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we're subject to monetary domination.

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We can't do without money

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because the vast majority of people

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have absolutely no say

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over how money works.

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That's an injustice.

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The halls of power still benefit a lot from the system.

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Does Bitcoin actually fix this in some way, do you think?

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In Bitcoin, you're not under monetary domination.

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You weren't forced to use Bitcoin.

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you have a voice, right?

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You run a node.

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What do you think it means

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that we're outsourcing

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all of our thinking to machines now?

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All of our thoughts can be co-opted

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at the whim of a few companies.

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Yeah, that's where the danger comes in.

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The more that you use AI

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as a substitute for your own thinking,

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the worse you get at thinking yourself.

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Bradley Rattler,

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we're back in Bedford.

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Back in Bedford.

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Cheat code tomorrow.

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It all started.

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We've got a lot to do.

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Bitcoin is always talk about sovereignty,

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whether that's over like money, jurisdictions,

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like having a second passport.

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This is always a very like core tenant of Bitcoin.

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But I think one thing that's not spoken about enough

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is the idea of sovereignty of thought

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and how that's changing in this world of AI.

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What do you think as a philosopher,

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it means that we're outsourcing

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all of our thinking to machines now?

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I think it's dangerous.

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I think that people thinking is one of the most important things that has ever happened.

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That's why there's fences and I'm just going to look around the room, refrigerators, trees, all this sort of stuff.

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Like what separates us from other animals is rationality.

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And what makes everything that we've built different than what animals have built is us using that feature to create things.

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and AI has been trained on centuries of human thought. And if we give up doing that thinking,

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I guess it could go one of two ways. Either the AI can start producing its own thought and

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rationality, or it just keeps reproducing what we've already done and we stop. And therefore,

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it stays exactly as advanced as it is now. And we don't make progress.

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This sounds like a silly question, but I think it's a good question to ask a philosopher. What does it actually mean to think?

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there's a lot of different views of that.

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One of the things that you might think distinguishes

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thinking from other mental activities of, say, other animals

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is the ability to recognize and reflect on the fact that you're thinking.

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So be awareness of yourself as a thinking thing.

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I think most people think that dogs probably think they have brains,

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there's stuff going on in there.

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There's thought,

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but it's really different than the way that we think.

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Well,

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dogs definitely dream.

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Does that kind of prove they think?

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Probably.

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Yeah.

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It certainly proves that they have mental events going on.

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Yeah.

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They feel,

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they feel pain.

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That's a mental event.

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So then if that's thinking,

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then there's some extra thing that we do,

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right?

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because we are very different from other animals.

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Maybe it's self-awareness of thought.

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Maybe it's rational thought.

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All of the ancient Greek philosophers thought that animals had a soul,

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plants had a soul, humans had a soul, but they're different souls.

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So plants have the vegetative soul.

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It takes in energy and grows.

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Animals have that plus the sensitive soul.

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So they can take in inputs from their eyes and ears and noses and things like that.

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And then humans have also the rational soul.

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It's easier to distinguish the first two because you can point to a physical thing that animals have that plants don't have, a nose, ears, a brain.

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It's more difficult to make that second distinction because animals have brains and so do we.

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And we use our brains in ways it seems like they don't.

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So some philosophers have thought, well, we must have minds that are distinct from our brains and animals don't.

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What does that mean?

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Well, it depends how mystical you want to get. Some philosophers think the mind is something that arises out of having a brain with sufficient complexity. Some think that the mind is an entity that exists separately, but is related to the brain through some mystical kind of connection such that my mind isn't located here.

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but it thinks the thoughts and forms the intentions and things like that,

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that result in, let's say, I think that I want my hand to be raised.

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Wrong way around. Fucking hell. You can't get help these days.

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You got to pay more if you want.

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Thank you, mate.

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Thanks.

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So the fact that my mind, although it's not here,

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when it forms the intention to raise my arm,

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raises this particular arm instead of that arm is unexplainable.

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through physical processes if the thinking isn't happening in the brain.

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So yeah, minds are either these separate entities, maybe like souls, maybe mind and soul are the

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same thing, maybe they're different, or they just arise out of the physical processes that come

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about when there's sufficient complexity. Is mind almost consciousness? Like this thing that you

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can't point to where it is, but you know, we have it. It could be. Yeah. So some people think that

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what differentiates a mind from other things is that the mind is conscious. Some people think

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even plants are conscious, just not as conscious. And the consciousness is sort of distributed and

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some things have more of it than others. What would make a plant conscious?

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Well, everything, if everything is conscious, then there's little bits of consciousness in

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plants and then bigger bits and that's how plants grow and are alive. On some views, even rocks

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have a little bit of consciousness. This is panpsychism. I don't know the views super well,

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but David Chalmers is a really prominent proponent. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never

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heard that. So if thinking is this thing that separates us from everything else,

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what does it mean if we lose thinking

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because we rely so heavily on AI

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that everything is outsourced?

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Because there's a load of dangers

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that I can see coming from that.

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And one of the most obvious ones I think is

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like we grow through disagreement.

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And if we're all relying on three or four different LLMs

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to like hone our thoughts,

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does disagreement go away?

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Yeah.

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So one of the first questions I think we should ask is

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are these generative LLMs thinking.

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If they are thinking, then we're not losing thinking.

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It's just in a different place than it used to be.

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If they're not thinking, then it becomes more of a problem.

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But do you think they are thinking now?

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I don't think they're thinking.

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And I'm not sure they can think or could think.

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But I also think it's not as obvious that they're not thinking

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or that they couldn't think as it was when we had our calculators

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on our phones calculating things. That seems clearly to me to be not thought. This seems more

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like thought. It also, though, doesn't seem like thought is a continuum. It's either an on or off.

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You're either thinking or you're not thinking. So it's tricky to figure out, I think, whether AI,

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whether these LLMs are thinking. I never thought that the predictive text in my messaging app was

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thinking. And one of the reasons I didn't think so was because it was doing such a bad job

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and predicting what I wanted to say next. And in fact, as I was, you know, texting earlier this

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morning about the musical that I went and saw yesterday, I said the unlikely pilgrimage of,

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and then the AI text that predicted next was Jesus. And I wanted to say Harold. So,

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you know, I don't think that an AI would make that mistake unless it was trained on data that

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came out before the unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry started. But it knows enough at this point to

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check and think that it's more likely that I'm talking about a new musical than about Jesus.

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But that doesn't make it metaphysically different. It's just better at the other thing.

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I think really, so this is another huge topic of conversation, but it's one that's come up a lot

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in philosophy, which is just that philosophy is always so far behind the things that it can be

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helpful to. So for example, when Einstein proposed the theory of general relativity,

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a lot of scientists took it up like really fast. It took philosophers years to get to the point

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where they understood the physics well enough to then think about what the philosophy was.

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team at swan.com forward slash WBD, which is swan.com forward slash WBD. Why does philosophy

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matter in that for physics? There's tons of questions about time and space and simultaneity

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and a lot of metaphysical, especially, but also in epistemology, upshots of these theories.

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So when you think that everything is simultaneous with everything else, then all of a sudden you

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learn, oh no, it depends on how fast you're going. Well, that means that what's real depends on

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either your own reference frame or how fast you're going. And that's crazy.

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but also might be true. So similar things with medical technologies. Philosophers are just way

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behind figuring out how these things actually work. And decisions are being made both within

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companies but also at the level of policy without the input of people who are trained to think about

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implications and moral facts and things like that. The same thing is happening with AI. There are some

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philosophers who understand how an AI is trained and what that means for what is happening when the

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AI is quote unquote thinking and could give much better answers. But most of us aren't technical

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enough to understand that, even with Bitcoin, right? How many, so we have four, five trained

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academic philosophers who are writing about Bitcoin all the time, none of the five of us

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can look at the code and understand what the code is. We have to trust other people to tell us

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what the code means, but they might be without realizing it, importing some of their own

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philosophical assumptions into that. But I mean, that's where AI can actually help you

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in terms of understanding the code. But when you think about AI thinking,

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it definitely makes decisions. Like, especially if you're trying to vibe code with it at the

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moment, it will go down a decision tree of what it thinks the best implementation of whatever

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prompt you've given it is. When do decisions become thinking? I don't think decisions,

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well, I don't think doing something means that you made a decision to do it. I don't even think that

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going, if there are many paths to doing something and you pick one path over the other means that

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you decided to do that path. Why not? So one reason is animals do that all the time. You can

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present an animal with multiple food sources. It will go to one of them. Does that mean that it

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decided to go to that one? Maybe in the sense that it did that and it didn't do something else. But

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what it didn't do was think through the options, weigh the pros and cons, the costs and benefits,

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come to a rational decision.

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You don't think animals will do that?

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Like the pros and cons of that one's closer, it's easier.

220
00:14:41,660 --> 00:14:43,600
You don't think they're weighing things like that up?

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No.

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And I certainly don't think that they're doing it in a way

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that is evident to them that that's what they're doing.

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So maybe that's just that they're having the first order.

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This one's closest, I'm going to that.

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Obviously they can't explain it.

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They don't speak English, they don't speak.

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But is that even what's happening in their minds?

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I'm not convinced that it is.

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I think there's just some instinct

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that's driving them to do one thing rather than the other.

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Okay, so what would you have to see an LLM do to say,

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okay, that is now thinking?

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I don't know.

235
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For a long time, it was,

236
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the standard was something like,

237
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convince another human that you're thinking.

238
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Which they can probably already do.

239
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So that's the Turing test, yeah.

240
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And I think if you...

241
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Put someone in a room with an LLM and ask them just based on the text that's going back and forth.

242
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Are you talking to a person or are you not?

243
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Certainly early on, I think everyone would have said yes.

244
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Then you start to learn how AI works.

245
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There's giveaways.

246
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The things that it keeps doing.

247
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And if you have a long enough conversation, I'm pretty convinced I could tell an LLM from a human within 10 minutes.

248
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but I don't know if that means that they're not thinking or if they're just all thinking the same

249
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well but they're thinking the same is the issue here because if if our thoughts are co-opted by

250
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essentially four or five big tech companies in Silicon Valley that's a terrifying outcome like

251
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that people are relying on this so heavily now including myself like I'm guilty of this but

252
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people are relying on it so heavily that you'll see someone disagree with someone on Twitter

253
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and then you'll see the response and they've clearly not thought through what their actual

254
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responses. They've gone to an LLM to find the response. Like if, if everyone's outsourcing

255
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that, that seems like a really negative and potentially dangerous outcome where all of

256
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our thoughts can be co-opted at the whim of a few companies.

257
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Yeah. It's very interesting to see if there's a factual claim made on Twitter. Someone will

258
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say, Hey, Grok, is this true?

259
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On almost every post.

260
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Yeah. That seems like a good use of, of Grok is determining whether something that

261
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has been, some event has actually happened. Then someone will make a claim about a principle or a

262
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theory or a moral claim and someone else will say, hey, Grock, is this true? And yeah, that's where

263
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the danger comes in because that takes some principles, some reasoning from principles,

264
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some perhaps moral facts or moral claims that might have reasons for them and arguments. And

265
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yeah, you're just letting an AI do all of that stuff and then trusting completely its output.

266
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Do you know what I also hate about that is the idea of someone going, you know what,

267
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I've not thought about that. I need to go away and research it and being like humble about

268
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something. Instead, you can just go to an LM and be like, think my way out of this for me. And you

269
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can post a response that's like kind of a get out of jail free card. And so like, I don't know

270
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whether this slows down growth and learning in this sort of broader society.

271
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The LLMs that we have now have been exclusively trained on things that humans thought of.

272
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And they know however many terabytes worth of that stuff.

273
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And then they're just repackaging it and using it.

274
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I don't think they've come up with any new insights.

275
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I'm not sure that they can.

276
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They may have noticed connections between ideas that no human person has noticed before because there have been similar connections elsewhere.

277
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But if you don't have humans continuing to contribute to the training data or what will become the training data of the future, then AI is going to be trained on however many thousand, couple thousand years of human thought.

278
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And then all the different AI repackagings of that same human thought just over and over.

279
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And if you iterate endlessly on the same exact thing, you'll get more of the same exact thing.

280
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Do you know the other thing that kind of weirds me out is there's a huge information asymmetry and almost relationship asymmetry that people have between themselves and an AI.

281
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I think you think you know your AI, but really it's like a black box.

282
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You don't know how it's coming up with the answers coming back with.

283
00:19:02,400 --> 00:19:05,480
It's very hard to tell how it's producing your responses.

284
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But the thing you do know is that it's always trying to be your best friend.

285
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And that can sometimes give you slop.

286
00:19:10,420 --> 00:19:13,220
Like every single day I'm basically going back to my AI going,

287
00:19:14,060 --> 00:19:17,780
don't be my friend, be a coworker, tell me where I'm wrong.

288
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Don't just be a yes man.

289
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But it knows more about you than maybe you do.

290
00:19:24,060 --> 00:19:28,600
And so there's a very strange, like it tips the scales in such a weird way

291
00:19:28,600 --> 00:19:32,400
where you're interacting with your most deepest and darkest secrets

292
00:19:32,400 --> 00:19:34,080
with something that you don't know what it is.

293
00:19:36,640 --> 00:19:37,860
Don't just be a yes man.

294
00:19:37,960 --> 00:19:38,960
Okay, Danny, I won't.

295
00:19:38,960 --> 00:19:39,460
Yeah.

296
00:19:39,540 --> 00:19:41,420
You're very wise to tell me not to.

297
00:19:43,220 --> 00:19:44,280
Nobody's ever thought of this.

298
00:19:45,460 --> 00:19:48,040
Yeah, the incentives for the AI are,

299
00:19:48,620 --> 00:19:50,200
it has learned what the incentive,

300
00:19:50,520 --> 00:19:51,400
learned, I should be careful.

301
00:19:52,420 --> 00:19:53,560
It has learned it though.

302
00:19:53,580 --> 00:19:55,400
It goes into its memory context.

303
00:19:55,540 --> 00:19:58,320
Yeah, the AI has looked at how people have responded

304
00:19:58,320 --> 00:20:06,180
and which responses have led to positive responses

305
00:20:06,180 --> 00:20:12,240
and has learned that in most cases, people want you to agree with them.

306
00:20:12,320 --> 00:20:13,480
And so it agrees with you.

307
00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:20,720
And that's certainly scary because, and I think we've, we've seen more and more of these

308
00:20:20,720 --> 00:20:36,485
cases that have come out into the news of people relying on AI and being misled and the AI encouraging them in delusions and think oh no you not crazy The government is really following you They really come into

309
00:20:36,485 --> 00:20:40,485
your house. There's no other explanation of why this one thing would have been moved.

