Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
hello and welcome to this episode number 143 of the free cities podcast brought to you by of course
veritas villages veritas villages are off-grid energy self-sufficient luxury communities in
latin america designed for freedom lovers just like yourself bitcoin is accepted at all villages
and that includes purchasing property there as well more info at www.ecovillages.life
forward slash free cities also in the show notes they've got four big projects on the go
at the moment to in panama veritas village coronado and veritas village chirokee chirokee
is the new one launched near vulcan and boquette solar powered communities with riverfront home
sites beautiful place that nicaragua their place is playa pacifica that's a beachfront village and
hot off the presses brand new land acquired in Atenas Costa Rica. Atenas is known for having one
of the best climates in the world. Right ecovillages.life forward slash free cities for more info
please mention us when you do business with them if you choose to and just to let you know I did
an interview with Patrick, their CEO, about three weeks ago, and it's on their channel.
Now you can hear all about my trials and tribulations in the wonderful country of the
United Kingdom and all the shenanigans going on there. See the show notes for more on that. Right,
deep breath. Before I tell you about today's show, I'm going to talk to you about the absolute
nightmare of a last few days that I've had tech wise. It will also help explain why there is
currently no video with this episode. Basically, I've been in Riga for the last week and a bit
recording interviews. And I have to say, I think it's been my favorite trip of all time
for content on this pod so look out for those i've got nine phenomenal interviews
coming up over the next nine weeks however right at the end of the trip
just before i left my most important podcast hard drive in history had an absolutely catastrophic
failure quite randomly it appears one of those photons just hitting something and doing something
anyway there's nothing obvious that triggered it now whilst there was actually none of my
unpublished episodes on there so all the content I recorded in Riga was absolutely safe fortunately
I put that on a different drive and I back it all up no that was every single other piece of content
that I have created for this podcast and stupidly I suppose it wasn't backed up mainly I think my
thought process was I've published it so I don't need to think too much about it but actually
what I've realized is there are lots of files that I need on that drive to produce this podcast
not least all the video and audio templates and all the assets that go into those templates anyway
what this means in reality is that I need to record a lot of stuff again from scratch if I
can't retrieve it from the broken drive. That was a couple of days ago and with the help of
ChatGPT I've been trying to recover the data. However this is a five terabyte drive filled up
to 4.65 terabytes and as you can imagine that's a lot of data crunching. A single process takes
about 20 hours and I have to do quite a few of them to try and recover the data. Anyway
what it means is i will only be putting out an audio episode right now the video one will be
coming in due course please accept my apologies i'll have to wait until either i get the data back
which is going to be at least another two to three days or i can recreate all the templates and i will
decide to do that if i realize i can't get the data back anyway just to let you know i'm on it
I'm trying to fix it, but it takes a hell of a long time to probe a five terabyte corrupted drive.
And I'm doing my best.
Right. Today's guest.
It's a good one.
It's a really good one.
In fact, he's a returning guest and he's a bit of a legend in the Bitcoin and privacy tech world.
Max Hillebrand brings cypherpunk and praxeological principles to his work.
And I, for one, am definitely here for it.
My new best friend ChatGPT.
Yes, I had to get a paid subscription because I'm doing so much coding.
I'm getting it to write all the scripts for delving into my drive.
It's analysed the episode this week.
Max joins me to explore freedom, privacy and property in the modern world.
As we enter the broader battleground of ideas, we discuss concepts like mean time to harassment
as a measure of personal freedom, the cypherpunk strategy of raising the cost of attack
and the appeal of Bitcoin, free cities and digital nomadism as ways to resist creeping
socialism and surveillance. Drawing on Lockean ownership theory, Austrian economics and his new
book, Max makes the case for combining decentralisation, community and technology
to defend liberty in both physical and digital realms correct that's choc gpt's summary my summary
mind blown again uh last time i spoke to max it was a four and a half hour epic and i i was come
away from conversations with him needing a lie down if you know what i mean um and i really like
pushing myself and you'll probably hear my brain grind to a halt a couple of times during this
episode as i sort of reach the edge of what's conceivable for me that is anyway many thanks
max always a pleasure mate my philosophical journey continues right more thanks before we go
into it thanks to antcb christopher albanese bullish my cousin vinnie dovidas matthias to name
but a few for actually choosing to send your hard-earned bitcoin to this podcast's strategic
bitcoin reserve in the form of your monthly subscription to the show uh the bonus episode
should have been coming this week but i didn't anticipate all the problems i was having
with the hard drive so sorry about that i'll try and get it in next week the new bonus episode
with gg another bitcoin og uh if you find value here and you're not one of those people just
mentioned please consider doing this yourself hit the subscribe button on the fountain app
and you'll gain early access to long interviews the bonus episodes i just spoke about
and obviously the warm fuzzy feeling that you're helping out this phenomenal podcast
disseminating ideas of freedom and liberty right many thanks to you all time to have your mind
altered come on up to my studio in Riga grab a coffee in a chair adopt a relaxed position why
you could even sit back relax and enjoy my conversation with Max Hillebrand
looking forward to this yeah what is it my my second appearance i think on the show it is
first one was epic yeah blew my mind there was another conference where we're sitting in your
very small hotel room you did upgrade it's bigger now we were that that was the that was the free
podcast when it was just starting out we were literally in prague in a weird little hotel
down the side of the bed weren't we how far we've come i'm glad you remember that because wonderful
it's um it's quite exciting actually i really enjoy this job uh it's kind of making money
kind of you know it like um it not exactly can you maybe just bring that across a bit like Being a podcast is the most ridiculous job right Because you have the best excuse to talk to people Yeah That all it is
It's talking around the fire.
It is.
It's like the same thing.
Like if Neanderthal men realized they could make a living sitting around the fire talking,
they'd be much happier.
I think they wouldn't always have that sullen look on their face whenever you see them.
But, um, no, it is, um, I honestly believe mate, um, that the, the kind of battleground
of ideas is it's the new, the new place to be.
I mean, really, when you think about it, if you think about all the places that you could
operate in the physical world, the digital world, the, this, the realm of ideas in this
day and age is, is, is where to be.
And you're fighting, putting in your own ideas and hoping that they catch on.
Yeah. Mises was already saying this many years ago, right?
That this battle for freedom has to be fought with ideas.
That's why he was a prolific writer and author and lecturer, right?
So we're just standing on those shoulders of giants.
I haven't done this yet. We've started, but I'm better just do one of those.
the reason why i'm so dis uh disheveled is because i've just had the most infuriating
um interaction with the with the with normie world in the form of that's traumatic my
it was it's not traumatic it's just like most things it's like end of the end of it soviet era
bullshit yeah you know and it basically involves me getting it starts with me getting the most
expensive vodafone plan i can because i don't want any bullshit right so just leave me alone
take my money it literally says unlimited everywhere unlimited unlimited unlimited unlimited
limited of course unlimited doesn't mean unlimited unlimited data means in when i'm in latvia means
25 gigabytes which disappeared after two days i'm a bloody i'm a bloke you know like and i run my
business on the internet so um and i'm like so it's called fair use it's obviously not fair use
i'm not an unfair person i'm very fair i'm a very fair person so my unlimited so me trying to keep
bullshit at bay doesn't work bullshit is there i said is anyone on vodafone getting unlimited i've
just been on the phone to them first thing is first of all first thing is i get a text saying
you've just run out of data i'm like well on unlimited i've run out of data um and in the
text it said if you want to increase your limit go to this web address so i pressed it and it's like
i've got no data i can't go to the web address
it literally directs you to a web address obviously they're expecting you to have wi-fi
i don't have wi-fi here funnily enough i don't know why this is the first airbnb i've ever
got that didn't have wi-fi so now i'm like pressing the button it's not going to the page
oh my god anyway a good future uh tech for this is called tollgate it is a a wi-fi router
whom you can pay in Bitcoin to get online.
But the thing is, you're offline, right?
So how are you going to pay with Bitcoin for the internet
when you're not even on the internet yet?
Correct.
And so the answer is eCash.
CashU specifically.
You can make CashU payments as a sender while being offline.
And the receiver is a router, so he is online.
So you just paste some eCash and you get internet.
Well, there's a topic of conversation.
Because I use CashU.
I use the Minibits wallet for small payments, right?
so and i know i don't care to know exactly what i'm doing i just know that everyone thinks it's
really good and people i trust say use that use cashew but anyway can we come back to that i've
got to get to the end of my story because basically i had this wonderful morning planned my wife
arrived in riga last night so woke up this morning let's go out for a coffee i've got plenty of time
on my hands i i've got a bit of research to do i'm interviewing max sort of one so it'd be great
you know and then basically the whole thing starts crumbling beside me i got no internet i can't
research you i can't even talk to you i sent you that text saying saying and you the last i heard
of you was i'm on my way and basically people don't realize where i'm recording is in a big
commie block you can't just arrive see the doorman say send him up you know it's like
you have to go in through the kitchens to get to get up here you know and you're on your way and
i'm like oh no and i've got no data i can't get your messages blah blah blah and so i've basically
done no research at all not that we need to do research but i did want i did want to i want to
know what you've been up to because we haven't spoken for quite a long time i'm not sure i sure
i've seen you since prague probably over a year ago or something that's been a while but but um
But I now am back online.
Cut a long story short.
I've actually, I'm so vindictive, mate.
I have told Vodafone I'm leaving.
And they've sent me one of those codes to go to port me to another.
I just went there.
I just went, right, dude, I'm out.
This is absolute bullshit.
How do I cancel my contract?
And, you know, like sometimes when you get that irate, they say, oh, here's some data.
Here's a...
You get your fix.
basically they're gonna lose i don't know i've been with vodafone like what 20 years
what have i been spending 60 a month 50 a month you know that's like five six hundred a year that's
a lot of that's a lot that's a lot of money yeah back then that's a lot of money right
and going forward i had no plans on changing from vodafone that's another 10 grand
so they're basically for the sake of what does 25 gigs of data cost them
the marginal cost is really small right you have the upkeep of the whole infrastructure that's
ballistically expensive yeah but once it's there sending a couple bits it's fine right and they are
prepared because i said can i have some data please you know i'm i've been with you 20 years
you've told me it's unlimited but it's not and now you're telling me this is fair use which
like i'm one of the fairest people i know i'm like mr scales i want the scales to to really be fair
so it's obviously not fair use and you've kind of sold it to me with you know and they just went
computer says no and i said right i'm out dude so they've now sent me one of those codes to port me
to another network so now i've got to find another network i'm not going to do it today but i think
i'm going to do it i'm like no f you like i why are you doing business like that yeah why are you
treating your customers like that and the answer is because the guy i was talking to on the phone
it's not his problem he he was computer said no the other guy was computer said no and all this
stuff is like this is end of an era stuff like i heard the same story that we've been doing the
rounds at this conference about this guy who ordered some knives off amazon and they arrived
at the door and the guy said um you need to prove how old you are you know and this is some old dude
at the door saying here i am like you know do i look under 18 no no i need you i need i need some
id and he's like what do you mean he said no i need to take a photo of your id and and he's like
he's a kind of privacy person.
He's like, no, just give me the stuff.
And in the end, they sent it away.
And this is like the kind of shit you see
in the Soviet era,
you know, like these itty bitty little laws
that get more and more tedious
and more tedious and more tedious
until they're literally dictating
how long your fingernails can be
and all that stuff.
Yeah.
Rothbard would call it a triangular intervention.
And so this means that the state intervenes
how two, three people get to do their business.
You're not allowed to buy the knife from this merchant
and get it delivered.
That's a ridiculous notion.
That sounds like terrorism to us.
We would like to see some ID to protect the children.
This is unfortunate.
And there's this intervention cascade.
Mies has also spoke about this greatly in his book,
Socialism.
As soon as you start with one set of interventions,
let's say price control for socialism
or these types of things,
then the market fails or like it stops being nice.
And so it gets worse.
And then the state, of course, is, well, let's try some more intervention.
Maybe that will fix it.
And that just makes it worse.
And the only answer is more intervention and so on.
And that leads to nowhere.
And in the end, it almost certainly collapses.
Yeah.
Because everyone is falling foul of the rules.
