WBD205 Audio Transcription

Coronavirus: The State vs Civil Liberties with Aleks Svetski

Interview date: Monday 23rd March 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Aleks Svetski from Amber. 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.

In this interview, I talk to Aleks Svetski, CEO at Amber and a passionate Bitcoiner. We discuss the COVID-19 coronavirus, state response to the pandemic, the economic impact and the threat to our civil liberties.

“We are never going to get rid of the shit cunts, but the best thing we can do is limit the shit cunts ability to run the show.”

— Aleks Svetski

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Aleks, man, how are you?

Aleks Svetski: I am good. I'm alive. Apparently not as though I'm here. So we'll soon see!

Peter McCormack: Very, very strange times. I think I've started every podcast I've done it the last week or so with very strange times. But these are very strange times we're living in dude!

Aleks Svetski: Fucking hell, holy crap! This is what it took for us to get on a pod together. Only the world burning down! It's all right.

Peter McCormack: We would have got it eventually. Usually I like to do them in person, so we were going to have to wait for one of those times where we're at the same place and the stars align. But now I don't have that choice right now. So now we're going to do remote, which I don't like as much. I always prefer to be sat in front of somebody, but we will make it work. But very strange times, you obviously pinged me yesterday.

So I have a habit of saying things that don't... I poke the bear certainly within the Bitcoin community and I say the Bitcoin community, there's a lot of very strong opinions with regards to governments, the state, lot of libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists. So this will particularly have riled some people up, and I get that and I knew it would, but I do believe it's something worthy of debate.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, well look, it obviously made me smack my head and I think a lot of those opinions are well-founded and well-grounded. In every space you get people who buy into ideologies and run around without fucking understanding them and that obviously happens here. I think you can see that in a lot of the in the fake libertarians.

One of the people I respect so much these days is Giacomo because he's consistently kept a moral compass in the direction of what he believes in and he's just consistently called people out from fucking Trace to God knows what? I feel what you said just needs to be discussed. I think there's a smarter way of explaining the other viewpoint, or the anti-statist viewpoint or whatever the fuck we're going to call it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so and let's also be clear that I am not an expert on libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism.

Aleks Svetski: Neither am I. I don't think anyone is.

Peter McCormack: Neither of us are experts in pandemics, the spread of viruses, neither of us are set in the position where we're having to run a government. Let's just be very clear we're just two people living through a situation, probably with similar concerns, maybe different opinions on what's happening. A couple of things I wanted to say before we start is that I've never... A lot of responses were saying to me yesterday, that I'm a boot licker, and that I was a libertarian and now you're crying to the government for help.

I think a lot of the responses were very unhelpful and I think very fucking childish, to be honest. I think you can debate the point without having to throw such bullshit at somebody. I've always historically been somebody who believed in the state because I didn't know of another option Aleks. Pre-Bitcoin, my worldview was there is a state and we get to vote who is in power and I lived from a privileged position of the UK where in my lifetime, we haven't lived under authoritarian regime. Let's say that the state has descended into more authoritarian policies, we have crappy censorship rules and we have quite high surveillance, but we're not living in China here.

But it's only in getting into the Bitcoin world that I learned about libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism and these different ways of thinking. I certainly have a lot of sympathies with them and a lot of things I like about it. I've interviewed Erik Voorhees a couple of times about it, I've interviewed Michael Goldstein, I've interviewed Stephan Livera and there are lots of things I like about it, but I'm not fully sold on it being a perfect solution myself. So I've never gone around saying "I'm a libertarian." I've always said I like a lot about libertarianism, but I think that certain areas are flawed as well. So it's important to say that, it's important to get that out first and that doesn't mean I can't Bitcoin. It just means I have a different view.

Aleks Svetski: Actually while we're there, what areas just out of curiosity, because I think this will help us navigate the discussion. Is what areas do you think are flawed? What areas still don't gel for you?

Peter McCormack: So interestingly, despite me having a raging argument with Francis Pouliot yesterday, it was him who introduced me to the concept of minichism, a very small state responsible... Like the nightwatchman state. So despite him calling me a boot licker, that is still the belief of a state of some kind and I've always felt that it's quite impractical to just be a libertarian on its own, and then comment on global politics because I've never seen anyone present me the path for moving from the state we have now to a libertarian structure, which I think is important.

Aleks Svetski: What do you mean by libertarian structure though?

Peter McCormack: Libertarian structure, meaning essentially no structure, no government, no state, all voluntary interactions with open free markets, the things that I've learned about. What I'm saying is I think you can live day to day with a libertarian mindset, but ultimately if you want a libertarian society, I've always wanted to know, "Well how do we get there? What are the steps for getting there?" Something always stuck with me from Erik Voorhees, where he almost he said that it's too big a leap and let's start with, how do we have less government? How do we reduce the government by 5% or 1% and do that every year, because every year all we ever get is more government.

Again, that's something I really like and I can hang my hat to that. But I also spend a lot of time with people outside of the Bitcoin world and I spend a lot of time with people who are essentially statists because they believe in left and right and they vote every election and then they blame the government when things go wrong. We can sit here in our radical bubbles debating how bullshit the government is, but there is the practical reality of day to day life and there's the practical reality of what the 99% outside of this world are dealing with and I think it's important to think about those practical realities. So that's where I am, but I'm not going to claim to be an expert in any of this, but I am trying to be practical. Does that make sense?

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, me neither. For me, I've never sat down, and "studied", what is libertarianism. Libertarianism to me is one of these things that has a lot of principles and ideals, but I don't think anyone is really clear on what the structure looks like afterwards. So you mentioned something there, I want to say, what does a libertarian structure look like afterwards? And you sort of said, "no structure" and I don't know if that's true, or accurate, because I don't think that's what libertarians drive as a concept, at least not from where I stand.

Bitcoin has been a catalyst for me to really become more interested in the schools of thought and in the principles that libertarians have been talking about for a long time. But I think one of the core pillars to me that I find important is this idea of personal property rights and having a low cost to defend yourself versus there being a high cost to attack someone. What that little primitive does at the base is it diminishes the need for a group of representatives to have to organize in order to protect the clan, the group, the society, the nation, whatever fucking level we talk about, in order to protect their property rights and protect them from violence etc.

I don't think the idea of libertarianism is even possible without the ability to cheaply defend your wealth. So I think libertarianism as a concept today has been purely fucking fictional without the advent of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is a real catalyst for it and so I think that's probably one thing we need to just put out there. Then I think the next part is just trying to understand, what does a system or a society like that look like? I actually think, libertarianism doesn't mean no organization or no structure, I actually think that it means some sort of organizational structure that is more rooted in competency, something that actually looks a little bit more like a business, where there is a direct measure of competency to protect or competency to defend.

So I'll throw out a random example. I was talking with someone one day and we were like, it was kind of the Citadel discussion, what does the Citadel look like? And how does Citadel fund it's protection from some crazy fucking external threat? Well in that sense, I thought, "Well shit, what if the citizens of the Citadel collectively put together a couple of percent of their wealth, which is easily measured and verifiable. Let's assume that it's all in Bitcoin at this point in time.

They pull those funds and somebody either runs defence in that Citadel, or there's a number of free open contractors who are running defence in order to protect the fucking people. Or then you've got private police, you've got all these sorts of things." So I don't think it's an absence of structure. I think it's something that solves itself on a needs basis, as opposed to how we try and solve problems today, which is on a fucking assumptive basis.

Peter McCormack: But there's always going to be some needs for some form of governance in there. I think what we're talking about is more decentralized governance, more smaller scale, localized governance.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, exactly. So I think localized is a big fucking answer to a lot of the dramas that we have and we haven't been able to really do localized corporate governance on mass because we just haven't had the tools and the infrastructure to do that in the past. But the shit's changing! It's funny, as localized governance is becoming more of a reality, so is large scale authoritarian draconian fucking governance. It's this fork that's spreading simultaneously at the same time.

I've got this conspiracy theory that Satoshi is someone from the future that literally came back and dropped the shit off for us because without it the localized form of free kind of order is not possible without something like Bitcoin, it just literally isn't.

Peter McCormack: But we are still talking about concepts, which are... I've never got into the whole Citadel thing. I've just not gotten to the talks about it. There's something about it I don't like. But it sounds very sinister to me sometimes. It makes me think of, have you ever seen Land of the Dead or was it Day of the Dead? It's one of the zombie movies and it's an amazing movie, but essentially the non-zombie humans living in this gated tower, I would say and outside are all the zombies.

What it does it's like a class system, the upper class are those living within the gated community and the zombies are the lower class outside. It's really beautifully made and eventually there's this amazing moment where the zombies eventually cross... They realize they can walk through the water and they never got in there before because they didn't think of it, if you go through the water and then they realize they do and they walk through and they attack the Citadel. My problem with the Citadel is that it has a defence, but I still think we have this violent society, we always did.

Anywhere I've been recently in my travels, doesn't matter whether it's Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, inequality always causes problems. It doesn't matter what societal structure you have. If you have high inequality, there's going to be social unrest in a society of millions of people. So whenever people talk about the Citadel, I can't help but just think that it is a haves and haves not situation which will ultimately have a social unrest around it and violence. I don't think it actually solves and I don't think it changes any of the problems we already have in society.

Aleks Svetski: Inequality is a symptom, it's not a cause, so what delivered the inequality in the first place in those places that you've been?

Peter McCormack: I don't think Bitcoin changes inequality. You will always have inequality. Hard money does not stop inequality.

Aleks Svetski: I'm not saying it does so. So I'm asking is let's first define the inequality you're talking about, and then let's talk about what actually spawned some of that inequality. So what kind of inequality you talking about? You talking about wealth inequality? You talking about fucking locational inequality? Are you talking about skilled inequality? Are you talking about educational inequality?

Peter McCormack: Inequality comes down to the person who feels like they're in an unequal situation. So in the UK inequality might be the cause of gang violence whereby London street gang members are growing up in poverties in let's say deprived areas. They join a gang because the gang says you can earn money and you can get the latest trainers and they have the latest things that could be their inequality.

Inequality in Santiago, Chile now is that those in the lower class paying taxes, but seeing an increase in transport costs and a breakdown of the pension system and believing they want education and health and they can't afford it, and that's their inequality. Inequality I think is it depends on the location of the people. But wherever in history there has been in inequality there has always been violence. I think also inequality is exacerbated these days by globalization. I think the advent of mobile phones and global TV networks means people are more exposed to what other people have that they don't, and I'm not excusing behaviour. I'm just recognizing the patterns of violence surrounding inequality.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, so do you think inequality is a good thing or a bad thing?

Peter McCormack: I don't think either. I just think there are outcomes for inequality. I wouldn't say inequality is bad because then we're talking about communism and we know communism is dangerous. I wouldn't say inequality is good. It is just a thing that exists, but inequality has outcomes, which leads to social unrest and violence and when inequality becomes more extreme and I think if you throw into the melting pot corruption, so an interesting point on...

Aleks Svetski: You just said the magic word, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so if you look in Chile, so I was out there recently, one of the interesting points there was there is high inequality there, and there's a lot of people in the lower class who have seen their parents or their grandparents pensions wiped out by a new pension scheme, which was poorly designed. They don't have access to education, they don't have access to health, I'm not debating the value of socialism here right now, I'm just saying this is what they see and they're angry. Some of the points that came back to me, it's like, " Well, what do you want? Do you want socialism? Socialism's evil, blah, blah, blah."

The point is that pretty much, I would say every single government and every single country is socialist. It's just a spectrum of socialism, but there's no denying that the UK has socialist policies. Despite having a conservative government, we have the NHS, we have welfare programs, we have programs for parents and single mothers, and all different types of kinds of programs that are social programs, the US has social programs, in Venezuela they have food baskets being handed out, every single country has socialism.

Aleks Svetski: 100% every single country today is socialist. We haven't had a capitalists fucking nation because we haven't had a tool for actual capitalism, but anyway continue.

Peter McCormack: So if every country is socialist, let's just be a bit practical about this. Let's just look at Chile as a whole. These people live in a socialist country, they are paying their taxes, they are going to work, they are contributing to the government, but they are unable to afford healthcare, but they are contributing to society and they are seeing masses of corruption within their government as well.

So that's where the inequality is there and that's why you get social unrest and violence. It peaks when the inequality gets... I think it's a combination always of inequality and corruption. I think the inequality is something they feel, whereas the corruption is something they see which almost throws tinder on the fire.

Aleks Svetski: Can I add some colour to this? I think it's a really important distinction, is that we've got two types of inequality you're talking about is symptomatic inequality. What I believe is that you have natural inequalities in every organic system, you have different things that I can't do. I have things that you can't fucking do. So natural inequality is extremely and extraordinarily fucking powerful and that's a natural thing and I don't think anybody fundamentally or naturally has a problem with people being different. That is actually what makes human beings, human beings. It's what makes us unique.

Peter McCormack: No, some people certainly do. Some people certainly...

Aleks Svetski: Okay, but loud voices are all fucking morons.

Peter McCormack: And I disagree with them.

