WBD613 Audio Transcription
America’s Role in the New World Order with Natalie Smolenski
Release date: Wednesday 1st February
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Natalie Smolenski. 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.
Natalie Smolenski is an Executive Director of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and a Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. In this interview, we discuss why America needs to be re-found. We talk about the self-destructive impacts of striving for supremacy, what the American project stands for, trying to build solidarity across the divide, and the importance of Bitcoin.
“People have forgotten what a freedom to transact means…without having to involve a third party intermediary, without having to prove my identity to some panopticon, without having to demonstrate that I’m a good and loyal subject. No, the government is subject to me, I am the source of sovereignty, you are the source of sovereignty. So let’s take that back.”
— Natalie Smolenski
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: What were you saying; it's allergy season?
Natalie Smolenski: It is, yeah. So, every January, February in Texas, there's this cedar fever explosion, because the ashe juniper trees start to pollinate and it's triggered by cold. And so what's interesting is this year, it was triggered by the freeze that happened in December, so it was moved up a little earlier, but it lasts for weeks and I've been mainlining Claritin-D and FLONASE.
Peter McCormack: Both my kids have it, we call it hay fever, I don't know if you call it the same?
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, it is, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, they both have it, my son especially. His eyes can fully close up and I don't know why. I mean, I don't have it. Anyway, nice to see you.
Natalie Smolenski: Good to see you, happy Friday!
Peter McCormack: Happy Friday, welcome back. Can I embarrass you?
Natalie Smolenski: Of course.
Peter McCormack: The last show we made at this very table was my favourite show last year.
Natalie Smolenski: Yay!
Peter McCormack: No, we really enjoyed it. It was a topic right at the time I was really interested in, really enjoyed it, and the feedback was fantastic, I mean you must have seen that.
Natalie Smolenski: Oh, that's great. Yeah, I did catch some of it on Twitter.
Peter McCormack: I think the things you're interested in and writing about are -- you're covering something I'm really interested in, in that everything's kind of fucked on the political front and there's so much polarisation, I'm interested in people who are trying to bring people back together rather than separate them. So, you're the last show of this sprint, the 20th show in 10 days, and I've been very much looking forward to this.
Natalie Smolenski: Great.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so you wrote an article in this issue here, It's Time to Re-found the America Dream, in the Orange Party issue. Why did you attack this subject?
Natalie Smolenski: I broached this subject because I don't think any kind of meaningful political reform is possible in the United States without moving away from the imperial tradition that has characterised our politics since at least the end of the Second World War, and I say that very advisedly because there are many peoples around the world who have counted on America exerting a kind of global policeman force. But many of those peoples have also experienced that as a double-edged sword. I say this specifically as a Polish American.
So, Poland, the United States, long-time allies. There's a lot of, I think desire on the part of the Polish American community for America to continue this position of global leadership. But I see it as containing unsustainable costs, both for the United States and the world at large. So, I think there are difficult diplomatic decisions to be made, but they can begin with a recapturing of the foundational American tradition of liberty not dominion. This was very much the point of view of the Founding Fathers and articulated eloquently by John Quincy Adams in the 19th century.
Peter McCormack: Is there a connection between the US's role as the international policeman, this imperialism which has been largely economic; is there a connection between that and the polarisation; or is it you're just recognising that there's a focus required on re-founding the American way and in doing so, you just have to discard, because there's too much of a distraction?
Natalie Smolenski: There absolutely is. So, you may be familiar with this phenomenon known as the Triffin Dilemma.
Peter McCormack: Yes, but explain it to listeners.
Natalie Smolenski: Basically, the idea is that the United States made this kind of bargain with, not all of the world, but with much of the world post-World War II, that in exchange for using the dollar as the global reserve currency, the United States would maintain a trade deficit with these other countries. That, in effect, was a programme of economic uplift. It enabled these countries to earn the dollars that they could then use to trade with the United States. This was a solution to the post-World War II global economic situation, where basically everybody but America was broke, and so America had three-fourths of the world's gold and a vast arsenal and industry, but nobody to trade with. So, this bargain enabled countries around the world to run trade surpluses, vis-à-vis the United States.
The problem with that is that it has decimated over time the American productive economy, particularly in manufacturing, and it has generated so much dollar surplus in other countries that that needs to be parked somewhere. And so, what we have seen is the slow selling-off of American hard assets: land; equity in American companies, which used to be unheard of; commodities. In effect, what that means is we've been selling our country piece by piece to maintain this global dollar reserve supremacy.
Peter McCormack: And how has that affected the country domestically in terms of the very clear polarisation that's happened now; is that connected to this?
Natalie Smolenski: Certainly. So, the immiseration of the American middle class is something that has been a multi-generational trajectory, and it has resulted in a lot of political polarisation. People want to point figures at -- culture war is generally the easiest thing, you know, the people that I don't like, the political tribe that I don't align with. But ultimately, regardless of who is elected, who has been elected, in the neo-liberal age, that trend has not reversed. So, we've seen declining standards of living, it's no longer possible for families to really make ends meet on a single income, it's very difficult; spiralling costs of healthcare, education, which are also connected to other factors.
But in short, the vastness of resources that the United States dedicates, year after year, to maintaining this status as a global hegemon is actually detrimental to the American people at this point.
Peter McCormack: Do you think people are recognising this? I think people recognise there's an issue and there's a problem, a nation becoming wealthier but standards of living dropping. I think people recognise there is an issue with politics and media and polarisation. How many people recognise this is connected to what you've said?
Natalie Smolenski: Relatively few. I would say this is still far from mainstream, let alone consensus. And that's unsurprising, because historically the rise and fall of empires has very little to do with public understanding of the causes of the rise and fall of empires. Empires rise when their resource base is expanding and they fall when their resource base is contracting, prosaically, and the people may not always understand why it's suddenly contracting. But in this case, it simply has to do with an economic trade-off decision that has reached the end of its logic.
Peter McCormack: And you're trying to front-run the collapse and resulting revolution by encouraging people to consider that some kind of reform can either minimise the damage that's caused by this, or point the country in a new direction?
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely. So, I think the imperative to be dominant, to be the world's policeman, has resulted in the United States conducting itself in ways that many Americans wouldn't recognise as what they consider to be American values. We saw this particularly after the war in Iraq, but also the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There are now multiple generations of young people who have grown up with a background of constant war. Many of them have parents who have served, or themselves have served, and they have this sense of moral injury, which is a psychological phenomenon, where they've sacrificed everything in many cases and they don't really know what it was for; their lives aren't materially better; they don't feel particularly safer; the global war on terror is no longer the big, salient, political issue that it was a couple of decades ago, now it's the rise of China or Russia.