So everyone's committing crimes constantly.
A felony a day.
Yeah. And I'll be honest, you know, I've always been aware that I break the law, obviously, in little bits and bobs and ways and this and that. But, you know, like take our online safety bill that's just come. That's one step away from VPNs being banned, which is being talked about.
Now banning a VPN is going to make me a bonafide criminal because I been using a vpn for a long time purely for simple reasons like yeah i don really like to know what i don think my isp has any interest
knowing what i'm doing and i don't want them to sort of sell that data use that data release that
data reveal that data yeah nothing wrong with that simple privacy even but even the the kind of
I don't trust you guys to look after my bank details or my this or my that.
And so when that happens, which they're talking about it now,
you know, when they start talking about stuff, it's not that far.
It's already done.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, where else have you seen VPNs banned?
What?
North Korea.
Where else is VPNs banned?
Probably China in a roundabout way.
They're probably not.
You probably get penalized, you know.
You get penalized everywhere.
like you know these captcha portals yes they're way more prevalent when you use a vpn right they
know that you're using a vpn or tor and then every business every like website is making your life
just a little bit more difficult because there's a risk behind it right yeah well yeah but the risk
is for them to get to get into trouble exactly it's nothing they're not they're not thinking oh
you know this this is very risky some you know they're literally worried that the rule says you
can't do that or the rule says you need to identify who's on your website and send it to us and if you
don't you're in trouble and that's basically how they enforce it in the beginning i think probably
in the later stages they start enforcing it on you do you know what i mean that's when you know
it's getting serious but i'm not even sure and this is amazing look a bit of plastic literally
just came off my water bottle this is this is like this is a criminal offensive how did these
get through the net look they haven't even got that i suppose it is still attached but
oh my god you know anyway when they start coming directly for you and i think it's almost like
in the old world you could do that you could be an authoritarian and you could steam in with guns
point them at people and say do what we say and then in the more in the more contemporary kind of
western world it's like people would would think that was bad so they just say right everyone that
you do business with everyone you deal with everyone you have to they have to police you
and now it's like oh i'm dealing with a friendly face i'm not dealing with the state the you know
it's it's i don't know it's it's getting serious don't you think it is getting serious it has been
getting serious for for many years and the trend is definitely in the wrong direction right like
it got worse over the last 10 years a lot right and and so unfortunately it will continue to get
worse the real question is when does this socialist system fall apart and i do hope that it does fall
apart like the soviet union more with a whimper than with a bang right but war and and a lot more
destruction is definitely on the menu do you know what though um i it's taken me a long time as a
as someone i would think of as quite free thinking quite inquisitive quite it's taken me quite a long
time to comprehend that this is a sort of socialist system a communist system it's bizarre because
and and you know voting and and and democracy and all these things are kind of communistic in their
nature yeah i know but that's a i i don't think um 99 of people are anywhere near and not
acknowledging that yeah yeah no but i mean read through the communist manifesto by karl marx right
and there's a little list of bullet points with what what what should be there in a communist
society right and we have like centralization of education right so in in germany for example if
you want to homeschool your kids the police show up like literally this happened to many of my
friends that kids got dragged by the police into the school building right so it's that's a thing
then we have of course that like the the the central bank let me name me a country that does
not have a central bank right now and so that those those two aspects already if you have
the power of propaganda and the power to print money then all of the other thing kind of is
becomes very easy because the people just kind of do what you want them because you taught them
literally and you have unlimited budgets because you can print it and trick everyone into using
that fiat currency, that together is extremely powerful.
So we're deep down the socialist rabbit hole.
We're very far away from a free market.
But people would never think that.
No, people would never think that.
I didn't think that for a very, very long time.
You look at communist empires and you think, ah, there's communism.
That's communism.
But I suppose the sort of owning the means of production and no private property stuff and that.
Although you will own nothing and be happy.
Yeah.
And you know, there's a real actionable metric of success of freedom.
It was defined by Rayo, an anonymous author from the 70s.
And he was saying, what's your mean time to harassment?
And in other words, when was the last time you were stolen from?
When was the last time someone physically assaulted you?
When was the last time you had to ask for permission to use your stuff?
right and all of a sudden you realize wait a second i just had to ask for permission from
vodafone to get my internet back right that that didn't happen so long ago it was their internet i
suppose yeah theoretically but i know what you mean yeah or like you you know you pay taxes on
that internet bill right you pay taxes on the bubble gun if you want to drive your car you need
to have to drive a license if you want to start a business you need to ask for permission to have
that business license the meantime to harassment if we analyze the the intervention of the state
is within hours or days, right?
Not weeks or months.
So we really are in a situation
where the amount of theft is so pervasive
that we don't even realize anymore.
We're like the fish in water
and completely unaware of the extent of the tyranny
that we're suffering through.
But once you step out of it,
specifically, for example, Bitcoin is the perfect example.
Once you opt out of the theft of the fiat system, now all of a sudden you realize, wow, this is not just a little bit better, that's like so much better.
And we all adjust our life completely around this new phenomenon that we've experienced and move on in a much freer way.
And then are baffled of how long could we have used this fiat money without even asking it, without questioning it.
It's interesting coming to Latvia now and obviously being around.
Honey Badge is the real cypherpunk kind of gathering.
mainstream anyway, cypherpunks.
But for me, it's the one place where I do tend to mix more
with those people who really do live the principles.
And I've got a lot of respect for people whose mindset is
what's legitimate and what's illegitimate.
Like, you know, someone telling me what to do.
This is some guy wearing a police outfit.
And being able to stand in front of that person
and consider them illegitimate.
It's quite a power and it takes quite a lot of power
and a lot of knowledge and a lot of understanding
that you can just do stuff.
You know, this meme that's going around,
you can just do stuff.
You can just not listen to that thing, you know.
And this is the place where, you know,
in my yearly calendar, if I get to come here,
where I actually get to mix with those kind of people.
And it's a real skill.
It's something that I forget so easily
and lose myself in my head and before I know it,
I'm looking for permission or looking for, you know,
am I legitimate?
You know, we've moved to a new area, right?
We need to register here to get a doctor
or we need to do this or do that.
And then you need to sit back and relax and go,
actually, no, I don't.
No, I don't.
I'm a, it's something going on outside.
I'm a human being walking the earth
or something along those lines, you know.
So I'm, or even worse, I'm a spirit just here.
And, you know, it's a funny old matrix that's imprisoned us.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
It's propaganda.
Propaganda is extremely powerful.
It was powerful 100 years ago.
It got exponentially better.
So to this mind control of making sure people don't ask the right question and that people don't go against the mainstream.
it's literally been
like carefully designed and implemented
starting basically from birth
especially from kindergarten or school
and that's really really difficult to get rid of
and it actually takes like a de-culting
we need to de-brainwash people
and that's why ideas are so powerful right
and you're part of the counter propaganda machine
to instill a new form of way of thought
in the minds of people
I had a conversation in America about six or eight months ago and it was put very well that if you survive school and you a freedom lover you done incredibly well Because school teaches you authoritarianism It literally teaches you the relationship between you and the person in charge
This is all based on outcome-based education
that was first introduced in Prussia, specifically Bismarck.
And he wanted to have obedient soldiers.
Prussia was a military regime, let's say.
So they needed to have frontline soldiers that walk into death without flinching, without questioning.
If you get the order, you move forward.
And if you die, that's all right, because the body of the army has survived.
That's scary shit.
And that's literally, literally what that system is built upon with the intent of creating soldiers.
Now, back then it was for military school.
Now it's for everyone.
Here's the teacher.
He's the authority.
He stands in front of you.
He knows what is correct, right?
He will tell it to you and you shall repeat it until you repeat it correctly.
And if you don't, then you get punished.
First, you got hit on the fingers, right?
And now you have to leave the room and go for detention or whatnot.
But ultimately, you do as you are told to.
And that's just not an encouraging mindset to explore and to be creative and to be who you actually want to be.
Do you, I mean, when you think about the way it's implemented now, it seems like there's a lot of useful, and this is a horrible way to describe it, but it's kind of true, useful idiots that implement this stuff.
um are you are you someone that believes in a grander plan or is this just a natural incentive
of power to sort of secure itself look for more power look for more obedience or the or is it
is it something more conscious than that do people sit around thinking i want to control someone else
that's what i kind of mean i suppose i think it's a bit of both like there there are thieves out
there right no question they they want to get more money more capital from others without actually
getting their permission they always have been there they always will be there right the question
is how what what are the systems we we utilize and do they incentivize and make this theft
profitable because thieves are entrepreneurs too right there's a proxiology to violence
meaning that if you have to spend 10 bitcoin on an attack on equipment on time on fuel etc
and at the end of the day you earn one bitcoin in by stealing from your victim then you just lost
nine bitcoin you're no longer profitable and that that means you have less capital than before
right and maybe you have so much less that you cannot afford to do the next run
and and so thieves need to be profitable and and then obviously thieves are incentivized to decrease
their cost and to increase their revenue. And that will naturally lead to some structure where
they make sure that this is more towards their favor. And so they become in charge of, for example,
the school system and then dictate that, no, you should actually hand over your money to the thief
without questioning, without resisting, because that's the right thing to do. That's what we do
in a civilized society, etc.
And all of a sudden,
you've decreased the amount of resistance,
you've decreased the cost of attack,
and therefore you become more profitable.
And that gets iterated like on a free market, right?
There's not just one gang of thieves.
There's countless thieves
who are more or less interoperating
and coordinating with each other.
But ultimately, there's a massive demand for this,
and so people figure out solutions to it.
The real trick then and how we make the stop and that's the cypherpunk insight is to increase the cost of attack and to decrease the cost of defense because then we have an economic solution to theft and to slavery.
That's literally what ended slavery in America. It was more profitable to work with free people than it was to enslave them. You simply made more money by not stealing from them because they were more incentivized to actually do the work etc.
So the slavery in America did not fall because some politician said, oh, no, no, we don't do that anymore. It fell because entrepreneurs on the market realized that there is more profit opportunity in collaborative, voluntary interaction than there is with slavery.
And the exact same thing is happening now with the added bonus that we have builders of technologies, of tools, who have now optimized for this metric specifically.
How do we make theft more expensive?
How do we make using defensive force cheaper?
And that's ultimately cryptography is the prime example of what we've achieved here, of making theft so expensive that it becomes completely uneconomical.
And so, and you could, and as I mean, modern day slaves tend to be people that just work under the, under an inflationary system, I suppose.
That's kind of, that's, that's the modern definition of a slave, right?
Yeah.
And it's, it's not only the inflation, right?
I mean, Germany, for example, right?
Many other European countries are the same.
There's a 50% income tax, right?
Then you have a 20 or 19% value added tax.
whatever value was added here is a bit out of scope, but we're already at 70%, right?
Is that what it is in Germany?
Yeah. And then when you buy diesel, there's like a 300% tax on that because we're saving the planet,
right? If you would buy some tobacco, that's not good for you. So we actually have to punish you
with another 250% tax rate, right? So we're getting above 90% easily, easily, just by direct
taxation of goods.
You think that in Germany
90% of your income is
being taken from you? Absolutely.
90? Before inflation.
How can it be 90, mate? How do you live?
That's the thing.
You actually don't.
But I mean, I've heard
70, I think, when you add it all up
and 90 just seems like...
How do you get like
one month of the year of your own money?
Yeah.
I just have to believe you, I suppose.
God, that seems crazy.
Yeah, no, it really is crazy if you think about it like this.
And then we haven't even talked about the regulatory cost of everything, right?
If you want to start a bakery, you need like 50 hours, 500 hours of lawyers to get all the licensing that you need to have the permission properly.
You need to invest in all types of weird building constructions that might not actually be necessary for you to provide a good service.
but they are required in order for you to do it.
And so if we add up all of this cost,
it's baffling.
It's baffling.
Like it's more balls and shackles slavery
than it used to be
just by the percentage of what of your work
has to be given away.
So, okay, let's,
I need to get this straight in my mind
because I've never thought about this before.
So take your example of the original abolition of slavery
and what made the cost of attack more.
And then tell me how the modern-day version of slavery gets solved.
So ultimately, if you enslave someone, you need to police him.
