WBD573 Audio Transcription

The Philosophy of Money with Andrew Bailey

Release date: Friday 28th October

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Andrew Bailey. 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.

Andrew Bailey is a philosopher, professor, fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and co-founder of Resistance Money. In this interview, we discuss the philosophy of money in respect of what it is, what makes good money, the traps we can fall into with money, and why Bitcoin is a bulldozer that makes us rethink money anew.

“Bitcoin isn’t like a new theory about what kinds of money are possible, it’s more like a bulldozer that says: you’re all wrong, you need more tools to think properly about money; here’s a totally new kind of money that is kind of like fiat, kind of like gold and kind of like neither.”

— Andrew Bailey

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Andrew, how are you?

Andrew Bailey: Doing all right, Peter, how are you?

Peter McCormack: Good.  Welcome to What Bitcoin Did.

Andrew Bailey: Thank you.  It's good to see you again.

Peter McCormack: Well, yes.  I didn't know we'd met before.

Andrew Bailey: We had a Zoom chat in 2020.  I asked you for some time to help me and my colleagues work on some branding for this new Bitcoin research collective we were going to be launching.  That was two years ago, and you gave us the thumbs up on the title we'd landed on, which is Resistance Money.

Peter McCormack: I have no memory of this at all.  It's terrible, isn't it?

Andrew Bailey: Well, it happened, the website is up.  We've published 20 articles since then and we've got a book.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  Well I say, "Email me, anyone, I'll do my best to reply".  We cut it out for a while, but it's back and I don't tend to say no to a lot.  So, that's kind of funny!

Andrew Bailey: Thank you!

Peter McCormack: Well, when we first spoke, was it Troy we first spoke to?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And Troy referenced Resistance Money and I was like, "That's a fucking cool name"!

Andrew Bailey: Well, that's what you thought back then, the reason we stuck with it.

Peter McCormack: No memory of it at all!  Jesus, wonder why that is.  Well, listen, we're doing a stretch of shows, we just did Texas, we're now here in Miami; and Danny, I don't want to put any pressure on you, but Danny said, "The show you're going to most enjoy is the Andrew Bailey show.  That's the one you're going to look forward to".

Andrew Bailey: But then the last episode, you said Danny says that everybody's great!

Danny Knowles: That's true.

Peter McCormack: Well, Danny has to say that.

Andrew Bailey: Thank you, Danny!

Peter McCormack: Danny is the gatekeeper of What Bitcoin Did.  If Danny says no, then people don't come on; he's the booker, so he would think they're all great.  But he said, "Andrew Bailey's the show you're going to most enjoy".  I think it's because we've had some philosophers on recently and we got into a bit of philosophy, and he knows I enjoy those, and he said, "Pete, I'm telling you now, Andrew Bailey is the one you're going to enjoy".  So, the pressure's on, man!  And we're going to talk about the philosophy of money.

So, I think a good starting point, as one of the Resistance Money collective, tell people a little bit about you if they don't know you, what is it you do, workwise, what do you spend your day on?

Andrew Bailey: Can I start with a pre-Bitcoin story, then ease into that?

Peter McCormack: Hell, yeah, you start with anything you want, my friend.

Andrew Bailey: I want to talk about Roger Ver.  In 1999, I was 15 years old and I was at this debate camp and we were arguing about taxation.  And there was this guy in the audience, named Roger, who came up to me and told me, "Andrew, you're wrong about everything, this is wrong, this is wrong.  You need to read some real books".  And then he sent me in the mail a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Peter McCormack: Wow.

Andrew Bailey: And we met one other time.  So, I was 15, he must have been about 19, 20 at the time.  I still have those very copies he gave me, and I later had them signed by Harry Brown, who was the Libertarian Presidential candidate in the year 2000.  So, I met Roger.  He was actually an influence in a way to move in that libertarian zone, even in my youth.  So, I think that was one thing that prepared me for Bitcoin, even though I'm not libertarian anymore; it made me receptive in some ways.

Then years later, maybe in 2019, I emailed Roger, I was like, "There's this guy named Roger who gave me this book.  Was that you?"  He was like, "Actually, that was me.  I used to give away books all the time.  Now I give away Bitcoin Cash", and then he sent me some BCH.  I quickly traded it for real Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Good man.  Roger Ver is one of the saddest parts of Bitcoin, a little bit like, we discussed Peter Schiff this morning; we did an interview with Perianne Boring.  You see, that's why I have to have a little nap, I'm going to wake up now!  We did an interview with Perianne Boring, we were discussing Peter Schiff.  If you separate Peter Schiff from Bitcoin, he's a super-interesting guy, he makes some amazing points, he's written some really interesting things.  He's talked to me about the economy or the Fed, taxation; he's brilliant.

Andrew Bailey: He's halfway there.  He could be 90% there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's 90%, 95%.

Andrew Bailey: Something doesn't compute though.

Peter McCormack: Well, he made the decision to go against Bitcoin and he refuses to do the work to consider it.  Even today, after the interview, I went and checked his Twitter, and his last tweet was, who's the guy, Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy?

Andrew Bailey: Robert something.

Peter McCormack: Kiyosaki, or something.  I'm trying not to confuse it with Kobayashi from Usual Suspects.  He puts out a tweet saying something about the economy and, "You'd need to buy gold, silver and Bitcoin", and Schiff's reply is, "I agree with you on everything apart from Bitcoin".  So, he's made a decision in every single interaction to reject Bitcoin.  But I can't imagine he's ever done the work, and done it in a neutral scenario where he reconsiders gold as well.  So, he's completely useless with regards to Bitcoin, he's not useful in any way at all, but he's useful outside of Bitcoin.

I have similar feelings about Roger Ver.  Roger Ver was very useful to me at one point, in terms of trying to understand freedom and trying to understand parts of Bitcoin, but now he's completely useless because he doesn't understand Bitcoin.

Andrew Bailey: I think he was hurt by bitcoiners too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but we can all have that comment.

Andrew Bailey: You've been hurt by bitcoiners too, saying mean things about you on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: They hurt my feelings!

Andrew Bailey: I think it went deeper for Roger than he might admit.

Peter McCormack: Well, when you go from Bitcoin Jesus; I think Roger's problem is he became Bitcoin Jesus, which is a really crap label to receive, to then having an idea you have completely rejected.  That possibly hurt him, but that is an ego problem and with an ego, you have to have an ego death and he just didn't have the ego death.  Now, he still hasn't given up on Bitcoin Cash when nobody gives a fuck.  When I say, "Nobody", a relatively small amount of people.  Nobody new comes into Bitcoin and then goes to BCH.  The only people who care about BCH now cared about it four years ago or three years ago, whatever their time period was where it had a small amount of relevance.  Nobody goes to BCH now, unless they're a fucking idiot, and that's a shame.

Andrew Bailey: Not even Peter Schiff goes to BCH.

Peter McCormack: But I would happily have Peter Schiff here opposite me and have that conversation with him, talking about things outside of Bitcoin.  I would still talk to Roger Ver, but we could not discuss Bitcoin, because it would be a pointless conversation, and it's a shame.

Andrew Bailey: It is.  He was sincere, he really believed.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, what did the Adam Smith book do for you?  Tell people who Adam Smith is, if they don't know him.  I've never actually read The Wealth of Nations, which is why I've written it down.

Andrew Bailey: Well, I never read the whole thing either, but sometimes I teach some of the famous portions.  So, he was a Scottish Economist in the 18th century, living what was the called The Scottish Enlightenment, so this was a group of thinkers around Edinburgh, David Hume, who was a friend of Adam Smith, basically inventing what we now know as political economy, or economics.  And the big question of The Wealth of Nations was, "Why are nations wealthy?  How is it that capital's formed; how is it that some nations get rich and others don't; what are the underlying mechanisms here?" and the big answer throughout was markets.

That was Adam Smith's big discovery, was thinking systematically about how markets create prosperity.  And of course, this is a theme that you can see in other economists ever since.  But he was one of the people who really put it in a, I wouldn't say "punchy" way, because it's a two-volume set that I've never read the whole thing of, but I think he discovered the mechanism that underlies all of that and put it together in a really attractive way.  So, that's the thing he's known for.

Peter McCormack: I've never heard somebody refer to economics as political, the political economy.

Andrew Bailey: Economics used to be called "political economy".

Peter McCormack: Never knew that, did you know that, Danny?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: Never heard that.  It makes sense.

Andrew Bailey: It's interesting that they dropped the political part, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Well, because it really alludes to propaganda.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, and I think it's also specialisation and academia, we get further and further apart from each other.  So, there's political science over here, there's economics, and there's their intersection, political economy.  But a lot of economists don't know about that bit, and a lot of the political scientists are economically ignorant.

Peter McCormack: Another thing Perianne brought up this morning, she also said, "Economics has nothing to do with maths".

Andrew Bailey: Interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  She said it's all about humans and incentives, it's got nothing to do with maths.

Andrew Bailey: I don't think you'd learn that if you took a modern economics degree course.

Peter McCormack: She said the reason she took economics was because she wanted to do the maths class, because there were maths classes that went with it.  But she said, "Economics really isn't anything to do with maths".

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, if you think of economics as the study of human behaviour under scarcity, then it's not fundamentally maths.  Maybe maths is one useful tool that we could and should use, but you wouldn't think of it, I think, the way a lot of modern economists do, which is that it's something like calculus, the study of curves.

Peter McCormack: So, you're a professor?

Andrew Bailey: I'm afraid so.

Peter McCormack: You're a professor where; can you say that?

Andrew Bailey: I teach at Yale-NUS College.  It's a small school in Singapore, jointly founded by Yale and the National University of Singapore, and I teach Philosophy of Politics and Economics there.

Peter McCormack: Philosophy of Politics and Economics.  And, if you're teaching economics there, are you teaching that there are different competing schools of economics; or, are you a Keynesian economist?

Andrew Bailey: I'm not going to answer the question as you've raised it!

Peter McCormack: Okay.  You know what I'm getting at though.

Andrew Bailey: That's right.

Peter McCormack: Again, I bring that up only because we did the interview with Perianne, but we also did another interview recently with somebody who studied economics.  I studied economics at A level.  I don't know if you understand the British system, but A levels is 16 to 18.

Andrew Bailey: Singapore does it that way too.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  We were taught Keynesian Economics.  We had pretty much a whole semester on Keynesian Economics, and it wasn't studied as a competing school of economics, it was taught as, "This is economics".

Andrew Bailey: That's not the way I think about it or the way I teach it.  I don't teach the techy side of econs, because I'm not good at calculus.  What I teach is the stuff that intersects, especially with philosophy, so the stuff that isn't all about demand curves, or about indifference curves, or whatever other technical devices economists use now.

I do have a thought about Keynes.  I think when bitcoiners talk shit about Keynes, they miss that he was more than just a macro economist who said some wonky things, maybe dangerous things, maybe things that were influential to the worst.  He also said a bunch of other things too and there's one great essay from him I've just got to plug.  It's called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

Peter McCormack: Debt!

Andrew Bailey: That wasn't what he thought it was.  He saw this prosperous future, where productivity continued to go up and that all of us could work four-hour days.  So one great question is, "Dr Keynes", or maybe it was Mr Keynes, "What happened in 1971?  Why is it that we don't have four-hour workdays?"  Productivity continued to rise, at least for a big part of the 20th century, but something broke.  And he was predicting the rise, he didn't predict the break, and he was wondering, "What are we going to do with our time?"

It's a great essay, it's one of the bits of kind of speculative futurology, or science fiction, and just dreaming about what the possibilities could be.  I think that Keynes is deeply appealing and interesting and humanist, and bitcoiners might like it, even if they won't like anything else he said about the paradox of thrift, and stuff like that.

Peter McCormack: So, he had good intentions.  People talk about Karl Marx in a similar way that you talked about Keynes then, because people talk about Karl Marx as somebody who was a great observer, great intentions, but it was the application of his ideas which was the issue.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, Marx was a great social scientist in this respect.  He really had a great mind for putting together theories, these abstract hunches or intuitions we have, with data and seeing if we could support or disconfirm the theory with the data.  He was basically inventing social science as we know it now, which is kind of the intersection of numbers plus people.  Unfortunately, in my view, a lot of his ideas just turned out to be false.

Peter McCormack: Yes, and the application of his ideas --

Andrew Bailey: Dangerous.

Peter McCormack: -- dangerous.  And still today, some people think his ideas have just not been implemented correctly; we haven't had real Marxism.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, dear!

Peter McCormack: I'm surprised people haven't said, "We haven't had real Keynesian economics".

Andrew Bailey: You know, Peter, somebody said that somewhere, I'm sure.

Peter McCormack: I'm sure they did.

Andrew Bailey: Somewhere on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: In your teaching, how much freedom do you have in terms of what you want to teach and how you want to teach, with regards to a syllabus; do you have absolute freedom, or are there certain constraints around what you can teach?

Andrew Bailey: Some of my teaching is in the common curriculum within my college, which is the classes that all students take, and those are team-taught, so all syllabus decisions are made by the team, so very little freedom in a way there, except over time, where you iterate and persuade colleagues and build coalitions to make the changes you want.  But when teaching my own courses, near full autonomy.

Peter McCormack: Excellent.

Andrew Bailey: So, guess what I've been teaching about for, I don't know, the last four years plus?!

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin Cash?!

Andrew Bailey: Close!  One of those words was accurate.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's amazing, and I imagine your students absolutely love this class and love the fact that they're doing something completely different, that they're at the forefront of real economics.

Andrew Bailey: Well, I think reflecting carefully about money and Bitcoin, both of these things are catnip for students.  And if you can do them together in a responsible way, I've found not only do I get the enrolment, student butts in seats, but they get something out of it, at least I hope they do and I think they do.  That's what the alumni tell me later.

Peter McCormack: And, how much of it -- I was talking to Perianne about this as well, in that I went to university and I went to a shit one and studied a shit course and left and it was terrible.  I was telling her, I romanticise, I'm going to say American higher studies, because I said to her I imagine these large amphitheatre classrooms full of students debating with their professor and their professor encouraging debate and encouraging questioning.  We don't get that at school, my kids aren't encouraged to question.  I encourage them at home to question, question me, question school, don't trust anything, don't believe anything.

I've just had this example.  My son was a drama student and he had to do a monologue as one of his performances, and the monologue he picked out was one that was done by, what was the name of the kid who was in Dune? 

Danny Knowles: Timothée Chalamet.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Timothée Chalamet.  He found the monologue that Timothée Chalamet did as a student, I think it was that one, I could be wrong.  But anyway, the piece was set during, I think it was the post-slave era -- I'm going to get some of this wrong -- in the US, and so the piece had some racist connotations in it.  But my son was a fan of the actor and thought the piece was good and wanted to do it.