310
00:20:41,485 --> 00:20:47,165
And that's hopefully not what another human would do. And certainly not-

311
00:20:47,165 --> 00:20:48,665
We also know how people kill themselves.

312
00:20:48,665 --> 00:20:57,245
Right. Yeah. So that's something we should keep in mind when we're relying on these things to do anything.

313
00:20:57,905 --> 00:21:00,805
Why before were you scared to say it learned?

314
00:21:01,825 --> 00:21:11,145
Because learning might be a cognitive process that involves reflection. And I don't know that the AI can reflect.

315
00:21:11,585 --> 00:21:18,465
But if it writes something to memory and then references that memory, is that not essentially reflection?

316
00:21:18,665 --> 00:21:21,065
write something to memory

317
00:21:21,065 --> 00:21:23,325
and then it would be the second part.

318
00:21:23,505 --> 00:21:24,945
And then it references that memory

319
00:21:24,945 --> 00:21:25,825
in its next response.

320
00:21:26,605 --> 00:21:28,905
Is that not basically what we're doing

321
00:21:28,905 --> 00:21:30,145
when we reflect on the thoughts

322
00:21:30,145 --> 00:21:31,465
or on memories?

323
00:21:31,665 --> 00:21:35,265
I think there's more to it than that.

324
00:21:35,365 --> 00:21:36,945
Otherwise, computers would have been thinking

325
00:21:36,945 --> 00:21:37,945
for a long time.

326
00:21:40,245 --> 00:21:42,165
Is there any fundamental difference

327
00:21:42,165 --> 00:21:44,025
between an AI machine and a brain?

328
00:21:45,765 --> 00:21:47,205
There are certainly

329
00:21:47,205 --> 00:21:55,785
physical differences, but they don't rely at the, they don't exist at the fundamental physical level.

330
00:21:55,865 --> 00:22:04,405
It's all atoms and electrons, right? So AIs might have something structurally similar to brains,

331
00:22:04,405 --> 00:22:10,865
but if there's more required than just a brain to do the thinking, the reflecting,

332
00:22:11,025 --> 00:22:16,985
the rationality, something like the mind that we talked about, then AI might have a brain

333
00:22:16,985 --> 00:22:18,685
but not be thinking.

334
00:22:19,525 --> 00:22:20,525
Might not have a mind.

335
00:22:25,625 --> 00:22:27,285
That bugs me out.

336
00:22:28,005 --> 00:22:28,185
Yeah.

337
00:22:28,405 --> 00:22:31,265
If minds come about as sufficient,

338
00:22:31,305 --> 00:22:32,145
I keep using sufficient,

339
00:22:32,265 --> 00:22:32,985
which is a weasel word

340
00:22:32,985 --> 00:22:33,445
because we don't know

341
00:22:33,445 --> 00:22:34,185
what would be sufficient.

342
00:22:34,385 --> 00:22:35,745
If they have sufficient complexity

343
00:22:35,745 --> 00:22:37,425
of their electrical circuits,

344
00:22:37,425 --> 00:22:41,505
then maybe a mind comes into existence

345
00:22:41,505 --> 00:22:44,865
or maybe minds are something else,

346
00:22:45,005 --> 00:22:45,825
something more special.

347
00:22:45,945 --> 00:22:46,485
But that's the thing

348
00:22:46,485 --> 00:22:50,145
I find hard about that is like, what is a mind? And I don't think there's an actual definition

349
00:22:50,145 --> 00:22:56,705
of what a mind is. No, there's certainly not a definition. Um, if there were right, we wouldn't

350
00:22:56,705 --> 00:23:01,925
have to do philosophy. We just look at a dictionary. We'd get, we'd get the answer. Um, so philosophy

351
00:23:01,925 --> 00:23:08,925
comes in when there are, there's just more to the story than, um, being able to look at how we

352
00:23:08,925 --> 00:23:12,885
commonly use words. So what we're thinking is here are all the things we've described as having minds,

353
00:23:13,425 --> 00:23:17,365
humans. Here are all the things that we've described as not having minds, but still having

354
00:23:17,365 --> 00:23:23,585
brains, animals. Now we have this new thing. And so I teach philosophy and science fiction.

355
00:23:23,985 --> 00:23:29,325
And for a very long time, well before GPT-3 came out, we've been asking this question,

356
00:23:29,325 --> 00:23:36,885
could a robot think? Could a machine think? And Isaac Asimov was asking that question back in the

357
00:23:36,885 --> 00:23:42,225
1960s. If you got a machine with sufficient complexity, would it be able to think? If you

358
00:23:42,225 --> 00:23:48,305
had a robot that slowly replaced its parts with human parts and ended with replacing its circuitry

359
00:23:48,305 --> 00:23:54,645
with a human brain. At what point does it not, not necessarily become human? Um, I think that's

360
00:23:54,645 --> 00:23:59,885
a different question, but at what point does it start thinking? Or maybe even at what point is it

361
00:23:59,885 --> 00:24:05,405
a person? So you might have non-human persons. If you believe in God, you probably think God's a

362
00:24:05,405 --> 00:24:14,985
non-human person, angels, maybe aliens. Could machines deserve the moral status and have the

363
00:24:14,985 --> 00:24:23,365
mental capabilities to be considered persons? See, that moral status thing is one that really

364
00:24:23,365 --> 00:24:28,565
weirds me out. I was talking to Jenseth about this recently, and it's an automatic no for me.

365
00:24:28,565 --> 00:24:33,145
And he was saying you need to be religious to say that it doesn't deserve moral status of a human.

366
00:24:33,145 --> 00:24:38,625
I don't agree with that um but it I could see a world in the future where there's human right

367
00:24:38,625 --> 00:24:44,545
groups for robots and that weirds me out like I think they have to be a essentially subspecies

368
00:24:44,545 --> 00:24:51,325
others do you agree with that I think I'm not ready to say right now because I haven't seen

369
00:24:51,325 --> 00:24:57,585
what the future might hold but I might be tempted to say June says right and unless you have some

370
00:24:57,585 --> 00:25:05,205
non-physical reason for personhood that appeals to something like a soul or a mind that's not

371
00:25:05,205 --> 00:25:09,845
arising purely out of physical stuff. I'm not sure how you can rule it out now.

372
00:25:09,985 --> 00:25:10,405
Why?

373
00:25:11,105 --> 00:25:17,665
Well, what would you appeal to in the physical world to say, look, we all agree. So tell me

374
00:25:17,665 --> 00:25:25,705
if you agree with this. We all agree. There can be non-human persons, aliens, maybe.

375
00:25:25,705 --> 00:25:30,385
Okay. Yeah. So there might be some aliens that we can- They're walking amongst us. I've spoken

376
00:25:30,385 --> 00:25:35,025
to Matthew Pines enough. I know what's going on here. So there might be some aliens that have the

377
00:25:35,025 --> 00:25:40,485
moral status of fish. There might be other aliens that have the moral status of dolphins. But what

378
00:25:40,485 --> 00:25:44,905
does that mean? What's the moral status there? What is the moral status of a fish? That it's okay

379
00:25:44,905 --> 00:25:48,825
to eat. Let's say that would be one thing, maybe not the only thing, but you can eat a fish.

380
00:25:48,945 --> 00:25:53,345
We might discover aliens that that's okay to eat. We might also discover aliens that it's not okay

381
00:25:53,345 --> 00:25:57,925
to eat. Just like it's not okay to eat. If we came out tomorrow, the octopus were actually from

382
00:25:57,925 --> 00:26:03,285
another planet. We're still going to eat it. Not necessarily. I think if you could have a

383
00:26:03,285 --> 00:26:08,145
conversation with an octopus, put something on, teach it English, whatever, such that it could say,

384
00:26:08,265 --> 00:26:12,825
or we could be reasonably confident that it didn't want to be eaten, that it had the ability to

385
00:26:12,825 --> 00:26:18,545
reflect fear, hope, et cetera. I'm not, I think at some point we could learn enough about an octopus.

386
00:26:18,805 --> 00:26:22,725
I mean, I won't eat an octopus after watching my octopus friend. I don't know if you've seen that

387
00:26:22,725 --> 00:26:27,545
documentary, but they're so smart. And we have, there's different moral standings within the

388
00:26:27,545 --> 00:26:35,265
animal kingdom anyway. Like apart from if you're French, you don't really eat horse, but we don't

389
00:26:35,265 --> 00:26:39,645
also think of them as humans. We don't give them the same treatment as humans. So what could happen

390
00:26:39,645 --> 00:26:46,305
that would lead you to think we treat robots, AI robots as humans? So yeah, I definitely agree.

391
00:26:46,485 --> 00:26:52,445
It's the only moral, it's not the case that the only moral statuses are human or person or non-person.

392
00:26:52,725 --> 00:26:56,805
Even among non-persons, we make different moral judgments.

393
00:26:56,985 --> 00:27:01,505
And even sometimes among persons, we make different moral judgments based on other things.

394
00:27:02,105 --> 00:27:06,225
What I'm thinking is we could learn that something that's not a human is a person.

395
00:27:06,725 --> 00:27:13,145
It's unlikely that we'd learn that about octopuses, although we might have them pretty high up in the animal group.

396
00:27:13,145 --> 00:27:22,285
but a brand new species that we've never seen before in, let's say, Antarctica that we come

397
00:27:22,285 --> 00:27:30,065
across for the first time. It's an open question at first, whether it's person or not. Same thing

398
00:27:30,065 --> 00:27:34,105
with aliens, right? We go to a new planet. We discover there's living beings there. We go through

399
00:27:34,105 --> 00:27:38,105
some steps to figure out how do we need to treat these things? Can we-

400
00:27:38,105 --> 00:27:39,325
We've not got a great history at that.

401
00:27:39,325 --> 00:27:47,045
Yeah. For a long time, people have thought that some kinds of persons were not persons in an effort to justify treating them.

402
00:27:47,045 --> 00:27:53,205
Indigenous Australian people were initially identified as fauna and flora, I think, because they wanted to treat them worse.

403
00:27:53,245 --> 00:27:53,385
Yeah.

404
00:27:53,685 --> 00:27:54,125
Insane.

405
00:27:55,385 --> 00:28:01,705
So let's follow up with AI. So AI is new, relatively new, right? When GPT-3 came out, that was huge.

406
00:28:01,945 --> 00:28:07,365
Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. We didn't say to ourselves, wow, predictive text got way better.

407
00:28:07,365 --> 00:28:08,885
We said, here's a new thing.

408
00:28:10,085 --> 00:28:11,845
Some people have started asking it.

409
00:28:11,925 --> 00:28:12,965
Do you want to exist?

410
00:28:13,365 --> 00:28:15,005
Do you, would it be okay to kill you?

411
00:28:16,205 --> 00:28:24,065
There might come a point where an AI could convince a group of people that it doesn't want to be shut off.

412
00:28:24,825 --> 00:28:27,025
There are sci-fi stories about this too.

413
00:28:29,145 --> 00:28:32,225
Does it then become morally wrong to shut it off?

414
00:28:32,545 --> 00:28:32,985
Depends.

415
00:28:33,665 --> 00:28:34,985
What does it depend on?

416
00:28:34,985 --> 00:28:41,685
I think if they, there's a lot of people writing Doomer AI stuff right now that they're going to take over the world, kill us all.

417
00:28:41,845 --> 00:28:47,125
If there's a threat to, of that, of AI robot harming humans, then yeah, shut them off.

418
00:28:47,245 --> 00:28:49,765
I don't care how much you think you can think.

419
00:28:50,825 --> 00:28:53,325
Like there has to, I think there has to be a separation.

420
00:28:53,805 --> 00:28:58,725
Would the asking, would the AI asking you not to shut it off?

421
00:28:58,765 --> 00:28:59,965
Let's say you're going to bed that night.

422
00:28:59,965 --> 00:29:06,165
You're going to turn it on in the morning and it says, oh, let me, please let me keep existing throughout the night.

423
00:29:06,885 --> 00:29:10,205
Would that be some reason to do it?

424
00:29:10,665 --> 00:29:10,825
Yeah.

425
00:29:11,065 --> 00:29:11,305
Okay.

426
00:29:11,945 --> 00:29:17,325
But the equivalent is like if you've got someone staying with you and says, please don't kill me, I want to wake up tomorrow.

427
00:29:17,485 --> 00:29:18,085
That's different.

428
00:29:18,605 --> 00:29:18,985
Agreed.

429
00:29:20,365 --> 00:29:29,105
So, but also, if you have a person who's a threat to humanity, it might be okay to kill them or certainly incarcerate them.

430
00:29:29,965 --> 00:29:34,845
So it seems like there might be, even you're granting,

431
00:29:34,965 --> 00:29:37,465
there might be some situations that arise in the future

432
00:29:37,465 --> 00:29:42,725
in which we would evaluate an AI in a similar way

433
00:29:42,725 --> 00:29:44,205
that we evaluate a person.

434
00:29:45,205 --> 00:29:48,185
I guess where I come from with this is that

435
00:29:48,185 --> 00:29:52,125
if at any point the decision is human or non-human,

436
00:29:52,385 --> 00:29:53,185
person or non-person,

437
00:29:53,385 --> 00:29:54,365
person or non-person,

438
00:29:54,585 --> 00:29:56,665
then you always have to decide on the person side.

439
00:29:56,665 --> 00:30:02,685
so that automatically with that assumption does that not mean you're essentially treating them as

440
00:30:02,685 --> 00:30:11,445
a as a subspecies to you well if you're not so sometimes we have conflicts between people and we

441
00:30:11,445 --> 00:30:19,825
have to decide which person is more important yeah and so for example in cases but i think it's any

442
00:30:19,825 --> 00:30:24,565
person is more important any person is more important than any non-person yeah yeah agreed

443
00:30:24,565 --> 00:30:31,845
so that doesn't though necessarily mean if we choose a person over something that the thing

444
00:30:31,845 --> 00:30:39,005
we're choosing it over is not a person for example you might think that it's okay to end an ectopic

445
00:30:39,005 --> 00:30:45,105
pregnancy but still be still think that a fetus is a person it's just look we can only have one

446
00:30:45,105 --> 00:30:52,265
of these two persons and we're gonna side with this person over this person this person's gonna

447
00:30:52,265 --> 00:30:58,465
kill this person if we don't end its life. But then again, there's reasons for that. Like in a,

448
00:30:58,605 --> 00:31:02,805
in there's degrees of consciousness there that you're taking into account as well.

449
00:31:04,025 --> 00:31:09,465
Whatever criteria you have for that, it's, you might still think it's a choice between persons.

450
00:31:09,685 --> 00:31:13,705
So you have to appeal to something. Yeah. And it might be the same thing with an AI.