So, there's a sense that there is a political calculus here and not necessarily a moral calculus. And I think Americans want to be proud of their country, and that starts with who you are, that starts with how you conduct yourself in the world. And when you feel constrained to always be in charge, it doesn't give you the space and the freedom to consider what might be the moral course of action.
Peter McCormack: Have you watched the series on Netflix, Turning Point?
Natalie Smolenski: I have not, no.
Peter McCormack: Okay, I recommend it highly. It's a four-part series that covers 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. And as America's role as the world police, whether you agree with it or not, they became the target over years, I mean generations of terrorists, whether it was the original, I think it was 1991 attempt at bombing the World Trade Centre, I can't remember the exact date, but the embassies around the world, but eventually 9/11, and there was a lot of sympathy for America and support behind the entering of Afghanistan.
I think then it covers a lot of the reason why that sympathy was lost with Iraq, because there was little belief or thought that this was the actions of the world police; it become more like the actions of a world's bully, and a lot of suspicion behind what happened in Iraq. And, now I think there is a lot of suspicion behind any form of war. I mean, I'm fully supportive of the Ukrainian people and the defence of their country, but any kind of financial support to that, it's suspicions that this is really to support the military industrial complex. So, I feel like Iraq has muddied the waters for anything America does as world police.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I pointed out in another one of my essays, about the end of the petrodollar system, is that the invasions of Iraq happened suspiciously closely to Saddam Hussein publicly declaring that he was going to start pricing oil in euros, and he was one of very few countries in the world making that claim. So, there is certainly, I think, a way in which the petrodollar reserve system really saved the United States' global economic position after the closure of the gold window. I mean, it was a Nixon Administration priority to get this deal done, and so preserving that world order has been considered of paramount, national strategic importance; I don't want to minimise that.
On the other hand, it's like being a debtor. This was, I believe, John Maynard Keynes, "If you owe the bank $1,000, you know you're in trouble. If you owe the bank $1 million or $1 billion or $1 trillion, then you own the bank". So, we've kind of become -- what's interesting is, after the closure of the gold window, we actually sold the world our debt as gold. No other empire in human history has ever done this. We fully monetised our debt and made that the global reserve asset. But that's put us in a position where we have to keep generating more and more debt in order to prop up the liquidity of the entire global economic system, and that puts us in a terrible position because we inflate our money supply, we immiserate the middle class and increasingly the upper middle class, and not to speak of the lower class. So, it's really been a dangerous set of trade-offs.
Peter McCormack: Can we do the background to the article?
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Can we talk about your parents moving to the US and what that experience was like for them, because I think that sets out the foundations of what people believe are the traditional American values, and why they wanted to come to the US; why I, as a kid, always looked to the US and wanted to come here, and I spend a lot of my time here. By the way, there's the lens of what you see of the US on media and online, but the experience, most of the time I'm meeting people like you, who represent that values of what I believe America's about.
Natalie Smolenski: Right, yeah. So, my parents came to the United States in the very beginning of the 1980s. They were both software engineers in an era where that was not yet as common as it is today, and they didn't intend to stay, but it just so happened that martial law was declared in Poland while they were here. They had both been active in the Solidarity Movement, which was a broad coalition, society-wide coalition against the communist state, and so they were concerned about being thrown into prison if they were to go back. So, they ended up finding jobs and I grew up here, I was born here, I loved it.
My parents are some of the most patriotic Americans you'll ever meet and a lot of immigrants are. They truly have made sacrifices to be here, they've never expected anything, they didn't feel entitled to it. They really came here to work and to make a life for themselves.
Peter McCormack: And they also have experienced communism.
Natalie Smolenski: Right, they've seen what the alternative can be. So for them, this is the land of opportunity, and it has been for me as well. So, having a kind of allegiance to the values of liberty, of free enterprise, that's what I believe America to be, and that means you can't have everything. So, you can't be the world police and also the land of opportunity at the same time, and that's what we've been learning slowly as a country.
Peter McCormack: Why can't you be though?
Natalie Smolenski: Because it costs everything. If you want to be any kind of power supremacy, it costs you everything over time. This is why authoritarianism is so brittle, because it always contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It has to be constantly upheld and maintained. The United States spends an extraordinary amount every year on the military apparatus, and that's just the known military apparatus. We also, when you have an apparatus as big as that, you intend to use it. And so, there is this constant pressure to engage in new forms of covert and overt military conflict.
A case in point on this, going back a few decades, was after the Vietnam War where that didn't end very well for the United States and there were a whole bunch of CIA Agents out of work back in the US, stateside, feeling demoralised. So, we decided to start a proxy war in Angola and just shipped our agents there and completely destabilised this country that most Americans have never even heard of. So, if you have a hammer, you're inclined to use it. And over time, using that hammer changes who you are, it changes your character. So, now you've traded your character for supremacy, and it's the character piece that I'm most concerned with.
Peter McCormack: So, if the US was -- if your thesis is correct and as a country, it decided to re-establish its values, resign from its role as world police, how does this actually happen; what are the things we're talking about? Is it removing Americans from all these bases around the world? Because, the role of world police is something that has to come to force when there's required support on an action, when there's certain regions that have been destabilised. But there is also this kind of, I'm not sure how to put it, but there's this protective layer that the US has built around the world, whether it's in Japan, or trying to support Taiwan in the South China Sea, or bases in Germany. I mean, I've seen these maps. Can you try and find that map of US bases around the world?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Are we talking about scaling this all back and America coming back to within the confines of its own borders?
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, so there's not going to be a simple way to do this, but there can be a clear-sighted way to do it. There always needs to be a positive project. A negative project isn't going to work, it's not something that will motivate people, or serve as a coherent rubric for action. So from my point of view, the positive project here is to be a good neighbour, and I'm literally talking about Mr Rogers, good old-fashioned Republican American values of being a good neighbour, and asking ourselves what does that mean, first of all with our most proximate neighbours, with Canada and Mexico; let's just start there.
Let's just start, North America, what does it mean for us to be a good neighbour to the countries that we share a border with? And then let's ask about Cuba and the Caribbean and Latin America, and we can begin expanding from there. And over time, as we're guided by this philosophy or this commitment, we will begin to organically make trade-off decisions between what being a good neighbour is, finding that fit, finding that win/win for both parties without over-extending, and that can guide our policy.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, because I wonder what that even means. Me and Danny were talking about this the other day. We were interviewing a guy who runs Gridless down in Africa and he was very critical of NGOs. But a lot of the work of NGOs, is it good intentions, misguided intentions; how do you avoid having misguided intentions, feeling like you're supporting a country, but actually you're destabilising it, or you're trying to change the culture of a country to something that isn't American?