He presented it to the teacher and the teacher said, "I don't think you should do this because there's racist connotations to it".  My son came home disappointed and I said, "Is the piece itself racist; or is the piece itself reflective of a period of racism?"  He didn't understand the full question but he said, "It's just about that time".  I said, "Well, do you want to do it?" and he said, "Yes".  I said, "Well, why can't you?" and he said, "The teacher was worried that there may be some black people in the audience who would be offended".  So I said, "What do you think about that?" and he said, "Well, it's performance art".

I mean, my view is that it's racist to say you can't do it!  This teacher is creating a situation that isn't racist and turning it into one.  So I said, "You, as my son, are welcome to go back and demand to the teacher this is the piece you do and you're willing to question them; and if you don't agree with their decision, you are welcome, under my approval, to refuse to do anything else.  You can challenge this".  I mean obviously he said, "No, dad, I'm not going to do that".

Andrew Bailey: That was a gift to offer that freedom.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they're not taught to challenge.  I say to my daughter every time she says, "I don't want to do my homework", I say, "Don't do your homework then.  Tell your teacher why and tell the teacher what you did instead".  They don't teach any of this.  I mean, I'm a dick, so I want my kids to be like that, I want them to be challenging and spikey.  But that's what I always hope happens at higher education, and I kind of hope maybe you are like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

Andrew Bailey: I don't know about that, but I think the question is a powerful tool for a teacher, not to tell someone the way things are, but to ask them something interesting and see what happens.  It can be magic.

Peter McCormack: And have you found teaching Bitcoin, it forces people to question more, forces students to question more?

Andrew Bailey: It makes us question everything.

Peter McCormack: Hell, yeah.

Andrew Bailey: A good question opens up, I'm afraid, more questions, which in turn open up more questions.  And the fundamental questions about Bitcoin are very fruitful in that way.  They just generate more and more of the same, and that's magic in the classroom, when you get somebody wondering and not just trying to answer the question that you just asked, but responding with questions of their own.  Of course, you can't do this forever, sometimes you just have to write an essay, or figure something out.  But that's the magic, that's where it's at, that's what I aim for as a teacher.  Could I make an observation?

Peter McCormack: Please do.

Andrew Bailey: You described the interaction with your son and I think you gave three questions in a row.  You were asking him questions, instead of saying, "I think you should do it"; you asked him questions.  That's the way to do it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do all the time.  Well, because the other thing about having children right now, we're in a very difficult time to have children, for two reasons.  They're living through a reset of some kind.  I don't mean the World Economic Forum's Great Reset, but they're certainly living through a reset.  They're living through a time of increasing growth in authoritarianism and surveillance within western liberal democracies; but they're living in a time where there's massive change in technology.

There's a TED Talk we've watched, that guy, he's a teacher, he said, "Teach a kid to dance", you must have seen it.  This kid wants to dance and he's saying, "We don't know where we're going to be in five years and we've got 5-year-olds; we don't know the world they're going to be in in 20 years.  What skills do we need to teach them?"  So, with my kids it's like, when my daughter's 20, 22, entering the world of work, we don't know what jobs are going to be available, what types.  So, I think one of the most important skills is the ability to stand out and be different, to question things; not to be just someone who's able to go in a cubicle and complete a task, because we don't know what the task will be, and plus they'll be mind-numbingly boring.

Andrew Bailey: It's hard to teach.  I believe it can be taught.  You have to give people freedom to take risks and not punish them when they take the risks.  They have to have environments where they can flex that muscle of risk tolerance.  For me, that's one place that the classroom is, it's a place where we can say the weird, the outrageous, the dubious things as we're processing through and not be punished for them, by peers or by a professor.

Peter McCormack: I can think of a podcast like that, but we do get punished for them! 

Andrew Bailey: This is your other podcast, or this one?

Peter McCormack: No, I think this is a place to question and think about things and test ideas.  That's why this show isn't just a bunch of right-wing libertarians confirming why Bitcoin is amazing.  It's a place where we talk to everybody, from somebody who is a professor to somebody who is an economist to somebody who's -- all different people.  Let me ask you, is Bitcoin a solution to the problem, or is Bitcoin a theory?

Andrew Bailey: I want to say both, as if it's a trick question.

Peter McCormack: It's not a trick question.  What I'm getting at is, one of the questions me and Danny ask ourselves a lot is, are we wrong about Bitcoin?

Andrew Bailey: I don't know the answer to that.  I have a thought about the theory question.  I think of Bitcoin in some ways as an anti-theory.  It's more like something that bulldozes through the theories that pre-existed it.  So, here's a view, and you can probably think of a bunch of these; here's just an example, here's a view that was standard.

On the one hand, we have commodity monies; these cost something to make.  On the other hand, we have fiat monies which have no intrinsic value and cost nothing to make.  Commodity monies do have intrinsic value, that is they have use value; you can burn them, eat them, they're shiny, and so on.  What Bitcoin shows us is it's actually possible to combine these characteristics.  Nobody's ever done that before.  It's costly to produce and it has no intrinsic value.  The fact that it has no intrinsic value means that the design space has opened up in ways that it's not for a commodity money; and the fact that it costs something to produce means that it's not just a shitcoin.

So, there's this theory or a standard way of thinking about what monies are even possible.  Bitcoin isn't a new theory about what kinds of money are possible; it's more like a bulldozer that says, "You're all wrong, you need more tools to think properly about money.  Here's a totally new kind of money that is kind of like fiat, kind of like gold and kind of like neither".  So, I think Bitcoin can do that in a variety of other ways too.  It's not a theory, it's more like something that shows us we were wrong before.

Peter McCormack: Are you more interested in the philosophy of money, or the application of economics?

Andrew Bailey: I'm better at philosophy, because that's where my degrees and training are in.  But I'm super-interested in the econ stuff and I'm trying to learn more so that I can be a more effective teacher and researcher on that side of things, and really the intersection.  That's the forefront, that this bit, you know, the Venn diagram where the two meet.  It's so poorly understood but so vital, I think, to understand our dynamic world, because it's right in that intersection where so many interesting things are happening.

Peter McCormack: So, I question therefore, what does good money mean; and how do we class a successful money?  Let me frame what I'm thinking.  It's that, when we recently just sat down with Steven Lubka and we talked about fiat money, the way it distorts the markets, distorts prices, that's absolutely true.  But could we also argue that with Keynesian Economics and the money printer, that extra money has sped up the advancement of society and has led to more innovation?  I mean, we talked about venture capital firms having access to cheap capital, but perhaps that cheap capital has led to advancements in technology, which has led to advancements in development of positive drugs, I know negative drugs as well. 

It's very obviously difficult to create a net calculation, but would a Bitcoin-based economy have slowed advancement, would it have slowed development and how would society have shaped like that?  Could it be a net more dangerous society, because there isn't that kind of shield and protection from government in certain areas?  Now, there's thousands of inputs to these, because somebody who is anti-fiat could say, "Well, military industrial complex" or, "Widen the wealth gap"; but somebody who was positive fiat would say, "World police protection".  There's different ways you can look at it and your bias will certainly influence it.  But that goes around in my mind a lot.  I always think it's important to question it, rather than just cheerlead it.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, and I think that's what Bitcoin does in an unsettling way for many people, it raises these questions.  I'd like to make a distinction between two kinds of questions about money and the best kinds of money.  There are some properties that make something useful as money; these are things that make it a useful medium of exchange, the primary role of money, so things like durability, divisibility; you're familiar with the list.

There's a less studied question by monetary economists, which might be surprising, the people whose job it is to study money, which is not what makes something a better or worse money, better at being money, but rather what kinds of money have better or worse externalities or consequences for the rest of the world.  Obviously, these are hard to foresee sometimes, the higher-order effects of selecting one kind of money over another.

Now Bitcoin, you can size it up against other monies on either of these dimensions.  It might turn out that it's worse in some ways, better in some others, but I think one of the unsettling things that Bitcoin does, and this is why we're so resistant to it when we first encounter it, I don't know how many times it took you; it took me a couple of times to see it as more than anything as funny money for libertarians, or the speculative bet.

Peter McCormack: I try to never allow myself to fully see it.

Andrew Bailey: That's wise, you should always ask this question.  But it's unsettling to ask that like, "Okay, wait a minute, what if we've collectively selected a money that has negative externalities?  What if we're encountering them now, the grand experiment since 1971 is turning out to be not so great?"  This is not a totally happy thought to have.

Peter McCormack: We need a bottle of wine!  I'm having a drink for this conversation; you don't have to, but I want a glass of wine.

Andrew Bailey: Let's wait until we've got five minutes left and I'll have a glass.

Peter McCormack: This is a glass-of-wine conversation.  All right, fair.

Andrew Bailey: I'm having fun so far, I hope you are.

Peter McCormack: Yes, but this is the point, I'm always questioning it, because I worry about the negative externalities.  I've decided Bitcoin personally, outside of the podcast, I've decided on Bitcoin, I've chosen Bitcoin.  But as a podcaster releasing content for an audience, I haven't allowed myself to get fully there and I never allow myself to get fully there.

Andrew Bailey: I think if you became a pure cheerleader, I don't think you'd be as successful.

Peter McCormack: If I didn't have Danny, I wouldn't be as successful.

Andrew Bailey: I hope you don't lose that.

Peter McCormack: What, Danny?!

Andrew Bailey: Danny, or this kind of intellectual honesty.  And I think that's one reason you and Troy connected well.  It looked to me like you did; Troy's an old friend.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, love Troy.  He speaks very highly of you.

Andrew Bailey: Well, he had a really nice moment talking about me.  Hi, Troy!

Peter McCormack: Hi, Troy!

Andrew Bailey: One of the things I admire about him is his intellectual honesty, and I think you connected on that point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but we do question it a lot, don't we, Danny?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, well you especially.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  One of the things that you have to really fight as a content creator is audience capture.  It's really difficult, because if there is a certain cohort, or a certain group of people who have a particular set of opinions, you are rewarded for echoing those opinions and you are punished for, not for challenging, but maybe disagreeing. 

Andrew Bailey: For disrupting their expectations of you.

Peter McCormack: Yes, that's it, disrupting their expectations of you, you've put it perfectly.  That also can have a personal economic impact, because of the risks of (1) being cancelled, (2) being ignored, (3) there's no three; those two primary ones.  And that's why I think so many people get audience captured, because they get the likes, the follows, the confirmation and they grow what their thing is.

Andrew Bailey: You know, there's a parallel to money.  Money is this thing that we want, we strive for, we dream of it.  How often do you check the Bitcoin price?  How often do you think about your portfolio?  Those are behavioural manifestations of the way that money, we want it, yes; but then, it comes to control us.  At least, that is a very real worry.  And it's not just those who have a lot of it who have to worry about this, of course, they maybe have to worry more that the things you own end up owning you, to quote Fight Club!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And Eric Weinstein was the one who made us think about that.  The first time we interviewed him, it was a very challenging interview and I did a shit job.  But he said, "You're talking your book".

Andrew Bailey: I remember that.

Peter McCormack: And I felt like I was trying to convince him on Bitcoin.  I was like, "What am I trying to do this for?  I'm here to interview you, not debate you.  I'm terrible at debating, it's not my job".  So since then, I'm always questioning Bitcoin and I never allow myself to --

Andrew Bailey: Have you told him that?

Peter McCormack: Yes, I have told him that.

Andrew Bailey: You should.  People like it when you learn from them and then you tell them, "Here's what I learned from you".

Peter McCormack: Well, I put out a tweet thread about exactly what I'd got wrong in the whole interview, and he retweeted it and said something along the lines of, "Don't worry, I can be a right dick sometimes"!  He was good about it.  We did a follow-up interview and it was magic, we got on really well.  But I think you're right, there's this expectation that people have and when you miss that expectation, it disappoints them.  But that is their problem and their weakness, not mine.

Andrew Bailey: It could be yours, that's up to you.  I think of money as that way too.  So, bitcoiners are used to talking about the bad effects of a bad money; we just listened to an interview about that very topic.  We can go on about that.  I think one thing that Bitcoin has done to me is to think more deeply about money, so what money is, but also to see more clearly that money, even good money, can be dangerous.

Peter McCormack: Yes, how?

Andrew Bailey: It can be dangerous for those that have it, the way that it has a hold over our own hearts, our own desires, the way it captures us, just the way an audience might capture a content maker.  So, the thing that you think you own is, "I have so many followers, this is my account", and there's the ownership language there; it ends up owning you, controlling you, so it does the exact opposite.  Money's supposed to be a tool of freedom, but it can enslave us too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Jiddu Krishnamurti talks about that in a slightly different way, do you know him; Indian philosopher?

Andrew Bailey: I know the name but nothing more.

Peter McCormack: So he talks about, you shouldn't own stuff and things, you should get away from owning stuff and things, because he talks about the person who has the big house, has the yard, has the garden, has the fence.  Now that person has to think about the house and the garden and the fence and look after that.  And the more stuff you accumulate, the more distractions you have in your life from exploring truth and exploring the world and living a fruitful life; these things own you.  It's the same point. 

I think you strive for money, then if you don't have money -- some of my happiest times, I was broke because I didn't have any money.  I had a wage.  Sorry, I had money but not wealth.  I had money but I hadn't accumulated any stuff.  Then you earn money and you fear losing it.

Andrew Bailey: And you know that fear gets worse.  Sitting from the outside you might think, "Oh no, I should worry less and less about money the more I have of it", but in fact the opportunity cost of stepping out of the rat race, or of loss, gets higher and higher.  So, it can have this effect that we worry more the more we have.

Peter McCormack: I wonder if it's a worry of losing the money you have itself, or losing the status that the money has afforded you, because I think it could obviously be both.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, money represents a lot for us.  In a way, it represents all material things, because you can trade money for anything that's for sale.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: So, it grabs our attention.  It's like an attention magnet in ways that other things of value aren't.  So here's a goofy example.  So, here's something of value, it's worth $1,000.  You won't look at it when I put it on the table, totally uninteresting.  But if I go like this, this is not worth as much as the iPhone.  I put a $100 bill on the table.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I like that!

Andrew Bailey: And yet, when I do this in the classroom, do you know where the students' eyes are?  On the $1,000 or the $100 thing?  Of course, they're looking here, you can't take your eyes off of it.

Peter McCormack: Shall we put some pounds on the table as well.

Andrew Bailey: There we go.

Peter McCormack: Have you ever seen British money; have you ever been to the UK?  Well, I don't know if you've been there.  Some people haven't.

