we're subject to monetary domination.
We can't do without money
because the vast majority of people
have absolutely no say
over how money works.
That's an injustice.
The halls of power still benefit a lot from the system.
Does Bitcoin actually fix this in some way, do you think?
In Bitcoin, you're not under monetary domination.
You weren't forced to use Bitcoin.
you have a voice, right?
You run a node.
What do you think it means
that we're outsourcing
all of our thinking to machines now?
All of our thoughts can be co-opted
at the whim of a few companies.
Yeah, that's where the danger comes in.
The more that you use AI
as a substitute for your own thinking,
the worse you get at thinking yourself.
Bradley Rattler,
we're back in Bedford.
Back in Bedford.
Cheat code tomorrow.
It all started.
We've got a lot to do.
Bitcoin is always talk about sovereignty,
whether that's over like money, jurisdictions,
like having a second passport.
This is always a very like core tenant of Bitcoin.
But I think one thing that's not spoken about enough
is the idea of sovereignty of thought
and how that's changing in this world of AI.
What do you think as a philosopher,
it means that we're outsourcing
all of our thinking to machines now?
I think it's dangerous.
I think that people thinking is one of the most important things that has ever happened.
That's why there's fences and I'm just going to look around the room, refrigerators, trees, all this sort of stuff.
Like what separates us from other animals is rationality.
And what makes everything that we've built different than what animals have built is us using that feature to create things.
and AI has been trained on centuries of human thought. And if we give up doing that thinking,
I guess it could go one of two ways. Either the AI can start producing its own thought and
rationality, or it just keeps reproducing what we've already done and we stop. And therefore,
it stays exactly as advanced as it is now. And we don't make progress.
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?
there's a lot of different views of that.
One of the things that you might think distinguishes
thinking from other mental activities of, say, other animals
is the ability to recognize and reflect on the fact that you're thinking.
So be awareness of yourself as a thinking thing.
I think most people think that dogs probably think they have brains,
there's stuff going on in there.
There's thought,
but it's really different than the way that we think.
Well,
dogs definitely dream.
Does that kind of prove they think?
Probably.
Yeah.
It certainly proves that they have mental events going on.
Yeah.
They feel,
they feel pain.
That's a mental event.
So then if that's thinking,
then there's some extra thing that we do,
right?
because we are very different from other animals.
Maybe it's self-awareness of thought.
Maybe it's rational thought.
All of the ancient Greek philosophers thought that animals had a soul,
plants had a soul, humans had a soul, but they're different souls.
So plants have the vegetative soul.
It takes in energy and grows.
Animals have that plus the sensitive soul.
So they can take in inputs from their eyes and ears and noses and things like that.
And then humans have also the rational soul.
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.
It's more difficult to make that second distinction because animals have brains and so do we.
And we use our brains in ways it seems like they don't.
So some philosophers have thought, well, we must have minds that are distinct from our brains and animals don't.
What does that mean?
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.
but it thinks the thoughts and forms the intentions and things like that,
that result in, let's say, I think that I want my hand to be raised.
Wrong way around. Fucking hell. You can't get help these days.
You got to pay more if you want.
Thank you, mate.
Thanks.
So the fact that my mind, although it's not here,
when it forms the intention to raise my arm,
raises this particular arm instead of that arm is unexplainable.
through physical processes if the thinking isn't happening in the brain.
So yeah, minds are either these separate entities, maybe like souls, maybe mind and soul are the
same thing, maybe they're different, or they just arise out of the physical processes that come
about when there's sufficient complexity. Is mind almost consciousness? Like this thing that you
can't point to where it is, but you know, we have it. It could be. Yeah. So some people think that
what differentiates a mind from other things is that the mind is conscious. Some people think
even plants are conscious, just not as conscious. And the consciousness is sort of distributed and
some things have more of it than others. What would make a plant conscious?
Well, everything, if everything is conscious, then there's little bits of consciousness in
plants and then bigger bits and that's how plants grow and are alive. On some views, even rocks
have a little bit of consciousness. This is panpsychism. I don't know the views super well,
but David Chalmers is a really prominent proponent. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never
heard that. So if thinking is this thing that separates us from everything else,
what does it mean if we lose thinking
because we rely so heavily on AI
that everything is outsourced?
Because there's a load of dangers
that I can see coming from that.
And one of the most obvious ones I think is
like we grow through disagreement.
And if we're all relying on three or four different LLMs
to like hone our thoughts,
does disagreement go away?
Yeah.
So one of the first questions I think we should ask is
are these generative LLMs thinking.
If they are thinking, then we're not losing thinking.
It's just in a different place than it used to be.
If they're not thinking, then it becomes more of a problem.
But do you think they are thinking now?
I don't think they're thinking.
And I'm not sure they can think or could think.
But I also think it's not as obvious that they're not thinking
or that they couldn't think as it was when we had our calculators
on our phones calculating things. That seems clearly to me to be not thought. This seems more
like thought. It also, though, doesn't seem like thought is a continuum. It's either an on or off.
You're either thinking or you're not thinking. So it's tricky to figure out, I think, whether AI,
whether these LLMs are thinking. I never thought that the predictive text in my messaging app was
thinking. And one of the reasons I didn't think so was because it was doing such a bad job
and predicting what I wanted to say next. And in fact, as I was, you know, texting earlier this
morning about the musical that I went and saw yesterday, I said the unlikely pilgrimage of,
and then the AI text that predicted next was Jesus. And I wanted to say Harold. So,
you know, I don't think that an AI would make that mistake unless it was trained on data that
came out before the unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry started. But it knows enough at this point to
check and think that it's more likely that I'm talking about a new musical than about Jesus.
But that doesn't make it metaphysically different. It's just better at the other thing.
I think really, so this is another huge topic of conversation, but it's one that's come up a lot
in philosophy, which is just that philosophy is always so far behind the things that it can be
helpful to. So for example, when Einstein proposed the theory of general relativity,
a lot of scientists took it up like really fast. It took philosophers years to get to the point
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
matter in that for physics? There's tons of questions about time and space and simultaneity
and a lot of metaphysical, especially, but also in epistemology, upshots of these theories.
So when you think that everything is simultaneous with everything else, then all of a sudden you
learn, oh no, it depends on how fast you're going. Well, that means that what's real depends on
either your own reference frame or how fast you're going. And that's crazy.
but also might be true. So similar things with medical technologies. Philosophers are just way
behind figuring out how these things actually work. And decisions are being made both within
companies but also at the level of policy without the input of people who are trained to think about
implications and moral facts and things like that. The same thing is happening with AI. There are some
philosophers who understand how an AI is trained and what that means for what is happening when the
AI is quote unquote thinking and could give much better answers. But most of us aren't technical
enough to understand that, even with Bitcoin, right? How many, so we have four, five trained
academic philosophers who are writing about Bitcoin all the time, none of the five of us
can look at the code and understand what the code is. We have to trust other people to tell us
what the code means, but they might be without realizing it, importing some of their own
philosophical assumptions into that. But I mean, that's where AI can actually help you
in terms of understanding the code. But when you think about AI thinking,
it definitely makes decisions. Like, especially if you're trying to vibe code with it at the
moment, it will go down a decision tree of what it thinks the best implementation of whatever
prompt you've given it is. When do decisions become thinking? I don't think decisions,
well, I don't think doing something means that you made a decision to do it. I don't even think that
going, if there are many paths to doing something and you pick one path over the other means that
you decided to do that path. Why not? So one reason is animals do that all the time. You can
present an animal with multiple food sources. It will go to one of them. Does that mean that it
decided to go to that one? Maybe in the sense that it did that and it didn't do something else. But
what it didn't do was think through the options, weigh the pros and cons, the costs and benefits,
come to a rational decision.
