack: I don't know, man, it's hard to -- I'll give it to Emma! But I don't mean it in a derogative way. I mean, Danny's fucking brilliant, he's one of the most brilliant people, and he runs this part, okay. But I've collected people to help me do things, but I've collected a podcast and I've collected a film career, and I've now collected a football club and there's a build-up of stuff. There was a time, and Danny knew it, when we were in Austin, about eight weeks ago?
Danny Knowles: In March, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I was in a bad way, right.
Danny Knowles: At the time, it wasn't good.
Peter McCormack: No. I had a lawsuit, I had a football club I was trying to take over, I had a collection of all this shit I'd collected that I now had to deal with. And sometimes I think of a simpler life. Could I just -- I can't, because I'm scared, but could I just let this all go and live a simpler life, knowing that year, the happiest year I had; which has taken me to my point which is, have we created an illusion of what happiness is that is keeping us away from the happiness we really should be living?
Dan Weintraub: What you just said is a cognitive thing. We create the illusion, because we create the narrative, the story.
Peter McCormack: And Instagram, for me, is the perfect example of that illusion. We give the world this illusion of happiness. Here's a snap of every happy moment I'm having, "Here, look, I'm in New York; here, I'm looking at a football match; here, I'm at a concert", I'm always happy. And then our friends are looking going, "Oh my God, they're always happy, I need to be happy". Is this the collective issue we've created?
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, I like that. I think that there is that keeping up with the Jones's part of that collective sort of, "Oh, they must be much happier, because they have these things and they're doing these activities. I must not be as happy, I should aspire to that". But it's also, we are so highly attuned to the need for a physiological, and I do this when I do that sort of gesture in front of my body, it's like, "This is our nervous system, our vagus nerve, the entirety of our nervous system". We're so attuned to needing more and more, just to feel okay. That baseline is going up and up and up, that we are pushing ourselves, we keep pushing and pushing to get that baseline stimulation.
So, when I talk about my minimalism -- look, when I heard you owned a football team, I was fucking jealous as fuck! I was like, "That is so awesome!" Then I played out the fantasy in my head, "I wish I had a great deal of wealth and then I would get a football team", and then I kept playing it out.
Peter McCormack: I think you overestimate how much Bedford cost!
Dan Weintraub: I was looking at them in the league; I was trying to figure it out.
Peter McCormack: You tell me what you think, and I'm going to tell you the reality, because it's an interesting point.
Dan Weintraub: What it cost?
Peter McCormack: No, in terms of where you run through the idea of owning a football club.
Dan Weintraub: Right. I played out the game, the same game I play out when, "I wish I was a famous musician". I play it out and it always gets to the point where I'm like, "No". I can literally feel my body going -- I can't even have a job anymore, and it's not because I'm not competent; it's because my body says no. But it's still way deep down in me, I'm still the guy who seeks stimulation, I'm still the guy who goes on dating websites and tries to go on dates. And then I go on a few dates and I'm like, "No".
I'm still the guy who fantasises about -- I play the lottery. Why the hell would I play the lottery? If I won the lottery, what? I would be miserable, I would give it all away. And then I would be like, "Giving it away, this is going to make me feel great, because I'm going to give all this money away. It's very altruistic of me, isn't it?" I would just be getting the stimulation from the false everybody being, "Oh, Dan, thank you for the money". It's not relational, it's just dopamine hits.
Peter McCormack: Let me tell you about the football club, but I'll lead up to it. Again, let's use the benchmark, the happy year, where I wasn't working and I woke up every day and I said, "What do I want to do today? I'll go down the gym, I'll go spinning, I'll go for a walk, I'll read this book". I'd go to the cinema on my own, which by the way, if you ever do that, book a ticket online, because I didn't and I got to the cinema and I was like, "Ticket for one, please", and I felt like a fucking loser!
Dan Weintraub: I do it all the time!
Peter McCormack: I know, but I would go to the cinema, I just did what I want. I would sleep well, I was just happy, it was brilliant. Then I get back into work and it becomes new goals, "Okay, I've got a podcast. I need the downloads to go up, because if the downloads go up, I can get a sponsor. I've got a sponsor, I need the downloads to go up so I can get another sponsor". That creates that kind of business growth mindset into that. We just had our third biggest month on record and I'm like, "Why the fuck's this not our second biggest month on record", so there's that constant chase there.
Then I accumulate a football club, it's my dream, my dream to own my local football club, it's amazing. It's mainly been fucking hard work and shit, people yelling at me, people pissed off, us losing. All I'm thinking about now is, "We've got to win the league, we have to win the league". And then, what's going to happen the following season? It's like, "We need to win this league".