Aleks Svetski: Correct. But fundamentally what makes us different, what makes us unique is extremely important, and makes us that. So that's inherent, call it inequality and you can build a powerful system off it. The problem is, so here we're talking about the ability to rig the game. It's not inequality that makes people angry, it's rigging the game, which causes symptomatic inequality later that is fundamentally unfucking fair. That then creates this second layer of inequality, which is not causal, it is symptomatic. It sits above what real inequality is. Then you have dumb cunts who get mixed up and they just point to inequality as this blanket term and they blame everything about inequality.

They therefore think the solution to this is to make us all the same, to make us all fucking communist or socialist or whatever, as if that's the fucking problem. It is not the problem. It is the piece in between where somebody can rig the fucking game and whenever the re the game gets rigged, particularly to a large extent, like what you're discussing in South America, or like what's been happening for fucking hundreds of years in Africa, or whatever other fucking place.

When you rig the game, people have these what's called what's the word exogenous events, like shit happens externally to what they can control that creates greater and greater unfairness. I don't even want to call it inequality because I think there's a big difference between equality and fairness. I think what actually makes people angry is fairness.

Peter McCormack: I think that's a really important distinction, but I would say even in a fair system, you can have inequality and that inequality...

Aleks Svetski: And that's fine.

Peter McCormack: ... But I still think in that system, fairness is subjective. So inequality might still lead to violence and social unrest because what you think is fair and what I think is fair, it might be entirely different.

Aleks Svetski: And I'll agree with that. So you are never going to take that that stems from deeper things like people's jealousy and people's competence ratio between others. The fact that it's potentially easier to tear somebody down than to build something up and all of that sort of shit, but that's the way...

Peter McCormack: I think you need to throw in desperation in there as well in certain situations. So if you go to, for example, somewhere like Venezuela, which is essentially a completely broken society, a broken system, which is highly socialist verging on communist in certain ways in that they are handing out food baskets to the poorest who can't survive on the minimum wage.

But where the society has completely broken down and you have people there they can't get enough money to survive and are also greedy. You have crime, which stems from people who are just essentially gangsters who just want more and are happy to rob. But you also have crime which comes out of desperation as well.

Aleks Svetski: I guess at some point, survival is our core driver as a species anyway, so we're going to find a way to survive. I think on an individual basis desperation is really real and now we're seeing desperation on a slightly more macro level with people freaking out about all this corona shit. So I totally agree with that. I think those situations just become more real when you end up having a basket case scenario, like what's happening in Venezuela, where you don't have some core principles that people can rely on, where the game that you're playing is fundamentally fucking rigged and fundamentally flawed.

You have that at a much broader scale, whereas when you have some rules of fairness, America for example, is a really interesting case study. I only recently started reading... Like I saw that play, the Alexander Hamilton one, and that just sort of got me really interested in how the US was formed early on, and all that sort of shit.

Peter McCormack: Where did you see it?

Aleks Svetski: I had a friend record it. So when I was in the US I missed it while I was in New York because I didn't know about it, but I ended up watching it as a recording on my laptop.

Peter McCormack: So I've seen it three times, twice in London and once in New York and the reason I've seen it three times, is I don't think there's anything out there creatively that's ever blown my mind as much as that. The first time I saw it, I was just wowed. Just on the creative level, the choreography, the way the story is told and so much so that I don't think I took the full story in. So I had to go and see it again and it gave me a real deep interest in the US Constitution.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah me too!

Peter McCormack: Something that I've been reading a lot about and the checks and balances that those forefathers wanted to put in place to ensure they had a fair and decent society and interestingly, I've said this to a couple of people recently, it feels like that that constitution is actually fundamentally brilliant in many ways, but is constantly under attack by those who can't get their way. I feel like Donald Trump attacks the Constitution.

Aleks Svetski: Well everyone does because fucking they want some sort of gain in their favour. But see that constitution is such a fucking incredible example of what happens to a society and how quickly it can develop itself when you place some really wide, fair, sound fucking rules that protect some basic things and now they managed to do that and build arguably the greatest fucking nation in history, yada, yada, yada.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, it depends how you measure it.

Aleks Svetski: How you measure that, exactly. That's why I'm not sort of blanking that point.

Peter McCormack: Because there were plenty of people would say that it's built one of the worst nations in the world. It depends how you measure it. There's a lot I really like about America, there's no country I've visited more, but there's also a lot of things I don't like about it.

Aleks Svetski: Correct, but we are also...

Peter McCormack: I like the internal stuff. You know what I really don't? I dislike a lot of the external things.

Aleks Svetski: Correct, but let me finish my point here is that we're talking about American now, which is in the 2020's, which has become a fucking complete basket case. So I'm talking about the genesis and the spirit of America, and how it was able to come from nothing to being the dominant power in the world because it had these ideals and these ideas in place as a foundation. They were able to do that with and this is really important to understand with the layer that society sits on, the bedrock that society sits on, is a form of money and they were able to do that with a fucked up form of money.

Imagine if we can do something similar with that kind of Constitution, with a money that can't be coerced or fucked up or stolen or robbed, for all of the things that we're doing with the money today. You would have a much more extraordinary fucking situation. So the reason America has peaked and turned into this crony capitalist, socialist fucking system is because despite having this incredible Constitution that they were able to emerge with, they have a system where they can also steal through taxes, steal through in-fucking-flation and we're seeing the greatest inflation experiment in the history of fucking human kind right now with these idiots printing platinum coins.

So the problem is it always had an Achilles heel, and back then it was impossible to create something like Bitcoin, obviously, for this to happen. But I think we're going to have an opportunity to do a 21st century version of what they did in America with the Constitution and I think that initial bedrock has to start from somewhere, and unfortunately, generally it has to start from fucking the rubble of the prior, which I don't think is going to happen right now. I actually don't think corona is that bad, but it's likely going to happen in the next decade or two, where we're going to have to really rethink shit.

But we're going to have an economic layer upon which we can do this, which we haven't had in the past. So that's why I don't want to sound like one of those fucking gold bugs, "It's different this time." But it genuinely is because now... Do you know Daniel Wingen? He runs Value of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course, great guy!

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, so I just did a talk at his conference in Austria, and my topic was "Austrian economics doesn't work without Bitcoin". So all of this stuff, Austrian economics, libertarianism, this idea of free societies, all of that stuff was a fucking pipe dream until the advent of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the fork in the road that makes all of that stuff practically possible because whilst the unit through which social cooperation, through social interaction, through social corporation, through which your work, my work and all that sort of stuff is valued and measured and then able to be interacted with, whilst that is measured and managed by someone, you will never have a truly capitalist society. You will never have a free society, you'll never have a libertarian opportunity, you'll never have Austrian economics, all of that shit was a fucking pipe dream until fucking Bitcoin.

So now we honestly have an opportunity to experiment with that kind of system. The Keynesians won, because by definition, the Keynesian model means that somebody needs to manage it and play with it and up until now, that's been the fucking only way and it's been the way that if you have the ability, if you're in a position to be able to manage it, you can significantly give yourself an advantage over others. Then when we then tie that opportunity up with human nature and self-preservation, of course I didn't give a shit if it's you and me or anybody else, we're all going to fucking abuse it, even if we think we're not abusing it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how many power corrupts, absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. Okay look, we know that and I don't disagree with you, by the way and I agree with a lot of Bitcoiners. But I think some of them lose their shit with me. But what they don't understand is that my role in this is to question things. I absolutely should question every area of thinking, every fundamental principle that people have regarding Bitcoin.

It's really important to do, not to just sit there and create a cheerleading podcast that only says, "Yay, Bitcoin's great. It solves every problem in the world." It's not objective enough and I struggle with calling myself a journalist. Do you know what the people say when they want me to do something which they think is responsible? They call me a journalist and then when they don't like what I say, they say, "You're not a journalist," or whatever the fuck.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, of course!

Peter McCormack: Either way, I have a responsibility for challenging things and for challenging people and so that is already important. By the way, at times I challenge people, I ask questions I know the answer to, or I challenge them on things that I still actually agree with them on, because that's an important part of doing this.

Aleks Svetski: Of course! If we're all just sitting there agreeing with each other, it's fucking boring.

Peter McCormack: So I agree with you, completely and fundamentally agree with you. I think we need sound money, but I don't think sound money solves every problem and also, we're talking about a future scenario where there's many hurdles to get over. Right now, Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It allows for censorship resistance and seizure resistance and that's very, very cool. But it has no influence over central banking now. We don't have a sound money-based economy.

Aleks Svetski: We don't. Bitcoin is purely a lifeboat today.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a lifeboat today and you and I and everyone else is working towards this, hopefully creating a better society. But right now, we're having this conversation because of a crisis which is happening right now. Now some people don't believe it's a crisis and we can go round and round in circles on this. But this comes from a tweet which flies in the face of most Bitcoiner's thinking, or a lot of them, which is why it was heavily criticized, because I'm trying to be practical.

We're living in a socialist society right now, we have a government, we have a crisis and we have opinions on how our governments are handling this. By the way, I think none of us are experts, but we have an opinion. But there are many people acting like experts in what should happen and quite frankly spreading disinformation, talking about things as an expert, which they're not an expert in and I think that is quite dangerous. But we can come back to that. By the way, I've probably been a hypocrite with that as well. But as I said, this conversation started from that tweet, because right now we are in a situation and people are questioning whether this is right.

Actually, I think there's a couple of things. Firstly, people are questioning the response, the decisions these governments are taking. So they're questioning whether they're the right decisions, they're questioning the trade-offs for these decisions and let's say some people are seeing this as an opportunity and an excuse for the governments to extend their powers and control over us. That's a very valid fear if you look at history. So I think this is what we should talk about now, not the future Bitcoin world. Let's talk about what's happening right now, because this is the active debate, right?

Aleks Svetski: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: So my view is that I've never claimed to be a libertarian. I like libertarian ideas, I really, really do. But I've always said I am a bit of a statist. Now that itself is a weird term because by saying I'm a statist, it's not saying that I like the governments we currently have. It's not saying I historically like the behaviour of governments. It's not saying I like central banking, but I believe that certain aspects of society are better centralized, for example, law and order.

I believe that. I don't believe in an entirely free market, because I think it ignores greed and misbehaviour. So for example, right now we have companies within regulated markets doing some of the most terrible things, Monsanto, what Uber did in India was absolutely terrible and I don't believe a completely free market stops that happening. I don't believe that when people say, "well people will see reviews of what they've done and they will stop using." No, they won't.

Aleks Svetski: What did they do?

Peter McCormack: What Uber did in India?

Aleks Svetski: What did they do?

Peter McCormack: So what Uber did in India, it was quite shocking actually. So because they're backed by venture money, investment capital, they went out to India and they went to the taxi drivers and offered them loans to buy cars and essentially launched in India. Then what happened is that the prices for the Uber drivers was pretty good to begin with, so they were able to pay off their loan payments and earn a decent salary.

Then they sold so many cars to Indian Uber drivers that the rates dropped, because essentially the fees that the drivers receive is market-based, but also Uber has influence over it. So people ended up not being able to afford to pay off their car loans, and a number of people committed suicide. That, to me, was an abusive situation that a large, powerful company was able to implement. But historically, it wouldn't take long to go online and find hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of companies being abusive. That happens.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but that's not a function of free markets. I think that's generally more a function of...

Peter McCormack: It's a function of people.

Aleks Svetski: Well that's a second, third, fourth order effect of the structural inconsistency is that we have in these systems. So for example, one of the big reasons why there's so much fucking money floating around in a dumb idea at times is because there's all of this fucking excess capital that needs to go somewhere. So you end up having a situation where someone like Uber, in a free market society, wouldn't be as funded or as a large fucking player as they would be in a fucking free market.

Peter McCormack: Well hold on, you're missing the point. The point I'm saying is you will still get large companies and you will still get companies and people that operate via greed, lie, and do abusive things. Hard money does not change people's greed. Hard money does not change abusive practices. It just changes how much capital you have to do that. But it's not going to change that, I think that's really naive.

Aleks Svetski: It actually does.

Peter McCormack: It really doesn't.

Aleks Svetski: No, no, no, it actually does, and I'll tell you why. So how does somebody like Monsanto use greed to get an advantage and to do evil shit in the world? How are they able to do that?

Peter McCormack: I don't really know how to answer that. They just do it, they do it as part of their business. Perhaps they're able to use money to get the best lawyers, but I don't think hard sound money changes that.

Aleks Svetski: Who are they friends with?

Peter McCormack: Oh, you're going to talk about what they get away with in the government.

Aleks Svetski: Well that's the only way they can actually do that shit.

Peter McCormack: And lobbying. But the government are the checks and balances. Without the government, you don't even have the checks and balances, so they can still get away with it.

Aleks Svetski: Well the problem is when you have this veneer of checks and balances, where we think that there's a mad checks and balance, they just get away with it whilst we think that there's nothing fucking wrong there.

Peter McCormack: No, I think people know there's things that are wrong with companies and they still use them. I think people are very clear right now that Amazon runs quite abusive warehouse practices. I'm very clear that there are people living in tents outside Amazon warehouses. I'm very clear on the quite abusive practices in there, I think everyone is. Have people stopped using Amazon? No, they haven't. I think it's a fallacy that people think suddenly we've we have sound money, everyone is going to change the behaviour of everyone.

