WBD628 Audio Transcription
What Does Bitcoin Actually Fix with George Kaloudis
Release date: Wednesday 8th March
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with George Kaloudis. 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.
George Kaloudis is a senior research analyst and columnist for CoinDesk. In this interview, we discuss the validity of Bitcoin ideology. Can it replace governments? Does it promote individualism? Is Bitcoin’s distribution fair? Can Bitcoin fix the world? We unpick popular Bitcoin maxims to sift genuine slogans of change from the hyperbolic froth.
“I think money is an instrument for change, but it’s not the change itself. And it’s a very powerful tool, and it depends on who wields it and what kind of change gets implemented. If a bad person has good money to make change, they’re going to make bad changes. Throwing good money at bad doesn’t do a damn thing.”
— George Kaloudis
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Your dad introduced you to Bitcoin?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, you believe that?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do; well, I introduced my son to Bitcoin.
George Kaloudis: Oh, you did?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.
George Kaloudis: How old's your son?
Peter McCormack: He's 18.
George Kaloudis: Okay, so I've got a decade on him.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: So it's kind of crazy.
Peter McCormack: So is your dad an actual bitcoiner?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, my dad is more of a bitcoiner than anyone in this room, and he doesn't have any left; that's not OpSec, that's genuine truth, because although he was a CPU miner back in the day, life happens, I know you know life happens, right.
Peter McCormack: Why are we talking to you and not your dad; why's he not here at this table?
George Kaloudis: I'm not quite sure; I could call him.
Danny Knowles: I think the next New York trip.
Peter McCormack: What, is he here in New York?
George Kaloudis: No, he's not, he's in North Carolina.
Peter McCormack: Next time then, let's get Dad here.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, he's from Queens and from Athens, he's just kind of crazy, a little back and forth there.
Peter McCormack: So, I can tell from your accent, I can picture your dad in my mind.
George Kaloudis: Yeah?
Peter McCormack: I can picture him, I can totally picture, I'm probably going to be very clichéd and think of all the old-school New York films I've seen.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I can imagine his accent.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and he smoked Camels too, so he looked about as cool as you imagine in your head.
Peter McCormack: So, how come you're a West Ham fan? Whenever somebody in the US supports a football team, and it's Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man City, I never understand it.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, so I'm a contrarian through and through, right. So, growing up, I was playing soccer all the time.
Peter McCormack: Playing what?
George Kaloudis: Soccer, football; I was playing footie with my friends.
Peter McCormack: The game you play where you kick the ball with your foot?
George Kaloudis: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: So, I played football my whole life, I played in college even, so everyone I was playing with was always pulling for Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, he's the guy. So, my dad was a Karagounis fan, so I pulled for them a little bit. Then, I'd watch EPO at weekends, so who am I going to pull for? Then I watched Green Street Hooligans with my brothers and --
Peter McCormack: You're a thug!
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I'm a thug.
Peter McCormack: You're a fucking thug!
George Kaloudis: It's deep within me, I have that in me, I am pretty civilised but…
Peter McCormack: I struggled with that film because his accent's so shit.
George Kaloudis: His cockney is terrible.
Peter McCormack: It's so bad.
George Kaloudis: And I'm not ever cockney and I think it's terrible.
Peter McCormack: I was like, "Surely you can find a decent British actor who can do a cockney accent".
George Kaloudis: Yeah, he is British, right, and he's an actor, and his American accent's pretty great; he's great in Sons of Anarchy.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, so I thought he was American until this very moment; his accent's so bad, I thought he was an American doing cockney.
George Kaloudis: I'm pretty sure he's English.
Peter McCormack: Jesus!
Danny Knowles: Yeah, he's British, he's from Newcastle though.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay, fair enough.
George Kaloudis: From the Toon.
Peter McCormack: Good to see you, man. How are you?
George Kaloudis: Hanging in there.
Peter McCormack: Do you want to introduce yourself to the listeners in case they don't know who you are?
George Kaloudis: I would venture a guess that they don't know who I am.
Peter McCormack: Maybe.
George Kaloudis: I'm one of those lowly plebs.
Peter McCormack: Well, Harry Sudock is a big fan of yours.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. I actually was listening to his show and I heard my name and I was washing dishes because I'm just a lowly pleb, and, "Whoa, my name!" He's a good dude.
Peter McCormack: Harry's the best.
George Kaloudis: Very smart too, very philosophical, kind of feels like he's floating off the seat when he speaks to you, a little philosopher.
Peter McCormack: The thing about Harry is, me and Danny have both spotted this, you'll bring up a subject, and when you go to discuss it, we all attack it like you would, Harry's goes around the outside and comes back in with this whole new way of thinking about that subject that you haven't even thought about yourself.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And he's fucking smart.
Danny Knowles: He's so logical, but that's his job, isn't it, it's strategy?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: He sums things up instantly and I don't know how.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, just his brain is bigger and works faster.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: He has a particularly large head, he does, to fit that ginormous brain in.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I'm not quite sure if we're close enough friends for me to say that, but yeah.
Peter McCormack: I can say that, I love that dude.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and so do I. I work at CoinDesk, so the shitcoin capital of the world, and I am a resident Bitcoin maxi. I started off as a research analyst writing about Bitcoin and our research team kind of devolved and turned into something else, so I've become somewhat of a columnist who writes longer-form things, just about Bitcoin, about the market in general.
I have a background in finance; I started in investment banking, did that for far too long, about five years, got pummelled in the bullpen and made my way over to Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: So, we've been talking a little bit recently about ordinals, and I'm not going to get into that with you today, but there seems to be a thing at the moment, American HODL brought it up yesterday, he said, "A standing army destroys itself", and it feels like there hasn't been a huge amount to talk about, argue about, debate about recently.
My observation, at the moment is that there are a lot of people who don't really know what to do at the moment with Bitcoin, what to say, what to talk about, and I think because of that, we've had this big influx of new people coming into Bitcoin with new ideas, whether it's macro people, governance people, philosophers, energy people, and that's shifted the entire discussion regarding Bitcoin. Anything which is about toxic maximalism just seems almost juvenile and irrelevant right now, and people are hungry for bigger discussions about tangential subjects related to Bitcoin; is that something you've noticed?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, absolutely, and it's a good thing; we want to have as many bitcoiners as possible, and as much as I think the earlier crowd would like to just talk about Bitcoin forever and ever and ever and how amazing it's going to be, for it to be successful, it needs to kind of just disappear into the background and become our base money and just how our economy works; and to do that, we have to bring more and more people in. So, as more and more people come in, we're going to have these new ideas.
When you see the generations that have come into Bitcoin, there where cypherpunks were libertarians, and then I'm not quite sure what it was after that, and then we have this toxic maximalism that was sort of the COVID, Fed-driven culture. Now, it seems like ordinals much be pushing some non-bitcoiners to come in, and that's fine. The thing that makes a bitcoiner is not anything with culture, it has to do with liking Bitcoin, having Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Using Bitcoin.
George Kaloudis: Using Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: You make me think of that term when people say, "You're not a proper bitcoiner", and I always fucking hate that, and I always say, "Well, what are you on about; what's a proper bitcoiner?"
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: "What's inscribed in the protocol that says this is how you must be a bitcoiner?"
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I feel very strongly that I just don't want to fucking talk about Bitcoin forever. If, in a decade, I'm talking about Bitcoin on a podcast that isn't the biggest podcast in the world, I'm not interested in it. I want it to disappear into the background. No one runs around saying, "I'm a US dollar-ee or a dollar maxi", that's fucking weird.
Peter McCormack: Well, Schiff is a gold guy.
George Kaloudis: Gold bugs should be on the same page as bitcoiners, and I've known my fair share of gold bugs because my parents run a restaurant in the country in North Carolina and they'll be, "I remember when a burger was a nickel".
Peter McCormack: God, people have heard this so many times on the podcast we'll be bored of it, but we have this ongoing debate, it's when is this not called What Bitcoin Did?