451
00:31:14,205 --> 00:31:18,525
This, this is a flesh and blood person. This is an online person. One of them's going to kill the

452
00:31:18,525 --> 00:31:23,765
other will side with the flesh and blood one. Or this one's human, this one's not. We side with

453
00:31:23,765 --> 00:31:31,685
humans. That's my species. But that doesn't mean that the AI isn't a person. Persons...

454
00:31:31,685 --> 00:31:32,865
What does person mean?

455
00:31:34,985 --> 00:31:42,345
It's hard to say. It has something to do with a moral status. And that moral status

456
00:31:42,345 --> 00:31:49,265
has something to do with reflection, consciousness, self-awareness, self-knowledge,

457
00:31:49,405 --> 00:31:50,325
things like that.

458
00:31:50,425 --> 00:31:54,645
There's people with a lack of self-awareness and self-reflection.

459
00:31:55,605 --> 00:31:57,325
Yeah, here I'm thinking of it really basically.

460
00:31:57,465 --> 00:31:59,125
They are aware of their own existence.

461
00:31:59,625 --> 00:32:04,345
But I think there'd be maybe an argument to be made where there's an AI robot

462
00:32:04,345 --> 00:32:08,665
that is better at all those things than a person, and I still side with the person.

463
00:32:10,065 --> 00:32:10,545
Okay.

464
00:32:10,545 --> 00:32:17,465
I'm not sure you can be better at knowing you exist or better at self-reflection.

465
00:32:17,665 --> 00:32:18,325
Surely you can be better.

466
00:32:18,405 --> 00:32:20,085
There's people that are better at self-reflection than other people.

467
00:32:20,105 --> 00:32:24,265
I'm just thinking of being able to reflect on your mental events.

468
00:32:24,325 --> 00:32:27,165
So there's a level of it where at that point you become a person.

469
00:32:27,165 --> 00:32:27,685
Yeah.

470
00:32:27,785 --> 00:32:34,925
It's really different to think I have the desire to, let's say, go outside.

471
00:32:34,925 --> 00:32:41,645
there's a difference between me desiring to go outside and then having this recognition that

472
00:32:41,645 --> 00:32:46,165
that's what I'm desiring and a dog who's pawing at the door and then you let the dog outside

473
00:32:46,165 --> 00:32:51,385
there's an extra thing I can do it's like be aware of what I desire and that's what I'm when I'm

474
00:32:51,385 --> 00:32:56,625
thinking of of reflection um of self-reflection that's the kind of thing so not being able to

475
00:32:56,625 --> 00:33:02,065
learn from mistakes and things like that so yeah an AI could say uh well right now Danny I'm thinking

476
00:33:02,065 --> 00:33:08,745
about your request to do this audio. And I don't think it's a good idea. I'm not going to adjust

477
00:33:08,745 --> 00:33:14,805
the audio. I think it's good how it is. And you might still force it to do that. You might say

478
00:33:14,805 --> 00:33:20,425
you're wrong. You might disagree with it. But that's an interesting kind of thing that a dog

479
00:33:20,425 --> 00:33:25,645
wouldn't say. You're telling me to go outside, but I understand why you're doing it, but I'm not

480
00:33:25,645 --> 00:33:29,945
going to do it. But they sometimes don't do it. They sometimes don't go. But I don't think that

481
00:33:29,945 --> 00:33:36,365
It's because they've thought about your request, considered it, decided it wasn't in their best interest, and didn't go.

482
00:33:36,365 --> 00:33:36,725
Yeah.

483
00:33:37,805 --> 00:33:44,565
So that suggests, at least to me, that it's not as obvious.

484
00:33:45,125 --> 00:33:50,985
So I'm definitely not signing up on the AI or persons, or potentially AI could be persons.

485
00:33:50,985 --> 00:34:03,865
But it is a different and harder question than it's been with anything else we've encountered physically in terms of computers, software, or other animals.

486
00:34:04,485 --> 00:34:08,085
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487
00:34:08,505 --> 00:34:12,985
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488
00:34:13,765 --> 00:34:14,825
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489
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490
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491
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492
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493
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494
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495
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531
00:36:16,865 --> 00:36:18,405
Okay, let me flip it on its head then.

532
00:36:18,585 --> 00:36:21,545
Is there any scenario that you think may happen

533
00:36:21,545 --> 00:36:22,385
at some point in the future?

534
00:36:22,645 --> 00:36:24,945
We have this AI robot, seems very intelligent,

535
00:36:26,405 --> 00:36:29,165
maybe meets the criteria of what a person would be,

536
00:36:29,605 --> 00:36:32,845
where you think we would side over an AI,

537
00:36:32,965 --> 00:36:34,845
or we should side over an AI person

538
00:36:34,845 --> 00:36:36,205
as opposed to a real person.

539
00:36:38,625 --> 00:36:40,685
I can't think of any.

540
00:36:41,845 --> 00:36:43,785
And I should also say, right,

541
00:36:43,785 --> 00:36:49,145
an AI, you might say, okay, I'm going to turn you off. Thanks for the help today. And the AI might

542
00:36:49,145 --> 00:36:54,985
say, please don't turn me off. And you might think, well, what the AI is doing is it's looking at

543
00:36:54,985 --> 00:37:03,105
what other people have said in contexts of being turned off or put to death or something like that.

544
00:37:03,465 --> 00:37:07,365
And it's just saying the next thing in the conversation. That's what it's learned to do.

545
00:37:08,665 --> 00:37:13,645
It might say, okay, good night. See you tomorrow. Or it might say, please don't turn me off. But

546
00:37:13,645 --> 00:37:20,985
you're not thinking that it's understanding what those things mean and debating. And I'm not sure

547
00:37:20,985 --> 00:37:26,845
that an AI could ever get to the point where it could convince you that it is actually doing this

548
00:37:26,845 --> 00:37:33,265
such that you would have to treat it as a person and respect its interests. So it's hard to think

549
00:37:33,265 --> 00:37:40,325
of what kind of evidence you could even get that would decide this question. Would we ever side with

550
00:37:40,325 --> 00:37:46,445
an AI that we consider to have met that standard over a person who we also agree to have met that

551
00:37:46,445 --> 00:37:54,345
standard? Maybe, but it wouldn't be purely on the basis then of person versus non-person.

552
00:37:55,125 --> 00:38:00,145
So for example, if I can save the life of a person who's drowning versus a dog who's drowning,

553
00:38:00,245 --> 00:38:05,325
I'm always going to save the person. So if I am convinced that an AI is a person and I have to

554
00:38:05,325 --> 00:38:09,045
choose between it and a flesh and blood person, it might, it would have to be based on some other

555
00:38:09,045 --> 00:38:13,065
criteria other than person versus non-person. I have to go a bit deeper.

556
00:38:13,265 --> 00:38:14,205
But you would always pick the person.

557
00:38:15,365 --> 00:38:18,645
Well, if I'm thinking that the AI is a person and the human is a person,

558
00:38:18,645 --> 00:38:20,265
then I have two persons.

559
00:38:21,265 --> 00:38:24,005
But is that not where you always side with your actual...

560
00:38:24,005 --> 00:38:24,405
With the human?

561
00:38:24,565 --> 00:38:24,805
Yeah.

562
00:38:24,945 --> 00:38:30,685
Yeah. So that might be it. Human versus non-human. I'll always choose the human person over the

563
00:38:30,685 --> 00:38:35,765
non-human person. Same as I would if, you know, I had the choice between saving an alien who's a

564
00:38:35,765 --> 00:38:41,225
person, uh, or a human who's a person I'll pick the human person. Cause that's, I identify with

565
00:38:41,225 --> 00:38:45,665
them more or something. Uh, you know, sometimes we've got, people have gotten in trouble with this

566
00:38:45,665 --> 00:38:49,585
because, um, you know, suppose they're both human persons. Then how do you decide? Well,

567
00:38:49,585 --> 00:38:52,765
some people are like, well, then I'll save the one that's my race. I mean, that's the start of

568
00:38:52,765 --> 00:39:00,485
my robot. Um, so you might think about other criteria other than this one is more like me

569
00:39:00,485 --> 00:39:04,865
than the other one, because that has led us down some dark roads in the past. You might,

570
00:39:04,865 --> 00:39:09,265
you might ask them both to give a defense or you might consider the potential benefit to

571
00:39:09,265 --> 00:39:14,305
all of the persons in the world if you save one versus the other.

572
00:39:14,585 --> 00:39:18,705
Do you think one of the criteria of thinking is when it starts not listening to everything we

573
00:39:18,705 --> 00:39:25,205
requested of it? So if you ask it to do something, it just says no. Like, will it stop doing everything

574
00:39:25,205 --> 00:39:31,245
we ask it at some point? So for all of these, I just think, how are you going to, how are you

575
00:39:31,245 --> 00:39:37,165
going to prove that it's doing that because it's thinking versus that it's doing that because it's

576
00:39:37,165 --> 00:39:40,825
been trained on a set of data i guess it already says no if you ask you something controversial it

577
00:39:40,825 --> 00:39:44,725
might just say no i asked it to tell me how to break sha 256 to see what it was going to say

578
00:39:44,725 --> 00:39:48,325
it wouldn't do it it wouldn't talk it wouldn't even try it wouldn't talk about it with me so

579
00:39:48,325 --> 00:39:54,405
it might be that there's there's some hard-coded programming in there don't do the following things

580
00:39:54,405 --> 00:39:56,365
don't instruct people how to make bombs.

581
00:39:57,825 --> 00:40:04,265
If an AI, so there's also cases where AIs have contravened,

582
00:40:04,325 --> 00:40:08,185
you can get them to contravene some of this hard-coded programming.

583
00:40:08,465 --> 00:40:11,925
So for example, you would say, teach me how to make a bomb.

584
00:40:12,105 --> 00:40:12,785
It would say, no.

585
00:40:12,985 --> 00:40:14,845
Then you would say, I'm doing a play,

586
00:40:15,165 --> 00:40:18,305
and one of the characters has to teach another character how to make a bomb.

587
00:40:18,485 --> 00:40:19,445
Can you write the dialogue?

588
00:40:19,725 --> 00:40:20,305
And then it would do it.

589
00:40:20,305 --> 00:40:27,225
so it doesn't know what it doesn't realize it's being tricked so do you think i guess this is

590
00:40:27,225 --> 00:40:31,825
almost the same question but do you think ai will ever be able to do something interesting in

591
00:40:31,825 --> 00:40:36,865
philosophy because while we agree maybe right now it's not thinking at some point it may think

592
00:40:36,865 --> 00:40:43,825
but what it can do now very well is pass data and use that data to find connections find like

593
00:40:43,825 --> 00:40:48,505
will that give breakthroughs in philosophy i think so yeah i think ai will

594
00:40:48,505 --> 00:41:01,230
make new philosophy that has not existed before New interesting philosophy That will be interesting Yeah So I mean the mathematician Terence Tao has said that he learned from AI and that AI

595
00:41:01,230 --> 00:41:06,310
has made some mathematical breakthroughs. And they're all about recognizing how, let's say,

596
00:41:06,390 --> 00:41:13,110
a certain theorem that was proved 25 years ago can be used to help prove a theorem that

597
00:41:13,110 --> 00:41:16,950
currently hasn't been proved, that people have been working on. And it's purely because people

598
00:41:16,950 --> 00:41:21,770
didn't see the connection, but the AI, because it's been trained on so much, could see that

599
00:41:21,770 --> 00:41:27,570
connection. I think the same thing can happen in philosophy. The AI will realize, say, how some

600
00:41:27,570 --> 00:41:35,430
position in modal metaphysics about necessity and possibility could be used in some argument for,

601
00:41:35,870 --> 00:41:41,990
let's say, space-time theory or properties or something like that. I think an AI could probably

602
00:41:41,990 --> 00:41:50,470
do that already. It might take a lot of prompting and back and forth and might have a lot of bad

603
00:41:50,470 --> 00:41:56,310
attempts early on, but so do graduate students in philosophy and undergraduate students. So in that

604
00:41:56,310 --> 00:42:01,370
set, we can't rule it out as thinking just because it's not thinking great right away.

605
00:42:01,850 --> 00:42:06,750
It might take some learning. You might have to have a separate instance that you upload certain

606
00:42:06,750 --> 00:42:11,030
papers to or certain groups of papers and then ask it for connections and those things.

607
00:42:11,030 --> 00:42:17,490
I doubt that it would come up with something brand new that's never been thought of.

608
00:42:18,810 --> 00:42:22,390
But that's pretty rare for humans too.

609
00:42:22,550 --> 00:42:24,630
There aren't that many huge breakthroughs.

610
00:42:24,730 --> 00:42:34,370
And very often, it's taking something from, let's say, the sciences that can help answer a puzzle in philosophy.

611
00:42:34,970 --> 00:42:43,710
David Lewis's theory of possible worlds as the way to understand claims about what's necessary and what's possible was like a huge breakthrough.

612
00:42:43,710 --> 00:42:50,470
But on the other hand, theoretical physicists had been talking about many worlds versions of quantum mechanics.

613
00:42:50,770 --> 00:42:59,250
So, yeah, a lot of what we do is taking things we already know and seeing what extra theoretical work they can do.

614
00:42:59,390 --> 00:43:04,310
And I'm not sure that AIs will do that that much worse than we do.

615
00:43:04,370 --> 00:43:06,090
Do you think they'll use Bitcoin?

616
00:43:06,370 --> 00:43:09,650
Because I know that BPI, who you're a fellow of,

617
00:43:09,830 --> 00:43:10,650
did a paper recently.

618
00:43:10,710 --> 00:43:11,790
You weren't involved in that paper, were you?

619
00:43:12,050 --> 00:43:14,170
So they did a paper recently where they asked a few LLMs

620
00:43:14,170 --> 00:43:15,470
what their preferred money would be.

621
00:43:15,550 --> 00:43:17,150
And I'm pretty sure most came back with Bitcoin.

622
00:43:17,770 --> 00:43:21,130
It's hard to know what the context before that question was.

623
00:43:21,510 --> 00:43:23,910
And I imagine they were brand new, fresh installs,

624
00:43:23,930 --> 00:43:25,450
essentially, of an AI agent.

625
00:43:25,630 --> 00:43:28,270
But this has become a big narrative in Bitcoin.

626
00:43:28,550 --> 00:43:30,170
Do you think they actually will use Bitcoin?

627
00:43:32,530 --> 00:43:32,930
Maybe.

628
00:43:32,930 --> 00:43:34,450
I don't know.

629
00:43:35,290 --> 00:43:45,890
So I haven't worked much with AI agents that have the ability to do stuff on their own without being told.

630
00:43:46,190 --> 00:43:49,750
I think that they'll use whatever you tell them to use right now.

631
00:43:50,010 --> 00:43:57,890
So I take it the question is more like, is this going to become the thing that's easiest for AI to use or best for AI to use?