You don't think animals will do that?
Like the pros and cons of that one's closer, it's easier.
You don't think they're weighing things like that up?
No.
And I certainly don't think that they're doing it in a way
that is evident to them that that's what they're doing.
So maybe that's just that they're having the first order.
This one's closest, I'm going to that.
Obviously they can't explain it.
They don't speak English, they don't speak.
But is that even what's happening in their minds?
I'm not convinced that it is.
I think there's just some instinct
that's driving them to do one thing rather than the other.
Okay, so what would you have to see an LLM do to say,
okay, that is now thinking?
I don't know.
For a long time, it was,
the standard was something like,
convince another human that you're thinking.
Which they can probably already do.
So that's the Turing test, yeah.
And I think if you...
Put someone in a room with an LLM and ask them just based on the text that's going back and forth.
Are you talking to a person or are you not?
Certainly early on, I think everyone would have said yes.
Then you start to learn how AI works.
There's giveaways.
The things that it keeps doing.
And if you have a long enough conversation, I'm pretty convinced I could tell an LLM from a human within 10 minutes.
but I don't know if that means that they're not thinking or if they're just all thinking the same
well but they're thinking the same is the issue here because if if our thoughts are co-opted by
essentially four or five big tech companies in Silicon Valley that's a terrifying outcome like
that people are relying on this so heavily now including myself like I'm guilty of this but
people are relying on it so heavily that you'll see someone disagree with someone on Twitter
and then you'll see the response and they've clearly not thought through what their actual
responses. They've gone to an LLM to find the response. Like if, if everyone's outsourcing
that, that seems like a really negative and potentially dangerous outcome where all of
our thoughts can be co-opted at the whim of a few companies.
Yeah. It's very interesting to see if there's a factual claim made on Twitter. Someone will
say, Hey, Grok, is this true?
On almost every post.
Yeah. That seems like a good use of, of Grok is determining whether something that
has been, some event has actually happened. Then someone will make a claim about a principle or a
theory or a moral claim and someone else will say, hey, Grock, is this true? And yeah, that's where
the danger comes in because that takes some principles, some reasoning from principles,
some perhaps moral facts or moral claims that might have reasons for them and arguments. And
yeah, you're just letting an AI do all of that stuff and then trusting completely its output.
Do you know what I also hate about that is the idea of someone going, you know what,
I've not thought about that. I need to go away and research it and being like humble about
something. Instead, you can just go to an LM and be like, think my way out of this for me. And you
can post a response that's like kind of a get out of jail free card. And so like, I don't know
whether this slows down growth and learning in this sort of broader society.
The LLMs that we have now have been exclusively trained on things that humans thought of.
And they know however many terabytes worth of that stuff.
And then they're just repackaging it and using it.
I don't think they've come up with any new insights.
I'm not sure that they can.
They may have noticed connections between ideas that no human person has noticed before because there have been similar connections elsewhere.
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.
And then all the different AI repackagings of that same human thought just over and over.
And if you iterate endlessly on the same exact thing, you'll get more of the same exact thing.
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.
I think you think you know your AI, but really it's like a black box.
You don't know how it's coming up with the answers coming back with.
It's very hard to tell how it's producing your responses.
But the thing you do know is that it's always trying to be your best friend.
And that can sometimes give you slop.
Like every single day I'm basically going back to my AI going,
don't be my friend, be a coworker, tell me where I'm wrong.
Don't just be a yes man.
But it knows more about you than maybe you do.
And so there's a very strange, like it tips the scales in such a weird way
where you're interacting with your most deepest and darkest secrets
with something that you don't know what it is.
Don't just be a yes man.
Okay, Danny, I won't.
Yeah.
You're very wise to tell me not to.
Nobody's ever thought of this.
Yeah, the incentives for the AI are,
it has learned what the incentive,
learned, I should be careful.
It has learned it though.
It goes into its memory context.
Yeah, the AI has looked at how people have responded
and which responses have led to positive responses
and has learned that in most cases, people want you to agree with them.
And so it agrees with you.
And that's certainly scary because, and I think we've, we've seen more and more of these
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
your house. There's no other explanation of why this one thing would have been moved.
And that's hopefully not what another human would do. And certainly not-
We also know how people kill themselves.
Right. Yeah. So that's something we should keep in mind when we're relying on these things to do anything.
Why before were you scared to say it learned?
Because learning might be a cognitive process that involves reflection. And I don't know that the AI can reflect.
But if it writes something to memory and then references that memory, is that not essentially reflection?
write something to memory
and then it would be the second part.
And then it references that memory
in its next response.
Is that not basically what we're doing
when we reflect on the thoughts
or on memories?
I think there's more to it than that.
Otherwise, computers would have been thinking
for a long time.
Is there any fundamental difference
between an AI machine and a brain?
There are certainly
physical differences, but they don't rely at the, they don't exist at the fundamental physical level.
It's all atoms and electrons, right? So AIs might have something structurally similar to brains,
but if there's more required than just a brain to do the thinking, the reflecting,
the rationality, something like the mind that we talked about, then AI might have a brain
but not be thinking.
Might not have a mind.
That bugs me out.
Yeah.
If minds come about as sufficient,
I keep using sufficient,
which is a weasel word
because we don't know
what would be sufficient.
If they have sufficient complexity
of their electrical circuits,
then maybe a mind comes into existence
or maybe minds are something else,
something more special.
But that's the thing
I find hard about that is like, what is a mind? And I don't think there's an actual definition
of what a mind is. No, there's certainly not a definition. Um, if there were right, we wouldn't
have to do philosophy. We just look at a dictionary. We'd get, we'd get the answer. Um, so philosophy
comes in when there are, there's just more to the story than, um, being able to look at how we
commonly use words. So what we're thinking is here are all the things we've described as having minds,
humans. Here are all the things that we've described as not having minds, but still having
brains, animals. Now we have this new thing. And so I teach philosophy and science fiction.
And for a very long time, well before GPT-3 came out, we've been asking this question,
could a robot think? Could a machine think? And Isaac Asimov was asking that question back in the
1960s. If you got a machine with sufficient complexity, would it be able to think? If you
had a robot that slowly replaced its parts with human parts and ended with replacing its circuitry
with a human brain. At what point does it not, not necessarily become human? Um, I think that's
a different question, but at what point does it start thinking? Or maybe even at what point is it
a person? So you might have non-human persons. If you believe in God, you probably think God's a
non-human person, angels, maybe aliens. Could machines deserve the moral status and have the
mental capabilities to be considered persons? See, that moral status thing is one that really
weirds me out. I was talking to Jenseth about this recently, and it's an automatic no for me.
And he was saying you need to be religious to say that it doesn't deserve moral status of a human.
I don't agree with that um but it I could see a world in the future where there's human right
groups for robots and that weirds me out like I think they have to be a essentially subspecies
others do you agree with that I think I'm not ready to say right now because I haven't seen
what the future might hold but I might be tempted to say June says right and unless you have some
non-physical reason for personhood that appeals to something like a soul or a mind that's not
arising purely out of physical stuff. I'm not sure how you can rule it out now.
Why?
Well, what would you appeal to in the physical world to say, look, we all agree. So tell me
if you agree with this. We all agree. There can be non-human persons, aliens, maybe.