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Not just like an ego thing, I mean, I do have that desire to have conversations that are outside of Bitcoin, we do it a lot; we just did, what was it, eight shows in a row, six shows?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, it was two weeks of shows, so six shows, yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, what we do is, every now and again, we make shows which aren't about Bitcoin, but the subjects are a tangent to Bitcoin, and they find they get away with it. We decided, well I decided, Danny wasn't sure, I said, "Let's release all six of those shows we've made which aren't Bitcoin shows all in a row and see what happens". And look, the downloads dropped 15% to 20%, but I think we went through, reputationally, our best period in terms of people to writing to us saying, "I am loving the content at the moment".
So, we lost the Bitcoin-only people, but we created more loyal listeners in terms of the content. So, there will become a time when this isn't What Bitcoin Did, it's just The McCormack Show or something else instead, whatever it is. It will still be a Bitcoin show but it won't be a Bitcoin show; it is all the subjects that bitcoiners care about, energy, philosophy, money, macro.
George Kaloudis: It's topics people care about. People are bitcoiners, all people should be bitcoiners, everyone should be a bitcoiner.
Peter McCormack: People are bitcoiners too.
George Kaloudis: Right, people are bitcoiners too, exactly, that's actually probably a funny way to say that, but it's as if you were a preacher and you're standing in front in the pulpit and you said, "God is amazing, God is amazing, Jesus is amazing", and then you've kind of said, "Okay, Jesus said we should be good people, so you didn't talk about Jesus and God and stuff, but you're talking about the all good things he did". And there are tangential things with Bitcoin, there are plenty of things out there to talk that isn't just Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not supposed to change, we're not supposed to talk about it all the time, it's supposed to be there, tick tock, next block.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's supposed to change everything around us.
George Kaloudis: Kind of.
Peter McCormack: So, everything that money touches which has poor incentives, it hopefully contributes to things improving, but also the positive externality of considering your time preference should mean that you consider other things such as health, wellness and such and such. Now, you could be doing all that as a non-bitcoiner, and as somebody who's new to Bitcoin, you might think about that stuff, not to say Bitcoin fixes everything.
George Kaloudis: I would argue it doesn't.
Peter McCormack: It doesn't fix everything.
George Kaloudis: It doesn't really fix anything except maybe money.
Peter McCormack: Bitcoin doesn't stop Tottenham being shit.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. Well, what does Sir Alex Ferguson, say, "Well, is it Spurs?"
Peter McCormack: Three point lane.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. I hadn't heard that one, I like that one.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's the one I have with my buddies because so many of my friends support Tottenham. That's why I hate them, because my problem with Tottenham fans is they still think Tottenham is a big club and it's really frustrating because they're clearly not, they're a mid-table club. Your big clubs are your Man U, Man City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and then you've got your next level, which is Tottenham, Newcastle, Leicester, Villa, they're one of those. Now, they think they're top tier, they act like they're top tier, but they're not; at least Leicester win trophies.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Won an FA Cup and a League.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: When did Tottenham last win a trophy?
Danny Knowles: I'll have a look.
Peter McCormack: It was before Bitcoin was invented.
Danny Knowles: Was it?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I think it was like 1990s they won the --
George Kaloudis: So, Bitcoin doesn't fix Tottenham.
Peter McCormack: No, it can't fix Tottenham, nothing fixes Tottenham.
Danny Knowles: 2008.
Peter McCormack: 2008, yeah, before Bitcoin.
George Kaloudis: So, you think Satoshi was a Tottenham fan?!
Peter McCormack: He should have inscribed that into the Genesis block. So, it doesn't fix everything. So, is that you as an outsider coming in, is that something you find particularly frustrating?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and I'm a pretty hyperbolic person just in general, but if say I'm a regular person, just a normal person, most people have heard of Bitcoin before, and the only thing I know about Bitcoin is that it exists, and you come up to me and you look me dead in the eye and you say, "Bitcoin is going to fix healthcare; it's going to solve the mental health crisis; it's going to fix our food supply chain; it's going to end wars; it's going to get rid of the lead in the air", I'm going to look at you and I'm going to roll my eyes so fucking hard that I sprain my eye sockets, it's absolutely ridiculous. Why would I take anything you say after that at all seriously?
Peter McCormack: All right, give me one, let me have a go at rationalising.
George Kaloudis: Fine, what did I say, mental health, like I don't think money fixes whatever the mental health crisis might be.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
George Kaloudis: I'm not a psychologist, by the way.
Peter McCormack: Let's say why is there a mental health crisis? I think there's a combination of things, it's social media, child pressure, life pressure. I can make an argument that a lot of this has come down to parents not spending enough time with their children because they're getting squeezed. What used to be one salary used to pay for a house, a car and a holiday, two salaries now can't even pay for all that.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: The pressure on parents is to work harder, they're leaving their kids to their own devices, the family unit's been broken by the breaking of the financial system. By improving the financial system, changing the incentives, you would have more time for families to be with their children to dedicate to raising them in the right way so they face less of these mental health issues.
George Kaloudis: Sure, but you don't lead with, "We're going to solve it". Bitcoin has a marketing problem I guess is the way you could say it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, where did that come up before? That's Neil Berkeley, the guy I make films with, he thinks Bitcoin has a marketing problem, and I agree.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and besides that, the grandiose claims, these hyperbolic statements, those all have really crappy UX. A lot of the really, really good wallets have terrible UX. The best way to use Bitcoin wallets is to have a non-custodial wallet, and if you want to use Lightning, a non-custodial Lightning wallet, which means you have to have your own Lightning node, which you connect to over Tor, and maybe it's a little finicky; that's a pain in the ass. You know what's better? Use Wallet of Satoshi or something where it's very, very simple to send Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, dude, listen, when we were at Pacific Bitcoin, we had a little stall where we were selling Real Bedford merchandise and stuff, and people want to pay in Bitcoin. One guy actually had his non-custodial Lightning wallet connected to his Lightning node; it took forever.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It failed, it didn't connect, failed, but I have sympathy, I'm like, "Well, we're trying to build a decentralised technology that is state-resistant"; these things improve. If you look at Bitcoin back when it was command-line interface, and then we had wallets, and now we have improving wallets, so I'm sympathetic to it, but I'm also sympathetic to your point of view.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and to be clear, I love Bitcoin, but some people do not think that I do. Some of the sort of gatekeepers and the laser-eye contingency, they don't think I'm all in because I'm critical of it. It's something I love very deeply, and I'm critical of it.
Peter McCormack: I've been through that, man, yeah, I've been through that, I've been critical, critical of UX, I said I didn't run a node very late on, for a time when I should have been. My rule on this, I'll tell you my rule, I think I've talked about this rule before, the previous interview, I said, "My rule on this is, if I don't think my friends --" let me back up a second.
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I started this podcast to help people like me understand Bitcoin, but I make the show based on what I think the audience will do and will care about. So, whereas a bitcoiner thinks I should run a node, I go, "Do I think my dad, brother, friends will run a node? No, they won't", so I won't. The reason I do that is because hopefully then you'll end up getting a version of a node you don't even to have to think about, it's like part of a router or something or it's part of a wallet, you forget about it.
XPubs, really pissed off a bunch of people by saying, "I don't know what an xPub is, and I don't care", "But you should care", "No, I don't care", because I think, if you got a random selection of people from Coinbase, a random 1,000 customers, and you asked them, "What's an xPub?" out of those 1,000, I'd be surprised if you had 5 who knew what it was.
George Kaloudis: And then, could they even answer why it matters?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that's the point, and someone like Matt Odell might rightly argue, "Well, if you want sovereign money, you have to take responsibility for this and you should learn it", but if your background is UX and designer strategy, you understand how people operate, how people think, and you know they don't give a fuck.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. I want to steal a tweet from a CoinDesker who I respect, you've had him on, David Morris.
Peter McCormack: I love David.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, he's very smart.
Peter McCormack: How's his book coming along?
George Kaloudis: It's coming along it seems; I'm going to talk to him later today.
Peter McCormack: Say hello from us.
