WBD547 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin for Libertarian Socialists with Ben de Waal

Release date: Tuesday 30th August

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Ben de Waal. 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.

Ben de Waal is the VP of Engineering for Swan Bitcoin. In this interview, we discuss living on bitcoin, what it means to be a libertarian socialist, the issues with capitalism and why Bitcoin should be a home for those on the left and the right.

“Left libertarianism, libertarian socialism, is the idea that you want to maximise freedom for people in general so maximising of liberty, that’s the libertarian part of it. And the socialist part of it is explaining that the best way to do that is with traditionally socialist structures, rather than more capitalist structures.”

— Ben de Waal

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Ben, how are you, man?

Ben de Waal: I'm good.  It's a pleasure to be here.

Peter McCormack: Well, you're the first guest in the Bedford studio.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it's a nice place.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming out to do this.  Wanted to talk to you for a while, as you know.  I really enjoyed your Twitter.  Yours is one of the ones I look forward to most because, as discussions, debates, arguments happen, I see you often come in with a rational perspective, often one that's quite unique; I reached out to you because of that. 

So, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, but we're not starting where I wanted to start because Danny told me something.  We've just made a show with Sahil from Unchained Capital whose big thing is, "Get on zero".  So, a lot of bitcoiners, we say, "Get off zero, get your first bit of Bitcoin", but his whole thing is, "Get on zero", and I didn't know but you've been living on Bitcoin.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, since early 2017.  So I can actually kind of give a little bit of the history there.  It was around 2010 I first discovered Bitcoin, ignored it for a year like a lot of people did.  2011, just started getting back into it, you know buy a bit, use it for something, buy a bit, use it for something, so basically on zero Bitcoin the whole time there.  Around 2013, I started doing what everyone was doing at the time, spend and replace; that was the big thing on Reddit at the time, "You should spend and replace", so, held some Bitcoin, if you spend it, replace it so you've still got the same amount of Bitcoin.  But I stopped and thought to myself, "What does that actually mean?" 

If I'm doing spend and replace, what that really means is I value Bitcoin more than I value fiat.  Why do I value Bitcoin more than fiat?  Well, okay, there are all these obvious reasons, but if I'm doing that why am I still holding fiat at all?  What's the point in holding fiat?  I can spend Bitcoin so why not simply entirely hold Bitcoin?  The opportunity cost of spending Bitcoin is the same as the opportunity cost of holding fiat that you could have exchanged for Bitcoin but didn't.

Peter McCormack: Well, I would love to do the same but I always have that fear of, well two fears: one of timing everything wrong and, if I went all in on Bitcoin, I mean now's not a bad time, but what if something happened and we halved?  I'm like, "Ah fuck!"  For it to be an economically good decision, it requires some uptime as well; but the other one is some catastrophic loss.  They're the two things that put me off.

Ben de Waal: So, catastrophic loss is the only one which worries me a little bit and I'm not that worried.  I think Bitcoin is beyond the point that catastrophic loss is going to happen.  I think it will still have a big ups and downs, but catastrophic loss, I just consider that so unlikely, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

Peter McCormack: Some people have a personal risk of a catastrophic loss through stupidity.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, okay, but by catastrophic loss there I meant more Bitcoin failing, I just don't think that's going to happen.  As for the ups and downs, that's more a case of stop measuring your worth in fiat and you don't notice them as much.  I get paid a salary denominated in US dollars, but paid in Bitcoin; so if Bitcoin goes down in fiat terms, my costs go higher, my salary goes higher by the same amount.  So, let's just say I spend 80% of my salary on living costs, I save 20% regardless of whether it turns out to be 1 million sats or 10 million sats, I'm saving 20% of my income, so going down actually just means my savings are going up.

Peter McCormack: Have you ever thought of asking if you can have your salary denominated in sats?

Ben de Waal: There's no way any company I know would pay that because Bitcoin, 10Xs from now, I'm bankrupting the company.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but do you know what you could do, you could offer it now with a slight discount, say 10%, and then when it does that 10X you say, "Well, we'll negotiate".

Ben de Waal: I could talk to them about it.  So, aside from my main job as VP of Engineering at Swan, I also do run a small consulting company.  I don't do a lot of it now because I'm focused mostly on Swan, but when I write an invoice for Bitcoiner Consulting, I write it denominated in sats, so I charge 500,000 sats an hour and that's it.  Bitcoin goes up in fiat terms I'm making more in fiat terms, Bitcoin goes down in fiat terms I'm making less in fiat terms; I don't care, I'm charging 500,000 sats an hour.  I might redenominate, I might change that if Bitcoin, for example, does go up 10X, I might change my hourly rate to 50,000 sats, but I'm not going to be changing it on a daily basis.

Peter McCormack: Did you just do the conversion rate?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I knew you were doing that!  As soon as you said that, I heard tap, tap, tap! 

Danny Knowles: I'm so bad at sats.

Peter McCormack: I am so bad at sats.  Well, there are 100 million so it's --

Danny Knowles: I'm having to capture so this is going to take --

Peter McCormack: It's a 200th of $23,500, I think; am I right there?

Ben de Waal: Something like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I could basically operate the Project Hail Mary!  We've both, well Danny's finished it, been reading this book, Project Hail Mary; do you know it?

Ben de Waal: I don't know it, no.

Peter McCormack: It's by the same guy who did The Martian.

Danny Knowles: Andy Weir I think he's called.

Peter McCormack: Andy Weir, yeah, and it's about this guy who's basically gone to try and save the Earth.  I'm going to tell you as much without giving too much away, but he ends up piloting this ship into space.  But they do a lot of math and science in it during it, well, it's a bit like The Martian really because remember he says, "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this", it's a bit similar.  So, that was a little in joke for me and Daniel over there. 

Okay, so what have you learnt from it?  If you were to say to somebody, or somebody was to come to you and say, "Ben, I'm going to do the same, I'm going to go all in Bitcoin", what are the things you've learnt, the most important lessons that you can pass across so people don't screw up their life?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, only do it if you have enough savings already that you basically have a buffer for those down times, because you need to be able to handle the idea that, if Bitcoin were to drop 50%, it means basically your prices of everything around you denominated in sats doubles, and if you don't have some kind of buffer for that you're kind of screwed. 

But then the second thing is more of the mindset thing, stop thinking in terms of the fiat value of your savings, because that is essentially irrelevant at that point.  As long as you've got those savings there and those savings are going up every month, why should you care how much the relative value was of your income versus your expenses?  As long as you're spending less than you're earning you're saving money, and those savings go up every month.

Peter McCormack: That was what Sahil said, didn't he?

Danny Knowles: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, you can't not ever think in fiat terms, because everywhere you go things are pretty much priced in fiat.

Ben de Waal: So, yes, but it probably helps that I deal with so many different fiats at the moment.  I'm paid denominated in US dollars, I live in Germany where most things around me are in euro, I'm very close to the Czech border where everything is in Czech crowns and some things I pay with an Australian credit card denominated in Australian dollars so that I can pay it off using Living Room of Satoshi using Bitcoin.

So basically, I've got US dollars, euro, Czech crowns and Australian dollars as these variable things all around.  Bitcoin is the only stable thing that I see that crosses everything for me.  So basically, Bitcoin is the stable thing and all of these other currencies, or whatever they are, are just fluctuating around it.

Peter McCormack: So, has it worked out economically; was it the right decision?

Ben de Waal: Definitely, yeah.  So, I started doing it in early 2017, just before the big runup in value.

Peter McCormack: Early 2017, we were at like $1,000?

Danny Knowles: $2,000.

Peter McCormack: $1,000 in January or February?

Ben de Waal: Something like that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you've built your buffer.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: It's better timing than Sahil!

Peter McCormack: Do you have like an app on your phone to constantly check prices so you know what you're paying?

Ben de Waal: Not so much, I generally have a feel for it.  So, because I'm kind of used to it now, I know how much things cost in sats and, sure, sometimes it goes up and then I'm like, "Oh okay, I guess the value of Bitcoin went down a bit", and usually I'm not paying Bitcoin directly.  So, there are a few places around me I can use Bitcoin directly, but obviously most places still don't take Bitcoin.  I can't go to the supermarket and buy stuff with Bitcoin; so I go to the supermarket, I buy stuff using, for example, that Australian credit card I mentioned and then I pay it off using Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Is your wife fully onboard with this?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, actually she is onboard with the idea that I do that, she doesn't feel like that's something she needs to get that involved in!  Basically, it also helps she doesn't work, she's a full-time stay-at-home mother and she's concentrating on raising the kids and everything and money is basically my responsibility in the family.

Peter McCormack: It is tempting.

Danny Knowles: It is.  My wife's not going to go for it.