Natalie Smolenski: That's a great question and I think it starts with being honest about your own interests. So, being a good neighbour doesn't mean pretending that you're a selfless altruist. No country around the world believes that America, or any other country, acts selflessly on the world stage, there's always a question of interest. And this is where -- I actually have a background in sales and business development. In that kind of situation, it's very clear what's going on. I'm selling a product, there's a potential buyer on the other side of the table; my interest is clear but also, their interest needs to be clear. And sales works not by strong-arming, but by finding fit so that both parties walk away from the transaction feeling like they've benefited in some way, and that's the ethic that I think we need to recover.
Peter McCormack: And no longer trying to sell democracy around the world?
Natalie Smolenski: Right. I mean, we can stand for democracy, but it's like John Quincy Adams says, "We have to embody ourselves those democratic values. It is our example which stands for democracy, not our military intervention". And honestly, there are countries, many countries around the world, where American intervention, even very well intentioned, has sabotaged the cause of democracy. There are autocracies that exist because we took out the guys who we thought were the bad guys, but they ended up being the most likely vector of democratic reform, and so now there's nobody.
By focusing on ourselves being who we espouse to be, that gives other people courage to themselves make the sacrifices that will build their own future.
Peter McCormack: I had Alex Gladstein on here recently, we were discussing the IMF and the World Bank, and he's written a long piece discussing US economic imperialism. He talked about how in certain countries, that the US would make significant loans to help grow and support the country; but in doing so, would create trade relationships where the resources of that country would be fed back to the US. He gave a few specific examples, but he often talked about these often propped up authoritarian regimes, because you had corrupt people within the country willing to take the money and sell off the resources.
But I also know in your article, you talked about the fall of the Soviet Union and the IMF and the World Bank, that they relied on the loans to maintain democracy. So, there's kind of a conflict contradiction between what you're saying and what Alex Gladstein has said to me, and I guess both could be true.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, so the history of these multilateral lending institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, is very interesting. They were founded in the era of high liberalism, high internationalism in the West, largely prompted by this desire to never again experience something like a world war. So, we tried after the First World War, tried again after the Second World War, and the idea was that if there was a global body that was a lender of last resort for countries that nobody else wanted to lend to, then maybe we could avoid some of the terrible conflicts that we had seen.
Now, the problem with being a lender of last resort is that that's a position of immense power. So, everything you do is highly leveraged and you can end up just moving a little bit and squashing an entire generation. So, the power that these institutions have wielded has often been profoundly destructive. It also has often been the only reason that people in some countries were fed, because their governments were so corrupt that there was no bilateral, there was no other country or private lending institution that was willing to lend to them because they couldn't trust them.
It's very difficult to extricate yourself from that but also, if you go back further, this is part of the legacy of colonialism as well, in that many of these countries were colonies. They had independence movements, they were liberated, but their resources and their economic institutions were still entirely owned by the West. So, they had entrepreneurial politicians who knew how to advance their own personal interests amidst this web of great power politics.
Peter McCormack: It sounds very messy.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, it's extremely messy, yeah.
Peter McCormack: And if the US was to resign from its position of world police, what are the considerations towards handing this role to China, not so much that I believe China would want to be world police, but by changing the power structure across the world, and we've seen with the Belt and Road Initiative that China's willing to make significant loans to countries and those countries have become indebted, they end up owning their ports or having considerable power, what risk is there with consideration for that?
My brother, I talked to him about this and my brother is very much anti-war, he marched against the Iraq War. But he sees a high risk of giving power, or changing the power structure and giving more strength to China, he sees that as a much more risky scenario for the world.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah. No, I think the United States no longer being the global hegemon does not mean that there is some other country out there who would be a better hegemon. In fact, the structure of hegemony is the problem. But I would encourage you to consider this. Imagine that China had a client state that bordered the United States, like Mexico or something, and that they had fully militarised it, they had bases there, they do regular military exercises, land, air and sea, and somehow claimed this territory as part of their sphere of influence. We might rightly ask, "They're all the way on the other side of the world. What are they doing here? Why are they asserting this as their sphere of dominance?"
This also gets at the Russian concerns about the expansion of NATO. The problem isn't that smaller countries are defending themselves against Russian aggression; that is obviously a prerogative of any sovereign state. The problem is that the United States established itself, post-World War II, as sort of the military protector of Europe. So, European countries have indigenous defence forces, but they still largely rely on the United States for protection, and this is Putin's point. He's basically like, if you're not militarily sovereign, you're not sovereign, and so who's really the sovereign over Europe? Well, it's the United States. So, it's a war in Ukraine, but it's a war against the United States.
There are many considerations here, but the point is that this prerogative that many Americans feel is just second nature, to just be anywhere at any time and just self-evidently be in charge, that's a problem.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think many other countries around the world would be fearful of the US reining in its protection for other countries. But then alternatively, who's to know whether this would make the world a safer place; who's to know? You talked about in the article, or you mentioned you're seeing a rise, well there is a rise of socialism around the world, or a threatened rise of socialism. Do you see this as a rejection of capitalism; why is this happening?
Natalie Smolenski: The pie is growing at a much slower rate. So, when does a civilisation feel confident? It feels confident when it's expanding. It's expanding when the economic pie is growing fast enough that generally, standards of living are being raised, people feel that they have opportunity, prospects. That trend has reversed, not just in the United States.
Peter McCormack: We're experiencing it; in the UK, we're experiencing it.
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely. So, what happens when the pie starts to shrink? Well, people start clambering over the existing resources and calls for redistribution become louder; calls for punishing corruption become louder; this often becomes a kind of populism. People like to say right wing or left wing, but I don't really think those terms are appropriate. I think there's a kind of inchoate sense that the elites as such, they've gotten too top-heavy, and that is in fact materially the case. Elites consume more resources than any other stratum of the population, and as they have children, they reproduce and they expand generation after generation, they want all of their children to be situated also as elites.
You can't have a shrinking economic pie and a growing elite base forever. Eventually, the elites also start to feel constraints and really, there's a historian, Peter Turchin, who argues that prior to the advent of capitalism in the agricultural world, it was actually these battles between elite factions that spelled the end of empires.
Peter McCormack: I think during COVID, during the year of COVID and post-COVID, we really had a light shone upon a separation between them and us, in two ways. I think during the COVID era, we had the light shone on this separation between the elites and the peasants, and I think it was in two ways; the numbers that were published, how some of the richest people in the world got much richer, and then we all saw companies that had to close down, bakeries, ice cream shops. I mean, we had Michael Malice in here yesterday. He was talking about how he left New York. He said all the interesting little quirky shops, they've all closed; all the cafés, the ice cream shops. We saw all that.