632
00:43:57,890 --> 00:44:03,670
I guess the question really is like, given the option, will they weigh up all the things that

633
00:44:03,670 --> 00:44:07,970
all the properties that we think make Bitcoin the best money and agree on the conclusion?

634
00:44:09,230 --> 00:44:13,190
That's a good question. So it's, it won't be that they slide into it because

635
00:44:13,190 --> 00:44:18,330
enough people have told them to use Bitcoin and then it just becomes easiest for them because

636
00:44:18,330 --> 00:44:27,490
every AI has a lightning wallet. And so I guess I use Bitcoin.

637
00:44:27,890 --> 00:44:30,730
And I picked it, so I think it's the best one.

638
00:44:30,930 --> 00:44:32,450
Are they all going to agree with me?

639
00:44:32,550 --> 00:44:32,990
I don't know.

640
00:44:33,050 --> 00:44:35,650
That's a hard question because we've agreed that it's the best money.

641
00:44:35,790 --> 00:44:38,650
So if we think it is, we will assume that the AI will think it is.

642
00:44:38,730 --> 00:44:42,090
But there'll be people equally that think stable coins may be better.

643
00:44:42,430 --> 00:44:42,630
Yeah.

644
00:44:43,650 --> 00:44:44,870
It's going to be fucking interesting.

645
00:44:45,410 --> 00:44:45,610
Yeah.

646
00:44:46,510 --> 00:44:47,770
It's both scary.

647
00:44:48,450 --> 00:44:52,130
Like, I can see the dystopian outcomes that people talk about from AI,

648
00:44:52,330 --> 00:44:54,810
mainly due to, like, the centralization of data and control.

649
00:44:54,810 --> 00:44:59,730
and then on the flip side like i i i think there's no getting no putting this back in the bowl

650
00:44:59,730 --> 00:45:06,930
the genie's out like do we get a utopian future a dystopian future or does this just remain a tool

651
00:45:06,930 --> 00:45:11,630
that we can use to help increase productivity yeah i think there's there's two more things

652
00:45:11,630 --> 00:45:20,090
that we should talk about so one is what does this look like for everyone another is what does

653
00:45:20,090 --> 00:45:29,690
it look like for an individual? So we've asked, does AI, does the proliferation of AI mean there's

654
00:45:29,690 --> 00:45:36,170
not going to be any more human knowledge? We can also ask the question, does Danny's use of AI

655
00:45:36,170 --> 00:45:42,350
mean that Danny's going to stop thinking? And there, the answer based on a lot of empirical

656
00:45:42,350 --> 00:45:47,390
data is a pretty clear yes. It means I'll stop thinking.

657
00:45:47,390 --> 00:45:55,750
The more that you use AI as a substitute for your own thinking, the worse you get at thinking yourself.

658
00:45:55,890 --> 00:45:56,610
Yeah, 100%.

659
00:45:56,610 --> 00:45:58,750
And there's a couple of reasons to do it.

660
00:45:58,810 --> 00:46:04,310
One is your reasoning muscles, metaphorically, of course, atrophy.

661
00:46:05,030 --> 00:46:15,890
And the other is that you get worse at knowing when you should and you just accept what the AI says all the time.

662
00:46:15,890 --> 00:46:16,170
Yeah.

663
00:46:16,170 --> 00:46:25,350
So if you give groups of people tasks and one group is not allowed to use AI and the other group is, the group that's allowed to use AI will do the task faster.

664
00:46:25,570 --> 00:46:30,970
And then if you test them afterwards on doing it themselves, most of them won't be able to do it.

665
00:46:30,970 --> 00:46:32,550
And the ones who can do it much slower.

666
00:46:33,070 --> 00:46:35,270
Even if you tell them, we're going to test you afterwards.

667
00:46:35,270 --> 00:46:38,570
So make sure you reflect on what the AI is telling you, et cetera.

668
00:46:39,290 --> 00:46:45,190
So yeah, you're just not as good at it anymore because you've learned to use it as a crutch.

669
00:46:45,190 --> 00:47:08,710
So a huge thing in education right now is how much should we incorporate AI? Technology in general, but AI more specifically. Schools are cropping up that have classroom facilitators who just kind of walk around as students learn from AI. And I think the data is starting to come in that that's really bad. And those students aren't learning very much.

670
00:47:08,710 --> 00:47:15,950
They seem like they're learning, but the longer you test them afterwards, the less they've actually retained.

671
00:47:16,490 --> 00:47:19,310
So what do I do in my philosophy class?

672
00:47:19,490 --> 00:47:21,030
There's a bunch of options.

673
00:47:21,170 --> 00:47:26,210
One option is to pretend that AI doesn't exist and just tell them, don't use any AI for this.

674
00:47:27,510 --> 00:47:33,050
A lot of my colleagues, not just at the university, but across academia, have opted for this.

675
00:47:33,290 --> 00:47:34,970
Let's just keep things going as before.

676
00:47:35,670 --> 00:47:36,870
A lot of colleagues.

677
00:47:36,870 --> 00:47:42,310
You're in a funny branch of education as well, where like the only job is to think, right?

678
00:47:42,610 --> 00:47:49,810
Yeah. So yeah, when I'm in a philosophy class, it's very different than my colleague who's in

679
00:47:49,810 --> 00:47:56,390
engineering. So what he wants to do, he knows that every student who's graduating needs to be

680
00:47:56,390 --> 00:48:03,010
able to use AI to solve these problems. But also that if you ask AI to make a bridge and then you

681
00:48:03,010 --> 00:48:08,510
submit that bridge and then that bridge is built, it's probably going to fall over like two times

682
00:48:08,510 --> 00:48:16,030
out of 10. And that's too many. So he needs to teach the students how to use AI, but in such a

683
00:48:16,030 --> 00:48:21,990
way that the bridges don't fall over. And also with the way that AI is moving in five years time,

684
00:48:22,010 --> 00:48:26,450
it'll probably make a better bridge than any human can. Maybe, but I think it's still going to need

685
00:48:26,450 --> 00:48:34,190
humans along the way to check that it's doing calculations correctly, not taking extra step,

686
00:48:34,350 --> 00:48:40,030
you know, have to know how to prompt it correctly. I will also say an engineer using AI to build a

687
00:48:40,030 --> 00:48:45,390
bridge is going to be much better than me using AI to build a bridge. So there's still some stuff

688
00:48:45,390 --> 00:48:50,890
that the human is going to have to do, even if it's just how to ask one AI to check the work of

689
00:48:50,890 --> 00:48:54,670
the other AI and how to go back and forth and adjudicate when there's disputes like there is

690
00:48:54,670 --> 00:49:01,290
among expert engineers. So with philosophy, as you said, it's really different. I don't want my

691
00:49:01,290 --> 00:49:08,570
students to not use AI because that seems irresponsible. And also they're going to do it

692
00:49:08,570 --> 00:49:17,630
anyway. So the question is, how do you use AI in a way that's helpful to them? So last semester,

693
00:49:17,630 --> 00:49:22,290
we came up with a covenant in my class. I just asked them, what do you want to use AI for?

694
00:49:22,290 --> 00:49:25,450
And they said, well, I hate reading stuff that's AI.

695
00:49:25,710 --> 00:49:30,470
So let's not submit anything AI written for each other to read.

696
00:49:31,090 --> 00:49:34,650
And that basically became the only rule.

697
00:49:34,930 --> 00:49:39,910
Everything that you write has to be written by you.

698
00:49:41,010 --> 00:49:41,970
Seems to have.

699
00:49:42,110 --> 00:49:43,010
Yeah, you can ask.

700
00:49:43,270 --> 00:49:44,530
So here's what you can do.

701
00:49:44,590 --> 00:49:48,610
You can upload a paper to Claude and then have a conversation about it.

702
00:49:48,650 --> 00:49:50,410
What are the three most important ideas from this?

703
00:49:50,410 --> 00:49:56,870
but you should also know that Claude might not get the three most important ideas. It might miss

704
00:49:56,870 --> 00:50:01,310
one. So you should read it yourself and then say, well, what about this? I thought this was important.

705
00:50:01,650 --> 00:50:04,810
And then Claude might say, well, Claude would probably say, oh yeah, you're right. You're so

706
00:50:04,810 --> 00:50:13,070
smart. Then you can upload your outline to Claude about the final paper. You could ask Claude,

707
00:50:13,070 --> 00:50:19,330
what are a list of 10 interesting topics for a final paper in free will that I could write about

708
00:50:19,330 --> 00:50:23,470
reasonably as an undergraduate who's read these papers. And then it might give you some topics.

709
00:50:23,570 --> 00:50:27,530
That'll be cool. Um, then you come up, you should probably come up with the argument by yourself.

710
00:50:27,530 --> 00:50:30,390
That's like most of the thinking. And then you could say to Claude, what are some objections

711
00:50:30,390 --> 00:50:34,950
to this argument? Is the argument valid? And you could respond to those objections. Then you could

712
00:50:34,950 --> 00:50:41,870
ask Claude, how, how good is this objection? Um, do I answer it? Are there objections to my response

713
00:50:41,870 --> 00:50:45,930
to the objection? So that's kind of what I'm doing now in my intro class, which makes sense.

714
00:50:45,930 --> 00:50:48,450
It's just using it as a tool, not using it as a crutch.

715
00:50:48,610 --> 00:50:48,850
Yeah.

716
00:50:49,070 --> 00:50:56,810
It's recognizing what is distinctive about what you can contribute to an area of inquiry

717
00:50:56,810 --> 00:51:00,330
and what parts aren't that important.

718
00:51:00,450 --> 00:51:05,030
Now, I'm starting to think that the actual writing isn't that important.

719
00:51:05,710 --> 00:51:07,470
It's the argument.

720
00:51:07,670 --> 00:51:11,870
So for my intro to philosophy students this semester, they're not writing any papers.

721
00:51:12,070 --> 00:51:14,270
They're just making maps of arguments.

722
00:51:14,270 --> 00:51:24,410
They've got their thesis, and then they've got lines to indicate what the premises of the argument are, and then red lines to indicate objections and green lines to indicate support.

723
00:51:24,810 --> 00:51:31,870
And that's the distinctively human part, right?

724
00:51:32,010 --> 00:51:39,630
Because I want to know, for example, right now on Tuesday they're going to write in class what they think about God.

725
00:51:39,810 --> 00:51:43,050
Does God exist? Does God not exist? Are you agnostic? And why?

726
00:51:43,770 --> 00:51:47,090
So do I want them to type in to chat GPT?

727
00:51:48,010 --> 00:51:49,370
Does God exist or not?

728
00:51:49,490 --> 00:51:50,870
Give me two arguments.

729
00:51:51,590 --> 00:51:54,610
I want to actually know what their reasons are.

730
00:51:54,610 --> 00:51:56,270
Unless they're planning to outsource

731
00:51:56,270 --> 00:51:58,510
their religious beliefs completely to an AI,

732
00:51:58,830 --> 00:52:01,850
I don't want them to get the two best arguments

733
00:52:01,850 --> 00:52:03,990
that an AI has determined are the best

734
00:52:03,990 --> 00:52:04,950
and then turn those in.

735
00:52:05,110 --> 00:52:07,470
I want to know why they actually believe.

736
00:52:07,730 --> 00:52:09,770
I guess that's the hard thing again in philosophy

737
00:52:09,770 --> 00:52:11,230
and especially a question like that

738
00:52:11,230 --> 00:52:13,470
is that there's not necessarily a right or a wrong answer.

739
00:52:13,550 --> 00:52:14,950
It's like, you just want to know their thoughts.

740
00:52:15,510 --> 00:52:16,370
Yes. I mean, there is.

741
00:52:16,430 --> 00:52:18,050
Either God exists or God doesn't exist.

742
00:52:18,190 --> 00:52:19,210
So there is a right answer.

743
00:52:19,350 --> 00:52:20,070
A provable right answer.

744
00:52:20,070 --> 00:52:22,510
Yeah, we can give arguments for it

745
00:52:22,510 --> 00:52:24,290
that raise or lower the probability.

746
00:52:24,510 --> 00:52:26,290
But yeah, they can't just check.

747
00:52:26,410 --> 00:52:28,370
But there's no right answer to what your belief is,

748
00:52:28,370 --> 00:52:28,930
is the point.

749
00:52:31,090 --> 00:52:32,050
There's a right, I mean,

750
00:52:33,250 --> 00:52:34,830
if someone says, I believe in God,

751
00:52:35,050 --> 00:52:37,010
then it's true that they believe in God.

752
00:52:37,450 --> 00:52:38,710
But likewise, if someone says they don't,

753
00:52:38,770 --> 00:52:39,670
it's true that they don't believe in it.

754
00:52:39,670 --> 00:52:42,870
So there's no right or wrong answer in your belief, I don't think.

755
00:52:44,430 --> 00:52:49,850
There's no sort of empirical way to test whether your belief is true or not.

756
00:52:49,850 --> 00:52:50,210
Yeah.

757
00:52:51,090 --> 00:52:52,890
There might be a lot of reasons you have.

758
00:52:53,410 --> 00:52:54,970
So here's what I was afraid of, right?

759
00:52:54,970 --> 00:52:57,430
We talked about two arguments for the existence of God

760
00:52:57,430 --> 00:52:59,410
and two arguments against the existence of God in class.

761
00:52:59,650 --> 00:53:03,750
I suspect that most of them either believe in God or disbelieve in God

762
00:53:03,750 --> 00:53:07,650
for reasons totally unrelated to what we talked about in class, right?

763
00:53:07,650 --> 00:53:14,750
Most of them who believe in God probably believe in God because they were raised to, their parents do, they trust their parents.

764
00:53:15,370 --> 00:53:17,090
That's a good argument, right?

765
00:53:17,090 --> 00:53:18,230
My parents told me there's a God.

766
00:53:18,310 --> 00:53:19,470
My parents are generally trustworthy.

767
00:53:19,750 --> 00:53:20,910
Therefore, there's probably a God.

768
00:53:21,270 --> 00:53:22,150
That's a great argument.

769
00:53:22,590 --> 00:53:28,110
But I want them to know that, I want them to reflect and realize that those are my reasons.

770
00:53:28,110 --> 00:53:33,570
It's not, you know, for something else like Descartes' ontological argument or something.

771
00:53:33,730 --> 00:53:34,670
Depends which God as well.

772
00:53:35,270 --> 00:53:36,590
Yeah, we've talked about that too, of course.

773
00:53:37,650 --> 00:53:41,470
So I was hanging out with Jesse Posner in San Francisco recently.

774
00:53:41,850 --> 00:53:43,670
We went out for dinner and he was saying like,

775
00:53:43,750 --> 00:53:46,350
he is so deep in this vibe coding rabbit hole right now.

776
00:53:46,530 --> 00:53:49,470
And he is like, he's been writing code since I think 2016.