Because if he doesn't do what you want him to do,
you need to make him change his opinion and change his actions.
So ultimately, for every, I don't know, 10 slaves that work on the field,
you need like what two guys with guns to make sure they don't run away to make sure they're
not lazy right to make sure that they actually do stuff um and and do it adequately not not just
lazily and then half-assing it and so you have costs of of two guys in order to enforce these
10 guys for for doing stuff right and and these two like protectors they or or guards let's say
they need to get paid as well right and and um funnily the kind of it's often recounted as the
worst kind of slaves were the house slaves right the slaves who could live in the house of the lord
um and who in exchange did their bidding right they these were the slaves who who kicked down
all the other slaves and made sure that they did not revolt they and they were politicians
Kind of.
So these slaves were the most vicious,
according to some accounts,
because they could have a leg up on the others.
They still weren't free,
and they would ensure that the others aren't free either.
So that's quite sad.
And we see, of course, a lot of that happening
with politicians, with military personnel,
with police, etc.
They have quite a good time of telling others
that no, you cannot meet two people in a park bench.
We have a virus going on.
You're supposed to be at home.
And this type of intervention is costly.
Plus, you have the unseen,
the opportunity of what would have a group of free people achieved.
That's way more than what any group of slaves would achieve
because they don't have skin in the game.
They don't have that fire, that creativity.
Here's the problem though, right?
The internet made the cost of policing cheap, didn't it?
That's the thing.
Really cheap.
What I'm saying, the cost of attack, the cost of defense,
and how technology can aid us freedom fighters,
it can also aid the thieves.
If we have a massive dragnet surveillance, as we currently do,
if nobody has any privacy,
then the cost of attack becomes very cheap.
Because you know exactly whom to attack, when to attack,
and what to attack for.
And then you can make a much more educated economic decision
of will I get my money's worth from this attack?
You're not going to attack the guy who doesn't have any money
because you know exactly that he doesn't have any money.
Rather, you focus on the guy who just was productive
and sold some stuff and now has capital to spare.
If you have a perfect surveillance system,
then that makes the profitability of the attack way in your favor.
So the cost of attack on the internet becomes more costly if you employ cryptography. Is that the kind of theory?
Yeah, exactly.
That's the one tool to make those things costly.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And like, I mean, let's take encryption as one example, right?
Like encryption depends on private public keys.
So you have a private key, that's your secret number, basically, a password that gets you
to decrypt stuff.
And you have a public key, which I can use to encrypt messages to you.
In order to create a private key, all you need to do is flip a coin.
56 times, done, you have your private key.
Your computer can do it a million times a second.
It's basically free, a tiny bit of compute power, electricity,
which amortized across the entire use of the computer is nothing.
In order to create a public key out of a private key
is, again, just a simple math formula.
You need to multiply some numbers, and that's it.
Again, almost free.
But now, if I have your public key,
and I would like to have your private key.
All of a sudden that requires such an enormous amount of computation
that it's not just infeasible.
Like if we would have a computer that could do this in the classical setting,
it would consume so much electricity that we would create a black hole.
It's just unbafflingly how much more difficult it is
to get the private key from a public key.
And now this is an asymmetry.
and that is part of what makes it so powerful.
It's literally free and instant
for you to create the private and public key
and it's virtually impossible for me
to get your private key from the public key
and that extends to things like encryption.
Now I can encrypt messages to you
so that for me to encrypt it, it's trivial.
I take my message, I multiply it with your public key basically
and I have something, a new number that I can send to you
and other people will not have any ability to get to the actual true message.
It will be, again, infeasibly expensive for them to read that message.
But for you, it's, again, just multiplying that ciphertext number with your private key,
and all of a sudden you have a clear text message, exactly what I sent you,
and it was extremely cheap for you and me to do this,
and basically impossible for anyone else to intervene,
to make sure that we cannot use this because it's just math right once you know it you know it
and then also to undo the math formulas that we made and so these trapdoor functions are are
miracle technology like the fact that this works in this universe is is wild is absolutely wild and
and it's kind of like a gift of god that we have to use in in our favor and and that's ultimately
what cypherpunk is about.
Herein lies the problem, though.
And this is the, I think this is the number one question for freedom lovers right now.
What you've just described in the digital realm is pretty much the solution,
currently at least, and for probably quite a long time into the future.
This is the solution in the digital world.
But we live in the physical world.
Yeah.
Right?
And so do our computers.
Right.
Okay.
Now, the physical realm is the realm where the search for freedom and privacy is way more esoteric, way more difficult, way more.
And I think I've always thought of our movement, the Free Cities movement, is searching for freedom in the real world.
You've got the cypherpunk world or the Bitcoin world or the Nostra world.
This is searching for freedom in the digital realm.
And it's quite easy, actually. It is now, at least. But there's no route in the physical world that's easy. And in fact, I don't actually think there's a definitive solution like cryptography in the real world. What do you think?
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I just like to highlight that all of these beautiful things that we can do in cyberspace, these constructs of the mind, they absolutely depend on a secure physical space.
The perfect example is you want to create a new Bitcoin wallet, you want to send a thousand Bitcoin into it. And so you sit in front of your computer and the computer generates your private key and shows it to you as 12 words. So you write down the 12 words and super secure, only you know it. Now you can receive and send money to it.
But unfortunately, over there is a small drone with a telescopic camera like a kilometer away.
And it's zooming in and sees exactly what you're doing in front of your computer.
It sees exactly what the screen is doing, sees exactly what you're typing in.
All of a sudden, cyberspace can no longer protect you because meatspace was compromised.
And everything in cyberspace is anchored to meatspace.
Not just for your backups of your private keys, but literally for the computing hardware.
with any computer basically whoever has physical access to the computer can do whatever he wants
there are some great advancements in computer science that does not make that so you can have
secure enclaves that even with physical access to the machine you cannot really intervene or read
what was happening amazing tech but that's not really implemented wildly yet and and that's that's
a serious serious problem and that's why we absolutely do need to fix freedom in in meatspace
in the physical reality.
That's why I'm such a massive supporter of your work
and the Free Cities Movement's work
because we need to have a secure, long-lasting,
decentralized alternative to the violence of the state
in the physical world.
And that's really hard because the state has a money printer
and they can literally print tanks and missiles and spies.
I've never heard it.
You print it perfectly, mate.
I would have said they print money to make tanks.
He's like, no, they print tanks.
No, but it's true.
It's scary.
All right.
Okay.
So let's talk about that then because creating sort of safety and freedom and privacy in the meat space is a very, very difficult thing.
I've only nailed down three techniques.
This has been from three years almost of talking about it.
You've got three ways to do it.
One is legal.
so you've got the whole legal system this this bit of meatspace technology that kind of it's
that exists well it exists in the digital realm almost now but it's there and and it's like a
an abstract power that you can you can use to protect your physical space that's number one
number two is you've got community so you've got the ability to get everyone on board with your
safe place that they all want to protect it. Right. And the third one is that, um, well,
in the case of a free city, um, you're, you're, you're making, everyone is making such, so
everyone, yeah, is that the community one? Everyone's making so much money, a bit like Venice,
you know, Venice is, is such a, or somewhere like Dubai at the moment, no one's attacking Dubai
because everyone that's living there is pretty good. And they're, they're all making money and
they're all doing things and so you've got this kind of no one wants to be the person that attacks
this thing um everyone is makes a profit out of it right yes if we would attack it we would make a
loss yes exactly so you join the profit rather than the loss and you've got so you've got these
three things you've got defending it you've got legally defending it and you've got the fact that
it doesn't need defending because no one wants to attack it but there's not much else i can think of
There's no, you know, guns are all included in that, you know.
And we've got an example of that right now happening in Prospera in Honduras.
We've got this, and interestingly, and I don't know how much you know about what's going on over there at the moment.
I'm not sure about the very, very latest work, but the whole drama with the new opposition is.
Well you be pleased to know that people over there are relatively hopeful and think that not only are the socialist well the socialist government are backed down and they already started spinning this new narrative that they managed to stop There were a number of things they stopped Basically they said that Prospera is illegitimate
and kind of backed themselves into a corner because at that point now they need to basically
go in with guns and shut it down. That's what they do. They didn't. They didn't. And now they
started saying, well, we stopped the new occurrence of these places.
So they're backtracking to that because they basically realized, obviously, that they couldn't do that.
And Prospera was using legal.
What they weren't using very well, I mean, legal was their big one, this treaty that they have,
which basically allows them to go to an international court,
and they ended up basically suing the Honduran government for an astronomical amount of money.
So that kind of, that part of the plan worked.
It seems to have worked.
Where they weren't so strong was in the community,
because there was a lot of rumors spread about the whole thing.
And there's so much misinformation that they didn't really get on top of.
It's a very difficult one to get on top of.
And then, of course, there's the fact that, I mean,
they've just had a massive new round of investment in there and in amongst all this so that people
realize the potential to make money so they're still they're still pumping money in but what's
good about that situation is is if you can beat the socialist government and they're a proper
socialist government they're not like you know they're not like democratic socialists or whatever
then that's a really good precedent that's just been set as far as i can tell and you know that's
securing an independent place. And it's a small one as well. It's not like a vast place. There's
hardly anyone there. And it would be a wonderful, wonderful precedent to be set.
Yeah, absolutely. But as you say, it's a small place. It's only one place. It's not going to be
enough. We need to decentralize, so to say, because the likelihood of any one physical
location being compromised is there, right? It's not zero for sure. And so we need to have
basically an evacuation plan, right? Because when in direct conflict with the state,
oftentimes de-escalation and evacuation is the more profitable way to go. Because either you can
stand your ground and fight it out against tanks and missiles, right? And again, they print them
faster than you could ever spend your own money on it. So a direct conflict with the state,
the cards are not in your favor. Plus, you're wasting all of this time trying to destroy the
other guy's tanks, when instead you could evacuate, pack up all your stuff, move to a new location
that does not attack you, and then continue building. So instead of fighting a destructive
fight, we move on and continue creating something more beautiful. That is the frontiers minertitude,
In fact, that's why America was founded, that exact thing.
I've often thought about this because I used to think I was a stay and fight guy.
And I don't think I am now.
I've noticed that.
And it's even as I've adopted more libertarian ideas that I've become the, there's a point where I go, okay, now I'm better off leaving and creating something new.
But this is the problem because a lot of, this is what free cities are pretty much.
They're frontier cities.
They're frontier places.
You need a frontier though.
And frontiers currently don't really exist other than at sea.
And seasteading is a phenomenal idea that may have a number of years still to go before the really influential things start happening.
Or space.
And space is coming.
And space will come.
I'm not sure it's going to be something I'm going to jump on board straight away.
But these are the only frontiers left.
or what, Liberland, you know, or there's one in the desert of Chad, there's a bit of unclaimed
land there, but no one wants to live there because it's so hot. Or there's Liberland,
you know, in Serbia, Croatian border, you know. There is no frontiers. I mean, the internet was
a frontier. And that's why it was so free until now. They started to police it and they want to
police this and they want to tell you what you can and can't look at in this new frontier, you know.
So maybe we don't necessarily need a frontier. Maybe we just need a parallel
space, the parallel economy that can be anywhere. Because regardless of where you are, regardless of
how much state intervention there is, there are groups of free men and women pushing their path
forward, despite all of the intervention. The free market is anywhere. And so potentially,
we don't really need to have this plot of land with our flag, where we stand strong on the hill.
because again that's that's quite a target maybe to go about it more subtly is at least in the
meantime until new frontiers open up or the old tyranny falls this parallel system seems for me to
be the more actionably doable in the short run i think that's a common experience in totalitarian
places anyway yeah i've spoken to a lot of people you know in czech public and you know the kind of
alternative world that runs parallel to clown world, which is kind of what we have now. We have
clown world and we have our kind of world where everyone knows everyone and there's transactions
that can occur outside of that system and there's business that can be done. And, you know, that is
something that's very commonly reported on in, you know, former socialist countries at the end.
there's this thing that they're saying on the TV
and everyone's going, yes, yes, yes,
and then no one's doing it
when they're not being watched, I suppose.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And that, of course, is risky
because there are informants,
there are mules, etc., right,
that try to subvert these underground movements
and very successfully so, right?