We also saw the ridiculous thing where there would be some kind of event, a Met Gala or whatever, and nobody was wearing a mask but all the staff were. And I think it was this really grotesque display of separation between elites and everyone else. There's always going to be wage disparity, there is always going to be rich and poor; but to have it so grotesquely put in people's face. Now you add to that since then, a lot of suspicion about the truth that's coming to us. We're seeing a lot of suspicion with regards to media. I mean, Malice corrected me in saying "mainstream media", call it "corporate media", but there's lots of suspicion to the incentives now.
I feel like we're in this place of teetering on potential revolution, and I don't say that likely, but I just think people are fucking fed up.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, I think that's true.
Peter McCormack: I don't want a socialist revolution though.
Natalie Smolenski: Well, yeah, every revolution is messy and revolutions tend to replace one set of elites with another. The question of whether or not they affect actual structural change that will materially uplift the condition of the people is a whole separate question. In some cases, redistributive revolutions have had near-term equalisation effects.
The problem with near redistribution is that if you're not generating the economic flywheel, if you're not preserving the engines of wealth generation, then you're going to just run into the same problem that the past regime ran into, and this is why capitalism matters. It's not because it's morally virtuous, it's because it's the most reliable social technology we have for growing the pie.
Before the 19th century, net world economic growth was almost stagnant. Most people would make the same amount of money or resources for their entire life. That also meant the pace of social change was much slower. But once the Industrial Revolution hits, once capital becomes a technology, you start just seeing spikes in economic growth and much faster changing standards of living, culture change, education, science, I mean everything takes off; which is not to say that it's been great for everybody, but there is no meaningful alternative that doesn't shrink the pie.
Peter McCormack: And shrinking the pie is what leads to famine and hunger --
Natalie Smolenski: Rolling revolution.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and potentially millions of deaths. The reason we had Malice in is we were talking about the Soviet Union and what happened under their communist revolution. Tens of millions of people died; was it tens of millions? Millions? I don't know the numbers, but a lot of fucking people died.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You can't destroy the productive class.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, and Lenin actually realised this. So, after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a period of time when the Communist Party wanted to do away with money. They dissolved the central bank, they printed quadrillions of rubles, just literally hyperinflated the money away. People began bartering just to go about their daily lives. And Lenin quickly realised that he actually couldn't build the Soviet Union into an industrial power without some value, some stable peg of value that could be a store of wealth and a medium of exchange. So, he brought back the central banker and re-established a bank, reissued the currency and in fact embraced something called the New Economic Theory, which was also the model for Deng Kiaoping's reforms in China, that led it to be basically a market economy.
So, Lenin's thinking was that you actually had to have entrepreneurial activity. The small business, the entrepreneur and the worker were all united in this common cause of building the socialist republic. The earliest USSR actually saw some of the fastest economic growth rates in the world, because they were an agrarian economy industrialising. And whenever you do that, I mean your GDP goes through the roof, because you're literally exponentially increasing your productive capacity.
Peter McCormack: So, where did the Soviet Union fail where perhaps China has succeeded?
Natalie Smolenski: I mean, that's a great question and I am not a historian of either of these places in enough depth to probably answer it satisfactorily.
Peter McCormack: Okay, can you point us where we should look?
Natalie Smolenski: I would suggest some of the major reasons that have been identified for the slowdown in growth in the Soviet Union is interestingly around a kind of resource protectionism; so, it wanting to basically be self-sufficient, which is I think a noble intention. But when your economy is growing, sometimes there need to be periods of time where you are reliant on foreign sources of whatever.
There also was this phenomenon whereby the state kept ploughing resources into factories that were no longer productive, so it was a kind of propping up. Again, well-intentioned, not wanting these workers to lose their jobs, these factory towns to basically become immiserated. I mean, look what happened in Detroit. The United States, we just kind of abandoned that city. The Soviet leadership didn't want to do that because after all, it was supposed to be a workers' party. But the problem with that is the factories weren't solvent, they weren't able to keep up with the productive demands of a growing economy. So, eventually the state just couldn't prop it up any more, the state does run out of resources, and we're seeing these cascading defaults start to happen around the world now.
The United States is in a privileged position because all of our debt is denominated in the currency that we print. So, there's a bandwidth that we have to print away our insolvency for a certain period of time. But eventually, the question of real value always catches up with you. Is your productive economy able to support the level of debt that you have? I would suggest the answer is no.
Peter McCormack: So, look, can we talk specifically about China? For an authoritarian country, it has been economically successful over the last, what would you say, two decades?
Natalie Smolenski: So, the real post-Mao reforms started happening in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and they've continued dramatically. And now the problem is, China's facing many of the same problems as the United States, which is that they have a tip-top elite of super-rich people, many of whom have been engaged in scandals around not paying taxes and incurred public outrage around ostentatious spending and lavish lifestyles, so the Chinese state is really trying to reel that in.
Peter McCormack: Dissent also.
Natalie Smolenski: Right, so this is the problem with the exercise of state power. It's always framed publicly in these virtuous ways, "We're fighting corruption, we're fighting terrorism, we're fighting money-laundering, we're fighting crime. But as we're fighting all this other stuff, we may also fight the people who are genuinely criticising us for reasons that we need to be criticised.
Peter McCormack: I mean, Jack Ma has just agreed to step down from, what's the wider company; is Alibaba the main company?
Danny Knowles: I think so, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, did you see this, this week?
Danny Knowles: Ant Group.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Ant Group. Have you got the article?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Because he went missing for a while because he had been I think only mildly critical. So, he'd been missing for a while, probably in some re-education camp somewhere. So, yeah, "… to give up control of China's Ant Group. Jack Ma will cede control of Chinese fintech giant, Ant Group, the company announced, following the Communist Party crackdown on the nation's tech sector that targeted the charismatic billionaire…
"But the former English teacher has retreated from public view since Beijing torched Ant's planned IPO in Hong Kong following his barbed comments about government regulators".
Natalie Smolenski: He also met publicly with Trump, which I saw someone comment recently that in China, if you're a captain of industry, you cannot also be a diplomat; if you try to cross into the sphere of politics, it's sort of overstepping your bounds.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he was critical of the regulators and suddenly disappeared and now he's back and he's given up control of his group. It's very authoritarian, but I guess the thing I wanted to talk about is, even as an outsider we're all very critical of China, despite us having iPhones and such, we're all very critical of China; but they also have managed to grow their economy. I mean, you said they've lifted 750,000 out of poverty --
Danny Knowles: 750 million.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, 750 million people out of poverty, and so what are the trade-offs here?