George Kaloudis: I will. But he said, and this is going to sound like I'm mixing metaphors and kind of playing on both sides, but he said people are mid just in general. So, people are mid but also people are amazing; we have opposable thumbs, that's fucking awesome, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: People are very smart but also they don't want to have to deal with all this bullshit, and I mean bullshit when I say it. It's people are mid, but we believe in the people; does that make sense?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I totally get it. I get it, I think you and I are probably on a very similar page with all of this, and also you're a journalist, you can make an argument possible. What I do is journalism and so you kind of have to be objective sometimes as best as you can be from personal perspective and try and say, "But what if?"
George Kaloudis: Yeah. I can yell about Bitcoin's privacy issue; you talk about Matt Odell, he's the guy to talk about privacy, maybe Lopp as well, but privacy's hard on Bitcoin and I don't know how to make it easier. Again, I'm a writer, I'm a think boy, I don't have anything to go forward with, but privacy's hard on Bitcoin and it feels like it shouldn't be.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think there's a distinct difference between being a journalist and being a cheerleader.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Your job, when you go to work every day, isn't to cheerlead Bitcoin, it's to be a journalist.
George Kaloudis: Sure, but I can cheerlead in my personal time, I guess.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: Approaching things and being critical of it, like you're saying, is not me saying it's bad, but we were talking about mental health, if I can say that Bitcoin doesn't solve that, that doesn't mean I don't think it could if we fixed the money and then there are two-parent households and things like that.
Peter McCormack: So, what does it actually mean to you then; what does Bitcoin mean to you; what does it improve?
George Kaloudis: So, like I mentioned earlier, I've known about Bitcoin for a long time, everyone seems like they've known, "Oh, I knew about it, my friends are buying drugs with it, they're buying fake IDs".
Peter McCormack: "I knew about it in 2007".
George Kaloudis: Yeah, exactly, "So, I'd be rich now", no, you wouldn't because you would have sold.
Peter McCormack: "You fucking idiot".
George Kaloudis: I've known about it for a long time and I didn't really even care about it until I heard about and/or met people who actually genuinely needed it, and what I mean by that is everyone in this room has a bank account?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: We're relatively privileged when it comes down to it, seriously.
Peter McCormack: Relative, we're the most privileged in the world, we're in the 1% of the 1%.
George Kaloudis: Yes.
Peter McCormack: We're very lucky.
George Kaloudis: Absolutely, we're so lucky. I go and open a bank account, I don't even have to go into a branch, I've opened a Bank of America bank account from my cell phone.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: That's amazing; not everyone can do that. We have so many people living under authoritarianism, some people, if your name's Osama Bin Laden, how are you going to open a back account?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: It's going to get flagged, you're going to have to come in, get to show all these whatever.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, or you have no electricity where you live.
George Kaloudis: Right. The story that got me, or where Bitcoin kind of collapsed on me and I said, "Wow, this is actually something that's very profound", I read a story about Venezuelans going to the coffee shop and they're scraping off little gold flakes to pay for coffee; that is crazy. They have a debasing currency, that's why they're doing that. What if we had something that was more infinity divisible like Bitcoin? That's when it sort of collapsed in on me, and that's when, "Okay, those are the people that need Bitcoin". I don't need Bitcoin, again, that makes me sound pompous, like, "I don't need Bitcoin, the poor people need Bitcoin", but they do, they need it more than I do, and I'll share another story --
Peter McCormack: Can I throw some nuance in that?
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: We were with American HODL yesterday, as I mentioned, and I put a question to him about the different needs of people of the Third World in Bitcoin. I think it's less that these people need Bitcoin on an individual level, they need Bitcoin to work on the grand macro level.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, what I mean by this is, if you're in a Third World country, somewhere you're living on less than $3 a day, what do you need? You need a way of holding money and spending money and ideally a currency that doesn't debase, but the problem we have is we have so much volatility, the debasement argument is dumb on a short-term window. Yes, eventually if it's the global currency, if Bitcoin is a global currency and has high liquidity, yes, it should be fairly stable, but while its price is not stable, it is useless to somebody living on $3 a day.
It's a great payment mechanism, like if you bought your Bitcoin in, I don't know, February of last year, halfway through the year, you could have lost half your value. So, it's not that I think they need it, I think they need it to work, and there are parts of it they need right now, there's the stuff that Jack Mallers is doing with Strike, that's super-useful.
George Kaloudis: It's awesome.
Peter McCormack: But I think they need it to work.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Do you understand the difference?
George Kaloudis: I do, and I'm going to talk about Tether now, but I've heard stories from people I know, people going across borders in Russia during the sanctions, and they didn't only use Bitcoin to bring their money out of the country, they used Tether as well. I know 8% inflation in the US dollar, or whatever the actual number is, it's terrible, but Zimbabwe, back in 2008, had 65,000,000% inflation; 8% is pittance compared to that, it's nothing.
Peter McCormack: You don't even need that, you can talk about Turkey at 56%.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You can talk about Lebanon's just devalued their currency by another 90%.
George Kaloudis: Argentina.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't know how much money you've got in the bank or your savings; if I was hit by 90% inflation, that would wipe out everything I've done for the last 5 years.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, absolutely.
Peter McCormack: That's all wiped out.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. Bitcoin, I think you're actually making this argument that is does fight against currency debasement, because if everyone uses it, it's a way to opt out of their currency; is that what you're trying to point at?
Peter McCormack: I'm saying, if there was not speculation against Bitcoin --
George Kaloudis: No paper Bitcoin, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well just no speculation and we didn't have these bull and bear markets, it would be a much more useful tool against inflation. Yes, you cannot debase the unit.
George Kaloudis: Sure, one sat is one sat unless you put a clown picture on it or something.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so you can't debase the unit, but it is not a unit of account, so the speculation on it means it's too volatile for certain people as a currency.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's just way too risky, and I've had arguments on Twitter where I've defended stablecoins, I've said, "Look, the reason I defend Tron and Ethereum is for one reason and one reason only, there are stablecoins issued on them that people will find useful", and so many people are like, "No, they should be using Bitcoin". I'm like, "You're fucking stupid; go to visit these countries, these people cannot afford a 50% haircut".
George Kaloudis: Yeah. We can make this a nuance show, but the nuance there is someone like my grandmother who is an immigrant, she came to this country and she worked in a Lance factory making crackers, chips, because that's the only thing she could do, she couldn't speak English, she could say, "Fork, table, chair", things in your kitchen, and she was really good at saving her money. But all of her purchasing power was getting just wiped away over years and years and years since the 1970s because she didn't know that, "Oh, I need to buy stocks and bonds and rebalance my portfolio". I hate using the term "sophisticated", but because she's not a sophisticated investor, she wasn't able to save her purchasing power.
Bitcoin's treated like an asset, right; if you had a base money that was treated like an asset and it kind of ticks up along the way, it's savings technology built in the money. So, selfishly, I would have loved Bitcoin to be available to my grandmother as she was, you know, coming up in a new country. So, it's kind of cutting the other way, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean look, these are all timeframes.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Short-term timeframe, unless you pick your timing right, Bitcoin's either good or bad for you, and I'm super-conscious of not having my own time bias because I've been in Bitcoin for let's say six years, five-and-a-half, six years this time, and I've done well because of that, but there are some people who've been in it for four years and who are down.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, at some point, long time preference behaviour needs to turn into short. You're not going to live forever, so at some point, we need to reap what we sow. Are we going to be saying for the next ten years, "Oh, in ten years, in ten years and ten years until we die, I'm just going to do this forever", that's an issue, right?
Peter McCormack: So, what does it fix then; what are the areas of Bitcoin you're super-interested in?
George Kaloudis: We were talking about my privilege, but the Fed, what are they doing, man? Inflation at 8%; on one hand, I just said not that big of a deal, that is crazy as being the world's superpower, and we have the US dollar. We need a way to opt out of that, and Bitcoin does do that.
A lot of EconTwit gets mad about the fact that it has a capped supply and I think that's a load of bullshit. No one sits there and does time-value money calculations whenever the buy groceries, they just want to buy fucking groceries. So, what I do think it fixes is, maybe quite loosely, fixes the fact that our money is shit for saving, and it's sort of what I talked about earlier with my grandmother, she can save in her money and not have to worry about if Apple is going to be the dominant phone for whatever, that's the best stock, whatever it is; does that make sense?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. Do you think the Fed is evil, dumb or do you think this is just a natural outcome from having central banking?