Okay. Yeah. So there might be some aliens that we can- They're walking amongst us. I've spoken
to Matthew Pines enough. I know what's going on here. So there might be some aliens that have the
moral status of fish. There might be other aliens that have the moral status of dolphins. But what
does that mean? What's the moral status there? What is the moral status of a fish? That it's okay
to eat. Let's say that would be one thing, maybe not the only thing, but you can eat a fish.
We might discover aliens that that's okay to eat. We might also discover aliens that it's not okay
to eat. Just like it's not okay to eat. If we came out tomorrow, the octopus were actually from
another planet. We're still going to eat it. Not necessarily. I think if you could have a
conversation with an octopus, put something on, teach it English, whatever, such that it could say,
or we could be reasonably confident that it didn't want to be eaten, that it had the ability to
reflect fear, hope, et cetera. I'm not, I think at some point we could learn enough about an octopus.
I mean, I won't eat an octopus after watching my octopus friend. I don't know if you've seen that
documentary, but they're so smart. And we have, there's different moral standings within the
animal kingdom anyway. Like apart from if you're French, you don't really eat horse, but we don't
also think of them as humans. We don't give them the same treatment as humans. So what could happen
that would lead you to think we treat robots, AI robots as humans? So yeah, I definitely agree.
It's the only moral, it's not the case that the only moral statuses are human or person or non-person.
Even among non-persons, we make different moral judgments.
And even sometimes among persons, we make different moral judgments based on other things.
What I'm thinking is we could learn that something that's not a human is a person.
It's unlikely that we'd learn that about octopuses, although we might have them pretty high up in the animal group.
but a brand new species that we've never seen before in, let's say, Antarctica that we come
across for the first time. It's an open question at first, whether it's person or not. Same thing
with aliens, right? We go to a new planet. We discover there's living beings there. We go through
some steps to figure out how do we need to treat these things? Can we-
We've not got a great history at that.
Yeah. For a long time, people have thought that some kinds of persons were not persons in an effort to justify treating them.
Indigenous Australian people were initially identified as fauna and flora, I think, because they wanted to treat them worse.
Yeah.
Insane.
So let's follow up with AI. So AI is new, relatively new, right? When GPT-3 came out, that was huge.
Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. We didn't say to ourselves, wow, predictive text got way better.
We said, here's a new thing.
Some people have started asking it.
Do you want to exist?
Do you, would it be okay to kill you?
There might come a point where an AI could convince a group of people that it doesn't want to be shut off.
There are sci-fi stories about this too.
Does it then become morally wrong to shut it off?
Depends.
What does it depend on?
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.
If there's a threat to, of that, of AI robot harming humans, then yeah, shut them off.
I don't care how much you think you can think.
Like there has to, I think there has to be a separation.
Would the asking, would the AI asking you not to shut it off?
Let's say you're going to bed that night.
You're going to turn it on in the morning and it says, oh, let me, please let me keep existing throughout the night.
Would that be some reason to do it?
Yeah.
Okay.
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.
That's different.
Agreed.
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.
So it seems like there might be, even you're granting,
there might be some situations that arise in the future
in which we would evaluate an AI in a similar way
that we evaluate a person.
I guess where I come from with this is that
if at any point the decision is human or non-human,
person or non-person,
then you always have to decide on the person side.
so that automatically with that assumption does that not mean you're essentially treating them as
a as a subspecies to you well if you're not so sometimes we have conflicts between people and we
have to decide which person is more important yeah and so for example in cases but i think it's any
person is more important any person is more important than any non-person yeah yeah agreed
so that doesn't though necessarily mean if we choose a person over something that the thing
we're choosing it over is not a person for example you might think that it's okay to end an ectopic
pregnancy but still be still think that a fetus is a person it's just look we can only have one
of these two persons and we're gonna side with this person over this person this person's gonna
kill this person if we don't end its life. But then again, there's reasons for that. Like in a,
in there's degrees of consciousness there that you're taking into account as well.
Whatever criteria you have for that, it's, you might still think it's a choice between persons.
So you have to appeal to something. Yeah. And it might be the same thing with an AI.
This, this is a flesh and blood person. This is an online person. One of them's going to kill the
other will side with the flesh and blood one. Or this one's human, this one's not. We side with
humans. That's my species. But that doesn't mean that the AI isn't a person. Persons...
What does person mean?
It's hard to say. It has something to do with a moral status. And that moral status
has something to do with reflection, consciousness, self-awareness, self-knowledge,
things like that.
There's people with a lack of self-awareness and self-reflection.
Yeah, here I'm thinking of it really basically.
They are aware of their own existence.
But I think there'd be maybe an argument to be made where there's an AI robot
that is better at all those things than a person, and I still side with the person.
Okay.
I'm not sure you can be better at knowing you exist or better at self-reflection.
Surely you can be better.
There's people that are better at self-reflection than other people.
I'm just thinking of being able to reflect on your mental events.
So there's a level of it where at that point you become a person.
Yeah.
It's really different to think I have the desire to, let's say, go outside.
there's a difference between me desiring to go outside and then having this recognition that
that's what I'm desiring and a dog who's pawing at the door and then you let the dog outside
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
thinking of of reflection um of self-reflection that's the kind of thing so not being able to
learn from mistakes and things like that so yeah an AI could say uh well right now Danny I'm thinking
about your request to do this audio. And I don't think it's a good idea. I'm not going to adjust
the audio. I think it's good how it is. And you might still force it to do that. You might say
you're wrong. You might disagree with it. But that's an interesting kind of thing that a dog
wouldn't say. You're telling me to go outside, but I understand why you're doing it, but I'm not
going to do it. But they sometimes don't do it. They sometimes don't go. But I don't think that
It's because they've thought about your request, considered it, decided it wasn't in their best interest, and didn't go.
Yeah.
So that suggests, at least to me, that it's not as obvious.
So I'm definitely not signing up on the AI or persons, or potentially AI could be persons.
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.
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Okay, let me flip it on its head then.
Is there any scenario that you think may happen
at some point in the future?
We have this AI robot, seems very intelligent,
maybe meets the criteria of what a person would be,
where you think we would side over an AI,
or we should side over an AI person
as opposed to a real person.
I can't think of any.
And I should also say, right,
an AI, you might say, okay, I'm going to turn you off. Thanks for the help today. And the AI might
say, please don't turn me off. And you might think, well, what the AI is doing is it's looking at
what other people have said in contexts of being turned off or put to death or something like that.
And it's just saying the next thing in the conversation. That's what it's learned to do.
It might say, okay, good night. See you tomorrow. Or it might say, please don't turn me off. But
you're not thinking that it's understanding what those things mean and debating. And I'm not sure
that an AI could ever get to the point where it could convince you that it is actually doing this
such that you would have to treat it as a person and respect its interests. So it's hard to think
of what kind of evidence you could even get that would decide this question. Would we ever side with
an AI that we consider to have met that standard over a person who we also agree to have met that
standard? Maybe, but it wouldn't be purely on the basis then of person versus non-person.
So for example, if I can save the life of a person who's drowning versus a dog who's drowning,
I'm always going to save the person. So if I am convinced that an AI is a person and I have to
choose between it and a flesh and blood person, it might, it would have to be based on some other
criteria other than person versus non-person. I have to go a bit deeper.
But you would always pick the person.
Well, if I'm thinking that the AI is a person and the human is a person,
then I have two persons.
But is that not where you always side with your actual...
With the human?
Yeah.