So, I've collected these things and created these new pressures that have created these things that affect sleep, happiness, physical, mental health and I don't know why, but I've done it. But is this not the human nature? Isn't this evolutionary nature? Isn't this what got us to leap out of the oceans, to grow flippers, to walk on land, to then create fire?
Dan Weintraub: No.
Peter McCormack: Isn't there this thing that's within us?
Dan Weintraub: No, I don't buy that, I don't buy the argument that we're driven to innovate or we're driven to grow. I think, again, this comes back to the fiat brain and why Bitcoin is the saviour, down the road hopefully. You used the word "happy", you were happy. I don't mean to be patronising; I try not to use words like that, because I'm simply observing where I feel the most at home. So, when I say "at home", it's literally at home in my body.
Happiness is this story that we create, "I was happy". You might be at home in your body with all of this stuff you've accumulated and the show and the podcast and the football club. That might be your homeostatic reference point. It's just that it gets to the point where it's really stressful, or it can be, and the cortisol as coursing through your body and the adrenaline is coursing through your body, and your body says, "We can't do this".
Peter McCormack: Well, the base is higher.
Dan Weintraub: The base is higher.
Peter McCormack: Because, what happened was, I was stimulated, I had everything I needed, life was good. Now I've got all this other stuff that I really wanted; there's higher highs and lower lows.
Dan Weintraub: Which I translate into, you have times when that adrenaline, noradrenaline, endorphins, that thing, it's really maxed out and it feels fantastic.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's fucking great.
Dan Weintraub: It's great, right. I mean, why do people take meth? I haven't taken meth, haven't taken meth! It feels great. I mean, people do these things for a reason.
Peter McCormack: Well, drugs have their tolerance, and to get back to that point, they say about heroine, a drug I've never done, but they say, "You're chasing the dragon", right; you're always trying to get back to that point and you can never get there.
Dan Weintraub: Unless you take fentanyl, right, and then you die. So, yeah, I think that reference point, in terms of the fiat brain, we've escalated. Over the course of generations and centuries, it's gotten higher and higher. And even over those hundreds of years, or even just for individuals, you have a certain reference point, it doesn't work anymore, so you up the ante; it doesn't work anymore, so you up the ante; but it takes a toll on your body.
In my paper, I cited some statistics about heart attacks. It used to be that heart attacks were the dominion of 60- and 70-year-olds, 80-year-olds; it's now the dominion of 30- and 40-year-olds; what the hell's that about? My belief is that's because there's just too much cortisol, too much adrenaline in our systems, and a lot of it is because we need speed, we need more and more just to feel okay, and that is a function of fiat money, it's a function of a credit and debt economic system that essentially pushes us and facilitates us doing more and more.
The whole idea of a credit score makes me want to vomit, nails, head spin around, the Exorcist, the whole works. The idea that you should aspire to having a higher credit rating so that you can go into more debt and destroy your nervous system, that's fucked up.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that is fucked up. Okay, so how does Bitcoin fix this.
Dan Weintraub: Bitcoin?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Dan Weintraub: Over the course of time, when I came to this realisation that Bitcoin fixes this, I literally freaked out. My friends, of whom I have a few, and I've written these little things and I give them to them, and most of my friends are liberal-left ideology and they're like, "But environment; but libertarian; but ransomware", etc. I'm like, you've got to understand, beyond Alex Gladstein and his case and beyond -- for example, I have a lot of friends who are women who are pro-choice, and I said, "You know, Bitcoin will be an interesting thing, an interesting material way to transact if indeed abortion becomes illegal in certain states. And if you talk about it, if you pursue it, if you're a doctor, your bank account will be seized, just like Trudeau seized the bank accounts of the truckers", etc.
I think Bitcoin fixes this, because if we get to a point where nobody can gain the monetary system, you can't be dishonest anymore. Right now, we have deep fake videos and they're getting better and better. It's like, nobody can trust anything. Our former President, Donald Trump, can just say, "That's a lie, that's a lie", and people will say, "Well, it must be a lie. Well, they made this video; that's a lie".
Peter McCormack: But Bitcoin doesn't get rid of deep fakes, it doesn't get rid of Donald Trump lying, it doesn't get rid of those things.
Dan Weintraub: We're talking about collective memory too. I believe over generations, not only will the Bitcoin protocol vet information as well, like be an information transactional network, but we will get to a point where the memory of our fiat brains will fade.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so it's like an evolutionary stage, like our hopes and expectations 300, 400 years ago would be quite simple; our hopes and expectations now are, not everyone, but people want to be rich, successful, or just relatively well-off, or do a particular job, etc, and chase the money and chase debt to get there. Under a Bitcoin system, it doesn't eliminate it, but it just reduces it; there'll still be ambition.
Dan Weintraub: So, Jeff Booth, he always talks about, it's impossible, very hard to analyse the future, because you're in the present and that's the paradigm.