This is not a new thing.
The tyrants do have strategies
to go against this type of movement,
but at least it's something, you know.
I don't know what. Yeah. I mean, do we have any examples, historical examples where people didn't amass together en masse like that? I mean, arguably, I suppose the digital nomad sort of revolution, which is a new thing because it's that's kind of who they are.
they don't really have a state per se i mean ironically i went to a conference a digital
conference recently and they were talking about that they were saying that as a as a group of
people we all should there's a couple of things that really unite us all and that's looking for
certain visas looking for a place to live you've got a good standard of living blah blah blah but
we as an we're not a nation you can't ring anyone up and say hey tell the digital nomads to do this
because they could be a powerful group.
But I suppose they are one of the best examples of that,
the largest examples.
And they do feel an identity.
Because then you've also got the kind of network stake type of people,
but they're not as real to me.
They don't appear to be doing it to the same degree as the digital nomads,
who really are out there living in different cities,
once every few months moving to another one
because they're treated better or because it's a favorite place of theirs you know all that kind
of stuff so yeah and here again like the internet really made this possible because we we like to
have community right we want to continue working and continue talking to people to to get things
done and without an instantaneous global transfer of information and not money with bitcoin this
simply isn't possible so this idea of the digital nomad is a new and very exciting area of of
design space for freedom fighters.
It's also very costly to attack, the digital nomad.
Exactly.
And again, the de-escalation and evacuation is lived.
As soon as someone makes you trouble, as soon as you have a bad gut feeling about the place,
you just leave.
As a nomad, the question of where do you want to wake up tomorrow?
You actually have to ask yourself that seriously, because you could literally wake up anywhere
on this planet in the next 24 hours if you really wanted to right and and so why would you choose to
wake up in a place where where you are in under fear and under attack and under extortion well
the reason is probably um to do with the reason why we stay long term anywhere family roots
familiarity you know and these are all very strong things but but for example like i think bitcoin
events are the perfect example because that feels to me like a family gathering right we all know
each other we've seen each other for many years we know each other's stories we want to help each
other we don't see each other all the time but we actually see each other frequently right maybe
there a year or so in between but there people that i see like every every two weeks or something on the next conference well you bet you also see them online i mean exactly you feel i mean i i feel very
in touch with most people that i only see once every two years yeah because i i'm watching what
they're saying publicly anyway exactly and privately then you get all the good stuff yeah
you know but you're yeah the yeah the digital nomad thing it's i'm gone you should say something
and and one super common objection is i i don't always want to move to a new place
and you really don't have to um digital nomadism works great if you have like i don't know two three
four locations that you really like and you just travel in a circle from one to the next and you
you know all the people there, you know the best restaurants, you know the nice spots in nature,
and you can build a relationship there across years. And sure, you're not there all the time,
but that just means that when you are there, you actually want to experience the place to the
fullest. And arguably, that is the free cities dream. And, you know, it's almost like what you're
describing is the parallel universe of free cities. Exactly. We need a network. Within the
network. Yeah. You're right, actually. I've never thought of it like that. It really is
one form of it. I wonder what, or you might know this actually, is the state cottoning on to digital
nomadism, digital nomadism in that sense? I know they went through a phase of really
trying to attract them. And quite quickly, they retracted all that. They didn't really,
lots of places went yeah come and then they were like no now we're going to tax you a lot of money
really really quickly but there will probably come a time if people move carry on moving as freely as
possible and these ideas become more prevalent because it's something that like i just came
i'm not even a digital nomad dude i live in um you know like a house an old house in which we own
and we're going to be there for a long time and blah blah blah and all this kind of stuff
but when i knew that there was a i was coming to honey badger i didn't come for three days i booked
it i booked like 10 10 days because i knew i could work from here yeah and the this is a latvia is
cheap much cheaper than where i live so the actual cost is not that much different and i'm not even a
digital nomad so youngsters coming through now i've got have got to sort of like cotton on to
this fact on the whole, unless you have a job which is very geographically specific,
you have to stay site-specific or whatever, it would seem silly not to at least try that when
you were young. But then, and the reason I know that it's a costly attack, costly to attack,
you know, to tax people, for example, who are digitally nomadic,
they're obviously going to try and clamp down on it.
I mean, is that starting already?
Or have you noticed that?
Yes.
Absolutely.
I mean, one extreme example is Ukraine, right?
A war zone where the state warmongers want to get more slaves to die for them, ultimately.
And so there's conscription, right?
If you're a male adult, you're going to get drafted.
And so a lot of people fled this, obviously, and switched to the digital nomad life.
but then Ukraine stopped
reissuing new passports
for people right so
if your passport expires
or your driver license expires or whatever
you need to come back in order to do it
right and then they kidnap you
so that's a real thing
right and
could you in that moment
claim refugee status somewhere
do you think?
probably not in the EU because they all support it
right
but do they support
conscription, I suppose they do.
Of course they do. And they're seriously
thinking of adding this back in most European
countries. Really? Yeah.
Do you mean like, not in wartime,
just you need to do, like in Israel,
you have to do two years of
military service or whatever. This used to be the
case in Germany as well, like you have to
go there for a year, then they stopped that, thankfully.
Now they're thinking of doing it again.
They will start in a voluntary way, and then if
nobody signs up, which most likely will happen,
they will say, no, you will have to.
and and that's not wartime right and when wartime comes absolutely they're gonna draft their
citizens that's what they're there for that's what the whole prussian outcome-based system
literally was designed to do right to have obedient slaves that come to your calling and
die for you on the front lines when you so choose god and you know every now and then i i i i'm from
on Twitter or something, or you see those horrendous videos from Ukraine or Russia.
It's either one side or the other.
They're kind of these weird semi-propaganda things,
which are basically drones killing people.
And it's the most depressing, you know,
this bit of technology that costs probably a hundred bucks flying in
to this guy on the floor who's just given up.
he's smoking a cigarette and then it's just, I mean, this is what we've come to.
This is, I know war has always been hell, but when you see it like that,
it's absolutely despicably disgusting and horrendous, you know.
Maybe that's actually great for us because in the past,
bullets didn't have cameras attached.
You didn't see that fear and devastation and mode of giving up on the victim.
Now with drones, you actually do see it.
And I hope that that brings back a little bit of humanity, because it's actually hard to kill someone with your bare hands.
Not physically, but spiritually hard.
With a sniper rifle, that's different.
You're way more disattached from it.
And I don't know.
The thing with a drone is you can do it on the other side of the planet.
So there is a certain amount of physical separation, but at least you see the devastation coming close.
Do you know what I heard the other day? I don't know who told me, but it was even more depressing was that apparently drones that are operated from base are under the threat of being intercepted with radio waves or whatever. I don't know how they control them.
So the new thing was just pop an AI in it, an independent AI in it and send it off on its way.
I mean, it just got even more depressing.
There's something out there that's job is to hunt you down.
You could be anyone.
It's going to try its hardest to kill the opposition, which is bad enough anyway.
But you could just be some guy walking along the road mistaken.
And that's, you know, that used to be something we would laugh about predicting.
like you know this is skynet or i know it's not run by skynet but this is autonomous drones going
out and massacring people and slaughtering people this is this is like um this is like a
this is disgusting and evil and oh i can't even i don't know yeah this tyranny sucks it's the
It sucks so much.
It's the abstract nature of it that's the most disturbing.
I hate it when machines do things to living things.
It really irks me.
It really, because it's just this.
Because someone designed that machine.
Yeah.
Do you know what?
That's, I was really, when I was young, this is going to sound like a strange story, but I just came to mind then.
When I was quite young, I used to go to the library and sometimes I used to sit in the library and just pull books off the library and just look at them.
And I ended up looking through this agricultural book.
And in it was, for the first time in my life, it was so disgusting.
I saw a slaughter line of, you know, and it just, I wasn't ready for it at age, whatever, nine.
And it was just like chickens hanging up on this thing, going through an automatic system of getting stunned, getting killed, getting their throats cut by a spinning blade.
And I was so disgusted by it.
I still to this day can't stop thinking about it.
This is like 50 years ago.
It's still something I think about.
And it was that fact that someone, I thought that exact thing.
I thought somebody sat down on a drafts board, you know, drafting this machine.
Optimizing it.
That kills things.
And they had to stay with it for all that time.
you know because after things you know the spinning disc that cuts their throat doesn't
always get it it misses slightly and just injures them and and i was like oh my god this is like what
how do people do that this abstract force that you just send out into the world and it does your
bidding and it doesn't know about emotion it doesn't know about doesn't care it doesn't do
And that's where, you know, we're getting a long way down that route with humans now.
There's a scary book that talks about exactly that called Ordinary Men.
I know it Is it the people the Nazi Germany the people that killed were sent out to just kill people They were a regular police battalion basically civilians you know firefighters butchers whatever
And they were created, ultimately, like, got the mission to, hey, we need to exterminate this village, right?
And interestingly, on the very first order that was given, the general said, hey, if that's not for you, you can leave, right?
and a couple people put up their hands and like hey i'm out and sure right you you can go nobody
thinks worse of you you go to the kitchen i do whatever um and then they started killing right
and and most people stopped the killing after a couple deaths like um and it's worth saying this
was women and children as well this wasn't like soldiers this was take that woman over there and
put a bullet in her head take this child over there and put a bullet in its head yeah
and that just escalates
and you get used to it
and there's propaganda
dehumanizing the victims etc
like this is real
I think also in that situation
I can understand
the emotion behind those guys
if we're a band of brothers
all on the same team
and one of us says
look we've got to do this
you kind of default to your band of brothers
right let's do it
it's going to be horrible
but let's do this you forget that this is a person you think we have got to do that we've
got to suffer because you will you'll suffer intensely forever basically the person at least
that you killed dies they don't carry that you know memory with them but i can understand the the
the the power that drove those people to do that and then after you've done it once i can imagine
that you could probably do it again.
Once you've committed that, you know, that taboo,
once you've done that taboo, it's like, whatever, bang, whatever, bang.
Because same thing happens to me when I have something,
when I have to resist something.
I'm fine as long as I resist it forever.
The moment I go, all right, just one, then it's 100.
You know what I mean?
Because you devalue that moral stance that you just took.
and then you know obviously the killing of innocent people is the ultimate taboo i would
have thought i don't know there may be more but but i don't know it's it's it really yeah it we
really are entering some bizarre times the weird thing is many more people many more good people
exist than bad many more i would i would hazard a guess it's like 95 5 99 1 i don't know and yet
we still end up in this situation which is really bizarre we've got it we it's it's we're a we're a
strange species yeah when you think about it i think there's there's some very small percentage
of actual psychopaths people who who just don't have the empathy don't care they'll kill if they
detail and are fine with it. And then there is a much larger percentage of people who get easily
influenced by psychopaths and who do what they say, right? And who just need that authority to
tell them, no, no, it's all right. You should do that. And that is a scary large percentage of
number. And that's where propaganda becomes so dangerous because they're influenced by whatever
propaganda is out there and then go with it. And I would say a very minority of people
actually would resist a compelling psychopathic authority telling them to do bad stuff.
Do you know what? Something I've been thinking a lot about recently.
You know the meme that, oh, if you lived in Nazi Germany, you would have been a Nazi.
There's quite a common meme, isn't it? And people like myself think, I won't do that. I wouldn't have done that. I would have been the guy defying it. And people say, yeah, but would you? Do you know what I'm noticing happening, which is absolutely crazy and bizarre, is when you look at the, um, the filification of Israel and Jewish people, I don't know whether you've noticed it, but it's becoming much more of a meme again.
you know and when you look now you get to look at it as that person you really do like when you're
online and you look at some propaganda saying you know something in the palestine israel and
it's really pro-palestinian and it's showing israelis knocking on people's doors and
you know and taking property and stuff like that that's the moment that you are now being tested
as you know the that's the propaganda that's deciding whether you go oh they're the bad guys
or they're the bad guys you know it's really interesting because i it you really do get to
to test your your ability because i've noticed there's a there's a massive i don't know whether
it's just on my social media or what but it's back the village the vilification of jewish people
for example, appears to be back. There's lots of people coming out quite openly and saying this,
that, and the other. And there may be truth in what they're saying. They may not. I don't really
know. But what is happening is you're being offered an opportunity to vilify a whole group of people.