George Kaloudis: I think I'm naïve, I don't think that our systems and our political system in the US is evil, I really don't. I do think that the incentiveness alignment with the fact that there are celebrity politicians now is a huge problem. You like talking about politics, I don't like talking about politics because I get so angry about the celebrity politicians. I don't think politicians, the celebrity ones, are doing what they think is best for the people. I think they are doing what they think the constituent that will get them elected purports to want; does that even make a shred of a sense?
Peter McCormack: I literally, 100%, agree with you. I've just written an intro for Jason Maier's book, and in that I identify, I've talked for years about this, that this political cycle, the four-year cycle, is highly detrimental to making correct policy decisions for the electorate.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's a war between two groups, "I want your votes, he wants your votes, what am I going to say to get your votes because I want to stay in power?"
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and notice I'm talking about politics, however the Fed is supposed to apolitical but we know that's not the truth.
Peter McCormack: Come on, man.
George Kaloudis: We had Donald Trump, President Donald Trump saying, "Well, you know what to do here", no, I don't know what to do here. Now I know how polarised the UK is.
Peter McCormack: Not like the US.
George Kaloudis: It's terrible.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons, I think two reasons; firstly, we don't have a two-party system, so we have that kind of release valve.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, you guys have a communist party, or socialist party; we have that in Greece too.
Peter McCormack: Well, no, our communist party is the Labour Party.
George Kaloudis: Oh, okay.
Peter McCormack: Well, when Corbyn was in power, it was certainly a socialist party.
George Kaloudis: You're over here for me right now.
Peter McCormack: All right, so we have Conservatives and Labour are our two main parties.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: Conservatives are your more fiscally conservative party but also, I would say they're more for the elites, some people say it's the higher paid, because people who pay the most tax tend to be the higher paid and they want to pay less tax. Although my dad's working class, my dad always voted Conservative because he was like, "They take less of my money away by tax. I work fucking hard, leave my money alone".
The Labour Party tend to be more socialist, have a deeper relationship with the unions and tend to be those who are a bit more like the Democrats, they want free healthcare, well everyone wants free healthcare in the UK, sorry, free education, those kinds of things.
We also have the Liberal Democrats, but they're kind of, if you don't want to vote either party, you tend to go for them. They're kind of like Champagne socialists, they're like your middle class voters who are embarrassed to vote Conservative because Conservatives are seen as -- look, people call them Tory scum and they tend to think they're very inconsiderate about the rest of society.
George Kaloudis: People, they're mean too over there, aren't they?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, they are, but we have the Green Party, which has quite a solid position. So, we just have that, but I think the even bigger reason, we don't have news channels dedicated to a particular wing of politics. The BBC, I can see the criticism because it's essentially state media, but also it's so regulated and it has so many different watchdogs keeping an eye on it that they kind of have to be fair.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Then, all the other channels, have we got GMB, what's GM News?
Danny Knowles: GB News.
Peter McCormack: GB News?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That's kind of trying to be like Fox News, it's an absolute shitshow full of morons, but Sky News tends to be pretty, would you say, balanced as well?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, a little bit. If you tried to draw it in a map, it would probably be like BBC would be just left of centre and Sky News probably just right of centre, I would guess.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: But they're pretty close, BBC especially, I know people hate the news here and I stand up for it all the time, I'm a statist or whatever, but I think the BBC's about the best news organisation in the world.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I would probably agree with Danny on that.
Danny Knowles: Do the talking heads make a ton of money like they do in the US?
Peter McCormack: No, and it's not a talking heads show.
George Kaloudis: There's no Talk with Carla Sands, Anderson Cooper, Sean Hannity?
Peter McCormack: No, we have people who have regular slots, but not like that.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: If anything, Danny, I'd say they're both left of centre, BBC's a bit more left.
Danny Knowles: Probably, yeah, that's probably fair.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: But I kind of trust some of the reporters as journalists more than I would trust in the US. I find Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, when you come from the UK and watch that, it's fucking mental.
George Kaloudis: It's a little different.
Peter McCormack: It's so obvious to me how much this is leading to the fracturing of society.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: These people, the incentive structure is to make one group of people hate the other group of people.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, there is a shred of hope though, I still do think that most people aren't polarised because I have friends and family that sit on either side of the spectrum, and they're closer to the centre than I think our media sort of shows, and so I think a lot of us are kind of looking at these crazy people who are on either side, like, "What are you all doing?!" So, I think there's a shred of hope in there where people are going to stop trusting them and stop listening to them and just kind of move.
Peter McCormack: But the centre ground has no power in that there's no incentive structure for a centre ground, well, I'm going to come back to that.
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: There is incentive structure for either wing to fight, argue, point out the differences and there is an aligned incentive structure for politicians to then disagree with each other and never give ground. Like when I interviewed Ted Cruz, I said, "Can you tell me one thing you like about the Democrat Party, one policy you like?" he wouldn't give me one.
George Kaloudis: Not even one?
Peter McCormack: Not one. So, I think that's the incentive structure. Even if the middle ground's 80% of rational people, where is their power to make change?
George Kaloudis: Yeah. Well, what is Ted Cruz going to do if, all of a sudden, liberals like Bitcoin; is he going to not like Bitcoin anymore?
Peter McCormack: That's a tricky one.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That is a tricky one, and if he does, if he changes his opinions like that, it shows how shallow and how kind of like a terrible person he is because this is not how you should be making decisions. I understand differences of opinions on things like abortion, big key issues like that. I understand some of the challenges, the big issues that people are fighting over, but if you chose to fight on every issue, then what are you standing for?
Danny Knowles: I think the problem as well is, at an individual level, people are very rational, and you can have a one-on-one conversation in private with someone and most of the time you can find alignment. But I think the problem, in a lot of these news organisations especially, is the social pressure of aligning to certain topics. I think that, while the BBC is a pretty good news organisation, I think that's their massive problem. I think they have like an internal pressure to conform to certain views. I don't think it's like a top-down issue, I think it's a social issue and things like peer groups rather it being like these evil overlords that tell you what your story should be.
George Kaloudis: There's a Bitcoin-adjacent angle here, I think people really want to belong to a group, and I'm playing armchair psychologist right now, but everyone wants their tribe, everyone wants to belong to something bigger than themselves. We have people who live in New York City, 10 million people live in London, 10 million people, and they're piled on top of each other and they feel all, and I'm sure you guys know the people who have done this and you've talked to them and they're like, "Well, I don't have any friends in New York, I don't have any friends in London, I don't have friends in" -- what's a big city in Australia?
Danny Knowles: Try Sydney.
George Kaloudis: Sydney, it's things like that, so people, they just will latch onto anything that they can feel belonging to, and that might actually be why a lot of people are probably bitcoiners, they don't have very many friends in wherever they live and they find this likeminded or they think likeminded community with Bitcoin maximalists and, "I'm a bitcoiner now, that's my tribe".
Peter McCormack: Well, I think certainly early on, I'm saying this because I am one, I think a lot of bitcoiners are kind of weirdos.
George Kaloudis: It's the spice of life though.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, I think they're rebels or people who see the world differently or know something's wrong or --
Danny Knowles: Contrarian.
Peter McCormack: -- contrarian because I think you kind of have to actually be able to say --
George Kaloudis: You're an early bitcoiner.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, you think about what you're saying to people, you're saying, "By the way, you know this money we have that we spent for years, it's completely wrong. What actually we need is a form of money that nobody controls, that's completely decentralised, that's digital, that has this consensus layer". Try and explain that to people who say, "What you do mean; the Government doesn't care?" "No, the Government won't control money, remember the Government are all evil and bad". You sound like a fucking nutter.
George Kaloudis: Yes.
Peter McCormack: So, you have to be contrarian, you have to be able to think like that. Fortunately, what I think what has been happening over the last couple of years is that kind of contrarian thinking is going mainstream.