Peter McCormack: She's definitely not to go for it!  I don't have a wife, but I don't think Emma would let me go for it either.  All right, man, well listen, look, there's other stuff I want to get into with you.

Ben de Waal: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: The area of Bitcoin I find the most interesting has never really been the technology, which I think people know; I don't get it and I think there are other people who are more naturally drawn to it who understand it better.  I'm always interested in the social side, the governance side, how people see the world, especially in Bitcoin world where we have lots of different competing ideologies that come together and clash at times. 

So, I'm always wanting to meet as many people as possible and understand what they think and why they think it.  So it's similar with you, I want to get into your kind of philosophy, Ben, I've got it here, as a classical anarchist, libertarian socialist, essentially a left libertarian.  There's a lot in that, come on.

Ben de Waal: There is.

Peter McCormack: Explain it all to me; what's your viewpoint, where does it come from, how do you see the world?

Ben de Waal: All right, so yeah that's the $1 million question and it's a big one as well, it's a really complex question, so I think we can discuss different aspects, discuss around it, but essentially left libertarianism, libertarian socialism, is the idea that you want to maximise freedom for people in general, so maximising of liberty; that's the libertarian part of it.  The socialist part of it is explaining that the best way to do that is with traditionally socialist structures rather than more capitalist structures.

So, capitalism and socialism are not the only two ways to manage societies, there are other concepts, but one of the best ways to understand socialism in today's world is to kind of contrast it to capitalism in today's work.  So, one of the biggest problems that socialists in general see with capitalism is the authority going to those who have capital.  If you look at the big corporations, they can control things far more effectively than most governments can, they have the power to essentially influence how people live their lives. 

A lot of people would complain and say, "Oh, you're talking about crony capitalism", I don't see a distinction, I think capitalism inevitably leads to crony capitalism simply by what it is.  If you give power to those who have capital then you no longer have a truly free society, you no longer have people having freedom. 

Peter McCormack: Do you give power to them or do you concede power to them?

Ben de Waal: Actually, that's a good way to frame it.  I would say, yeah, you concede power to them in a capitalist system but you, after a while, no longer have a choice.  If you imagine a poor person born in even a nice country, so imagine the United States for example, a poor person born in some horrible little town in the middle of nowhere US, not a lot of opportunities, they are not going to end up going and working for NASA and being a rocket scientist because they don't get the education in that little town, their parents don't get the appropriate work in that little town. 

It's not the case that you can always just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be anything you want to be; that classic American dream is a lie, that doesn't exist, and socialism recognises that.  So, what socialism is essentially largely about, the classical definition of it, is that the means of production, distribution and exchange are owned by the people and not by a centralised entity such as a corporation, and how that usually manifests is in essentially working structures. 

So, rather than having a corporation which is this entity that people are working for, you just have people coming together and working together in order to achieve goals.  That can be in a business-like structure, you can have things like worker cooperatives which are people coming together and we all own the business that we are working towards and we all get the profits from that business rather than, "I am the person who owns the business and I will pay you this amount regardless of how well the business is doing.  Maybe you can ask for a raise at some point, but that's my decision as the boss"; that's the capitalist way of doing things.

Peter McCormack: Can you not have a mix of the two?

Ben de Waal: You can, but largely it's a matter of how the society is structured, and that's where a lot of arguments actually come in with libertarian socialists is, how much do we want to say we recognise or don't recognise some of these kinds of things? 

So, one thing I always like equating it to is, in an anarcho-capitalist world view, you can have a contract which says, "Okay, I freely sign this contract to go work for these people".  Okay, can I freely sign a contract to be a slave to somebody else or is that not okay?  Is that something we would say, "Okay, even though there's a contract, we don't recognise that because we do not consider slavery acceptable".  In the same way, I would say an employment contract is something I do not consider acceptable, because you're basically making yourself a wage slave to that company.

Peter McCormack: Okay, right, lots to get into here.

Ben de Waal: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Are you basically a commie?! 

Ben de Waal: Short answer, no, because communists are generally against money and I think markets are one of the best ways to sort out the value of things in society, so I'm very much in favour of markets, very much a free market advocate.  Although, in left libertarianism, we often use the term "freed markets" rather than "free markets" to imply the difference that the markets are currently controlled and we wish to free them, we wish them to be freed rather than just free.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we have a company, there are 100 employees and you advocate for the workers owning the means of production; is it an equal share or is there structure behind that?  Is there consideration given for how long you've been at the company, how senior your role is?

Ben de Waal: That depends very much on the individual organisations.  In a small worker cooperative usually not, because it's just people coming together, for example, to sell fruit at a market, and they are all really equals.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get that.

Ben de Waal: In a larger organisation, yes, there would generally be some kind of structure and it would be structure that would be agreed by the people.  And again, exactly how that is done is a case-by-case basis.  I'm not going to sit here and claim to have all the answers; one of the big things about the libertarian side of libertarian socialism is, if I were to come and say, "Here are all the answers, this is exactly how society should be", then basically I'm now a dictator, I'm dictating, "This is how society should be", and I don't have all the answers, I don't think anyone does.  So, you aim to work towards the most equitable situation, even if you don't know what that's going to eventually look like.

Peter McCormack: So, how do you actually make the steps to get towards that?  Do you try and carve that out within the structure we've already had?  Do we try and encourage companies to think along the lines of consideration for the employees?  I mean, a good example in the UK, there's a company, you must know of John Lewis?

Ben de Waal: The name rings a bell.

Danny Knowles: It's a department store.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a department store, they've got hundreds around the country, but aren't they primarily owned by the staff?

Danny Knowles: Oh, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, look it up; there is a structure in place.  Yes they have shareholders, yes they have directors who are paid lots and lots of money, but I'm pretty sure all the staff are members.  But is that what we're essentially saying, rather than trying to create an entire new society where every company is forced via some kind of regulation to do this, it's more of an encouragement that this is the right thing to do?

Ben de Waal: That's more my preferred method, yes, but there are plenty of people who agree with me politically who would have other methods like revolution, violent anarchy, that kind of thing; I don't advocate for that, I think that's a bad way to go about it.  I think you're more likely to end up with despotism, people basically seizing power and then controlling things in a far less free situation when you do that.  But that said, we do have examples in the real world of societies which had crumbled so much that they could then rebuild themselves in a more libertarian socialist kind of way.

One of the good ones there as an example is Rojava, that's the north-eastern Syria administrative region.  So, the war in Syria basically completely decimated everything and, about ten years ago, Rojava established itself as a libertarian socialist state independent of Syria from their perspective.  So far, I think nobody recognises them other than Catalonia, which also nobody recognises as an independent state, so okay, but they are self-administering and they are a libertarian socialist society.  They're definitely not perfect, they've definitely done things which are not in line with libertarian socialist ideals.

Peter McCormack: Such as…?

Ben de Waal: There was, a few years ago, some concerns from humanitarian groups about children being used in the army there, there were some concerns about treatment of prisoners.  But that said, unlike pretty much everything else in that part of the world, they've abolished the death penalty, there are rights for prisoners, treating them how they should be treated.  Feminism is a part of the platform of the group who are organising -- I'm not going to even call them a government because it's libertarian socialism – so, yeah, the group who are organising have considered feminism as a strong part of the system.  So they are, I would say, better politically than pretty much everything else around them.

Peter McCormack: But if they're not government what are they?  How do they self-organise?

Ben de Waal: I'm going to call them an organising group.

Peter McCormack: But isn't that what government is?

Ben de Waal: To an extent.  So that's where you actually have to come into the question of what is government and what even is a society?  And that, you're getting into some deep philosophical things there.  We are human beings, we're just an advanced ape sitting on a rock spinning around the sun, and we make up these ideas like government and cooperations and borders and that sort of thing.  That's not a bad thing to make up, it helps us organise, it helps us give a better world, but sometimes we make up things which are suboptimal, and government is one of those things where perhaps it started off as, "These are the people who we should get to help us organise and make some decisions", but it's largely turned into, "These are the people who make the rules that we have to follow", and that's a problem.

Peter McCormack: Did you find anything?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it is owned by a trust on behalf of its employees and bonuses paid out on the profits.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it can happen.

Ben de Waal: Absolutely.  So unions are often also seen as an example of an attempt to move towards more libertarian socialist ideals within a capitalist society.

Peter McCormack: Are you pro-union?

Ben de Waal: Only insofar as I think in the societies that we live in that have unions, yes, a bit, but I think those societies are fundamentally broken and the better way than having unions is to fix the society.  So, I consider unions a good Band-Aid in a bad situation, but in a well-functioning society we wouldn't need them.