Aleks Svetski: No, sound money is one of the pillars for free market capitalism. Now what my argument is on free market capitalism is that you get rewarded for a couple of things. You get rewarded for adding more value, you get rewarded for delivering a better product, delivering a better service, or doing something better. So the metric is merit. So this is a principles thing, so let's not talk about what's happening today.

Let's just talk about a hypothetical, which is when you have a system where the metric is merit versus a system where the metric when you actually get to the top, it's no longer merit, the metric becomes how do I stay at the top via whether it's lobbying, whether it's filling my fucking bags with ridiculous amounts of fake fucking capital that the retail can't get a hold of, all of those inconsistencies, what happens is you become a company at the top that stays at the top, not because you continue adding value, delivering better products and services, you actually stay at the top because you can create this crony system to keep you at the top.

Therein lies the fucking problem with this quasi socio capitalist fucking system that we have today that doesn't have this, call it, brutal fucking capitalist effect, which is as soon as you start doing shit that doesn't deliver better value, better products, better services etc, you go down and you start to decay.

Peter McCormack: You can do both. See this is where I think you're wrong because I think you can do both. I think you can deliver high value whilst being abusive and you can do things that are abusive that people are completely unaware of in the background, and you can get away with it for a long time. You can poison the water for a long time before anyone knows.

You can get away with abusive practices. I completely agree with many aspects of the free market. I think it does make things more efficient, but I disagree fundamentally that it's going to change human greed. I disagree fundamentally and where you have human greed, you will have abusive practices. Absolutely, you will have abusive practices.

Aleks Svetski: You will, but they get drowned out because there is opportunity to have more functional practices, because again, changing some dials down the bottom, for example, time preference and for example, people's desire to fucking consume, consume, consume, consume now. One of the things I love about it, because I'm just finishing writing an article, is how the halving represents this symbolic divergence from the world of excess consumption that we have today where everything is about my exponential, my doubling, my tripling, my more, more, more, now, now.

Whereas when you change some of the dials at the bottom, and this is why time preference is such a powerful thing and this idea of bitcoins being savers etc, is you have the base ingredients for people thinking more ecologically, thinking more long-term, and behaving around a new form of principles, versus a lot of the problems today stem from the fact that down the bottom, at the very base of how society functions, it's driven by blind fucking consumption without regard to the future. It's driven by more, more, more, now, now, now. It's driven by the incentive to win and stay at the top through corruption, not through merit.

So I'm not saying that Bitcoin is this panacea to everything, but what it does is it's a divergence from the core principles that we have today, which are clearly fucking flawed and what those core principles do is we trend despite some people's belief that some things are free market and all that sort of stuff, so we've got this big mishmash of shit, so despite all of the good in the world, we have these dials down the bottom that it's almost like...

Let's picture water flowing down a slope and you've got grooves in the slope. The groves that we have at the moment are fucked up, so water is still trending inside those groves. What we need to do is we need to change some of those groves and it doesn't mean that nothing bad is going to happen in the new system, it just means the tendency for that to happen is a lot fucking less and that is...

Peter McCormack: But that, I'm not disagreeing with. I'm just saying this idea that, suddenly under a sound money system, that everyone has a moral backbone and there's no greed and no abuse, I think is a fallacy because it's ignoring human nature.

Aleks Svetski: Correct, and that's the thing. So you can't change human nature, but what you can do is you can build systems and infrastructure. You can build this playing field that has a tendency to move in a particular direction versus the tendency we have and the direction we're moving today.

Peter McCormack: You're just changing the dials, but you're not changing the fact that it happens. I think that's just an important part for me to tell my side. I do not think it will change human nature. Yes, the incentives change, but...

Aleks Svetski: But we shouldn't change human nature, because if you take greed away, for example, that removes our desire for innovation, for moving forward. So greed is such a fucking powerful concept, but greed unchecked, when you mix that with the incentives of a system like we have today, you have the outcomes that you have today. But when you take greed...

Peter McCormack: You will still have some of the outcomes in a sound money system.

Aleks Svetski: Proportionately. I would argue that it's fucking proportionately orders of magnitude less because the incentive system is fundamentally different. It is that the slope is pointing in a different direction.

Peter McCormack: I would agree it's less, but I'm not going to sit from a position of wanting Bitcoin to succeed so much that I'm going to ignore that there are things that we don't know or going to pretend things are going to fundamentally change that I don't believe are. Yes, the incentives model change, yes, there will be less unchecked greed, but I can't stand by and say, "I don't think there will be abuses and I don't think there will be practices which are unacceptable." I just think it will happen and there's no negotiating me out of that position because that's a core belief that I think doesn't change.

Aleks Svetski: Well that core belief is built on the idea that humans are humans and they're going to be shit cunts basically?

Peter McCormack: Some, not all.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, well, that's what I mean!

Peter McCormack: Not all, but some.

Aleks Svetski: Some are, exactly and we're never going to get rid of the shit cunts, but the best thing we can do is limit the shit cunts' ability to run the show and that will have more of an impact than anything else we do in the world. That's my argument. So we're going to talk about corona?

Peter McCormack: Well yeah, but so getting on to the situation is that I agree with the direction of Bitcoin. There's no disagreement with me here. Not that all Bitcoiners agree, but I do want a sound money, I do want better money, but I'm also trying to be very practical as someone who is, I'll just say journalist through this, and if people want to argue whether I'm not, let's have that as a separate debate. But as a journalist, I'm trying to represent and shine a lens on what's happening in the world, not just the Bitcoin world.

I don't just make Bitcoin shows, I make shows for my Defiance thing and I just make other random stuff. We are in a situation right now where we have this virus and we have our governments making decisions. Yes, we can sit there and have our debates about how historically terrible governments have been and how an anarcho-capitalist society would be much better and we can debate and discuss these radical ideas.

We can refer back to the radical literature we read and the things that we debate on Bitcoin Twitter and whilst we're doing that, the wheels of the world are still turning and our socialist governments are continuing to make decisions. So I'm trying to be also practical. So for example, today, the government is debating 300 pages of new legislation, which is going to get passed. It has support from the opposition bench and has pretty much unilateral support, but they're debating certain aspects of it. One of the politicians came out and said, "It's very difficult for us to debate 300 pages of legislation in one day.

These are emergency measures." So what the biggest contention point in the debate is how long do these powers last for? The government wanted them in for two years and I think the reason being is the assumption is going to be 18 months until we get a vaccine. Therefore, they're giving themselves a buffer, right? Some of the rebel MPs are saying, "Nope, a year, ideally six months, and then let's review again," which I think is a very good thing, that these are meant to be temporary measures. Obviously, there's a risk they won't be and the evil overlord government will want to keep these powers and enslave us, blah, blah, blah. I think they are genuine concerns...

Aleks Svetski: I think it's rarely the evil overload government. I think it's more so the idea that the next crisis is around the corner. So there's a simple justification to keep them. So anyway, that's just me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and that's a good point. It's like all the bullshit we now have because of terrorism, right? All the shit we have to deal with for that and it seems to be a worse thing out in the US. We have to track every spend you have because terrorists, we want access to your phone records because terrorists and I completely agree and understand with that. But right now, we're in crisis, so what should be happening and what do people expect and what do they want?

It's not what do Bitcoiners want, because it's a very small percentage of people. We have to consider society as a whole and what do people want right now and there are a large percentage of people who are very scared about what is happening and they're looking to their government for support.

Aleks Svetski: Why are the scared?

Peter McCormack: I think they're scared because people are dying in high numbers, and possibly...

Aleks Svetski: Is that why they're scared?

Peter McCormack: I think it depends how you want to look at it. You could say they're scared because they're sitting watching 24 hour news and seeing people dying in hospitals of Italy and you could say because the media is spreading fear. Behind all of that, what I've been using as my measures for this, because I've been tracking this for a couple of months now, the two most important things which I track are death rates. I'm ignoring infection rates because they're highly skewed and every country is testing in different ways, wo it's a poor benchmark.

I think death rates are an interesting benchmark and I'm also following the reports from frontline medical staff in the hospitals of the worst affected regions, so originally in China, the footage and the response from the doctors there, now in Italy and now obviously the UK, we're having reports coming out, and what's happening out in the US a bit now and also France and Spain. I think that's the most important information that I am using to base my opinions on what is happening.

Aleks Svetski: Okay and let's just touch on what are some of the high level. I've done some reading on this anyway, but let's just, for the listeners and for me to see where you're at, what are some of the high level I guess, patterns that you're seeing thus far in the death rates?

Peter McCormack: I think there's two consistent patterns. It feels like there's the Asian pattern, whereby this flattening of the curve seems to be happening quicker and then there's the European pattern where it feels like we're more in a hockey stick moment. So Italy is far surpassed China, and we've seen no flattening of the curve yet and if you look at most European countries, France, Spain, the UK, we seem to be following a very similar trajectory to Italy.

Aleks Svetski: So where does this curve go? Does it go to infinity or...

Peter McCormack:No, of course not. Then the other thing I'm tracking and following is, like I say, the reports from the frontline medical staff, nurses and doctors in the hospital and they are unilaterally consistent.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, are you looking at total cumulative cases or are you looking at total new cases?

Peter McCormack: I'm not looking at cumulative. I'm just looking at deaths.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, so total cumulative deaths or total new deaths? Have you made that differentiation between those two graphs? Because this is very important.

Peter McCormack: I'm following the trajectory of the rate at which deaths are increasing.

Aleks Svetski: Well from what I've seen over the last couple of days, even Italy is now slowing down. Everyone's slowing down. So what you've got is not hockey sticks, you've got these bell curves.

Peter McCormack: Yeah Italy dropped yesterday, but has that happened because they've put in Draconian measures?

Aleks Svetski: I highly fucking doubt it, but...

Peter McCormack: So you think it's got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they're on lockdown?

Aleks Svetski: I think nothing is a strong word, so again, it's a spectrum. So if we're going to use the argument we used before about libertarianism and spectrums and all that sort of shit, so let's say it's a spectrum. I think obviously fucking panic mode, locking down everyone is going to have some impact. But I think it would have had no more impact than doing some things really sensibly, which I've got some ideas for solutions, but I don't want to say that towards the end of the conversation.

But I think you would've got the same fucking result with much, much, much, much, much less ridiculous, fucking knee-jerk reactions that I think are going to create much bigger problems than the virus ever, ever could have hoped to create.

Peter McCormack: So I'm going to put myself in the world where I don't know, because I'm not an expert in this area. I just don't know and I can't say whether you're right or whether they're right. It's too risky an area, I think, for someone like myself to weigh in on that, but carry on.

Aleks Svetski: Well look, I'm obviously in the same fucking boat, but I'm just going to take an approach toward the end about, again, I think all of this just comes back to principles and how things are approached and what we spoke about earlier with Bitcoin being a new set of principles that people and society can function with that trends in a very different direction to what we're doing.

So I think a different set of principles in how we approached this whole clusterfuck would send us in a different way. So for example, right now, people are calling for fucking stimulus because everyone's out of work and all that sort of stuff. Well my argument is that crazy fucking stimulus, what's being produced now with stupid trillion dollar coins and whatever else...

Peter McCormack: Should we come back to the money? Because I think that's a separate point. Let's just deal with what the response should be, what people believe it should be, because I said yesterday ... Let's put the wording up. I think some people misunderstood it as well, and it was two paragraphs really. But I said, "Right now, I am definitely a statist. I think we need Draconian centralized planning to reduce the spread of coronavirus and the overwhelming of the health systems." So let me tell you where that comes from.

That comes directly from every report I've read from a doctor on the frontline, in Italy, in the UK now, in China, where they're all consistently saying they've never seen anything like this, they've never dealt with anything like this and that you need to put in place social distancing because this is scary. One of the interesting things I would like to know, so for example, there was an 18 year-old who died in the last 24 hours, who had underlying health issues. I'd love to know what those underlying health issues are. I think that's a really important thing we're not seeing enough about of, is it asthma?

Because if it's asthma, it's a condition they could have lived with perfectly fine, a normal life. My dad has asthma, right? And he's 72. Or were they a stage four cancer patient and terminally ill? I think that's a really important thing to know. But either way, we also have a 36 year-old nurse with no underlying health conditions now, report came in this morning that she is in an intensive care unit. So that is happening.

So we have health systems which are potentially going to collapse under the weight of dealing with this and that is why I said I like some of the centralized planning, specifically, a couple of things I really like is that the UK government realized we didn't have enough ventilators and turned around and said, "We will buy any ventilator at any price if people could start making them." And now, we're seeing all of these different companies change what they're doing. There's a company that makes lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners who are now making ventilators.

Aleks Svetski: That's fucking fantastic, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I think that's brilliant, but bear with me. That is centralized planning. Another thing I like is there has been an arrangement between the private health sector in the UK, that they're going to provide all of their doctors, medical staff beds to support coronavirus. Again, I think that is brilliant. So when I talked about centralized planning, they are the things I like. I really like those.

Aleks Svetski: Okay. So if we're starting off with the basis that, "Hey, we have a fucking socialist system and we have these guys running the show anyway, what's the best they can do?" So that's where it was starting from, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Aleks Svetski: So we're not talking about in a free market?