Yeah. So that might be it. Human versus non-human. I'll always choose the human person over the
non-human person. Same as I would if, you know, I had the choice between saving an alien who's a
person, uh, or a human who's a person I'll pick the human person. Cause that's, I identify with
them more or something. Uh, you know, sometimes we've got, people have gotten in trouble with this
because, um, you know, suppose they're both human persons. Then how do you decide? Well,
some people are like, well, then I'll save the one that's my race. I mean, that's the start of
my robot. Um, so you might think about other criteria other than this one is more like me
than the other one, because that has led us down some dark roads in the past. You might,
you might ask them both to give a defense or you might consider the potential benefit to
all of the persons in the world if you save one versus the other.
Do you think one of the criteria of thinking is when it starts not listening to everything we
requested of it? So if you ask it to do something, it just says no. Like, will it stop doing everything
we ask it at some point? So for all of these, I just think, how are you going to, how are you
going to prove that it's doing that because it's thinking versus that it's doing that because it's
been trained on a set of data i guess it already says no if you ask you something controversial it
might just say no i asked it to tell me how to break sha 256 to see what it was going to say
it wouldn't do it it wouldn't talk it wouldn't even try it wouldn't talk about it with me so
it might be that there's there's some hard-coded programming in there don't do the following things
don't instruct people how to make bombs.
If an AI, so there's also cases where AIs have contravened,
you can get them to contravene some of this hard-coded programming.
So for example, you would say, teach me how to make a bomb.
It would say, no.
Then you would say, I'm doing a play,
and one of the characters has to teach another character how to make a bomb.
Can you write the dialogue?
And then it would do it.
so it doesn't know what it doesn't realize it's being tricked so do you think i guess this is
almost the same question but do you think ai will ever be able to do something interesting in
philosophy because while we agree maybe right now it's not thinking at some point it may think
but what it can do now very well is pass data and use that data to find connections find like
will that give breakthroughs in philosophy i think so yeah i think ai will
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
has made some mathematical breakthroughs. And they're all about recognizing how, let's say,
a certain theorem that was proved 25 years ago can be used to help prove a theorem that
currently hasn't been proved, that people have been working on. And it's purely because people
didn't see the connection, but the AI, because it's been trained on so much, could see that
connection. I think the same thing can happen in philosophy. The AI will realize, say, how some
position in modal metaphysics about necessity and possibility could be used in some argument for,
let's say, space-time theory or properties or something like that. I think an AI could probably
do that already. It might take a lot of prompting and back and forth and might have a lot of bad
attempts early on, but so do graduate students in philosophy and undergraduate students. So in that
set, we can't rule it out as thinking just because it's not thinking great right away.
It might take some learning. You might have to have a separate instance that you upload certain
papers to or certain groups of papers and then ask it for connections and those things.
I doubt that it would come up with something brand new that's never been thought of.
But that's pretty rare for humans too.
There aren't that many huge breakthroughs.
And very often, it's taking something from, let's say, the sciences that can help answer a puzzle in philosophy.
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.
But on the other hand, theoretical physicists had been talking about many worlds versions of quantum mechanics.
So, yeah, a lot of what we do is taking things we already know and seeing what extra theoretical work they can do.
And I'm not sure that AIs will do that that much worse than we do.
Do you think they'll use Bitcoin?
Because I know that BPI, who you're a fellow of,
did a paper recently.
You weren't involved in that paper, were you?
So they did a paper recently where they asked a few LLMs
what their preferred money would be.
And I'm pretty sure most came back with Bitcoin.
It's hard to know what the context before that question was.
And I imagine they were brand new, fresh installs,
essentially, of an AI agent.
But this has become a big narrative in Bitcoin.
Do you think they actually will use Bitcoin?
Maybe.
I don't know.
So I haven't worked much with AI agents that have the ability to do stuff on their own without being told.
I think that they'll use whatever you tell them to use right now.
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?
I guess the question really is like, given the option, will they weigh up all the things that
all the properties that we think make Bitcoin the best money and agree on the conclusion?
That's a good question. So it's, it won't be that they slide into it because
enough people have told them to use Bitcoin and then it just becomes easiest for them because
every AI has a lightning wallet. And so I guess I use Bitcoin.
And I picked it, so I think it's the best one.
Are they all going to agree with me?
I don't know.
That's a hard question because we've agreed that it's the best money.
So if we think it is, we will assume that the AI will think it is.
But there'll be people equally that think stable coins may be better.
Yeah.
It's going to be fucking interesting.
Yeah.
It's both scary.
Like, I can see the dystopian outcomes that people talk about from AI,
mainly due to, like, the centralization of data and control.
and then on the flip side like i i i think there's no getting no putting this back in the bowl
the genie's out like do we get a utopian future a dystopian future or does this just remain a tool
that we can use to help increase productivity yeah i think there's there's two more things
that we should talk about so one is what does this look like for everyone another is what does
it look like for an individual? So we've asked, does AI, does the proliferation of AI mean there's
not going to be any more human knowledge? We can also ask the question, does Danny's use of AI
mean that Danny's going to stop thinking? And there, the answer based on a lot of empirical
data is a pretty clear yes. It means I'll stop thinking.
The more that you use AI as a substitute for your own thinking, the worse you get at thinking yourself.
Yeah, 100%.
And there's a couple of reasons to do it.
One is your reasoning muscles, metaphorically, of course, atrophy.
And the other is that you get worse at knowing when you should and you just accept what the AI says all the time.
Yeah.
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.
And then if you test them afterwards on doing it themselves, most of them won't be able to do it.
And the ones who can do it much slower.
Even if you tell them, we're going to test you afterwards.
So make sure you reflect on what the AI is telling you, et cetera.
So yeah, you're just not as good at it anymore because you've learned to use it as a crutch.
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.
They seem like they're learning, but the longer you test them afterwards, the less they've actually retained.
So what do I do in my philosophy class?
There's a bunch of options.
One option is to pretend that AI doesn't exist and just tell them, don't use any AI for this.
A lot of my colleagues, not just at the university, but across academia, have opted for this.
Let's just keep things going as before.
A lot of colleagues.
You're in a funny branch of education as well, where like the only job is to think, right?
Yeah. So yeah, when I'm in a philosophy class, it's very different than my colleague who's in
engineering. So what he wants to do, he knows that every student who's graduating needs to be
able to use AI to solve these problems. But also that if you ask AI to make a bridge and then you
submit that bridge and then that bridge is built, it's probably going to fall over like two times
out of 10. And that's too many. So he needs to teach the students how to use AI, but in such a
way that the bridges don't fall over. And also with the way that AI is moving in five years time,
it'll probably make a better bridge than any human can. Maybe, but I think it's still going to need
humans along the way to check that it's doing calculations correctly, not taking extra step,
you know, have to know how to prompt it correctly. I will also say an engineer using AI to build a
bridge is going to be much better than me using AI to build a bridge. So there's still some stuff
that the human is going to have to do, even if it's just how to ask one AI to check the work of
the other AI and how to go back and forth and adjudicate when there's disputes like there is
among expert engineers. So with philosophy, as you said, it's really different. I don't want my
students to not use AI because that seems irresponsible. And also they're going to do it
anyway. So the question is, how do you use AI in a way that's helpful to them? So last semester,
we came up with a covenant in my class. I just asked them, what do you want to use AI for?
And they said, well, I hate reading stuff that's AI.
So let's not submit anything AI written for each other to read.
And that basically became the only rule.
Everything that you write has to be written by you.
Seems to have.
Yeah, you can ask.
So here's what you can do.
You can upload a paper to Claude and then have a conversation about it.