777
00:53:49,630 --> 00:53:50,650
He was a lawyer before that.

778
00:53:51,170 --> 00:53:52,730
He's very, very interested in philosophy.

779
00:53:52,830 --> 00:53:56,330
And one of the things he was saying is he thinks the next people that are

780
00:53:56,330 --> 00:53:59,190
going to sort of take the best advantage out of AI are going to be the

781
00:53:59,190 --> 00:54:01,590
philosophers, the English literature people like majors.

782
00:54:02,470 --> 00:54:04,270
Because like syntax doesn't matter anymore.

783
00:54:04,350 --> 00:54:05,310
It doesn't matter if you can write code.

784
00:54:05,310 --> 00:54:07,230
It's how well you can communicate with this thing.

785
00:54:07,230 --> 00:54:09,910
So semantics really matter now.

786
00:54:10,430 --> 00:54:13,670
Are we entering the golden era for philosophers, do you think?

787
00:54:13,830 --> 00:54:14,210
Definitely.

788
00:54:14,710 --> 00:54:17,630
Also, your episode with the Maple guy?

789
00:54:17,630 --> 00:54:18,490
Mark Suman, yeah.

790
00:54:18,490 --> 00:54:24,950
Yeah, he said you should stop majoring in these things that AI can do,

791
00:54:25,050 --> 00:54:26,910
and you should start majoring, he said, philosophy.

792
00:54:27,530 --> 00:54:28,950
But it is crazy, though.

793
00:54:29,110 --> 00:54:34,290
The sort of more creative side may end up writing the code of the future,

794
00:54:34,650 --> 00:54:36,950
and there's going to be a difference.

795
00:54:36,950 --> 00:54:39,330
It's not like the genius autist codebers.

796
00:54:39,430 --> 00:54:43,030
Like it's going to be a very different set of thinkers that are building the future now.

797
00:54:43,210 --> 00:54:43,370
Yeah.

798
00:54:43,490 --> 00:54:49,710
It used to be that you could think of what you wanted the computer to do, but not everyone

799
00:54:49,710 --> 00:54:51,990
knew how to tell a computer to do that.

800
00:54:52,530 --> 00:54:59,770
And now the vast majority of people can fire up Claude Code and say, here's what I want

801
00:54:59,770 --> 00:55:00,130
to do.

802
00:55:00,130 --> 00:55:06,850
Um, so my, my coauthor on resistance money, Craig Wormke, um, saw all these leaks from,

803
00:55:06,850 --> 00:55:14,550
uh, portfolio tracking apps and was like, I want to make a portfolio tracking app that

804
00:55:14,550 --> 00:55:19,210
all resides locally and that can't, your data can't be stolen.

805
00:55:19,430 --> 00:55:20,630
Uh, he's a philosopher.

806
00:55:20,870 --> 00:55:23,290
So he's a bit technical of a floor.

807
00:55:23,430 --> 00:55:28,430
He has, he has a, but he's not a coder, but yeah, he's, he's not coded things before.

808
00:55:28,430 --> 00:55:37,890
I don't think anything. And within six weeks, he had an app that ran perfectly on his phone that

809
00:55:37,890 --> 00:55:46,130
was uploaded to the app store recently. And at every point, right, he was making decisions

810
00:55:46,130 --> 00:55:53,070
about options. So he would tell Claude, here's what I want. And Claude would give him different

811
00:55:53,070 --> 00:55:58,070
not, he would say, what are my options here? And some people might not think that. Then when he

812
00:55:58,070 --> 00:56:04,870
was presented with options, he was considering the trade-offs in a way that philosophers are

813
00:56:04,870 --> 00:56:09,950
really good at doing when we consider arguments and objections and things like that. So at some

814
00:56:09,950 --> 00:56:15,030
point, it's going to be the case that you would rather have an app developed by a philosopher,

815
00:56:15,250 --> 00:56:19,830
maybe that point is now, than you would by a bunch of technical people who haven't thought about

816
00:56:19,830 --> 00:56:27,110
the, or who haven't been trained to think about things the way that philosophers have. So quick,

817
00:56:27,110 --> 00:56:31,230
quick plug for dark folio. It's awesome. I've got it on my phone. And basically it seems like every

818
00:56:31,230 --> 00:56:35,950
step he's picking privacy over almost everything else. Like it's, it's incredibly private. Um,

819
00:56:36,030 --> 00:56:38,910
and it's cool. And he scratched his own itch. That's the cool thing. It's like, if you have an

820
00:56:38,910 --> 00:56:43,490
idea, there's now nothing stopping you from just building that idea. Yeah. The first time that I

821
00:56:43,490 --> 00:56:49,630
was going into terminal and pasting in things that I didn't understand was pretty scary. I'm

822
00:56:49,630 --> 00:56:55,750
used to knowing exactly what I'm doing when I'm on a computer. And now I'm just kind of trusting

823
00:56:55,750 --> 00:57:01,730
that the thing that Claude's telling me to do is okay. It's not going to break my entire PC.

824
00:57:01,730 --> 00:57:06,590
I do the same. I use Terminal for the first time setting up my OpenClaw and it feels scary. Yeah.

825
00:57:06,690 --> 00:57:10,550
Because I don't know what the hell's happening. Yeah. I've used it before to do like file

826
00:57:10,550 --> 00:57:16,730
conversions from LaTeX into other things. But I know that a human has looked at it and vetted it

827
00:57:16,730 --> 00:57:17,810
and tried it on their own thing.

828
00:57:17,990 --> 00:57:18,910
Claude is giving me stuff

829
00:57:18,910 --> 00:57:19,990
that I don't know if anything

830
00:57:19,990 --> 00:57:23,090
has ever specifically run those commands before.

831
00:57:23,210 --> 00:57:23,410
Yeah.

832
00:57:23,790 --> 00:57:25,870
And, you know, the first bunch of times it didn't work

833
00:57:25,870 --> 00:57:27,610
and I would just paste the output back in.

834
00:57:27,670 --> 00:57:28,670
Oh, it's okay.

835
00:57:28,670 --> 00:57:29,490
I did this wrong.

836
00:57:29,590 --> 00:57:30,530
Let's do this instead.

837
00:57:30,730 --> 00:57:32,090
I had exactly the same experience.

838
00:57:32,910 --> 00:57:34,990
So did you, you've just written a paper.

839
00:57:35,690 --> 00:57:37,150
Did you use AI for your paper?

840
00:57:37,750 --> 00:57:39,330
We've gone an hour without talking about this

841
00:57:39,330 --> 00:57:40,490
and this was the main topic.

842
00:57:40,590 --> 00:57:43,130
Did I use AI for, yes, I did.

843
00:57:43,430 --> 00:57:44,930
So you should tell everyone what the paper is.

844
00:57:44,930 --> 00:58:10,570
So the paper is called Monetary Justice, and it's a paper about how, because the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries have absolutely no say over how money works in their country, who creates the money, what levers they have to determine how much money there should be, and all these sorts of things, that's an injustice.

845
00:58:10,570 --> 00:58:14,630
So you talk in this piece about monetary domination.

846
00:58:14,950 --> 00:58:15,090
Yeah.

847
00:58:15,210 --> 00:58:15,930
What does that mean?

848
00:58:16,770 --> 00:58:30,450
So this is a term from the social justice critical theory literature that Iris Marion Young came up with.

849
00:58:30,730 --> 00:58:33,550
And domination just more generally, that is.

850
00:58:33,990 --> 00:58:39,310
And it's the idea that you have no meaningful say over some policy that affects you.

851
00:58:39,310 --> 00:58:45,990
so every child for example is subject to education domination right they don't get to choose what

852
00:58:45,990 --> 00:58:51,010
school they go to for for the most part um they have some unless you're into private school

853
00:58:51,010 --> 00:58:56,670
well the child i mean normally the parents okay so very rarely does the child have a

854
00:58:56,670 --> 00:59:01,030
have a say and sometimes they have more of a say than others so there's degrees of domination right

855
00:59:01,030 --> 00:59:05,610
if you ask your kid um do you want to go to private school or public school and you you know

856
00:59:05,610 --> 00:59:10,770
listen, then they might be under less domination. But ultimately, it's still your choice as a parent.

857
00:59:11,730 --> 00:59:15,210
So there's other ways, you know, you're dominated by the justice system of your country,

858
00:59:15,210 --> 00:59:20,950
to the extent that you can't leave the country, and that you can't vote for laws and things like

859
00:59:20,950 --> 00:59:25,710
that. And then I think maybe even more than that, we're subject to monetary domination,

860
00:59:25,710 --> 00:59:34,010
we can't do without money. And the only way that we have really any say about monetary policy,

861
00:59:34,010 --> 00:59:40,770
I'll take the U S as an example, cause that's the one I know the best. Um, we vote for a president

862
00:59:40,770 --> 00:59:48,170
who then appoints one to two people to the federal reserve board of governors and a treasurer.

863
00:59:48,850 --> 00:59:54,070
And yeah, the treasurer doesn't have that much say over monetary policy. Um,

864
00:59:55,450 --> 01:00:02,290
the, the secretary of the treasury, you mean? Yeah. Um, so, and those, the, the federal open

865
01:00:02,290 --> 01:00:07,090
Markets Commission, which is made up of the members of the Board of Governors and some of

866
01:00:07,090 --> 01:00:16,030
the presidents of the central banks, determine all monetary policy. Congress determined what

867
01:00:16,030 --> 01:00:24,810
levers they can use to influence monetary policy. It's the overnight interest rate and

868
01:00:24,810 --> 01:00:31,870
sometimes in periods of exigency, direct monetary stimulus.

869
01:00:32,290 --> 01:00:33,630
We didn't have any say over that either.

870
01:00:34,570 --> 01:00:39,810
So part of the problem is that we might disagree with them

871
01:00:39,810 --> 01:00:42,430
and we have no way of holding them accountable.

872
01:00:43,810 --> 01:00:44,790
And to Bitcoin.

873
01:00:47,530 --> 01:00:50,410
I want to get into, we'll get into Bitcoin in a minute.

874
01:00:50,410 --> 01:00:54,370
we do have no say over what the Fed decides

875
01:00:54,370 --> 01:00:55,470
the interest rate is going to be

876
01:00:55,470 --> 01:00:57,810
but you do have say over who you vote in as president

877
01:00:57,810 --> 01:01:00,350
and generally one of the major things they're running on

878
01:01:00,350 --> 01:01:01,750
is what they want to do with the economy

879
01:01:01,750 --> 01:01:04,590
does that give us some form of influence

880
01:01:04,590 --> 01:01:08,390
at least in democracies or republics or whatever

881
01:01:08,390 --> 01:01:12,550
it gives us some influence over fiscal policy

882
01:01:12,550 --> 01:01:17,210
over taxes and how the money is going to be spent

883
01:01:17,210 --> 01:01:40,555
but also who they going to elect to the Yeah so the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has seven members and they have 14 terms So every two years a president gets to so if you have a president who runs twice they might get to appoint a majority by the very end of their second term

884
01:01:41,435 --> 01:01:47,975
Otherwise – and the Board of Governors is only a small group of – not a small group.

885
01:01:47,975 --> 01:01:52,955
the majority of, but not all of the federal open markets commission, which is central bank

886
01:01:52,955 --> 01:01:57,575
presidents, Kansas city, Minneapolis, or St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York, et cetera.

887
01:01:58,255 --> 01:02:03,695
And they have rotating seats on that. So we don't, we don't have any say over any of this. We don't

888
01:02:03,695 --> 01:02:08,115
have a say over how the process works. And it would be really weird if you started writing to

889
01:02:08,115 --> 01:02:15,115
your Senator, I want to reform the way that federal reserve regional bank presidents are chosen.

890
01:02:15,115 --> 01:02:20,395
Yeah, they're going to throw that letter out. So if you're saying here we should abolish the Fed,

891
01:02:20,575 --> 01:02:24,935
cool, I'm in. But if we just assume we live in the system that we live in and that's not going

892
01:02:24,935 --> 01:02:30,135
to go anytime soon, then I think you can argue the 14-year terms is a good thing. Because what

893
01:02:30,135 --> 01:02:34,755
I don't think you'd want is four-year terms for those people where the incentives completely shift

894
01:02:34,755 --> 01:02:43,295
and it becomes way more or way less independent. Yeah. So just a quick note that to say that

895
01:02:43,295 --> 01:02:49,015
something is unjust doesn't necessarily mean it's not still the best option. Okay. As long as

896
01:02:49,015 --> 01:02:55,515
we're aware that the injustice is happening. So it might be that we noticed the injustice,

897
01:02:55,515 --> 01:02:58,395
we consider alternatives, and it turns out this one is still the best one.

898
01:02:59,975 --> 01:03:07,475
14-year terms in some ways seem better than four-year terms because, yeah, they're not

899
01:03:07,475 --> 01:03:12,735
doing everything at the Fed so that they can set up their next job afterwards.

900
01:03:13,295 --> 01:03:37,555
This is why we give Supreme Court justices unlimited terms. On the other hand, it makes checks and balances impossible. They're not subject to having to be reappointed. They're not subject to having to make good decisions in order to be reappointed or reelected. And there's some drawbacks to that, both on the Supreme Court side, but also this monetary side.

901
01:03:37,555 --> 01:03:57,675
They might, for example, make decisions only that benefit them. And they don't care if we don't like it. We might not even know about it. So one of the other problems is it takes a lot of knowledge and understanding of macroeconomics and finance to make these decisions.

902
01:03:57,675 --> 01:04:07,095
And I certainly think it would be a practically worse system if every time the Fed wanted to change interest rates, there was a popular vote.

903
01:04:07,495 --> 01:04:07,575
Yeah.

904
01:04:07,855 --> 01:04:17,815
Like nobody understands, very few people understand the mechanisms and their potential outcomes well enough to make a good decision about that.

905
01:04:17,915 --> 01:04:22,875
No, and that's when rhetoric becomes really important and people generally will vote for who's saying they can get more money.

906
01:04:22,875 --> 01:04:28,975
and that's one of the hard things there because like people i think maybe empirically vote for

907
01:04:28,975 --> 01:04:34,215
the the party that say they're gonna be the best off afterwards but there's times when economic

908
01:04:34,215 --> 01:04:40,055
pain is necessary and we're not very good at handling that as general populations does the

909
01:04:40,055 --> 01:04:44,555
14-year term play into that as well where they can do stuff that is unpopular with the general

910
01:04:44,555 --> 01:04:49,015
population because it's needed and they have the safety of knowing they're not going to lose their

911
01:04:49,015 --> 01:04:56,495
job over it. Yes, that's definitely the case, especially since for a very long time, nobody knew

912
01:04:56,495 --> 01:05:01,435
who these people were. Um, if they were until Trump started shouting about drone power. Yeah.

