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 151 of the Free Cities podcast.
Brought to you as always by our wonderful sponsors of the show, Veritas Villages.
Veritas Villages are freedom-oriented, energy-self-sufficient, luxury communities designed for people who want to enjoy peace of mind and real freedom in these uncertain times.
How many times have you heard me say that now?
hopefully it's something you're interested in and you're looking into it on our behalf
they're a fantastic company to work with they can help you live amongst like-minded neighbors
in a community that uses bitcoin and you can buy your property with bitcoin as well
more info as always at veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities it's all in the show notes of
course and don't forget we've got the prague conference coming up in just a couple of weeks
and Patrick, the founder of Veritas Villages,
will be speaking there and hanging out amongst everyone.
So if you have anything you want to talk to him about
or any of our other wonderful speakers,
grab a ticket now, freecitiesconference.com.
I almost said freecitiespodcast.com.
We don't actually have that domain yet.
freecitiesconference.com.
Formerly Liberty in Our Lifetime, as you may remember,
but everyone called it the Free Cities Conference.
So that's what we went with. Look down in the show notes for links to all these things.
And it's now on to today's show. Right. It's another dispatch from my trip to Riga recently.
Susie Violet Ward is a financial analyst and journalist who specializes in Bitcoin content.
You might have seen her commenting on TV news shows like GB News or writing in publications like Forbes.
Susie is also the CEO and the co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK.
Turns out also, I didn't know this one until I looked her up.
She previously had a column called My Two Sats in City AM.
Well, there's something I remember.
I was working in London as a journalist when City AM started.
It seemed strange at the time because it's an actual newspaper that they give out free on the tube.
It didn't seem like a good business model at the time because lots of other newspapers,
physical newspapers were struggling to make any money.
Anyway, back to the show.
Here's the AI summary of this episode.
in quotes what starts as a light-hearted chat about chewing gum for focus quickly evolves into
a deep thought-provoking conversation about freedom privacy and the future of our digital
world in this episode Susie and Tim explore the bittersweet reality of living at a time when
technological innovation and financial revolution coexist with growing surveillance and control
From the UK's Online Safety Act to digital IDs and the normalization of data collection, they unpack how our modern conveniences may be costing us more than we realize.
Yet, amid the concerns, they find hope in Bitcoin, in community and in the power of individual action.
And it finishes.
If you've ever wondered how to navigate an increasingly authoritarian world without losing your sense of autonomy or your optimism, this episode is a must listen.
Did you notice I asked Venice, the AI, to be a little bit more engaging with its summaries?
Did it fail? 50-50 anyway.
In fact, it mentions a lighthearted chat about chewing gum.
I actually cut that out the conversation it happened right at the start before we officially started speaking so you won't actually be able to hear that FYI it was neuro gum I don't know whether you've ever heard of that stuff I got I saw it on Joe Rogan a few years ago and he he he was eating it and I managed to track down what the pack what package was I use it at the end of a very long day of recording podcasts like this one when I met Susie.
I might add also that sometimes when I get together with another Brit, especially when they're a journalist, I do sometimes tend to rant a bit.
So apologies if I'm ranting at all here. Right.
Subscribers to the show on Fountain.fm.
I hope you enjoyed your new bonus episode that I dropped last week.
There'll be another one coming next week.
you'll be happy to hear it's a chat I had with Giacomo Zuko on the Plan B forum space he was
interviewing me about free cities and bitcoin so look out for that one I will be posting it
next week early in the week hopefully right onto the show and it's time to grab that copy of a
dusty inky newspaper that's on the seat next to you on the tube then without making eye contact
with a single person please just settle down pop on your headphones sit back relax
and enjoy my conversation with Susie Ward
so do I call you Susie Susie but it's S-U-S-I-E oh is it yeah and the violet bit is that your
middle name or is that a double bound no it's it's my middle name yeah there's it's um i was
trying to distinguish well there is a reason why i use the it's a bit of a i don't know if it's a
boring story my dad my dad's mum's name was violet okay and so they gave me that as a middle name and
he always used to say to me um i'm really sorry i know you hate your middle name and i was like no
No, I don't, Dad.
Anyway, Dad died like 10 years ago before my Bitcoin journey.
And so I have it there as a tribute because I knew that he would be a Bitcoiner.
And so therefore, it's my little tribute to Dad to say I don't hate it.
It's stupid, I know.
But like, we all do these little things, don't we, I guess.
At least your name isn't Tim Allen, which is...
Do you remember Tall Time Tim?
Well, do you know who that is?
No.
Oh, God.
He's a, well, I mean, he's a very famous actor.
He used to do this film program called Tool Time in America.
And I recognize the name Tim Allen.
I didn't know that that was.
Well, I changed mine back to Timothy to distinguish myself from that,
because I used to be a journalist in London.
And when in the early days of the Internet, if you Google Tim Allen,
I didn't stand a chance.
I thought maybe if I make it Timothy and it kind of worked, you know,
I did distinguish myself and then one Christmas um Tim Allen did a Christmas movie and it was
called Christmas with Tim Allen and you know sometimes on the tube they do blanket campaigns
literally for something and everywhere you look is Tim Allen says happy Christmas and everyone was
just sending it to me and it was quite funny the first time but then obviously after a while it got
bit boring um anyway timothy's a lovely name i know but the well it's funny you should say that
i agree but tim's more friendly than timothy tim nice and if you stick to timothy then you've
there's this kind of um politeness that happens ah so and so that means when someone goes straight
to tim yeah it's quite a quite a sort of it's an aggressive move if if you're known as as your
full name and they go straight for tim it's kind of like hold a minute you know i haven't given you
permission it's almost a bit like that because um tim's the kind of slangy version of it it'd be
like if you were a school teacher and you were miss you know miss ward yeah and someone came in
and said hey susie can hold on a minute yeah it's teacher student relationship and all that yeah
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Anyway.
So I was thinking about a few things to talk about.
And I thought I went through, I just went through all your old tweets of the last sort of, I don't know, probably it was about three or four or five weeks.
Because it a good when journalists are big tweeters and you are a pretty big tweeter you not the biggest tweeters But you do you do tweet enough you can see what you been doing it a good timeline and um i find this time
we're living in at the moment is like a bittersweet because on one hand i'm super excited about what's
going on but on the other hand when you go through the kind of things you're reporting on
I mean, it's super depressing as well. It's really getting kind of serious, I suppose. And, and it is really bittersweet, because the Bitcoin thing is always exciting. And in one sense, gets from go better and better and better. But as a technology, when you look at what else is happening in the tech sphere, it's super.
um the authoritarians love it and i mean i was just looking through your tweet what you were
tweeting about tornado cash what's been going on um you know the uk's um online safety act
labor silencing um critics mass surveillance even talking about vpn restrictions now obviously
because of the online safety bill just it's a stupid idea because if you know even my kid my
youngest kid knows how to get around that kind of stuff you know and and when you look at it like
that there are certain things like vpn restrictions for example are a bit of a massive red flag for me
because the only time i've ever known that previously was out in china where they have
various firewalls and um so when things like that start happening i start getting a little bit
concerned and you're obviously concerned so like what's what's going on what's it all about what
why is all this stuff seem to be happening all at once it does seem to be happening all at once right
i i think it's been creeping in and i think for a long time we have been at this crossroads where
we will go down the freedom route or we'll go down the authoritarian route and so I think it's
the human rights foundation put out a percentage that 72 percent of the world are under some sort
of authoritarian regime and that includes countries like India that are technically
democracies but obviously in reality are not and I think that when you look at how we are sleepwalking
into authoritarianism and how tech can free us or enslave us we're going down the wrong path
at the moment that doesn't mean that we can't correct but it means that we have to be aware of
what's happening and the biggest concern that i have is that so many people don't see it because
it's insidious and it's slow and it creeps in and also there's this narrative i mean obviously
being bitcoiners we're quite keen on the idea of privacy and privacy has almost become a dirty word
but privacy is very normal and we shouldn't lose it just because we have all of this tech and
we have um we have a lot of legislation that's coming in uh the fat f travel rule um which is
What's that one? FATF Travel Rule? I don't think I've heard of that one. Is that about...