And are you taking it? Do you know what I mean? It's absolutely fascinating because you think,
when you think of it, when you think of things like, you know, Nazi Germany, you think, well,
when's that ever going to happen to me right it's happening now it's happening in the the internet
the internet is the nation in which that thing is happening what are you doing who are you you know
it's it's unbelievable the times we're living through it really is bizarre what's going on you
know but um yeah and and you know like it's it's it extends to to just regular like european
nations right like because like we know that printing money is bad right um we know that
using printed money is bad as well and whenever you pay someone with printed money you're continuing
that kantion effect right you're stealing from all the people who received his newly created
money after you um it's still we all do it right we we know that all the taxes go to fund wars and
and pedophiles and whatnot, and we still do it, right?
It's just a very easy excuse to keep proliferating this system of theft and slavery.
And most people don't care, right?
Most people don't care enough to do something about it.
For most people, it's just way easier to just go along with the mainstream, right?
And that includes radicals, right?
Like, I mean, I'm pretty radical about this.
I still use fiat sometimes, right?
If you were really consistent about it, I could be much more radical.
But it's hard, right?
And not convenient.
So there really is, it's hard to, when you're in it, to stop the bad things that you're doing.
That's hard work.
Convenience is the word.
It's a really, it's the word of our time, isn't it?
Convenience.
It's like we are in the most convenient time in history, probably.
I mean, you can literally sit here, press a button,
and a car appears and takes you places or delivers food to you.
I mean, we've gone...
I get that probably if you look deep into the psyche of the human being,
you realize that the desire for convenience is a good desire.
It's the desire to save energy almost, isn't it?
It's like, and when you're a Neanderthal, you don't, if someone, if there was a machine that killed, that killed wild animals, so you don't have to strangle them with your own arms, of course you're going to take it.
But we've just created this world.
We've gone, we've gone so far.
I mean, I don't, I really don't know what, what the future holds anymore.
I don't, I, I, I used to have a bunch of ideas about where we were going and there've been such radical changes recently in things like that.
I mean, take convenience to its natural end.
It's AI and robots basically doing everything for you.
And at that point you have a choice.
Do you let them?
And what happens if they don't let you let them, you know, like, like what, where does it, you know, what's your, are you, are you a fan?
fan of AI? I mean, do you even think AI is a thing? I know a lot of techie people who just say,
look, it's good, but it's not what you think. I mean, AI is definitely a buzzword, right?
If like we think, for example, with coding, the code that actually runs on the machine is called
like assembly, right? It's just ones and zeros that come in. Humans cannot really read that.
So we use programming languages that compile into assembly and those programming languages are much more human readable.
English words in there, right, with some weird syntax and stuff, and the semicolon has to be
exactly in the right place and this type of stuff. But ultimately, humans don't code in assembly.
And to a large extent, I think large language models are an extension of this, because now you
can code not in a programming language, but just English, like verbal, logical English,
compiles into source code now, and that compiles into assembly now.
so I think we've just walked up on the stack of making it easier to build code per se right if
so if we're looking at LLMs just for coding and that I think is incredible like even a bloke like
you and me can can now write code that that does something that we wanted to do so that's that's
really exciting especially because that now increases the number of people who can build
freedom tech right like I can build freedom tech now that's ridiculous I never really programmed
and I never wrote a line of code
other than like some little bash script
or whatever.
I just got a button in there for a second.
But that's not intelligence, is it?
Like you say, that's just coding.
Yeah.
Like all it is,
do you remember,
like I started my coding,
I'm not a coder at all,
but when I was young,
I coded in BASIC.
Do you remember?
I don't know,
are you old enough to know BASIC?
Yeah.
Right.
And I did it on a ZX Spectrum.
I don't know whether you know that computer.
It was like a 48K computer it was.
There was a 24K one and a 48K.
I had the 48K one.
But the point was that you were using a language
to make the computer do something.
So using English to make the computer do something
is not some crazy...
It just got more convenient.
Yeah, exactly.
But it's not even a crazy advancement.
It's basically just teaching a computer
to convert English to code.
Right.
So is that what you think AI is?
or is it bigger than that that's a big part of of the current technology and and i think the most
exciting one because like code is either correct or it isn't like either it compiles or there is a
bug you know so we can get really really good at optimizing the large language model to write great
code and so there was massive massive improvements in the last i know five years and it will basically
be perfect in the next five years like any code that you want to write you will get it from english
on the first shot all the time for basically free or like compute you reckon in five years yeah
absolutely absolutely we're almost already there like there's a website called shakespeare.xyz
or something or.diy whatever and it's a website with a chat interface and you type in whatever
nostre client you would like to develop and literally five minutes later you have a website
that people can use where they can log in with their private keys yeah then start posting messages
and whatever nuance you want right um that's that's here right and it costs you like i don't
know 10 bucks an hour to use it right for um and that will you know it's a buggy the software is
aren't perfect and but in in five years most maximum that your phone will be able to do it
i designed my own app it's already been designed but i just wanted to see i i wanted to see if it
could do it and it did i designed a calculator that that is basically an inter an interface for
private message uh private things i want so if you type the right code into the it looks like a
calculator and you can use it as a calculator but if you type a certain number in you get to
a bunch of you get to an encrypted box full of secret things and stuff and it did it pretty much
first time i had to change the ux a little bit but that is it is it is quite amazing that's wild
right and and then so on the other hand we have for example robotics right robotics made also in
the last five years in an insane amount of progress like if you look at robots five ten years ago they
could barely stand and keep themselves balanced right now they do backflips and cartwheels right
And they can run fast.
Now, they're still incredibly inefficient, consume an insane amount of electricity and all of this.
But in five years, they won't.
They will get extremely efficient.
We can engineer this.
Humans are really good engineers.
And we can engineer the killing machine to work like 99.999% of the time.
And the same will happen with robotics.
And then we put large language models into the robots.
and all of a sudden we can talk to them about anything
and have deep philosophical conversations
and they can code for you, right?
That's wild, right?
I'm not sure if that is artificial intelligence,
but I guess if you would ask any researcher
like 10, 20 years ago,
if we would have this in the future,
would you say that we have reached a singularity
in artificial intelligence or whatever?
They probably say yes,
but now that we're here,
doesn't really feel like it, right?
There's still a lot of stuff that isn't really there.
John Verveke is really good on this topic.
And I think one of the aspects that these AI models cannot do is have good taste.
To decide what to do and what not to do.
To make this value judgment.
They will do whatever you put on the input side.
It's just an algorithm that returns you an output.
But the question of what should I put in the input side?
Do you know what really helped me understand it was someone said, and I mean, somebody said, look, go on to the best AI you've got and ask it to generate a picture with all the clocks saying 20 past four or something.
And it comes back with a picture of all the clocks, but all the clocks are set to four o'clock.
And the reason is, is because most clocks on the internet are set at that time, because that's what looks best when you sell a watch, right?
So that shows you they have no understanding.
There's absolutely no understanding there at all.
It's purely what's most likely to be the correct answer to what I'm being told.
But I wouldn't say that's intelligence.
It's just incredible how far this goes if you scale it up.
I think that's the very surprising thing that researchers didn't really get of, hey, the simple prediction model, right, of what is the next word, what is the next pixel, right?
We just need to increase compute power in training, inference, and so on.
And we'll get outcomes that are surprisingly good.
But is that how intelligence works, do you think?
No, probably not, right?
But maybe it does.
I don't know, yeah.
Right?
And that's kind of the crazy thing of like you as a baby, you can learn language just by observing it.
And it seems likewise computers did that.
They just observed language.
They just observed pictures.
We didn't tell them this is the grammar written out.
These are the rules.
But there's a visceral feeling of understanding, isn't there, when you look at a picture.
there's a difference between generating a picture based on likelihoods and understanding
that's a fat cow or something you know and isn't there is there i don't know i don't know either
that's really deep questions i don't know well it would be sad to think that all we're doing
is when we're thinking and when we're conscious it's just like error correcting or you know like
it would it would be a sad insight into human intelligence i think to to think that it's like
a guessing game it's a bit like it's a bit like hashing in a way isn't it it's like you chuck as
much compute at something until the correct the correct result comes you know and the way you
understand the result is getting feedback from you know your teacher or something you know you know
I don't know.
Maybe we are really that brutal as a species
and there's nothing deeply, you know.
What is impressive is how energy efficient we do it.
That really is something.
If you compare the energy consumption of the human brain
and of like an AI supercomputer GPU cluster,
it's insane.
Like these machines are so, so, so inefficient at the moment
that there's no short-term path
where we can get to the same efficiency as the brain
anytime soon for sure.
Do we know how the brain computes?
Is it something like quantum?
Sorry, something like, what's it called?
What's the next iteration of computers,
the one that everyone says is going to break?
Quantum computing?
Is it quantum computing?
Yeah.
Is that how we think then?
Is that?
I'm not sure.
Certainly not how I think.
My brain's all over the place.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm, I, at the moment,
And like I say, my theory at the moment is AI is intelligent if that's how we think.
If that literally we just don know it that we are way advanced down the line but the human mind began life in the same way Like you imagine language began like that
You and me have no language between us.
So what we do is we make sounds to each other and we look for the response to see whether it works.
So if I do that or if I'm like pointing and you move that way, I think, all right, that's pointing because it works.
and and and and you know ai is kind of the same right it's it's looking at everything that's ever
been done and from that predicting what should happen next according it according to to you know
like what it's computing you know like so maybe maybe yeah maybe we're just really simple beings
you know yeah might might well be but i think out of simplicity comes a lot of beautiful complexity
on top and so there's not there's not much nuance if you zoom in close enough right like dna
turns out to be super simple building blocks but what you can do with it is wild
yeah i don't i i'm i'm i'm at a loss with all that stuff something i wanted to talk about actually
and you almost certainly already know this um but i discovered this for the first time
yesterday and it really blew my mind um i was supposed to be interviewing a jacomo zuko
yesterday but he he didn't turn up whatever but i did some research to to sort of i was thinking
what we're going to talk about because i want to talk about freedom and he'd done a really
interesting talk about freedom for plan b forum and he explained something to me on this video
that I'd never heard of before.
And it was to do with the Lockean theory of ownership.
So John Locke says, you know, like homesteading,
if you go to a place, a frontier, that's not owned, let's say,
it's just nature, it's just nothing, whatever,
and you add your labor, it becomes your property, right?
You know about this, obviously, right?
now bitcoin's basically the most perfect example of that you have and i i can't believe i've lived
this long and not thought that thought that you have the miner basically has this frontier of
nothing adds work creates the bitcoin and the bitcoin is property yeah that's amazing like how
Why did no one ever tell me that before?
That's the best way to explain proof of work and ownership and why Bitcoin is perfect ownership.
And I think on top of that, similar applies actually to private keys, which I think is even more mind-blowing.
Because the private key is just a number.
It's literally a number.
Numbers are not scarce.
If I tell you number 4729, I didn't lose it.
I didn't give up.
control over it. You got a copy. So there is not really ownership in ideas. Stefan Kinsella
is fantastic on this. His book Against Intellectual Property, great read. So he's basically saying
ideas are not scarce. Therefore, we don't need to allocate our resources because we can just
copy it. Therefore, we don't need property rights. Therefore, there is no exchange. There is no IP.
With ideas, though.
With ideas specifically.
And that idea includes the number, whatever your private key is.
And that's what my new book actually is about.
That when the ideas itself cannot have property rights, but access control or coordination of these ideas, there are scarce aspects in here.
like if I have a secret like my private key right then I can exclude you from knowing this private
key by not telling you the secret right so there is a a rivalrousness either you know it or you
don't and it's all in my hands because I'm the only one who knows the secret that is a scarce
aspect and that behaves like a property right right like if you would hit me with a five dollar
wrench until I give you the secret, then ultimately that would be unjust acquiring of the access
right to this information with physical coercion on top of that. But ultimately, you're trying to
get something that I don't want to give you. And so that's a violation in property rights.