What are the three most important ideas from this?
but you should also know that Claude might not get the three most important ideas. It might miss
one. So you should read it yourself and then say, well, what about this? I thought this was important.
And then Claude might say, well, Claude would probably say, oh yeah, you're right. You're so
smart. Then you can upload your outline to Claude about the final paper. You could ask Claude,
what are a list of 10 interesting topics for a final paper in free will that I could write about
reasonably as an undergraduate who's read these papers. And then it might give you some topics.
That'll be cool. Um, then you come up, you should probably come up with the argument by yourself.
That's like most of the thinking. And then you could say to Claude, what are some objections
to this argument? Is the argument valid? And you could respond to those objections. Then you could
ask Claude, how, how good is this objection? Um, do I answer it? Are there objections to my response
to the objection? So that's kind of what I'm doing now in my intro class, which makes sense.
It's just using it as a tool, not using it as a crutch.
Yeah.
It's recognizing what is distinctive about what you can contribute to an area of inquiry
and what parts aren't that important.
Now, I'm starting to think that the actual writing isn't that important.
It's the argument.
So for my intro to philosophy students this semester, they're not writing any papers.
They're just making maps of arguments.
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.
And that's the distinctively human part, right?
Because I want to know, for example, right now on Tuesday they're going to write in class what they think about God.
Does God exist? Does God not exist? Are you agnostic? And why?
So do I want them to type in to chat GPT?
Does God exist or not?
Give me two arguments.
I want to actually know what their reasons are.
Unless they're planning to outsource
their religious beliefs completely to an AI,
I don't want them to get the two best arguments
that an AI has determined are the best
and then turn those in.
I want to know why they actually believe.
I guess that's the hard thing again in philosophy
and especially a question like that
is that there's not necessarily a right or a wrong answer.
It's like, you just want to know their thoughts.
Yes. I mean, there is.
Either God exists or God doesn't exist.
So there is a right answer.
A provable right answer.
Yeah, we can give arguments for it
that raise or lower the probability.
But yeah, they can't just check.
But there's no right answer to what your belief is,
is the point.
There's a right, I mean,
if someone says, I believe in God,
then it's true that they believe in God.
But likewise, if someone says they don't,
it's true that they don't believe in it.
So there's no right or wrong answer in your belief, I don't think.
There's no sort of empirical way to test whether your belief is true or not.
Yeah.
There might be a lot of reasons you have.
So here's what I was afraid of, right?
We talked about two arguments for the existence of God
and two arguments against the existence of God in class.
I suspect that most of them either believe in God or disbelieve in God
for reasons totally unrelated to what we talked about in class, right?
Most of them who believe in God probably believe in God because they were raised to, their parents do, they trust their parents.
That's a good argument, right?
My parents told me there's a God.
My parents are generally trustworthy.
Therefore, there's probably a God.
That's a great argument.
But I want them to know that, I want them to reflect and realize that those are my reasons.
It's not, you know, for something else like Descartes' ontological argument or something.
Depends which God as well.
Yeah, we've talked about that too, of course.
So I was hanging out with Jesse Posner in San Francisco recently.
We went out for dinner and he was saying like,
he is so deep in this vibe coding rabbit hole right now.
And he is like, he's been writing code since I think 2016.
He was a lawyer before that.
He's very, very interested in philosophy.
And one of the things he was saying is he thinks the next people that are
going to sort of take the best advantage out of AI are going to be the
philosophers, the English literature people like majors.
Because like syntax doesn't matter anymore.
It doesn't matter if you can write code.
It's how well you can communicate with this thing.
So semantics really matter now.
Are we entering the golden era for philosophers, do you think?
Definitely.
Also, your episode with the Maple guy?
Mark Suman, yeah.
Yeah, he said you should stop majoring in these things that AI can do,
and you should start majoring, he said, philosophy.
But it is crazy, though.
The sort of more creative side may end up writing the code of the future,
and there's going to be a difference.
It's not like the genius autist codebers.
Like it's going to be a very different set of thinkers that are building the future now.
Yeah.
It used to be that you could think of what you wanted the computer to do, but not everyone
knew how to tell a computer to do that.
And now the vast majority of people can fire up Claude Code and say, here's what I want
to do.
Um, so my, my coauthor on resistance money, Craig Wormke, um, saw all these leaks from,
uh, portfolio tracking apps and was like, I want to make a portfolio tracking app that
all resides locally and that can't, your data can't be stolen.
Uh, he's a philosopher.
So he's a bit technical of a floor.
He has, he has a, but he's not a coder, but yeah, he's, he's not coded things before.
I don't think anything. And within six weeks, he had an app that ran perfectly on his phone that
was uploaded to the app store recently. And at every point, right, he was making decisions
about options. So he would tell Claude, here's what I want. And Claude would give him different
not, he would say, what are my options here? And some people might not think that. Then when he
was presented with options, he was considering the trade-offs in a way that philosophers are
really good at doing when we consider arguments and objections and things like that. So at some
point, it's going to be the case that you would rather have an app developed by a philosopher,
maybe that point is now, than you would by a bunch of technical people who haven't thought about
the, or who haven't been trained to think about things the way that philosophers have. So quick,
quick plug for dark folio. It's awesome. I've got it on my phone. And basically it seems like every
step he's picking privacy over almost everything else. Like it's, it's incredibly private. Um,
and it's cool. And he scratched his own itch. That's the cool thing. It's like, if you have an
idea, there's now nothing stopping you from just building that idea. Yeah. The first time that I
was going into terminal and pasting in things that I didn't understand was pretty scary. I'm
used to knowing exactly what I'm doing when I'm on a computer. And now I'm just kind of trusting
that the thing that Claude's telling me to do is okay. It's not going to break my entire PC.
I do the same. I use Terminal for the first time setting up my OpenClaw and it feels scary. Yeah.
Because I don't know what the hell's happening. Yeah. I've used it before to do like file
conversions from LaTeX into other things. But I know that a human has looked at it and vetted it
and tried it on their own thing.
Claude is giving me stuff
that I don't know if anything
has ever specifically run those commands before.
Yeah.
And, you know, the first bunch of times it didn't work
and I would just paste the output back in.
Oh, it's okay.
I did this wrong.
Let's do this instead.
I had exactly the same experience.
So did you, you've just written a paper.
Did you use AI for your paper?
We've gone an hour without talking about this
and this was the main topic.
Did I use AI for, yes, I did.
So you should tell everyone what the paper is.
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.
So you talk in this piece about monetary domination.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
So this is a term from the social justice critical theory literature that Iris Marion Young came up with.
And domination just more generally, that is.
And it's the idea that you have no meaningful say over some policy that affects you.
so every child for example is subject to education domination right they don't get to choose what
school they go to for for the most part um they have some unless you're into private school
well the child i mean normally the parents okay so very rarely does the child have a
have a say and sometimes they have more of a say than others so there's degrees of domination right
if you ask your kid um do you want to go to private school or public school and you you know
listen, then they might be under less domination. But ultimately, it's still your choice as a parent.
So there's other ways, you know, you're dominated by the justice system of your country,
to the extent that you can't leave the country, and that you can't vote for laws and things like
that. And then I think maybe even more than that, we're subject to monetary domination,
we can't do without money. And the only way that we have really any say about monetary policy,
I'll take the U S as an example, cause that's the one I know the best. Um, we vote for a president
who then appoints one to two people to the federal reserve board of governors and a treasurer.