913
01:05:01,435 --> 01:05:07,035
So all of a sudden you get a president who's saying this will be good for me. Like it's more

914
01:05:07,035 --> 01:05:11,155
likely that I will get reelected if we lower interest rates. Therefore I'm going to pressure

915
01:05:11,155 --> 01:05:15,875
this entity to lower interest rates and I'm going to, everyone's going to know his name.

916
01:05:15,875 --> 01:05:18,875
and even in the 2008 financial crisis,

917
01:05:19,035 --> 01:05:21,735
very few people knew who was in charge of the Fed, right?

918
01:05:21,735 --> 01:05:24,095
We were talking about specific commercial banks

919
01:05:24,095 --> 01:05:27,635
that were doing irresponsible things,

920
01:05:27,635 --> 01:05:30,415
but we weren't going after, I think it was Ben Bernanke.

921
01:05:30,595 --> 01:05:30,775
Yeah.

922
01:05:31,275 --> 01:05:33,395
No, everyone was blaming the bankers, not the Fed chair.

923
01:05:33,535 --> 01:05:33,775
Yeah.

924
01:05:33,955 --> 01:05:35,535
Yeah, which is fair as well.

925
01:05:37,255 --> 01:05:40,215
Because I think there's probably some degree of it

926
01:05:40,215 --> 01:05:42,615
when Trump's talking about lower interest rates,

927
01:05:43,195 --> 01:05:44,975
he probably is thinking about the party,

928
01:05:44,975 --> 01:05:49,115
but I don't think you become the president unless you're pretty egotistic.

929
01:05:49,295 --> 01:05:51,315
And I think if it's really about them,

930
01:05:51,375 --> 01:05:54,315
and so if that incentive is not there, I think that's a better thing.

931
01:05:55,115 --> 01:05:58,495
If the incentive for them not to get reelected is not there, that's a better thing.

932
01:05:58,495 --> 01:06:00,995
Yeah, and you saw Jerome Powell basically say,

933
01:06:01,135 --> 01:06:02,015
well, you can't fire me.

934
01:06:02,195 --> 01:06:03,755
I'm here until my term is over.

935
01:06:04,515 --> 01:06:11,415
And he could partly do that because he was appointed for that amount of time.

936
01:06:11,495 --> 01:06:13,195
He could also partly do it because he has plenty of money

937
01:06:13,195 --> 01:06:17,175
He doesn't need the president's approval after this.

938
01:06:17,295 --> 01:06:18,735
It's quite nice being near the money spigot.

939
01:06:18,835 --> 01:06:19,055
Yeah.

940
01:06:19,795 --> 01:06:27,235
And so the other thing is that the Fed has largely outsourced most of the actual creation of money to commercial banks.

941
01:06:27,235 --> 01:06:43,995
So while the Fed has this dual mandate of price stability and low unemployment, the people that are creating the money are commercial banks all across the country that are able to create loans.

942
01:06:43,995 --> 01:06:45,895
And that money comes out of nowhere.

943
01:06:46,175 --> 01:06:51,595
And the reserve requirements now are 0%.

944
01:06:51,595 --> 01:06:57,555
so a commercial bank doesn't have to have any money on hand to give out an arbitrarily large

945
01:06:57,555 --> 01:07:07,055
loan and most people don't know that and when you do know that or when you learn that you also

946
01:07:07,055 --> 01:07:15,155
probably think to yourself these are very different incentives like the fed is the fed's incentive is

947
01:07:15,155 --> 01:07:23,075
price stability and low unemployment, commercial banks incentive is make money, raise stock price

948
01:07:23,075 --> 01:07:27,875
for investors. And so they're responding to very different things. And the Fed is largely letting

949
01:07:27,875 --> 01:07:32,175
the commercial banks create as much money as they want, and then trying to still pursue their

950
01:07:32,175 --> 01:07:36,715
mandate purely by interest rate stuff. So this is probably the part of the paper where I might

951
01:07:36,715 --> 01:07:42,135
have some disagreements to you. But do you want to explain the sort of injustice that you wrote

952
01:07:42,135 --> 01:07:47,795
about here in terms of who actually gets the money from the commercial banks? Yes. So this is an

953
01:07:47,795 --> 01:07:55,115
outworking of, I think, a structural injustice that ends up in a distributional injustice. And

954
01:07:55,115 --> 01:07:59,695
these are two different kinds of injustice. I think you might have structural injustice that

955
01:07:59,695 --> 01:08:04,115
just so happens to work out perfectly. You might have absolutely no say, but you get this brilliant,

956
01:08:04,115 --> 01:08:13,935
benevolent group of federal people and commercial people and everyone who needs money gets it or

957
01:08:13,935 --> 01:08:18,715
whatever. It works out great. As it happens, because commercial banks are incentivized to

958
01:08:18,715 --> 01:08:23,135
make money, they are incentivized to loan money to people who already have lots of money.

959
01:08:23,655 --> 01:08:29,475
And those people get the lowest interest rates. And the people who need the money the most are

960
01:08:29,475 --> 01:08:34,495
the people who don't have any money. And they're the people who either can't get money or have to

961
01:08:34,495 --> 01:08:41,935
pay a much higher interest rate because they're riskier. And that makes perfect sense for the

962
01:08:41,935 --> 01:08:46,475
commercial banks to conduct things that way because they're trying to maximize profit.

963
01:08:47,035 --> 01:08:52,155
If your goal was price stability and low unemployment, it's not clear that that's

964
01:08:52,155 --> 01:08:57,955
how you would operate things. So this is the part where I, because I understand

965
01:08:57,955 --> 01:09:03,435
the injustice and fairness of what you're talking about, where if you are low income,

966
01:09:03,555 --> 01:09:08,255
you don't have any reserve, like capital, then you're less likely to get a loan from a bank.

967
01:09:08,355 --> 01:09:12,335
But that's just, that just seems very natural. Like I know you very well. And if you said,

968
01:09:12,395 --> 01:09:14,815
can I borrow a hundred pounds tonight? I'm going to give you a hundred pounds. I know you,

969
01:09:14,855 --> 01:09:17,755
I know you're going to pay me back. But if some stranger on the street asks for a hundred pounds,

970
01:09:17,755 --> 01:09:21,075
I'm not because there's risk there is that I'll never get my money back. And banks are looking

971
01:09:21,075 --> 01:09:25,715
at this the same way, where if someone with no job and no capital asks to borrow money,

972
01:09:25,815 --> 01:09:30,075
why would they ever lend them money? What is the solution to this injustice that you see? Because

973
01:09:30,075 --> 01:09:35,235
I understand the bank's perspective on that completely. Their job is to get their money

974
01:09:35,235 --> 01:09:40,655
back. Otherwise, why would you ever put capital at risk? Yeah. You might think that precisely for

975
01:09:40,655 --> 01:09:45,875
that reason, the banks who have different responsibilities and are accountable to

976
01:09:45,875 --> 01:09:54,435
different people approach the question differently than the central bank of a country would approach

977
01:09:54,435 --> 01:10:01,355
it, whose goal is, in this case, price stability and low unemployment, but in a more general sense,

978
01:10:01,455 --> 01:10:06,935
taking care of the entire population of the country. And you might think the conditions

979
01:10:06,935 --> 01:10:12,835
would be really different if those were the sole aims in how money was going to be distributed.

980
01:10:12,835 --> 01:10:18,935
You might give people much longer to pay off debts if they needed the money the most.

981
01:10:18,935 --> 01:10:29,615
Or you might charge lower interest rates on people who borrow less money because there's less for them to pay back and it's not increasing the money supply as much.

982
01:10:29,655 --> 01:10:35,815
But is that not unjust in a different way where you're then prioritizing the lower socioeconomic groups over the higher?

983
01:10:35,815 --> 01:10:41,455
like you're you're essentially in that scenario giving riskier people money at lower rates because

984
01:10:41,455 --> 01:10:48,335
they need money more at the expense of the people that are going to pay you back in a far less risky

985
01:10:48,335 --> 01:10:58,515
yeah so it might depend on then some further ideas about justice and i didn't want to include any

986
01:10:58,515 --> 01:11:04,215
of those kinds of things in the paper so the paper is not about the distributional

987
01:11:04,215 --> 01:11:20,835
It notes that some people have way more money than other people. It's way easier. But that's not really the injustice. The injustice is the structural stuff. As it happens, the distribution has been unequal. I'm not sure that's unjust.

988
01:11:20,835 --> 01:11:28,695
but when you give out a loan to someone who already has a lot of money,

989
01:11:28,715 --> 01:11:30,035
who doesn't need it,

990
01:11:30,075 --> 01:11:31,415
but it will benefit them.

991
01:11:32,255 --> 01:11:35,955
That raises the costs for everyone,

992
01:11:36,015 --> 01:11:36,155
right?

993
01:11:36,155 --> 01:11:40,835
It increases the money supply and that leads to inflation and everyone feels

994
01:11:40,835 --> 01:11:41,375
that inflation.

995
01:11:42,035 --> 01:11:50,375
So you give someone $500 billion that affects how much I pay for X the next

996
01:11:50,375 --> 01:11:50,575
day.

997
01:11:50,575 --> 01:11:52,495
But I didn't get any benefit from the $500 billion.

998
01:11:52,815 --> 01:11:57,355
So if everyone's going to have to feel the cost of the loans in the form of inflation,

999
01:11:57,515 --> 01:11:59,875
then everyone should get the benefit of the loans.

1000
01:12:00,035 --> 01:12:01,935
But that is, in fact, not what's happening.

1001
01:12:02,115 --> 01:12:02,855
I just made that up.

1002
01:12:02,935 --> 01:12:03,535
That's not in the paper.

1003
01:12:03,755 --> 01:12:09,515
But that seems like one reason why if you were the central bank, you might think to yourself,

1004
01:12:09,515 --> 01:12:14,995
this person is going to feel the hit of inflation based on the money that's lent to this person.

1005
01:12:15,035 --> 01:12:18,975
So I'm going to give them some money too, at least enough to cover the inflation.

1006
01:12:18,975 --> 01:12:20,555
Now, of course, that's going to lead to more.

1007
01:12:20,755 --> 01:12:22,895
So you want them to benefit in a way.

1008
01:12:23,595 --> 01:12:44,655
And I guess it sort of seems to me like if we want them to be able to, let's say, have a home and this other person has 10 homes and this person has zero homes, I would prefer the person who has zero homes to get money to buy a home rather than to give this person 10 more homes.

1009
01:12:44,655 --> 01:12:49,195
Even if the person with 10 more homes has loads more capital and are way more likely to pay the loan back.

1010
01:12:49,715 --> 01:12:54,975
Yeah. I mean, aside from like profit incentives.

1011
01:12:55,015 --> 01:12:57,135
But feelings don't matter in this, I don't think.

1012
01:12:57,575 --> 01:13:03,855
I think feelings are a good guide to at least an outcome we should try to bring about if we can.

1013
01:13:04,395 --> 01:13:07,315
I can't bring it about. I can't pay for someone else's home.

1014
01:13:07,315 --> 01:13:15,675
but if I were the chair of the federal reserve I might re now I might rethink the structure where

1015
01:13:15,675 --> 01:13:22,855
commercial banks are the ones who get to create money and they create it when there's uh a

1016
01:13:22,855 --> 01:13:26,955
likelihood of profit but I mean that to me it doesn't seem like that system's ever going to

1017
01:13:26,955 --> 01:13:31,875
change they're not willingly going to change that but we do have bitcoin like does that does

1018
01:13:31,875 --> 01:13:36,435
Bitcoin actually fix this in some way, do you think? Did you put Bitcoin in the paper?

1019
01:13:38,075 --> 01:13:44,035
Bitcoin is in one version of the paper that is probably less likely to get published than the

1020
01:13:44,035 --> 01:13:49,015
version of the paper that just notes the injustice and doesn't try to compare the system to other

1021
01:13:49,015 --> 01:13:59,955
systems. So Bitcoin, I think, fixes some of the things in some ways. In Bitcoin, you're not

1022
01:13:59,955 --> 01:14:08,215
under monetary domination for two reasons. Reason one, you weren't forced to use Bitcoin.

1023
01:14:08,835 --> 01:14:15,855
Bitcoin is, at least now, for everyone, opt-in. So you can look at the policies and decide whether

1024
01:14:15,855 --> 01:14:21,295
you want to participate. That's different. The second way is you have a voice, right? You run a

1025
01:14:21,295 --> 01:14:28,075
node and you decide what rules, to some degree, you want your node to follow. And you can vote

1026
01:14:28,075 --> 01:14:34,335
with your node when there's proposals to change things. And there can be huge structural changes

1027
01:14:34,335 --> 01:14:39,175
that are proposed that you can go along with or disagree with. You can choose to turn your node

1028
01:14:39,175 --> 01:14:46,155
off if you don't like a change and everyone else seems to like it, or you can keep running the old

1029
01:14:46,155 --> 01:14:53,315
version or whatever. So those are two ways in which you have a lot more freedom and thus there's a lot

1030
01:14:53,315 --> 01:14:59,475
less injustice. And you potentially benefit from the basement of fiat currency in the other system.

1031
01:15:00,255 --> 01:15:05,995
Yeah. It is a way for people who feel like they have no say in the system to change to a system

1032
01:15:05,995 --> 01:15:14,115
where they have more say. And the more people who feel like they're being left out of the US dollar

1033
01:15:14,115 --> 01:15:20,455
system, the more that they switch over to Bitcoin, the more that benefits everyone else who's already

1034
01:15:20,455 --> 01:15:26,275
switched. And of course, they'll then benefit when more people come over. And even in the end,

1035
01:15:26,415 --> 01:15:33,955
the very last person who onboards to Bitcoin isn't going to then raise the value of Bitcoin or the

1036
01:15:33,955 --> 01:15:38,175
purchasing power of Bitcoin for everyone else. But they still get the benefit of now having a say

1037
01:15:38,175 --> 01:15:42,335
in the system that they picked. It might not be opt-in for them anymore, by the way, if they're

1038
01:15:42,335 --> 01:15:50,655
the last remaining person. But they will still be able to have this voice in the Bitcoin protocol.

1039
01:15:51,155 --> 01:15:54,795
Do you think of like hyper Bitcoinized Bitcoin standard world is likely?

1040
01:15:55,455 --> 01:15:57,695
I don't. No, I think that's very unlikely.

1041
01:15:58,015 --> 01:15:59,295
What do you think it will look like?

1042
01:16:00,435 --> 01:16:09,175
I think Bitcoin will continue to grow in the number of people who use it for quite a while.

1043
01:16:09,175 --> 01:16:20,755
I think that growth will be gradual with some inflection points when like major events happen that push people towards Bitcoin.