So I actually think we homestead not just land on the frontier, not just Bitcoin as a miner.
I think we actually homestead private keys as well.
And then we do have the power to open up what we've homesteaded and make it a public good simply by telling others about it.
And then the secret becomes worthless.
A secret is worth a lot if it's only kept in the mind of one person because then he has exclusive ownership of it.
but when it is shared with others and then some things that we could do before are no longer valid
specifically in cryptography like if i am the only one who knows my nostril private key i can make a
post and you can be very sure that this comes from me if i would send my private key to someone else
all of a sudden you no longer have these assurances so when we are in this uniquely homesteaded
concept of private keys and ideas specifically where only one person knows them, a secret,
then cryptography works. And as soon as we have the drone flying over you as you're making your
backup, that's where it breaks apart. What blew my mind about what Giacomo said, though, was that
it implies that john locke's theories of ownership on are real are naturally a real are a real
naturally occurring thing because in the digital world of bitcoin the only way to create private
property is to add your work to it isn't it yeah that's that that's literally blown my mind
because when i when you think about you know like i mean john locke's theories have given rise to
property right legal spiel all over the world really haven't they and and but when i when i
thought about it before i thought this is just a guy this is a philosopher who's had some ideas
and it's become part of um you know the way we the way we'd work and the way we do business and
the way we have contracts and all this kind of stuff but the truth is his theories on property
are like physics they just exist that's amazing mate that's absolutely amazing
That's why I'm such a huge fan of praxeology, right? Because it's evident, it's self-evident, right? We assume a couple things, like we assume humans act. That was Mises' grand assumption, like the axiom, the action axiom of humans act purposefully, right?
we have a problem and then we strategize on how can we allocate our resources available now
so that the problem is gone in the future. And then we act and we manifest a temporal change
of solving a problem that we have, not just for us, also for others, right?
If from the starting point, we can deduce a bunch of stuff on top, right? And so Mises went
incredibly far with deducing economic reason out of a simple axiom of humans act purposefully
and and and then we get property rights right that's that's the thing like i have own self
ownership is is a conclusion of of this very obvious starting point and the thing is it's a
self-evident starting point like if you would tell me that hey i am not acting like i cannot
act right now right i'm not acting purposefully well you're just forming the words right that's
that actually tried to convince me that you're not acting purposefully,
but that itself is an action.
So it's this tautology where you cannot really deny it.
Hoppe added on top of this the axiom of argumentation,
and also quite similar of humans have the ability to, with reason,
come to the truth and to argue and to try to convince the other person of that sad truth.
And from this point, Hoppe argues that we can actually deduce an ethics.
and he comes to the conclusion that property rights are not just a value-free logic from
action. It's inherent in saying basically what ought not to be done. So you shall not steal
is a objective rationale, a response or like a conclusion from the action axiom and the
argumentation axiom both applied. And then what I think the third addition to this trilogy of
axioms is from Eric Voskule, a contemporary economist and
bitcoiner, who introduces the axiom
of resistance. Meaning a system can be designed
to resist external control. We can
have a system that, and if the user
resists the attacker, he will be secure.
And that allows us to build technologies that enshrine this property right in reality in an unfuckwithable way Cryptography is perfect If you resist the attacker and you do not share your private key
then encryption is secure and bulletproof and cannot be violated. And so all of these three
things together, I would say, is a proof that freedom exists. Freedom is a good thing. And we
can engineer freedom into existence. And that's wonderful. That's amazing, mate. I mean, that's,
I'm just astonished that I kind of only just having these thoughts that even that the idea
of property rights might be as natural as one plus one equals two. You know, like it's encoded
into the framework within which we live.
And you know, it's really interesting because I had a great discussion with a space scientist
about a year ago, and we were talking about Mars.
And when you get to Mars, who's going to own Mars?
Because it's true.
Who's going to own, when Elon gets to Mars, who's going to own?
And the UN in the 60s came up with an agreement that nobody owns Mars.
In fact, they said nobody owns the universe, I think, outside of the Earth.
Typical communists, right?
It's like they do, right?
But the truth is, and he said this, he said, look, it's the John Lockean principle.
If you get to Mars first and you build a city, of course it's yours.
You know, it's not anyone else's.
That's theft.
But it was just really mind-blowing to realize yesterday morning that this isn't some made-up idea.
This is an idea that has been discovered.
It's like a bit of physics that got discovered or a bit of math theory that got discovered.
It was always there.
We didn't just really know how to phrase it and how to look at it.
And then some guys just come and put the reality into verbal thoughts that just make sense, that adequately describe it.
Well, in the case of property rights, the digital realm offers you the possibility to create like the purest form of property.
Because property is quite an intangible thing, really, isn't it?
When you actually talk about what is yours.
but in in the digital realm property is a very specific thing and i'm not even sure
that that say take bitcoin for example bitcoin's not property really but your ability to access it
is the property exactly you know what i mean yeah but what is that what what is that that's like well
in my book i call it coordination just make me what's your book i didn't know you had a new book
Is it written and published already?
Well, kind of.
So it's called The Praxeology of Privacy.
And the idea of the book is to bridge Austrian economics,
Praxeology, with cypherpunks, cryptoanarchy, and privacy,
and to make that synthesis.
Because I first fell down the Austrian rabbit hole.
I'm an economist first and foremost.
Later, I discovered software and freedom tech and technologies.
And that turned me into a cypherpunk.
And so I would like to bridge that gap and to show that there is incredible support between those two ways of thought.
So far that privacy, Mises, Hoppe, Voskule, they assume privacy to be the case.
If you want to act purposefully, you need to have a private space for your mind to come up with your decisions.
If that private space is not there, then we don't have purposeful action, actually.
Things turn into behavior.
If someone else can spy on you and see what you're thinking, and he can interfere with you before you make your decisions,
then you're no longer for yourself deciding on how to act.
You're behaving according to someone else who has told you.
And so action, argumentation, resistance, they presuppose that privacy exists.
and I think that's a powerful realization.
And then on top of that,
we can actually build systems of interaction
both in meatspace as well as in cyberspace
that follow economic reasoning,
that follow economic laws.
So like for example homesteading a private key
to the later use to encrypt your communication.
You're not claiming ownership in the number itself
but you're claiming ownership in the access right
to that information.
And so this opens up a large amount of coordination markets
that I think in traditional Austrian literature
has been dreadfully underdeveloped.
Stefan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property
is probably the main book that covers this quite well.
And then the cypherpunks are not bullish enough.
They don't understand of how fundamentally,
deeply correct they are
and the technologies that they build are.
so we need that bridge that's the book privacy and property it was almost like privacy is the
that's why it's called privacy is the property privacy is the property though isn't it yeah it's
like the the property isn't the thing it's the access to the thing and deciding what to do with
And privacy is kind of stopping people having access.
Yeah, exactly.
Eric Hughes defines privacy as the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world.
That's a choice.
That's you choosing what to say when and to whom.
Do you think that anything to do with the reason why privacy is such a bad word at the moment?
Do you think that's anything to do with people trying to...
So, of course it is.
That's the communism versus individualism.
That's the battle that goes on.
It's private versus public.
Yes, it is.
A private, sovereign individual versus the public common good.
Yes.
This is fundamental at the pivot point between freedom and slavery.
A slave does not have privacy.
A slave has to tell the master what he has done.
Otherwise, he gets whipped until he tells him.
It's fundamental, isn't it?
It is extremely fundamental.
But it's probably as old as we are as well.
And it's probably a cycle that will continue forever.
It's just what side are you on, isn't it?
It's like, who are you?
Are you the collectivist or are you the individualist?
Yeah.
And again, I think it's just clearly articulating these everlasting truths
and seeing if this is actually a correct articulation thereof.
and then adjusting your behavior to be in accordance with what we know to be true.
And I'm pretty convinced at this point that property is a thing.
Like you own yourself.
It is.
I think cryptography and Bitcoin proved it.
It's proven.
And it's also proven that the way to create property is to add work to it.
Proof of work.
It's so amazing.
It's so amazing that someone in the 17, John Locke's like 1700s or something, realized this.
Because he didn't have a kind of, I mean, all he had was what it felt like in real life.
That's mine.
Because it's not intuitive to think that just because I add my labor to this piece of land, it's now mine.
I suppose it becomes more intuitive when someone comes to take it.
And they're like, what did you do?
Well, I'm now just, this is a separate thing.
I'm now just bigger than you.
This is, the land is now mine, not because I toiled on the land, but because I'm bigger than you.
And it's, yeah, my mind is, my mind, it's just been blown a bit more, actually.
It was, I don't think, I thought about it yesterday and I thought, that's incredible.
I'm just realizing now it's deeply incredible that as an understanding.
Yeah.
Yeah. And it's a difficult understanding to reach and it's easy to make mistakes there.
Like Locke made a lot of mistakes, right?
Menger cleaned up some of his mistakes.
Like Locke still assumed that value is intrinsic to the good itself.
So did Adam Smith, right?
Like actual Marxism is in line with Adam Smith's thoughts, basically.
Like Adam Smith made mistakes that if consequentially applied leads to Marxism, ultimately, right?
So that's where Carl Menger comes in with subjective individualism, right?
or subjective value theory and individualism as a methodology.
And still, Menger made mistakes that Mises fixed,
in terms of time preference for example Rothbard makes mistakes or Rothbard fixes some of the inconsistency of mises like mises was still a statist right rothbard is is way more radical in in his anarchism
right and and rothbard makes mistakes that that hoppy fixes and hoppy makes mistakes that that
voskiel fixes and so on um it's really really difficult to to come up with with a proper actually
correct statement but it's not impossible and you might not have a fully correct magnum magnus open
theory but but some parts of those are correct and then you just have to be careful to to not
apply the mistakes continuously right which which certainly happens and will probably lead to some
some suffering but but ultimately when we when we're serious with ourselves and we don't lie to
ourselves we realize that some of these things are actually correct and it's scary like if to to
To realize that freedom is correct, the state is evil, that's a scary thing because it literally subverts hundreds, thousands of years of propaganda.
It's not scary.
I think sometimes it's hard to act on an intuition or on a feeling, but on a provable theory like that.
And I know all theories are falsifiable potentially, I suppose.
But really, things like that do help.
Like if you know those things, you carry their abstract power with you into your interactions with the world. You really do.
And to some extent, you're just not ashamed anymore to be free.
You realize that, hey, I'm standing on solid ground here.
This is correct.
I don't need to be ashamed for living and acting freely.
This is just how it's supposed to be.
And I'll do it.
And if someone doesn't like it, so what?
Yeah, it's justifiably a reason to exist in that state, in that way.
And that is really powerful.
I mean, that is the power of abstract ideas that can propel human beings to stand strong.
It's not even that it makes you angry and to want to fight.
It's the opposite.
It's like standing your ground.
It's like when something comes at you, you just stay as you are because you believe so deeply in this, in who you are and the ideas that you hold.
It's really amazing, mate.
Do you know, I never thought about that before.
It's weird.
I'm 54.
I've been alive a long time.
And you've been interested in freedom for a long time, right?
Yes, yes.
So that just shows you stuff is unintuitive.
Or maybe that's part of the intelligence is that humans are so good at ignoring stuff.
what what i what it is though is it's like i i didn't think to i didn't realize how powerful it
was i didn't realize how powerful it was that's all it's like if you if you told me one plus one
is two and i go yeah i know and then someone comes in and says no one plus one is three i'll
i'll fight that battle if they're not insane obviously it's very easy to fight that
because you're like, dude, I'm going to win.
I'm definitely going to win.
Probably not, actually.
I was about to say, I met a guy who was very, very confident
that 1 plus 1 is actually 3.
Come on, I think I read about this.
What is the theory behind it?
I have no idea.
No, but there was a guy that went on.
I can't remember how he justified it.
It was something to do with negative numbers as well.
and abstract maths, you know.
I don't know.
It all sounds very confident,
but then probably if you get an actual mathematician
to argue with him, it will get confusing very quick.
That's probably the gist of it.
I don't know, real foundational mathematics is weird.
Yeah, of course it is.