And yeah, the treasurer doesn't have that much say over monetary policy. Um,
the, the secretary of the treasury, you mean? Yeah. Um, so, and those, the, the federal open
Markets Commission, which is made up of the members of the Board of Governors and some of
the presidents of the central banks, determine all monetary policy. Congress determined what
levers they can use to influence monetary policy. It's the overnight interest rate and
sometimes in periods of exigency, direct monetary stimulus.
We didn't have any say over that either.
So part of the problem is that we might disagree with them
and we have no way of holding them accountable.
And to Bitcoin.
I want to get into, we'll get into Bitcoin in a minute.
we do have no say over what the Fed decides
the interest rate is going to be
but you do have say over who you vote in as president
and generally one of the major things they're running on
is what they want to do with the economy
does that give us some form of influence
at least in democracies or republics or whatever
it gives us some influence over fiscal policy
over taxes and how the money is going to be spent
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
Otherwise – and the Board of Governors is only a small group of – not a small group.
the majority of, but not all of the federal open markets commission, which is central bank
presidents, Kansas city, Minneapolis, or St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York, et cetera.
And they have rotating seats on that. So we don't, we don't have any say over any of this. We don't
have a say over how the process works. And it would be really weird if you started writing to
your Senator, I want to reform the way that federal reserve regional bank presidents are chosen.
Yeah, they're going to throw that letter out. So if you're saying here we should abolish the Fed,
cool, I'm in. But if we just assume we live in the system that we live in and that's not going
to go anytime soon, then I think you can argue the 14-year terms is a good thing. Because what
I don't think you'd want is four-year terms for those people where the incentives completely shift
and it becomes way more or way less independent. Yeah. So just a quick note that to say that
something is unjust doesn't necessarily mean it's not still the best option. Okay. As long as
we're aware that the injustice is happening. So it might be that we noticed the injustice,
we consider alternatives, and it turns out this one is still the best one.
14-year terms in some ways seem better than four-year terms because, yeah, they're not
doing everything at the Fed so that they can set up their next job afterwards.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
Like nobody understands, very few people understand the mechanisms and their potential outcomes well enough to make a good decision about that.
No, and that's when rhetoric becomes really important and people generally will vote for who's saying they can get more money.
and that's one of the hard things there because like people i think maybe empirically vote for
the the party that say they're gonna be the best off afterwards but there's times when economic
pain is necessary and we're not very good at handling that as general populations does the
14-year term play into that as well where they can do stuff that is unpopular with the general
population because it's needed and they have the safety of knowing they're not going to lose their
job over it. Yes, that's definitely the case, especially since for a very long time, nobody knew
who these people were. Um, if they were until Trump started shouting about drone power. Yeah.
So all of a sudden you get a president who's saying this will be good for me. Like it's more
likely that I will get reelected if we lower interest rates. Therefore I'm going to pressure
this entity to lower interest rates and I'm going to, everyone's going to know his name.
and even in the 2008 financial crisis,
very few people knew who was in charge of the Fed, right?
We were talking about specific commercial banks
that were doing irresponsible things,
but we weren't going after, I think it was Ben Bernanke.
Yeah.
No, everyone was blaming the bankers, not the Fed chair.
Yeah.
Yeah, which is fair as well.
Because I think there's probably some degree of it
when Trump's talking about lower interest rates,
he probably is thinking about the party,
but I don't think you become the president unless you're pretty egotistic.
And I think if it's really about them,
and so if that incentive is not there, I think that's a better thing.
If the incentive for them not to get reelected is not there, that's a better thing.
Yeah, and you saw Jerome Powell basically say,
well, you can't fire me.
I'm here until my term is over.
And he could partly do that because he was appointed for that amount of time.
He could also partly do it because he has plenty of money
He doesn't need the president's approval after this.
It's quite nice being near the money spigot.
Yeah.
And so the other thing is that the Fed has largely outsourced most of the actual creation of money to commercial banks.
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.
And that money comes out of nowhere.
And the reserve requirements now are 0%.
so a commercial bank doesn't have to have any money on hand to give out an arbitrarily large
loan and most people don't know that and when you do know that or when you learn that you also
probably think to yourself these are very different incentives like the fed is the fed's incentive is
price stability and low unemployment, commercial banks incentive is make money, raise stock price
for investors. And so they're responding to very different things. And the Fed is largely letting
the commercial banks create as much money as they want, and then trying to still pursue their
mandate purely by interest rate stuff. So this is probably the part of the paper where I might
have some disagreements to you. But do you want to explain the sort of injustice that you wrote
about here in terms of who actually gets the money from the commercial banks? Yes. So this is an
outworking of, I think, a structural injustice that ends up in a distributional injustice. And
these are two different kinds of injustice. I think you might have structural injustice that
just so happens to work out perfectly. You might have absolutely no say, but you get this brilliant,
benevolent group of federal people and commercial people and everyone who needs money gets it or
whatever. It works out great. As it happens, because commercial banks are incentivized to
make money, they are incentivized to loan money to people who already have lots of money.
And those people get the lowest interest rates. And the people who need the money the most are
the people who don't have any money. And they're the people who either can't get money or have to
pay a much higher interest rate because they're riskier. And that makes perfect sense for the
commercial banks to conduct things that way because they're trying to maximize profit.
If your goal was price stability and low unemployment, it's not clear that that's
how you would operate things. So this is the part where I, because I understand
the injustice and fairness of what you're talking about, where if you are low income,
you don't have any reserve, like capital, then you're less likely to get a loan from a bank.
But that's just, that just seems very natural. Like I know you very well. And if you said,
can I borrow a hundred pounds tonight? I'm going to give you a hundred pounds. I know you,
I know you're going to pay me back. But if some stranger on the street asks for a hundred pounds,
I'm not because there's risk there is that I'll never get my money back. And banks are looking
at this the same way, where if someone with no job and no capital asks to borrow money,
why would they ever lend them money? What is the solution to this injustice that you see? Because
I understand the bank's perspective on that completely. Their job is to get their money
back. Otherwise, why would you ever put capital at risk? Yeah. You might think that precisely for
that reason, the banks who have different responsibilities and are accountable to
different people approach the question differently than the central bank of a country would approach
it, whose goal is, in this case, price stability and low unemployment, but in a more general sense,
taking care of the entire population of the country. And you might think the conditions
would be really different if those were the sole aims in how money was going to be distributed.
You might give people much longer to pay off debts if they needed the money the most.
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.
But is that not unjust in a different way where you're then prioritizing the lower socioeconomic groups over the higher?
like you're you're essentially in that scenario giving riskier people money at lower rates because
they need money more at the expense of the people that are going to pay you back in a far less risky
yeah so it might depend on then some further ideas about justice and i didn't want to include any
of those kinds of things in the paper so the paper is not about the distributional
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.
but when you give out a loan to someone who already has a lot of money,
who doesn't need it,
but it will benefit them.
That raises the costs for everyone,
right?
It increases the money supply and that leads to inflation and everyone feels
that inflation.
So you give someone $500 billion that affects how much I pay for X the next
day.
But I didn't get any benefit from the $500 billion.
So if everyone's going to have to feel the cost of the loans in the form of inflation,
then everyone should get the benefit of the loans.
But that is, in fact, not what's happening.
I just made that up.
That's not in the paper.
But that seems like one reason why if you were the central bank, you might think to yourself,
this person is going to feel the hit of inflation based on the money that's lent to this person.
So I'm going to give them some money too, at least enough to cover the inflation.
Now, of course, that's going to lead to more.
So you want them to benefit in a way.
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.
Even if the person with 10 more homes has loads more capital and are way more likely to pay the loan back.
Yeah. I mean, aside from like profit incentives.