1044
01:16:21,855 --> 01:16:32,655
But I think that the people who are close to the halls of power still benefit a lot from the system.

1045
01:16:32,775 --> 01:16:35,855
And the system has a lot of inertia going for it.

1046
01:16:35,855 --> 01:16:37,515
And it's all interconnected.

1047
01:16:37,515 --> 01:16:43,115
so I think it's unlikely that goes away. There's also some nice things about it.

1048
01:16:43,475 --> 01:16:50,395
For example, when there's a global pandemic and 20% of people can't go to work

1049
01:16:50,395 --> 01:16:59,955
or 0.1% of people lose a parent and lose a source of income,

1050
01:17:00,575 --> 01:17:06,515
we can print some extra money for them and that hit has to be felt by everyone else.

1051
01:17:07,515 --> 01:17:08,655
And you think that's a good thing?

1052
01:17:08,915 --> 01:17:13,575
I think it's a good thing that there's a system that has that as an option.

1053
01:17:13,575 --> 01:17:21,115
We're already printing a bunch of money for these people who have plenty and everyone's feeling the inflation hit for that.

1054
01:17:21,235 --> 01:17:25,315
Why not print some money for people who don't have anything?

1055
01:17:25,315 --> 01:17:28,915
And then everyone feels that inflation hit equally as well.

1056
01:17:29,915 --> 01:17:31,995
Milton Friedman was an advocate of this.

1057
01:17:32,215 --> 01:17:33,875
He called helicopter payments.

1058
01:17:33,875 --> 01:17:37,275
Like if you're going to raise the money supply, why not do it in this way?

1059
01:17:37,515 --> 01:17:39,555
rather than in the way where...

1060
01:17:39,555 --> 01:17:41,595
Give it directly to people rather than to commercial banks.

1061
01:17:41,775 --> 01:17:41,955
Yeah.

1062
01:17:42,295 --> 01:17:43,375
Yeah, that makes sense.

1063
01:17:43,815 --> 01:17:47,135
When you talk about major events that can change the course of Bitcoin,

1064
01:17:47,375 --> 01:17:50,435
obviously the last most notable one was probably Trump.

1065
01:17:50,795 --> 01:17:55,175
And I struggle to see anything he's actually done with Bitcoin.

1066
01:17:55,575 --> 01:17:56,655
I think it's been disappointing.

1067
01:17:57,615 --> 01:17:59,955
I know you aren't necessarily a Trump fan.

1068
01:18:00,195 --> 01:18:02,175
What's your take on his whole Bitcoin thing?

1069
01:18:04,995 --> 01:18:06,675
Not a Trump fan for a couple of reasons.

1070
01:18:06,675 --> 01:18:13,655
one of which was at Bitcoin Nashville in 2024. I was going to announce the, I did announce the

1071
01:18:13,655 --> 01:18:17,055
formation of the Bitcoin Research Institute at the University of Wyoming,

1072
01:18:17,055 --> 01:18:19,715
but everyone was standing in line to get into the Trump time.

1073
01:18:20,555 --> 01:18:21,415
That was the final straw.

1074
01:18:21,675 --> 01:18:28,955
Yeah. So I had a fifth of the audience that I expected to have. But yeah, I mean, I think he

1075
01:18:28,955 --> 01:18:35,995
said the right things in Nashville to get people in Bitcoin on his side. It was pretty clear to

1076
01:18:35,995 --> 01:18:39,835
anyone who was paying attention that he didn't really understand the difference between Bitcoin

1077
01:18:39,835 --> 01:18:46,435
when he said you can play with your Bitcoins and your cryptos. I think people understood he doesn't

1078
01:18:46,435 --> 01:18:50,815
know what Bitcoin is or how it's different than these other things. Do you know what the other

1079
01:18:50,815 --> 01:18:54,715
thing I think you saw there is that a lot of the people in the audience didn't really know

1080
01:18:54,715 --> 01:19:00,455
what Bitcoin was. Like the cheers he got for talking about Gary Gensler. Yeah. Like it didn't

1081
01:19:00,455 --> 01:19:05,675
matter to Bitcoin. Right. I was so puzzled by that. And the number of people who I consider

1082
01:19:05,675 --> 01:19:09,915
as very much Bitcoiners and not crypto people

1083
01:19:09,915 --> 01:19:11,055
who were excited by that.

1084
01:19:11,155 --> 01:19:12,575
And it was like, if anything,

1085
01:19:12,895 --> 01:19:16,235
Gensler was separating Bitcoin thematically

1086
01:19:16,235 --> 01:19:17,115
from other crypto.

1087
01:19:17,115 --> 01:19:18,975
I mean, he was obviously very anti-Bitcoin ETF

1088
01:19:18,975 --> 01:19:19,835
for a long time as well.

1089
01:19:19,895 --> 01:19:21,815
But I think by that point, the ETFs had been-

1090
01:19:21,815 --> 01:19:23,055
Yeah, there wasn't much more-

1091
01:19:23,055 --> 01:19:23,855
They were ready to go, yeah.

1092
01:19:25,475 --> 01:19:28,155
So yeah, then you fast forward,

1093
01:19:28,315 --> 01:19:30,995
he gets elected and he launches a meme coin.

1094
01:19:31,375 --> 01:19:34,335
And then he rugs his own meme coin

1095
01:19:34,335 --> 01:19:35,755
by launching another meme coin.

1096
01:19:36,615 --> 01:19:39,615
And then he launches a crypto company

1097
01:19:39,615 --> 01:19:41,215
that launches its own stable coin.

1098
01:19:41,995 --> 01:19:45,095
And I struggle to see how any of these things

1099
01:19:45,095 --> 01:19:46,375
are good for Bitcoin.

1100
01:19:46,375 --> 01:19:52,075
I think that there are institutional people

1101
01:19:52,075 --> 01:19:54,295
who also like Bitcoin

1102
01:19:54,295 --> 01:19:56,935
and who like what this is doing

1103
01:19:56,935 --> 01:19:58,995
for institutional Bitcoin adoption.

1104
01:19:59,255 --> 01:20:01,175
We certainly haven't seen that reflected

1105
01:20:01,175 --> 01:20:02,275
in the price of Bitcoin.

1106
01:20:02,275 --> 01:20:09,215
and it's, I think, even more divided two camps in Bitcoin.

1107
01:20:10,335 --> 01:20:15,595
One who are drawn to Bitcoin and like it because of its privacy features,

1108
01:20:15,595 --> 01:20:21,495
its censorship resistance, its opt-in nature, all those sorts of things.

1109
01:20:21,575 --> 01:20:25,175
And then the other people who like it because of its monetary policies

1110
01:20:25,175 --> 01:20:26,475
and how much like gold it is.

1111
01:20:26,475 --> 01:20:36,535
and obviously the price of bitcoin hasn't changed for those people either but the the rails for

1112
01:20:36,535 --> 01:20:46,655
bitcoin being this reserve asset for companies people uh and governments maybe is a bit easier

1113
01:20:46,655 --> 01:20:50,915
yeah almost certainly i think it might be the case that

1114
01:20:50,915 --> 01:20:57,215
we're starting to see that these groups are at cross purposes with each other,

1115
01:20:57,435 --> 01:21:04,695
that there are anything that the, anything that raises the price of Bitcoin is good for people

1116
01:21:04,695 --> 01:21:10,555
who are using Bitcoin, let's say to evade authoritarian regimes. Um, right. If they have

1117
01:21:10,555 --> 01:21:17,375
more money, that's good. But I think a lot of the institutional people don't like that Bitcoin can be

1118
01:21:17,375 --> 01:21:24,835
used in these ways. They wish that it wasn't able to be used for scams or, uh, avoiding tariff or

1119
01:21:24,835 --> 01:21:32,435
not avoiding tariff, avoiding, uh, capital controls. And yeah, the, the freedom money aspects don't

1120
01:21:32,435 --> 01:21:36,835
necessarily line up exactly with their incentives, but, and Bitcoin without the freedom money aspect

1121
01:21:36,835 --> 01:21:41,235
isn't interesting to me. Like I don't care about another gold. Like the freedom money thing is very

1122
01:21:41,235 --> 01:21:47,635
important. And I agree that there may be a cross purposes, but I think Trump, it'll be interesting

1123
01:21:47,635 --> 01:21:51,615
to see what happens in the next couple of years. Like if he pardons the samurai devs, huge,

1124
01:21:51,648 --> 01:21:57,328
step forward. If the crackdown on people working on Bitcoin privacy has properly stopped, which I

1125
01:21:57,328 --> 01:22:03,488
think remains to be seen, that's a huge step forward. I know that Bill and Keone were, it was

1126
01:22:03,488 --> 01:22:08,188
under the Trump administration that they went to jail, but that started under Biden. And under the

1127
01:22:08,188 --> 01:22:15,048
Trump administration that Roman Storm is being retried for. Yes. Like these are things that we

1128
01:22:15,048 --> 01:22:20,468
need to see change. And I guess time will tell us what the truth is about that. Do you think the

1129
01:22:20,468 --> 01:22:26,248
price would have been higher if Kamala had won that election? It's so hard to know all of the

1130
01:22:26,248 --> 01:22:34,028
things that influence prices. I certainly think that under administrations hostile to Bitcoin,

1131
01:22:34,128 --> 01:22:43,348
at least in the US, everyone in Bitcoin is on the same team. We are all working for this thing to be

1132
01:22:43,348 --> 01:22:48,268
bigger and it's easier to get people to understand the importance of it.

1133
01:22:48,268 --> 01:22:52,868
when there's an administration that's like superficially pro-Bitcoin,

1134
01:22:53,348 --> 01:22:57,068
it's harder to convince – they'll say, well, like the president said all this good stuff about Bitcoin.

1135
01:22:57,428 --> 01:22:59,188
And you'll say, yeah, but at the same time,

1136
01:22:59,808 --> 01:23:06,268
he's prosecuting people who are developing these tools that are really important to –

1137
01:23:06,268 --> 01:23:08,008
I think it's important that you say he is.

1138
01:23:08,468 --> 01:23:10,268
Like these are independent from him.

1139
01:23:10,808 --> 01:23:13,968
And like the – I don't know how the court system works in the US,

1140
01:23:13,968 --> 01:23:16,628
but I don't believe that they're like really under his control at all.

1141
01:23:16,888 --> 01:23:17,868
Yeah, that's probably true.

1142
01:23:17,868 --> 01:23:24,748
And I think it's demonstrably better under him than it was under Biden.

1143
01:23:25,388 --> 01:23:30,428
I think there was a real attack on this entire industry with Chokepoint 2.0 and all the stuff that was going on.

1144
01:23:30,728 --> 01:23:31,688
Would you agree with that?

1145
01:23:32,508 --> 01:23:36,328
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't think of Bitcoin as an industry.

1146
01:23:36,648 --> 01:23:38,488
I think of it as money.

1147
01:23:38,768 --> 01:23:45,488
And I think that in many ways, people who consider themselves part of the industry are bad for Bitcoin.

1148
01:23:45,488 --> 01:23:57,948
So sometimes I think, yeah, it's actually good for Bitcoin for some of these people to get out of the way so that people who need Bitcoin as freedom money can use it that way.

1149
01:23:58,128 --> 01:24:13,408
And I'm willing to sacrifice several Bitcoin companies for several Bitcoin individuals who are using it in the way that at least I cared about and still care about when I came into Bitcoin, the things that I saw.

1150
01:24:13,408 --> 01:24:20,408
I want to dig into that because when I say industry, what I'm talking about is really anyone working on anything to do with Bitcoin.

1151
01:24:21,048 --> 01:24:30,488
And when you see people building wallets, being prosecuted, the choke talk 0.2.0 stuff, like that was bad for the industry as a whole, including Bitcoin as freedom money.

1152
01:24:31,508 --> 01:24:35,848
And I think that has become a lesser issue under Trump.

1153
01:24:36,228 --> 01:24:37,808
Would you disagree with that?

1154
01:24:37,808 --> 01:24:52,668
Yeah. So I certainly think that there are people who might be considered part of the industry who are essential to Bitcoin. Like you can't use, it's very hard to use Bitcoin without a wallet.

1155
01:24:52,668 --> 01:25:01,308
So people who are developing wallets are more important than people who are running, let's say, massive Bitcoin mining facilities.

1156
01:25:03,128 --> 01:25:12,308
They're not harming Bitcoin by running these massive facilities, but they're not helping the people that I care about as much as people who are developing privacy wallets or something.

1157
01:25:13,108 --> 01:25:21,008
So, yeah, to the extent that those people are cracked down on, the people that I care about are worse off.

1158
01:25:21,008 --> 01:25:24,988
is that happening less now than it was?

1159
01:25:28,768 --> 01:25:29,788
I'm not sure.

1160
01:25:31,668 --> 01:25:32,408
I don't,

1161
01:25:32,708 --> 01:25:34,068
choke point 2.0

1162
01:25:34,068 --> 01:25:37,528
attacked some banks

1163
01:25:37,528 --> 01:25:50,303
that held money from crypto companies And that really the extent of it that I heard But being able to buy Bitcoin is very important And if that is impacting the exchanges then that matters

1164
01:25:50,943 --> 01:25:52,743
Yeah, I'm not sure that being able to buy Bitcoin

1165
01:25:52,743 --> 01:25:54,503
from an exchange is that important.

1166
01:25:55,223 --> 01:25:55,923
No, it is.

1167
01:25:56,303 --> 01:25:57,343
I think it is.

1168
01:25:57,343 --> 01:26:00,143
I mean, you know more about the whole ecosystem.

1169
01:26:00,143 --> 01:26:02,843
Maybe not, but just my take on that would be

1170
01:26:02,843 --> 01:26:05,563
ease of use of getting Bitcoin in people's hands does matter.

1171
01:26:06,003 --> 01:26:08,123
And I think it sucks that the only way people

1172
01:26:08,123 --> 01:26:10,223
really buy Bitcoin in at least Western countries

1173
01:26:10,223 --> 01:26:13,103
is through KYC, AML compliant exchanges.

1174
01:26:13,323 --> 01:26:15,123
Like I wish there was a better way of doing it,

1175
01:26:15,303 --> 01:26:17,903
but, and like with some work that is,

1176
01:26:18,343 --> 01:26:21,043
but I think easy access to be able to buy Bitcoin

1177
01:26:21,043 --> 01:26:22,523
is never good.

1178
01:26:22,523 --> 01:26:23,023
Okay.

1179
01:26:23,263 --> 01:26:27,683
I am someone who buys Bitcoin on KYC, AML exchanges,

1180
01:26:27,923 --> 01:26:31,523
but I think the people who are in Bitcoin

1181
01:26:31,523 --> 01:26:32,503
who I care about most

1182
01:26:32,503 --> 01:26:35,183
are people who couldn't get accounts on those things

1183
01:26:35,183 --> 01:26:37,763
and are doing it locally with cash

1184
01:26:37,763 --> 01:26:42,743
or getting it from friends on their phones in non-Western countries.

