This episode sees the return of popular guest David Gerard - reluctant expert on crypto currency and author of Attack of the 50ft Blockchain and Libra Shrugged - to tell us about Bitcoin and the Nazis. Content Warnings, as ever, but an especial TW this time for discussion of a suicide. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: David's... Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidgerard Site: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/davidgerard/overview The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia (https://twitter.com/dgolumbia): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin Brenna Smith at Bellingcat on the 'Bitcoin Fairy': https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/02/03/why-500k-donation-to-right-wing-causes-does-not-signify-return-of-bitcoin-fairy/ Craig Wright copyright claims, Grayscale, Mt. Gox, Reddit on Ethereum, the French Bitcoin neo-Nazi: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/01/27/news-craig-wright-copyright-claims-grayscale-mt-gox-reddit-on-ethereum-the-french-bitcoin-neo-nazi/ Thread: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1350174661590577155 Neo-Nazi BTC Tracker: https://twitter.com/NeonaziWallets
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome once again to IDSG, the
dead and rotting Royal Duke Queen's consort of podcasts that's currently lying in the frozen drawer of the morgue that is the internet and dominating the airwaves with endless chatter about how great it was while it was alive.
So yeah, it's another episode of Your Favourite Podcast Ever, and it's me again, of course, as usual, and Daniel, as usual, and once again, returning, previous guest, hugely popular previous guest, David Gerrard.
Hello, Daniel, and hello, David.
Hello there.
Hello, hello.
Let me see, what do I want to say?
I want to say first, Happy Easter to everybody.
I hope you had a good time, even the radical left crazies who rigged the election.
And I want to apologise for any and all misspeakings that I made during our last couple of episodes, which apart from a couple of polite criticisms about that, have been very well received.
Yeah, indeed.
We'll definitely get into... We don't usually like to cover kind of a post-episode errata with guests around, but we will cover that in a lot more detail in the next episode.
There were definitely a couple of times when I misspoke slightly, and people were very polite about that for the most part.
So I do apologize for the misspeak, and we will kind of cover some issues that have come up since then in probably the next episode.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, and I also want to incidentally say thank you very much to... I won't use the name, although I'm not sure the name is a real name, but I won't use it anyway just in case.
Thank you very much to A.S.
who sent me a lovely message.
I will reply to that message at some point, but yeah, I love that message and thank you very much for sending it to me.
A.S., I hope you know who you are.
And yeah, so David, I was going to say you've got a new book out.
Is it actually out now?
So Libra Shrugged came out late last year in November 2020.
Oh, right.
OK.
This is completely off topic for IDSG, but you know, I'm here and talking about a book is one of those things people do.
Yeah, yeah.
So what I do is... I read your first book.
I read that one.
Oh, you'll enjoy Libra Shrugged.
Libra Shrugged, in which Facebook is so fucking awful that the biggest banks in the world end up being the good guys.
That's basically the pitch, right?
Yes.
Yes, I managed to write a book where central banks turned out to be the heroes of the story, which takes some doing, but they managed it.
So the first book was about why Bitcoin is nonsense and blockchain is nonsense and all of this is terrible stuff and it's all made of scams all the way down.
But it's a really fascinating car crash and I'm still covering it like three years later, four years later.
Yeah, there's no escape.
For my sins evidently.
After my first book, I thought, oh well, that's it, I've done Bitcoin, I don't need to talk about it anymore.
The world had other ideas and suddenly I was an expert on the topic.
And it's now at the point where I have a Patreon with a newsletter, and I write stuff for magazines, and it's like basically a second half a job.
And that's great.
But, yeah.
Torturing yourself with Bitcoin nerds all the time.
Like, I routinely kind of, like, whenever you tag me in something, then I end up seeing what your mentions are like, and, like, the Nazis are bad, but the Bitcoin boys are just, like, they are relentless.
My mute button gets a lot of work out.
I can imagine.
No, let me explain to you for the thousandth time why Bitcoin is going to change the world.
Absolutely.
Now, here are three reasons that contradict all physics and human psychology.
So yeah, after that I decided, well, the world obviously needs more books from me.
So I thought, hmm, Facebook's cryptocurrency adventure is getting a lot of play in the press.
Maybe people want to read about that.
So at the end of 2019, it was really, really popular, interesting news.
So I thought, oh yeah, I can do a book in about six weeks.