They want to collect KYC data on everybody and it basically travels with the transaction.
So it's a really... They're collecting so much data that isn't even needed.
And the reason why that is such a crazy idea is because they actually implemented it in TradFi 10 years ago.
So it was some G7 countries, they're completely unelected, coming together, putting together some legislation, put it together in TradFi.
It didn't stop money laundering.
I mean, the World Bank, I believe it's the World Bank, has been saying for about 20 years that 3% to 5% of global GDP can be attributed to illicit activities and money laundering.
so they haven't even stopped it in tradfi so if if it's proven not to work why are they now
implementing it in i hate to say the c word but crypto i mean when you when you look at all those
things there and when you said 70 percent 70 percent of people live under authoritarian regimes
72 percent i think it might sorry yeah um but that changed that probably changes all the time
to be fair it was a bit like the um cpi is that it's what they say there is and what actually
there is right because the uk is probably not included well yeah and i and i and i'm gonna i'm
gonna go there i think there are like i traveled 20 years ago to a lot of when i was a journalist i
went to war zones and this and that and blah blah blah and 20 or 30 25 years ago i used to look at
things and go blimey that's pretty full-on that's full-on they're stopping people from doing this
they're stopping if you're doing that i traveled a bit in china and sort of like and i now look at
these kind of things that are going on and say yes they are happening here now they're definitely
definitely happening here they're like the the fact that the um um the online safety bill in
the uk now which is quite obviously a gateway drug to complete kyc on the internet have you
noticed the way that they sell all of these it's for the kids safety normally isn't it right always
well i've got i've got three kids and i i did a big ranting introduction to my last
episode of this saying look if you think the government give a shit about your kids don't be
retarded of course they don't and if your kids if you're worried about your kids looking at porn on
the internet that's your responsibility it's nothing to do with the government you know and
you either bring up cool kids who understand all that stuff and who don't mind that and aren't
going to be interested in it or you block them yourself or you don't give them the tech in the
first place and that's something that well i used to write an opinion um i had a column called my
two sats and I used to have right opinion pieces so I would talk about how broken the world was and
how Bitcoin could potentially fix it and I wrote about the online safety bill that was coming
about two years ago and part of that article I said you know maybe the problem is we're normalizing
giving this highly addictive very dangerous technology to young children you can see it
you walk around somehow they've even got like little clips around their neck where they can
have the ipad constantly like a necklace um i went on holiday last week and we were going around
a water park and i thought oh brilliant somewhere where it's going to be phone free no they've just
invented a way that you can carry your phone with you in a water price a waterproof carrier
and it's unbelievable you've got children walking around a water park with their phones around their
neck like their parents actually think that's an important thing for them to have with them
why well it's obvious that one is a pacifier and you know i don't know i i find it equally
disturbing but i also feel for people who do it because it makes their life a lot easier because
we're time poor because money is broken because we don't have the the time or the energy to
police it in the way that it should be because everybody's stressed out there's no judgment
necessarily I mean I do think it shouldn't happen but I know what you mean though there
yeah that one I mean I I've done we've done our we've done it our way I've got three young kids
and they're very good in that sense but that was only because we were hard about it um and very
it was a tough love let's say my daughter was the last person in her class to get a phone
what year was that uh age 12 which is still young right she's got graphene phone she's got a hacked
google phone with graphene on it she knows about all this stuff i've she was the first person that
came to me and said oh dad look um when i go on um venice.ai which is the ai we use which is a
privacy ai doesn't leak your data doesn't you know she said is asking me even that was was
came under the umbrella of the online safety but she said this is um you know this asking me for my
date of birth and stuff and obviously you know i just said we'll switch the vpn to another country
then because you we leave it on uk we work we use a vpn for privacy reasons therefore we just leave
it on the uk all the time because it's annoying if you go to amazon and it says finish dutch you
know like Norwegian Kroner or something yeah right but now it's like oh god here we go this is now a
thing so every time my VPNs on and I know I using it to skirt these kind of things that serious now because now that that it probably a criminal offence is it I don even know if it a criminal offence or
I don't think so yet.
But presumably if they're telling companies to police their websites, which is what they're saying.
So if you're of a certain type of website, mainly porn sites, but like I say, Venice is ChatGPT.
It's a private version of ChatGPT.
So it's not a porn site in the slightest.
But they're being told to police it.
I mean, they're very sarcastic about it.
They say, look, you guys, you've got to enter your details here.
They've made a whole page about why it's ridiculous and stuff.
But I know, but that still doesn't stop you coming up against the problem of it.
Yeah. So who's in the who's in the wrong?
Do you happen to know? Is it that if you choose to skirt the user VPN, which is I think vast numbers of people must do it now.
I found it in China. A lot of people used to do that back then when I was there.
Who's who's the criminal in that situation? The people who have the website or the people using the VPN?
I don't think I don't think people using VPNs are being criminalized yet.
I think it will happen I think they will eventually clamp down on it I mean obviously
it's a very obvious work around now but I think that slowly they will start closing in
but what I don't understand about this what what blows my mind is that when did they stop just
going after the criminal it's the whole tornado cash thing you know why if somebody is doing
something wrong go after the person doing the thing that's wrong don't don't collect everybody
every innocent person's data don't stop them from using tools just because you can't catch the people
that are actually doing the bad thing like it for me it's it's a nonsense i think i mean you know
I'm not a conspiracy theorist much I do every now and then I dip my toes
dip my toes in but it seems to me that it might be a combination of complete incompetence in
government people that nobody likes or respects in positions of power thinking this is a good idea
yes right but I also do think there are people that let it happen who know exactly what's going
on and that muddies the waters and it makes it very difficult to know what's going on
but when I did actually write about the online safety bill when it was coming
two years ago in my column I highlighted one of the people that was working on the bill
somebody from the House of Lords and when I looked into his background he was just a diversity
officer in his previous life he had no tech experience he was blind and he would go on stage
with a guide dog and talk about cbdcs and the online safety bill and digital ids and it was like
because he was blind he gave it the diversity tick it felt deliberate and when you looked at
his background there was nothing to suggest that he was in any position to be creating
legislation like that that does appear to be the timeline that we're going through at the moment
we've i think we've reached this point in the sort of the democratic cycle where it's so broken now
the system of the democratic system that the incentives now mean that the worst people
go for those jobs anyone who is any good at what they do doesn't want to work at the government
they want to be they want to work in the private sector they want to do it properly they want to do
it well they want to do it free anyone who can't compete in the private sector goes into the
governmental sector and then looks back at everyone else because they suddenly realize wow i've got my
finger on the button here now everyone has to come to me and ask permission to do everything which is
what you know it's so frustrating when you see that situation arise we've got entrepreneurs on
one side and regulators on the other and the regulators regulating regulators so like then
crangles of regulators so nobody's got any accountability and that that so there's layers
upon layers so no no one can be held accountable you're right and they rarely probably i probably
it's a sweeping generalization but the the they rarely lose their jobs over stuff and if you do
you tend to you tend to move to another department or move sideways you know like
you often hear of people getting doing i mean i don't know it's a it's the only word for it's an
absolute shit show if you look at anyone who who comments on this stuff regularly and you go and
you look at their timeline on twitter or wherever it is they're posting nostre or whatever it's just
shit constantly just incompetent people saying ridiculous things in positions of power
Do you know what makes it even worse though?
Well, a lot.
This is the thing for me.
I think those people actually think they're doing the right thing.
Well, you wouldn't do it on purpose.
I mean, I know everyone's got their own history.