Andrew Bailey: I've been to Scotland only and I was happy to be in Scotland.

Peter McCormack: That Scottish money is worth less, will buy you less.  We don't accept that money down South.

Andrew Bailey: Just think about the simple fact that we pay attention to these way more than we pay attention to even things of greater value; it has this pull on us.

Peter McCormack: We should say, just if people don't know, there's a $100 note on the table.  Who's that on the front; is that Benjamin Franklin?

Andrew Bailey: It is.  You can't have it.

Peter McCormack: You can't have this.  If you had $20, I would give you £20.  At the moment, that's a good trade.

Andrew Bailey: We're at parity, okay.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, it's a better trade for you right now.  Would you take $20 for £20?

Andrew Bailey: No.  Well, you just told me I should, so okay, maybe I would.

Peter McCormack: You would?  I mean, £20 is probably about $23?

Danny Knowles: $22, yeah.

Andrew Bailey: I try to acquire the money that I think I'll need.  So, I have Singapore dollars and US dollars and Bitcoin for United States, for Singapore and for the future.

Peter McCormack: How much would you sell $20 for now?

Andrew Bailey: This is a trick question.  You know the philosopher's going to get this wrong, but sure, just for the sake, I'll give you $20 for it right now.

Peter McCormack: So this trade now, you've made more money than I have.

Andrew Bailey: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Right, let's save these notes until we next meet and let's see who has more money, because I think I won that trade based on the fact that we've time-locked this money until I next see you again.  You have to keep that in your wallet, I'll keep this.

Andrew Bailey: So, I've given up good money for bad?  Or, I've given up bad money for worse?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, bad money for worse.  But I think, when we next meet, I made the better trade there.

Andrew Bailey: We'll see.

Peter McCormack: I just fucked you over!

Andrew Bailey: Thank you!

Peter McCormack: So, with your students, where's the starting point on the philosophical side?  Do you just start with, "What is money?"  Are you trying to teach them what is money holistically, or what it is to them?

Andrew Bailey: More the latter.  In fact, that's what got me thinking about this as a class to regularly offer, an interdisciplinary class on money.  I had older students come to me who were looking forward to careers in finance, management consulting.  They would eventually be making, in fact very quickly be making a lot more than me, and eventually be making quite a bit more than me.  These would be high-flying, rich people, if they're not already rich.  And as students do, they come to you with an existential crisis, "Well, I'm interning at Barclays, at Goldman Sachs, I'm not happy, I want more money and I'm incentivised to get more of it.  And the more money I make, the greater the opportunity cost of opting out is, so it's actually harder to opt out of the long hours, of the intrusive work, of this obsessive money-chasing game.  So, is that good; is that bad; what do I do about this?  Help!"

There's one student in particular, I won't say his name.

Peter McCormack: We'll call him Derek!

Andrew Bailey: So I started thinking, "You know what, I need to offer a class about this, exploring these kinds of questions" like, "What is the role of money in a good life?  How much is enough?" and, "Money has a power over us; is there a way to think well about that and to maybe not be so controlled by money?"  So, as I think of things, these were theoretically interesting questions.  They're rich, they connect to that question, "What money is", they connect of course to Bitcoin and many other things; but they're also deeply practical.  And for the people I'm trying to serve, they're intensely practical.

Peter McCormack: So you're trying to help them --

Andrew Bailey: Be happy.

Peter McCormack: -- be happy.

Andrew Bailey: I want them to be the best versions of themselves, to live thoughtful lives.  And in the money class, we're living thoughtful lives with respect to money, so we sort of zoom in the mission op.  That's obviously impossibly big to say, "I want to help you be a better person".  "Okay, but I can help you think better about money and your interactions with it and the hold it has over you and figure out how much you want and why".

Peter McCormack: Because nobody on their death bed ever thinks, "I wish I'd worked more".  The regrets are usually the same, "I wish I'd spent more time with my children, I wish I'd spent time and looked after my health more", not that, "I wish I'd worked every weekend when I was with Goldman so I would have been even richer".

Andrew Bailey: It's a strange man who dies with that thought on his mind, let's put it that way; an unusual man.

Peter McCormack: You have to really, I guess help people -- sorry, I'm going to jump back.  People don't often think about the nature of money.

Andrew Bailey: No, it's like water to a fish.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  So I have my friends in Bitcoin and my friends out of Bitcoin.  Friends in Bitcoin, they spend a lot of time thinking about money.  Friends out of Bitcoin, they haven't.

Andrew Bailey: Can I make a small thought there?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: I think they think about money, but mostly they think about getting more of it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, not what it is.

Andrew Bailey: They're not reflecting about money.  It's on their mind; mind on my money, money on my mind, but not in this reflective way.

Peter McCormack: Well, when they buy a car, there's a handful who understand the engine of the car they're buying.  Most people just buy a car because they like the look of it, or they like the brand and it is just something that gets them from A to B.  They don't think about the nature of how the car does that.  And I think money's similar; very few people think about that.  Some are forced to. 

If you go to Venezuela, they're forced to think about the nature of money because it melts in front of them.  And people in Turkey are forced to think about it, and you know this because in these countries, the dollar has a black market, so people are forced to think about it.  There's no dollar black market in the UK because it's melting slower.  So, a lot of people don't think about the nature of money, they don't think about that there is an alternative to sovereign currencies.  It just doesn't happen, which is why low inflation is so insidious, whereas high inflation forces you to think about money; what is money as a store of value.  People don't think about a store of value often; not everyone.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah, and I think human psychology is sensitive, or more sensitive to change than to information.  Picture that, think about the T-Rex in Jurassic Park; does the T-Rex respond to people, images of people in front of it?  No, it responds to change, it's when the people move quickly, or when there's a flare moving back and forth.  It's more efficient to have a perceptual system that responds to delta, rather than to information, to change over time.  And what that means is that when the change over time is slow, we don't notice it.

Peter McCormack: So, how were you orange pilled; and at that time, how did you reflect on Bitcoin and the nature of everything you'd taught previously?  Was it a real fork in the road; did you have to question everything you'd one previously?

Andrew Bailey: I think it's hard to answer questions like this because there's a bit of narrative or myth-telling.

Peter McCormack: I could look at myth.

Andrew Bailey: You look backwards and start to tell a story about yourself; it doesn't make it wrong, it might be true, but it's a story that you can only tell looking backwards.  But when I try to do that, I see at least two forks.  The first fork was whether to buy Bitcoin or not.  For me, that was not all that difficult, because some of my good friends simply told me to, and I looked and I thought, "This is so cool, it might catch on, you might want to have some!"  So, that was in 2014.

It didn't occur to me that it could be interesting beyond a speculative bet, until some time later.  And it was really my friendships with Troy Cross, Craig Warmke, Brad Rettler.  And Craig, Brad and I had to make a decision in early 2020; this was actually before March 2020, before the shit hit the fan and asset prices started to do weird things and the money printer started to go brr and all that, and we had to decide, "Do we want to give our careers to Bitcoin or not?" 

We actually made the decision before March 2020, it was about February.  It was like, "Okay, we're going to wind down our other research projects, because we think this is a civilisation-shaping technology.  Maybe it's not fire or the printing press, but it's really important.  This is the big thing of our lifetimes to really think deeply about.  So, wind down our other research projects and start working together more and more".

Peter McCormack: It could be.

Andrew Bailey: It might; I can't say it won't.  I'm not totally sure.

Peter McCormack: Well, it might destroy part of the printing press.  Ideally, the printing press that prints the money.

Andrew Bailey: Well, there you go.  It's an anti-printing press.

Peter McCormack: There are plenty of people who will say that Bitcoin is the most important technology innovation of our time, and they will say electricity, railroads, internet, Bitcoin.  And we won't really know.  We can write our hypothesis on what it will be, but we will only know retrospectively that it is, because in 40 years' time, books will be written on the transition to Bitcoin and why it happened and what it meant.  At the moment, it's a potential.

At the time of the internet, there were people who said with the internet, "This is going to change everything", then there were people like, Paul Krugman, "No, it won't".  Now we know how fundamentally different the world is because of the internet.  We will maybe know in 20, 30, 40 years, maybe beyond our lifetimes.

Andrew Bailey: I think it was a couple of years of teaching about money and thinking about money, not only in connection to Bitcoin, but just money, and then having a crew to work with.  These things converged together, so I guess there's three inputs to that: there's the Bitcoin interest; there's a crew; and there's this background of thinking about money, and those converged in February 2020 or so.  So we decided to start writing on this and to write about nothing else eventually.  So, our other research projects are winding down.

Peter McCormack: Have you all got together physically?

Andrew Bailey: Yes, we had five weeks together at the University of Wyoming this summer.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Andrew Bailey: I had five weeks with Brad.  Craig was with us for two of those five weeks.

Peter McCormack: And Troy?

Andrew Bailey: Troy was not.

Peter McCormack: You've not had the whole gang together?

Andrew Bailey: Not yet.

Peter McCormack: We need to make that happen and I want to be there and just want to be in the corner of the room watching this!

Andrew Bailey: It will be crazy, man!  When you get enough philosophers together, I'm not sure you want to see that!

Peter McCormack: Do you want to see that?

Danny Knowles: I want to see that!

Peter McCormack: Fuck yeah, I want to see that!

Andrew Bailey: There's something that Troy said, it may have been on your podcast, it may have been somewhere else, that his drug of choice, and he's speaking for all philosophers here, he said, "My drug of choice is ideas, so in a way I'm high all the time".  There's something deeply right about that, that's what philosophers love.  We love ideas and we love to get high on them.  You get a bunch of us in a room together and we'll say some pretty zany stuff.

But Bitcoin has always taken me back to the real world; that's one difference between the work that we do in Bitcoin and any of the research and the thinking and teaching I've done in philosophy that's highly abstract and theoretical, because Bitcoin answers to the real world.  It has a price, it has people who use it, it has people who desperately need it.  And so, whether we're right or wrong, Bitcoin matters in ways that speculative stuff about free will or the nature of material objects or time, these things just don't matter.  They don't have that concreteness that Bitcoin has.

Peter McCormack: But there is a resistance to Bitcoin as well.  People resist it, people actively campaign against it.  There are certain people who will lie about it.

Andrew Bailey: They will.

Peter McCormack: I know you can go to incentives.  So, when that comes from somebody connected to --

Andrew Bailey: Digiconomist!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Digiconomist, de Vries, you fucking moron!  But there are people who actively hate it; they think it feels like they hate it.  And there are those that feel like they hate it because they discovered it early and forgot to buy some; but there are others who I don't understand the hatred that some people have towards it.

Andrew Bailey: I don't know if you noticed this, bitcoiners can be pretty annoying.  That's got to be part of it!

Peter McCormack: Maybe, yeah, that is true.

Andrew Bailey: We get obsessed and we refuse to talk about anything else, and we display cult-like behaviour.  That doesn't make us bad, but it will make us annoying to some people.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get that.  Maybe also, it's people don't like their cheese being moved, they're scared of change, implication.  We question sometimes…  I came to a realisation recently.  I used to question the transition to Bitcoin and how chaotic that might be and what might come out of that chaos, which might mean blood, death, disaster, war, revolution, and I used to hold that personally, like I have a deep responsibility to this.  I'm doing something that is disseminating information about Bitcoin and in part, this show might be part of the acceleration of that happening.  And what if I'm wrong?  What if I've contributed to something like that?

But then I came to a realisation very recently that this acceleration is happening because of the failures of fiat money and therefore, it's a natural response.

Andrew Bailey: It's not your fault!  It's not your fault!

Peter McCormack: Stop it, man, I will fucking cry!

Andrew Bailey: That's our second Robin Williams reference, there we go.

Peter McCormack: That is one of my favourite moments of any film ever, ever.

Andrew Bailey: They earn it.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man, that film is so good.  If you haven't seen it, what the hell are you doing with your life?  But this is a famous moment between Robin Williams and Matt Damon, and I remember getting my son to watch this film.  He fucking loves it.  God, I'm always bad with names, I always forget names, what's the film?

Danny Knowles: Good Will Hunting.

Peter McCormack: Good Will Hunting, that's it, "How do you like those apples?"  Yeah, it's not my fault!  Well done.  So, what is money, man; what is money, Andrew Bailey?

Andrew Bailey: I've had a little fight on Twitter with some bitcoiners about this.

Peter McCormack: Who specifically were you fighting?

Andrew Bailey: I won't name names, but here's something bitcoiners like to say, and I'm not totally sure where this came from.  They say, "Money is that which fulfils three roles: store of value; unit of account; medium of exchange".  That's not how economists think about money.  Economists, when thinking carefully say, "Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange".

Peter McCormack: But isn't that currency?

Andrew Bailey: I use that and money interchangeably, or maybe currency is just a species of money.  So, money is the abstract kind and currency is an instance of it, like the dollar is an instance of money, so the dollar is a currency and then money is the bigger category.  Why are you grinning?

Peter McCormack: No, I'm just listening, I'm enjoying the interview!

Andrew Bailey: Me too, man.

Peter McCormack: I get like this.  I've recently discovered that philosophers are my favourite people to interview.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, thank you.

Peter McCormack: But I think a good interview with a philosopher is also a little bit of therapy.  And I can imagine some people are going to be listening to this and going, "Pete, shut the fuck up, just let the man talk"; but I'm using this to deal with things I question.  I say therapy, that's not the right word.  I'm having a one-to-one philosophy education with a philosophy teacher right now.  I'm getting to ask those questions where you get to fire the questions back at me, and I get to deal with things I'm dealing with, which might not be the best for the listener but I fucking love it!

Andrew Bailey: Well, you're a professional asking questions.  You pointed that out to some guest recently, I forget which one.  It's like, "I'm the expert asking the questions, I'll ask the question".  Do you remember that?  This was a couple of episodes ago.

Peter McCormack: Possibly, I say that a lot.

Andrew Bailey: It may have been Paul Sztorc.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: "I'll ask the questions".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that was a tough one.

Andrew Bailey: You guys came around, it was rough.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean just some people, they aren't very good at understanding what the audience doesn't understand. 

Andrew Bailey: Well, Paul needed you and I don't know if he knows that, but maybe he does now.  He needed someone to make him slow down and answer the questions.  And he has the answers; he's a terrific bitcoiner that everybody should pay attention to, in my opinion.

Peter McCormack: I agree.  Some people don't realise how much smarter they are than other people as well.  Where they seek clarity, others see a mess.  It's back to the xPub thing.  Some people see an xPub, I see a mess, I see confusion, I see something I could fuck up.