Danny Knowles: So, are you kind of aligned with the anarchists from the Thatcher era?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, I would say most anarchists from that era probably are more libertarian socialists, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Is any amount of government useful?  I know, from meetings so many people on this podcast, there are a range of views; there are libertarians who believe in no government and there are libertarians who believe in minimal government or small government, so there is that range that exists.  I would say I largely agree with the majority of what libertarians say, but I don't agree with no government.  I think I almost think that governments are like a natural monopoly that will always happen, we always will have structure.

Ben de Waal: So yeah, I think that's actually again then coming back to the question of what is government?  So, do you need a group of people who help organise everything?  I think yes.  Do you need a group of people who define laws?  No, I think laws can be defined by the collective as a whole and then organised by that organising group who are very easy to change out. 

I do have to say I don't know a lot to some of these questions, because I don't know what the future looks like and I don't know how things would progress as we move more in that direction.  Maybe, at some point, we would get to a point where we could say, "Hey, look, government actually isn't necessary at all, we can get rid of them", or maybe we'd get to a point where we say, "Okay, we actually need to have these particular structures here which are fulfilling some of the things that governments used to do, but not all".  So, it really is an open question.

Peter McCormack: Have you not considered moving out to this place in Syria?

Ben de Waal: No, because it's Syria!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I find these topics really interesting, but I wonder if often we're just discussing theories that are too far from reality to actually happen.

Ben de Waal: So, yes, but that's why you do it as a stepwise approach.  So, a lot of people I've noticed, especially on Twitter, they like to counter me by saying I'm imagining a utopia.  No, I'm not imagining any particular world, but they've kind of got this idea in their head that I've got this perfect utopia that I've imagined and, you know, everyone has to corporate and be nice with each other and we don't need government because everyone's cooperating and being happy; that's ridiculous.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree.

Ben de Waal: I don't think that, I've never thought that and, to me, that's almost just like this point and a strawman argument that I can dismiss.  But I don't have this end goal in mind, so rather than saying, "I'm imagining some kind of world which is so abstract", or whatever, I would rather actually say, "Let's focus on the things right now that we can move towards more libertarian socialism", rather than saying, "Here's an end goal that we have to try to get to".  So, it's recognise hierarchies that needn't exist and then get rid of them.

I hope to never again have an employment contract, for example.  Right now, my contract with Swan is as a contractor and, to me, that's a much more libertarian socialist approach, because I am on equal terms with them; they're not directing me as such as we have an agreement between us as to how we will work and that's it.

Peter McCormack: But is what is wrong with the contract?

Ben de Waal: So, employment contracts in general essentially are this controlling structure which say, "You are going to get this amount of money for doing this work regardless of what you're bringing into the company".  I'm not saying being a contractor is that different, I mean really I'm still also getting paid the same amount regardless of how much value I bring to the company. I would like to see it even the next step, so worker cooperative-style where I'm getting more if the company makes more, I'm getting less if the company makes less.  I'd like to see that kind of thing happening, but right now I can't only work in that kind of environment, there are just not enough opportunities out there.

Peter McCormack: But you do need a contract or do you feel like, because the company holds the jobs, they have leverage over the individual?

Ben de Waal: So, yeah, contract is actually one of those difficult things, because one of the big differences between socialist thought and capitalist thought is on what property is and the idea of legal fictions.  So, a company is a legal fiction, it doesn't actually exist as an entity, you can't touch a company, you can see a company, a company exists on paper and is enforced by the laws and the government saying that that is a real thing.  In the same way, ownership of shares in a company, it's purely a legal fiction; and a contract to work with somebody, or even an employment contract, are again this type of legal fiction.

Generally speaking, socialism is a political viewpoint where you reject the existence of those things to begin with.  So, we make a very big difference between the idea of private property and personal property; socialists tend to be against private property and for personal property.

Peter McCormack: Are you the same?

Ben de Waal: Yes.

Peter McCormack: So, explain the difference.

Ben de Waal: Exactly, yeah.  So, private property is property that exists as one of these legal fictions, personal property tends to be stuff you can touch and hold.  So, you know, I have a water bottle here, this is my property, I have it.

Peter McCormack: You can't touch Bitcoin.

Ben de Waal: You can virtually touch your private keys to your Bitcoin.  Bitcoin held on an exchange, for example, yeah, that's more or less a fiction and I'd be very concerned about that, so not your keys, not your coins.  I actually think Bitcoin lines up very well with the libertarian socialist viewpoint for exactly that reason, you know, people saying, "Not your keys, not your coins", to me, that's a socialist statement.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so no private property but okay with personal property?

Ben de Waal: Yes.

Peter McCormack: But would you not consider a company personal property as well?  I consider my podcast property.

Ben de Waal: So, yeah, but that's private property and actually, I'm sorry to say, but in a libertarian socialist society, no, your podcast is not a thing that you own.  This table is a thing you own, these microphones, the agreements that you have with the people who work with you, like Danny, these cameras, all of that stuff is your property and out of that you are making a podcast which makes you money and that's great; I'm very much in favour of that.  But to call What Bitcoin Did a property, I would disagree because I don't think it exists as a thing, it's a virtual concept.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let's try and unwrap why it may be useful for it to be a thing, and you can break it down.  So, it's useful to be a thing because it's, say, a brand and it has a structure and an output and, at some point, somebody may want to buy that company from me.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So I might what to sell you this table, but I might want to sell you the podcast, and with the podcast you get the brand, the structure, the team, the history of shows, and so that's an entity I want to sell.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, and that's what I consider problematic.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.

Ben de Waal: If you are able to do that then you are now building a society where those who have capital have power, you're building a society with less freedom because being able to sell this virtual thing essentially gives you capital power over those who do not have these things.

Danny Knowles: So how would you ever transfer a business?

Ben de Waal: Essentially, if somebody wanted to buy all of the stuff for What Bitcoin Did, they would buy the cameras, they would buy maybe even the digital copies of past shows for example, but they would just go ahead and they would make a new show.  Intellectual property I also don't consider to be --

Peter McCormack: Well, I was going to come to that.

Ben de Waal: Intellectual property is basically another type of private property and I don't consider it to be something valid in a good society.

Peter McCormack: We'll come back to that because that was my next question.

Danny Knowles: Just quickly, in that scenario, would the subscribers be personal property, because that's a large part of the value in a podcast, for example?

Ben de Waal: You don't own other human beings.

Danny Knowles: No, but do you own that subscription?

Ben de Waal: You might own an agreement with those people but they are free to make agreements with other people as well, so they might make an agreement with a new podcast.

Peter McCormack: So you never sell the company; what happens is, if I just don't want to do it anymore, I just leave it and, say if it's Danny and Jeremy, they could find a new host or Danny can take over as a host, but basically I'm free to join it and I'm free to leave it, but I'm never free to sell it?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, because there's no "it" to sell from the libertarian socialist perspective.  So, it's not that we're saying you can't sell your company, we're just saying the company doesn't exist.

Peter McCormack: I'm trying to work it through in my head, Danny.  You see where I'm lost?

Ben de Waal: It is a very different way of looking at things and, when you're used to capitalist structures, it doesn't come easy to think of these kind of things because you're used to the idea of virtual property, you're used to the idea of these imaginary things like companies being something.

Peter McCormack: I know it has its flaws, but it does create a meritocracy where you can create things and sell things and benefit from that and live the life you choose to live, and I know there are other people who don't have the opportunity.  So, we're all lucky in this room in different ways.  We're lucky that we were born in western liberal democracies, not really under authoritarian rule, stable economies, good parents, got a chance to go to a good school. 

Some people are born to super shit situations; they can be born in the UK.  I mean, we just made a film, we're covering some pretty underprivileged areas, there are people who don't have good parents or don't have a good chance to get into an education.  Some people break free of that and do very well, but there is a consistent pattern with those who come from good and bad backgrounds and what they achieve.  Then you've got people who are not even born in this country and may be born in shitty countries with no opportunity.  So what you're trying to do here is create more equitable opportunity but not equitable outcome?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, exactly.  It increases equitable opportunity by increasing liberty.  I mean, essentially if you're really think about it, liberty is the freedom to do what you want to do within your means.

Peter McCormack: But then isn't there a contradiction, because if I want the freedom to do what I want to do, I might want to create a company?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, but then other people would have to recognise that, so the whole idea there is whether or not it's "recognised". 

Peter McCormack: Legally recognised.

Ben de Waal: Legally is just societally so, sure.  If it's societally recognised that companies exist, then you can sell your company, but I would aim for a society where it's not recognised that companies exist.

Danny Knowles: I don't want to get caught up on that analogy, but the thing I'm really struggling with is that, over the last four or five years, or however long you've been doing the podcast, all that sort of time and effort has been to build the audience and make it a full business now with multiple employees that makes money.  And if you go to sell it, it's worth more than just the cameras and the table and microphones, so how do you value that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think what Ben's getting at is, if I do do that, I suddenly have more capital.  It's like that old term, "The first million's the hardest", once you've got money it's easy to make money and accumulate more capital and more capital.