We've all got our quirks and we've all got our sort of stuff from the past that makes us do this, that and the other.
but i really do think that the system is incentivizing these people to seek out these
positions because it's there's it's a safe it's a safe place if you're that kind of a person because
you get paid whatever i mean the pandemic was a perfect example who did all right during the
pandemic people that worked in government yeah they didn't lose their jobs they went and worked
from home they weren't exactly had parties yeah yeah beside that i just mean your average person
working in a council or something like that you know yeah they're they're not really incentivized
to run their shop like a business and make money and do well it's very rare to see you know a local
council or you know i'm thinking that because that's what i'm of most contact with doing well
and and they're not they're mostly bankrupt at the moment mostly seem to be slowly fleecing everyone
more and more and more every like i was someone was do you not have to pay for your brown bin
as an extra add-on no i was just about to mention that we don't even have one check this out so i
live in i live right in the middle of nowhere in the countryside fair enough but our at one point
our bins were collected once every three weeks wow and when you live in the countryside if you
put stuff in a bin all kinds of wildlife like takes an interest in it and you'd often get up
in the morning because it's been there for so long and you find it all out on the floor
um but yeah i heard we don't have a brown bin brown is that's for the garden waste right yeah
we don't even have that yeah i saw someone complaining about that the other day it's like
they got a letter from the council to say it's going to now cost you to have your brown bin taken
away yeah and you have to we have to but it's the admin involved in actually doing it so you have to
have a call center for people that can't do it the infrastructure for the website to take the money
you've got to tell people that it's happening send out the stickers that they can put on their bin
you know and you think well how much money are you actually making out of this i mean they must
be i hope have done some sort of benefit cost analysis you would hope that they have i don't
think so but this is where the incompetence comes i think the thought process was let's charge
everyone for one of the bins yeah because that's going to generate us money and everyone went yay
you know and then six months later they realize it's costing them more this is the same thing with
the millionaires leaving the uk what is it 16 500 millionaires expected to leave this year
they're down on the revenue on tax revenue by basically saying we're going to tax the rich
yeah i mean once again they don't understand the last thing do they great idea let's tax the rich
reality you make less money not you know i don't know i probably probably shouldn't just rant
continuously but but the reason why i find it disturbing is because it's funny to sort of go
on about this but it's actually quite it's very serious like i say when you look at online safety
Bill, when you look at the general clamp down on everything and KYC is at the heart of it
all.
Yes.
So digital ID, which we know is coming in.
What I want to know is from someone who sort of, you're probably a lot deeper into it than
me.
What do you do as a person who because when I look around our community I think yeah there everyone on it Everyone doing all kinds of stuff There this that and the other
But really, it doesn't matter.
It's a bit like privacy only exists if everyone does it.
If you do it on your own.
Edward Snowden said that.
He actually said that and it really stayed with me.
At Bitcoin 2023, he had a keynote speech.
he said you shouldn't be contorting yourself through a keyhole of hell using coin joins and
mixes he says i'm proud of you guys you're finding a workaround that's great but unless privacy exists
for everybody it's pointless so how does how do we do that because when you look at the trajectory
we're on and the like the obvious one is digital id um we've seen all kinds of versions of it we're
now seeing online digital all this stuff which has been predicted since i remember first hearing
about it in i think the 80s people talking about one world government and you know monitoring
everything and this that and the other and fortunately bitcoin arrived which was a really
gave a lot of hope certainly to me and i know a lot of other people but even with that now when
you look at what kind of a world are you going to be navigating and is it going to be is it going
to be good enough is it going to be are you going to be able to navigate that world and still
stick to the principles that you believe in and privacy
possibly not but that what does that mean then i mean i my my my answer would be currently and
that will probably change would be some form of geo arbitrage so move somewhere where they do
leave you alone but where and and also if you want to interact with the financial system
if you want to touch the current financial system in any way shape or form
you've got to kyc in some way otherwise so for example perfect solution you've got a little bit
of bitcoin sitting in self-custody it's safe no one can take it you've got it but you need to buy a
car and you need to get it in to the normal way you know there'll be some sort of kyc
you know the when it reaches your bank account where did you get this money from
you know so it is if you want to interact with the financial system and do normal day-to-day things
there'll be a way that they catch you interestingly i had a great conversation about this exact thing
a couple of months ago with ben it's a pseudonym ben gunn and he framed it really interestingly
because i never thought about it like this before the part of the market that isn't taxed which is
either very small transactions or very very very large transactions is the place where bitcoin
works so people sending a hundred billion dollars not a problem people buying a t-shirt for sats
not a problem no one's taxing that that you know this it's that bit in the middle like you say cars
houses large items that are a bit of a problem because unless you're buying something straight
off another bitcoiner or someone who wants to receive sats for their car which is easy to do
um you're right the your money will then suddenly be of interest to the government and in that sense
it would be they may may come a time when they decide to confiscate a 6102 they'll know it's
there they will want to take some of it in all kinds of taxes even though it's money you know
um and yeah i i do think about this a lot because i know a lot of people who at the moment
live in a parallel system which is fine you know you can you can you can live in a complete
completely parallel system it's not a problem but more and more and more the rest of the world
is being taken over by this
other system or the one that we're coming from and it won't be much fun if you're just stuck in a very
small group of people and there's not a lot you can do which seems you know one of the i mean one
of the other things that could potentially happen i suppose is somewhere like the us has you know
such great legislation and such a great attitude towards bitcoin in the financial sense that um it
paves the way for the rest of the world right and arguably there was a there was a there's a
possibility of that. I think that now looking a few months down the line since the last election,
so-called elected, you know, Trump was very pro-Bitcoin. He seems to still be quite pro-Bitcoin,
but he has released his own shitcoin. Yeah, of course, we know that. But I mean,
just in general i saw something today or yesterday about um banks um
they passed a bill so that banks can't debank you if you have is that it's the genius act is it
i don't know i don't know they've done three bills recently i think they've done a cbdc bill
stable queen bill and the genius act i think that the cbdc bill um it has really confused me because
they're still very pro stable queens and stable queens in my opinion are just cbdc's via the
back door so even though they've got this bill to say no you know cbdc's are a violation of our
constitution we will not have them they've just got another workaround in place and that seems to
be the case across the board do you know what though um you know efrat don't you yes she
He interviewed a couple of, I think it was yesterday, it was, what's his name, from the guy with the podcast, the financial podcast, you know.
Oh, very famous.
Oh, my God, I can't remember.
Anyway.
What country is he from?
He's American.
I'm just having a bit of brain fog at the end of the day.
But he's very well known.
I can't believe I've forgotten his name.
That happens to me all the time.
Right.
But he had what I would call a pretty unpopular opinion about CBDCs,
but I did find it interesting that they are necessary
in order to create liquidity to move onto a Bitcoin standard.
And it makes sense.
I think stable coins will drive Bitcoin adoption.
but then if if if a stable coin is a is a backdoor cbdc does it does it even matter because
once well once bitcoin is you know once the liquid like mass liquidity from the world as
as as kind of moved into bitcoin presumably people would choose the bitcoin they won't choose
the cbdc necessarily because it will it won't preserve their purchasing power for starters
i don't know i i'm i'm every time there's another thing to go to go oh my god about i'm always
looking for the right is it is that really true or is there a possibility that there is a silver
lining on this cloud could it be xyz you know and um preston pish was the guy sorry oh preston
i was just um yeah he was just on my panel right sorry preston was the one very you know kind of
financial brain yes but no he was the one that he was the one that mentioned it um so so you think
that that cbdcs are coming via stable coins yes yeah so i think that the in the uk we've actually
said that they're not going to pursue a cbdc that was obviously going to happen because it goes back
to when you were saying at the beginning you know the right the right people to implement these
things won't do that job no one who understands the tech or what's going to happen or would be
good enough to implement a cbdc would work on a project like that so you just wouldn't get the
right people to do it um but it but it has left the door wide open for stable coins
but in order for a stable coin to sort of take on the characteristics of a cbdc that's quite a lot
of change in the tech right because at the moment stable coins are used as dollars but you can still
stop them you can still kyc them it you know the whole when they talk about debanking if you're
using the rails and and a lot of um stable queens now will pop up all the different banks well
they'll have their own stable coins and it's still something that can be censored stopped tracked
but presumably i mean yeah they're all none of them are fully none of them are decentralized so
at the end of the day they have a company that runs them.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, they're never a good idea.