Andrew Bailey: I think you're fronting on this, I think you know what an xPub is.  Matt Odell has told it to you beautifully at least twice that I've heard!

Peter McCormack: I know what an xPub is now, but sometimes there's a benefit also to the listener.

Andrew Bailey: Yes.

Peter McCormack: I think the role of an interviewer sometimes is to disarm two people.  It's to disarm a guest to feel comfortable answering questions, and disarm an audience into feeling comfortable not understanding things; so, you have to do both.  And I've said many times, there are three types of interview.  If you want to listen to an expert and an expert, go and listen to Stephan Livera discuss with an expert on libertarianism; that will be an expert and expert.  My show is a moron and an expert.

Andrew Bailey: What was Bitcoin Uncensored?  Is that two morons?

Peter McCormack: No, no.

Andrew Bailey: It's two experts pretending to be two morons, I think that's what it is.

Peter McCormack: No, I think it's two experts acting like morons, but they are two of the smartest people out there, Junseth especially.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Fantastic, the two of them, I miss them dearly.  Luckily, we get to talk to Junseth and I was very fortunate enough once to interview the two of them, here in Florida in a hotel room with all our shirts off!

Andrew Bailey: Yeah?  Just like the old days.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just like the old days.  But we had no video, so it was the perfect way to disarm them two at the start.

Andrew Bailey: I think of Junseth more than Chris as a kind of jester, where he's pretending to be a fool, he dresses like a fool, he talks like a fool, he jokes like a fool; not a fool, not at all.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  He was the jester and DeRose was the judge and they worked together perfectly.  I mean, if that show was still running today, it would be hugely successful.

Andrew Bailey: This was an important informative thing for me in maybe 2016, 2017, when they were active, that got me thinking about Bitcoin, even things that are commonplace now that we all say.  For example, Bitcoin is a bearer asset, not a registered asset; very important distinction.  It was Chris, in my experience, who really articulated that and got clear about how, even though it's on a ledger, it could still be a bearer asset.  They got deep, they were intellectuals.

Peter McCormack: But do you know the interesting thing about those two?  They only worked together.  You have Junseth on his own, it doesn't work; you have DeRose on his own, he tried to do it on his own, it didn't work.  But the two of them together was absolute magic.  Miss you guys.  Don't know where DeRose is these days.

Andrew Bailey: You don't know me, but I miss you too.  I've listened to every episode, I've got them all archived on my website, even though they deleted all of them, I kept copies for myself.  Do you know they interviewed Perianne Boring?

Peter McCormack: I do.  Danny was listening today.

Andrew Bailey: Did you talk to her about it?

Peter McCormack: No, I didn't, because do you know what?  I think it was a tough show for her.  And when you go to do an interview, it is a man in the arena again.  We know it's tough for a guest because we know people get nervous coming on this show, especially now with the production.  So, I personally never want anyone to be uncomfortable in the seat and never want to push them too hard; I want them to enjoy the experience.  And then, if I've got tough questions, I'm very careful about how I do it and I try and do it in an empathetic way.

She made a mistake that a lot of people have made with regards to blockchain, focusing on blockchain, considering blockchain, being convinced that blockchain can do all these magical other things other than money.  And she put herself in the arena, did the interview and it wasn't good for her.  But she had that experience and she's carried on.  She still operates the Digital Chamber of Commerce and she's doing some good work.  She is a libertarian at heart, and I had a wonderful interview with her today.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, great.

Peter McCormack: There was nothing good that come of, "So, how do you reflect on that interview?"  Now, I'd ask her personally and separately and do it again some time, but there was nothing from that.  We had nothing to gain from that in this interview.  Well actually, that's not true.  I'll tell you what, Danny, would have been a good question is to ask her, did she learn anything from that; did she reflect on that?  I mean, they crushed her.  I actually felt sorry for her.

Andrew Bailey: They were not kind.

Peter McCormack: No.  That was a crushing.  But that also was a striking warning to anyone else who thought they could try and hoodwink the likes of DeRose and Junseth with "blockchain, not Bitcoin".

Andrew Bailey: You asked me, "What is money?"  I started to go on a rant.  Can I pick up that thread?

Peter McCormack: Please do.

Andrew Bailey: So, bitcoiners talk about money as having these three constitutive roles, three things that make something a money, and this annoys economists when they hear bitcoiners talk this way, because it's not the way they talk, in part because the roles can actually come apart in important ways.  It's the medium of exchange role that's definite, that's at the centre of it all.  Everything is an asset, everything that retains value over time is to some extent an asset.  That is a store of value; asset is just another word for store of value, as Lawrence White, the Bitcoin economist OG says. 

So, I don't think that gets to the heart of what money is, and unit of account doesn't either, because you can make exchanges where you have a different unit of account than is the medium of exchange.  When you spend money, foreign money, for example when I spend Singapore dollars in the United States, the United States dollar is the unit of account because that's what goods are priced in.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin's unit of account is the dollar.

Andrew Bailey: Yes, exactly, and yet Bitcoin can still be money.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Andrew Bailey: So, I think we set ourselves up for weird kinds of intellectual failure when we fixate on these other roles of money.  And of course, they can be important to the evolution of a money, they can contribute to the medium of exchange role of money, but that's not what money is.  Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange.

Peter McCormack: So, how's money different from currency?

Andrew Bailey: Money is the abstract substance, and then a currency is an instance of it.  And then we have units of currency, which are quantised pieces of that abstract substance, where they contain that abstract substance.  That's how I think of it.  Does that seem right?  Is that now how you would use the words?  We don't need to get into a semantic discussion.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is quite interesting, because we've had quite a few conversations recently where people have said, "Do we even know what money is?"  Jeff Snider is like, "We don't know what money is, we just don't know", and other people have questioned it.

Andrew Bailey: Well, I think we don't know what kinds of things could be money.  So here's maybe a goofy analogy.  I've used this in this book chapter I was just writing actually.  Think about a doorstop.  What colour is a doorstop?  What do doorstops smell like?  That's a weird question, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: A doorstop is something that stops doors.  It could be any colour, it could smell like anything.  Maybe it will burn at 100°C, maybe not.  Money's like that.  Money is whatever it is that is the commonly accepted medium of exchange.  What kinds of things could be money?  We used to think that it was commodities and fiat money.  So, these are the two main kinds, that they go together, that their properties go in a certain way.  Well, Bitcoin showed us that there is another kind of money as well.

Peter McCormack: Why is physical money so attractive?  You mentioned it earlier and when you brought it out, I looked and I smiled.  We watched a film last night, War Dogs.

Andrew Bailey: I haven't seen it.

Peter McCormack: You've not seen War Dogs?

Andrew Bailey: No.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you've got to see War Dogs.  It's Jonah Hill and Miles Teller and they're arms dealers, accidental arms dealers.

Andrew Bailey: Should I rewatch Good Will Hunting, or watch War Dogs?

Danny Knowles: War Dogs.

Peter McCormack: I mean, Good Will Hunting is one of those films where I can probably name five or six films that I've seen 20 to 30 times and every single time, I can watch it over and over again.  So, that's a tricky one.

Andrew Bailey: You're going to love Brad Rettler. 

Peter McCormack: I know I will.

Andrew Bailey: Talk to him about Good Will Hunting when he's on the show.

Peter McCormack: I know I'm going to love Brad Rettler.  Do you have a favourite film?

Andrew Bailey: I've always liked Being John Malkovich.  It might not be the favourite, but maybe top five.  It's a weird movie, it's a mind trip.

Peter McCormack: I met John Malkovich in an elevator in London; the weirdest thing!  So, oh God, how do I tell this version of the story?  I'm on a date, there's no point lying about it, I'm on a date and it was a successful date and I was staying over in London and we went back to my hotel and we get in the lift.  And it was that classic moment where somebody puts their foot in the door and the lift opens and they come in and in my head I'm like, "That's fucking John Malkovich!"  And I was like, "You're John Malkovich, aren't you?"  And he was like, "Yeah".  So, I've got a photo, I'll show you the photo of me and John Malkovich in a lift.

You can meet anyone in a lift in a weird moment.  But I always felt like meeting John Malkovich in a lift is the perfect person to meet in a lift.

Andrew Bailey: There is something about him.  There's a reason that screenplay was about him and not somebody else.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen it?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man, you've got to see it.

Andrew Bailey: It's not for everyone.

Peter McCormack: No.  It's brilliant and weird.  Yeah, I don't know how to pick between War Dogs and -- because War Dogs is a great film, but it's a piece of entertainment.  It's a piece of entertainment, not a great piece of film; it's just entertaining.  Whereas, Good Will Hunting is a great film, a brilliant film, because of what it makes you think, what it makes you question.

Andrew Bailey: What it makes you feel.

Peter McCormack: What it makes you feel, yeah.

Andrew Bailey: How did we get to War Dogs?

Peter McCormack: Money, because we were talking about looking at money.

Andrew Bailey: Why do we care?

Peter McCormack: There's a bit in the film where they go to collect their money from these Berettas they've sold, and you see the money machine scanning through the money and instantly you're like, "Oh, money".  And then it pans out and they're in this room full of fucking big, giant blocks of money.  What is it, $13.2 billion?

Danny Knowles: Something like that, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And it was all the money Saddam had hoarded and it was just piles of money.  And you're attracted to it thinking, "Just carve a little bit of that corner of that money off for me, a few million".

Andrew Bailey: Money plays an outsized role in our minds.  There's a lot of psychological research that speaks to that in various ways.  One of them is this kind of silly example, but maybe it makes the point.  When you give children coins and they understand money, so they're old enough to know what money means, and then you ask them later, they've played with some coins, "How big were the coins?"  They draw on a piece of paper and they overestimate the size of the coins and they don't do this with other tokens, non-money tokens. 

So already, even very young, it starts to play this outsized role in their minds.  They pay attention to it, we treat it differently than other material objects, even objects that are worth more than the money.  Marx thought that this was a kind of fetish.

Peter McCormack: I fully empathise with that.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.  There's something not wrong about that connection.

Peter McCormack: Well, you see it with the likes of rappers.  I mean, they'll come onto a video and they're waving their big wads of cash, or Floyd Mayweather, he'll have a photo on Instagram of him on an aeroplane, and there was just like $2 million on there and he's on his phone.  They understand that fetishism around money, and that fetishism of displaying wealth, but in the form of money.

Andrew Bailey: Well, here's a danger.  Because we want money so much and because it plays this outsized role in our minds, I think it's easy to treat it as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.  There's a Bitcoin connection here.  Maybe you'll remember this moment when Ross Stevens, in the Bitcoin for Corporations Conference, maybe February 2021 or so, sponsored by Saylor, Ross Stevens at one point said, "Well, nobody actually wants Bitcoin, they want what Bitcoin can get them".  And as he says that, 1,000 plebs on Twitter are like, "No, no, I do want Bitcoin!"

You're missing the point.  Bitcoin is a means to an end.  If it really is money, it's a means to an end.  And if we identify or think of it as an end in itself, that is a psychologically disastrous place to be.  All you'll want is money and all you'll get is money and you will not be happy.

Peter McCormack: So, maybe one of the benefits of moving to a Bitcoin world is, because it's a digital money, that fetishism goes?

Andrew Bailey: Well, I think there are trade-offs, because there's something really intuitive about small, physical objects.  We understand how this solves the double-spend problem.  Once I go like that, I can't take it back without fighting you for it.

Peter McCormack: Unless we exchange something.

Andrew Bailey: Unless we exchange, which we won't.

Peter McCormack: I'm not doing that again; that's my $20 bill.

Andrew Bailey: So, we understand physical money very intuitively, very young children understand how material objects work, object permanence comes pretty early on in development.  It's much harder to understand abstractions.  And abstractions, like deposits in a bank account or a balance on a ledger, these come really late in human history, so I don't think we've evolved the cognitive apparatus to think about it super-intuitively.  It's sort of weird and new for us in terms of our history, but maybe there are benefits to moving away from something so concretely physical. 

I don't think this is well understood.  This might be one of those second- or third-order effects of Bitcoin that we won't know about in advance until they've already happened, sort of like the mining effects.  Nobody could have predicted five years ago that mining could have this role to play in variable load on the grid and turning methane into much less deleterious gases, monetising methane burning instead of just putting it up in the atmosphere.  Nobody could have predicted that five years ago, so I think there are lots of things that we'll just discover.

Maybe this is a realm for one of them just to think about and watch, is does the abstraction of money and Bitcoin take that to an extreme because it's only abstract?

Peter McCormack: Do you think about the relationship between money and time?  I'll frame it for you again.  I think we have two important scarce items in our life that are personal to us, which is the Bitcoin we own and the time we have left.  Now, we know how much Bitcoin we own, but we never know how much time we have left.  But as you get older, you become more aware of, there's a limitation to the time you have, your own mortality.

You talked earlier about your young students going into the world of work and considering how much time they've got and chasing money.  As I've got older, I've become more protective over my time than my money.  Time has become a more important currency for me than money, but I don't know if that is a reflection on the money I have, I'm not rich, but a reflection on the money I have; or a reflection on how much time I have left.  But time has become a form of money for me.

Andrew Bailey: I think one thing you'll do once you realise the time is finite, and all of us realise this some time or other, some of us later than others; some of my students haven't realised it yet -- sorry, guys, you will -- we learn how to spend it better.  It's not that we don't spend it, it's that we learn to spend it on the things that are precious to us.  Maybe that lesson applies to Bitcoin too.  Once you see how scarce it is, you've really taken in the 21 million cap and you take seriously the possibility that Bitcoin will become an important money, I think the thing to do there isn't just to hold on to it, it's actually to spend it on the things that are most precious to you, just as you would with your time.  You don't just do nothing once you realise the finitude of time; you spend it carefully.

Peter McCormack: But therefore, is time money?

Andrew Bailey: Well, now we need that glass of wine!

Peter McCormack: I want that glass of wine.  Anyone going to pour it?  Jeremy's on.

Andrew Bailey: That question is one of these things that's so abstract and so deep that there has to be something right about saying yes, but I don't know if I'm the person to try to unpack that.  But they have absolute scarcity as the thing that they have in common and it's scarce for all of us.  So, some resources are more scarce for others than for some, so the people who have access to the shitcoin printer.  Shitcoins are not scarce for them, they're scarce for me, because I don't print shitcoins.  But Bitcoin is scarce for all of us, nobody can print more of it, and time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, like I say, both are scarce.  To me, I consider time like money.  I've never questioned if it is money right until this moment.  I just felt like you're the guy I could do it with, but I do consider it more like money.  I've become more protective of it over time; I've become less tolerant of a waste of my time; I've become a bit more selfish with my time.