Peter McCormack: We're not reinventing the system.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah exactly, we're working with what we've got. So okay, a couple of the measures that you mentioned, they're fucking fantastic. So I think in the system that we have, a couple things. I think the most important thing that should have been done from the fucking beginning was incentivize any company that can make tests.

They can make tests and sell tests fucking tax-free, or that the tests are bought, like you said, by the government at fucking any price, because then what you do is you incentivize the private sector to go and produce the first fucking thing that is important in this entire chain of events, which is not locking people up in their fucking houses or producing new laws or fucking any of that stuff.

The first, first, first, first, first, first thing that anybody should be fucking doing in this thing is broad testing. Iceland tested their entire fucking country practically before anybody else got off their fucking asses and did anything. Likewise, the countries that were most successful in this, the South Korea, the Thailands, and the Singapores, they have the highest rates of testing.

So that's the first thing, because then you can identify who the fuck is actually sick and who the fuck thinks they're sick, because at the moment, I can't remember what number I read, some statistic of like 93% of people who think they have corona, don't actually have fucking corona. What they're doing is they're the ones overloading the system, not the people who are actually sick. We need to incentivize testing before we do anything fucking else.

Peter McCormack: But this is still statism, this is a state response.

Aleks Svetski: Fine, but I just opened my argument with the fact that we're starting from that premise. So we can't change that.

Peter McCormack: Do you agree with it? Do you think this should happen? And does that make you a statist right now?

Aleks Svetski: No I'm not being a statist. I'm just saying that in the situation we're in, what can the statists do to do this better? Which is they need to incentivize private sector and they need to incentivize the private sector to do something about it. Not nationalize the production of masks for example, or tests, because if they nationalize the fucking thing, they're going to bumble it because they don't have the capacity or the competence to manage the production of these tests or ventilators etc, the same way as the private sector can do, if the incentives were placed there. So at the moment we're stuck in this quasi...

Peter McCormack: But Aleks, how is that different? Yeah, how is that different from what I said about saying that I am a statist and believe we require centralized planning to reduce the spread of the coronavirus?

Aleks Svetski: Well this isn't centralized planning what I'm saying.

Peter McCormack: Yes, it is, of course it is, because you're saying the government must incentivize companies to be able to produce tests. That's centralized planning, that's the government who instigates this. If it's not the government, then you're saying, allow the government to do nothing and just wait for everyone to do something. I don't see how you're not agreeing with my point.

Aleks Svetski: There's a couple of nuances here. Number one, is we need to figure out the basis from which we're making this argument. If the argument is, should the government do anything or do nothing? I err on the side of ideally, it really comes back to what's pragmatic and what's realistic actually, in this situation, is the government going to do something? And as we've seen, they're doing shit with a complete fucking knee jerk reaction and they're making decisions that make absolutely no fucking sense. So what should they do? Just like in any situation, the government should do the minimum fucking viable, but hey we live...

Peter McCormack: What do you think Aleks? What do you think they should do? Do you think they should do something or nothing?

Aleks Svetski: I think they should get the fuck out of the way as much as possible.

Peter McCormack: How do they get out of the way?

Aleks Svetski: First of all, these fucking lockdowns are ridiculous.

Peter McCormack: No, no, no. Let's just stick with the point on the tests because you think the tests are important and I agree. Look I might have had it and I don't know, because I wasn't tested and I was really sick and then my son was sick and my son actually went to school possibly carrying without knowing he's carrying because 111 when I spoke to them said to us, "You haven't been to an effected region and you haven't been in contact with a confirmed case, treat it like the common cold."

No lockdown, no self-isolation. So I'm asking you, what do you think the government should do? Not even with it, what you say, get the fuck out of the way. Okay, so how do they get out of the way?

Aleks Svetski: They announce a couple economic incentives and then let the private sector fucking do their thing.

Peter McCormack: So they announce a couple of economic incentives centrally planned to incentivize the private sector. So how again...

Aleks Svetski: You're approaching it in a binary method man. You want me to treat you on a spectrum and then you want to treat mine as a binary?

Peter McCormack: No, no, I'm just saying is that... I'm just keeping to the facts because people are very critical of this and my biggest issue is I haven't seen a valid alternative argument yet and I want to see it. But my tweet said, I think we need draconian, centralized planning to reduce the spread of coronavirus and overwhelming of the health system.

Aleks Svetski: We don't need draconian, what we need...

Peter McCormack: Centralized planning is draconian. All centralized planning is considered draconian. Let's forget the word draconian. Let's just say you think we need some...

Aleks Svetski: I think that's where you poke the bear in the wrong fucking way. But anyway...

Peter McCormack: Just take that word out right now. I am a statist because I think we need centralized planning to reduce the spread of coronavirus. You are saying that you believe the government should provide incentives to the market. That is centralized planning.

Aleks Svetski: Only because we have a government. We're starting from the premise that they exist and that they're going to do something anyway, so they should do the minimum viable, that's all I'm saying. If they didn't exist, again, if we want to go back to the argument of let's create a fantasy society, which doesn't exist today, of the government didn't exist and what the response would look like in that type of situation, I'm happy to have that conversation, but the conversation we're having now...

Peter McCormack: We don't live in fantasy and that's the point and that's why I think a lot of the replies to this were very childish because they're not actually dealing with the practicality of where we are today. You are saying, you think we need centralized planning for this based on where we are today.

Aleks Svetski: I'm saying that we have centralized planning, irrespective of what we do. As a result, we should take the fucking minimum version of it and do that because they're going to do something anyway. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying we've already started tumbling down a fucking hill.

Peter McCormack: Are we saying the only difference between you and I is the use of the word draconian?

Aleks Svetski: Well not exactly because I also don't think, central planning would imply to me that... Well, actually I'll give you an example of central planning is what they're doing at the moment. So central planning is the government is going to nationalize the production of all of the medical supplies for this. The government is going to nationalize all the fucking hospitals, the government is going to tell you when you can and cannot fucking move from your house, the government is now going to work with Google and Facebook to track your fucking phone, so we can tell you what you can and cannot do.

The government is going to enforce the close down of all these fucking businesses. That to me is fucking morons central planning that are going to create a hundred times the fucking problem than saying, "In the beginning, we need to figure out what this thing is. So we're going to create an incentive for anybody who wants to build fucking testing, masks and everything fucking tax-free or we're going to pay you whatever and we're going to get the fuck out of the way and you fix it." They're two very different methods.

Peter McCormack: What we're saying is there is a spectrum of things they might do?

Aleks Svetski: That's 100%! Yeah, that's it. We're dealing with reality. If we want to deal with reality, if we want to deal with fantasy and we don't talk about spectrums, we talk about absolutes. We don't have that.

Peter McCormack: So the things I listed centralized planning in the UK so far has led to more ventilators being manufactured, a deal between the NHS and private hospitals making more beds and doctors available provided an income to those who want to socially distance ourselves. So we're going to come back to money. But what we're saying is there are a range of things that they can do. But the assumption I think people jump to with my Tweet is that I want people to stand outside people's houses with guns and telling them they can't leave their house.

Aleks Svetski: Well again, that's the spectrum. So I mean, the words draconian probably didn't help when you said that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah okay, I'll concede on the word draconian that perhaps that is misleading. The reason I use draconian is because it's been used so much in the press recently and actually, if you look at the dictionary definition, excessively harsh and severe.

So perhaps that word itself is misleading, but also let's stick with the point is that I am a statist in this situation because that was a lot of the criticisms came from the fact that I said, "I'm a statist" and people were like, "You're always a statist, you're a boot licker, you're a slave." I think the alternative to being a statist in this situation is believing the government should not do anything.

Aleks Svetski: Again, that's not realistic in the state that we're in because the government does exist. Even if they do nothing, they're doing something.

Peter McCormack: Yes and no.

Aleks Svetski: They are by definition... I mean we've got a public health system, so they're doing some... The problem is, there is no scenario here, realistically, where you pull the government out of the equation, because they're there, we just live in that world.

Peter McCormack: Exactly! So where is the use when somebody tries to open up this debate and says, "Look, right now I'm a statist, I think we need centralized planning." Where's the use of people turning around saying, "You're a slave, you're a boot licker." What actual use and what actual contribution is that making?

Aleks Svetski: I don't think you should wave the statist flag. I think what you should be doing is you should be saying, "I think there is a better way to approach this. By the way, we do have a state, we do have all these governments who are fundamentally incompetent at many things, but the one thing they could probably do here in this situation is a very, very light touch, not a draconian authoritarian approach, where they do harsh fucking measures.

What they need to do is a really fucking light touch and that would involve a couple of things. Number one, is incentivizing the manufacturer of the things that fucking matter. Number two, is try and fucking help educate people on what the fuck this thing is without all the fear mongering." There're probably the two things. I don't know, have you heard of the soap police analogy?

Peter McCormack: No, please tell me.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, so you wash your hands after taking a shit, not because somebody would throw you in jail, but because you've been taught and know that hygiene is important. There's not some fucking soap policeman standing outside your door, that if you don't wash your fucking hands, you're going to get dumped in jail. We didn't use to wash our hands after taking a shit. 200 years ago, we would take a shit and then we'd go and eat and then we'd go and operate on someone with faeces on our hands.

We didn't understand that because we didn't understand the concept of hygiene, but over time, what happened is people learnt what that meant. Through our need, we're talking about you can't remove human desires, things like greed and everything, you cannot remove the idea of self preservation from humans, because our desire to live is the strongest desire for fucking human species. What we need to do is we need to teach people that, "Hey, by not washing your hands, this thing will spread and it'll kill someone that you care about."

Now some people granted will not fucking listen, but guess what? Evolution has an answer to that, is the people who don't fucking listen, they will increase their risk of existential damage and they may kill themselves and a couple of people around them that they may care about.

Yes, that may be sad, but when you zoom out for a moment and stop thinking on a micro level, when you think on a macro level, that is the system's way, if we look at humanity as this system, as this complex infrastructure, that somebody dying for making a stupid decision, despite potentially being educated about it, is the system's way of self-correcting itself. I'll give you another example...

Peter McCormack: Can I just respond to that? I just want to add something into that. Natural selection for stupidity, Darwinism, yes okay, fair enough. But we have something that in the space of four months has spread from known patient zero, to recorded cases of say 350,000, of which there might be three million, we just don't know. In that, we know it spreads quite easily, quite rapidly, it's very contagious. Would you agree with that?

Aleks Svetski: Not entirely as well, because you look at that cruise ship, that cruise ship was the ultimate cesspool for this shit and I think the infection rate was something like 17% or whatever.

Peter McCormack: I don't know that, but still 17%, that's a lot of people.

Aleks Svetski: But that's an enclosed space with a bunch of corona people that are fucking trapped on a fucking boat. That is the worst, worst, worst case scenario and they were all older people because they were on like some fucking retirement cruise or whatever. So it's like the worst case scenario had a 17% infection rate.

Peter McCormack: But still what we have is something that is contagious and is spreading through the population. It is spreading whether it's 350,000 or three million people, we don't actually know it is. We also have people dying with underlying health conditions. But sometimes these underlying health conditions might be that they are overweight or they're a smoker, or they have asthma.

They're things they can live perfectly well with today, we have a nurse with no underlying conditions who's in an ICU right now and we have an 18 year old who died. Whilst natural selection will occur, what we've also seen is that you may spread it to other people unknowingly and you may be causing the illness, the hospitalization and the death of other people.

Aleks Svetski: 100% and that's the same thing with AIDS and syphilis and fucking God knows whatever other fucking disease that we end up spreading to each other.

Peter McCormack: Yes, but what we're then saying is we're treating people as numbers and we're saying there's an acceptable range of people we think can die during this. Let me just conclude that, is that I think what the contentious point here is, is that there are some people who believe this is just a virus, it happens, they happen, there is an acceptable number of people that will die, so be it, society moves on.

Versus those who think, we can do a bunch of stuff to reduce the number of deaths, let's do it, but we're going to force you and I think that's the point of contention because some people are saying, "Well I don't want to lose my freedoms."

Aleks Svetski: It's a massive point of contention because we've become as a society, again this is one of those problems with the direction we move in as society is, we've become so afraid of a little bit of pain, or we've become so afraid of fucking death because we're so fucking concerned about how we look on Instagram or whatever other surface level stupidity now, that we go and make stupid fucking decisions, which are going to affect us for a much longer period of time than allowing something to run its natural course.

Peter McCormack: We're talking about trade-offs here then.

Aleks Svetski: We always are, everything in life is a trade-off. Everything in society, everything in the world is a form of trade-off.

Peter McCormack: This by the way Aleks, I am really wrestling with this, I've got to say. I am really wrestling with this in terms of, I absolutely agree with people and fully understand the fear of new laws coming in that give new powers that we don't come back from. I am fearful that every part of our life will be tracked after this and they'll want all our phone data under the guise that, if there's another pandemic, we want to know who was where at exactly that point, you use phone data because they've been using phone data.

I absolutely agree. Totally understand those fears and I do not want our government to have more power. I am also a compassionate person, I can't help it. I want less people to die and I don't want health workers dying, I don't want our health system overrun and this is why I'm really, really personally wrestling with this. I think it's really complicated.