But in the financial system we live in, maybe,
They are a bridge to...
I think they are.
Because in a way, if they are a bridge to a new financial system, which is basically backed with Bitcoin and Bitcoin used at day-to-day transactions, you could argue that that would be a very smooth transition compared to the alternative, which is normally a war or complete collapse of the financial system or some huge event that caused massive inflation or whatever.
so it could it could i think that will happen i think that will happen regardless of stable coins
but what inflation yeah because stable coins is it is just a different version of fiat
correct but in a way it is fiat sorry on different rails yeah the thing about the dollar though is
because there's so much demand for it it's hard for much it's the hardest of all of your currencies
to hyperinflate because and stable coins add more yes but and stable coins add more liquidity in a
way so they add more demand for it which is good because then the it it keeps the inflation at bay
presumably not that i'm a fan of them at all but you can understand the meme that is spend your
spend your dollars save saving your bitcoin you know yes but the
so the way that stable coins are backed is u.s debt so 85 percent of i think it's i think it's
tether 85 percent is backed by u.s um debt right um so what they do is the money from the countries
that are desperate and use it as a lifeline then are feeding back to keep the u.s hegemony alive
which then exports their inflation to these countries and then people justify it by saying
it's a lifeline and they use that lifeline and it goes back and it just becomes quite an ugly cycle
which is actually um once again i think the u.s is quite desperate for people to for for people to
buy their treasuries and that's another reason why they quite like stable coins of course but
Do you think they've allowed Tether to exist?
Yeah, but don't you think that Tether usage aids Bitcoin adoption?
Yes, I do.
So do they not know that?
Because Bitcoin defunds the government pretty much.
So does it matter to them?
Or are they not thinking about it in those terms?
Because that would seem like that would be quite an ironic turn,
that this would happen.
No one's buying US Treasuries,
so they so they have to create this liquidity so they push stable coins on the world and because
stable coins are the way that you interact with bitcoin from the dollar yeah the then bitcoin
becomes much more widely used and that defunds the government so yes unless you have a plan to
centralize bitcoin i mean it is becoming more institutionalized and i have concerns around
centralization risks i mean we talk all the time about how bitcoin is a decentralized currency and
yes it is but when you look at the centralization of mining you look at the centralization of mining
pools um 40 of the current hash rate is in the u.s of fact transactions have been censored
hypothetically well marathon have proven that you can censor of fact transactions if the u.s got over
51 of the hash rate you know it would make censorship more possible so with all the
The Bitcoin that's now being bought, most of it is being bought through ETFs and treasuries.
So you could argue that although it's feeding Bitcoin, maybe, maybe, I don't know,
they've seen that it can't be stopped.
So they're just finding ways to capture it.
Or like you said earlier, the KYC rails will be so inhibitive that by default,
you can't even spend your Bitcoin unless you swap it directly with someone else,
which is the point of it and the the optimist in me goes great it's just going to take a long time
before we're all on a bitcoin standard because we will be forced to do that in the same way that
people are being forced to use vpns now for example or they're being forced to to do whatever
move leave the country or whatever i don't know i mean it's like i say i as i said right at the
start i feel like at the moment it's i mean i'm ecstatic and i'm really depressed at the same time
about the about what's going on i feel the same feeling exactly the same but is that i when i kind
of when i think about it i think that's because technology is neutral and all you're doing is
looking at the people that are using it for freedom and the people that are using it for
authoritarian and they're both doing it at the same time and i mean i would argue that we've got
the better team because it's decentralized and people are more passionate about it i think
but nevertheless i'm not sure where to position myself sometimes do you know what i mean i do
i mean are you relatively are you not a nomad you you have a fixed abode do you you i've got a
family yeah so me too yeah it's really difficult when people say we just move i can't i've got two
kids that are at secondary school and they quite like where they live you can't you can't just up
and leave and then the question is where do you go because is there anywhere that has the perfect
setup i haven't found anywhere yet yeah the perfect setup no but there are places that are
working better than us i think it's fair to see where would you go i well i i would have two
strategies currently i'm in the same position as you i i i've got at least another 10 years
where I have to stand still because my kids love it where we live.
I don't want to disrupt their life.
They don't need to know about any of this stuff.
They just need to know they're sorted.
You know, I'm looking out for them and steering them in the right direction.
But when they're free, and we've already talked about it,
that, you know, me and the missus,
that there's much better places to position ourselves.
Where?
It would either be one of two.
One route would be the kind of Switzerland type route,
which would be you go and hang out with all the rich people basically the other route is you go
to the other end of the spectrum you go to the places that haven't quite made created a system
that paraguay mexico you know those kind of things or you you we get lucky in the next 10 years and
there is some kind of a political renaissance um unfortunately that doesn't look too good i mean
look at the uk is a good example at the moment we're obviously going to get a regime change at
the next election if if what's happening now is anything to go by and it will be as exciting as
probably when trump got in but i don't think it will have any longevity because i think the same
thing happened with trump trump getting in was like oh my god this is amazing for so many people
who didn't like the former regime um but when you actually can't get into power and it would be the
same in the uk i think if the one of the reform type parties or all these new kind of like freedom
oriented parties get in they'll just hit the the the kind of immovable object of the system the
blob yes the blob and the blob requires that you print money and you sell treasuries and you do all
this stuff that's why rachel reeves had a breakdown because she looks she looked at everything she's
like i can't actually do anything yeah but isn't right does rachel reese even know anything about
the financial industry do any of them i don't think at the moment no i think it's this is what
i was saying earlier i think that i mean you know our whole government at the moment is a complete
shit show it's an embarrassment it's full of people who you never associate with in in real
life these these are that literally the kind of social outcasts and the worst kind of people
um but i i think with the new there's going to be a turnaround at the next election there's gonna be
a lot of business people coming into positions of power again i think but they're still going to come
up against the same problem and the problem is because trump did it trump was really vocal about
a number of things and do you remember that doge stuff it's like oh my god they're really going to
make the government smaller they're gonna and they didn't they made it bigger because they can't make
it smaller this is the answer to all these problems the answer is a smaller government
yep and how do you get there separate money and state yeah but that's the long-term strategy
like in the short term you need to sack a load of people and run your and if you were a business and you went into the government as a business you just sack most people Yes Because they not they not they just eating up resources
Isn't that what Elon did when he took over Twitter?
Apparently, yeah.
I don't, I mean, you know, you never know what's true.
No, that's very true.
I know he sacks a lot of people, but the government,
the problem with the government is it doesn't make money
other than from you and me and everyone else.
and trying to convince people to lend it money.
It's like the worst relationship.
It's either, either I'll lend us some money, buy some of these,
you know, I've got some treasuries, buy some of these,
or it just comes up to you at gunpoint and says, give me some money.
It's like, it's a really abusive relationship.
I don't think many people ever think of it like that.