Right now, every six to eight weeks, me and Danny get on a plane, we go somewhere in the world and we make 20 to 25 interviews, and we're so fortunate to do this; it's the most amazing life.  We turn up in a city, Jeremy arrives, we all give each other a big hug, we have a glass of wine, we hang out and we get to talk to some of the -- I'm so lucky I get to talk to people like you and Steven and have these amazing conversations, and we get to hang out and eat good food.

But I also sacrifice something.  I sacrifice being at home in my town and with my family and more recently, being involved in the local community.  Now, through the vehicle of football, I support my local community and, I don't even know what day it is; what day is it?

Danny Knowles: It's Sunday.

Peter McCormack: So, if it was Monday, tomorrow night, I would be taking my daughter to football training and when I take her there, there's 100 young girls out there playing football and training, and I would be spending time with the coaches, finding out their requirements and their needs and how I can support them because I'm part of that community; and I sacrifice that.  I've made the choice still to come here, but there will come a time when I won't want to come here because that's going to become more important because I have less of that time. 

So, I'm considering time like money, like how do I spent it; what is the value exchange I'm getting?  So, I consider time as money, or like a money, or a money substitute.

Andrew Bailey: Time is hard money, not just any old money. 

Peter McCormack: I read something once and it really stuck with me, "An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but you cannot buy an inch of time with an inch of gold".  I thought of that very much, I thought of that a lot, when my mother died.  The time I had with her was priceless because there was a finite time until she would pass.

Andrew Bailey: Literally priceless, you couldn't pay to extend it.

Peter McCormack: More importantly, that.

Andrew Bailey: Thanks, man.  Cheers!

Peter McCormack: Cheers!

Andrew Bailey: To time.

Peter McCormack: To time, to my mother.  So, she lived in Ireland, I lived in the UK.  Every time I went to see her, there was a cost, but I would do it because I wanted to see her as often as I can, so there was a cost to me.  And that time was priced in cost of opportunity cost, but there was no amount of money I could spend.  And Steve Jobs, probably one of the richest guys in the world, he could not buy more time with money.

Andrew Bailey: These are deep waters.  If you reflect a lot on this stuff, it can turn you into a really morose guy, or maybe, just maybe a more wise guy.

Peter McCormack: I would like to be wiser.

Andrew Bailey: That's the first step, says this guy who knows nothing about wisdom.

Peter McCormack: Come on, man.  You are obviously (1) wise, (2) have a quality in allowing someone to feel comfortable questioning things, because I'm instantly, in this scenario, questioning things now.  I have no idea at the moment if we're making a good show or a terrible show, but I kind of don't care.  I'm entirely selfishly enjoying the experience for me.

Andrew Bailey: In preparing for this show, I didn't read any articles, but I looked through some old quotations that I sometimes reflect on to remind me of my business, what it is that I'm here for.  There's one from a poet, I don't remember the name, but I tweeted it just this morning, and he says that -- for philosophers, it's the questions that matter and this is the line that stuck out to me.  He said, "They're like embers in the fire.  They just sit there and they burn", and those questions can have consequences later, but it's the asking that matters.  That's the valuable thing in philosophy.  So, they burn.  Those questions sit in the back of your mind like little embers.

Peter McCormack: What questions are sitting in the back of your mind like little embers?

Andrew Bailey: I wonder whether bitcoiners have, and I think about this a lot, overestimated the likelihood of hyperbitcoinisation and the inevitability of Bitcoin, and underestimated the negative costs, those who get left behind.  And if you do both of those at the same time, you can make some really deep mistakes, I think, or at least you set yourself up for certain kinds of failure; intellectual, maybe even moral failure, when you think it's inevitable that this thing will take over and you haven't really thought about who it might leave behind.

So, that's something that Brad, Craig and I have thought a lot about.  Brad's kind of the heart of our operation; he really thinks about that question, who Bitcoin may leave behind, if it is what we think it just might be.  My own suspicions, my best guesses are that Bitcoin will not hyperbitcoinise, it will not become the dominant money; it will become an important money that sits alongside others, and it is kind of an eternal check against institutional overreach.  I think that's the best scenario that I think is a real possibility, given where we are now.

Maybe that's optimistic.  It could be really deeply pessimistic actually to think that Bitcoin can take over, if you really think about who that taking-over might harm; that is the people who didn't buy early.

Peter McCormack: But you could potentially look at it a different way.  It harms people who didn't buy it early, but there's a net reduction in harm, in that it would ultimately raise everybody up.

Andrew Bailey: So, the positive externalities, the good stuff that Bitcoin creates, outweighs, or maybe even compensates the least well off.

Peter McCormack: I think about those questions a lot.  We thought about it in the interview with Perianne.  The premise of the interview was actually to do with why an ETF has not been improved.

Andrew Bailey: So, this is mindreading of Gary Gensler, a bit of that?

Peter McCormack: I mean, I think everyone has come to the same conclusion on Gensler and it's not really mindreading, it's pretty obvious; but, by the by.  Why has he not approved a spot ETF?  And, rather than just question that, Danny and I questioned, before the interview, or the question we wanted to put to Perianne was, "Is a spot ETF good for Bitcoin, current Bitcoin holders or everyone at large?  My fear was, especially when she talked about --

Andrew Bailey: It's a good distinction.

Peter McCormack: Well, she talked about the wall of money that would come in, trillions of potential investment.  And if that's coming into the US, which already has an outsized position in Bitcoin as a collective group of people of ownership, I don't know what the split is, but I wouldn't be surprised if 40%, 50% of Bitcoin is all held by Americans.  If that wall of money came into Bitcoin and it raised the price 10-, 20-fold, that would disproportionately benefit America.  Would that make America an even far wealthier nation?  What does that do for the little guy?  And I don't know the answer, I'm not even the person to answer it, but I questioned it, and I'm not sure…

An ETF would be amazing for me if this wall of money came in.  I personally would make a shitload of money.  But what weighed on me was, actually is this good for Bitcoin and humanity at large?  I think I'm siding on the side of I don't want a spot ETF, because I'm not sure it's the best outcome for Bitcoin or people yet.  I think we still need to get the little guys in.

Andrew Bailey: It sounds like integrity to me to care about something more than just NGU, Number Go Up.  We have to.  If we're going to be more than the laser-eyed cultists they think we are, we have to care about more than just Number Go Up.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but if I only cared about Number Go Up, I wouldn't be involved in --

Andrew Bailey: You'd be in crypto or something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'd be involved in shitcoins, and I'm not.  But that's not to say I don't want money and I'm not attracted to money or what it provides, the opportunity that it provides for myself and my children, the nice holiday, nice car, and things like that.  But ultimately, what is the mission here, trying to anchor back to the mission; what is the mission?  So, I question that.  What other embers do you have going?

Andrew Bailey: I think about what the mission is, and this is something we've talked about at Bitcoin Policy Institute.

Peter McCormack: To get rich!

Andrew Bailey: That's what the cynical onlookers might guess.  I think they might be surprised at how little we care or talk about price, and how much we care about things other than price, and how united we are around a mission.  So, I was on the phone the other day with Grant talking about this Swan-sponsored opportunity, thanks again, and we ended on this really upbeat note, and it wasn't because I thought that some research money would be coming to me and my friends.  Honestly, maybe none of it will come my way, maybe the Resistance Money people will get nothing; that's okay. 

What was so exciting was that there was something more than just getting rich that brought me and Grant together on that call; it was a mission, it was that we thought that we could make the world better, and that is so powerful as just juice to get you up in the morning and to get you on that call and to get you writing.

Peter McCormack: So, what is the mission; is the mission personal?  Because, Bitcoin's personal, I think.  If somebody asked me, "What is Bitcoin?" I --

Andrew Bailey: What is Bitcoin to you?

Peter McCormack: Well, no, I said this to Steven earlier.  I'd start with trying to explain to them what is wrong with fiat, and then if inflation comes up, we've pointed out that inflation is a very personal problem because it affects people differently.  It benefits some people; there are winners and losers.  But Bitcoin to a Nigerian activist is very different to a Pete McCormack in Bedford, it's very different to a female Afghani who can't get a bank account.  Whoever you are, it's completely different, it's completely personal, so what is the mission?

Andrew Bailey: I've heard you say on the show what you think the mission is.  You think it's the separation of money and state.  I would put it a little bit differently.  I think it's an eternal check on our institutions, is a fancy way of saying it.  It's not just the state.  I think we're in this time and place where schools and churches and states and corporations and mega-corporations and various unholy combinations of any of these things have tremendous power over individuals, and it's these little technologies that occasionally come up that tip the balance of power in favour, back towards the individual.

So, the printing press is something like that, the firearm is something like that, and I think of Bitcoin as being one of those technologies that can really shape maybe even hundreds of years of human history by protecting us from precious, valuable, important institutions that nonetheless have great capacity to really screw us over when they get too big.  Bitcoin takes something important out of all of their hands.

Peter McCormack: It breaks the concentration of power.

Andrew Bailey: It does.  It splits it up, it disintermediates, just in the same way that firearms might have done so when they were invented.

Peter McCormack: So, it's a democratising of power?

Andrew Bailey: I hesitate about democratising, because it has so much connection to things like elections and electoral politics, but if democratising just means putting hands into individual people, then yes, absolutely, that's the mission.

Peter McCormack: Well, power concentrates.

Andrew Bailey: Yes, it tends to over time.

Peter McCormack: And power concentrates with money.  So, can power concentrate with Bitcoin if Bitcoin concentrates?

Andrew Bailey: Of course it could.

Peter McCormack: Saylor could become the most powerful man in the world.

Andrew Bailey: Or some unknown whale.  In fact, more likely Roger Ver, for example, at one point had 400,000 Bitcoin.  There are other unknown whales that may splash around, that have more than Michael does, that are unnamed or unknown to most bitcoiners.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I like what Bitcoin does to incentives.  It breaks certain incentives, but I think it does it in two ways.  I think it breaks incentives with regards to the money printing press.  Within Bitcoin, you've got this check and balance on institutions; but there's a check and balance within the community.  Like, if one week, I have an ad read which is for Cardano, I'm fucked, it's the death of the show.

Andrew Bailey: I think I would unfollow you, and I would ask to please have my $20 bill back, please!

Peter McCormack: I'd be like, "That's £30!"

Andrew Bailey: I said Bitcoin is an eternal check.  I should qualify that; I don't think that it's an eternal solution.  I think these things are kind of cyclical and we need new technologies at new places, new times, to fight back this inevitable concentration of power.  Equilibrium outcomes tend to coalesce around concentrations of power; not always, but this is a long tendency over human history.  So maybe someday, we'll need something that none of us in this room could even imagine and think about, something even weirder than Bitcoin, that will make the internet once again a site of freedom, rather than surveillance and control.

There's this concept from Tolkien, from my favourite author, he calls this The Long Defeat, the idea that you can't defeat evil once, in fact evil will come back.  So, there are these moments of triumph in Tolkien, but if you take a long view of his entire history, in fact Morgoth is defeated, but then Sauron comes.  Sauron will be defeated but then the Nazis will rise.  There's always new evils, I'm afraid.  That's The Long Defeat.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean we have the evil of China, that exists within China, which I personally believe is an evil; we have two sides, some people would argue, of evil and a war right now.  I personally think one side is more evil than the other, but we have evil rising within the United Kingdom where I live, we have evil everywhere.

Andrew Bailey: It gets even worse than that.  The line between good and evil, you know this line from Solzhenitsyn, it's not between you and me; the line between good and evil runs straight down each man's heart.  I mean, these battlegrounds are spiritual battlegrounds in a way, when each of us makes a choice.

Peter McCormack: Evil runs through all of us.

Andrew Bailey: It does.  Does Bitcoin fix this?  No, but Bitcoin can be enormously helpful now for certain kinds of evils that we do see.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  There's a lot to think about here.  Does money create a myth of happiness?

Andrew Bailey: I think if we use it wrong, yes.

Peter McCormack: Because you know one of the terms I really fucking hate is, "Money won't make you happy, money doesn't make you happy", because having no money can make you fucking miserable.  I think having money can be a lot of fucking fun.  And I think it's a lie, but I think worded better, it has meaning.  Like, "Money doesn't guarantee happiness" I think is a better term.

Danny Knowles: But fun isn't happiness, is it?

Andrew Bailey: Maybe it's one element of happiness, if you think of happiness as just an overall better life.  Well, a life can be made better by having some fun in it.  But a life that's only fun without meaning is not as good as life with both.

Peter McCormack: Not exactly.  You might live a very happy life by only having fun.  I have a lot of fun and I'm very happy.

Andrew Bailey: Good for you.

Peter McCormack: Because, I don't know, does my life have meaning?  Does your life have meaning?  What's the meaning of your life, Danny?

Danny Knowles: I need a joint!

Peter McCormack: You've got one.  Why don't you get on it?

Danny Knowles: It's upstairs.

Peter McCormack: What is the meaning of your life, Danny?

Danny Knowles: I don't even know how to start answering that question.

Andrew Bailey: The separation of money and state!  I hope not; I hope you've got more!

Peter McCormack: Do you feel like the work we do has meaning in your life right now?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think it's meaningful work.

Peter McCormack: No, not is it meaningful; is it giving you meaning?  Do you think about that?

Danny Knowles: I honestly don't really know what that means.

Peter McCormack: Do you feel like your life has a purpose with this; do you feel like you've found a purpose with it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think the work has purpose, but --

Andrew Bailey: You switched the question again!

Peter McCormack: He's doing it, isn't he?!

Danny Knowles: Yeah, but I honestly don't really know what that means.  I think the work is valuable work and it does have meaning.  Does it give meaning to my life?  I don't know if it does.

Andrew Bailey: There's empirical research on a couple of questions that's relevant to what we're talking about here.  So, the big question is, "Can money buy happiness; can money buy a good life?" and there are various ways of thinking about what happiness actually is, how to measure it.  It turns out that if you're measuring happiness by asking people, "Do you feel good right now?" basically money can remove unhappiness and up to a point, it makes you happier in that sense by removing unhappiness.  But then it levels off and it stops giving you benefits; there are diminishing marginal returns.

Peter McCormack: It's like that baseline we talk about.  Being broke and poor sucks, I've been there, it's fucking shit.  And I know right now, especially in the UK, because we made a film about it, there are people right now who are broke and poor and therefore struggling and it's shit and they are unhappy.  And I think once you can cover those base costs of living, your rent, energy, which is a challenge right now for some people, you can go and do your shopping and not really think about your budget, have a holiday a year; beyond that, everything else you need money for is for lumpy things, so a flash car, a big house.  It's lumpy things, and I don't think that will make you happy.