George Kaloudis: Being a contrarian is not being contrarian anymore.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, because it's just like so many lies and bullshit. I think Iraq was a big, big point, yeah, I think that was one of the starting points; we knew we got lied into a war.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That, to me, was like that's a big starting point. Then we had the Financial Crisis of 2008, I was like, "Okay, we all got fucked here", and nobody went to jail, and there's been more and more and more and now people are like, "The media are lying to me, the politicians are lying to me, I've got no money, everything's fucked". I think people are starting to realise, and the big hope for me, the centre ground to me is Joe Rogan; I will bring him up again and again. He has managed to create one of the biggest media companies in the world which is him and another guy in the studio interviewing people and having the ability to discuss anything, not get cancelled and not care.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You can completely disagree with him, doesn't matter, he's allowing those conversations to happen. He openly admits he's progressive on a number of issues, and he likes to shoot guns and fight.
George Kaloudis: He's a Bernie Bro, kind of.
Peter McCormack: Is he a Bernie Bro?
George Kaloudis: You can say one thing about Bernie, at least he's been consistent.
Peter McCormack: That's a Rogan line.
George Kaloudis: Is that true?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what he says.
George Kaloudis: I don't listen to Rogan very much.
Peter McCormack: So, he does, but he will have Tulsi Gabbard on, he's a big fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but he likes to shoot guns, he likes almost the conservative lifestyle, the Texas lifestyle; he wants to shoot guns, hunt.
George Kaloudis: A Texas liberal.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he has issues where he would say he's progressive, so he's not audience captured, he's not ideologically captured, he just says what he thinks and he cannot get cancelled for it and he doesn't lose his audience for it, and that is what we need more of because Anderson Cooper can't do that.
George Kaloudis: No.
Peter McCormack: Anderson Cooper has to be a complete lefty.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Sean Hannity can't, or Tucker Carlson, even worse, absolute piece of shit I think he is, who will literally pick up any point to fight the other side, and these people are captured, they're trapped.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: They cannot express themselves outside of the stream of views that must be held by their wing of politics, and that is dangerous.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I think I found your soapbox.
Peter McCormack: Do you reckon?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, you love this, or hate it.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what it is? When you're growing up in the UK, you hear of America and your rich friends got to go to Florida and Disneyland and you didn't get to go but you heard about it and it sounded amazing.
George Kaloudis: Disney, as an adult, is amazing, by the way; you should do that.
Peter McCormack: I did that; the first time I did it was as an adult, took my kids.
George Kaloudis: It's amazing.
Peter McCormack: But you see America from a distance, it's like land of free, it's amazing, everything's amazing, everything's big, hotdogs and hockey, like everything's amazing. Then I started coming and there's no country I've travelled to more than America, it's like 80 times now, absolutely love it and my experience of America, living it, meeting you today, hanging out, is entirely different from social media and media.
George Kaloudis: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: So, what we see of America on media in the UK is very different from the experience of coming here, and I see a great nation of people tearing each other apart because of the incentives of the politicians and the media, a very small group of people who are fucking it up for everyone else.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It annoys me.
George Kaloudis: I will defend America to the end of time, I am proud to be an American, I am proud that is what helped bring me here. My grandmother was going to be a tobacco farmer in Greece, she got her family and came over here, and I got the opportunity to be a tobacco farmer if I so chose; that is an amazing thing.
So, I totally agree with you, social media has ruined the world; as long as it stays on social media and doesn't enter our real life, I think we'll be okay. I think we're in this really weird post-COVID time where everyone was staring at their damn computers all day and they got stuck in their echo chambers, bitcoiners got stuck in their echo chambers, nocoiners got stuck in their echo chambers, and while we're saying all these terrible things about the other guy and the enemy, we're not quite enemies, we're all one human people; that sounds like Kumbaya bullshit but we're part of this big system.
I'm getting on a tangent now, but bitcoiners love talking about individualism and how Bitcoin kind of pushes that forward, "You're your own person, self-reliance", but if you actually think about it, Bitcoin does a really, really good job of highlighting exactly the opposite. If I owned all the Bitcoin, Bitcoin wouldn't be worth anything; if you were mining all the Bitcoin, Bitcoin wouldn't be worth anything; if Danny was over here being the only Lightning guy running a channel with himself, that wouldn't be anything valuable.
If anything gets highlighted how reliant on all of each other, I mean for fuck's sake, I don't have to go down to the river every day getting fish for my food and get some water and bring it back, it's an afterthought. We live on top of each other in New York City, there's I guess about 8 million people here, or however many million people, we don't have to worry about surviving, so now we have to go find our other tribe and start yelling at each other on Twitter. Bitcoin has done the opposite, I think, and people like talking about individualism, libertarianism, whatever the hell it is, but I think Bitcoin does the complete opposite.
Peter McCormack: The Orange Party.
George Kaloudis: The Orange Party.
Peter McCormack: You said the other day, was it you who said that?
Danny Knowles: No, I don't think that was me.
Peter McCormack: Who was it? I agree, I love the idea of the Orange Party, it's like we come together on the important issues rather than fight, like what unites us rather than what divides us.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, sounds like some hippy shit though.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it does, but like fuck it. I'm not a fan of Lex Fridman, I listen to the odd show, but he gets criticised --
George Kaloudis: Do you have time for that?
Peter McCormack: I don't have time for much. He gets criticised for like he comes with love and everything, but when you think about it, you criticise him for a person coming out and saying, "I want unity, I want love", and it's maybe a reflection on society that we're rejecting that.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: "What are you on about, you want people to unified and come from a position of love, you fucking weirdo? Let's fight".
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: That's a reflection on us in society.
George Kaloudis: Well, it's like some people take that to the logical extreme and they say, "Oh, you mean you want one monoculture?" We don't want that, just want you to love each other. Do you guys know Chad Ochocinco?
Danny Knowles: No.
Peter McCormack: No.
George Kaloudis: Oh man, you should follow him on Twitter, he's hilarious, he's an American football player, 85, Chad Ochocinco, and all he says is, "I love you", and people will say, "How can I say that I love you if you've never met you?" He'll say, "Because I love you". Again, I sound like such a hippy, but it's true, it's great.
Peter McCormack: Hippy, bro.
George Kaloudis: I'm such a hippy. It's funny, my closest friends know that I probably lean more liberal and I think a lot of people think I'd lean the other way, which makes me an enigma; I'm a contrarian.
Peter McCormack: Show him my pin tweet.
Danny Knowles: Okay.
Peter McCormack: I think you'll like this.
Danny Knowles: I'm curious what you think on the Orange Party stuff, you didn't really answer, because I don't know if voting on policies just because it aligns with Bitcoin is a good idea.
George Kaloudis: Sorry, I'm looking at this tweet. That's what the people in the UK think of you?
Danny Knowles: That's how Americans see Pete versus how Brits see him.
George Kaloudis: That's hilarious. So, the Orange Party is, we only care about Bitcoin, where the policies only are beneficial to Bitcoin, is that the idea?
Danny Knowles: I think it's you vote on what's beneficial for Bitcoin, yeah; is that right?
Peter McCormack: I think it's that, but I also think it's an exit valve from two-party politics in the US. It's not being politically ideologically driven, it is saying, "We're exiting that, let's come together. We might disagree on other things, but let's disagree on the issue rather than because of who we are", so it kind of brings us to a bit more unified and saying, "Let's just focus on --" well maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's just single-issue voting, it's Bitcoin and that's it.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I don't think you'd get very much support for that. There are not that many bitcoiners; it's a really small echo chamber. What did we say, 100 million bitcoiners in the world, is that what they say, whatever the number is?
Danny Knowles: That seems like a lot.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: That seems high.
Peter McCormack: That's more than the population of the UK.
George Kaloudis: If I'm someone who believes that Bitcoin should disappear into the background and just become base money, then I would not vote for the Orange Party I don't think. People are going to hate me for this, I think that the state should exist in some capacity.
Peter McCormack: You statist cuck!
George Kaloudis: I don't think we'll survive in anarchy, and I think the people who believe that they can survive without the government are the ones who probably can't, the ones who are on social media saying they're truly anarchists, probably a few of them.
Peter McCormack: I agree and disagree, so take it where I agree --
George Kaloudis: My brother's an animal, he would survive as an anarchist, and he loves the state, he was in the Marine Corps.