Aleks Svetski: I know man, but you've got to zoom out a little bit. I've got a deeper philosophical question is, what are we trying to save and at what costs? What is everyone so deathly fucking afraid of and why are we so much more afraid of this than other more fucking dangerous things that are happening every single day in the fucking world at the moment? It's like, yes, I know you're a compassionate person, but if you're going to be compassionate about a coronavirus patient, then why not be compassionate about a fucking AIDS patient or about a starving child?

Peter McCormack: And I am.

Aleks Svetski: Exactly, but we physically can't fucking help everyone because that's just not physically possible. We're not in a fantasy land here where we've got the unlimited resources to fucking help everyone. People freak out in this and they imagine doomsday scenarios, like potentially this coronavirus is going to cause mass extinction, but that's just not going to happen.

Peter McCormack: I don't think people are thinking that. I don't know anyone is thinking that actually.

Aleks Svetski: But that's how they're behaving.

Peter McCormack: No, I think people are seeing the fact that there are ranges of people dying, anything from 1% to 3% and they're thinking for example, |I don't want my dad to die". I put my dad on lockdown three weeks ago and I forced him to do it.

Aleks Svetski: But you didn't have to have somebody fucking tell you to go and do that.

Peter McCormack: Of course not.

Aleks Svetski: You were sensible enough to fucking make that decision.

Peter McCormack: Of course not and that's great, but I'm just saying, I think what people are scared of. I think they're scared of dying and I think also the governments just want to preserve life. I think actually they're most fearful of the overwhelming of health systems as well, because I do think Italy has managed to probably stem the infection, because they've been flying people out of Lombardi into other regions because there their hospitals are overrun, into regions which aren't overrun because they brought in a nationwide lockdown and I think that nationwide lockdown did reduce the spread. I find it difficult to argue against that. As we've seen the virus has spread, putting people in lockdown of course stops the spread.

Aleks Svetski: I actually don't think it does. I think what stops the spread is people like you being concerned about their parents and washing their fucking hands and taking some precautions. So that has happened alongside all of these stupid fucking lockdowns, which don't do anything. People going outside, going for a run, getting some sun, that kind of stuff does not spread the fucking disease. What spreads disease is actual contact with droplets or contact with surfaces that have been infected. The lockdown I would argue has had very little effect or let's call it even fucking marginal effect. But the ramifications that it's going to have...

Peter McCormack: Okay, I disagree.

Aleks Svetski: ... Are what people are going to be more afraid of moving forward is people who don't have now money to fucking eat. People have no fucking work anymore, people will close their businesses and that is going to have an order of magnitude or two, three, four orders of magnitude greater impact to people's lives, to people's future, to people's fucking prospects of living a fucking life than the coronavirus ever would've had, if it was just allowed to fucking spread through and even the worst case scenario [Inaudible 00:19:41]. So we've traded an if for a guaranteed fuck up basically. Did you see the chart this morning of the unemployment claims in the US?

Peter McCormack: It's unbelievable.

Aleks Svetski: It's fucking ridiculous! What effect do you think that's going to have versus if the government sort of stepped back, took a fucking light touch? We've got all this spectrum, right?

Peter McCormack: Should I answer that?

Aleks Svetski: Okay, you go.

Peter McCormack: I don't know. I've got no way of knowing and no way of accurately predicting the differences. What I can say is that I expect we're going to see a higher rate of suicides over the next year. I think we're possibly going to see a lot of weird things pan out that we know were going to happen, just from being in the Bitcoin world, that we know where money printing is going to lead to. We know what that's going to happen, inflation, and I've seen the impacts of inflation in other countries. Which scenario will see more people die?

We don't know, possibly more people would have died, we might've lost 1% to 3%, whatever of the population with coronavirus allowed to just spread, we don't know! We don't know what percentage will die because they have earlier deaths later on in your life because they've struggled more. Again, none of this we know. I don't think anyone actually claiming to know is a liar I think. But what we can do is map out potential scenarios and I agree with you that this could be absolutely terrible, but I just don't know.

Aleks Svetski: I believe we've turned a small, relatively benign issue that could have been dealt with through rigorous testing and potentially if anything, quarantining some of the higher risks.

Peter McCormack: How do you quarantine people?

Aleks Svetski: Like what you did with your fucking dad.

Peter McCormack: What if someone refuses to be quarantined or refuses to be tested?

Aleks Svetski: Well then he's going to go out and he's going to die.

Peter McCormack: But what if he's not going to die? What if he's going to go out and make other people sick and die? I'm saying, how do you...

Aleks Svetski: What will happen is, very quickly you'll have, what's called a systemic reaction, which is people will stay the fuck away from that person. Guess what? Unfortunately, some people are going to die and some people, unfortunately, who didn't deserve to die, who shouldn't get the virus, who got their life cut short are going to die the same way as some people unfortunately die when they cross the fucking street and some maniac runs them over and it shouldn't have happened.

Peter McCormack: Let me just ask you a question. Say we have widespread testing and there's a family that's been tested, but one person refuses to be tested for whatever reason and two of the family come up with coronavirus and we suspect this other person has coronavirus, but they haven't been tested and they refuse to be testing. They go on, carry on living their life and potentially spreading it, do we just allow that to happen? Because we really believe so much in defending our civil liberties or do we arrest that person?

Aleks Svetski: Okay, in both a free market libertarian society, and in both a statist society, that person who has no fucking reason to refuse being tested under this situation, something would have to happen to them.

Peter McCormack: Well what's that something that would have to happen?

Aleks Svetski: Lock the fuckers up, simple as that. Even in a libertarian society, the people who think they're at risk will get rid of that fucking person. So whether it's a private fucking police force that throws the fucker somewhere, because they're too stubborn to get tested or in a state fucking system that we have now, is that the cops, if you don't get tested...

Peter McCormack: Let me just ask you to that, because we don't live in a libertarian society. So do you believe the police should be able to arrest that person and force their quarantine?

Aleks Svetski: If that person has the capacity to get tested and they don't want to get tested and they don't have a fucking reason, what the fuck's their problem?

Peter McCormack: I'm not saying what the fuck is their problem, I'm saying, do you believe the state should arrest that person?

Aleks Svetski: If there is a risk of them fucking infecting others, and they can get tested, and they have no reason not to get tested, like their fucking brother got tested fucking right there with them, there may be a case for that yet, then yeah, because they're fucking potentially harming others.

Peter McCormack: But we currently don't have a law in the UK that allows for someone to be arrested for this. If there's no law for that, are you okay with the government passing a new temporary law for this? See I think you're in a tricky position now, because I think you are in a position where you're trying to defend your ideology against a real scenario.

Aleks Svetski: But my ideology isn't confined to one person's action. My ideology has never stated that you can go and do whatever the fuck you want, irrespective of the damage to other people. That's not my ideology, my ideology here is that you should be free to do whatever you want to do as long as you're not harming other people.

Peter McCormack: We don't know if this person is harming anyone.

Aleks Svetski: Correct, but you just made the assumption that they can get tested, but they don't want to be tested. That's a very different argument.

Peter McCormack: But that is somebody expressing their free will to, I don't want to be tested. Like anti-vaxxers like...

Aleks Svetski: No, no, no, no, no, Anti-vaxxers aren't spreading fucking shit, that's a very different story.

Peter McCormack: They can be spreading shit with their children.

Aleks Svetski: No, they can't, that's not true.

Peter McCormack: You don't believe that people who refuse to have their children given say, the MMR in the UK, aren't putting at a higher risk of their children developing it and spreading?

Aleks Svetski: What's MMR?

Peter McCormack: Measles, mumps, rubella.

Aleks Svetski: I never got vaccinated for that shit, I didn't spread it to anyone.

Peter McCormack: Well why do we vaccinate people at all then?

Aleks Svetski: Because I think that's another strange thing that we've created in society where we've... That's another discussion, but the body is 53% fucking microbes that aren't actually humans.

Peter McCormack: Let's not go down a new rabbit hole, let's just stick to that point. We don't have a law that allows you to arrest and force quarantine people who you believe may be infected. So do you agree that the state should pass that law?

Aleks Svetski: No, I believe that we should have something in place that gets people tested.

Peter McCormack: But this again, sorry, I'm going to push you on this because I think it's important to map these things out. You said a moment ago, you agree that that person should be arrested if we have a suspicion they might be, and they might go and affect other people, but we don't have a law that allows that.

Aleks Svetski: Not a suspicion, if they refuse testing.

Peter McCormack: So you believe that we have to force testing?

Aleks Svetski: In the absence of voluntary testing that and in the existence of a state, then that may be something that needs to be done, yeah.

Peter McCormack: See, this is the point and then let's go back to my Tweet, sorry to keep doing this.

Aleks Svetski: I actually think that very few people... I think we're talking again about another fantasy scenario which is if testing existed, I think everyone get tested.

Peter McCormack: But the government have put in a law today in the UK, which says you can be fined £1,000 if you refuse to be tested because they know yes, the majority will do, but you're going to have people out there like, "I don't want to be tested. You can't force me to test. Fuck the government!" So they're putting that in place for that type of person, because that person could also be a super spreader. Now what I'm asking is, do you agree with that or not? Not the level of fine. Do you agree that if there is no law to enforce this, that we need that law?

Aleks Svetski: In the current paradigm, again, we're speaking out of the existing paradigm that we live in.

Peter McCormack: I'm speaking in the practical life situation. Now do you want this to happen in your country? No offence Aleks, I think you're trapped by what you want to believe and the practical situation. I think that's why you're pausing on the answer.

Aleks Svetski: No, I'm trapped by my idea of doing no harm to others and this is where a situation like this is a bit more complex and looking at a scenario where if somebody can get tested and they don't want to be tested and there's a risk of them infecting others then yeah, there has to be a consequence, because again, if I put on my systems thinking hat, in any system there must be a consequence for constituents within a system behaving in a way that's detrimental to the others. So as a result, yeah, that leads me to agreeing.

Peter McCormack: So you think the law should be passed for this?

Aleks Svetski: I guess so, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So then, I'm just going to refer back to my Tweet, which I said, I am though thinking about post coronavirus and how we ensure governments retract from their new powers. So I'm agreeing, I'm recognizing, I think we need some new powers to prevent risks to others because of the morons, not because of the good people like you and I, the people who are thinking of quarantining their parents, who will self isolate, I am worried about the morons who inflict damage on others and therefore I was very specific about saying...

These laws by the way, they're going to pass anyway, no one is going stop these laws passing. I am thinking right now is that we need to be very aware as a public of these laws and we need to be very aware that they can't stay. That's what I'm thinking about. I don't understand what is wrong with this Tweet. I understand from the point of, the anarcho capitalists who just fucking hate everything say, "Yeah, fuck you state, I don't want to agree to anything, let everyone just do whatever." I get their position, it's just not my position.

I'm talking to my friends and my family and people who are genuinely scared, I'm talking about people who are working in the health system, in the hospital my mother worked at and the hospital that I was a volunteer at. Let me just read you this, it came in yesterday on my Facebook. My friend is in ICU and I'm like, "Really? Damn because of this?" She said, "Yes, in Bedford Hospital, fucking scary. We just need people to stay away from each other." So this is happening. People are getting infected and people are scared. People out there are scared.

These aren't libertarians or Bitcoiners, these are normal people who are just trying to cope day by day and they are nervous and they are scared and these are frontline medical staff who are saying, "We are dealing with a problem here." That is where my Tweet came from. I'm trying to deal with the practicalities of where we are today, not this future idealist Bitcoin world, which I fully support where we are today. So I can only conclude from this, that you have very similar feelings me and that you want the help of the state at the moment.

Aleks Svetski: No, I'm going to actually going to take a step back on what I said. I actually think that on a macro level, so the further I zoom out... As you were describing, the further you zoom out, I actually think that the number of sensible people... So if people are well informed about what the fuck's going on, the number of well-informed people, again, coming back to the soap police analogy, that want to wash their hands after taking a shit, will by far drown out the couple morons who will eat with shit on their hands despite knowing that.

I actually think one of the issues with passing a law, like you must get tested is that what happens when the next test comes out, which may be even more intrusive or more fucking thing, then you have a clear opening to do much more, how can I say, send us the things when probing people? So I think that's actually a worst trade-off than rolling the dice on a few fucking morons that may spread it to a couple more people, but on aggregate, still be a much better outcome. Despite being sad that some people are going to end up losing lives, it's still a better outcome than passing something where ...

Peter McCormack: You don't want a new law.

Aleks Svetski: No, I'm actually going to back flip on that...

Peter McCormack: Can I tell you what I think happened here? Please take this with no offense.

Aleks Svetski: No, it's all right.

Peter McCormack: I think you've backed down here and changed your opinion because I think you're worried about your reputation.

Aleks Svetski: No, I just gave you a straight up reason. The reason was that... So what I wasn't thinking of when I first mentioned that is what, how can testing be construed later? That is a big fucking danger. I actually don't think... So again, so I zoomed out for a moment.

While you were talking and giving your example of your friend who's been telling you this stuff, what I did was in my head, I zoomed out for a moment and I thought, all right, what is the ramifications of a couple morons potentially spreading it to a few people, versus the very real opening that you create by using a broad word like testing and passing a law around that. I actually don't think that's a trade-off worth making.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's fair. So it's back to that contentious point then that there are certain people that just believe let's just let this wash through the system and civil liberties are more important. Look, I understand that, I'm not fighting against that and I totally understand that argument. I think it's a rational fear, because I think the Patriot Act in the US is a very, very good example of where new laws have come into place, they haven't been retracted and they are an overreach of the government. I completely agree and understand with that.