There's this very commonly held belief that nothing functions without the government.
and the truth is we're at a period in history i think i'm pretty sure this is the biggest
governments have ever been i think the u.s government is the biggest government in history
like when you do it by by the number of people that actually work there very depressing well
that's the bit it's at least the problem is quite simple it appears there's a there's an institution
there's a there's a body which is soaking up like is making bad decisions and causing normal people
certainly middle class people to give up doing things that the government really wants them to
do like start businesses be productive join in with them it's just sending them out overseas
you know i don't know many people starting businesses at the moment i don't know many
people feel you can't they're leaving they're leaving the uk exactly and i mean but they're
going somewhere yes america i think is one of the top places that they're going and um and the uae
yeah the uae almost taxless but i wouldn't move there would you well it depends it's not really
a place for freedom lovers is it no but what it depends what you want because it's an interesting
place in as much as there's no political sphere there it's what i find interesting about dubai is
it it sort of smashes a lot of the myths that we have about things like for example
dubai is 10 local people so 10 emiratis 90 immigrants so that that whole idea about the
immigrants are taking from us you know that you know you can you can see that that's not necessarily
true obviously they don't have a social care system in the same way you don't go to dubai to
take you go to make money you go you're a trader you're like a you go to dubai to make money you
don't go there to vote either you don't care who's running the place you care whether your business
is making money and so in these terms it's actually an interesting place i live under a
two-tier system is like really because you have you do have like you said the 10 that the arabs
are treated they treat people differently and then you've got the other 90 and they have different
services it's almost like an apartheid almost and men and women are very much kept separately
um and and it was built on slavery when you actually look at the way that it was built i
remember going back there in 2005 and i think this has really stayed with me which is why i don't
think i could ever consider living there is because i saw the people that were working on
those buildings and I saw how they were treated and everything about it makes me feel really sad
arguably though there's no place in the world that you could say is is crystal clear is is
you know perfect no has it has a has a history um and also I I used to work a lot in the UAE
I used to go a couple of times a year and for start I mean all the emirates are slightly
different they're different personalities and i did i didn't find that women were necessarily
oppressed in in many i used to work in charger which is the emirate emirate next to buy and um
i agree that there is a difference between the emiratis and everyone else and that's by
kind of that's on purpose you know the the emirs look after their own first and foremost
which is something that you would say in the UK a lot of people are saying you know why don't you
look after the British people first you know it's not it's a very gray area that whole thing.
The term British people is a bit looser I'd say if you were going to separate it out I'd say
taxpayers maybe you know because my um my grandparents I'm second generation immigrant my
grandfather came over from Poland and my grandmother came over from Italy and they
came over to do the rubbish jobs that the English people didn't want to do so
it worked in factories and actually went to Bedford which now has a yeah and that was where
I was born it's now really bizarre that it has a big queen connection really you're born in Bedford
I was yeah let's talk about that afterwards because it's really fascinating what's going on
there anyway come on so um my non-law came over and worked in the brick factories in bedford and
they were very proud and they they did all those awful jobs that that the english people didn't
want to do they had a house they went on holiday once a year they had a car they had everything
that they needed and the system was working for them they were unskilled workers but they still
had a home their pride and everything that they needed that was before money was really truly
broken but I don't think London would run without immigration they're very it's a very very important
part of our history and our economy and it's it's really important that we we I don't like
segregation I don't like separating people out I don't like putting people in order of you're more
important or you're not and so that's why I don't think I could ever really get on board with the
two-tier system that they have in in Dubai but immigration is vital for our country and I think
we need to change our mindset and actually treat them well because they're people that are not only
providing a service but they're actually paying tax into our system and quite often they don't
take out what they put in I think though isn't the gray area at the moment who is actually
taking and who is putting into the system I think if you look at the general meme of in the country
yes people rightly or wrongly are super angry because they think people are coming in you know
and just taking and it's there are people doing that and there are people who aren't doing that
and who are actually coming here i think probably i wouldn't choose to be an immigrant to the uk
currently it's not the greatest place to there's lots of better places to go to but um but i suppose
that's what the problem is people rightly or wrongly and i don't know if it's true what the
relationship is between the number of people that come here and take and the number of people that
come here and and add to the system or here but you know what i mean in the uk yeah well anyway
I don't know those numbers either, but I do think there's an awful lot of people here that don't contribute to the system that are native to the country.
And in a funny way, I don't even think that's their fault.
And I think that that comes back to broken money because we know that we came off the gold standard in 1971.
And since then, the gap between earning wages and the cost of living has grown.
The gap has got bigger.
so before when you could live on one salary now you need two and then in the future you'll probably
need three to be able to have the same lifestyle that you had before if working paid if an unskilled
person could go to work earn a salary have a house and everything that they needed i don't think
they'd be sitting at home on benefits i think it's definitely a broken system that is forcing
them down that road you're right to do you know what's going to be next after two salaries i think
it's going to be two salaries and ubi oh my goodness because but they go kept with ubi you
say that but that's kind of what's happening one thing when the penny dropped of what was actually
happening with um tax credits you get full-time working people having to go cap in hand to the
government asking for extra money a full-time working person I don't care if they're unskilled
you know they're providing a service it doesn't matter like we shouldn't that's another thing that
we shouldn't be doing is like prioritizing oh you're a professional or you're better or you
we you know you just I don't know work in a factory therefore you're less than that that's
just utterly ridiculous all work should pay and regardless of the job and regardless of the skill
level and and also i don really think that say investment bankers that earn a lot of money they not exactly contributing to society are they they not adding anything of value they they the extractors really when you when you actually think about it yeah i think i think the way that mostly at least the way that wages work out work themselves out
is based on a spreadsheet of how much do you make compared to how much do you make for the company
and how much xyz i don't know how it works with people that flip burgers at mcdonald's or whatever
i think that's just minimum wage but even that all that stuff um it doesn't solve the problem
putting up people's wages doesn't solve the problem we know that it's broken yeah it just
causes it just puts the price of everything else up if you put up the minimum wage to 30 quid an
hour it won't last long before the price of a uh twix doubles and your 30 quid gets half as much
You know, that's the kind of system we live in. And I think most people that I know understand that have taken precautions. You know, especially to do with Bitcoin, it's obvious Bitcoin as an asset that they can park their money in and it insulates themselves from kind of stuff like that.
However, going back to what we were talking about earlier, it's no good having your wealth stored nicely if you can't spend it the way you want to spend it.
And that is serious.
And I think that is what's suddenly becoming serious now.
The KYC, you know, all the stuff we were talking about, the online safety, it's real.
It's really happening.
It's real now.
It's not people just talking about it anymore.
you are now becoming criminalized in in a very normal life not you know like i don't i think
many of my friends would class themselves as criminals um but they're only one step away from
becoming a criminal because they require privacy which is yes and that's become a dirty word as
well it's bizarre how you we all want privacy that you got blinds there for a reason because
you you haven't got anything to hide but you want people don't want people looking in when you're
walking around when you've just got out the shower you know the privacy is is is normal but even that's
being demonized because it's the mantra if you haven't got anything to hide what's the problem
and that's the psyop that's what people have been led to believe and part of this system is convincing
people that they need or like like it's for the children you know it is just convincing people
that all these horrific things that they're putting on us is is is normal and okay and and
the things that you want that's then you get treated like a pariah but what do you think
the solution is then i mean beyond don't don't just say bitcoin oh of course i was gonna say that
You can't. You can't say that. I want a realistic answer. The truth is, like, for example, soon, like this is pretty obvious what's transpiring now. Soon everything gets KYC'd. Everything.