Andrew Bailey: There's another way of measuring happiness, which is not asking people, "Do you feel good right now?" but more like, "Are you satisfied with your life?"

Peter McCormack: Oh, don't do that, because I'm not.

Andrew Bailey: Well, it turns out that money and having more of it is correlated, but it does satisfy at a certain point, and then start to have diminishing marginal returns, but the number's higher.  So, it's easier to buy off unhappiness than it is to buy life satisfaction, and we actually don't know the edges, because there aren't enough megarich people to know just how far money can buy life satisfaction.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, again that's possibly personal as well.

Andrew Bailey: Yes, and one thing that's really difficult to measure here is difference across people versus change in one person's life over time.  One of these things that makes money not help us be happy is hedonic adaption.  It's when you get new pleasures, and then after you've experienced them for a while, you kind of forget that they're pleasures.  The human perceptual apparatus, remember I mentioned this a bit ago, it's delta sensitive, it senses change.  So, the way to have a good life from pleasure is to have more and more and more pleasure, but we know that can't go on forever; increasing amounts and kinds of pleasure.  That doesn't actually work, you adapt to what you have.

Peter McCormack: Well, as a former drug addict, I know that path.

Andrew Bailey: Exactly, yes.

Peter McCormack: It is diminishing returns.

Andrew Bailey: It will kill you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it becomes a trap.  It goes from a pleasure to a trap.

Andrew Bailey: And what you think you're seeking is pleasure, but it turns out you're seeking to hold off displeasure, and that is no way to live.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: So, this is maybe one of the deeper reasons or ways that money can trap us, is that we think we can get money, we want more of it so that we can exchange for pleasure.  But it turns out that you just hedonically adapt to new pleasures and they're no longer great to you anymore.  What we need are mechanisms to fight back, something to keep us from adapting too quickly to actually notice what is good in our lives.  And if you don't have that in your life, then you'll always just be seeking more and more and more and never finding it.

Peter McCormack: Is there any study of the superrich and happiness?  You will see super-famous people going through a very hard time and the same typical cliché criticism is, "How can they be miserable, they're so rich, they've got everything they could want?"  And I think it's just such a naïve statement with regards to understanding relativity.  You're not living their life, so you see their house, their car, their lifestyle and you think they must be super-happy because they've got all that shit that you want.  For them, that's their baseline.

Andrew Bailey: They've adapted.

Peter McCormack: They've adapted, they can't change how they feel internally.  But is there any study that too much money can have a destructive power against happiness?

Andrew Bailey: There is, in fact.  Now, getting social scientific research on this is tough, because the megarich do not submit to happiness monitors.  So, the way some of these studies work is you wear basically like a little Apple watch, and then you can dial in a number; it beeps at you once every hour and you put in a 1 through 10.  Elon Musk is not going to wear this watch, he will not submit to this kind of study, it's too intrusive.  So, we don't have big data sets to understand the things like that. 

What we have are anecdotes.  Here's one.  This is from the introduction to a book by the Dalai Lama; it's called Ethics For The New Millennium.  He names a bunch of famous people.  He's like, "I've been in Brad Pitt's house, I've been in [so-and-so's] house, and you know what I found there?  When everybody else is at the party, I go to the bathroom, I take some time for myself, and then I rifle through their medicine cabinets.  And you know what I find?  Drugs, benzos, opioids".  These are people that are looking for something.

Danny Knowles: That's a rude houseguest, to be fair!

Peter McCormack: The Dalai Lama takes the piss!

Andrew Bailey: It's not just in his book, it's in the only part of the book anybody ever reads, which is the introduction.  So, if Brad Pitt wants to know what the Dalai Lama's doing in the bathroom, it's in print!  So, a lot of us are really bad at this, we're bad at exchanging money for happiness.

Peter McCormack: You're just pissed that I said the show wouldn't be funny if I died and you took over!  Danny's trying to be funny now.  Yeah, or is it that they have easier access to these drugs that they believe can mask problems?

Andrew Bailey: Oh, that has to be part of it too.  You know, I sometimes think about this for, I'll say bitcoiners, but I'm really talking about me too, the struggles in my own heart.  We bitcoiners anticipate some future moment of getting money.

Peter McCormack: Absolute wealth.

Andrew Bailey: This is Number Go Up, this is retirement early; it's those kinds of pipe dreams.  But my guess is that if we don't practise and get good at exchanging money for happiness now, we won't be any better at it later, and it won't make us happier.  And what is the point, except to be happier and for those you love to be happy?  So, what's the point of money, except to somehow exchange it for something that's of better value?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is why I'm not 100% comfortable with the hodl-only mentality.  I say hodl, but I sometimes whether that is collective propaganda to force Number Go Up more.

Andrew Bailey: Of course it is, and it's kind of scammy too, because the people yelling, "Hodl!" the hardest are those who are secretly selling on the way up.

Peter McCormack: Well, we don't know that.

Andrew Bailey: The Celsius stuff is out. 

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah.

Andrew Bailey: We do know it sometimes.  Peter, sometimes we do know it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but generally speaking, Celsius is a specific situation.  But I sell Bitcoin and I admit it.  I bought a car with it and a house, and I bought my son a car and I openly admit it.

Andrew Bailey: And your dad, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I bought my dad a car.  But I don't think I bought his with Bitcoin, I bought his with cold, hard cash.  But when I've had those jumps, I've spent and raised my or other people's lives up.  Or, we give money out to projects, like we support what Steven's doing, or Peter Todd, or whoever; we support things.

Andrew Bailey: And HRF, I hope?

Peter McCormack: HRF.  I've supported HRF, I've supported a lot of projects.

Andrew Bailey: The Human Rights Foundation, you should give them some of your Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: You should definitely give them some of your Bitcoin.  Danny, we don't talk much these days in terms of the next bull run, we're going to be fabulously wealthy; we talk about the next bull run in terms of the freedom that it gives us for this show.

Andrew Bailey: It's healthy.  I'm glad for you that you're not thinking of your next Aston Martin, because you don't need another one.

Peter McCormack: No.

Danny Knowles: It's a Lambo next!

Peter McCormack: Nobody needs three Aston Martins!  I haven't got two Aston Martins.  But this show is not really a Bitcoin show anymore.  It's called What Bitcoin Did and we talk about Bitcoin a lot, but strictly speaking today's show is not a Bitcoin show, this is a philosophy of money show; and the show we just made with Steven was a show about mis-incentives with fiat money, it's not a Bitcoin show; and we made a show, I mean the majority of the show we made with Perianne, we were discussing libertarianism and the health system.  It's becoming more about the asymmetric topics.

There is a creative desire to move on from Bitcoin, because I prefer personal stories anyway, so there's a creative desire.

Andrew Bailey: Everybody prefers personal stories.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do.

Andrew Bailey: Human beings care about human beings, of course.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  We set up to do the show with Perianne about ETFs.  For the first hour, we didn't discuss them, and for the last 40 minutes we did, I was bored.  But when we were talking about her and her background and why she was drawn to libertarianism, I enjoyed that.  But there is also a reality that the word, Bitcoin, can cause an inertia to some people, and I feel like if there wasn't Bitcoin in the title and it was just a background topic…

For example, the best way I can say it, Joe Rogan makes a show with a range of topics.  He doesn't make a show about MMA and jiu-jitsu.  But just by listening to his show over and over again and these little bits that come in, I'm now interested in it.  I watch a little bit and I actually found out, in the little school that's five houses down from where I live, they have a jiu-jitsu class twice a week and I was like, "I might go and try that out".  But if he'd have made a jiu-jitsu show, I never would have listened to that; I don't give a fuck about jiu-jitsu. 

So, I think about the show, if I want Bitcoin to be a success, am I just making a show for bitcoiners who already exist and then every four years, there's a bunch of people who realise, "Shit, I need to learn about Bitcoin", Number Goes Up and they go into Spotify, they search for Bitcoin and they find my show, or their friends tell them to listen to it?  But then, I'm just preaching to the choir.  Would it be a more successful Bitcoin show if it wasn't a Bitcoin show?

Andrew Bailey: Well, you've answered that question a while ago, and we started ranging more widely. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we know we want to do that.  So the big question is, can we?  And I questioned this to Willy Woo and other people, and the only reason we have not made that leap right now is it's a gamble, and it's a financial gamble.  This show is secure --

Andrew Bailey: You've got guys to pay for.

Peter McCormack: Got guys to pay for.

Andrew Bailey: You've got stuff to pay for.

Peter McCormack: I've got stuff to pay for.  But I also asked a question about this earlier without you realising it, it's like the risk isn't just to the people on the show, the risk is to personal status and standard of living.  If it doesn't work, I may have to downsize house, I may not be able to afford the life I had before.  But I don't know what I want to do, and therefore I'm economically trapped doing this.

Going back to the idea, if the next bull run comes and I had a 5X on my net wealth, we definitely go and change the show; we do, don't we?  We know we do, because we know that's our mission where we want to go, spread this knowledge to as many people as possible, and we think there's a different way.

Andrew Bailey: You're in a position to give people a gift.  You can give them the gift of thinking, a time and a place to just ask questions.  We talk about these psychological forces that are kind of at war with us, they're not to our benefit.  One of the tools that we have to fight back is thinking, is noticing, the simple act of reflecting and just noticing how you feel, noticing what money is doing to you, noticing how you think about Bitcoin, how often you check the price.  And these things are prompted by questions.  So, you're in a position to raise questions that could help us notice, could help us think.

Peter McCormack: I think money makes me a better person.

Andrew Bailey: It doesn't make everybody a better person.

Peter McCormack: I know that.  I just think for me.

Andrew Bailey: It's just leverage, it just extends what you already have.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think it makes me more generous.  No, it doesn't make me more generous; I'm the same generous, but the amount I give away is more, the total amount.

Andrew Bailey: The impact of your generosity has expanded.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And I think money allows me to -- maybe that means I'm not a good person, because money allows me then to focus on the things I want to do; but I'm only doing that because I've got the financial freedom.  Whereas, if I had a pair of bollocks, I'd just do it anyway.  So, maybe I'm a piece of shit; maybe I'm putting money before my own happiness and what I want to do?  No, I am.  How much is enough money?  27!

Andrew Bailey: 21!

Peter McCormack: 21!  No, I'm greedy!

Andrew Bailey: We talked before about how the happiness effects of money taper off as you get off.  There's a magic number that some people cite, which is about $75,000 per person, per household.

Peter McCormack: Per year?

Andrew Bailey: Per year, that's income.

Peter McCormack: Wait until they get there!

Andrew Bailey: That's right.  Well, here's the thing.  You ask how much is enough.  There's a one word joke answer that everybody knows: "more".  It's a joke, but it actually expresses something deep and maybe pathological, because if that really is your answer, and from NUS it is, then you'll never be happy.  So, I think the answer isn't $75,000 a year per person in your household, nor is it more; it's more like, "How much do you want to be enough?"  Maybe aim at that, but then you need to set yourself up so you can stop.  You need to set yourself up so that you won't be grabbing for more and more on the hedonic treadmill, always adapting and never happy anymore.

Peter McCormack: Are the ethical and unethical ways to spend money?

Andrew Bailey: Of course, the answer in one sense has to be yes.  You can pay somebody to assassinate somebody and that's bad.

Peter McCormack: But what if you're killing Baby Hitler?

Andrew Bailey: You can pay somebody to assassinate an innocent person, and that's bad.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Andrew Bailey: One thing that this question highlights is that there are interesting moral and social taboos around money that don't always make sense when you examine them.  Let me give you an example, and maybe you can think of one, Peter.  Here's something that I give students a lot.  Quite regularly, I'll see a student who really wants to think about something, and so I'll just give them a book about that thing and then I will rebuy the book for my own personal library; so I just give them a copy.  It happens all the time, this is part of the job, I basically budget for it to give away books all the time.

Peter McCormack: How many books do you give away per year?

Andrew Bailey: Maybe one per month, so nine teaching months out of the year, so nine books per year.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Andrew Bailey: So maybe "all the time" is an exaggeration, but this happens, it's not at all unusual for me and it goes over fine.  Now imagine that instead of giving a book to a student, I had handed them money, even money of equal value.

Peter McCormack: To go buy the book.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.  That would be weird.  There's a kind of social taboo about that like, "Wait a minute, profs don't give students money.  What is this creep after?"  Think about what gifts you might have bought for your mother.  Would you have given her money or a gift?  Could you have given her the equal value in money or a gift?  Which would be a weird thing and maybe a cold, inhuman thing to do versus the right thing?

Peter McCormack: I always give my sister money for her birthday, because I always forget it, and she's always glad I give her money, because I always give her more money than I would have spent on a present to make up for the fact that I didn't get her something!  I'm sorry, Lorraine!

Andrew Bailey: Well, there you go.  These social rules don't always bind us and obviously there are exceptions.  But there are a lot of things, a lot of times and places and contacts where it's totally inappropriate.  Here's one more example.  Somebody who I thought was a friend of mine asked me a bit ago if I could read one of his papers and give comments on it.  Of course, I was about ready to say yes and then he said, "I'll pay you" and I just thought, "Dude, I thought we were friends".  His offer to pay me, actually it separated us; it's like we weren't friends anymore.

Peter McCormack: That sounds like the start of mine and Danny's relationship, and mine and Jeremy's.

Danny Knowles: And we're still not friends!

Andrew Bailey: What did Peter offer you money to do, Danny?

Peter McCormack: That's not what happened!  It's the opposite.

Andrew Bailey: Go on.

Danny Knowles: Well, I reached out to Peter years ago saying, "I think I could help with the podcast", and I offered to do the first couple of shows for free, see if he wanted me to carry on.  And straightaway he just said, "No, I'll just pay you for the work".

Peter McCormack: Because I didn't want to see his unpaid work, I didn't want to see that.  I wanted to see what his paid work was, and I wanted him to know that I value paying for work.  Same with Jeremy; Jeremy offered me the same.

Andrew Bailey: It changed your relationship though.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: When you bring money in, it changes the way we relate to each other.  So, Marxists talk a lot about this.  They say that money alienates us from other people.  I think there's something right and something wrong about that.  Here's what's right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think people will immediately want to disagree with that, because they don't want to agree with a Marxist idea, but I think they're right.  We have class structures which are based around money that create separation.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.  Alienation is the fancy Marxist word for that.  Here's where I think Marx and those who follow him have made a mistake.  They failed to notice the ways that money brings us together.  I took an Uber ride here.  I gave the guy money, he gave me a ride, it brought us together.  We had a fun conversation and then we both got something we wanted out of that relationship that we couldn't have gotten without a medium of exchange between us.  It's this great social technology to enable us to relate to each other.