Natalie Smolenski: I mean, that's exactly right. The question that many US-elected officials are asking openly now is, "Why can't we be more like China?" and that chorus is only going to grow.
Peter McCormack: But that's actually very anti-American --
Natalie Smolenski: Right!
Peter McCormack: -- because all the films and TV shows that refer to, I don't know, maybe the era of the 1950s, 1960s, it was like, "Are they communists? Where are the commies?" It seemed to be like everything America stood for was anti-communism and the threat of the expansion of communism around the world. And now, I mean I know they're not communist any more, even though they're the Chinese Communist Party, there is a certain amount of entrepreneurial spirit, but they certainly are authoritarian.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah. There's an economist who recently wrote about how the main paradigm of political economy going into the 21st century is not capitalism or socialism, but a dirigiste economy. So, that's a French term for a market economy that is centrally directed. So, it's neither full, single-party, economy planning, nor is it free markets; it's the state is the benevolent steward of the market and takes a very active role in shaping the market.
I would suggest that China's perhaps on a more authoritarian end of that spectrum, but most western governments at this point aren't that different, aren't materially different. They may, in their rhetoric and in their cultural traditions, have these traditions of liberty, but in practice the state is seen as the arbiter of virtually everything from speech to economic transacting to --
Peter McCormack: Gas stoves.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, I mean literally every little thing. And again, we talked about the hammer and the nail problem; you have a huge military, you're going to use it. The political class, their mandate is to pass laws. And so, they tend to approach solving problems by passing more laws, instead of thinking about --
Peter McCormack: Sorry, the reason I'm giving a nod to Danny, you know what I'm thinking?
Danny Knowles: It's the Mark Moss quote.
Peter McCormack: It's the Mark Moss quote; what is it?
Danny Knowles: "Every new law, whether good or bad, means less freedom", roughly.
Peter McCormack: Unless it's a law to remove a bunch of laws, but yeah, generally speaking.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, exactly. So, we never get less laws, we don't get fewer laws, we get more laws, we get more complex layering of laws, and this then requires more administrators to interpret the laws, and more complexity in the layers of governance who oversee these societies, so the state gets bigger and bigger and bigger. That trajectory isn't going to be reversed through rhetoric, we actually need real action here, and it's going to be hard, there's going to be a lot of resistance to it.
Peter McCormack: It also damages productivity.
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: To say you don't get the removal of laws, I remember I was out in Wyoming with Tyler Lindholm and he was talking to me about licences. It's like, you have to have a licence to be a hairdresser. I was like, "Why do you have to have a licence to be a hairdresser; either you can cut hair or you can't?" and I think you do get periods of, would you not argue deregulation is a removal of regulations?
Natalie Smolenski: Perhaps, but they're the exception, not the rule.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean Erik Vorhees, one of my very first interviews, he's a libertarian, talked about the size of the state. He said, "I'm not even asking for the abolition of the state, can we just get 1% smaller, can we just get a little bit and then maybe target 5%?" But yeah, the nuclear industry has been hamstrung by regulation.
Natalie Smolenski: That's right.
Peter McCormack: Similar things with even what I do in the UK, like certain rules are holding back my business; the ability to get bank accounts. I'm now actually being investigated for buying a house because I've sold Bitcoin in the past. There's so many things like that that get in the way. But how do you get these reforms, because I'm with you, Natalie; how do you do it?
Natalie Smolenski: So, I think there has to be a generational turnover in leadership, and that in itself, that's necessary but not sufficient.
Peter McCormack: Why though a generational turnover in leadership? Are you talking about the political class?
Natalie Smolenski: I am talking about the political class, because I would suggest that the current generation of political leadership has been formed under a paradigm of geopolitical relations and economic -- well, let's just say political economy that is profoundly in this direction of good guy, American King, dirigiste state economies, top-down federated system of control that ensures that the world functions smoothly. Well, that's a very coherent picture and it's comforting. The prospect of a more decentralised, multipolar world is terrifying to many people in the current generation, even the people who do lean more libertarian.
I think the younger generation hasn't inherited the assumptions of the post-war order. They're entirely digitally native, so the world is at their doorstep and has been at their doorstep from childhood; they have known nothing but economic crises and a shrinking of prospects and lowering of standard of living; and so, I think they're open. But the question always is, open to what? And this is why there has to be leadership, there have to be voices in the public sphere who are speaking in terms of character and not just of getting yours or getting revenge against the bad people who took things away from you, "No, who are you going to become; what are you going to build; what are you going to invest in and sacrifice for?" That's the world that you're going to create.
Peter McCormack: We seem to have very few people of that kind of character and quality about at the moment, because I mean you talk about a generational turnover of the political class, but we do see people entering the realm of politics, new, interesting, you can believe they want to change, you can believe they stand for something, but they seem to get co-opted by the system very quickly, the incentive structure, the sort of horse-trading that goes on behind scenes.
We talked about it the other day, and whatever you think of Matt Gaetz and his questionable dating, he appeared to be standing for something. And he got a little whisper in his ear from the Godfather and changed his vote. So, I wonder how difficult it is to get anything done, because the incentives of the system are completely screwed.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, well this is the problem, that even the revolutionary voices, or the rebellious voices are themselves beholden to an authority structure. It may be a mirror image authority structure of the one that's dominant, but this is very much like the sort of dichotomy between obedience and rebellion that is such a cultural trope in teenage life or growing up, putting on the leather jacket and showing my parents that I'm independent by rebelling. Well, you're still acting in reference to their authority when you're doing that; you're just now opposed to it, rather than for it.
People who ping-pong between obedience and rebellion their whole lives never actually individuate. And so what I'm talking about is a kind of cultural individuation where you become autonomous, you act without reference to authority. It doesn't mean you don't have authorities, it doesn't mean authorities don't exist, there are always going to be authorities, it's a social technology; but you are an autonomous, individuated human being who navigates authority structures.
Peter McCormack: So, I kept a note earlier when you talked about re-founding the American Dream based on traditional Republican values. I'm bringing that up because you said there is so much polarisation. To sell in reform based on traditional Republican values on a person-by-person count, you may be losing plus-50% of the nation, certainly close to 50% of the nation. And I think some people might say, "You know the problem is, we haven't evolved from traditional Republican values and the world has changed". How can you ever get reform when the reform is based on one political wing? Are there not traditional American values that span Americans?
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely, and when I said that, I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Peter McCormack: Okay. I mean, look, when I think of traditional American values, I think of Republican.