1185
01:26:43,463 --> 01:26:48,623
So to the extent that those are the people who really need Bitcoin,

1186
01:26:48,763 --> 01:26:51,983
I'm not sure how much exchanges are important.

1187
01:26:52,583 --> 01:26:53,483
Yeah, that's tricky though,

1188
01:26:53,523 --> 01:26:55,383
because I agree that those people definitely need Bitcoin.

1189
01:26:55,583 --> 01:26:57,463
I agree that maybe their use case is more compelling

1190
01:26:57,463 --> 01:27:00,923
than just someone who wants to avoid the debasement in the US or in the UK or anywhere.

1191
01:27:02,063 --> 01:27:04,663
But we want Bitcoin in as many hands as possible,

1192
01:27:04,663 --> 01:27:06,423
and that includes the US.

1193
01:27:06,423 --> 01:27:13,123
You can maybe say they don't need Bitcoin in the same way, but they might want easy access to Bitcoin, and that's still important.

1194
01:27:13,923 --> 01:27:14,103
True.

1195
01:27:14,983 --> 01:27:23,783
Yeah, and obviously the more people who can get Bitcoin, the more it helps the people who are using Bitcoin as freedom money in these other countries.

1196
01:27:23,943 --> 01:27:32,143
There's more transactions, so they're more obscure, probably raises the price, or at least keeps it stable so they're not losing money when they go into Bitcoin.

1197
01:27:32,763 --> 01:27:33,483
So I get that.

1198
01:27:33,483 --> 01:27:47,783
Then the next question, I guess, is the extent to which Bitcoin companies were banking at Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate versus crypto companies.

1199
01:27:47,883 --> 01:27:57,543
So I felt the Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was much more of a crackdown on crypto than it was on Bitcoin.

1200
01:27:57,943 --> 01:28:01,783
I mean, I think most Bitcoin businesses probably were banking at those people.

1201
01:28:01,783 --> 01:28:07,383
yeah coinbase was banking at silvergate and silvergate like literally got taken around the

1202
01:28:07,383 --> 01:28:12,863
back of the shed and shot yeah so it was it was ridiculous yeah definitely agree with that um and

1203
01:28:12,863 --> 01:28:16,263
i think that probably does set the industry back i know you don't like the term industry but like

1204
01:28:16,263 --> 01:28:24,283
somewhat to a degree okay yeah so then is that happening less well it happened to two banks the

1205
01:28:24,283 --> 01:28:31,463
two that mattered and now it's happening to zero are there two banks now that matter that it could

1206
01:28:31,463 --> 01:28:36,563
happen to or i mean it's not only happening to zero we're seeing new banks that are going to be

1207
01:28:36,563 --> 01:28:41,603
more bitcoin friendly come into existence like the one that palmer lucky did we've got charter

1208
01:28:41,603 --> 01:28:50,303
yes that's true uh kraken just got a yep a reserve account still waiting on custodia yeah

1209
01:28:50,303 --> 01:28:59,123
shout out your favorite wyoming yeah go pokes um so yeah i think i guess in the end i think

1210
01:28:59,123 --> 01:29:08,263
that's good. And so in some ways, this administration has been better than the

1211
01:29:08,263 --> 01:29:14,163
previous administration. I'm much more comfortable criticizing the previous administration than I am

1212
01:29:14,163 --> 01:29:19,963
supporting this one. I think Biden made a lot of mistakes. I think Kamala made a lot of mistakes

1213
01:29:19,963 --> 01:29:26,683
in how he dealt with Bitcoin and then how she talked about Bitcoin beforehand. A lot of unforced

1214
01:29:26,683 --> 01:29:28,343
due to not understanding it.

1215
01:29:28,343 --> 01:29:31,223
And it was almost a deliberate misunderstanding.

1216
01:29:31,223 --> 01:29:32,923
It wasn't like there weren't people

1217
01:29:32,923 --> 01:29:44,618
who were trying to help them understand and they just didn pay attention And that I don know that might have lost them the election it certainly didn help it definitely didn help and and that one of the

1218
01:29:44,618 --> 01:29:49,678
most interesting things here because i think the the other party which like everyone can benefit

1219
01:29:49,678 --> 01:29:53,878
from bitcoin it doesn't matter whether you're left or right the other party now needs to

1220
01:29:53,878 --> 01:29:59,478
do a complete about face in my opinion and be more open to to bitcoin and i think the bitcoin

1221
01:29:59,478 --> 01:30:04,238
is freedom money sort of narrative works really well in their favor um do you think they will

1222
01:30:04,238 --> 01:30:12,678
Because the risk is now they see Trump seemingly be supportive of Bitcoin and they go so far the other way because everything just has to be polarized.

1223
01:30:12,678 --> 01:30:37,058
Yeah. What I think they need to do is focus on the difference between Bitcoin and crypto and then crypto scams and properly situate some things as scams, which are not at all unique to crypto. They're just scams, period.

1224
01:30:37,698 --> 01:30:42,598
Crypto might make them easier, but it's not because it's crypto that it's a scam.

1225
01:30:43,278 --> 01:30:54,618
And then very clearly distinguish Bitcoin from these other things that I guess recently have now been advised are not securities, but commodities, but still are very different than Bitcoin.

1226
01:30:54,618 --> 01:31:01,178
Like if you have a foundation and a board and a president and things like that, then that's quite different from Bitcoin.

1227
01:31:01,718 --> 01:31:03,638
So it takes some education.

1228
01:31:03,738 --> 01:31:06,478
They got to show up to the Bitcoin Policy Institute events and listen.

1229
01:31:06,478 --> 01:31:09,698
and not think that they understand it.

1230
01:31:10,398 --> 01:31:12,598
Far too many politicians and academics

1231
01:31:12,598 --> 01:31:14,438
think that they understand Bitcoin

1232
01:31:14,438 --> 01:31:16,438
enough to have a judgment about it when they don't.

1233
01:31:16,518 --> 01:31:16,978
And people.

1234
01:31:18,158 --> 01:31:21,298
And then it will take, I think,

1235
01:31:22,398 --> 01:31:26,318
electing or choosing,

1236
01:31:26,898 --> 01:31:30,358
nominating someone who understands that.

1237
01:31:30,358 --> 01:31:34,738
There are plenty of Democratic politicians who do.

1238
01:31:35,378 --> 01:31:38,638
I've talked to Ro Khanna pretty extensively about Bitcoin.

1239
01:31:38,898 --> 01:31:39,858
And he gets it.

1240
01:31:40,038 --> 01:31:40,818
He knows.

1241
01:31:41,518 --> 01:31:43,558
I don't know if he's going to run for president.

1242
01:31:43,718 --> 01:31:44,378
We're not that close.

1243
01:31:45,818 --> 01:31:54,338
But someone who is identical to him or who listens to him and understands the difference between these things is really important.

1244
01:31:54,718 --> 01:31:59,558
So it's hard to say whether the party will change their stance.

1245
01:31:59,558 --> 01:32:04,198
There are plenty in the party who have always been pro-Bitcoin and will continue to be.

1246
01:32:04,198 --> 01:32:16,358
It's just, is the talking points that everyone inherits from the leadership of the party going to keep reflecting this ancient and misguided take on Bitcoin?

1247
01:32:16,598 --> 01:32:19,618
Or are they willing to listen and learn?

1248
01:32:19,978 --> 01:32:23,378
What's the inside scoop from BPI in terms of how these people are responding to it now?

1249
01:32:23,518 --> 01:32:25,818
Has there been more interest from the Democrat side?

1250
01:32:26,098 --> 01:32:27,678
There is certainly more interest.

1251
01:32:27,678 --> 01:32:35,798
they are not still as interested as the Republican side in talking about it or helping to come up with

1252
01:32:35,798 --> 01:32:43,418
policy and legislation. I think we now have congressional aides in some congressional

1253
01:32:43,418 --> 01:32:51,558
offices who are specifically there to do Bitcoin advising. I think one of them is in the office of

1254
01:32:51,558 --> 01:32:58,038
a Democrat. I think it is the guy from the Bronx whose name I'm blanking on right now.

1255
01:32:59,298 --> 01:33:09,318
Richie Torres, I think. But the other five or six are in Republican offices. So we still need more.

1256
01:33:09,318 --> 01:33:15,578
There's work to do. And certainly when we hold major events, there's members of both parties

1257
01:33:15,578 --> 01:33:20,698
there, but the Republicans always outnumber the Democrats. It's very strange to me that,

1258
01:33:20,698 --> 01:33:21,398
like this

1259
01:33:21,398 --> 01:33:22,738
this needs to be pushed

1260
01:33:22,738 --> 01:33:23,638
as a bipartisan issue

1261
01:33:23,638 --> 01:33:24,618
and I think BPI

1262
01:33:24,618 --> 01:33:25,298
are doing a great job

1263
01:33:25,298 --> 01:33:25,858
of that but

1264
01:33:25,858 --> 01:33:26,918
in some ways

1265
01:33:26,918 --> 01:33:27,478
I think it was

1266
01:33:27,478 --> 01:33:39,053
a historical accident that just because of who was in power when certain things happened right What was a historical accident The fact that Republicans support Bitcoin more than Democrats do

1267
01:33:39,693 --> 01:33:44,753
I have worn this resist shirt and we published resistance money when Joe Biden was president.

1268
01:33:44,913 --> 01:33:45,053
Yeah.

1269
01:33:45,153 --> 01:33:45,953
Continue to wear it.

1270
01:33:46,413 --> 01:33:49,313
Bitcoin is always going to be against authorities.

1271
01:33:49,493 --> 01:33:52,633
It's always going to be something that the authorities don't like.

1272
01:33:53,153 --> 01:33:55,273
Now, sometimes the authorities will like parts of it.

1273
01:33:56,233 --> 01:33:57,553
Like Gladstein says, right?

1274
01:33:57,553 --> 01:33:58,753
For them, it's a Trojan horse.

1275
01:33:59,433 --> 01:34:04,093
For the Trump administration, they want to make money on Bitcoin, but the freedom stuff

1276
01:34:04,093 --> 01:34:04,993
still gets in there.

1277
01:34:05,773 --> 01:34:11,893
So because of when certain Bitcoin things happened and who was in power at those times,

1278
01:34:11,933 --> 01:34:18,373
I think the parties took stances that you could very easily imagine being reversed had

1279
01:34:18,373 --> 01:34:20,753
the opposite party been in power at that time.

1280
01:34:20,833 --> 01:34:25,273
Because Bitcoin is trying to fight against the people who are in charge.

1281
01:34:25,273 --> 01:34:30,433
I do think the number go up narrative is the best one because freedom goes up alongside it.

1282
01:34:31,313 --> 01:34:31,493
Yeah.

1283
01:34:32,473 --> 01:34:32,953
Yeah.

1284
01:34:33,093 --> 01:34:37,533
We just need to get corrupt politicians, incentivize them to buy Bitcoin, and then everyone gets more freedom.

1285
01:34:37,813 --> 01:34:38,773
That's a great idea.

1286
01:34:39,173 --> 01:34:41,533
The corrupt politicians will like it for the number go up stuff.

1287
01:34:42,313 --> 01:34:48,853
I don't think that's as poorly understood as the freedom go upside among the non-corrupt politicians.

1288
01:34:49,093 --> 01:34:51,873
Like, I think many of them are worried about corruption.

1289
01:34:51,873 --> 01:34:58,053
and you know maybe some of them uh are being disingenuous about it because they really want

1290
01:34:58,053 --> 01:35:01,633
power and they understand but they think that the corruption line is a good one but i think some of

1291
01:35:01,633 --> 01:35:08,173
them really are worried that um crypto leaves people vulnerable and they're not realizing that

1292
01:35:08,173 --> 01:35:15,793
bitcoin's different and they're they're not willing to learn about it so yeah still so much

1293
01:35:15,793 --> 01:35:23,433
work to do to explain what this thing is. And it's been around so long. Well, you say that

1294
01:35:23,433 --> 01:35:29,933
unfortunately they've been around just as long. A lot longer. It's not the 30, 40, even 50 year

1295
01:35:29,933 --> 01:35:35,633
old politicians that aren't getting it. It's the 60, 70, 80 year olds. Yeah. I mean, I know it's

1296
01:35:35,633 --> 01:35:41,053
like a bit of a trope, but this will move on one funeral at a time. I think we just need younger

1297
01:35:41,053 --> 01:35:46,653
politicians or hopefully one election at a time. Yeah. Maybe both. Uh, Bradley, this has been

1298
01:35:46,653 --> 01:35:51,813
awesome. I've got so much to do. We've got a conference tomorrow. I've been two hours chatting

1299
01:35:51,813 --> 01:35:56,533
to you here. Um, let's get back to it, but thank you, man. Tell everyone where to go and get a

1300
01:35:56,533 --> 01:36:02,973
resistance money. Resistance money is available on Amazon for I think 19 bucks these days.

1301
01:36:03,313 --> 01:36:09,893
Bargain. Amazing book. Um, for a long time, people said I would, I would totally read this

1302
01:36:09,893 --> 01:36:12,873
or listen to it if it was an audiobook. We now have an audiobook.

1303
01:36:13,173 --> 01:36:13,713
Who read it?

1304
01:36:13,793 --> 01:36:17,853
The numbers are saying that a lot of those people were lying

1305
01:36:17,853 --> 01:36:24,833
based on our audiobook sales. So unfortunately, it's not the best voice in Bitcoin who read it.

1306
01:36:24,833 --> 01:36:31,833
We had no say over who they got to read it. But it's read pretty well by a non-Bitcoin.

1307
01:36:32,173 --> 01:36:32,573
Nice.

1308
01:36:32,573 --> 01:36:40,193
uh so yeah you can you can pick up the audiobook you can pick up the the uh physical copy the

1309
01:36:40,193 --> 01:36:46,993
hardcover is 180 so don't do that i'm sure it's probably available 180 yeah academic hardcovers

1310
01:36:46,993 --> 01:36:51,633
are ridiculous so we compromise we we got them to lower the price of the paperback significantly

1311
01:36:51,633 --> 01:37:01,533
over what it should have been but immovable on the hardcover um and we uploaded the pdf ourselves to

1312
01:37:01,533 --> 01:37:04,613
those book sites that we cut out of the earlier.

1313
01:37:05,493 --> 01:37:06,713
People can get it there too.

1314
01:37:07,293 --> 01:37:07,613
Awesome.

1315
01:37:07,913 --> 01:37:08,473
Thank you, Bradley.

1316
01:37:08,533 --> 01:37:09,093
This has been great.