Danny Knowles: But to someone buying it, it is worth more than the physical goods.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a different point.  There is that, what you're saying, but what Ben's getting at, correct me if I'm wrong, you're getting at the negative externalities of allowing that to happen in that you get this widening wealth gap, rich and poor, you give power to those who have the capital; you know, we are seeing that. 

In some ways we're seeing that now in that we've never lived in such an abundant society, like the United Kingdom is a very wealthy country relatively, yet we have, what is it, 40% of the country living in fuel poverty, I don't know how many kids are living in poverty, but it's quite high.  What you're trying to say is there's enough money or enough capital in the world for there not to be such unequitable distribution.

Ben de Waal: Exactly, and I think you can actually use Bitcoin as another good example of that.  There's been a relatively strong thing that people have been saying recently about Bitcoin represents energy, and people describe that in different ways; but value, in a lot of ways, can be similarly thought of as the amount of energy that a group produces or uses.  The more energy you produce or use, the more value you can generate from that, and Bitcoin is like this perfect monetary equivalent from the energy, because of the way proof of work works.

As a society is generating a certain amount of energy, you can split that in different ways, and capitalism essentially concentrates that to those who already have.  So the more you have, the more you will gain; the less you have, the less you will gain.  So capitalism almost definitionally ends up splitting people into the haves and have-nots; you're pushing more and more to those who have, they are getting richer and richer, and the poor are getting poorer.

Peter McCormack: Is there a risk that you destroy incentive structures which advance society?  So, we may have more advanced medicine, and then somebody could say, "Yeah, but now we have also the incentive for companies to sell bullshit that you don't need".

Ben de Waal: Yes, exactly.

Peter McCormack: There are both sides to that, but is there a risk that we do destroy incentives?

Ben de Waal: So straightforward, yes.  I think, even with all of the negative things I say about capitalism, things have done pretty well under capitalism for quite a long time, I'm not sure how many of those things are directly attributable to capitalism though.  Maybe, if we had a libertarian socialist society, we still would have developed a lot of great things, maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more, who knows?  It's possible that the capitalist structure, like you say, it does incentivise things because you've got a lot more competition happening directly at kind of a grander scale; but also, like you said, it incentivises bullshit as well.  In Germany, and I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but --

Peter McCormack: Do it, man.

Ben de Waal: In Germany, if you go to your local pharmacy and say, "I need something for a headache", there's a very good chance they're going to give you homeopathic sugar pills which do literally nothing for your headache.

Peter McCormack: What?  Why?  Why don't they just give you Nurofen?

Ben de Waal: Because the sugar pill manufacturer is allowed to sell it as if it's medicine, and there's nothing stopping them doing that and the pharmacy will make more money off it, because they can put a bigger mark-up on it.  So, if you want something that actually works, you walk in and you ask for the thing that you want.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but in a libertarian socialist society with maximum liberty, they could still sell products like that.

Ben de Waal: Yes, but they don't have as many incentives to anymore.  Basically, the incentive structure that causes that sort of thing to happen is largely disappearing, because you no longer have this strong motivation to make more money off the money that you have, you instead have motivation to make money off productive useful work.

Peter McCormack: Why?

Ben de Waal: Making money off money is essentially what capitalism allows. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but in the end you still want to make money, because the more money you have, the more things you can do.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, you might want a bigger house, you might want to have two holidays a year, you might want to drive a nice car, you might want to have a helicopter, you might to have a yacht, there are always new targets.  Those targets will still exist, you will still have the markets, so I still will have an incentive to be successful and I might realise, "Hey, I can make more money selling these sugar pills and manufacturing this".

Ben de Waal: Yeah, and I think some people absolutely would try and some people might even be reasonably successful at it, but I think you are more likely to be successful at selling something which people actually want to buy again.  So, if somebody has a headache, they're more likely to be buy Nurofen than they are to buy sugar pills once they have tried both.

Peter McCormack: But isn't that going to happen in a capitalist society?

Ben de Waal: To an extent, perhaps yes, but I think less so, because in the capitalist society, you've got these structures that allow people to be producing more unproductive bullshit basically.

Peter McCormack: I think that is certainly true, I'm just not sure it works with your sugar-pill analogy.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, perhaps my analogy wasn't the best one, but yeah.

Danny Knowles: After saying, "Let's not get caught up in the analogy", I'm totally caught up in the analogy.

Peter McCormack: Me too.

Danny Knowles: What I struggle to get my head around is, even if, in this world, you can't sell What Bitcoin Did as a business, are you not just choosing to ignore value?  Those subscribers, unless I'm thinking of this completely wrong, they are valuable and so you can ignore it, but it's still there.

Ben de Waal: So, they are valuable, but you would basically be choosing to either walk away from them or not walk away from them in the same way that if I sell fruit on the corner, I have regular customers, the fact that they trust me to sell them nice fruit, it has value.  But if I choose to stop selling fruit then that's my choice and that basically just disappears.

Danny Knowles: But that seems like an inefficiency.  So, if you wanted to buy the podcast, that's, I don't know, a five-year head start, as opposed to starting fresh just with our cameras if you just buy the physical things; so how do you square that when something is valuable, and you're just choosing to not take it?  Does it take a mind shift for everyone?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it does take a mind shift for everyone, yeah, it takes enough people agreeing that that is the way that society works.  I think that's why it's best done as a slow approach by just finding and identifying the inefficiencies or the unnecessary hierarchies first, so find those, eliminate them and see how society builds.  Again, this is one of those questions which is more towards the perfect utopian society in the future, which I deliberately don't try to imagine.  So, exactly what that would look like, I don't know, and I don't have a good answer to the question here, "What about the value of the subscribers?"  I think it's possibly an inefficiency which is worth it.

Danny Knowles: Right.

Peter McCormack: I think perhaps maybe one of the issues with some of the ideas is I think they ignore human nature, and I think we have an innate human nature to organise, lead, we have people who want to lead, who desire to lead.  We also have people who actually don't want to lead, they want to work. 

Look, I've run companies and, within the companies, you have a structure, you have a CEO, you have a board, you have management teams, and you have some people who want to sit on a board table and be at board meetings.  The other people, they're just, "I just want to turn up and just tell me what the fuck to do and just pay me".  I'm sure everyone wants to have part of the business, but everyone wants more of the business.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When you say you have to have enough people who want this, maybe there just never will be enough people who want this.

Ben de Waal: Possibly not, but actually I would also push back a little bit on it being innate human nature and I would say it's the nature of people who have grown up in that system.  If you go back 1,000 years and you look at the feudal societies of Europe, I don't think you had a lot of people who, amongst the plebs, who really wanted to be, you know, running a corporate structure --

Peter McCormack: Hold on, you don't think the serfs wanted to be the lords?

Ben de Waal: Yes, but that's a different thing, that's not wanting to be running a corporation, that's wanting to be in a better status in life, and I think everyone wants to be in a better status in life regardless.  Like you were saying before, you know, there's always the next thing, the nice car, the helicopter, whatever, and that's why I'm an advocate of free markets still, I don't say, "Get rid of markets", I don't say, "Get rid of money", I think communism is this utopian ideal because of that.  You can't do that, that goes against human nature, but identifying the unnecessary hierarchies and getting rid of those, I think works better.

Yeah, what I was saying about the feudal societies, they didn't have an idea of corporations, the idea of a company, it was just people coming together and doing things.  A butcher shop back then, or a goldsmith, or whatever, they were people applying themselves to do a trade, and if they stopped doing that trade, then things like the trust relationship they had with their customers is gone in the same way we were talking about subscribers before.  So, we haven't always lived in a capitalist society and I think capitalism is not inevitable and not necessarily human nature, it's just something that we have gotten used to.

Peter McCormack: But perhaps that's just part of evolution, we evolved away from feudalism, now we have this new societal structure, we do have new laws; one of the things that's come out of that is we have regulations.  So, back then, if you were, I don't know, a castle builder you would just build the castle, but now you're a housebuilder, you build the house, but there are certain regulations, certain things you have to do so you ensure you don't build structures that crumble, you know, certain buildings that have to be able to survive certain weather conditions.  Have we not evolved to do things for the betterment of society? 

Yes there are weaknesses in there, yes there are inefficiencies in there, yes there are things that we can complain about, but you can criticise every single structure, but are we not coming evolving naturally to where we should be?

Ben de Waal: I don't know, would be a very good answer to that.  It's possible that humanity evolves towards capitalism and then stays there, but I think it would be naïve to say we know that for sure.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I'm going to interrupt; people hate it when I interrupt, I apologise.  So, I just want to get this point, because it's like capitalism is essentially the accumulation of stuff.

Ben de Waal: Capitalism is the ability to control society by the accumulation of stuff.