So about a year later, in the meantime of which we had a pandemic, I got the book out and nobody really cared.
But it's still a good book.
So I am that arsehole who actually did write a book during the pandemic lockdown.
Yeah, I agree.
It is a good book.
I actually reread it over the course of the last couple of days, and it is just full of like, you know, look at the dipshits at Facebook who just don't know anything, who are just trying to destroy the world.
Again.
Again!
And even Republican legislatures are going, yeah, no, this is a bunch of fucking bullshit.
And when the Republican Party and the biggest banks in the world are not evil enough for you, that's when you know you've hit rock bottom.
I'll tell you, my opinion of Steve Mnuchin actually went up when he said, I hate everything about this.
Was there a way it could have gone down?
Not really, but you know it went significantly up.
Suddenly I thought maybe this guy has some idea what he's doing and apparently all these Mnuchin's arguments with Trump because Mnuchin wanted to do basic things like deals with other countries and Trump wasn't in on that.
So yeah, there might have been a trace of competence there.
One of my favorite details is that in one of the hearings for Facebook, they were literally reading Donald Trump tweets, and Donald Trump's tweets were better on these issues than Mark Zuckerberg.
I will say that Donald, that was probably from his team, it wasn't written like Trump himself, but clearly he had the right people giving him advice for his Twitter.
Basically he told Facebook if you want to act like a bank get a banking license it turns out there's reasons why if you want the massive free money tap that's called a bank you have to satisfy some basic rules so you don't blow the system up!
You know and Facebook didn't get that because the whole point of Facebook's crypto was they thought well who needs these um government money we can do it independently and They talked about their plans to override national currencies quite explicitly and blatantly.
Argentina was their favorite test case.
Yeah, it was just an amazing thing, and they were actually surprised when every regulator in the world said, no, you're not doing this under any circumstances whatsoever.
and started writing detailed plans why no one else would be doing a Facebook like currency either unless they became actual proper banks under regulation and tracking and inspection and all that stuff.
It's incredible.
And central banks have a number of issues, but one thing they are is actually public institutions and they think of themselves that way, they act that way, and their job is to keep the wheels on capitalism.
You You know, they keep the system running and don't let some bozos who don't know what the hell they're doing break everything.
And Facebook literally presented a plan that was the same thing that caused the 2008 financial crisis 11 years later.
Because history is bunk.
Because they're enlightened by their own intellects.
It was amazing.
And it all makes sense to realize that Facebook's cryptocurrency was started by four Bitcoin bros at the company who came up with this wonderful plan.
And Zuckerberg liked it because he thought, woohoo, more personal data!
And yeah, it went great.
So that plan has been stabbed through the heart.
What if we just had a record of every financial transaction anyone does anywhere?
Boy, we could certainly use that to sell more ads.
Absolutely.
How can you expect the ads to follow you around efficiently?
So those books are readily available.
You can buy them on mostly on Amazon.
You can buy them on the other e-book stores.
If you're poor then I believe they are on the standard academic download sites.
And yeah, please read them and talk about them.
Yes, I have.
I have the e-books of both of them.
They are both very, very worth reading, particularly Attack of the 50-Foot-Foot-Blockchain, which I think is a little more general.
But Lieberstrug, highly, highly recommended.
If you like documentaries like Dark Money and kind of the various people in back rooms trying to destroy the world with paperwork, which I enjoy those kinds of stories, this is very much that story.
It's Michael Lewis without the capitalism boosting.
I mean, these days, I just hear the word fraud and I go, Fraud!
Fraud!
Is there fraud?
Tell me about the fraud!
And I've never run out of subjects in cryptocurrency, I can tell you.
It's not a technology story, it is absolutely a psychology, scams and dumb crooks story.
That's all the stories in crypto.
Yeah, no, very much so, very much so.
So yeah, check that out.
And I guess we should move on and talk about kind of our more on-topic remit here, although we may mention Libra a couple of times.
I don't know, who knows?
Probably not because it was... It's not a Nazi story, it's just an arrogant Silicon Valley story.
Ironically enough, Peter Thiel didn't really come up at all in Libra Shrugged, at least not that I recall.
But presumably he was somewhere in the background working on this, right?
Thiel was a PayPal founder, and of course he made a lot of money selling Palantir as defense funding, but he really made his money in Facebook.