Aleks Svetski: Can I touch on a philosophical issue that might add some colour to this? Is that this idea that cushioning everyone is a big part of how we've come to the point of having a society that thinks the solution to every fucking problem is somebody else fixing it for them or another handout. We've conditioned everyone to think that any form of pain or any form of adverse reaction is bad or stupid shit like everyone deserves a participation or reward irrespective of what they've done to deserve it.

Coming back to the whole pain thing, markets are an incredible example of that, is this idea that anytime something bad happens, it's a bad thing that we should come and intervene, and fucking fix it. I think that's a much deeper philosophical issue. I was going to give you that pain receptor analogy earlier, it's like, well let me ask you this question; why do we have pain receptors in the body?

Peter McCormack: To give us warning.

Aleks Svetski: For what? What do these pain receptors do?

Peter McCormack: They warn us of potential danger I would say. It's a risk model for our body.

Aleks Svetski: It's danger, but more so damage. It's because when you put your hand in the fire, you're given a signal by the body that this is bad and it will cause greater damage to you. What we've done over the last God knows how many years in the world and particularly what we're doing now, is that we're removing the pain receptors from the system. We're removing our ability as a society and as people to know when something is wrong, because every time a little bit of pain fucking comes in, we try and wash it away as quickly as possible, we try and mask it.

We try and cover it up and we take blind, non-thought through measures to fix what are effectively complex problems in a bid to numb the pain, like a bunch of fucking junkies, only to find that we did greater damage later. This knee jerk attempt to avoid any fucking semblance of pain, when the whole point of pain is to signal that there's something bigger, that there's a bigger problem here, is I think where the root of the problem is.

If we keep approaching every single problem with that same mental model, all we're going to do is we're going to mask problems to the point where, again, I've mentioned some, I think I Tweeted this, I'm not sure, but I had practiced stunt driving when I was 24, 25. and one of the first things they teach you is you get in the car and your instructor yanks at your fucking steering wheel so the car starts losing control. The first thing that you're taught is to actually completely let go of the steering wheel and allow the car to find its own...

Peter McCormack: To correct.

Aleks Svetski: Equilibrium, exactly, to correct itself. What we've been doing from an economic standpoint and what we'll do, what we've just literally done as a society and as governments with fucking corona is we've fucking hit that steering wheel and tried to control it and we're about to fucking flipped the car over, because we haven't allowed it to naturally find its own homeostasis, to find its own equilibrium.

Every single natural system finds homeostasis and finds equilibrium and goes through a period of a little bit of pain, whatever micro or macro level you look at this thing, whether it's getting a normal fever, getting sick, you go through a period where the body experiences that. For example, me, I haven't taken a single drug, or antibiotic, anything like that for almost 15 years now, I haven't touched a fucking single thing. If I get any semblance of getting sick, for example, what I do is, I've been on the road now for eight months and a couple months ago, I'd been in like fucking eight countries and on plane, after plane, after plane, after plane, and this kind of flu and fever and shit hit me.

This was before corona got really popular, and what did I do? I fucking went and I sweated it out over a couple of nights. I went through the fucking process, went through the pain and came out the other end, feeling much better and healing myself. All natural systems, whether it's the body, whether it's society, whether it's the economy, we'll go through a period of, call it correction, call it natural homeostasis and equilibrium. Yes, there's going to be some pain along the way, but this notion of having to avoid every little bit of fucking pain and then taking stupid measures that cost more in the long term.

For example, when I was getting a little bit sick, I could have gone and pumped a bunch of drugs in my body and hey, that may have masked the symptoms and made me feel better in the moment, but it would have helped ruin my constitution longer term. I just think we've lost touch with taking more natural, organic approaches versus interventionist approaches. I think that is the core principle that diverges, call it Bitcoin as libertarian versus statist, is that there's a natural approach and there's an interventionist approach.

I just don't think interventionist approaches bode well for us in the long-term. They might make us feel better in the short-term, and we might con ourselves into believing that somehow [Inaudible] fucking our own houses is going to change this versus taking a more natural approach, which is educating people that, again, I keep using the soap analogy, washing your hands after taking a shit is a fucking good idea. People doing that because, like you caring about your dad, like me caring about my mum, help made this into reality. That is the most powerful way for anything to become functional versus going on and forcing it on people.

Peter McCormack: I think what we're saying is, is that it's that point of contention, right? It's the trade-offs. You're saying, let this wash through the system, give people the knowledge and let people know this is what we know about the condition. This is how we know it affects people, this is what you can do, here's some advice. You can self-isolate and you can have some food stocked up, but if you choose to not do that, these are the risks. This is what might happen to you.

Aleks Svetski: Yep.

Peter McCormack: But the trade-off for that is we retain our freedom and our choice. We have a risk that some people might infect others, but so be it. Humans are numbers and there will be some people who will die, it just happens that there's collateral damage. That, and I guess that's the point of contention is that you believe that's okay. Other people will believe that if this is a risk, that they want state intervention to reduce that risk. That's the point of, and the trade-off is your freedom and liberties.

Aleks Svetski: I think it's your freedom and liberties and I think it's also making the situation worse. Even take out the freedom and liberties components. Let's say this wasn't some Bilderberg, lizard people conspiracy to take away our freedom. If we take that out of the equation, I actually think we've turned something which was potentially benign into a much larger fucking problem, because I guarantee you the problems we're going to see now, I've had more complaints from people I love and care about, about them losing their job, about them having no fucking food, no money, no nothing coming into this.

That's going to impact their lives way fucking more than what corona ever would've fucking impacted. I think that what we've done is that, even take out the authoritarian and liberties thing, that that's fucking icing on the cake. The real problem is how we fucking approach this by shutting down the real economy and now taking fucking ridiculous approaches, like this crazy ass fucking stimulus, which guess what? You think you and I are going to see any of that fucking money?

Peter McCormack: No, of course not. Also I know full well, 18 months when we come out of this, the economy will go through the biggest boom.

Aleks Svetski: Fucking right it will.

Peter McCormack: We know who will profit from it.

Aleks Svetski: Of course.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we don't differ there. Let me ask you something else. Everybody has the advice what they can do and can't do. There is a potential under that scenario we have a recession anyway, because so many people self-isolate, because they're worried, or don't want to get on planes and they just change their behaviours. The airlines collapse, but it's going to put a lot of people in a position whereby they're like, "Crap. I want to self-isolate, but if I don't go to work, I can't have money."

It's almost accepting that it washes through the system and we have nothing in place to help those people who have no money. We have nothing in place to help those people who are... So they have to work. Then everybody who is struggling financially, because we go through the recession, has to find some form of work or rely on some form of handout to get by.

Aleks Svetski: Unfortunately, that's the price we pay for... Again, we're talking about a more utopian scenario here, is the price we would pay for a more equitable society. For a society where we don't have these situations where some fuckers going to print a bunch of money and then pocket it themselves, is that we're going to go through periods where we do contract.

Again, it comes back to that philosophy of a bit of pain. The only difference is that in that scenario, if you have... Have you seen the differences of the fires that happened in California and Baha'i?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, terrible!

Aleks Svetski: You've got frequent fires that happen in Baha'i, but never big catastrophic fires. Versus in California, they keep stamping out the little fires and then every once in a while they have this catastrophic fire. It's the same principle in everything in nature and everything in society, is that if we have more frequent, smaller amplitude downturns where just people have, make mistakes, human beings are imperfect, versus trying to mask and cover that shit up to the point where something catastrophic does happen and the fragility of the system is unveiled.

I would much rather take the cold turkey approach and deal with that shit on a more regular basis than mask it up, mask it up, mask it up until it becomes a fucking cancer that brings the whole system down. That analogy again, holds true with the car and the car losing control. Just let it fucking go, it'll rebalance, it will find its own equilibrium. All natural systems find their own homeostasis, we've just lost touch with that. The problem is, what I hope is that at some point part of society starts going cold turkey and just starts to live in a method that is more natural in its function versus this junky approach of trying to kick the fucking pain can down the road, because at some point we're not going to be able to.

There is no amount of trillion dollar coins or government rule that's going to stop a larger disaster from happening and this may be the last time an interventionist approach will mask the underlying issues. I've actually had a divergence with a number of Bitcoiners, where they think this is the big one that's going to bring the whole system down. I actually don't think it is. I don't think coronavirus is anywhere near strong enough as a pandemic to cause the "system to collapse." I think 18 months from now, 2 years from now, 3 years from now, we'll be at all time highs again in the market.

We will have successfully printed out and helicopter money our way fucking out of this. We'll inflate all the assets again, the real economy and main street will be poorer than ever, we'll increase the fucking inequality, thanks to another rigged fucking set of decisions that we've made now. Structurally and internally, the system will be more fragile and more fucking prone to collapse. On the surface, it's going to look like everything was okay and that thanks to government intervention, we've come out of this stronger and the markets are higher and all this bullshit. We'll have this fake fucking...

Peter McCormack: I don't disagree actually.

Aleks Svetski: My fear is that in 5, 10 years from now, when the next fuck-up happens, because the more you cover up the fuck-up, the greater the next one is going to be, that fucking explosion is going to make this one look like the dress rehearsal. That's actually what I'm afraid of.

At some point, we have got to stop this fucking spiral. Unfortunately, in the absence of voluntarily trying to stop the spiral, I feel like that the only thing that's going to stop the spiral of stupidity is going to be an actual catastrophic event. I don't think this is catastrophic enough. I just feel like we're going to mask this one again, and move on to bigger fucking problems, unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: I don't disagree with that outcome at all actually. I entirely agree that's going to happen. I also think, I don't think the governments really have a choice. If you look at every other government with their draconian lockdowns, could you imagine, just say in the UK, Boris Johnson, he originally came out with this herd mentality, but could you imagine him coming out and saying, "I think the best thing is we let this wash through the system.

Yes, people will die. Yes, there will be some pain. Yes, it will stretch the health service, but the economy will keep going. We will maintain our civil liberties, and you have freedom of choice." Map that scenario out and then map, try and imagine what the response from the general public would be.

Aleks Svetski: Unfortunately this is also what you're describing there is just the function of the cushion society that we've managed to build. No one's got the balls to do that.

Peter McCormack: What do you think would happen though? I think you would see protests, I think you would see mass social unrest and I think that would be a very short-lived government.

Aleks Svetski: Unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: Then I think they will be replaced by a government that has to do what every other government does. I don't think they have a choice in this scenario personally, because they have to follow the will of the people, not the will of the libertarians. They have to follow the will of the people.

Aleks Svetski: Unfortunately they do have a choice, it's just the consequences of the choice means that they'll get booted out.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, and also because they don't have that choice, I don't think they have a choice, but to print money as well. I don't think they can say, "Look, this is our choice, but by the way, we're not going to help you out. We are, as we both agree, we are a socialist society." They have to, and the only thing they can do is print money. The sad thing is that the money printing itself is shit. The worst thing about it is it will make the rich richer and it will make the poor poorer as well.

Aleks Svetski: Let's delineate that, it'll make the corrupt richer.

Peter McCormack: Yes, good point.

Aleks Svetski: I think we've vilified the concept of rich to our own detriment. We believe now being rich is something bad, when the word rich actually describes something profound. You can be rich in love, you can get rich in wealth, rich in wisdom and that's just my own two cents there. Yeah, it'll make the corrupt wealthier and have [Inaudible] it'll rob the rest of us. Look, stimulus, I had a point here in my little notes is, stimulus is only required if you're literally locking down the real economy.

When you kill the real economy and it's not producing anything, of course everyone's going to go broke and you need money for shit, but you have a deeper question there, or you have a side question there is, what are people spending it on when all the businesses are fucking closed down? What's the end game here? It's really messy. This is where I come back to if there was in the current paradigm, a brave leader who was running a state and running a nation or whatever, the ideal thing that I think that brave person, who doesn't exist, could have done was the following. Step one, get rid of taxes for, let's call it, six months or a year or whatever.

Number two, so this is instead of inflating. Step number two is economically incentivize the private sector to build, construct and manufacture anything that can help, "Fight the virus." Whether that's beds, ventilators, mosques, testing kits, or whatever. No tax, whatever. Number three is, bringing the education around this thing to bear. How does it actually fucking spread from what we know, yada, yada, yada. That way people can make their own decisions. Number four, by no means should you go in and forcefully shut down any businesses.

Nobody's got the fucking right to do that. What will happen is initially you'll have some businesses that, to their own detriment, will continue to operate and there will be people getting sick and that'll happen. Very quickly you'll have what's called a systemic response, where some people, they will be like, "Well fuck this I ain't going to work. I'm fucking going home." They can voluntarily make the choice of forgoing some fucking income.

At some point, again, the system, through a bit of a messy process, will find its own equilibrium and people that really, really need to work will take extra precaution when they go to work, and businesses that are smart, that are intelligent, that want to exist and survive, they may take some fucking precautions to ensure that when they're working together they're as safe and hygienic as possible.