thing at that point you're using a special type of money that is programmable and requires you
to be obedient if you want to use it yeah basically long and short of it and that's gonna happen now
i'm pretty sure the only way that doesn't happen is a complete collapse of the system which is that
is what could happen that that's actually what i was gonna say is that i think we need a reset
you sound like klaus schwab now is it a great reset by any chance well that you know it's funny
because when they said that about how you will own nothing and be happy i was wondering when i first
heard that how on earth are you going to do that and then i looked at the way things were progressing
everything's a subscription we don't even own music anymore everything is about you know renting
people can't afford homes and and now i can actually see how that is going to play out
i thought the home one is is a big one for me because i've always been a homeowner
and what started occurring recently was that when houses become a liability because wealth is taxed
that's how they'll get you even the people that own their houses you know because at the moment
you could say the the you'll own nothing and be happy lot are looking right no one can afford a
house except black rock or something exactly right yeah yeah but the people that own houses are
sitting there thinking well you know i'm all right i didn't have a mortgage on my house a lot of
boomers but actually if they bring in some kind of wealth tax or even you know then you your house
will then become a liability and if you unless you fork up say you own a million pound house you
might have to it goes up 25 grand one year and they say right we're going to tax that or um that's
how people even in that echelon of society start saying do you know what i'm just going to rent
because it's a lot less it's not a liability renting is not a liability i can you know walk
away yeah um that was a bit of an eye-opener for me because i always thought that there was
a defense mechanism against and do you know and unfortunately because the the you will that the
idea that you will own nothing and be happy seems seems quite sinister but you can actually see it
as a positive as well and i'm definitely not channeling schwab now no no i know you could
basically live a quite successful life just renting things and not owning things because
it's the ownership of those things that is actually the liability for you i've i've come to that
conclusion myself actually that the the less you are attached to the happier you are i know but
isn't that claus rob winning do you see what i mean about it there's a lot of there's a lot of
weirdness in the world at the moment or it backfires and it just gives people the freedom
that they need to move where they need to move to and they're not shackled well yeah well like i say
which is which would be a phenomenal thing i mean geo-arbitrage and the ability to move and if you
own a house it's much harder yes the ability to move is very liberating yeah super liberating
because it and we and in a way it's necessary to have that in the world if you want governments to
be more competitive yes because they should want to attract you it shouldn't i've always thought
that the way it should be working is that a country should want to attract people not try and keep them
out or keep them in or keep them in and bring them in i mean keeping them in is the big red flag
when they're stopping you from leaving no no keep them in because you want to stay not because you're
going to get taxed on your overall wealth because it's a good place to be that's how they should
keep you not because you leave and then you get taxed but because isn't that the case in the u.s
what exit taxes yeah lots of countries have them um it's it's but to renounce your citizenship
you've actually got to pay that haven't you that's the only way to not no are you talking about
being taxed in the u.s no matter where you live yeah yeah so you have to unless you renounce yeah
but then you get charged well what do you mean you i thought i could be completely wrong i thought
that that's when you also had to pay the exit tax if you announced your yes that's what happened to
roger vere right he became he went to japan and um he took all his bitcoin with him and didn't pay
anything and now that's why he's that's i think that's basically what happened but i mean i would
say that the reason why so many people are leaving the uk at the moment is because an exit tax will
probably happen and they're just getting out now that would that would make a lot of sense to me
because i think also it's impossible to run a business there they they are crushing innovation
yeah so you know high taxes impossible to run run a business of course you're going to leave i don't
think it's just the exit tax i think it's the actually what's happening now they can see which
way the wind's blowing and it's it's impossible to be a innovator and be successful but what about
yourself though like you said you said you're tied a bit like me because you have kids but is
that forever do you do you ever do you have a particular connection to the uk that you never
leave or you want to stay and fight because there's definitely two groups there's two types
of people there's the stay and fight and the go and create something new and live in it somewhere
else i want to stay and fight for the time being um while my kids are there they are very attached
to the uk which really surprises me i would move in a heartbeat they love where they live um and they like they like they like it i i don understand i always wondered where would I go what would I do I mean I moved to New York for a little while I moved to
New Zealand for a little while for some reason I always seem to come back it just happens not
necessarily because I want to but actually um my husband did actually say to me um the other day
he said so so imagine you've got all the money that you need and you don't have to worry about
anything where would you go and I think that I would probably live on the road I'd probably buy
a boat I'd probably just sail from one place to the next I'd get an Airbnb in New York for a couple
of months and I don't think I'd have anywhere fixed I would I would love to just live a life
of adventure and if money wasn't a concern I'd just move around I've lived like that for for a
long time and it's a great life but um it's it's i live the complete opposite life now i live
very settled in one place and they're both as good as each other there's no
coming to the end of being a nomadic person was the best feeling ever okay and i think coming to
the end of this particular thing and going back to some form of moving around the world will
probably be the best thing ever I think in in you know you get you they both they're both great in
the end they're not having a home base and it's great until you miss home after three years and
you're like you know I've got to move again I'm going to a new place I'm going to this that and
the other but um I yeah we've ended up coming back to the UK we we've been all over the world
as well. Why did you come back to the UK? So what, so you were moving around and then before you had
your family, you decided to come back here and then settle. Kind of. I moved around as a single
guy. I was on the move for almost 10 years working. I was a filmmaker and a photographer. So I, and all
my work was around the world. So quite often I would end up just living in that country while
we were doing something. And then, you know, then I met my wife and we were living in Germany
and she got pregnant and she wanted to move close to her mum so that was an obvious move i was
in either way you know the uk was a kind of nicer place back then um in the end we during the
pandemic when that hit that was a big wake-up call for me and we went we went took off on the road
um and we went to mexico el salvador you know before the right around the time of the bitcoin
law and everything no way before that actually or was it was it anyway it was the state of emergency
when we were in el salvador but we were in mexico us we went to from my side it was a i was just
having a look around because at that particular time heart in the heart of the pandemic people
were starting to really talk about hey where are we going to live because my country is not what i
thought it was you know um a lot of we ended up we ended up coming back again in the end because
my wife didn't want to be far from a family if it had just been me i'd be living in right now i'd
probably i'd be living in honduras i'd be living in prospero which is a one of the free city
projects that um because it's just the cutting edge of governance at the moment and i would have
to be there i'd have to be because i would have to be part of it you know or i would be in you know
doing the geo arbitrage somewhere like argentina living in buenos aires you know you know but when
you have a family you can't i mean not only are you thinking about your partner but you're thinking
about your kids and my kids are having the best childhood i don't want to take that away from them
even though they would i mean they they are now nine eleven and thirteen and really similar to
mine so uh 12 and 15 right and but and they've lived abroad and they know what it's like to
travel and they will travel one my eldest is quite a home girl she loves the british countryside
she loves riding horses she she wears green clothes she's that kind of a person my middle
one is all over can't wait to get back out to mexico you know doesn't really know why she just
knows she wants to go every time you see something on the tv she's like i want to go there i want to
go there and my youngest son he doesn't really he's not really making his mind up about anything
these days yet but i i must admit in the last um it's probably only a year and a half i've been
through a process of letting go of the UK and it's been happening bit by bit inside me and I noticed
I noticed it first when we bought a new house in the last couple of years we moved and I knew this
is the last one I knew that we weren't going to get another one after this and it was a doer upper
and I couldn't wait to get started and then slowly but surely I'm like I can't bother to do this house
up you know what i mean and that's a big sign because you know our last house we did it up over
seven years we completely transformed them and i've just realized that there's no future and it's
slowly i'm like why would i why would i pump all my hard-earned money into this house when i actually
a don't think i'm going to stay here long term and b i don't even think it's going to hold its
value either i think like i think houses are going to start to become a liability either through
taxes or just through the financial system realizing that parking your money in property
is not residential property is not a good idea because it's it's you don't get too much hassle
not a good return on your money all that kind of stuff and and and then you realize especially if
you're my age you realize you've got quite a lot of money stored in your house but you're never
going to be able to use it because one house is one house isn't it exactly you then move from one
house to another exactly but you you we've we've we come from this culture where it's it was thought
yeah do your house up add an extension do this it's all good because it increases the price of
your property well because the value of your money is going down yeah exactly but it's not
the thing is is it's because we don't look at houses for their utility factor
we look at houses as an investment and it's not that the value of your house is going up because
your house has become more valuable it's because the value of your money is decreasing and also
because um yeah and the way that debt comes into the system and how easily that flows in because a
lot of people don't even understand how money comes into the system and how debt is created
so when you get the money for your mortgage that wasn't sitting in honeyfax's account ready to
transfer to you it gets created in that moment i mean you just got to look at the bank of england
they've talked about debt creation and how it comes in i i mean on the on the positive note i
think concepts like quantitative easing and um credit creation and all that kind of stuff i think
they are becoming kind of more commonly understood now good i've noticed a few people in my life who
you know cousins uncles who really normally just say whatever the bbc says starting to talk about
things like inflation is not the rise in prices you know the rise in prices is causing inflation
which i've heard so many times in the past it's like they're actually starting to realize that
the increase in the money supply is inflation yes and who does that it's it's the government
and the central banks so are are we the problem are greedy businessmen trying to put their prices
up to try and take more money off you when they sell you it yeah or or are they just trying to
compete and and everything's so bloody expensive they have to put their prices up and the reason
they do is because someone in the government is just spending too much money yeah yeah so they
the government pretend to be on your side and then they create these problems and then they create
more problems because they put rules in place that then exacerbate said problems
and they don't admit that they created the problem in the first place but then they put in a solution
to fix the problem and it's just it's a really ugly cycle i think it is and so come on back to
my original question what do you do about this completely effed up system that we in you know
but can i say you can't no i that might be the conclusion i've come to not that not that i can't
for the system like i can make my own decisions about how i'm going to position myself and that
happens on a day-by-day basis at the moment it's like they'll they'll come a point i hope it doesn't
happen in the next 10 years but there may come a point where i feel like i'm forced out of the uk
not for any other reason that there are certain rules that i won't follow because i i deep i i
disagree with them in a deepest part of my core you know well give me an example well the
The KYC thing like someone I saw someone ranting the other day on
Noster about how
Someone came to the door with a parcel
And it was something now that has to be, you have to be over 18 to receive.