Actually, if loving someone is doing something that's good for them and being with them, there was a kind of love that was exchanged, because I did something that was good for him, I gave him money; and then he did something that was good for me, and we spent time together, we interacted.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the sum of the parts was more.  It wasn't just the trade, because you got the conversation.  The sum of the parts was more as well.

Andrew Bailey: But even if there hadn't been a conversation, there's a kind of love that's exchanged.  It's meeting each other's needs.  So, Marxists often miss that, they think only about the alienation bit and they miss that money as a social technology actually enables us to help to meet the needs of people that we have no knowledge of and couldn't possibly have knowledge of, we maybe even can't speak their language.  Yet, you could offer something of value in exchange for something of value, and we would understand each other and actually do each other a solid.

So, you asked earlier, unethical uses of money?  Of course there are.  There's also taboos, and that is so interesting, because it tells us that money is weird, it tells us -- the fact that there are these taboos is just further evidence of money's weirdness and I'll just say this, plugging myself and my work.  It tells us the philosophy of money is a real subject that we should be thinking about.  Taboos are excellent evidence of that.

Peter McCormack: How much time in teaching do you cover Marxism, Marxist ideas, communism?

Andrew Bailey: How much?

Peter McCormack: Do you have many students who spend time questioning it themselves and come to you?

Andrew Bailey: Of course.  In another part of the college that I haven't taught in, it's called Modern Social Thought.  It's this class that every sophomore in my college takes.  They read portions of Das Kapital and what they often come out of that with is this sense, and I believe it's correct, that something's wrong, something's wrong in the post-industrial age the way we relate to each other.  There's deep alienation and there's something F'd up about the money.  I just think Marx totally misdiagnosed what that was, and totally misunderstood how prices worked.

Economists now have a much better sense of how prices actually happen in markets.  It's not that something was super-costly to produce, that's the labour theory of value, therefore it's valuable.  No, it's because it was valuable to someone else.  It's when supply and demand meet that something is precious, and that somebody will give up something of value for it.  That ticks both supply and demand, and that's neoclassical economics, post-Marx.

So, Marx made many, many mistakes, but there's something so right about that, I think we should stop and think about the taboos around money and just what it does to us and how we relate to each other.

Peter McCormack: What did Marx get right?  Is there anything that should be taught or should be debated that you think he did get right, that is missed because some people are so fearful of Marxist ideas?

Andrew Bailey: I think he's right that if you offer somebody that you're intimate with, you're close to in some way, money, you've made a bad faux pas.  He thought it was basically wrong in all cases to use money, at least the early Marx, so this was before Das Kapital; he published this little piece basically arguing that.  So, I don't think that's quite right, but maybe there's another way to put it.  When you're close to someone, don't use money, and there's actually a difference in signal. 

So, think about what you've conveyed or signalled when you give a gift?  You've told someone that you know them, because you've bought something that they wanted.  You've displayed through your actions, not through your words, through your actions that you understood them, that you got them what they wanted, something that not everybody knows.  And that's the difference between giving them money and giving a gift.

So of course Marx is right that sometimes we should give gifts rather than money.  Now, he thought, the earlier Marx at least, thought that we should only have barter and there shouldn't really be capital formation, privately owned.  All of that's hogwash in my opinion, but there's a kernel of truth there.  If you want to show someone you love them with material stuff, know them and then give them what they want, and money won't send that signal; they won't feel loved.  When they feel loved is when you give something that maybe they want, that maybe they didn't even know that they want.  That's the deep signal of love, when someone gives you something that you didn't even know you wanted, and then you realise, "This is exactly the right thing for me"; and money won't be it most of the time.

Peter McCormack: And that goes back to time, because sometimes giving people time, especially as a parent, no child wants to hear, "But I'm working so hard to give you this life".  Every child, even if it is true, they don't give a fuck; they want time.

Andrew Bailey: Read to your kids.

Peter McCormack: Read to your kids, go and watch them play sports.  That's where time is also money for me.

Andrew Bailey: Yes.  Well, you're giving something non-fungible there when you give your time.  Money, at least good money, is fungible.  A $100 bill is as good as any other, not so your time.

Peter McCormack: Although right now, my son would be like, "Fuck off, dad, give me £500!"

Andrew Bailey: He'll change his tune.

Peter McCormack: No he won't, he listens to this.  I wonder if he's listening to this show.  If you're listening to this show, hello, Connor, I love you, man.  Okay, we haven't even spent any time on markets.  What is the role of markets?

Andrew Bailey: Well, markets are where we meet.  That's where supply and demand come together, and where price is set.  It is super-abstract, but that's where we perform this loving dance of money exchange, that's where you give up something of value to get something of value.  You wanted to know not just what do markets do, there's something else on your mind; what is it?

Peter McCormack: No, let's go there, I'll come to where I'm going.  What is the role of markets?

Andrew Bailey: Well, here's something that money does that's obvious, it's a medium of exchange.  Here's something that is maybe less obvious but still true, money is also a medium of revelation, that is it's in how we spend our money that we show who we are.  This, by the way, is why financial privacy is so important, because the way you spend your money says what you value, it says who you really are, not who you say you are, but who you really are. 

So, when you buy hormones or diapers or political tracts or religious icons, you can go through the list, this says what you're actually willing to give up something of value for, and markets are where that happens, and money is the medium of revelation in the market; it's how we show ourselves to the world, not just through what we say but through what we do.  And of course there's an abstract way of thinking about that, "It's prices, it's when demand and supply meet".

Peter McCormack: Are we out of wine?  Damn, we need more wine.  It'll be whiskey next.

Andrew Bailey: We'll work on that later.  Markets are where we show who we are.

Peter McCormack: How do markets get distorted; what breaks markets?  So, lack of privacy will break markets, you will have a more free and honest market if you have financial privacy.

Andrew Bailey: I'm not so sure about that.  What's the thought there?

Peter McCormack: Okay, so for example, prior to the internet, if you wanted to buy a sex toy, you would have to go to a sex shop and maybe some people were like, "I don't want to walk into that sex shop, because someone might see me going in there, or I have to face the person selling the sex toys and I'm too embarrassed", but you can buy sex toys online.  I'm pretty sure that's changed the market, because that person has a certain amount of privacy.

Andrew Bailey: You know the Kindle did this.  You can read books on the Kindle without anybody knowing what it is you're reading, and that changed people's reading; not just their reading, but their buying patterns.  So, I bought this book, I think it was called How To Be a Woman.  I never would have bought this book, because if I'm carrying that around, you know the kinds of questions that would run through somebody's head.  But I bought it and I read it and it was fun; on my Kindle.

Peter McCormack: On your Kindle.

Andrew Bailey: Nobody else know what it was.  I mean, Amazon knew, but people around me sitting by the poolside wouldn't know what I was reading.

Peter McCormack: So, private markets are more --

Andrew Bailey: Maybe more revelatory.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, more real.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.  They're a place where we even more so show who we really are, through what we're willing to give up.

Peter McCormack: Can we talk about wealth inequality and equality?  I think as students, I think the younger you are, the more you think about -- you have a naïve approach to equality.  Like, if I sat down with my daughter and I said to her, "Do you think we should tax the rich higher to give a more equal life to the poor?" she's definitely going to say yes, 100% she's going to say yes, and I think most of her friends would.  And I think as you get older, if you understand the redistribution of income and how that skews things and changes incentives, you realise that isn't the answer, although I am still somebody who is not an anarchist.

Andrew Bailey: A statist cuck, I believe is the technical term for what you are!

Peter McCormack: Well, I've tried to get away from making that claim.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, sorry!

Peter McCormack: Well, no, because --

Andrew Bailey: It's tongue-in-cheek, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think it's also not a fair way to describe myself; it's just the conclusions I've come to.  The conclusions I've come to is that, not the current form of democracy, I like democracy, sadly it's fucked at the moment, but I prefer a smaller state, but I don't mind taxation; I think it's too high.  I don't mind taxation and ideas that sport economic opportunity for people in a more difficult situation and I'm glad we have universal healthcare.  We get beat down continually for that, but they're the things I believe in.

But why is it that some people are more happy than others to pay tax to create more opportunity for others, and there are others who are opposed to it?  Is it down to money, or is it down to political ideology, or is it both?

Andrew Bailey: I think there's something that all of us see and perceive to be morally disquieting and we differ in how we interpret it.  So, let me just give you a picture, and I think you could see something went wrong here.  So, let's say there's a slum next door to a palace with a Bugatti, several Bugattis.  When you look at a picture like that, and this exists in the real world, I think if your heart is real, if it's beating with blood and you're human, you'll think something is wrong there, something went wrong.

Here's one popular diagnosis of what went wrong: "It's wealth inequality, it's the difference is what went wrong", and so we need to fix it somehow, whether with markets or with force; those are our options: with force, or without.  I actually take a different view myself for what went wrong.  I don't think it's the difference between these two stacks that is morally problematic, I think it's the fact that one stack isn't high enough.  So, one of these is an absolute measure.  It's having enough, and do we all have enough versus do some of us have too high a ratio relative to others?  Obsessing about that relative question can both distract us from what's morally important, which is that everyone has enough; and also send us into wild goose chases of levelling down, where we try to make the world better by making some people worse off, by taking away.

In my view, it's a deep moral mistake, but it's tempting because if you have a heart and you look at that kind of picture, you will feel something, I think.

Peter McCormack: If you heard a, "Mm" in the background, that was Steven Lubka agreeing.  Come and get it on the mic so we actually get it.  Do you want mine?  It's going to have to go pretty high.

Steven Lubka: It's like if everyone in the world was a millionaire, a real millionaire, who cares if one guy's a trillionaire, like barring some fantastic abuse of power, as long as everyone has enough?  The problem is poverty, not the range between the lowest and highest, so I completely agree with that.

Peter McCormack: This is the problem with politics as well, with someone like an AOC, who by the way I think there's some interesting things about her.

Andrew Bailey: I like AOC.  I often disagree with her, but she's a singular talent. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think she's naïve in her understanding of economics, but I also think she has a way to appeal to people; I have issues with that.  But a massive own goal is where she goes to the Met Gala and wears a dress that says, "Tax the rich".  It was just naïve and stupid and it's the wrong problem to focus on, as any of these "blame the billionaires".  That is an excuse, that is creating a scapegoat for a problem that isn't the problem.

We have this massive issue in the UK at the moment, whereby the country is getting wealthier in nominal terms, but the bottom of society is getting poorer.  I talked about this film we made.  We went to this place called Terminus House, in Harlow; it's a deprived town in England.  They've turned a disused office block into housing, because there's a problem with social housing.  We never used to have such a big problem with social housing, but we do because the poor in society have got poorer, and the jobs they have access to are zero-hour logistics jobs at places like Amazon warehouses.  And what we've done is created a favela in the UK, we've created a ghetto, we've created a fucking shit, terrible place for people to live.

We have, as a wealthy nation, pushed the poorest down further and in situations like that, you can easily see how people want to blame the rich, or politicians will use that as a scapegoat; but the problem isn't the rich, that isn't the problem.  The problem is the wealth divide we have created through the distortion of markets, the warping of money, has concentrated the wealth in fewer and fewer hands, but it's not the rich's fault for that, it's the system we've created.  We haven't created a way to raise these people up, raise up the baseline; we've pushed them down, and that bothers me.

Andrew Bailey: It should, and this is different than I think the vibe you might get from some bitcoiners.  There's a kind of libertarian shitlord on Twitter who might say, "Fuck the poor".

Peter McCormack: I don't think they would say that.

Andrew Bailey: I think there are some people who think that if this outcome is the result of markets, so be it, let the dice fall where they may, and there's nothing morally problematic about seeing someone suffer, or not have enough.  And I think it's important to highlight that you can care about everyone having enough without thinking that the problem is the ratio, or that redistributive taxes are the only solution.

Peter McCormack: I think anyone who feels like that is an outlier and a psycho, and I don't think there are many who think like that.  I think what the libertarians who you're referring to would think is that we have made it perhaps too easy for some people to not work and to live off the state, and they've been conditioned into that expectation and we need to remove that so people have the incentive to become productive.  So, I would challenge what you said there, because I've spent a lot of time with Bitcoin libertarians, and I don't think that's what they believe.  There would maybe be some people, but they're outliers and psychopaths.

Andrew Bailey: Let's set them aside then.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I believe the libertarian friends I've met and spent time with in Bitcoin are actually good people and they think that the fiat system, with too much collectivism is the problem, and you need to break that to raise up the opportunity for others, with the right incentives, because incentives matter.  I would challenge you on that.

Andrew Bailey: Challenge accepted!  I'm not going to fight that, I think you're right as a matter of generalisations.  There's one important distinction when thinking about distributive justice.  So, distributive justice is, is the distribution of goods just?  So, you've got 10 Bitcoins, I've got 3, Danny has 7, is this a just distribution?

Peter McCormack: You come to a similar answer to how much is enough?

Andrew Bailey: Well actually, what a great idea, let's circle back to that because I think there's a connection to what we were talking about earlier.  There's two big approaches to distributive justice.  There's what are called patterned approaches.  So, the idea here is that you can take a snapshot in time and look at the pattern, and then tell whether it's just or not.  And then there are competing historical accounts which say, "Wait a minute, you need to know how the pattern got there before you can know whether it's good or bad".

I think there's a really important insight in that second historical account that's often missed.  We don't know what is wrong with a situation when see one guy has too little, the other guy has a lot, until we know how they got there.  And this is where bitcoiners could maybe press, because bitcoiners know something about how we got where we are and what happened to the money, and what happened in 1971.  And that is a historical question, not a question about who has what at a particular moment of time, it's not a snapshot question; it's about mechanism of time, it's about what created this in the first place.

As far as that sufficiency question, the view that I've proposed, and it sounds like you're friendly to it, so I recommend it to you, it's called the sufficiency view, instead of egalitarianism.  So, egalitarians think that equality is intrinsically valuable, that's as such in an end in itself, it's good for people to be equal in some request.  The sufficiency view says, "No, what's good in itself is for everyone to have enough". 

Anyway, this connects to what we were saying earlier about this thesis that maybe for each of us, there is an amount that is enough, after which we should cease striving and start spending and start exchanging money for happiness.  What that is for you I think will vary across space and time and person.  And as productivity increases, the enough-ness, the amount that we can reasonably expect to be enough, I think will rise.  And we're lucky enough that we live in a world where that's true.  Those who live for two 1990 dollars per day, in 1990 it was billions, now it's significantly less than a billion.  The number of people who have enough is slowly rising, the world's actually getting better.  But if all you focus on is the ratio of the haves to have-nots, you might miss this really important fact that actually, our world's getting better.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Andrew Bailey: So, there's an optimistic spin on that.  Having said that, it doesn't follow that everyone has enough and that our world is perfect, because neither of those things are true.