Natalie Smolenski: Right, that's kind of been the brand, and this is why every Democratic Presidential Administration basically governs like a Republican Administration, from a policy standpoint. I mean, there really is no meaningful difference, I would suggest, between the parties on most issues. There are a few issues where there is a difference and for some people, those are the issues that they will vote on forever. But there's absolutely a bipartisan consensus that it basically has shoehorned politics into different flavours of the same thing.
So, when I invoked Mr Rogers earlier, I mean he was a minister, a Republican, but he never talked about politics on his show, there was nothing political. He was coming out of the era of children's theatre, puppet theatre, where the interest in the developing child was considered to be central to building the character of the next generation of American citizens and their friends. So, there's a real I think openness that has been lost.
America's a nation of immigrants, a lot of people believe that genuinely on all sides of the aisle. America is a diverse nation, but there is a kind of culture of hospitality that I think has a spiritual centre. In his case, he was a man of faith. You don't have to be a religious person to have this conviction, but the openness of heart, the willingness to reach across difference with the understanding that you and the person across the table will forever be different; the goal is not sameness, the goal is doing something together. That's what a shared project is, and that's the only reason that America matters, from my point of view.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we had a guy on the podcast last week, Vivek, I can't say his surname.
Danny Knowles: Ramaswamy.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Ramaswamy. We're not sure we 100% agree with him. Danny, you would be a little bit more sceptical than I am. I brought up this polarisation and he said there isn't really a true left/right divide, the real divide is between the management class and the citizenry. And when he talks about the management class, that could be from within politics, within large tech companies, the people who get to make the decisions, and there's this collusion that happens between them that we saw with some of the Twitter files that have been released.
My comparison to that is that in the UK, the nurses have been on strike recently, and they're all very similar people with a very similar standard of living, living very similar lives, but they are struggling with the rise of inflation and rise of cost of living, and they want a pay rise. And when they're on the picket line striking, it doesn't really matter what party they represent, they actually have the same goals, the same kind of objectives, same things they want to do. And I do wonder how much the incentive models of politicians and media is to divide people who genuinely are on the same team.
So, whether I agree with Vivek or not, I do recognise that actually there are a lot of people, whether you're Democrat or Republican, you're being punished the same way by a broken system of incentives, but you're being tricked into creating the wrong enemy.
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely. I mean, what's funny about this is that, this was Marx's analysis of the German ideology in the 19th century, is that this is how class politics work, is it works when the elites exacerbate cultural divisions between the working class to prevent them from recognising their shared interests as in fact the majority and the people who produce most of the value that the managerial class syphons off. So, the question is not so much the managerial class or the capital class or elites, are they evil or do they serve a purpose in society? They do clearly, there has to be an executive function for personalities of a higher order for human collectives to move in a certain direction to produce value. The question is, is the distribution of rewards, of economic rewards proportionate to the value that's created?
Peter McCormack: Nope!
Natalie Smolenski: Right, and this is why we have what some would call class struggle, and what others would call simply freedom of contract. If you, as my employer, are not compensating me adequately for the labour that I provide, I'm going to go elsewhere. The problem is when the managerial apparatus, either of the state or of the private sector, gets so heavy that people can no longer meaningfully exercise that freedom.
Peter McCormack: The same with the truckers.
Natalie Smolenski: Right, exactly.
Peter McCormack: That's why in some ways, sometimes I'm like, "I should just stay away from politics", but I'm so interested in it because I'm interested in the solution. I think so many people focus on what divides us, separates us, and then support this machine, and perhaps I've done it at times myself, but I'm always looking out for the people who are, like yourself, looking for a solution, because this is so utterly broken and it's not benefiting hardly anyone. This has fragmented society, causes division, I just fucking hate the whole thing. But that's why I find Andrew Yang so interesting. I disagree with him on UBI, absolutely disagree with him on UBI, but he's at least going, "We need something different".
Even Bret Weinstein, he started to try a new political party. He had an idea where we would get somebody from the right and somebody from the left and form a party together, get some strength from both sides and get them to work together. Whether these ideas are naïve or not, at least there are some people with the strength out there saying, "We need to fix this and change this", which is why I want so much more out of Elon Musk. That's the kind of person you think, "Just stop being captured by the audience, make a difference".
Natalie Smolenski: Right, and this is actually the caustic nature of the celebrity culture that we inhabit now. I mean, it will fry your brain, and this is one of the things that I myself am careful of. Every public appearance that I make is something that I treat with great respect, it's like a wild animal, because you don't want it to wield you, you want to be sure that you are wielding your public personality and that you are in service to the organisations and the people that you are responsible for.
Peter McCormack: So there's a wild Natalie Smolenski under there that if we prod in the right way, we will get you to --
Natalie Smolenski: Well, any kind of amplification, whether it's through celebrity or power or money, you're dealing with wild forces. And if you don't know yourself, then they will own you; in fact, you will own yourself.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think that's the big issue we notice with audience capture. Once you're captured, getting yourself out of that position is very difficult because again, back to incentives; your incentive is to dog-whistle the audience you've created. I had it when I was with Eric Weinstein. We did this interview when we were in LA and he said, "Let's get rid of 10%, 20% of the audience now, let's insult them and get rid of them. Keep shedding your audience, be willing to let them go, say things they don't want to hear, because then the audience you have is going to respect you for the honesty of opinion and they're going to trust you and you have integrity".
There's so many people out there who've just been captured. Tim Pool's always a great example for me. I just think he's become a dick, and that's going to piss people off, but he's so captured by his audience that he dog-whistles them the whole time. For me, I think I have the strength to go, "Okay, I like some of what you say and some of what you don't say", I think other people don't. And so those people add -- and by the way, people criticise the mainstream media; these people are making the same mistakes, they're doing exactly the same fucking thing.
Natalie Smolenski: Oh, exactly!
Peter McCormack: Someone like Tim Pool will criticise the mainstream media and I'm like, "You've got the same playbook, you've got the same incentives, you want to separate your audience, you want to dog-whistle, you want to build up this rabbit following and you're contributing to the same problem", it really pisses me off. Anyway, Natalie, what is the answer?
Natalie Smolenski: The answer is the slow, hard work of coalition building and character building in a shared project, and that's the question, "What is the American project?" I would suggest that the American project is one of prosperity and opportunity, regardless of who you are or where you come from. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, whether you're generating capital or knowledge or any other form of innovation, you should be welcome here.
Peter McCormack: Is that not true any more?
Natalie Smolenski: I think it is, but less and less so. I think it's becoming harder and harder for either people born in America, or who emigrate to America, to make it, and that needs to be fixed.
Peter McCormack: Oh, so you can come here, but making it, is that also a barrier? What are the barriers that are up?