You know what I mean?
Like maybe they ordered something online and it was an over 18 thing only.
And the guy came with the parcel and said, I need to see some ID.
There's a kind of like 45 year old person standing at the door.
They say, I need to see some ID.
And it's like, come on, bro, just give me the parcel.
You don't need to see my ID.
No, I need to take a photo of it.
And in the end, he just caused a stink and sent the parcel away because it's true.
It's like, hold on a minute.
No, I'm not going to give you a bloody copy of my passport to receive a parcel.
You know, it's like, stop it.
Stop all this stuff.
And it's become normalized.
Yeah, doing it.
And they're not even understanding the repercussions.
Yeah.
But that's what I mean.
So come on.
there's only so much you can stay and fight because it's like walking through treacle yeah you get you
get more and more of these little jabs and digs and and that guy's just doing his job he can't
give you the parcel until the computer says yes because he has to take the photo of your id and
you're going no so you end up not getting that thing you know yeah like what and the only long
term result is you move somewhere where they don't do that on your parcels and that's kind of
you know which is why when you were talking about bedford i found the bedford story quite
interesting because that is a very well-known bitcoiner from bedford and he is doing something
in bedford which arguably he's a stay and fight guy he's trying to get involved in the political
realm he's doing his podcast now has turned into a mouthpiece for everyone that isn't mainstream
politics which is phenomenal and it's great and he's even employing a private um you know
security forces in the middle of bedford because the town's turned into such a shithole you know
and i think it's all phenomenal to be fair it's been a shithole for a long time like having
gone there for you know decades because my grandparents if they say for the first 30 years
of my life I was going there it was like a second home to me and like I said they were they were
second I'm second generation they were immigrants you know they weren't rich they lived in a in the
poorer part of Bedford so I would I would have seen all of that and it's been like that for the
whole of my life but did they have people walking into shops and just picking things up fully out
no but that's not a bedford thing no i agree yeah but that's why they have a private security force
that's why pete mccormick's paying for a private security for you know in the middle of town and
was the middle of town full of people off their heads drinking and being just generally disrupting
either now no no no i know it's not a bit but that's because people are desperate it's it's
broken money it's because the system isn't working for them so although i understand that
law enforcement is is lacking because now if you have your house broken into they probably won't
come and likewise if you suddenly had a horse tackle me um the ambulance won't be there in
five minutes now you know all the services that we took for granted they're just not there and i
think is all of this stuff is happening because people are desperate so going back to my grandmother
my nonna she came from a very small little village in italy in the south of italy just outside of
naples called campagna and it was a tiny little village one road in one road out everyone's
related to each other they all know each other laws exist in italy obviously they do but that's
not what kept people in line what kept people in line with the communities and the structure the
the non-ners you know you wouldn't do anything wrong because you knew that there'd be somebody
over there ready to tell you off and then tell your mum that what you know what you're up to so
I think you can put all the laws that you like in place you can put all the policing that you like
in place but unless you fix the fundamental problem of why people are so desperate I don't
think it's going to improve I don't I don't think putting more powers in place to stop this and stop
that because I don't think that's how society polices itself I think that it's the breakdown
of community that has actually led us to this and until we rebuild communities and that's why
that's another reason why I love Bitcoin because it gives power back to the people currently we're
going through quite a another depressing centralization of everything everything is
being centralized which means that people aren't making decisions over their local communities the
decisions are being made at a central level and until we give that power back to people and it
actually empower them to have a stake in their environment in their community and in the people
then I just don't think it's going to fix itself.
And as much as I understand why you would want to put an additional police force in place,
it doesn't stop the underlying problem.
And until we fix that root cause, I think we're pretty fucked.
I think in the case of centralized government,
I think this is why a lot of people quite like the way, for example, Switzerland works,
Because I think it 90 of all the money that a local council derives off its you know community 90 goes to central government to be sort of given back to them in in with stipulations whereas they make their own choices don they they very much because i know but in switzerland
yeah i think it's like it's the i think don't quote me on it but i think 60 remains in the
local locality and only 40 goes to the central government so you when you pay your tax it goes
straight to your local government which would make much more sense to me 100 i i don't give a
shit who what happens in london i i would much rather my money goes to herefordshire council
because not that i think that they do good things with it but sending it back to head office and then
basically only getting stuff back because you you you pray really hard and do exactly what you're
told is not a good thing because london's a different place to where i live i live in a very
rural community yeah of course we need to empower people and people need to feel like they have skin
in the game yes come on i still i still need a i want some concrete things that we can do
um we have to be mindful that whenever you're kind of being forced into something it's usually
under the guise of convenience so don't always take the easy route and understand what it is
that you're doing and why you know like we have our phones and we have apps and it's so easy to
download this and do this and everything's been put in one place to make it easier for that or
but you know sometimes you might actually have to put a bit more effort in and actually
not take the convenient route have you ever wondered what could be a tipping point for
mass adoption of these kind of ideas of um hold a minute this is wrong because most people
don't even think about this stuff and especially in the uk we've got that britishness well well
you know yeah muddle on you know we'll just get through it yeah um but what what what could be a
tipping point because i agree with you that you have to make in your own personal life you have
to make all those little things you have to say no to this you have to not do that you have to
but when it's only like so back when there's only 10 of you doing i know it's exhausting it no it's
not only exhausting but it doesn't really achieve anything no it's a personal it's just your personal
thing and i and that's not to demean that because i have made some decisions in the last five years
which were very unpopular and proved right and it made me a stronger person you say you didn't
get the vaccine then i'm not saying anything about the vaccine because i i really respect
all the people that held out i got it i regret it deeply regret it and the reason why i got it is
because i had just i'd been homeschooling two very young children and i was trying to work at
the same time and it broke me and the amount of health problems that I got during that time just
due to the stress and I just and I feel ashamed even saying about saying it now but I was so
utterly broken by that time I just wanted to go on holiday and I wanted something to be easy and
I didn't want it to be hard and I just wanted to go away and not have all that shit it's the same
story from a lot of people that i know um like i say though if there's any consolation
and it's not just about not necessarily the vaccination whether you chose to do that or not
but any decision you make which was is hard um after you've made it it makes you a stronger person
and the more people that probably disagree with you when it's something you really believe in
in my experience it really does um mean a lot on a personal level it may not necessarily make
much difference in the in the real world but it will make a lot of difference to you
and it will probably make a lot of difference to your kids when they see you doing things like that
but but it's even so like i say that kind of stuff still doesn't um offer me much hope
on a grand scale you know i'm looking for i'm looking for a result i want everyone you know
like i even would just be happy with the way things were when i was a kid you know i know
that we can't go back to that and i know that they did that the internet is the reason why
authoritarianism is so emboldened now but it's also the reason why we have all these other tools
on the opposite side of the fence.