Peter McCormack: So, I agree and disagree.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: So, I am also somebody who's a proponent of democracy; I don't even feel like I need to say we need government, I feel we will always have government. If you get rid of government, a new government will come because there'll be ways to organise yourself. It's like if you went magic red button, the government's gone, what's going to happen? People are going to start being worried about safety.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, it's like, "Well, how do we become safer? Well, let's work together, let's build a community", and the community, how does the community make decisions? "Well, we need a decisionmaker", they need a leader; you create a government.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Every time you get rid of government, you create government. We have government within our podcast, the six people who work, I am the leader, but it's authoritarian; we have government within my family, it's authoritarian. But there's a certain amount of democracy in this, like if Danny's got an issue, he can come to me and we can work through it, but government exists everywhere. You might call it something else, or governance exists everywhere --
George Kaloudis: Yeah, that's the G in ESG we don't talk about.
Peter McCormack: -- because you have to have ways of organising people.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Companies have governance, charities have governance, football teams have governance, everything has governance as ways of organising yourself. You're not going to have 300 million people suddenly completely being individual, and so I think you will always have it. My worry with democracy is that we slide in towards authoritarianism. My other worry is, if you get rid of it, you maybe replace it with something much worse.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Peter McCormack: But I think democracy is broken at the moment and I think government is broken; I think it worked and now it's not working.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and Bitcoin fixes that. I'd argue that parts of it don't get fixed, you mentioned charity a little bit, how do we deal, I say "deal", that sounds very disparaging, how do we help our most downtrodden citizens, the homeless, the poor, in an environment where it's Bitcoin only?
Peter McCormack: How are they helping them in LA?
George Kaloudis: They're not.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: Homelessness is one of the most confusing things to me, and I wish I spent more time understanding it because it's so sad to me that, for people who are homeless, to have at least one person in their life that could just pick them up; it's really, really sad to me.
Peter McCormack: It's a complicated subject. Michael Shellenberger wrote a book called San Fransicko and then he went down the homelessness rabbit hole. He did, again, a show with Joe Rogan, I'd recommend listening to it; he talked about how he thinks he would solve it. He talked a lot about the cycle of drug issues, in some places, too easy to be homeless.
George Kaloudis: Well, it's easier.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but not easier but it's too easy in that it's harder to be homeless in Texas than it is in, where were we in Texas where they said they'd banned homelessness?
Danny Knowles: I don't know about that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, where was I?
George Kaloudis: Oh my God.
Peter McCormack: But what I'm saying is it's easier to be homeless in some places than others. I don't know how to solve big problems like homelessness, but there are certain things, like I've, for many years, been very proud of the NHS in the UK; it's now broken. But I think, again, the reason the NHS is broken is because of a failure of governance and a failure of economic management, that's why it's broken. But I was proud of the fact that anyone in the UK, whatever their condition, they have a problem, they can go and they get treated and it's not going to bankrupt them; I think that's a great system to have.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Sadly, it annoys people who want absolute freedom because they think it's theft to pay for other people. I'm proud of the fact that, in the UK, every building that gets built, every public building, has to have wheelchair access; nobody is discriminated against because they're in a wheelchair, they can get in and out of any building, I think that's great.
The incentives go the other way because I bought a house and the house couldn't be signed off by building regs until it had a ramp, and then, as soon as it's signed off and the house is bought, you can get rid of it. So, there are stupid things to have --
George Kaloudis: Yeah, that's so dumb.
Peter McCormack: I think it's a measure of a civilised society how much it looks after its most vulnerable and its weakest, and I absolutely support that. I am happy to pay tax, I pay too much tax, but I am happy to pay a tax to contribute towards it. Now, if you get rid of that, will you build the gap in a voluntary way? Food banks are a voluntary system that work in the work in the UK, I think it's 100% voluntary-based, Danny will check, but certainly, you do your shopping, there's a box at the end, you contribute something, that food gets distributed; I think that's great. But I think we need food banks, again, because of the broken economic system.
George Kaloudis: Do you think that, if we moved away from the government giving that away, could we actually, I'm asking you questions now, could we genuinely have a society where the rich people give all their money and take care of the downtrodden? I actually have a pretty strong opinion on this and I don't think rich people will take care of everyone because of the things that they donate their money to sometimes.
Peter McCormack: So, I can only give you answers based on anecdotal things I've seen.
George Kaloudis: And so do I.
Peter McCormack: So, when I've travelled to what you would say are poorer countries, I think the wealth gap is more obvious.
George Kaloudis: Between the rich and poor there?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: So, certainly places in South America, I think there's a much wider gap, it visually looks like a wider gap because you can have fences and walls on one side of favellas and on the other side you've got big houses and mansions. I don't know if that's because of a weaker welfare system that doesn't support people, I can't give you the basis for that.
I could just anecdotally say the most developed First World nations which have the most developed welfare systems seem to have a smaller gap between the rich and poor, and the poorest seem to at least have something to grab a hold of, some way of being able to feed themselves, maybe home themselves; but it's purely anecdotal.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. I think, if we went to a society or a country, just take the US where it was just the rich people giving away money to the poor people to take care of them, I don't think that would work. If you think about it, people seem afraid to give money anonymously, and so I was at the Air and Space Museum in DC, Jeff Bezos has given just a monstrous amount of money to it, and I'm not even thinking about him and how his name is at the top, like, "I am Jeff Bezos".
It's an amazing museum, it's awesome, but if you go around the corner, there is a section that's about the planets and, "Come explore the planets", and it's not called, "Explore the planetary system", it's, "Kenneth C Griffin's Explore the Planets"; who the fuck do you think you are, Ken Griffin, that you are even important in this situation where you're going to give money for this awesome exhibit about the planets and you think that your little microscopic ass matters? That is ridiculous, it's such an ego play.
They're just going to do whatever is most splashy, and it's anecdotal, I don't know how people are act. I know there are rich people who give their money away anonymously, but I don't think most rich do it because they care, I think they do it because they give a shit about themselves, and that's so cynical; I'm the most cynical person with that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, like my brother said to me once, "Charity is the ultimate form of self-flattery", something along those lines. There's a maths equation in there that needs to be figured out which is in terms of, if there was zero rate of tax and they managed to maintain their wealth, how much would they give away and how much more productive would that giveaway be compared to taxation by government and government's poor redistribution?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, the government does do a poor job of redistributing.
Peter McCormack: Absolutely terrible job, but it does a job of redistribution that might not exist without it.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Then, you go down the ethical lines of saying, "Well, so be it, that's life, why should I have my property rights violated?"
George Kaloudis: Well, because we were just talking about the human experience and the Kumbaya. You still turn on your sink on for the water, right, you're not hunting for food. It might have seed oils in it, but you don't have to hunt for it.
Peter McCormack: The great thing about Bitcoin is it's forced me to question all of this.
George Kaloudis: I keep asking you questions but it's fun to do it that way, I'm Socratic, the Socratic School of Thought.
Peter McCormack: That's fine, we're good.
George Kaloudis: Do you think that's a Bitcoin thing or do you think that's a you thing? I have a ravenous appetite for curiosity, I love learning about ant colonies, I don't know, that's the most recent thing I was reading about on Wikipedia, is just a you thing or is that a Bitcoin thing?
Peter McCormack: That's a good question. I think it's a me thing and Bitcoin has directed the me thing at certain topics.
George Kaloudis: Sure, like money.
Peter McCormack: Money.
George Kaloudis: Philosophy.
Peter McCormack: A little bit. Money, energy, but I think fairness.
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: Ultimately, all of it comes down to fairness, like what is fair?
George Kaloudis: That's philosophical I'd say.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I was a raging liberal growing up and I've definitely gone more to the centre, and then certain topics, more to the conservative side, but I've had to wrestle with climate change, what is real, what isn't real? I've had to wrestle with money, I'd have to wrestle with the role of the state, should it exist; will it always exist? I've had to wrestle with a lot of subjects and I still don't know the answer on a number of things, I'm still trying to figure it out, it's complicated.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's a very complicated world.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I think Bitcoin did help push me towards thinking about money, so I think that's fair, but you've seen the TikToks or the videos of young kids being, "Hold on a second, this is a paper thing, why does this have value?" and they get flamed by all the comments, but it's a fair question. So, I think people do have that question growing up and they just don't have an avenue, so Bitcoin does help with that, "Oh, this is a different kind of money, completely different than anything I've seen before".