What you'll have is that the economy and the system and the society will find its way through it versus like what we've done at the moment, we've taken a bat to everything, and basically the way the government approaches this shit is everything's a nail and they've got a hammer and they're just going to beat the shit out of it.

Peter McCormack: Are we in disagreement? We know it is nigh on impossible for a government to do that. I mean they can.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, unfortunately that's the reality we live in. This sort of comes back to what we said earlier is that unfortunately in the absence of us voluntarily, so pulling us, like a consciousness circuit breaker in the world that says, "Hey, we're no longer going to cushion ourselves and take the easy way out." Unfortunately, the only way this Ponzi scheme's going to end is through some sort of catastrophic failure where the system does fundamentally collapse. This I think is a glimpse into what that may look like.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what's kind of, I don't want to say funny, but the 2008 financial crisis was a great trigger for the creation of Bitcoin, right? What is happening right now is almost, it's almost like it's had this 10 years to build itself out. Now coronavirus is the...

Aleks Svetski: Validation? 100%.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I really struggle with this, because I definitely don't want to be in this position where it's like, "Yeah, this is great for Bitcoin." I would rather this was not happening, but it is happening.

Aleks Svetski: Look, I agree. Do you know what? Actually I'll challenge you on that. Rather that this was not happening is that I feel like maybe, as brutal as this may sound, maybe this is the catalyst for the critical mass of people that is required for...

Peter McCormack: This is the revolution.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, maybe it is and maybe this is the modern form of revolution. Whereas in days gone by, the revolution involved more like fucking jump on horseback and shoot the shit out of each other. Whereas, this might be a little bit different, where we meme a new ideology into place.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I don't know. There's part of me, and this is where people would say, "You fucking snowflake," and blah, blah, blah, I'm always attracted to reporting on human suffering. I always want to get the story out there and allow people to see what's happening. When I went to Venezuela, whilst I went there to look at Bitcoin, really my interest was showing the human suffering, how tough the life is for people there.

Nothing perverse, I just want people to realize there is human suffering here and certain things that Bitcoin can't actually fix, which was an interesting thing. When I went to the Greece and Turkey border, I understand every side of the argument from Turkey saying they've got too many migrants, to Greece saying they can't accept anymore. In the middle is human suffering, people who are living in a field with no food. In this scenario, in the end, whoever's right politically is very tough.

Again, I'm attracted to reporting about the human suffering, the struggles the doctors are going through, the doctors or nurses who are going to work with a potential that they might contract something that could kill them, and so fucking brave and so difficult. The choices! I've got a friend who works in Australia in an ICU and he was telling me that they're currently planning right now for how they handle triage when they haven't got enough ventilators to treat everyone. How they're going to make their decisions.

He's really struggling with that, and there are the things that I end up thinking about as a "journalist." I guess that's why sometimes maybe some of my thinking clashes with Bitcoiners, because I don't know, it tugs at me and it tugs at my conscious and my soul and I just struggle to treat people as numbers.

Aleks Svetski: I know. Look so do I man, for what it's worth, but I think we, and this is where strength and courage comes from is trying to acknowledge that, be compassionate with that, but also at the same time, realizing that that is the symptom that's caused by a greater problem. If we confuse the symptom, this again comes back to the philosophy of what we were discussing earlier is, thinking symptomatically is what got us into a lot of these messes in the first place.

If we confuse ourselves by taking that compassion and misplacing our anger, because we should be angry about this, hands down, but misplacing that anger and using that to be the basis from which we make decisions, that's never a good idea. It's never a good idea and then you get then viewed as a sick fuck who has no heart.

Sometimes making a level-headed decision requires having compassion, but being able to clear-headedly direct your anger and your subsequent desire for changing something in the right place. I think that's where a lot of Bitcoiners might come off harsh, because they've thought this through a lot, and they've been saying it for so long, that they short circuit to, "You're a fucking idiot", which I do as well.

Peter McCormack: By the way, I've loved this. I think this is a really good, rational debate where we've got to flesh out our different thinking points and challenge them go back and forth. I think that's a lot more useful than say on Twitter, where somebody makes a point and people just start insulting each other.

I think these are important points to discuss, because there is ideology and there is also practical reality. I think you and I wrestle in different areas with practical reality and ideology etc. I guess the question I have for you is that where are you in this practical reality? What do you think? How do we deal with the practical reality of where we are right now? Are you in acceptance that, I guess the state needs to do something?

Aleks Svetski: No, again I'm in acceptance that the state will do something

Peter McCormack: That's where I am.

Aleks Svetski: I'm in acceptance that the state will do something. I'm the hope that this proves to be more benign than it is, and that the state will hopefully get the fuck out of the way quicker than it will. I feel like that's more a hope than a reality. Me, personally, what I'm trying to do at this point in time is I'm trying to be a voice of reason. I guess let's look at what's happening and what I can do. What I'm trying to do personally, is I'm trying to be a voice of reason and trying to remind people that, "Hey, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Don't let fear be the basis from which you make life decisions now," because that's how we got ourselves into this whole mess in the first place. Making decisions from a place of complete fucking fear and bending over for somebody to rape you even further is not how you get out of being raped. That's one thing I can do.

The other thing I can do is maintain my own fucking health and immune system. Every day I've been outside running, building my lungs up, staying fucking physically fit and strong. I've been eating healthy, I've been ensuring all of that, I've been writing more content, I've been working on my business as best as I can so that I can make sure that we survive through this fucking period as well, making sure that my staff and my employees are still fucking working and that they've still got a fucking wage, educating my family and friends and people that I care about saying that, "Hey, look, this shit will blow over. It's not the end of the fucking world.

Stay safe, be sensible, but also don't fucking blindly give up your right to be fucking human over this thing." Don't cower away now, because this is the moment where human beings are fucking tested. It's either going to call on the best of us or the worst of us. I'm trying to maintain being a voice of reason in and amongst the backdrop of what the state and nation states are going to do, which is they're fundamentally going to take the fucking easy way out, which is the easy way out in the short term, but it's going to be the hard way out for the rest of us in the long term.

Peter McCormack: People can't morally accept that we don't do something, we don't try and do something. In their mind they just can't accept that. I think that's what it is. There's different reactions, by the way. Countries are doing, I think some of the stuff Taiwan is doing is very interesting. It's still state centralized state planning, but it's interesting.

I guess the position I was coming from Aleks, is that I know the state is going to do something and I know there are battles you can win and lose. There is the unwinnable battle right now is stopping the state doing anything, because the speed at which they're reacting, it's just happening. We've seen it country by country. These draconian measures being brought in.

Aleks Svetski: I know, but what you should be doing is calling out in your Tweet, you should be saying, "I think that the government should take less draconian measures and more practical measures", instead of calling for more draconian measures, because that's probably the wrong approach.

Peter McCormack: They're debating it today, and it's going to be passed today. For me, it's not a battle that can be won. The battle that I think is worth having is what can we do best to ensure they retract from those positions once this is over?

Aleks Svetski: Man, I think that's a losing battle as well.

Peter McCormack: But the biggest contention of debate today in UK parliament is the length of these measures. So if these measures are six months to be reviewed, that's a win. That is actually what I'm saying about. That is, ensuring that contract...

Aleks Svetski: I highly doubt it. Like I said, even if we take out the conspiracy theory element, in six months there's going to be another problem, which is going to require them to maintain the fucking laws. I guarantee it.

Peter McCormack: Well I think they're going to have to maintain it because I don't think we're going to be out of Coronavirus. But we're not stopping these laws being passed. They are going through today, it is happening. There's nothing anyone is going to do to stop them happening, right? So you can shout from the rooftops and complain and moan, within a week, the troops will be on the streets of the UK. By the way, it's not always a negative.

When we have the floods, the troops come out, the army comes out and helps shore up defences for people's houses, which is a very good and cool thing that they do. But the troops are going to be on the streets, keeping people in their homes, which is the things that people are scared about. This is not going to not happen. We can shout all we want about it and say, "This is terrible." But it's still going to happen.

Aleks Svetski: In the spirit of your show, Defiance, we should be defying that. We should be playing Rage Against the Machine and just saying, "Fuck you, I don't want to do what you tell me!"

Peter McCormack: I think some people misunderstand the role of Defiance. The role of Defiance is to represent defiant actions. It's not to say that I agree entirely with every single one all the time. So what I'm saying is if we live in a democracy and the government is to deliver the will of the people, and the will of the people is that they want social distancing and they want this to happen, maybe the will of the people is to have the troops on the street?

Aleks Svetski: I highly doubt the will of the people is that. I think the will of the people is...

Peter McCormack: I don't know. What I'm saying is, if that is the will of the people, then that is the will of the people. If the minority think this is an infringement on civil liberties and they don't want this and they want to force it through, then that's authoritarianism, because it's a minority choosing what should happen for the majority. I know we're in murky territories here.

Aleks Svetski: Very murky.

Peter McCormack: All I'm saying is this is happening, there is no stopping this. These laws will pass today, it will happen. What can be fought, is their retraction and what we can do is put pressure on the politician and the rebels today who are going to hopefully get it kept to six months to keep the pressure on them to say, in six months what are you doing?

Aleks Svetski: You don't the pressure Pete by saying that, "Oh, we need more draconian laws." You keep the pressure by trying to wake people up and say that, "Hey, this is being fucking overblown and look at the systemic fucking issues we're causing."

Peter McCormack: I don't know if it is being overblown. I'm not experienced, I'm not somebody who works in this area, I cannot say and I don't even think you can say it. I always refer to people...

Aleks Svetski: You can't tell me that having no money and no work, what that's going to do to people psychologically, emotionally, physically, and economically is going to be worse than a virus. You cannot tell me that.

Peter McCormack: I don't know. Well I can tell you what I don't know how to do is how to measure it. I don't know how to measure it and I don't know how to predict it. I can make assumptions and I can listen to arguments, but there is no way I can categorically say which scenario is better. I just can't.

Aleks Svetski: Well, none of us can. None of us can because we don't have a crystal ball, but we can take some first principles approaches to saying that, hey, even if 1% to 3% of the fucking world died from Corona tomorrow, it is still better than 50, 60, 70% of the world having no fucking work for months on end, because that is going to cause a much bigger problem than one to 3% of the fucking world dying. I guarantee you, that is just a simple fucking...

Peter McCormack: Aleks, let me ask you this on a personal level. Would you rather die or have six or seven months of no work?

Aleks Svetski: If I had to be fucking cooped up in a house with the threat of going to jail outside, or the threat of being shut down by a fucking military, I'd probably go outside and be a rebel.

Peter McCormack: Yeah cool. But I'm saying would you rather die or have six to seven months of no work? I think this is the question we're asking people. Again, this is not the question we're asking Libertarians, this is a question we're asking society as a whole. Do you want this trade-off? And I am not seeing a massive rejection of these trade-offs from people, I'm not. We're very good at benchmarking seeing what people say on Twitter and seeing what people say on Facebook.

Twitter is Bitcoin world, Libertarian world and Facebook is the real world and all I'm seeing in the real world is people saying, "I'm not going to work, I'm going to socially distance, everyone should do the same, we're all in this together, how can we help each other?" That's what I'm seeing. So I'm not seeing a massive rejection of this trade-off in the real world. I'm only seeing a massive rejection of the trade-off in crypto Twitter world.

Aleks Svetski: I think the big differences there is that you've got a community that is embraced the cushioning and the bending over versus a community that is finally seen through it. What's happened time and time again, is that the community that has seen through it, particularly the Bitcoin Twitter, were talking about money printing, were talking about authoritarian, draconian measures and we've been talking about this shit and every single thing that we basically said has come to light versus the ones that are in those Facebook communities that you're discussing, which are "the real world".

They're the ones who keep getting, pardon my French, but jacked in the fucking ass consistently and adopting and supporting measures that bend them over even further, without critically thinking. But what's happening is small subsets of those groups are slowly shifting towards the Bitcoin Twitter type community and waking up because they've in the... If you've seen The Network, from the 70s, they've had enough, they can't take it anymore, yada, yada, yada, so they finally pop. That's an unfortunate reality.

Peter McCormack: Also, I think there's another thing to that, I think some people haven't actually felt the pain yet either.

Aleks Svetski: That's true as well.

Peter McCormack: I think perhaps if somebody would say, "Accept this, we're all in this together", let's go forward three months, haven't worked, maybe haven't got the money, can't pay the mortgage, everything's getting a bit more stressful, maybe there's a breakdown in food supplies.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, wait until that happened, exactly.

Peter McCormack: Then we might see a reaction, but again, we don't know if that's going to happen? The government may print themselves out of this. We know that's a long-term, poor solution, but maybe they can print their way out of it. Again, we don't know this and I can't just live in a world where I make content based purely on a single demographic of people who are just Bitcoiners. I have to consider everybody.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but what you've got to do is you got to try and be a bridge to get this Facebook community that you mentioned of that level of thinking, you got to bridge them across to this fucking more critical method of thinking.

Peter McCormack: Do you not think I try dude!

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, you do, you do!