Peter McCormack: And it's distorted.
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, and it's very difficult to have imagination, because your imagination is based upon what you see now and you're influenced by that. So, when I think about Bitcoin, I think, "Okay, let's have lots of imagination". So, let's think of a time 150 years from now, where my daughter's great-great-great-grandchildren are living in a world that over the course of generations, the memory of irredeemable currency, the memory of debt and credit as an accelerant, as a neurological accelerant, has gone away slowly. Once that collective memory fades, what are we left with?
This is where I take issue with libertarianism. I think in some ways, libertarianism is saying, "I just want to do what I want to do, and I don't want anybody to really control me. I just want to be free to do what I want to do". Okay, I understand that, but we are nothing without everybody else around us and on the planet. It's not we want them to do what we want them to do or tell them to do, but we want to be able to relate to them, and to commune with them, and to interact with them.
Peter McCormack: I don't think they aren't ideas that aren't -- I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
Dan Weintraub: You're probably right.
Peter McCormack: I think you're talking a little bit like a libertarian. I feel like perhaps because you feel left-leaning, and often libertarians feel like they're on the right side of political spectrums; that's something you're trying to push away from. But I also feel like you're talking like a libertarian.
Dan Weintraub: I don't think you're wrong, and I believe that there's truth in the fact that because I grew up in a community liberal left, and that's my frame of reference, that sometimes when I hear folks espouse libertarian ideals, I look at who they are and I say, "Well, you're not really talking about personal freedom. You're using personal freedom for self-aggrandisement". So, I think that you're probably right.
Peter McCormack: But there are right libertarians, there are left libertarians as well. I feel like you talk from the libertarian left.
Dan Weintraub: I would call it the communitarian left, but maybe we're parsing words. Bitcoin provides me with this unbelievable sense of hope and imagination, because if we can get rid of, over the course of generations, a debt- and credit-based financial system, this idea of growth, growth, growth and we can slow down, then our neurological systems slow down, then that reference point slows down.
It doesn't mean that technology can't continue to advance, but it means that we slow down, we get healthier, and more and more people are living the life that you lived in that year, that blissful year, but they're not thinking of it in terms of, "I had this blissful year", it's just life. I walk five to ten miles every day.
Peter McCormack: Me too.
Dan Weintraub: My knees and ankles don't love me for it anymore, because I played too much soccer --
Peter McCormack: Football.
Dan Weintraub: That too! If I say football, it just doesn't sound right! But I do it because it just sits in my body right and it slows me down, and I do have this belief that Bitcoin provides us with, once the world slows down, we get back to that, in the last part of the paper, back to the garden, that Joni Mitchell was talking about.
Peter McCormack: Interesting. Talk to me about Fiat money as a Dialectic Monolith, Bitcoin as the Benevolent Solution. This is in here from my brother. My brother's a researcher on this show, and he said he enjoyed that article.
Dan Weintraub: Oh, good. Thanks. So actually, I put it as an addendum. So, the idea of a dialectic is you have a thesis, then you have an antithesis, that pushes back against it; the antithesis becomes the thesis, right. And then, it's like that cycle. So, the Woodstock generation, they become the Wall Street bankers, and then the new children are pushing back against them, and then their children become, whatever, the crypto people, the people on YouTube who do those silly crypto videos about like, "Oh my gosh, LUNA's going to $1 billion!" that kind of stuff.
Peter McCormack: Like Pomp!
Dan Weintraub: Where did he go, by the way; it seems like it's only his brothers now.
Peter McCormack: What are you on about?
Dan Weintraub: Pomp. Did he disappear?
Peter McCormack: I have no idea.
Danny Knowles: They just look very similar.
Peter McCormack: Maybe he's accepted that he's number two now!
Dan Weintraub: Well, he should!
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Dan Weintraub: But Bitcoin is the absolute idea. And the absolute idea in this dialectical theory is that it breaks the cycle of the dialectic. So, when we become a hyperbitcoinised standard, no longer will the children have to push back against their parents in this cycle, because the absolute ideal will break us out of that. And again, it's fiat money informed. So, the reason that it's fiat money informed is because all the kids, they go to Woodstock, and then they are compelled to join the human race, and then they get jobs and then they become lawyers and they become financiers, and all of a sudden they've eschewed that whole existence that they had that was so, whatever it was, and they've become part of the, "Got to get more, got to make the money", etc.
The beauty of Bitcoin is that it breaks that fiat dialectical cycle, and it becomes the absolute idea, where the dialectic ends. You know, there was a book written by Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a book called The End of History, and he wrote essentially his thesis was, when communism fell and the Soviet Union fell and that all went away, that that was the end of history. Now we were just going to have liberal western democracies, and this was the paradigm that was going to exist forever.