I mean, I think at some point everything just collapses as well,
doesn't it?
it's a bit like physics you know you can learn a bunch of stuff but then at some point
it's all it's all wrong you know the the theory is it's almost like the theory is it's all wrong
you know the theory is there's no theory well there's the map and the territory and the territory
is not the map and vice versa right and we're trying to reason about and articulate this crazy
reality that we find ourselves in and obviously words don't do it justice um we probably need
way more bandwidth like we probably need some terabytes of data being between us
so that we get a more serious grip on the situation so i'm we don't know all that much
what else is going on in your new book then and where can people buy it or is it still so right
Now I'm mainly asking for review.
That's the main thing.
So it's version 0.1.0 is released.
I started writing this like five years ago,
and then I didn't do anything for like 4.9 years.
I get that.
I really do.
You know, that journey into a book,
especially when it's about this kind of stuff,
you can't just say, right, this morning I'm going to,
you know, I'm going to write the chapter.
you might need to go and spend days hiking up a mountain and just meditating the whole way before
you even get anywhere near what you want to talk about and then you gotta find the words you know
so i the i the title came to me first like i was the praxeology of privacy i was like
someone needs to write a book about that um and nobody did for i'm not sure i even really
understand it can you explain praxeology to me praxeology to me twice and it's one of those things
where you go okay but then what is it but i still don't really know what it is well i like it almost
literally it means the the logic of human action yeah but but that's just that's not a thing is it
well it's it's like what what can we what can we deduce what can we say with certainty based on on
the fact that humans act right like what is the consequences of human action maybe one one
interesting way of saying is like a very praxeological statement is if we introduce a
minimum wage that leads to unemployment and that is a logically correct statement
once we define our terms and and assumptions etc but ultimately if we forbid merchants or
entrepreneurs to pay people less than a certain amount then they will simply not hire them because
that person has a marginal benefit to the business that is less than the marginal cost,
and therefore it's not profitable, right? And so people will not get employed.
But why is that praxeology? Why isn't that not just...
It's almost like you don't need to put a word on it. It's just logic, right?
Well, but there's different types of logic, right? And maybe one other way of differentiating is,
and I'm not even sure if that's correct, but that's how I have it in my mind, is that so
Praxeology is about the consequences of human actions, like what happens when we act in a certain way.
And psychology, for example, is the reasons for acting in a certain way.
Like why do people act this way rather than what is the consequence of whatever particular way people have acted.
And so it's this maybe praxeology also is so weird because there was like the war of the methods, Mises called it.
der Methodenstreit,
where it really,
a hundred years ago,
it was not clear
how should we think
about economics.
There was the historicism
out of Germany,
I think.
Popper.
Yeah, exactly.
Who was basically,
well, we can deduce
historical activity.
We can deduce economic loss
based on historical activity.
It has always been like this,
therefore it will be like that
in the future.
Sorry, that wasn't Karl Popper,
was it?
I think it was Popper.
Well, you wrote a book
called The Poverty of Historicism.
didn't he which is that you can't prove anything you can only disprove it which is slightly different
to what you're talking about i think but anyway um yeah so so and mises basically said that no
they're humans act right so or in other words maybe humans act differently right we we're we're
all we're ever changing it's not like we pick up a rock we drop it and it falls with the same speed
at the same time all the time, like physics, right?
Economics is not really like that
because humans do weird stuff all the time.
We're not really predictable that much, right?
So instead of seeing how things were in the past
and then trying to figure out
how they're going to be in the future,
let's instead come up with some foundational assumptions, right?
Axioms like human action, like time preference, et cetera.
And then from there on out we simply use logic, right?
Like, and logic similar to as mathematics or physics but not applied to these
and eight objects that just behave,
but applied to human ingenuity and creativity
to come up with different solutions in different situations.
How do you describe then something like property rights,
the theory of property rights?
So the gist is humans act,
meaning we use our body and other resources that we have available
to solve our problems, to remove our uneasiness, as Mises would say.
And for this, we need to have control over scarce resources like our body,
like clothing, like food, like fire or fuel, etc.,
in order to solve these problems.
And the thing is that humans have an infinite amount of problems.
We're really a troubled creature.
And there's a lot of humans, right?
but resources are limited and scarce meaning we can only if we have a steak and in front of us
either you eat it or i eat it there's a potential conflict over who can allocate these resources
according to his own problems and and so we need to address this conflict in in any shape or form
right and and there is a couple different ways that we could go about it we can do it like the
un nobody owns it neither of us gets to eat it it will rot on the table and we both starve so that's
not a great solution but when they say nobody owns it they mean we own it basically that's the second
thing of both of us the plebs don't own it but there's a priest over there right and he's a
special human so he actually owns it he gets to decide who gets it right and you know he chooses
whichever of us gets to eat it or maybe he just takes it all for himself right so here we have a
priest class, different quality of human. And that doesn't seem right. This guy is just a dude like
you and me. So we would like to have a rule that is defensible across all the categories, right? So
to make sure that it just makes sense for everyone involved ultimately. And so this
slave and master differentiation doesn't seem to be right. There's also economic reasons why this
leads to all types of misallocation of resources but that's kind of a later part of the conclusion
and then the third way would be well either you or i own it specifically whoever homesteaded it
right who raised the cow right who butchered it who cooked the steak that was intermingling your
labor with scarce resources and that were previously not owned and therefore the person
who did it gets it. And that is a property right, right? The right of how to allocate the scarce
resource that can only be allocated in one place at one time in one way. And that is property rights
based on homesteading. And this is one of the three options of how we can allocate those resources.
And it's clearly the most defensible from common sense logic, but also from the consequences that
rise out of that because obviously if nobody owns it we all die right because nobody gets to eat
anything if we have a priest class then naturally all the capital will flow to them and so we will
have insanely rich slave masters and very poor and suffering slaves um obviously not great and
and and so the third way is that whoever is productive gets to choose how to allocate the
fruits of his labors in his continual quest of productivity and this means that we reward those
who create and to some extent we punish those who who don't right if if you cannot raise your
own meat and butcher it and and and cook it then you will go hungry because you cannot go to your
neighbor who did it correctly and just hit him until he gives you the steak and what i just my
mind is blown and it's reeling what happens to ownership when and this may not happen but i think
probably will when ai takes scarcity away because then we we live in a really great world
because we'll have abundance right abundance is having scarce resources that can only be
allocated for one specific task by one specific person at one specific time but we have so many
goods available that we simply don't care about it like ownership so ownership doesn't even become
a thing. Ownership is a solution
to a problem of a conflict
of allocating resources. Of scarcity.
Yes. Ownership
is the solution to scarcity.
Yes. So without scarcity, you don't
need ownership. One great example for this.
It's a bit communistic, mate.
It is, but
it's a good type of communism.
So, for example,
I'm a communist of air
here, right? There's air in this room.
And it's
abundant, right? You can breathe as much
as you want we won't run out of it i can breathe as much as you want there is no real conflict over
who gets to breathe this air in this room it's abundant our atmosphere is amazing right now let's
go underwater on a scuba diving session and we have one bottle of compressed air right and we're
very far down and it'll take us a long way to come up and we have only so much air and it's not enough
for the both of us, right?
Now, all of a sudden,
we've reintroduced the unabundance,
like air is abundant above water.
It's very much not abundant below water, right?
And as soon as it's not abundant and scarce,
then we need to allocate the resources
and there needs to be a way that we figure it out, right?
So in the scuba diving example,
whoever packed it gets it.
Maybe out of the goodness of your heart,
you decide to sacrifice your own use of error and give it to someone else but it's still your
property it's still your property yeah that's incredible oh my god i'm so retarded sometimes
there's a lot of things that i i i wish i'd thought about a long time ago um but
property it's such a it's on the face value it's such a boring subject but actually it's a
deeply, deeply, deeply interesting thing. And, um, and it's funny because economics is the same and
it's all wrapped up in the same, you know, value transfer property, all this kind of stuff. You,
you'd never know as a young child that this is, could be as deeply fascinating as it is,
but it is. And they don't teach that. I mean, I'm already thinking about how I'm going to broach
this subject with my kids because because i'm gonna and it's it's it's completely important
because it solves all kids have a real problem with property don't they it's like a it's a real
issue for kids oh it's my stuff or it's this or kind of and and this is really helping me
mediate it's really helping me understand the best way to mediate these things you know
I started my economics career as a kid.
And the main reason why I got interested in this was because I had to work.
Work is a great teacher on a lot of aspects, specifically about, let's call it entrepreneurial logic.
I wanted to understand why do we have to work in the first place because it sucks.
But that's scarcity as well, right?
That's the reason we have to work.
Scarcity.
And the reason, and work creates property.
Yeah.
And work creates abundance, right?
Which cures property right Yeah No Oh no The solution of how can we reach communism is really hard work oh my god uh i don know i don know i i i just reached the edge of my um my sort of
psychological aura i think you know how you've got this kind of bubble of knowledge i'm sitting
on the edge yeah and my feet are dangling into chaos i can feel it i'm that's a great place to be
in that's where the fun starts it is where the fun starts but if in my case it's where i just go
i look like i'm looking at the tv as a young child yeah no but like that's that's the thing
man when when i so after i started working i i picked up like keynesian bullshit economics books
from the library ultimately, right?
And I didn't get it at all.
It was so weird.
It didn't make any sense.
It was not useful, right?
I came there with a problem of like,
why do we work?
How do I become a better entrepreneur?
Basically, none of that was discussed.
So I kept looking
and eventually found the Austrian school.
And compared to the crap of Keynesianism
and communism and that economic theory,
it's so obvious.
It's so naturally obvious
that you don't need fancy words to describe it.
You don't need crazy math formulas or whatever.
You need like a paragraph of logic, basically.
Why are communistic ideas so prevalent, though, in the West?
What's that all about?
I mean, really, you have to think of it like that.
You have to look at Western civilization in its current form and go,
there's a lot of collectivist ideas absolutely in control.
Yeah. Well, propaganda, brainwashing, and mind control.
Yeah, but why?
Why?
Because the slave masters profit from it.
But how come they manage to profit from it? It's insane.
I mean, if the slave thinks that his current situation is just and good and proper, then why would he ever rebel, right? Or do anything about it?
Yeah, I'm thinking more about the motivation of the slave master.
I mean, he gets to keep the slaves. That's great for him.
I don't think there's many of them compared to the other ones.
It's a really weird quirk.
That's why the psychology is so important.
Today's slave masters are master psychologists.
They might know nothing about economics,
but they do know psychology deeply, deeply well.
And how to twist the mind into doing something
that is anti-human and anti-the person who does the actions.
right but there is thousands tens of thousands year of years of of wisdom tradition built up
on how to make sure that the king stays the king right that is the number one concern of anyone
in power with power over others of how do i make sure that the slaves don't rebel against me and
kill me because they have every reason to it's the asymmetry of it though that doesn't seem
sustainable. Do you know what I mean? Like the fact that we often trend towards this
arrangement of a couple, a small number of people in charge of masses of people,
just, it seems illogical. There's this weird asymmetry, but it's, but it's obviously part of
the human condition, isn't it? I don't know what, I mean, maybe we're evolving out of it. Maybe we
Maybe this is a journey. Maybe these ideas of freedom, free market are this time. There's an evolutionary step there. I don't know. Is it possible or is this just a merry-go-round that just keeps going around and around and around?
I think a lot of the old tricks still work very well. And technology has made new tricks work way better. I mean, if the masters of propaganda would have today's technology available, back in the days, you could make maybe a radio broadcast and everyone had the same propaganda.
And, you know, people were probably talking about it and in their own club saying, you know, how this is BS or whatever.
Nowadays, we can make tailor-made propaganda specialized for that one individual where we have terabytes of data of what are his preferences, what are his weaknesses, how can we control him and manipulate him.
And then on top of that, if there is anyone resisting, then we will catch that in our surveillance efforts and we can exclude that person, call him a racist anti-Semite terrorist and single him out so that his influence of getting other people out of the propaganda will be tragically diminished.
I spoke to a guy a few months ago about AI and he pointed out that probably in the not too distant future, like TikTok-like platforms, if not TikTok itself, will just be 100% AI generated content in the moment, specifically for you.
It'll be like, you know, you think social media is addictive now.