Natalie Smolenski: Well, we have a very byzantine and bureaucratic visa process that routinely just leaves thousands of people, highly qualified people, either out of the country or forces them to leave, unable to set down the roots that they need to meaningfully build something here, meanwhile with immigrants leading the top ten technology companies in the United States. And so there's clearly a mismatch between our need for talent, and our ability to import the talent that we need to sustain the engine of economic growth.
Then, for home-grown talent, the challenge is one often of economic hardship and an education system that mirrors the hardship of the local communities. So, these are vicious cycles.
Peter McCormack: And that visa system, would you say that's just a function of more laws, more rules, more bureaucracy?
Natalie Smolenski: Exactly, and there's a lot of political grandstanding around immigrant visas, because political administrations want to appear tough on immigration, or they're prioritising American jobs, jobs for Americans. But the reality isn't, and actually Elon Musk has spoken about this, that economic prosperity generally relies on either rapid population growth or a lot of immigration, because you need to generate the productive capacity, and that's your human capital. So, if you have a shrinking population and you're not replenishng an influx of fresh talent, then your economy will contract over time.
Peter McCormack: And does this also become political because, correct me if I'm wrong, but immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat?
Natalie Smolenski: I think there are certain groups of immigrants that are targeted by whatever the hate message of the day is. But I would say immigrants on the whole are extremely diverse. I grew up in a community of immigrants, from all over the world, and I would say the vast majority of them voted Republican.
Peter McCormack: Oh, really?
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And that's not a function of the geography where you're from?
Natalie Smolenski: It is to a certain extent. It's also a function of profession; there are certain professions that tend to vote Republican or Democrat. That may have changed since I was growing up in that community. But when we talk about party affiliation, we're talking about culture. People are often Democrats or Republicans in the sense that they're Methodists who go to this church, or they're from this particular neighbourhood. This is why I'm actually hesitant to label people, because I've spoken to people with very different party affiliations, who agree on issues that they would never think they would agree on, but for cultural reasons they can't be seen together, affiliate with one another.
Peter McCormack: Okay. Can you help me just understand some historical context? Back hundreds of years ago, when America established the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the forefathers were debating it, how was the political divide then and how were these issues debated?
Natalie Smolenski: Do you mean around power projection outside of the United States?
Peter McCormack: No, just within the United States. When the forefathers were debating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and I know there were certain things that were written anonymously, but during that period, because I am clueless to this, the people, the forefathers themselves, were they Republicans, were they Democrats, was it a mix?
Natalie Smolenski: So, those parties didn't exist.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so what existed then?
Natalie Smolenski: I would say --
Peter McCormack: The North and the South!
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, there were profound geographic divisions. So, the main question in the early, early American Republic was, "To what extent are we a coherent project, a coherent state?" There was a lot of opposition to the Constitution, for the reason that people in all of the different states were suspicious that a federal government would rob them of their liberties, and each state had a very distinct culture, a distinct history, like reason for formation; literally different populations were sent there or chose to emigrate there from Europe and that created different states cultures. So, there was this sense that every state was sovereign and that much like in the European Union today, joining this larger federation would result in a compromise of state sovereignty.
So actually, the anti-federalists were just as vocal and popular as the federalists were and in many states, ratification of the Constitution happened through some really strong-arm tactics, like people being tarred and feathered and physically beat up in public. It was a violent era. And so, there was a question of, "Is America a country; is it a coherent project?" And eventually the federalists won.
I would suggest, though I'm not a historian of this era, because the logic of common defence was still so fresh, there was still the sense that if we didn't unite, if we didn't at the very last share an armed forces, we were vulnerable to being taken over again by our former colonists, or a colonial power, or perhaps a different one.
Peter McCormack: Or civil war?
Natalie Smolenski: Right, yes certainly, that was a concern as well.
Peter McCormack: Or state-by-state conflict?
Natalie Smolenski: I think probably more pressing was the concern that, "We just liberated ourselves from the British Empire, but they could be back", and in fact they were back and so, "We need to hang together". But Washington wanted to dissolve the military. He didn't believe that the United States should have a standing army. This is why in the Constitution, it makes reference to well-regulated militias, this notion that citizens should have the capacity to defend themselves, they should be ready, but it needs to be a citizen army, not a professional standing army. That is an instrument of tyranny, and look where we are now.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. When we had the Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU, I really struggled with the decision because as a bitcoiner, I was like, "Well, independence is better, smaller states are better", etc, but I really struggled with the decision. I ended up speaking to one of my friends and he said, "The great thing about the EU, it's one of the most successful peace projects the world has ever seen". We have not gone to war -- countries in the EU have not gone to war. We've had war in Europe, we had the Balkans, but countries within the EU have not gone to war with each other because we are united. We might disagree with each other, but we are united.
That's always weighed heavily on me. For all the bureaucracy and inefficiencies you get, the fact that you remove that incentive for war is kind of a big reason to vote to remain, because it just feels the right thing to do. I'm not really going anywhere with that, by the way!
Natalie Smolenski: Well, I think what you're pointing to is that there was an economic friction that was removed in trade between European countries, that did create a kind of rising tide of prosperity that incentivised the people to keep the peace. However, there was a trade-off there; you created a larger administrative class in Brussels, who then could dictate terms to every member of this union.
Peter McCormack: Brussels and Strasbourg. Do you know about the EU moving to Strasbourg every month for three days; do you know about this?
Natalie Smolenski: Okay, tell me!
Peter McCormack: Okay, I mean I won't get the details correct. But in the establishment of the EU, I think it was the French disagreed with the idea that it would just exist singularly within Belgium. And so, the compromise was three days a month, the entire EU, I mean literally lorries, they pack everything up, they move to Strasbourg for three days, they operate there for three days and they go back. I think the cost is like €150 million. Have you found that?
Danny Knowles: I'm just having a look now.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it's at the cost of €150 million a year. Yeah, here we go, "EU Parliament's €114 million-a-year move to Strasbourg's a waste of money, but will it ever be scrapped?" Can you scroll down a bit more, Danny? Yeah, "The EU Parliament's triangle of locations: Strasbourg, Brussels and Luxembourg, were formed to balance the original and smaller European Union. Among the costs accrued by the monthly relocation, however, includes transportation for thousands of parliament officials, political groups, parliamentary assistants and freelance interpreters, in addition to paperwork that is transported by trucks between the locations.
"In a March plenary resolution on the EP budget, it was noted that the environmental impact is significant and stands at between 11,000 and 19,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, the equivalent of driving between…" I mean, it's just fucking ridiculous; they literally move it. You can understand why they argued for it at the time, but I think we're in an era where that is required. But yeah, there is a lot of inefficiency there. Okay, so you mentioned a coherent state; would you say it's an incoherent state now though?