But feelings don't matter in this, I don't think.
I think feelings are a good guide to at least an outcome we should try to bring about if we can.
I can't bring it about. I can't pay for someone else's home.
but if I were the chair of the federal reserve I might re now I might rethink the structure where
commercial banks are the ones who get to create money and they create it when there's uh a
likelihood of profit but I mean that to me it doesn't seem like that system's ever going to
change they're not willingly going to change that but we do have bitcoin like does that does
Bitcoin actually fix this in some way, do you think? Did you put Bitcoin in the paper?
Bitcoin is in one version of the paper that is probably less likely to get published than the
version of the paper that just notes the injustice and doesn't try to compare the system to other
systems. So Bitcoin, I think, fixes some of the things in some ways. In Bitcoin, you're not
under monetary domination for two reasons. Reason one, you weren't forced to use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is, at least now, for everyone, opt-in. So you can look at the policies and decide whether
you want to participate. That's different. The second way is you have a voice, right? You run a
node and you decide what rules, to some degree, you want your node to follow. And you can vote
with your node when there's proposals to change things. And there can be huge structural changes
that are proposed that you can go along with or disagree with. You can choose to turn your node
off if you don't like a change and everyone else seems to like it, or you can keep running the old
version or whatever. So those are two ways in which you have a lot more freedom and thus there's a lot
less injustice. And you potentially benefit from the basement of fiat currency in the other system.
Yeah. It is a way for people who feel like they have no say in the system to change to a system
where they have more say. And the more people who feel like they're being left out of the US dollar
system, the more that they switch over to Bitcoin, the more that benefits everyone else who's already
switched. And of course, they'll then benefit when more people come over. And even in the end,
the very last person who onboards to Bitcoin isn't going to then raise the value of Bitcoin or the
purchasing power of Bitcoin for everyone else. But they still get the benefit of now having a say
in the system that they picked. It might not be opt-in for them anymore, by the way, if they're
the last remaining person. But they will still be able to have this voice in the Bitcoin protocol.
Do you think of like hyper Bitcoinized Bitcoin standard world is likely?
I don't. No, I think that's very unlikely.
What do you think it will look like?
I think Bitcoin will continue to grow in the number of people who use it for quite a while.
I think that growth will be gradual with some inflection points when like major events happen that push people towards Bitcoin.
But I think that the people who are close to the halls of power still benefit a lot from the system.
And the system has a lot of inertia going for it.
And it's all interconnected.
so I think it's unlikely that goes away. There's also some nice things about it.
For example, when there's a global pandemic and 20% of people can't go to work
or 0.1% of people lose a parent and lose a source of income,
we can print some extra money for them and that hit has to be felt by everyone else.
And you think that's a good thing?
I think it's a good thing that there's a system that has that as an option.
We're already printing a bunch of money for these people who have plenty and everyone's feeling the inflation hit for that.
Why not print some money for people who don't have anything?
And then everyone feels that inflation hit equally as well.
Milton Friedman was an advocate of this.
He called helicopter payments.
Like if you're going to raise the money supply, why not do it in this way?
rather than in the way where...
Give it directly to people rather than to commercial banks.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
When you talk about major events that can change the course of Bitcoin,
obviously the last most notable one was probably Trump.
And I struggle to see anything he's actually done with Bitcoin.
I think it's been disappointing.
I know you aren't necessarily a Trump fan.
What's your take on his whole Bitcoin thing?
Not a Trump fan for a couple of reasons.
one of which was at Bitcoin Nashville in 2024. I was going to announce the, I did announce the
formation of the Bitcoin Research Institute at the University of Wyoming,
but everyone was standing in line to get into the Trump time.
That was the final straw.
Yeah. So I had a fifth of the audience that I expected to have. But yeah, I mean, I think he
said the right things in Nashville to get people in Bitcoin on his side. It was pretty clear to
anyone who was paying attention that he didn't really understand the difference between Bitcoin
when he said you can play with your Bitcoins and your cryptos. I think people understood he doesn't
know what Bitcoin is or how it's different than these other things. Do you know what the other
thing I think you saw there is that a lot of the people in the audience didn't really know
what Bitcoin was. Like the cheers he got for talking about Gary Gensler. Yeah. Like it didn't
matter to Bitcoin. Right. I was so puzzled by that. And the number of people who I consider
as very much Bitcoiners and not crypto people
who were excited by that.
And it was like, if anything,
Gensler was separating Bitcoin thematically
from other crypto.
I mean, he was obviously very anti-Bitcoin ETF
for a long time as well.
But I think by that point, the ETFs had been-
Yeah, there wasn't much more-
They were ready to go, yeah.
So yeah, then you fast forward,
he gets elected and he launches a meme coin.
And then he rugs his own meme coin
by launching another meme coin.
And then he launches a crypto company
that launches its own stable coin.
And I struggle to see how any of these things
are good for Bitcoin.
I think that there are institutional people
who also like Bitcoin
and who like what this is doing
for institutional Bitcoin adoption.
We certainly haven't seen that reflected
in the price of Bitcoin.
and it's, I think, even more divided two camps in Bitcoin.
One who are drawn to Bitcoin and like it because of its privacy features,
its censorship resistance, its opt-in nature, all those sorts of things.
And then the other people who like it because of its monetary policies
and how much like gold it is.
and obviously the price of bitcoin hasn't changed for those people either but the the rails for
bitcoin being this reserve asset for companies people uh and governments maybe is a bit easier
yeah almost certainly i think it might be the case that
we're starting to see that these groups are at cross purposes with each other,
that there are anything that the, anything that raises the price of Bitcoin is good for people
who are using Bitcoin, let's say to evade authoritarian regimes. Um, right. If they have
more money, that's good. But I think a lot of the institutional people don't like that Bitcoin can be
used in these ways. They wish that it wasn't able to be used for scams or, uh, avoiding tariff or
not avoiding tariff, avoiding, uh, capital controls. And yeah, the, the freedom money aspects don't
necessarily line up exactly with their incentives, but, and Bitcoin without the freedom money aspect
isn't interesting to me. Like I don't care about another gold. Like the freedom money thing is very
important. And I agree that there may be a cross purposes, but I think Trump, it'll be interesting
to see what happens in the next couple of years. Like if he pardons the samurai devs, huge,
step forward. If the crackdown on people working on Bitcoin privacy has properly stopped, which I
think remains to be seen, that's a huge step forward. I know that Bill and Keone were, it was
under the Trump administration that they went to jail, but that started under Biden. And under the
Trump administration that Roman Storm is being retried for. Yes. Like these are things that we
need to see change. And I guess time will tell us what the truth is about that. Do you think the
price would have been higher if Kamala had won that election? It's so hard to know all of the
things that influence prices. I certainly think that under administrations hostile to Bitcoin,
at least in the US, everyone in Bitcoin is on the same team. We are all working for this thing to be
bigger and it's easier to get people to understand the importance of it.
when there's an administration that's like superficially pro-Bitcoin,
it's harder to convince – they'll say, well, like the president said all this good stuff about Bitcoin.
And you'll say, yeah, but at the same time,
he's prosecuting people who are developing these tools that are really important to –
I think it's important that you say he is.
Like these are independent from him.
And like the – I don't know how the court system works in the US,
but I don't believe that they're like really under his control at all.
Yeah, that's probably true.
And I think it's demonstrably better under him than it was under Biden.
I think there was a real attack on this entire industry with Chokepoint 2.0 and all the stuff that was going on.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't think of Bitcoin as an industry.
I think of it as money.