But I would just like to see a really, you know,
not such a tiresome experience in life
where everyone is doing,
a lot of people are doing a lot of illogical things,
like the guy who's there trying to get a 45-year-old person
to show them his ID.
Not because he doesn't believe you're 45,
but because the computer says, I've got to do it.
you know but you know when you listen when you talk to people who grew up in communist societies
they tell you they'll tell you all the same kind of ridiculous stories yeah and and you you listen
to those and you think yeah but that could never happen here yes it's happening here i know it is
it's happening here they're about to that i saw this on your timeline they're taught the labor
government is talking about banning vpns vpns just give you privacy on the internet they're
talking about banning them and they're not talking about banning them because you're a criminal
they just they saying it because your kids need to be protected from porn or something it ridiculous it so they need to be protected from addictive technology whatever they don give them the phone well
exactly but even that they the the the phone is they don't it doesn't matter like none of this
stuff matters you're you're you're using the excuse of um that you know you're using the excuse
of safety of your children for something to to ban something which is nothing to do with that
it's illogical like you say it doesn't make sense yeah i mean well it makes sense if you're if you're
the government because vpns do stop people being able to snoop on you another way there'll always
be a workaround always yes there will but but the the point is that yesterday you weren't a criminal
no tomorrow you might you might actually be a criminal and all you're doing is just saying to
the girl or someone in the government office no you can't see what i'm looking at on the internet
it's none of your business that's all it is you know like or or no i don't want you to have my
banking details freely because you lose them not just lose them there's actual real life examples
where data because it's a central honeypot for hackers we know that they their systems are weak
and that they won't look after our data and it actually has real life consequences so there's
going to come a point where an exchange a coinbase gets hacked you know and someone can see how much
bitcoin that you've bought and it's attached to your address that can cause physical harm that's
not just a oh it's a data breach oh that's unlucky oh my data's out there oh it isn't it actually
transpires into the real world and physical harm like and i just don't think they understand that
and so they want they want everything from you and they won't protect you they just won't and
they're not and that's what's so bad and you've said the word hope a couple of times
that is what bitcoin gives you you want an answer outside of bitcoin i can't give you that
bitcoin is the only thing that gives me hope if it wasn't for bitcoin i don't i honestly honestly
do not know what i would do well i i know what you mean i mean but bitcoin is when i look at the
sort of macro landscape it's a very long-term strategy i i think it's inevitable that it will
reorganize the landscape of society in the end yeah and it for the good and one of the main things
that it'll do is it will defund governments which is phenomenal and you could argue it's just come
at the perfect moment because they're at their height so something did need to be something did
need to be discovered that might do that but it's a it could be a 250 year plan i don't know i've got
no idea because really when you think about it like we were saying earlier one of the worst things
about the modern world is that it's all very well you might have some bitcoin but unless you can
spend it in the real world um it's not much use and almost certainly that is one of the capture
roots one of the ways that people who don't like bitcoin would would use to to and it's already
happening we can see it we can see it you can't you can't really buy a car with bitcoin like you
said no it's not possible yeah you i mean you can sorry you can buy it you've got to jump through
quite a few hoops yes but if you want any kind of financial privacy you can't um yes you will be
able to you i think you will be able to so that the technology to make your transaction private
kind of already exist and will definitely in the future the problem is you still might not be able
to buy that house because the the system that you're living in might in might insist that they
need to know like i've just bought a house and unfortunately i was just swapping one house for
another but the guys that were buying our house were using lots of money from different sources
and i was chatting to him it's unbelievable that you know they were having their grandparents were
giving them some money for you know in order just to help them out and they were asking them to say
where that money came from and track back and you know it was it they had like all these it was it
was absolutely ridiculous you know a lot of people do justify that of course because you have to stop
money laundering that you know but they don't stop money laundering this is the problem most
money laundering happens through HSBC JP Morgan they're not stopping it all they're doing is
making normal people jump through these hoops normal law-abiding people it stops nothing it
doesn't change anything they're going after the wrong stuff well I mean I think probably
it does stop a little bit like for example it's quite work around yeah i know they are but what
i mean is the way the government thinks or the way that the the the people that want to police
that think is without these checks and balances it's much harder to buy property to launder money
which is true but it's now it's it but i don't think it warrants it because i think
You basically yeah it a minute number of people that you actually penalising the whole of a country for Or anyone who wants to buy a house i yeah i agree with that but so you you obviously heard of the fourth turning yes so what we going from weak men
into hard sorry into hard times is there a solution no this is cyclical it's almost
it's pre-planned this we're gonna head into choppy waters potentially war i think that
it could lead to collapse and I think it's all um predictable all right go back to my
original question it's what do you do in this fourth turning like what have people done in
previous fourth turnings um I had a very very difficult and miserable time really yeah wow
we're normally quite positive and then you then you come out the other end then there's an end to
it so it'll be probably a 20 year period of of difficulty lessons will be learned it will be
really really difficult and then you go from hard times it with hard men and then hard men lead to
good times so it's it's a cycle i think is that correct have i got that that right even if it's
not correct everyone knows what you mean we all we all know the cycle i'm like you i can't
necessarily pull it out of thin air every time and say all the right words i remember concepts
and not i can't remember anything verbatim it's really frustrating yeah i'm the same i'm not
academic like that i have to write a lot of things down but i get the general gist
we've both got our notebooks full of just like words yeah my doodles anyway look we should
probably wrap it up here um i do want to leave on a positive note though i want i want people
listening to this to go away thinking hmm do you know what yes it's all shit and yes you know we're
going through hard times or we will but it doesn't matter actually because I've got this solution
that I've got I'm doing the best I can to insulate or to yeah insulate myself and my family and loved
ones from this putting myself in the best position I can what would that be for you you're someone
who's probably quite representative of a lot of people you live in a country uh where you're tied
to for many reasons and also that country is is is functioning in a in a way that you don't like
so what what are your how are you how are you weathering the storm i focus my energy on the the
hope aspect that is why I obsess over Bitcoin Bitcoin is hope it really is so my suggestion
would be study it learn it understand it and see why it's going to change the world because
the most amazing thing is I actually feel really privileged to be living in this time I can't
believe that Bitcoin has actually come at this time at a time that I'm alive to actually help
you know further that cause and it's a little bit like planting a seed or an acorn and you'll
never see that oak grow I don't think that I'll see the fruits of my labor but I do know that I'm
planting that seed and I believe that it will lead to a much brighter better future
study bitcoin then that's the takeaway yeah I I would agree with you I would agree with you I think
i would say study bitcoin um i would also but once again i still i always come back to that
point it's like right i've studied it i understand it it's all good but in the meantime how do i deal
with keir starmer being a douchebag you don't have to do you know what you do you do what you're
doing you build something you have a podcast you educate people you teach people stuff you give
people food for thought you give them extra um homework or something to go away you're doing it
you're you're doing it i'm doing it through my writing we're all doing it in our own little way
we're spreading a hopeful message we're saying there is there is a lifeboat and you can jump on
that lifeboat study bitcoin cool all right lifeboats away susie thank you for
taking the time to come into my um my commie chic apartment i love it yeah well inside it's not too
bad but you see from the outside you have to come in a little alleyway at the side
into the grottiest little staircase but there's something gritty and lovely about it though i
loved it when i lived in berlin we used to live in a former kgb listening building no it was
amazing it was was there an energy to it though was it um it was amazing i liked it was right in
it was right in the middle of all the good stuff where everything was going on it was a crazy place
but it had been completely renovated so it didn't feel like that at all but but all the buildings
were like this giant blocks of a you know before real 60s brutalism destroyed architecture you had
this kind of stuff which is like the walls oh yeah they're all massive all the rooms are massive
yeah yeah and but anyway thanks for coming to visit and thank you for having me good luck on
your journey and um and yeah it was good talking to you thanks thank you