Peter McCormack: Is inheritance fair?

Andrew Bailey: I stand to inherit nothing from my parents.  There's a question of bags here.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Andrew Bailey: People with wealthy parents might have strong reason to give a very different answer than me.

Peter McCormack: I kind of have to consider my children's inheritance.

Andrew Bailey: Could I distinguish two questions?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andrew Bailey: There's the question of whether we should stop people giving money, especially lots of it, to their children; and there's the question of whether we individually should give lots of money to our children.

Peter McCormack: So morally, a lot of people would say, "No, you shouldn't stop that, because that's theft and that's their family's money and they should do what the fuck they want with it", and they're absolutely right in certain ways.  But is it fair?  I think we are afforded a chronological and geographic luck in life.  So, I had a geographical luck in being born in the UK, and I had a chronological luck in being born before the invention of Bitcoin; so, I had some luck.

Andrew Bailey: I was born to a family that had a house loaded with books.  We were otherwise poor, but we had books; that was luck.

Peter McCormack: You didn't have a PlayStation?

Andrew Bailey: No.

Peter McCormack: That sucks, man!

Andrew Bailey: My friend, Chris, had a Super Nintendo.

Peter McCormack: Chris is fucking cool!  I used to go round Chris's house.  Fuck your books!  No, I'm only joking.  I get that, I fully understand that.

Andrew Bailey: There's a great line from another movie, About Time, which is not a great movie, but has a special place for me.

Peter McCormack: About Time is a great movie, what the fuck are you on about?  That film is incredible.

Andrew Bailey: I think it's special, though technically flawed.

Peter McCormack: I've been to that restaurant.

Andrew Bailey: Oh, the one in the dark?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the one in the dark.

Andrew Bailey: Good for you.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you a funny story about that.  Have you seen this film?

Danny Knowles: No, I've never even heard of it.

Peter McCormack: We should watch that tonight.

Andrew Bailey: Rachel McAdams, and who's the guy; the redhead?

Peter McCormack: Oh, you'll know him.  I'm so bad with names.  He's the guy in Star Wars who plays the bad guy, the English guy.

Andrew Bailey: He was in a Black Mirror episode too.

Peter McCormack: Yes, is he in the first episode?

Andrew Bailey: First series.

Danny Knowles: Bill Nighy?

Peter McCormack: No, Bill Nighy's the dad.  No, the first episode of Black Mirror is the politician having sex with the pig.  He's episode two of Black Mirror.

Andrew Bailey: I thought that was Waldo.

Danny Knowles: Domhnall Gleeson?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, About Time we should watch after this.

Andrew Bailey: It's charming, great soundtrack too.

Peter McCormack: There's a restaurant, the Dans Le Noir, and they've got about five of them in the world.  There's one in Paris, there's one in London, I think there's one in Vegas.  You eat in the dark, pitch black dark.  When you say dark, it's not like the dark when you go to bed and you can kind of make out the edge of the curtains; you can't see shit.  It's as black as you can get.  All the staff are blind.  And so, there are two things that happened.

Firstly, the staff, because they're blind, they're used to navigating without sight, so they know everywhere they're going perfectly.  The thesis about the restaurant is, when you cannot see the food, it raises your taste sensation so you taste the food differently.

Danny Knowles: That's very cool.

Peter McCormack: It's true, it's cool and it's true.  You end up eating with your hands, because if you're trying to use a knife and fork, you just can't do it.  So, two things happened that night.  Firstly, like a dick, I got my vape out and tried to have a vape and I lit the room up!  So, that didn't go down well.  And then secondly, you have to try and go to the bathroom at some points.  They don't guide you to the bathroom; they tell you where it is and you have to find your way.  I walked straight into somebody.  But it's a great experience.  I went with my friend, Martina, and it was a brilliant experience.  Sorry, I've deviated, just because I went to the Dans Le Noir.  Sorry, I do this.  Talk about the film.

Andrew Bailey: That's the third or fourth film reference, good!  The line that I was going to bring up, it's something like this, "Give your kids enough so they can do anything, not so they can do nothing".

Peter McCormack: Yes!

Andrew Bailey: I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.  If enough of us paid attention to that wisdom, we would have to worry less about inheritance taxes and fairness.

Peter McCormack: Did I hear right that Bill Gates is only leaving like $1 million to his children?

Andrew Bailey: Good for him.  I hope he does something good with the rest.  I have no confidence that he will but I hope he will.

Peter McCormack: I know he's unpopular with a lot of people because he's trying to engineer food and do a lot of weird shit, and I get that, but he has also done a lot of good with his money.  Is it polio he's eradicated from the world?

Andrew Bailey: Well, he's working on malaria.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but is it polio he's eradicated from the world?  He has done good things.

Andrew Bailey: I believe that was Jonas Salk.

Peter McCormack: What is it that he worked on?

Danny Knowles: I know that he's working on malaria.

Peter McCormack: No, but he's worked on something else.  I'm sure it's --

Andrew Bailey: Toilets and clean water, he's big on.

Peter McCormack: Can you look up "Bill Gates" and "Polio", because I'm sure it's down to the point it was in one location.

Danny Knowles: I mean, "Gates Foundation funds new polio vaccine".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, can you look up "Gates' children inheritance".

Andrew Bailey: What you said rings a bell, that he intends to give very little comparatively.

Danny Knowles: "Melinda Gates maybe angling to change kids' $10 million inheritance".

Andrew Bailey: $10 million, okay.

Peter McCormack: To what, more or less?

Danny Knowles: I mean, I'd guess more, but I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Because even at $10 million, a guy who's worth $100 billion, or whatever it is, to say, "Here's $10 million", because that is --

Danny Knowles: "Bill Gates has described it as miniscule"!

Peter McCormack: Fucking wanker!  But that is enough to do anything.  I mean, you could do nothing, but assuming the lifestyle they've lived, if they've got $10 million, they're probably going to spend half of that on a house.  They'll have to do something at some point.

Andrew Bailey: Good for Bill.

Peter McCormack: But it perhaps gives them enough, I was going to say "capital", but Steven will look at me; enough capital to go and do something that maybe they want to do, or something, because I think the more money you have, the more time you can focus on altruistic things, which is not a bad thing.

Andrew Bailey: Of course not.

Peter McCormack: I've obviously loved this interview.  It shows how much Danny joins me.

Andrew Bailey: It's great to be here.

Peter McCormack: Anyone listening all the way through, if you've enjoyed it, I'm glad; and if you haven't, I'm sorry.

Andrew Bailey: It's really special for me to be here, Peter, because you've been a voice in my ear for years, so it's kind of fun to be a voice in yours now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm a voice in my own ear!  I want to end in a really good way, but I know we're going to do this again.  I feel like I want to organise a Resistance Money retreat.

Andrew Bailey: I was going to say, if we want to end, I want to end by talking about my dudes.

Peter McCormack: Well, do that, but I'm still going to have questions.  You talk about your dudes, but I think we should organise -- one of our sprints should be a Resistance Money sprint.  We should get everyone together, I like the idea of reinterviewing everyone, including Bradley, because we do need to get Bradley on; but I do like the idea of getting you lot round a table with microphones and me just saying fuck all, or trying to.  That would be hard!

Andrew Bailey: And Troy, honorary member and sometimes co-author with me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and just seeing what comes out of that kind of session, because I think that will be super-interesting.  But the philosophy discussions are my favourites.  I don't care about UTXOs anymore, I'm bored of that.  I care about the more deep and meaningful conversations and I think we should all go to Wyoming and a great place to get steak, and we should all hang out and we should make a bunch of shows.  We could make like a month of shows.

Andrew Bailey: Well, Brad is a smoker, and he's getting better and better at it; he can make us some good stuff!

Peter McCormack: Challenge accepted, but I think we should organise that.  We've been talking about going to Wyoming.  We could get Caitlin Long while we're there, we could get Tyler Lindholm out, we could go shooting elk.  Maybe we'll go shoot an elk and eat that.  We'll have to challenge ourselves in killing an animal.  Okay, you talk about your dudes; no, you should finish on your dudes.  I want to finish on a question and then want you to talk about your dudes.

What is the most important question we can ask ourselves right now?  And if you can't answer that because it's personal, what is the most important question you're asking yourself right now?

Andrew Bailey: It's something we've touched on and it's not about Bitcoin, it's about time, it's what to do with the time we have left.  I'm a young father myself.

Peter McCormack: Not that young!

Andrew Bailey: My daughter's 3, I have one.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're not young.  How old are you?

Andrew Bailey: 38.

Peter McCormack: You're a baby, for fuck's sake.  Okay, you're the father of a young child.

Andrew Bailey: The time I have with her is so scarce and it's impressed upon me every time I'm away, when I come back, to see how she's changed.

Peter McCormack: Isn't that amazing, one of the amazing things about having a young child, is you can go away for a week and you come back and they look different and you're like, "Shit!"  It doesn't happen so much as they get older, but when they're little, they really change quickly.  I remember, I'd be away for a week and I'd come home and like, "You look entirely different".

Danny Knowles: Are you sure it was the same baby?!

Peter McCormack: We'll talk about that later!  No, you'll experience it with this job at some point, Danny.  You'll spread your seed and make a child and you'll go away with me for two weeks, you'll come back and you'll be, "This is an entirely different child".  It is amazing.

Andrew Bailey: Time is precious.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Andrew Bailey: Having a kid has made me see that acutely.

Peter McCormack: Over time, time becomes more important than money.  If you've got a week to live, that time is infinitely more valuable than money.  But when you're 20, 21 and you're leaving university, money's more important than time.  It flips at some point.  I think I'm on that line where they're the same, they're equal, and every question I put to myself is, "How am I using my time?"  I prioritise money sometimes more, but sometimes I prioritise time more, but I think that's a journey a lot of us go on.  Maybe some people don't do it and they make a mistake and that's why they have their regrets.  I don't want to regret a misuse of time.

Andrew Bailey: You can't take it back.  That's a train that you can't role back.  So, that's what I think about, and that has all sorts of consequences for everything else, as we've discussed.

Peter McCormack: All right.  You talk about your dudes and then we're going to get some money -- get some money!  Fuck!  What did I just do?!  We're going to get some food.  Motherfuck, I fucked up there, Danny.  And then we're going to get some food.  I can't say it, I want to say "money".  Let's eat the money.

Andrew Bailey: Let's get rid of some money.

Peter McCormack: Let's spend some money.

Danny Knowles: Eat the rich.

Peter McCormack: Let's eat the rich.  All right, talk about your dudes, talk about your work, spend as much time as you want on it.

Andrew Bailey: I think a lot of bitcoiners fantasise about citadels, and that really represents for us separation from other people.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I hate the citadel idea, fucking hate it.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.  My heart's desire has never been to be separate from people, it's to be connected to them, and my dudes are my bitcoiners that I'm connected with.  It's Brad Rettler, who you should follow on Twitter @rettlerb, Craig Warmke, @craigwarmke on Twitter, and Troy Cross.  I work especially with the first two.  Working with them, talking about Bitcoin with them almost literally every day the last couple of years, it just means everything to me, so I just want to tell them that.

I've got this kind of pet theory for how we work as a group, there are these views coming from Plato about how humanity has three parts.  There's the head, the heart, the hands; there's the rational part, the feeling part, and the active part, and I kind of think we've found this specialisation with the three of us, where Craig is the head in many ways.  He's the guy who has thought the most deeply about Bitcoin, especially in technical matters.  Brad is the heart, he's got a heart for the least well-off and for how Bitcoin can be a powerful tool for those who need it the most.

In many ways, I'm the hands, I'm the producer who makes sure that shit gets executed, to make sure that our collaborations actually happen, and the lead writer on many occasions, and the guy fiddling the knobs, even if the idea wasn't mine.  I play that role with Troy as well, jabbing him to get him to write that white paper with me, and then needling it and turning the knobs, like a producer, to get something out there.

Peter McCormack: I think Troy's the wings.

Andrew Bailey: The wings?

Peter McCormack: That makes it fly.

Andrew Bailey: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because I've seen how he's flown since the show I did with him.

Andrew Bailey: He's amazing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's incredible, and I see what he's wrestling with as well.  He wrestles with a lot, which is interesting.  Well, he's a philosopher, of course he does.  Okay.

Andrew Bailey: I'll say, Troy, I hope you don't mind that I say this.  Troy started out in philosophy as this shining star, a really bright career with a lot of promise, and he had a tough time earlier on.  He moved from Yale to Oxford and eventually to Reed College, and he found happiness there.  But him coming to Bitcoin and being received by bitcoiners has been everything to him, because it's like another chance at using his talents for good, and I just love seeing that unfold.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I just don't want to see him getting coerced or bullied into being what he isn't, because there are some dicks who will talk to him like a dick.  His big thread the other day, he didn't need to fucking do that. 

Andrew Bailey: I thought it showed integrity, but you're right, he didn't need to do that.

Peter McCormack: He didn't need to do that.  Sometimes you've just got to tell someone to fuck off, and that's what he should have done.  I mean, I would have, but that's why I've got a lot of enemies.  Okay, how do people follow the Resistance Money movement; where do you want to send them to?

Andrew Bailey: Our website is resistance.money.  We stash everything we write there and we've got a book that we are finishing up the manuscript; in December, it goes to the publisher, then we're getting comments later, and it will be out in 2023.

Peter McCormack: That's amazing.

Andrew Bailey: It's a complete treatment of Bitcoin from the perspective of philosophy, politics, economics, computer science, a bunch of perspectives all coming together at once.  And this is an academic book.  It's coming out in an academic press, we're not self-publishing.  We're trying to do it right to really reach audiences that wouldn't just pick up a Saifedean book, or wouldn't pick up even an excellent, but self-published book, like Alex Gladstein's book.  So, we've got high hopes for this.

Peter McCormack: Well, good luck with it.

Andrew Bailey: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: I cannot wait to read it, I would sit down like this with you any time you want, and I cannot wait to do it again.  I've fucking loved this.  And anyone listening, if you've enjoyed this, great; if you haven't, I'm really sorry, I just had to be very selfish in this one and it was wonderful.  So, thank you, I am so glad I know you and so glad you're in my life, and let's get some food.

Andrew Bailey: Thanks, Peter, it's a pleasure.