Peter McCormack: I don't see it as that, I think capitalism is the accumulation of stuff.  I think a fair observation is that it leads to the ability to control parts of society, but under feudalism there was control.

Ben de Waal: Absolutely, it was a much more direct and dictatorial control and much authoritarian, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we've actually got less authoritarian in a capitalist society, but I see it as the accumulation of stuff, but isn't that just like an innate evolved part of biology?  If you look at any animals, or go back, they need food, always the one thing you need every day, the Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, one of them is food.

Ben de Waal: It is.

Peter McCormack: So, we used to be scavengers and hunter gatherers and then we learnt about farming and so we created farms and then we would be able to hold product and the yield from the farm and store it and then have to protect that, but it's the accumulation.  We're just accumulating crazy now because we want different stuff.

Ben de Waal: Sure, I don't disagree with any of that except that, when we're talking about the accumulation of stuff, like I said, I have no problem with that, I think that's a natural thing in a market and humans want stuff, we want a better life, we want to be happier, and stuff generally makes us happy. 

Danny Knowles: Well, we hope it does.

Ben de Waal: We hope stuff makes us happy, maybe.

Peter McCormack: Hats make me happy.

Ben de Waal: Hats are good, yeah; I spent far too much on this one, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: Oh, now I want to know; you can't say that!

Ben de Waal: We'll talk about it later.

Peter McCormack: We'll talk about that later. 

Ben de Waal: All right.

Peter McCormack: Did you price it in sats?

Ben de Waal: No, I've had this one for much longer.

Peter McCormack: So, I bought a hat off Jimmy Song once in sats.

Danny Knowles: It's on the table out here.

Peter McCormack: Is it on the table?  I can't wear it because it depresses me because I actually know how much I paid in an auction and now I know what it costs me, now it's probably the most expensive cowboy hat in the world!

Ben de Waal: Which is why, actually to get back to what I was saying right at the start, the opportunity cost for spending Bitcoin is the same as the opportunity cost for spending fiat that you could have exchanged for Bitcoin but didn't.  Don't think of it as an expensive hat, think of all of the pounds that you had sitting around that you didn't exchange for Bitcoin at that point in time.

Danny Knowles: Makes it even worse!

Peter McCormack: No, that's a real click, that's a lightbulb moment, Danny.  We're going to need some more Bitcoin, man.  No, that's right, you're right, you're fucking right.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, Sahil explained it, you explained it earlier, but that's the first time it's properly clicked.  When I compare it to all the stuff I've bought in Bitcoin and I'm like, "Shit, why did I pay in Bitcoin?" but if I'd just put all my fiat in…

Ben de Waal: Yeah, and it's the exact same thing, if you bought that hat with fiat, that was fiat you could have exchanged for Bitcoin but didn't because you preferred the hat, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with buying a hat if you want a hat.  But if you think about the value of that hat and what it potentially could be in the future, maybe you want it, maybe you don't; that's your choice.

Peter McCormack: Right, you can't use that to take me away from where we were though.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, okay.  Where were we?

Peter McCormack: Right, so rules are not rulers.

Ben de Waal: Yes.

Peter McCormack: How do you establish rules without rulers, and how do you enforce rules without rulers?

Ben de Waal: So, yeah, I love that quote, "Rules without rulers", that is the kind of classic anarchist thing along with, "No gods, no masters", but how do you establish rules?  Essentially by agreement, and agreements can get very complex, they can be between individuals, they can be between groups of people, they can be between large groups of people who agreed that somebody else should temporarily represent them in order to make an agreement at an even larger scale.

This is where you get into an interesting question, and I know there are a lot people of who would strongly disagree with me here, I think the US Founding Fathers were essentially libertarian socialists.  I think they were anarchists, and what they were attempting to do with federalism was really to establish a more fear kind of society where smaller groups of people are making agreements between each other.  The states just got too large and too unwieldy over time.

Peter McCormack: I don't completely disagree with you.  I mean, I would have to go and spend a bit of time offline researching that, but I certainly feel there's a definite strong libertarian bent to the Founding Fathers.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I think there was a lot of desire for liberty and freedom, and we've talked about the Constitution.  I've got that mini Constitution book actually, but we've talked about it a lot recently, I find it fascinating.  I think you might be right; I actually think one of the problems with the US right now is the federal government has got too big.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, the federal government is far too big and has too much power, but I would even say the state governments are too big and have too much power, because the states are too large and unwieldy; they are no longer groups of people who can get together and organise amongst themselves, which is what they were at the time that all of those documents and things were written. 

The time the US Constitution was written, there were just a few towns in each state and the towns, everyone knew each other, and they could get together and make agreements with each other and then they could send representatives to say, "Hey, here's what we agreed in our town", and that becomes the Congress.

Peter McCormack: Right.  When I meet libertarians or speak to people about this, you get a lot of people who say that "I'm libertarian [or] I'm right-wing libertarian"; very, very rarely you hear left-wing libertarian.  Do you think it's fair for someone to call themselves left or right-wing libertarian?  The wing implies a political ideology whereas libertarianism itself is kind of like the idea of little to no state.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.  So, I do think it's fair but only in a more traditional standpoint where you essentially look at the left/right as being an economic situational divide rather than being a political divide.  So, if you recognise private property as being a valid thing and no difference between personal and private property you're probably more right-wing, if you recognise that divide you're probably more left-wing.

If you recognise that people shouldn't be able to own certain things because they are just naturally existing, for example, the air that I am breathing right now, we all agree hopefully that nobody owns that and nobody should be able to own it; what about water flowing in a river?  Well, some people will say you can own that, other people will say you can't.  Then, what about a factory that produces stuff?  Right now, most people will say you can own that, and very, very few people will say you can't, but where is the divide?  Where do you draw the line and say, "This is something which is ownable and this is something which is not ownable?"  That's basically where you are on the left/right spectrum.

The furthest to the right says you can own literally anything, you can own this air that I'm breathing and say, "This is my air, I'm selling it to you", that's the ultimate far right, and I think that's totally crazy.  The ultimate far left is, you cannot own anything at all, property does not exist, take what you can and what you have in your hands is yours and nothing else, and if somebody can fight you for it and take it then they now own it; I also disagree with that.  I think both of those extremes are absolutely ridiculous.  Somewhere along there is reasonableness, it's generally more towards the centre, but I fall on the left of that centre.

Peter McCormack: Right, so are there libertarian centrists?

Ben de Waal: I would imagine so but I've never met one.

Peter McCormack: Because you get centrists; I think of myself as a centrist, but I don't think of myself as a centrist where I'm straight down the middle on every issue, I consider myself as a centrist whereby I don't feel like I'm particularly attached to the left or the right on any particular issue.  "What is the issue?  This is what I think".

Ben de Waal: Have you seen the 2X's Political Compass?

Peter McCormack: I think so.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it's basically up/down, so the top/bottom is authoritarian to libertarian, the left/right is basically traditional left/right, and then you generally fall within one of those quadrants.

Peter McCormack: Have you got it, Danny?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Ben de Waal: Most US political parties, for example, are in the top right.  They move around within the top right, but even the US Democrats, they're definitely not left, they are authoritarian right-wing.  They're less right-wing than the Conservatives, I think they're probably slightly more authoritarian, I don't really recall, but yeah, they are both authoritarian and they are both right-wing. 

So, then you've got people like the fascists, and fascism is extremely right-wing and extremely authoritarian, so that's the top right of the top right box.  But then you've got people like the authoritarian communists, and they tend to be the top left box, so they're left-wing but they're extremely authoritarian.

Peter McCormack: But you get left-wing fascists as well, right?

Ben de Waal: Fascism, by definition, is right-wing, so actually no.  You get left-wing dictators; you get left-wing authoritarians.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, weren't the Nazis left-wing fascists?

Ben de Waal: The Nazis were right-wing, absolutely.  They called themselves national socialists, but the first people they rounded up and got rid of were socialists.

Peter McCormack: So they tricked people?

Ben de Waal: It was a marketing tactic in the same way that, you know, the People's Republic of North Korea is neither for the people nor a republic.

Peter McCormack: Democratic republic!

Ben de Waal: Yeah, Democratic Republic of North Korea!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it's not democratic, it's not for the people and it's not a republic.  Yeah, the Political Compass is a nice thing; there's a website where you can actually basically take a test and ask a bunch of a questions and you answer them and it gives you a point.  By no means is that definitive.  Yeah, that's the one.

Peter McCormack: So where do you place yourself?

Ben de Waal: I place myself near the lower left of the lower left box, so definitely not all the way to the left but somewhere kind of in that bottom left corner.

Peter McCormack: All right.  Danny, where do you think you are?

Danny Knowles: I definitely think I'd probably be more to the right.

Peter McCormack: I think I'm right in the middle of the crosshairs.