My argument is that Bitcoin is the end of history if, over the course of these generations, I mean I'm talking pretty big swaths of time, if we are fortunate enough to become a hyperbitcoinised world to the point of our collective memory of fiat and what fiat has been and is, and our collective memory of credit and debt as a way to run the world, goes away.
Peter McCormack: We reach the singularity?
Dan Weintraub: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I'm not sure I agree with this one point though. So, "In a hyperbitcoinised world, money is no longer an expression of power". I disagree with that, because I think it's human nature to, not for everyone, but certain people to want to accumulate power or express power, and we will have different levels of wealth, and some people will express power with that wealth. That one I don't buy, but I buy the potential that the swings, or the gaps between the rich and the poor are smaller, so the scale at which people can express power will be different. And I also believe people will find it easier to revolt against expressions of power as a collective.
Dan Weintraub: And I come back to neurology. I wrote a piece once about these four words: feel, believe, think and know. And it's interesting, I used to do this exercise with my students, "What do you feel; what do you believe; what do you think; what do you know?" and I would pose questions to them. They would say, "I know this to be true", and then I would say, "Are you sure you know it, or do you just believe?" We would play that.
I believe that in the future, in a bitcoinised world, how we express power changes. I don't have obviously any data to back this up, and part of it is hopefulness and part of it is trust, because I don't see human beings as being -- I don't believe in the idea that human beings are by nature aggressive, and by nature exploitative. I think that that's a rationalisation that the fiat world and people in power are able to use to defend a certain belief system.
Peter McCormack: I'm not sure. I think the males are aggressive.
Dan Weintraub: Testosterone and adrenaline. But again, back to neurology. What if we get to a point in a hyperbitcoinised world, where --
Peter McCormack: Collectives end state.
Dan Weintraub: Well, again this is big chunks of time, where adrenaline and the expression of adrenaline and the feelings generated by it didn't work. People who were aggressive were so alienated from the mainstream that people who had power and tried to exploit others based upon that power, the rush that they might have gotten, it didn't work anymore.
Peter McCormack: Well, we kind of have that at the moment. If you're aggressive to the level of criminal violence, you are excluded from society. But also, we have aggression within competitive sports, which is celebrated. We have political aggression, we have business aggression. Again, I think the extremes…
My brother always said this thing to me when I was a kid, and I like it a lot, I've always bought into it. He said, "Life is about averages". If you go and get drunk, you're going to have a hangover. If you want to go and eat a load of sugar, you're going to get fat. But if you go out and run, you're going to feel good. The hard things, you get the benefit from and the easy things, you get the negatives from. So, you've got to try and get that even state.
I feel like the end of times of fiat, we start to see these crazy charts where, whether it's Lawrence Lepard or Lyn Alden, or any kind of macro analyst, they're sharing with us crazy charts with relation to money or derivatives of money, or parts of the economic system. As the system's starting to break, things are getting extreme. I see the opposite can happen, whereby in a bitcoinised world, where we have no distortion of money, things start to level out a bit more; we get more into the averages and away from the extremes.
I can see that with your point in terms of expression of power and I can see that on the previous point with regard to aggression. I'm not sure it always goes.
Dan Weintraub: Yeah, and again, these are ideas that are, I would think, pretty far-fetched. They're far-fetched in the sense that I'm extrapolating well out into Star Trek land, when Captain Picard says, in one of the movies -- this woman who's from the past says, "Well, how do you make money in the future?" and Picard says, "Well, there is no money in the future. We don't do things for money, we do them to better ourselves and humanity" and she's like, "What? No Money?"
So, I feel like for us, we look at Star Trek and Picard and we say, "Well, that's just science fiction", and I say, "But Bitcoin is this fusion of science fiction and evolving reality, and it's impossible to know what that evolving reality could look like". Literally, in a world in which this experiment with credit and debt, and then this really messed-up experiment with irredeemable currency, if that goes away, and I believe it's going to take a long time to go away; it's not like we're going to wake up one day and governments are going to say, "Well, we're just going to --" it's going to be a mess; as that collective memory fades, who knows how it will impact us neurologically and who knows what we'll become?
Peter McCormack: I feel that's a very good ending point, maybe also a starting point! Dan, that was fascinating. I'm going to share everything you've written out with the listeners. Is there anywhere you want to send people to? Do you want them to follow you on Twitter or anything?
Dan Weintraub: So, Twitter is the only social media I use, and I only talk about Bitcoin. So literally, I'm @danweintraub, and I just make comments about Bitcoin, and that's it.
Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, I appreciate you coming in. I really enjoyed talking about this. I didn't agree with everything, but I see where you're going with this, and we will share this out in the show notes and see what people think of it. But appreciate you, man.
Dan Weintraub: And you. Thanks for the time.