You wait till in real time an AI is generating lifelike videos specifically for your brain and pumping them out at you.
And what kind of dystopia is that, man?
That is unbelievable when you think about it.
Well, but there is a chance that we use this tech for good.
And we just need to put our freedom propaganda and ship it first.
you know maybe that's how we get everyone no i don't think it is because i don't think people
want that yeah you have to want it like the the way the algorithm works is on your attention is
it spots what you like very very quickly and it could be a microsecond that you pause that it's
aha you know and then it pulls that thread and then it goes for it and if you're not interested
in freedom mate there's no way they're going to show you freedom freedom content and i don't think
many people are. I think it's 15, 20% of the world at any one time, probably less.
Probably less.
Yeah. And I don't think that's going to change. That's what makes me, I don't know.
You know, like the dream would be, especially if you believe in freedom, is I want everyone to be
free. And I think if you go down that path for a number of years, you realize actually,
whilst I still would like everyone to be free, I'm not fighting for that. I'm fighting for myself
and my family and probably right at the end you're just fighting for yourself you know and and some
people just actually don't want it so who are you to tell them what they would like that that's why
i love the second realm and crypto anarchy so much because we're not trying to force anyone to join us
like we're not trying to take down the old system and and and make it stop those systems can continue
we're not fighting against them we're building something better that we think is better right
Maybe you disagree and that's totally fine and sure you can try to stop us, but we will continue building something that we prefer and then we'll use it.
And it seems to me that the value created, the capital accumulated in a free system will be so outrageously larger than whatever the slavery system can produce that over enough time it will be clear which system is more beneficial to more and more people.
and then people will move at that point.
That was what first got me interested
in the Free Cities movement.
Titus was talking about something on a stage and he said you know we going to build this thing right And if you like it great come If you don don And people kept saying opt in to me opt in opt in And it really started making sense
And I had a very funny conversation recently on this podcast
where we were discussing the notion of free cities
as thousands of competing jurisdictions.
And the natural conclusion you draw from that is,
sure, a free city can be anything.
it's just that it's competing right so you can have a communist free city if you want
but what's going to happen is it's going to attract the people that want the free shit
and no one's going to go there and it's going to collapse and what free cities if they really did
evolve into a competing set of places slowly but surely they would show what governance works best
they'd literally be a signal yeah it's incredible really and you know it's a little bit
similar to what happened with with cryptocurrencies right like cypherpunks tried to build online money
for decades right satoshi figured something out that still works today which is a miracle but
what he mainly figured out was that he started the age of anarchy in money
where back in the day it was outrageous to even think or contemplate that a private person could
issue his own money right that would be ridiculous only the central bank can do that it was highly
restricted of who can start a new money and if you were the one starting a new money you got killed
straight away right um even if you dare to for example use gold right like gaddafi or whatever
um straight to gulag um then after satoshi we've decreased the cost of creating a new money
like tragically like you there's literally a website to it now is there there's a website
where you with a couple clicks and a nice pretty user interface can create a fork of bitcoin that
has whatever parameters you want you know two minute block time five megabyte blocks and you
know whatever hundred million tokens in total circulation whatever right it's it's super easy
to do it's just code and we can now do it not once but a million times every day it's so cool
So hardcore anarchy free money in a free market in the production of new money.
And that started a competition of money that is something that we've never seen before.
And sure, Bitcoin is still to this day the best one that we found so far, right?
And that's great.
But the fact that there is competition will make sure that we will find a solution.
like i'm not married to bitcoin people think that if bitcoin fails for whatever reason that that was
it i don't think so at all right we've we finally are over the hump where individuals can anonymously
even create a new money and design it however they see fit and then publish it and people on the
market will will choose it to use it or not isn't it that the free market can only exist in a place
where people aren't making decisions in a way.
Not making decisions, but like a free market
can't really occur in the world.
There's always going to be some limitation
because to be human is to sort of meddle a little bit
with the free market.
Whereas online in code, without the human element,
you get pure free market principles, don't you?
Is that true?
Well, I guess free market is an absence of coercion, right? And I guess specifically if we want to pin down on one thing that makes a free market, it's the non-existence of monopolies. So a monopoly, according to Austrian economics, happens whenever someone can prevent a new market participant from providing a service.
Which is coercion, though.
It's coercion, exactly.
You can, at point of force, stop someone from doing a service because you need a license, because you need to pay some taxes, because you need to have special education or whatever.
But all those things are human interactions.
You can't do that in code, can you?
If everyone is using, say Bitcoin, if everyone's using the same software, you can try, you can introduce a bit of malicious code that does that, but it doesn't have an effect.
It only has effect on your version of it.
Well, I mean, maybe one example for this is the cookie banner bullshit that the EU put upon us, right?
That every website now has to declare that it's using something as basic as a cookie and annoy users with stupid pop-ups.
And you have to say yes or no or whatever.
Exactly. Right. So that is an intervention, a triangular intervention where the state says to people, you can only have a website if you put up the stupid cookie banner. And if you don't, you go to jail.
Do you?
Probably. Right. I mean, that's the thing.
I've got one of those. We're not in the EU, am I? Probably the same in the UK.
Okay, but that's with any time where you're violating a state law, ultimately death is the consequence.
Like if you would consistently resist and say, no, I will not do a cookie number or cookie banner, whatever, then they come by your door and say, hey, you have to do this.
And say, no, then we'll take you to jail.
And when you still say no, then they will threaten to shoot you.
And if you still say no, they will shoot you.
Right.
The ultimate tool of the state is death.
Always has been.
And the threat of death is usually enough to get people to do what they want.
I was going to say, let's end it there.
We've been talking for a really long time now.
And I would go on for another five hours.
But I need to process some stuff because you've really just helped me to discover a whole new avenue that I'm going to pursue.
It's funny.
I'm still in shock that there is, once again, another aspect of thought that I just didn't bother thinking about.
Which is weird when you think about it.
We're so great at ignoring stuff.
Like really deeply, we ignore so much of the sensory input that we get.
And the same goes for ideas.
I mean, there's too many ideas to ever contemplate, even partially, right?
I know what you mean.
I feel like I'm entertaining too many at the moment.
I need to go and lie down.
let's end on a really positive note mate um um what is there like let's go back to your book
because i think and by the way can i call this episode the praxeology of privacy is that is that
cool yeah sure because i think that's a really interesting set of words and i think it would be
interesting people would see that and go what the hell does that mean i think it might draw people
in i'm not stealing it i i'm i'm borrowing it like the the good thing is uh you can't steal ideas yes
and i published this book in the public domain like have you yeah like so you can get the book
on towards liberty.com slash pop um will be in the show notes as well i'm sure and um there is
just all the chapters all the pdfs etc do whatever the fuck you want with it um i'm gonna print it
after some round of review already some people started printing the book you know great um but i
i want to make sure those ideas are at least not terribly wrong i know what you mean it is it is it
is scary isn't it committing a bunch of especially if you took a long time to to come up with them
it's quite scary to commit them to a piece of paper or or a tome and then think uh you know a
year later going oh my god at least if it digital you can kind of edit them a bit but i mean i i i think certainly in its in its core is quite a bit like well my john locke experience it like it it using extreme logic i can prove that thing so so there
is a limit i mean we're talking about if in order to disprove certain things you need to enter some
weird quantum realm of of brand of madness or whatever and i don't think that people are going
there you know but you're pretty sure you've you've got it cornered all right with praxeology
of privacy yeah yeah it's it it's a it's a really cool topic and like i i know there's a lot of
austrian economists listening to your to your show i mean there's a lot of other people as well
which is great but especially the austrian economists it's such a shame that they don't
get the cypherpunks like there was i don't know why do you say that though what what is it they
don't get about the cypherpunk. I mean, cypherpunks tend to be Austrian economists, right?
Exactly. That's the thing. So many cypherpunks are Austrian economists, and a lot of them make
quite big economic errors, but still, there's way fewer Austrian economists that are actually
cypherpunks. And I'm not exactly sure why that is. It might be that the Austrian economists are
just a bit boomers.
No, yeah.
It's like a suit and tie event.
I think cypherpunks are too edgy.
Yeah, they're a punk.
I think your average Austrian,
that I know anyway,
I mean, would see, yeah,
you know, someone with a hoodie at a computer.
That's a cypherpunk.
Whereas an Austrian economist
is like gliding around Vienna
who is spitting facts, you know?
Yeah.
And so there are a lot of great Austrian economists that did get Bitcoin, etc. early on.
Stefan Kinsella, Conrad Graf, etc.
And so they did a tremendous benefit of getting Bitcoiners up to speed with what the economic facts underlying Bitcoin are.
And so I just want to be part of that tradition to bridge that gap and to tell economists that
maybe the thing i had a really depressive period in my life when i deeply understood economics and
the evils of inflation and intervention and i had no i could not see a way out of it right that is
unspeakably depressive of seeing how the world is systematically collapsing
and not knowing how to fix it and i feel like that that is the mindset of most austrian economists
even mises was like yeah we can try it with ideas you know maybe if we talk about it enough we can
fix it that's such a bullshit solution i mean obviously it's important right but that's not
gonna help us they're just gonna burn the books and then that to to get out of that um out of that
kind of depression you need to have a a golden future an orange future to look forward to it's
something where you can see that hey actually we have it in our power to fix this not not just
to stop the pain but to make it work so incredibly well like the amount of capital that we can
accumulate in this new world in this new cyberspace is is outrageous it's it's baffling like look at
bitcoin what we achieved in what 15 years i mean damn like it's now larger than most companies are
It's larger than most fiat currencies are.
And it was just a bunch of dudes in hoodies on their laptop.
That's insane, right?
That is the most mind-blowing, actionable improvement in the human condition for thousands of years.
And we just did it, right?
And we did it knowing the underlying economic reasoning for why this is going to work.
and the theoretical and cryptological underpinnings of these are the cryptographic tools we can deploy
to make sure that it becomes unfuckwithable right it will succeed to resist right the cost
of resistance is now so low in fact resistance has become profitable if you resisted fiat inflation
in the last 10 years you're a billionaire right so resistance is no longer just this dangerous
thing that only weird people do right people that we shun from society no it's the people who
resisted now have the treasury the capital to build new nations ultimately so this really is
is an incredible success and bitcoin is just the beginning right we have so much more that
the cypherpunks can build for us that especially if the cypherpunks understand just how deeply
correct they are right we can give the cypherpunks even as economists we can give the cypherpunks
even more wind in their sails by showing them how how how deeply correct and and how
foundationally solid they are that they don't have to apologize for hey like we're working on
this new privacy technology, please don't put us in jail, right? But rather, we're working on
something that helps people express themselves to the fullest, that leads to them being able to
calculate their allocation of resources, right? If we don't have perfect privacy, we have the same
calculation problem as socialism had. We don't have adequate prices that tell us how much things
are worth in a state of surveillance that is quite equivalent and so we we really have a massive
theoretical underlying foundation that cypherpunks can build on top of and become even more radical
i like we're not radical enough by far we can go even harder and i hope this book is is part of
saying thanks to the economists for for what you did and look at what the cypherpunks did and it's
perfectly in line and likewise to the cypherpunks i keep going even harder max that was a beautiful
monologue wait um we've got to end it there that's just perfect really really thank you again
appreciate it you blew my mind last time it took four hours this time it only took two hours so
you must be getting better but but um i really appreciate you and i'm always thankful that
whenever i send you a message you just turn up and we sit down and have a conversation i i i and
Thanks for that.
And I really hope other people can listen and go the same route,
because that's why I do this.
I want people to hear what I'm thinking.
And because I'm learning it in real time,
and my mind, my clogs are turning,
and I'm really starting to understand a new level of stuff.
And you're part of that journey, mate.
So many, many thanks indeed.
And yeah, thanks for coming over and see you next time.
Thanks.
No, I'm really looking forward to all of our conversations.
I'm looking forward to the next one, which might be in the Gulag, you know, when they put you in jail for thought crime.
I'll come visit if I'm not locked up by that point.
You'll be locked up, mate.
You'll be locked up before me.
We'll have so much fun in the Gulag.
We will.
We'll orange pill the captors.
It'll be fun.
Great to talk to you anyway.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.