Ben de Waal: It'll be interesting to see where you are on the up/down scale actually.

Peter McCormack: I really don't want to say that I'm anything authoritarian though.

Danny Knowles: No.

Ben de Waal: But authoritarian, it's not necessarily only for what we traditionally think of as government.  Are you in favour of the idea that the boss of a company can basically tell his employees, "You have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this", regardless of what your employment contract said; your employment said, "You're a server at McDonald's but now I'm asking you to sweep the floor so you have to have to sweep the floor?"

Peter McCormack: No, I have employees, they have the things they're going to do and sometimes I ask them to do other things, like yesterday, Danny helped me put the couch together, but if he went, "No, fuck off", I wouldn't say, "No, you have to".

Ben de Waal: Right, yeah, so that makes you more towards the libertarian and less towards the authoritarian.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay; it's so complicated.  Do you what I think?  My simple version of this is that we have too many competing ideologies.

Ben de Waal: We do, yes.

Peter McCormack: One of things you notice when you make a show like this is how people get angry against other ideologies.  So, what'll happen is, when your show goes out on YouTube, I think you'll have a few people who won't agree with you.

Ben de Waal: Oh yeah, there are going to be a lot of people saying, "I don't understand what the word 'liberty' means, I don't understand libertarianism", there may even be a couple of people who say, "You're not even a real socialist because X, Y, Z".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I'll have people go, "Why the fuck are you inviting him on?" etc. 

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: The interesting thing is the more people you speak to with a wider variety of ideas, I think actually it can make you become a little bit more balanced yourself; I find that for me, maybe not for anyone else.  But how do you create a society or a structure that keeps as many people happy as possible?  Now, obviously the US, as a republic, has attempted that, you can vote with your feet.  What is that Balaji talks about?  "Vote with your feet is more powerful than the ballot because you can just move", yeah, it's great.

Ben de Waal: To an extent.

Peter McCormack: To an extent, but you're still within the US federal system, but like how do you do that?  I can only ever come back to democracy, and I know a lot of people don't like democracy, but at least within the democratic structure, certainly in a western liberal society, you have the ability to vote and get rid of, and it is inherently flawed.

Ben de Waal: It is.

Peter McCormack: There are so many issues with it, but we if we eradicated it and replaced it with, say, what you believe you in, there will be plenty of people that will criticise issues with that as well.

Ben de Waal: You'll probably be happy to hear I am a fan of democracy on a small scale.

Peter McCormack: Yes, and that's the problem.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, democracy at large scale falls prey to popularism and you get basically people promising a bunch of cool stuff and then everyone just like, "Yeah, okay, let's go do that", and then it doesn't work; that's the problem with democracy at large scale.  So, I'm a fan of democracy at small scale, I think it's the best way for self-organising groups in a libertarian socialist society to come up with, "Okay, what is it that we are doing as a group?"  They will say, "Okay, let's vote on this and, yes, some of us are going to be unhappy but at least it's only on this small local thing and, if I don't like it, vote with my feet and go to another group who does like". 

So, essentially get rid of the big scale politics, go down to smaller scale and a lot more localism in that way, and I think democracy works extremely well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I can get behind that.  We've talked a lot in the UK for having felt like decades now about devolution.  We have now, in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales have the ability to set some of their own rules on certain things; I think education is still free in Scotland, as an example.  Then they've talked about maybe, it's never happened, but being able to do it regionally and allowing regionally for local governments to be able to set their own rules, which I also think is a great idea and I would love to see that; it probably will sadly never happen.  But in every one of those scenarios, we still have the state to an extent.

You see a scenario without a state, but is there any part of the state that you think there are certain things the state does well?

Ben de Waal: Absolutely, I love things like a good public healthcare system.  I really think the UK's public healthcare, for example, there's no comparison in places that don't have something like it.

Peter McCormack: It's crumbling though at the moment.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, okay, but I think that could be for other reasons, I don't know the UK well enough to say, but maybe it's for a bunch of reasons.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think one the reasons is, I mean, it's efficient because it's a government-run system, and unfortunately the NHS is sacred in the UK, it's sacred in it's very hard to criticise it because it's, "We have the NHS", and we're proud of the NHS, but it's very inefficient.  My mother worked for it and the horror stories she used to tell me of the amount of bureaucracy and bullshit -- I volunteered in the hospital for a while, I saw it myself.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, I live in Germany, I understand bureaucracy.

Peter McCormack: Then you get it.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, Germany's famous for being efficient; Germany is not efficient, Germany is bureaucratic and, once upon a time, that probably meant efficiency, but realistically now it just means a thousand pieces of paper that you carry between a thousand different locations in order to get anything done.

Peter McCormack: I am very proud of the NHS in that I've heard the horror stories in the US, friends of mine who've had things that have happened and they don't have insurance, or they've got the wrong insurance, or the wrong ambulance turns up, or they've only got over cover for this part and not that part, or people lives have been destroyed because they broke a leg and they couldn't afford -- and I know Tom Woods and some of the other libertarians out there absolutely hate and criticise free healthcare, because it's not free and whatever, but I do like it and I don't think people want rid of it in this country.

I can identify what I think some of the problems with – Danny, if we had a vote in the UK whether to keep or get rid of the NHS, what do you think the stay/leave thing would be?

Danny Knowles: 90%-plus probably.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, maybe even more, 95%, maybe 98%.

Danny Knowles: It would probably be lower than it would have been, actually maybe not, after COVID.  Yeah, it's pretty high, it would be unanimous I think.

Peter McCormack: Some of the problems with the NHS right now is the backlog from COVID, we do have massive backlogs in operations and waiting times.  Also I think another problem with the NHS, it can never have enough funding.  Every political campaign is like, "We're going to put another £20 billion into the NHS", and I don't know where it goes, and I don't know if it's because medicine has become so advanced since -- I mean, when did the NHS start?  Find out when it was launched; do you know this?

Ben de Waal: I don't, but I can kind of answer where the money's going and that's more bureaucracy, and that's kind of the problem with a government, so I'm assuming here, obviously I don't know, but that's a problem with government-run things compared to things that are organised by groups.  This is where I'm making the distinction again of a government being something which sets and defines rules versus an organising group which is simply people who say, "Okay, this is what we're doing together and what we've agreed upon". 

I do think you can have something like the NHS without having a government that defines laws.  However, you're going to reduce a lot of the bureaucracy because you're going to reduce things like, "Okay, this person's job is set for life, and this person is this paper-pusher who does this and they can't be fired", or whatever.  I think those are where a lot of the inefficiencies come into those kinds of systems.

Peter McCormack: I think there are two things, I think you're right, I'm going to add another one in.  When was it?

Danny Knowles: 1948.

Peter McCormack: 1948, so that's, God, it's during the war, no it's after the war, 1945, so 3 years after the end of the World War the NHS is created, but what kind of medical coverage did people have?  What kind of treatments did we have?  I've no idea, in 1948, if you had cancer, what kind of treatment they had, but I'm pretty sure there weren't advanced drugs and advanced screening machines and MRI machines.  Medicine's so advanced now but it's become expensive.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I mean, we know with certain drugs because we hear about it, there's a National Institute for Clinical Excellence, NICE, they decide which drugs that people will have, and you hear cases in the UK where somebody wants a certain treatment for maybe a breast cancer, and the treatment's so expensive that NICE won't approve it and then eventually, maybe it'll go to court, and maybe they do, but they are rejecting drugs.

So, I agree with you on the bureaucracy, that is one side, but there's also clearly a massive increase in cost because the range of treatments and the cost of treatment and the medical equipment, there's so much more.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, there definitely is, and I think that's a very large part of it but it's definitely not all and I think bureaucracy comes in at every level.  So, why are drugs so expensive?  Because it costs so much to develop them.  Why does it cost so much to develop them?  Now, actually we start getting into a lot of the things like intellectual property.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  So, yes, I did want to talk about it, because it was actually Roger Ver who first talked to me about this, he explained to me that he is anti-intellectual property, and I actually think this is a very interesting area.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.  To me, yeah, intellectual property is simply another form of private property.  I think it's something we created, as people, in order to try to make things work better in the society that we were building, this capitalist kind of society, and it horribly backfired.  I think there's almost nothing good to the idea of intellectual property.

It does encourage people to try and do some things in a few cases, but I think the negatives far outweigh the positives.  For example, drug development, you have to buy this piece of IP in order to do this particular synthesis of a particular drug, and then you buy this other piece of IP in order to have a molecule that looks like a certain shape based on somebody else's patent just as a precursor to make the drug that you want, which is now a novel and new drug, but actually doesn't look that different to another one; the only reason you made it was because the other one that would have worked just as well is patented by another company.  That entire process is ridiculously long and complex and expensive and it brings no value.