What I mean by completely different is it's not that different from gold, but a lot of these kids growing up now have never really dealt in cash, so when they see their bank accounts and see numbers of the screen and it's, "Oh, actually, those aren't my numbers on the screen, those are the bank's numbers on screen and Bitcoin is my numbers on the screen", so it's cool that way, Bitcoin does help people think about money.
Peter McCormack: This is one of my favourite things about Bitcoin is it forces you to rethink these things.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, but I said people are mid earlier, people are also very, very smart.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: I believe in the human spirit and I don't necessarily think that, absent Bitcoin, we wouldn't be trying to do something else and thinking about other things and making things bigger and better.
Peter McCormack: I think you'd really enjoy sitting down with Andrew Bailey.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: Really?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: That's a compliment.
Peter McCormack: Did you listen to my show with him?
George Kaloudis: I think so.
Peter McCormack: He's a fascinating guy.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, that's a compliment, I appreciate that.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think you're wrestling with things I've wrestled with.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: This is why this has been less of an interview and more of a conversation, and Andrew Bailey, he kind of played a trick on me, I'm not sure if it was on purpose, but he kind of turned the interview on me and made me really --
George Kaloudis: I've asked you a bunch of questions.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it made me question things and things I'm wrestling with because it goes back to this point is that there are loads of Bitcoin podcasts out there, I think a lot of them are cheerleading shows.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And this isn't a cheerleading show, this is a podcast about Bitcoin that accepts it might fail.
George Kaloudis: We haven't talked much about it, honestly.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, fair, but accepts it might fail, it also questions whether Bitcoin is good for the world, like I've questioned that.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think it is, but I don't know with certainty. I don't know, if we went through hyperbitcoinisation, what the negative consequences of that are; could we see a complete collapse in society; could we see a lot of death, blood come from that; could it ultimately be a net negative? I don't know.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I think a lot of people say it will get worse before it gets better, isn't that sort of like the rallying cry around that?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and does it get better?
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Could it be a catalyst for human destruction? I just don't know the answers.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I'm going to say the corniest thing ever, I think it matters what layer zero is doing, and layer zero is people, yeah, it sounds a little corny. I think money is an instrument for change but it's not the change itself and it's a very powerful tool and it depends on who wields it and what kind of change gets implemented. If a bad person has good money to make change, they're going to made bad changes; throwing good money at bad doesn't do a damn thing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree. So, what we therefore need is a fairer system of money where there's less ability to game the system to acquire more of it in an unfair way, and if we do that, then hopefully you would see a wider distribution of money and a fairer distribution of money amongst good and -- you will get bad but you will get a fairer distribution of money.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, but if the social structures are still in place that discriminate against the currently discriminated, it doesn't matter how good the money is, it doesn't matter if you have access to banks or whatever institution you didn't have access to before. If society hates you, society hates you.
Peter McCormack: If Bitcoin leads to a fairer distribution of money, does it lead to a better distribution of power?
George Kaloudis: No, I don't think so. This is very philosophical, power's so strange to me, especially when you consider that a lot of people who are in power, and especially in totalitarian societies, and I'm not pointing to anyone right now, whoever may be listening, but they're always short and small, maybe not always, but for some reason, people listen to what they have to say because of the guns, I don't know. I don't know if I answered your question.
Peter McCormack: No, you didn't, you just picked on small people!
George Kaloudis: I'm below six feet tall so that makes me short.
Peter McCormack: What are you, 5 feet 11 inches?
George Kaloudis: 5 feet 11 inches.
Peter McCormack: Damn it, you're just short.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, that's fine.
Peter McCormack: I'm five feet, nine-and-a-half inches.
George Kaloudis: You're not short.
Peter McCormack: I'm average.
George Kaloudis: You're averagely heightened.
Peter McCormack: I'm literally average.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm above average weight! I'm the wrong way. So, my point is, money is power, right?
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: When you have money, you have power, you just do.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You can do more in different ways. So, you have the power to change people's lives. As I have accumulated Bitcoin and Bitcoin's led to more wealth, I've been able to give some of that to people to change their lives, so that is a powerful act you have, but also money gives you power and influence on a social and political level.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: We know that, especially in the US with lobbying and backdoor deals. Now, if you had more money in the hands of good people, does that lead to a better wielding of power and a better society?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and we didn't decide the fact that what is good is up to the eye of more variables.
Peter McCormack: Of course.
George Kaloudis: Yes, if good people had money and bad people have less that it would be better.
Peter McCormack: And if the Cantillon effect benefits the people who wield that power in the worst way possible, by getting rid of the Cantillon effect, would it lead to a fairer and better society? God, this is really philosophical.
George Kaloudis: And I was a maths major, can you believe that? So, maybe I'm misunderstanding what it is; isn't it where manipulation of money supply increases the price of both goods and of assets?
Peter McCormack: No, this is those closest to this spigot benefit more from the creation of money.
George Kaloudis: And you're saying that, if Bitcoin is the base money, you can't just create money willy-nilly?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so you lose that fact. But then, I'm going to flip it the other way, power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely.
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: So, was it the money that made these people bad or did they arrive bad and get the money; what came first, the money or the bad?
George Kaloudis: The money. I think people are good, I think people are genuinely good.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think I agree. So, if you get rid of that, if you have a fairer distribution of money, not in a communist way, just in a natural order of effects by having fair money, do we have less negative power?
George Kaloudis: Yes, but I would really question if Bitcoin has a fair distribution; just think about the wealth that the earlier people have.
Peter McCormack: But we're still very early, over time, does that distribution improve? I don't know.
George Kaloudis: If I'm to guess, I don't think so. I think hodl culture is so cemented in early bitcoiners, I mean a ton of money, and then we, all of us, are in Bitcoin because we think it's better money, we think it's borderless, it's a great central position, it's great, we also want to make money, we're not doing this for free; if I wanted to work for free, I'd work on open-source software. I work at CoinDesk, I make money there because I am person who wants to make money because that's how our civilisation works.
I think something that we had a blind to as early bitcoiners, and I mean early, I think Bitcoin's going to around forever or for a very long time, we're early bitcoiners, I think the blind spot is the fact that there is still this distribution problem, because people who were early, not all of them of were smart, some of them just got plain old lucky.
Someone like my dad, who we talked about earlier, who was earlier than them even that has no Bitcoin, well, shouldn't he be compensated for the fact that he was early and that because he took custody into his own hands and he fucked it up or whatever, or his family needed him to pay for things because it was the Financial Crisis, is that fair, is that a fair distribution? My dad was CPU mining.
Peter McCormack: I think Bitcoin has the fairest distribution model possible, but if you apply a moral layer to that, you can consider that maybe it is unfair.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think the earlier you are the fairer you think it is.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I think that's completely true. This is the fairest thing in the world, I thought, when I was CPU mining back in 2009 or 2010, whenever it was.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I wish I was.
George Kaloudis: More philosophical stuff here, I think we're great what we're doing now, this is great.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I agree. Look, I'm in a really good place with all of this, trying to avoid the doom-mongers or being a doomer myself, a bit more pro. I'm very interested in ideas that people have that bring people together constructively rather than pulling people apart, again, why we considered with this show I think we now have a bigger job to do, which is not preach about Bitcoin to bitcoiners, which is preach about money and economics to everybody, which means we might have to not be What Bitcoin Did anymore and be a generic show that can bring enough people in then to educate them about money, economy and important subjects. That feels like more of a mission now than talking about 21 million of UTXOs.
George Kaloudis: Yeah. I get bent out of shape with some of these maximalists slogans; who cares if it's 21 million? It rationally does not matter that it's 21 million or 22 million, it was not pre-ordained by some God; Bitcoin was invented, I don't care what anyone says, it just matters.
Peter McCormack: It was discovered.