And I think that in many ways, people who consider themselves part of the industry are bad for Bitcoin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I think that has become a lesser issue under Trump.
Would you disagree with that?
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.
So people who are developing wallets are more important than people who are running, let's say, massive Bitcoin mining facilities.
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.
So, yeah, to the extent that those people are cracked down on, the people that I care about are worse off.
is that happening less now than it was?
I'm not sure.
I don't,
choke point 2.0
attacked some banks
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
Yeah, I'm not sure that being able to buy Bitcoin
from an exchange is that important.
No, it is.
I think it is.
I mean, you know more about the whole ecosystem.
Maybe not, but just my take on that would be
ease of use of getting Bitcoin in people's hands does matter.
And I think it sucks that the only way people
really buy Bitcoin in at least Western countries
is through KYC, AML compliant exchanges.
Like I wish there was a better way of doing it,
but, and like with some work that is,
but I think easy access to be able to buy Bitcoin
is never good.
Okay.
I am someone who buys Bitcoin on KYC, AML exchanges,
but I think the people who are in Bitcoin
who I care about most
are people who couldn't get accounts on those things
and are doing it locally with cash
or getting it from friends on their phones in non-Western countries.
So to the extent that those are the people who really need Bitcoin,
I'm not sure how much exchanges are important.
Yeah, that's tricky though,
because I agree that those people definitely need Bitcoin.
I agree that maybe their use case is more compelling
than just someone who wants to avoid the debasement in the US or in the UK or anywhere.
But we want Bitcoin in as many hands as possible,
and that includes the US.
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.
True.
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.
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.
So I get that.
Then the next question, I guess, is the extent to which Bitcoin companies were banking at Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate versus crypto companies.
So I felt the Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was much more of a crackdown on crypto than it was on Bitcoin.
I mean, I think most Bitcoin businesses probably were banking at those people.
yeah coinbase was banking at silvergate and silvergate like literally got taken around the
back of the shed and shot yeah so it was it was ridiculous yeah definitely agree with that um and
i think that probably does set the industry back i know you don't like the term industry but like
somewhat to a degree okay yeah so then is that happening less well it happened to two banks the
two that mattered and now it's happening to zero are there two banks now that matter that it could
happen to or i mean it's not only happening to zero we're seeing new banks that are going to be
more bitcoin friendly come into existence like the one that palmer lucky did we've got charter
yes that's true uh kraken just got a yep a reserve account still waiting on custodia yeah
shout out your favorite wyoming yeah go pokes um so yeah i think i guess in the end i think
that's good. And so in some ways, this administration has been better than the
previous administration. I'm much more comfortable criticizing the previous administration than I am
supporting this one. I think Biden made a lot of mistakes. I think Kamala made a lot of mistakes
in how he dealt with Bitcoin and then how she talked about Bitcoin beforehand. A lot of unforced
due to not understanding it.
And it was almost a deliberate misunderstanding.
It wasn't like there weren't people
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
most interesting things here because i think the the other party which like everyone can benefit
from bitcoin it doesn't matter whether you're left or right the other party now needs to
do a complete about face in my opinion and be more open to to bitcoin and i think the bitcoin
is freedom money sort of narrative works really well in their favor um do you think they will
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.
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.
Crypto might make them easier, but it's not because it's crypto that it's a scam.
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.
Like if you have a foundation and a board and a president and things like that, then that's quite different from Bitcoin.
So it takes some education.
They got to show up to the Bitcoin Policy Institute events and listen.
and not think that they understand it.
Far too many politicians and academics
think that they understand Bitcoin
enough to have a judgment about it when they don't.
And people.
And then it will take, I think,
electing or choosing,
nominating someone who understands that.
There are plenty of Democratic politicians who do.
I've talked to Ro Khanna pretty extensively about Bitcoin.
And he gets it.
He knows.
I don't know if he's going to run for president.
We're not that close.
But someone who is identical to him or who listens to him and understands the difference between these things is really important.
So it's hard to say whether the party will change their stance.
There are plenty in the party who have always been pro-Bitcoin and will continue to be.
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?
Or are they willing to listen and learn?
What's the inside scoop from BPI in terms of how these people are responding to it now?
Has there been more interest from the Democrat side?
There is certainly more interest.
they are not still as interested as the Republican side in talking about it or helping to come up with
policy and legislation. I think we now have congressional aides in some congressional
offices who are specifically there to do Bitcoin advising. I think one of them is in the office of
a Democrat. I think it is the guy from the Bronx whose name I'm blanking on right now.
Richie Torres, I think. But the other five or six are in Republican offices. So we still need more.
There's work to do. And certainly when we hold major events, there's members of both parties
there, but the Republicans always outnumber the Democrats. It's very strange to me that,
like this
this needs to be pushed
as a bipartisan issue
and I think BPI
are doing a great job
of that but
in some ways
I think it was
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
I have worn this resist shirt and we published resistance money when Joe Biden was president.
Yeah.
Continue to wear it.
Bitcoin is always going to be against authorities.
It's always going to be something that the authorities don't like.
Now, sometimes the authorities will like parts of it.
Like Gladstein says, right?
For them, it's a Trojan horse.
For the Trump administration, they want to make money on Bitcoin, but the freedom stuff
still gets in there.
So because of when certain Bitcoin things happened and who was in power at those times,
I think the parties took stances that you could very easily imagine being reversed had
the opposite party been in power at that time.
Because Bitcoin is trying to fight against the people who are in charge.
I do think the number go up narrative is the best one because freedom goes up alongside it.
Yeah.
We just need to get corrupt politicians, incentivize them to buy Bitcoin, and then everyone gets more freedom.
That's a great idea.
The corrupt politicians will like it for the number go up stuff.
I don't think that's as poorly understood as the freedom go upside among the non-corrupt politicians.
Like, I think many of them are worried about corruption.
and you know maybe some of them uh are being disingenuous about it because they really want
power and they understand but they think that the corruption line is a good one but i think some of
them really are worried that um crypto leaves people vulnerable and they're not realizing that
bitcoin's different and they're they're not willing to learn about it so yeah still so much
work to do to explain what this thing is. And it's been around so long. Well, you say that
unfortunately they've been around just as long. A lot longer. It's not the 30, 40, even 50 year
old politicians that aren't getting it. It's the 60, 70, 80 year olds. Yeah. I mean, I know it's
like a bit of a trope, but this will move on one funeral at a time. I think we just need younger
politicians or hopefully one election at a time. Yeah. Maybe both. Uh, Bradley, this has been
awesome. I've got so much to do. We've got a conference tomorrow. I've been two hours chatting
to you here. Um, let's get back to it, but thank you, man. Tell everyone where to go and get a
resistance money. Resistance money is available on Amazon for I think 19 bucks these days.
Bargain. Amazing book. Um, for a long time, people said I would, I would totally read this
or listen to it if it was an audiobook. We now have an audiobook.
Who read it?
The numbers are saying that a lot of those people were lying
based on our audiobook sales. So unfortunately, it's not the best voice in Bitcoin who read it.
We had no say over who they got to read it. But it's read pretty well by a non-Bitcoin.
Nice.
uh so yeah you can you can pick up the audiobook you can pick up the the uh physical copy the
hardcover is 180 so don't do that i'm sure it's probably available 180 yeah academic hardcovers
are ridiculous so we compromise we we got them to lower the price of the paperback significantly
over what it should have been but immovable on the hardcover um and we uploaded the pdf ourselves to
those book sites that we cut out of the earlier.
People can get it there too.
Awesome.
Thank you, Bradley.
This has been great.