Peter McCormack: Well, it brings value to the patentholder.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it brings money to the patentholder, it brings no value to society and the total value of society has not increased after all of that, it's just transferred to the hands of those capitalists who hold the IP.

Peter McCormack: So, what we're really saying is that patents create concentrations of wealth, therefore concentrations of power?

Ben de Waal: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and without patents, somebody else could copy a drug and make it cheaper so we'd have a much more efficient and competitive market for drugs, which we do want; we always want competition, we always want more free markets.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: But what would happen in terms of drug research?  The argument is that these companies have to invest so much money into drug research that they need to patent it to protect their work; but I guess, without that, you might get more collaboration between drug companies to do the research.

Ben de Waal: You would.  I mean, we, as a society, we still want to solve problems, you know.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben de Waal: So, people will try to solve problems even if the total amount of money coming in is less.  It's still going to be profitable, especially when you're now not paying as much for all of those intermediate steps and so on.  So, it costs so much therefore we have to patent, but why does it cost so much?  Because of things like patents.  So, you can reduce the money that it costs and then you're more incentivised to do it, and it's just kind of basic to me there.

Peter McCormack: Certain patents have limits on expiration dates, don't they?

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Do we have any knowledge of what the impact is once these expiration dates pass?  Is it just a drive down of the prices?

Ben de Waal: So, often yes, but also there are tricks that different people play and I'm not an expert on this but I know in drug development, for example, they'll make something which is almost the same but not quite and then patent that and claim that that covers the old one because of similarity. 

Peter McCormack: Motherfuckers!

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: The term "socialism" is often used as a pejorative.

Ben de Waal: It is.

Peter McCormack: Even in making this show, certain opinions that I've held or certain discussion I've had, they're like, "Oh, you're just a leftie [or] you're just a socialist [or] you're basically a commie".  It basically just goes, even the idea I like the NHS, "You're basically a commie", you know, we always sink to that.  But whenever you actually ask somebody who is socialist or understands socialism, they always talk about it's about the owning of the means of production.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, what would you say to people who are very anti-socialist?  Firstly, do you think they have the definition wrong, do they misunderstand it; or do they just have a fair opinion that's different from yours?

Ben de Waal: Usually they misunderstand it, so usually it's something like they think socialism means having a government who is going to redistribute wealth in order to try and make everybody have equal outcomes; I have never seen any socialist, any self-identified socialist advocating for that.  The only people I've seen advocating for that are high school students who haven't learned enough about the world to realise how bad of an idea it is, and perhaps the US Democrat Party sometimes, but I also, like I said, they're not socialist, not at all.  So, yeah, I think it's mostly just a misunderstanding of what the terms means.

Then, you've got the problems of things like the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, "Oh clearly that must be a socialist society".  Okay, did the workers own the means of production in the USSR?  No, they did not.  I know people are going to say, "Oh, pull up the memes, that wasn't real socialism", yeah, but it simply wasn't, the workers did not own the means of production; that is not socialism.

Peter McCormack: So, it's basically people are confusing means of production with taxation and redistribution?

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And that's a useless -- but can words, over time, be redefined?  I feel like that's what people think socialism is, socialism is collectivism.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, so linguistics is one of my hobbies and, yes, words change meaning over time, they do, and perhaps eventually we're going to have to give up on the word "socialism", but the problem is there are so many books about socialism written over hundreds of years now, well a hundred and a bit years, about socialism and they're all talking about the thing that I'm talking about; they're not talking about redistribution of wealth.

So, if you pick up a book about socialism, it's talking about the things that I'm talking about now, it's not talking about taking money and distributing it out to people.  So, the new definition simply doesn't match what you're going to pick up and read in a book, so I prefer to stick with the term as long as possible because it should avoid confusion rather than cause it.

Peter McCormack: What do you think of fair criticisms of socialism?

Ben de Waal: So, that's difficult because socialism's such a broad thing. 

Peter McCormack: Well, where might you socialists argue?

Ben de Waal: So definitely on how much state is necessary.  There are people who I would define as state socialists, and I think it's a ridiculous idea because state socialism essentially is saying, "We have representatives, they are the government, and the workers own the means of production but we're giving that to the government to do on our behalf because they are our representatives".  To me, that's just a concentration of power in the government and it very quickly devolves into essentially authoritarianism, because you've now given the government control of every major company and corporation and so on; that's a really bad thing to do.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just go to Saudi.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, concentrated on power.

Peter McCormack: Is it even in China that every company's partly owned by the government?

Ben de Waal: Yeah, and that's state socialism, that's exactly what state socialism is and I'm very strongly against that, yeah.  So, those are the kinds of things socialists argue about.  We also, of course, definitely argue about things like how much personal property is personal property.  You know, you own this house, you're living in this house potentially and that's clearly your house, but what about the fact that you own this house and you own another house somewhere else?  At what point is that no longer personal property? 

It really becomes a grey area and that's what socialists will argue about.  They'll say, "You know, okay, the house you're living in is clearly yours, that's personal property, but that other house that you own and you're not using at all is not.  But this third house that you own and you're using it as your summer home, that is your because it's personal property, every summer you go there and you live in it for a short time". 

Peter McCormack: How do you protect property rights then in that scenario?

Ben de Waal: I don't know, and that's why it's this point where people argue about things, and I don't claim to have the answer there either.  If somebody asks me, "Is your summer home personal property or your private property?" my answer is going to be probably, "I don't know, let's get together and figure it out collectively".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think we have some interesting points, but I think people sometimes just want structure and definition.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They want to understand where they are and where they are with certain things.  I think you advocate for some things that are interesting.  I think the John Lewis model is core, I know people who work for John Lewis, they like it.  When John Lewis has a successful year, all the staff get a bonus; I think that is great.  We don't have that with the podcast; it is mine, Danny can't have shit!  But, no, we do, we share the benefits of the podcasts out. 

I don't see a libertarian socialist society as something that will ever happen, but what I do think is the ideas that you have can influence society and maybe change it for the better.  Maybe after this I'll turn around and go, "Do you know what, I should share the means of production with Danny", I'm not, but maybe I'll think about that.  No, fuck you, Danny!

Ben de Waal: In a lot of ways that's actually kind of the goal.

Peter McCormack: No, but maybe I will, like it's genuinely on my mind now.

Ben de Waal: I look at it a lot like you could say the goal of science is to know absolutely everything; we will never know absolutely everything.  What science does is makes you get less wrong with every answer.  Every time we discover something new, we are less wrong about the way the universe works, that's what science is.  But you could say science is the goal of knowing everything and we're never going to reach it; libertarian socialism, I'd say could be the same sort of thing.  There is no perfect libertarian socialist society and there never will be, but we can get steps closer to it and continue to get more libertarian socialist.

Peter McCormack: How niche are you as a bitcoiner?

Ben de Waal: Relatively niche, I definitely know there are a few progressives who strongly agree with me on a lot of things, not everything.  I do know a few other classical anarchists who, I would say, I agree with on 99% of stuff, well it's not everything but, you know, people like Ben Arc, there's this --

Peter McCormack: I love Ben.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, there's this nice German girl, Louisa, I think she's in Berlin, but yeah, so there are a few classical anarchists who are bitcoiners and I would say I agree with them on a lot of stuff.

Peter McCormack: We're seeing more progressives coming into Bitcoin now.

Ben de Waal: Definitely, yeah.

Peter McCormack: We're making a bit of an effort over the next couple of months to speak to more of them on the podcast, and the reason we want to do that is that I think, as Bitcoin grows and becomes more widespread in society, more adopted, it's naturally going to be adopted by people who may be from the left as well. 

One of the things I've been trying to say to people is, "If you're from the right, you should love the fact that people from the left are coming into Bitcoin, and you should want them to come into Bitcoin and you should disagree with them as much as you want, but celebrate the fact that they're coming in because they're doing two things; they're going to defend Bitcoin to the FUD spreaders from the left and they're also going to bring their left friends in".  This is the one area we don't want to fight on.  You can fight on BIPs and tech and shitcoins versus Bitcoin, all of that, but I think we all agree that Bitcoin is good for everyone. 

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, I was like, "I think we should be celebrating these people coming in and supporting them and helping them understand Bitcoin and civilly dealing with our disagreements", and I'm a big advocate of that.

Ben de Waal: Absolutely.  If it were the other way around, I would welcome the right into Bitcoin.  You know, if Bitcoin were majority left and I was like the mainstream opinion, yeah right, if I were, I would welcome the right.  I would still strongly disagree with them on the left versus right issues, but I would welcome them to Bitcoin because it's only positive to have more people with more different views.

Peter McCormack: How do you find it at the moment, Bitcoin, because it's very tetchy?  We're almost having a weekly nail someone to the cross; I mean, it was Matt Corallo yesterday.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I don't agree with Matt on altcoins or whatever, I think the guy's awesome and I love what he's done for Bitcoin.