Natalie Smolenski: Well, there are significant incentives to maintaining the integrity of the US state. One is, much like the European Union, interstate commerce. I mean, if there were to be a breakup of the United States, the complexity of setting up bilateral trade relations between all of the states would make doing business in any of the former US states prohibitive for a lot of companies. And again, this common defence. It's maybe not so hard to imagine the United States fending off a Chinese invasion; it's hard to imagine Mississippi fending off a Chinese invasion. So, in terms of economy and military sovereignty, there are really strong reasons to cohere.
The question is, what beyond that should the federal government do? And I think that's really where the open question is.
Peter McCormack: So, maintaining a common defence, there's a solid and good argument for that; but removing the power or the amount that the federal government gets involved in would make the country more efficient, it would make it less imperialist and that could lead -- I mean, how much of a common goal do you need? As long as you have strong states' rights and states' decisions, people have the ability to move and live where they want anyway.
Natalie Smolenski: Yeah, I mean it's a question of to what extent do we maintain the state apparatus that we built?
Peter McCormack: Right.
Natalie Smolenski: Just to give you a sense of this, there are currently 18 federal intelligence agencies.
Peter McCormack: 18?
Natalie Smolenski: 18! They've been exponentially growing, there's a hockey-stick curve. And that's not to say anything of all of the federal basically police, law enforcement agencies and then the state law enforcement, municipal, county law enforcement. So, there's this massive and growing police apparatus that exists at all levels of government. And to what extent do people in Texas, for example, need to be subsidising with their tax dollars all 18 of these intelligence agencies; I don't know?
Peter McCormack: I'm not sure how to close this one out.
Natalie Smolenski: Let's open it!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I said to you, "What next?" You said, "Build a coalition". But part of me thinks maybe things have to get worse before they get better. I don't know the answer. I'm totally intrigued by this subject, but I'm massively out of my depth adding to it because I'm not an American, I don't understand historical context, it's little that I know about it. You're going to have to close this one out for me, Natalie! What question do you put out there?
Natalie Smolenski: I would like to end with an invitation to your listeners to consider what it would be to build liberty; what does that mean as a positive project? Over the next few years, one of the reasons that I do research into political economy is because I would actually like to turn these principles into a set of actionable policies that something like a political, not necessarily party, but movement can form around. This is why I'm actually genuinely inspired by the Solidarity movement that took down the communist state in Poland.
I grew up hearing stories of this and it was very much alive when I was a child. This was a coalition of right and left, and people of different religions, and atheists, all across the spectrum to suggest self-determination is something that's worth fighting for, and I think that spirit of solidarity can be rekindled again.
Peter McCormack: Can you lead it?
Natalie Smolenski: Well, I'm out here trying.
Peter McCormack: I mean, you have the historical context with your parents. It would feel only right that you were to carry that torch on here in the US and drive forward that solidarity.
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: Well, you would have my full support and backing, and the limited resources I have to help you. I hope you do it; I'm so sick of it. I regret anything I've got involved in that drives polarisation, I've got zero interest any more. I just care about trying to bring people together. I don't want to say it in a Lex Fridman -- but at the same time, there is something to be said for that. We just need to bring people together.
Natalie Smolenski: Absolutely. This is just the beginning.
Peter McCormack: Yes. Me and Danny are going to be out there looking for the Natalie Smolenski Solidarity movement, creating solidarity between the left and the right and hopefully ending this bullshit. Natalie, I was well out of my depth today, but I absolutely love talking to you and listening to you talk about this and I wish you all the success. Where do you want to send people?
Natalie Smolenski: All right, so txitcoinfoundation.org.
Peter McCormack: I owe you some money.
Natalie Smolenski: Well…
Peter McCormack: No, I do, I totally forgot about that. Yeah, I'm going to send you some money.
Natalie Smolenski: So, we're already publishing the Satoshi Papers. This is the first academic journal. We're bringing together historians, economists, social scientists, philosophers to write about why Bitcoin matters for human societies and for state society relations specifically. So, that book is coming out by the end of this year. And then we also want to do some fun events. We want to engage people, we want to bring some really smart people who aren't necessarily bitcoiners, but who write about the stuff that we've been talking about today, because I think bitcoiners are some of the most intellectually curious people that I've ever met and they're hungry for this, so let's do it!
Peter McCormack: That was a question I didn't ask; I forgot I have a Bitcoin show! What does the role of Bitcoin play in this solidarity?
Natalie Smolenski: Well, it's a reminder that all power is not top-down from the state. In fact, value is an emergent phenomenon. It emerges bottom-up as individual people opt into something that is better than what they're currently living. So, what Bitcoin is, first and foremost, is an alternative, it's a new way of imagining, it's a new way of relating. People have forgotten what a freedom to transact means, that I can just pay you for something without having to involve a third-party intermediary, without having to prove my identity to some panopticon, without having to demonstrate that I'm a good and loyal subject. No, the government is subject to me. I am the source of sovereignty, you are the source of sovereignty, so let's take that back.
Peter McCormack: Honestly, I should show you this email afterwards.
Danny Knowles: We've got our quote for the opening of the show, I think!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think we have! So, in buying this house, I have to send six months of bank statements and prove I have the funds in my bank account. And now I've got my solicitors combing over all my private transactions and questioning them. Obviously, there's Bitcoin transactions, and they're asking me what it's about; what it's for; and, can I prove it? Not only is it invasive, but it's like, I'm not a criminal here, what the fuck have I done wrong?
Natalie Smolenski: Exactly!
Peter McCormack: I mean, surely if I was American, surely this would be against the Fourth Amendment.
Natalie Smolenski: Sort of.
Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah, that's search and seizures, isn't it?
Natalie Smolenski: Well, this is the thing, these constitutional rights are meaningless.
Peter McCormack: You need a new Constitution.
Natalie Smolenski: No, we lead a leadership class with the character to live by it.
Peter McCormack: Integrity.
Natalie Smolenski: Yes.
Peter McCormack: Wow. Integrity and politicians don't go hand-in-hand. Natalie, listen, I absolutely love talking to you. You can come on this show whenever you want. Me and Danny will have you whatever you want to talk about.
Natalie Smolenski: Wonderful.
Peter McCormack: Anyone listening, go on the show notes, read the article. Please go and check out the previous interview we've done and remind the, what's the name of the association?
Natalie Smolenski: The Texas Bitcoin Foundation.
Peter McCormack: That's it, the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, which Danny will remind me to make sure I send you some money to support for everything you're doing. Happy New Year, thank you for coming on.
Natalie Smolenski: Thank you.