Peter McCormack: Add me on Facebook and go and see all my posts. I post a picture of me and the kids out in a park and I'll get 150 likes. Let me give you a couple of examples. So you actually know what I'm desperately trying with these people. I actually lost a friend over one of the posts, she told me I'm selfish and greedy. This is a post the other day, right? "With the announcement of massive cash injections into the markets in the US, UK and France keep an eye on inflation numbers. While inflation is baked into monetary policy, it's essentially a hidden tax.

Inflation reduces the value of money and investments and injections of liquidity in the market may be a necessity for saving the economy, but will have a direct impact on all of us. With the expectations that this could be an 18 months of squeeze, these massive injections of cash to maintain liquidity in the market would likely see higher levels of inflation. As well as the obvious holding..". As well as the obvious means Bitcoin, because they all know me as a Bitcoiner, "Holding gold is not a bad option. Scarce assets tend to hold value better."

I've been doing this and that's just one example. For two years, I post Bitcoin shows, nobody fucking cares mate. Honestly, maybe one in every 500 people cares, they just don't care! It doesn't matter how you teach them, how you explain it, they've got to go through the pain. They've got to actually experience the pain.

Aleks Svetski: I know. You touch on an interesting point for me. So when people asked me, because I always get asked the questions, "Oh, so when does mass adoption happen?" Or "When does everyone start getting Bitcoin?" I actually came up with an answer on this, I think with Marty and Matt Odell about a year or two ago and I said, "People come to Bitcoin for two reasons and two reasons only, curiosity or pain." That's it.

Peter McCormack: No, no, no, you're missing one out there.

Aleks Svetski: Which is?

Peter McCormack: They come for number go up. People come because they've heard about people making money. When it's a bull market, they just fly in, they think I can make some fucking money.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but that's curiosity. You can broadly chuck that under curiosity, because they're curious about how they can make more money or curious about what Bitcoin is.

Peter McCormack: No, I think that's a stretch.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, it could be a stretch.

Peter McCormack: I think curiosity is more on the economics and the curious people, the ones who go... The reason I think it's different, I think the curious ones will go and read Saifedean's book, they'll check out my podcast, they'll go down the rabbit hole. The number go up people will put some money in and try and get out before it drops, maybe lose money and fuck off again. I think they're definitely different.

Aleks Svetski: Look yeah, you're right. It is a stretch, but I think if we changed to people come to Bitcoin or people come into Bitcoin, which is a slight difference, coming into Bitcoin is then starting to be involved in it. People will stay for either pain or curiosity and I think unfortunately, this is just the way the universe works, is that there'll be a Pareto's distribution, meaning that a couple percent are going to be there for curiosity and the remainder are going to be there for pain.

Generally speaking, human beings only really change shit if they're either proactive or if they're forced to change and the force generally comes as a result of pain, which is also why removing pain receptors from any system is really fucking dangerous because the pain is what tells you that you need to do something about the situation. We'll only ever have a couple percent of society be proactive in the changes and the decisions they make, because they're curious enough to either...

And you know what, actually number go up could really fall into curiosity because there's a presupposition for why you're interested in number go up and that might be the interest or the desire to live a better life to make more money, because you have some fucking interest. You're searching for a way to better your life. I guess you could bring it under that umbrella.

The silver lining in amongst all of this shit of the knee jerk reaction and of the ridiculousness of shutting down an entire real economy is that maybe that is the pain that a larger swath of the populace needs in order to realize that there's something fucking structurally wrong here. My concern though, is that they're probably going to point to the wrong things. They're probably going to point to, "Oh, it's capitalism, it's the rich" or something like that.

So that's probably a big danger of the cause not being understood only the symptom being looked at as the problem and a symptom thing that some people are going to come out of this wealthier. I put a tweet up the other day saying that people are going to call Bitcoiners lucky in the future because if it wasn't for Corona or insert X pandemic here, Bitcoin wouldn't have succeeded, which I think is going to be unfortunately, one of the things we're going to have to deal with. That won't change until people start thinking causally instead of symptomatically, which is again, a much bigger fucking societal problem.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what would be interesting is to do this again in a month and see where we are. See how a lot of this has played out.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah sure!

Peter McCormack: It's been really interesting to do this and just because I guess, I don't know if it's been the same. I know it's been the same for you because I've really had to think about my own thought processes through this and I just can't live in that position where I just think from a single viewpoint, I have to weigh it all up. I have to try and think about why the society and how other people will react and what other people are thinking as well. It's really hard not to do that.

I understand the reaction to my tweet, I do. I think some of it was really well articulated and some of it was just fucking childish. I think a response to that just saying you're just a slave and I think it's not useful. It doesn't add anything, there's no progress made, no one's going to change their mind just because you called them a slave or a statist. It just doesn't happen.

Aleks Svetski: Well, it might spur them into action.

Peter McCormack: Well no, it just does nothing, but I just want to more discuss it with someone like yourself. For me, I'm wrestling with a lot of subjects here, a lot of different points. I really am wrestling with that, I'm not trying to support the breakdown of civil liberties, I'm not trying to enslave people. Also I don't think my government is sat there rubbing their hands, going, "Mwahaha, let's create new rules and enslave our population."

I think they genuinely are trying to save lives and stop a breakdown of the health system. I believe that. I do think there are risks though, that they get new powers and they enjoy them and they don't relinquish them and they use them for future bullshit. But I am really wrestling with this, Aleks.

Aleks Svetski: I think that, but I think they're also more just going to end up... I think a lot of the damage that government does is more the notion of a bull in a China shop, is that they have powers that nobody else has and with great power comes great responsibility. All right, Spiderman!

The problem with wielding such powers is that anything you do has second, third, fourth, fifth order effects that you just can't measure and this is the problem which Bitcoiners and Libertarians always talk about, is that when you have complex systems, the more you fuck with them, the more down the line affects you have, that you just can't measure that generally turn out worse than letting the natural state of affairs play out itself.

So if I'm going to tie off my viewpoint for this entire thing is that I think nature and natural complex systems have their own systemically perfect way of rebalancing. Whether we look at plagues or anything like viruses or whatever, they've been with us since the beginning of time and part of the problem, particularly in modern times is that we see ourselves separate from everything. We see ourselves separate from nature, separate from the world, separate from viruses, separate from microbiomes, separate from natural law...

Peter McCormack: Each other.

Aleks Svetski: We can somehow fuck... Exactly, separate from... And somehow we think that we can outsmart fucking nature and we do stupid things, which always just seems to come back to my analogy of the car losing control. We will fucking kill ourselves in the process instead of taking a step back and thinking in a more symbiotic manner that things are interconnected, they're beyond our ability to hit with a hammer and fix.

This whole Corona thing is society's opportunity to potentially take a divergent viewpoint, one that is more natural in its essence. But unfortunately like you said, taking a more hands off approach that I believe would be better long-term for us and may cause a little bit of panic in the short term, but I think quickly correct itself, is probably wishful thinking because of how much we've cushioned society and the layers of pain receptor that we've removed from society at large, that is now got us in a situation where we expect somebody to fix everything for us and that's just an unfortunate situation.

I think coming back to what we said earlier is that maybe the real solution to all of this is 5, 10 years from now, the whole fucking thing comes crashing down and who knows, maybe at that point Bitcoin will be a strong enough and large enough lifeboat that there'll be some salvation for some.

Peter McCormack: Do you see with this how it's possible that people could listen to this conversation and think we're both right? In that I think you're entirely right about your analysis of, I would say the way people are making decisions and your analysis of the financial system and how we're set up in a really bad way, but also do you see, but they can also agree that perhaps Pete's also right in that there is no other option right now because we do live with a state and we are socialists and the state has to respond. Do you think it's one of those scenarios where in some ways we're both right?

Aleks Svetski: Look again, a fucking spectrum, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah! Well do you think it's more that actually we're both bringing valid things to the table that need fleshing out and debating? So for example, I would say entirely that we must and we should debate the role of government and the role of money. I think we must do because we've made so many mistakes and I also think we entirely have to debate the fact that the government is going to respond.

How should they respond and how should we react to that? I think rather than just ignoring either of them, I think to ignore either of them is dangerous.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, so I think the common ground here is that we can agree that all of this stuff needs to be discussed. I think what maybe you could do better in my humble opinion is instead of coming out with a tweet that says, "I'm a statist, I think that we must have the state introduce laws", I think maybe a better way to approach that may have been, in my humble opinion-

Peter McCormack: Well I didn't say that. Hold on, hold on, hold on, but I didn't say that. That's the thing, words are important here. I didn't say we must have new laws, not at one point did I say we must have new law. I said draconian, centralized planning. So I said right now I'm definitely a statist and I am a statist. I believe right now in state intervention in this situation. I very much agree with what Nassim Taleb came out with, not sure if you saw that?

But right now, I'm definitely a statist. I think we need draconian, centralized planning to reduce the spread of Coronavirus and the overwhelming of our health system. That was the first point of the tweet. I never said about new laws, I was fearful of new laws and I said, I am now thinking about post Coronavirus and how we ensure governments retract from their new powers. But I've no desire for them to have new powers, I just know they're going to have them. It's happening today.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, okay. So I'm looking into it again. I think maybe, and again, it's really hard on Twitter because you don't have enough space to really well describe what you want to say.

Peter McCormack: No, because really this needs 20 tweets to map out every scenario that people will...

Aleks Svetski: It does, it needs a whole fucking book, exactly! That's impossible to do. I think maybe using your platform and your reach to try and wake people up to maybe the risks of draconian, centralized planning, I think is also a very valid element and I hope that I've represented some of those risks during this conversation because my argument is that those risks are actually greater than the risk of doing nothing, A, or B, what I think is probably the...

Because we live in a paradigm of state run nations of a light touch and I describe what I believe the light touch approach should be, which is removing taxes for a period, a tax holiday and incentives for a couple select things and open information about this. Number four is just allowing people to make the decisions on their own about their businesses. So I think that that would be the way I would approach it if I was leading a state in today's paradigm and I think that would probably be more functional than doing nothing because I think doing nothing would probably cause a greater uproar.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I just don't think we can ignore the state right now. I think people can choose themselves to ignore it and stand for their central principles, but I think other people have to consider what the state's going to do. I think ignoring the state is ignoring practical reality and also ignoring the vast majority of society.

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, so maybe what you can do is put out a tweet that's saying that, "Hey look, I'm a reforming statist and I acknowledge the fact that draconian, centralized planning will occur and my intent here is to try and spread certain information that keeps people awake during this period, so that way they don't give up their civil liberties and freedoms from a state of fear."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there is a subtle difference though.

Aleks Svetski: That shit's going to happen.

Peter McCormack: No, because I actually think some of the centralized planning will be better, I do. I think it would be better decentralized and look we've done 2 hours and 40 minutes. We could go on forever, but the reason I said that is I think there's certain things the state right now in this very moment can do better than the free market or are better choices than doing nothing. So that's why I said, "I'm a statist", because right now I believe in the state. I'm not kissing their ass, I'm not begging them to help, I'm fine, I've already put in place the things I need.

I'm perfectly fine, my family is fine and my family's already prepared for this. I am not thinking about me, I'm thinking about other people and I think I'm thinking about the frontline medical staff, I'm thinking the less well off in society, the teenager with asthma who might get sick and I think there's certain things that the government can do, which the free market can't and that's why I said it.

Aleks Svetski: Okay, well, let's...

Peter McCormack: Let's come back!

Aleks Svetski: Yeah, let's maybe do this again in like you said, a month or two, and just see where things are at.

Peter McCormack: I think this is my longest ever interview by the way, Aleks.

Aleks Svetski: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've done a couple around this length. It might cut under with a few bits where we lost connection, but yeah, I think we're at Rogan level length of show here.

Aleks Svetski: There we go, fucking hell!

Peter McCormack: But let's come back to it. I think look, it's been very, very useful for me. I'm glad I got to explain my position to somebody and also just really challenge my thinking here.

Aleks Svetski: Good, I'm glad.

Peter McCormack: All right, man. Well, listen, look, we should always close out by letting people know how to find you and if they want to contact you, how do they do it.

Aleks Svetski: Sure, I have deleted most of my shit, but I'm on Twitter. So @Aleksvetski, but I'm sure that'll be somewhere in the show notes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'll do that.

Aleks Svetski: Then for those who are interested in what I'm working on, I work on an app called Amber, which is a dollar cost averaging Bitcoin app. So that's my main gig, but I also like to write a lot. I do a lot of writing on Medium and also wrote, in combination with Nic Carter, Hass McCook, Gigi, Dan Held, Conner Brown, Rory Highside and Robert Breedlove, we put together this thing called The Bitcoin Times, which is...

Funny, one of the pieces in there, I touch on a lot of the stuff that we just discussed in this, but it was written a good six months ago. Might be worth people having a read of it, it's called "Rise of the Individual, Fall of the State" and I think it's an important piece to help give people a very important viewpoint as we navigate through this period.

Peter McCormack: All right, cool man! Well I definitely want to check that out and I appreciate you coming on. This has been really good man. Well let's stay in touch and then let's possibly revisit this in a month and it'd be interesting to see if our views have changed and what's actually happened because I think we'll have a lot more information. Take care, man, stay safe, stay healthy both physically and mentally and if you ever need anything, you know exactly where I am and I'll speak too soon, man.

Aleks Svetski: Indeed! All right bro, take care man, likewise!