Ben de Waal: He's brilliant, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I'm not saying he's unimpeachable, but at the same time, it feels like it was mob yesterday wanting to destroy him.  It's like, "Well, hold on a second, Matt is a bitcoiner, he's done a lot for Bitcoin.  He's not trying to destroy Bitcoin, he's not asking for a hard fork, he's not advocating for poor security".  I mean, all the work he did for trying to have the mining -- so the mining and the pools became more decentralised, very important work, and it felt like the mob fucking went for him.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, I really feel the meme of toxic maximalism has become self-reinforcing.  People are trying to be more toxic, which is a ridiculous negative thing to do.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a race to the bottom.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, it's a race to the bottom, and something I've always tried to be is a non-toxic maximalist.  I am a Bitcoin maximalist, I believe money forms a natural monopoly within an economy and Bitcoin is the best form of money to do that, so I do not see any long-term value in altcoins.

I do see value in experimenting and playing with things.  I'm not interested in it personally, but if somebody wants to go off and create some kind of random shitcoin which does something interesting technologically I'll look at the tech and I'll say, "Yeah, that's interesting, maybe we can use it in Bitcoin, maybe we can't".  But, you know, that's what really interests me, is Bitcoin, I'm not interested in any of those shitcoins, so I am a maximalist, but non-toxic maximalist. 

I do not see any value in pushing people down and yelling at them and screaming at them.  If I want to bring people into Bitcoin, I will educate, I will teach, I will help them understand why Bitcoin is a good thing and also why I have this opinion that money forms a natural monopoly; that's an obvious thing.  Maybe some people will say, "Oh yeah, there can be a bunch of different monies"; I know Andreas Antonopoulos is of that opinion and he's one of the people I respect most in this space and I disagree with him on that very fundamental thing.

Peter McCormack: We should banish him from your life and call him names.  Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree, I'm a long-term Bitcoin maximalist in that I believe, in the long term, money is a natural monopoly.  But I think, in the short term, people have decisions to make, they've got to use certain technologies, monetary technologies to survive, and maybe they're going to not use one that I agree with but that's fine, that's by them. 

I absolutely do agree there are plenty of people out there creating useless experiments that shouldn't be done and people are getting ripped off and losing money and I think we should be aware of that, but also I'm kind of hoping there's going to be a change in the kind of discussion around this, because it's kind of getting a bit tiring now. 

It was like yesterday, when I saw the Matt stuff, I was just like, "Oh God, here were go again, fuck's sake!"  Then there's going to be a Twitter Spaces on it and six people are going to talk about, "Maxis think this".  There's a criticism of maxis is that they're mean.  I think there's a more important criticism, not that they're mean, it's like how much time and energy is being wasted and how effective is this?  Maximalism is important. 

We had a Bitcoin meet-up at our football club the other day, 60 people turned up, it was great, and we only talked about Bitcoin.  People asked me about altcoins, we're like, "Probably should avoid them.  We're here, we're focused on Bitcoin", and that was great, we weren't yelling at anyone.  I wonder how much time people are wasting discussing maximalism, discussing what somebody else is doing, then having a Twitter Space on it, then spending all day arguing; when actually, they're probably just reinforcing their beliefs and a few friends' beliefs.  Actually they could be using that time to be out there educating, doing other things.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, so they're reinforcing an echo chamber, they're wasting time, it's completely unproductive.  It's potentially even negative in that some other people could see it and say, "I don't want to be a part of this crap".

Peter McCormack: Well, that does happen.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, and stay away from Bitcoin because of what they're seeing there. 

Peter McCormack: So Tom, from my football club, me and Danny, we went down the pub with him the other day because Tom always talks to me about this and he just says, "I'm totally put off Bitcoin, I'm just put off it", because he sees all the shit that gets flung my way and he's like, "I don't want anything to do with this". 

Even trying to have this conversation, even trying to have that with some of these people, it's not possible because, I don't know what the criticism will be because it will be, but I just want to reframe it and say, "Hey, listen, your goal is Bitcoin expansion, Bitcoin adoption, mine is the same.  Your tactics are A, B and C, can we just evaluate whether they're productive or not?  I'll do it with mine, let's evaluate your tactics because, if you're being unproductive, shouldn't we rethink it?"  That's what I would hope because it was today, I was like, "I wonder who we're cancelling today.  Who are we yelling at today and what are we yelling at them for?"

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's got a bit much, man. 

Ben de Waal: Completely with you there.

Peter McCormack: You've gone into a few threads on it recently.

Ben de Waal: I have, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Well, what do you think the solution is?

Ben de Waal: I don't think there is an easy solution, I think it's something which will have to sort itself out over time.  People get polarised, especially on social media, and it doesn't matter what it is.  So, I'm in a few different kind of Twitter circles, not just Bitcoin, I'm on Medical Twitter as well because I have an interest in neuroscience and I love seeing neuroscience-type stuff, so I follow a bunch of neuroscientists, and there will be polarising arguments that happen about the most ridiculous of things.  There was one recently about a particular cranial nerve, whether it forms part of the central nervous system or the peripheral nervous system, and that turned into a fight. 

Peter McCormack: Do you have peripheral maximalists?!

Ben de Waal: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Is it very similar to what happens in our community or is it different?

Ben de Waal: So, perhaps on Medical Twitter, not so much because it tends to be medical professionals, but I think you get it in any society.  I grew up in New Zealand where the argument is Ford cars or Holden cars, you're either a Ford person or a Holden person, you cannot be anything else, and if you like Ford then the Holden people will hate you, and if you like Holden the Ford people will hate you, so I drove a Mazda.

Peter McCormack: My dad drove a Mazda all the way through, my dad loved Mazdas, he had like three of them.

Danny Knowles: I've got a Mazda.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben de Waal: It's just this silly polarising thing, and it happens in societies, and Twitter makes it worse, social media makes it worse.  So, I don't think there's going to be an easy solution for the Bitcoin world.  I think it's something that will disappear over time as we get more people with different viewpoints being expressed when people can't force their own echo chambers as much.  Eventually, you might get some people who block every single person who isn't 100% aligned with them, but now they're stuck in their echo chamber and it won't spread as much out of it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben de Waal: So, the more different viewpoints we have the less we should see of it, but I don't think it'll ever go away entirely and I think it's going to be with us for a long time, unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, like I said, I almost don't want to criticise the tactics, I almost want to just evaluate and say, "Is it productive?"  I don't want to argue against toxic maximalism, maybe it has a benefit that I'm not aware of, maybe there are times when I've been a little bit toxic and I'm a total hypocrite.  I just want to know is it productive because I go on Twitter now it's just like, "Fight, fight, fight", it's just like "Again?  Really?"  Are we being the most productive we can be? 

That's all I care about because I care about people understanding Bitcoin, people being able to use Bitcoin and expanding the people who get to it; is spending all these hours arguing over this shitcoin or this belief or that belief, is that making us less productive and is that having a negative effect?  If it is, I want to be away from it.

Ben de Waal: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: That's my simple view on it.

Ben de Waal: Yeah, I think one of the big things there is often, when you get into the discussion about it on Twitter, people say, "Ah, but you get perceived as a toxic maximalist because of this and this and this", and that's changing the discussion.  We were talking about the toxicity and whether it's useful not about whether somebody perceives me as being toxic. 

I'm sure somebody could say, "Ah, Ben, you used the word 'shitcoin' earlier", yes, I did and I will continue to use that word, and if somebody wants to call that toxic, okay, they're calling me toxic, but that's not what I'm talking when I'm talking about these toxic maximalists doing stuff.  But also, yeah, fine, we can even have the conversation there, "Is it productive to use the word 'shitcoin'?"  I don't know, right now, I don't care that much, I think there are bigger fish to fry.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.  Well, listen, this was an interesting conversation.

Ben de Waal: Thank you. 

Peter McCormack: There are things that you've given me to think about, things that paused my thoughts on, there are things I didn't 100% agree with you on.

Ben de Waal: That's fine.

Peter McCormack: But interesting all the same.  Do you want to send anyone to anywhere?  Do you want to tell them where to follow you?  Is there anything you're working on?

Ben de Waal: So, yeah, I'm not working on anything in particular.  Anyone who finds my thoughts interesting, yeah, follow me on Twitter, it's just @ben_dewaal.  There's nothing particular going on at the moment but I'm always interested in interesting discussions, especially about people who disagree with me, if they can disagree with me in a useful conversational kind of way and actually talk about stuff rather than just throwing insults.

Peter McCormack: Awesome.  Are you hungry; do you want some lunch?

Ben de Waal: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Let's get some lunch.  All right, wrap, thank you, appreciate that, Ben.