George Kaloudis: No, fuck that, that's ridiculous!
Peter McCormack: I know, it was invented.
George Kaloudis: That's so ridiculous. If it was 40 million at the beginning, so be it, the fact that it's unchanging is the good part, and I'm getting really tired of, what is it, infinity over 21, who gives a shit? It doesn't matter, also, you can't live on the blockchain. We've kind of touched on energy a little bit, Bitcoin, in and of itself, need not fix our energy systems and/or reverse the effects of climate change of whatever the correct term to use, I think climate change is right, it's not global warming anymore.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: Bitcoin in and of itself isn't going to do shit for that, Bitcoin doesn't have a moral compass and thank God it doesn't because there are some people I might discriminate against.
Danny Knowles: Short people!
George Kaloudis: Short people, anyone under 5 feet 11 inches.
Peter McCormack: The Cypriots!
George Kaloudis: No, man, those are my people.
Peter McCormack: I'm sorry, it's the Turkish, isn't it?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, well, the Cypriots, I guess the Turks listening might think all Cypriots are Turks but they're Greek; their island's cut in half, quite literally.
Peter McCormack: I've been.
George Kaloudis: Is it awesome?
Peter McCormack: Well, I was nearly born in Cyprus.
George Kaloudis: So, you're almost there.
Peter McCormack: I was almost there. So, I'm an accident, I'm a product of my dad getting a job in Cyprus and getting drunk one night and eyeing up my mum and getting her pregnant, absolutely; he admitted it this year, I've always suspected. Listen, what you don't do, you don't have a boy and a girl a year apart, you don't get the set and then, four years later, go, "Let's have another baby".
George Kaloudis: Sure.
Peter McCormack: My dad got offered a job in Cyprus, he was an aircraft engineer, they said, "Do you want to go out to Cyprus, turn the planes around? So, planes come in, check them, send them back out?" He was like, "Yeah, that's great". So, him, my mum, my brother and sister moved to Cyprus, Mum gets pregnant while they're there. Now, I'm definitely an accident, but I was going to be born there, then just the hospitals weren't good enough so my dad said, "You know what, Maureen, just send me back", so he sent my mum back, so I was born in Reading near my grandad's home. But we went back and visited and I've been up to that no man's land, it's so weird. So, I don't know if you know, but Turkey invaded Cyprus.
George Kaloudis: And Greece, like the Ottomans; that's completely different.
Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, but they invaded Cyprus and they basically annexed part of the land, and they've created this no man's land between the Cypriot side and the Turkish side and I'd want to guess, you might be able to find it searching for it, search for "Cyprus no man's land", I want to say it's like 100, 200 feet and it's the land where time stood still; nobody goes in there, so all the shops that are there look like they did whenever the war was.
George Kaloudis: That's crazy.
Peter McCormack: Have you found it?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: The Buffer Zone, is that what they're calling it?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a really strange place to go.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But they stole the land off of the Cypriots.
George Kaloudis: What was I saying, I don't discriminate; I could discriminate I said?
Peter McCormack: And I said well maybe the Cypriots but I actually meant the Turks. All right, well, listen, look, where do we go with this?
George Kaloudis: With Bitcoin or with society?
Peter McCormack: Everything we've spoken about. Do you feel a duty yourself?
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and it's like the most ridiculous thing for me to say that I feel like I have an impact on Bitcoin in the world because I am sitting in a little corner and trying to write about it in a way that presents it in a fair light and also gets people excited about it for the right reasons. We shouldn't get people excited about it because it might make them rich.
Peter McCormack: Agreed.
George Kaloudis: But it is a really good motivator to get people excited about it, like, "Oh, it's going to go to $600,000, let's 10X my money, or actually 30X my money, whatever; that sounds great". If I'm going to pretend that I have a small impact on Bitcoin, being a think boy, writing all my pieces, I just want to sit in the corner and try to help push the culture, and I hate the term "culture" around Bitcoin, but the culture around Bitcoin so that it's less about Bitcoin itself solving everything and how we can use Bitcoin as a tool to solve everything.
Peter McCormack: I think that's happening anyway.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think the culture's evolving.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying that I am the culture champion, no one knows who the fuck I am.
Peter McCormack: But I think the culture is changing itself, like I say, I think there's only so long you can just be like an angry bitcoiner; your ideas shouldn't be your identity.
George Kaloudis: Totally, being a Bitcoin maximalist should not be an identity.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it shouldn't be, your ideas should not be your identity because you need to be flexible around your ideas; I might have stolen that off Rogan or was it Tim -- I definitely heard it before, this isn't an original Pete McCormack thought, and because you need to be able to be flexible to say if your ideas are wrong.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Being an angry bitcoiner should not be an identity, and it is for some people, but it's doomed to fail, because in the end it just gets boring. But I do think at the same time, we need this almost army of considerate bitcoiners who really understand the mission and the goals and make sure that the system or the protocol doesn't get coopted for bad reasons. So, we still need to maintain that.
George Kaloudis: I agree.
Peter McCormack: But we're at a time of peace, relative peace, maybe a small little civil war over these ordinals, but we're at a time of relative peace; how do we make progress now; where can we put our time; what is a useful way to expend our time to spread education and knowledge about this and any other subject that is tangent to the Bitcoin? That's where my head's at.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and I think you're doing a great job with the podcast, you should continue to do that.
Peter McCormack: Okay, I will.
George Kaloudis: I should continue to write what I'm writing.
Peter McCormack: You should do.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I hope it was valuable for people to listen to me talk.
Peter McCormack: By the way, these kind of conversations, some people love and some people hate.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: Some people are going to be on YouTube and they're going to be, "Fuck you, you didn't talk about anything interesting, you statist cucks", other people are going to be like, "I loved this". These are my favourite types, I like the philosophical chats, I like wrestling with something live and trying to figure out where my position is, and openly admitting I don't fucking know, I don't know.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, I think that's one of the most powerful things you could you do as a human being in general, is humble yourself to the point where you can say, "I don't get that".
Peter McCormack: I built a whole career off it.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, you're quite good at it. I think it's one of my superpowers where someone tells me something, and you've been in that situation where they tell you something you don't quite know and you just nod your head, "Oh, yeah"; I don't do that, I'm a lucky man that I'm okay saying, "Wait, what are you talking about?"
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: "What's a Cantillon effect?" If that's the piece of the advice, don't worry about people thinking that you're dumb, ask questions if you've got them.
Peter McCormack: I think that's a perfect place to wrap up. All right, George, if people want to follow you, check your writing out, where do they follow you?
George Kaloudis: Follow me on Twitter, @gckaloudis, check me out on CoinDesk, I promise we won't bite, we write some good stuff.
Peter McCormack: Awesome.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, and I've got a book for you that we talked about.
Peter McCormack: Okay, tell me.
George Kaloudis: So, this is the only book I recommend to people because I hate going round and saying, "Oh, you should read it", because it doesn't make you virtuous if you read, but you should read books, they're great, and this one's short, so I know you like short books.
Peter McCormack: I can probably do that in a flight, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, it's great, and there were only two copies.
Danny Knowles: Thank you.
George Kaloudis: My bad, Jeremy, sorry, man.
Peter McCormack: If I was going to recommend one book for everyone to read it's The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt; if I had a copy, I'd give it to you.
George Kaloudis: Okay.
Peter McCormack: If you go and buy a copy, I will send you the sats.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, okay. Well, this one is called Tribe, and we talked a little bit about tribe and belonging, it's by Sebastian Junger, I think that's how you pronounce it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
George Kaloudis: That's a problem with reading a lot, and what it talks about is how modern society has kind of rejected the tribal attitude, and because of that we feel alone in New York City and in London, so we kind of talked about that a little. It's a fabulous read; some people don't like him because he's a hypermasculine kind of guy and he has these weird takes, but the book is phenomenal.
Peter McCormack: I will read this. Thank you, brother, great to meet you. Let's do this again sometime.
George Kaloudis: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: With your dad.
George Kaloudis: Yeah, with my dad, and we can talk about Bitcoin, let's do a show like that.
Peter McCormack: All right, man.
George Kaloudis: Cool.