Zuckerberg loves Thiel and listens closely to everything he says, and I couldn't find any smoking gun evidence, but I'm pretty sure that Thiel was pushing the Libra plan along and was quite interested in making it happen.
And of course it fell flat and none of it got on him, so there you go.
But there was only the one main mention I had in the book.
So yeah, I guess we should move into our main topic now, which is Bitcoin and Nazis and bears and terrible things and etc, etc.
And I guess the place to start – sorry, I didn't mean to take your hosting duties from you, Jack, but… No, no, please go ahead.
I can just sit back and relax.
I guess we should start off and just sort of have the sort of start with a basic question of like, what, what the fuck is a Bitcoin?
Well, it's going to be it's going to be like, there's no one in the world who has answered this question more times than you have, I believe.
You could probably disagree with me on that.
But but at least in terms of getting an accurate answer, I feel like we can get a very clear idea of what Bitcoin is from you right now.
You have 15 seconds go.
For our purposes, Bitcoin is an attempt to do digital cash, like money you can send on the internet.
It does really badly at this, so people use it when they can't use actual money.
It uses up a country's worth of electricity for very stupid reasons, though those details aren't relevant here, but they've been all over the press in the last two months, and that's good.
The entire threat model of Bitcoin is governments might tax you and take your money.
That's the whole threat model because it was made by anarcho-capitalists.
So all transactions are irreversible.
This makes it really suck as money.
The entire record of transactions is called the blockchain.
It's basically, computer scientists, it's a Merkle tree ledger, basically.
Like, you can only add things to it, you can't change old data without it being obvious.
The blockchain contains every Bitcoin transaction ever made back to 2009.
So everything you do on the blockchain is traceable, forever.
And therefore stupid people still use it to do crimes because they're dumb.
So you can trace everything that a Nazi does on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And quite a lot of people have.
Does this tell you what you need to know?
I think it's a fair summary.
Jack, how do you feel about that?
I don't understand it, but I love it.
So the thing about Bitcoin is it's not a Nazi subculture, that thing we have to say occasionally, like it really isn't.
But it has a lot of Nazis who are very interested in it because Nazis keep getting kicked off actually good payment services.
But also, the politics of Bitcoin is also right-wing, and they don't kick their Nazis out, is the way I would put it.
Because, you know, Bitcoin is free for everyone to use, and they even say Bitcoin's apolitical, which is a bizarre statement from my view, considering it literally started as an attempt to make anarcho-capitalism in computer code form.
So it literally is like the gab or parlour of currencies, isn't it?
It's not inherently Nazi, but it's very right-wing and it kind of becomes a home, a natural home for Nazis and is very badly run and also extremely insecure.
It's more the parlour of currencies than the gab of currencies, but yeah, pretty much.
So, Bitcoin actually started in anarcho-capitalism.
It started with a whole bunch of ideas where they wanted to do Austrian economics and have a gold standard, but have it be digital.
So, like you know about Austrians, they want actual gold.
They don't want weird... Yeah, they tend to be gold bugs.
And we're not talking about Austrian people, just to be clear.
We're talking about Austrian economics people.
Capital A Austrian economics.
Yes.
Yes.
So it is...
They're sort of bizarrely terrible.
Austrian economics is... So Jack, can you explain Austrian economics in 15 seconds for us?
You swore you wouldn't do this.
The first thing about Austrian economics is that it stems from the... Well, I mean, it stems originally from the work of this guy called Menger via another guy called Bernbavog, but As we know it, it stems from the ideas and the work of a guy called Ludwig von Mises.
And Mises is radical in his rejection of empiricism, and it's based upon this thing called Praxeology, which is kind of like the complete rejection of data in coming to conclusions.
It's hilarious!
It's entirely about reasoning from first principles.
He totally rejected every possible test of his claims, and he still wants people to listen to them.
Yeah, yeah.
And when you read Mises, he's radically inconsistent as well.
So he's one of those ultra-woke postmodern types who's all about cancel culture and critical race theory.
That's Mises, right?
Because that's what I've been told by everyone on the internet lately, is that that's where that comes from.
Yeah, it might shock you to know this, but that kind of thing, that kind of authoritarian rejection of reality, that's actually more a thing of the right.
Mises worked for Dolfus, the Austro-fascist dictator, and he didn't particularly like fascism and he eventually had to escape from it, but he was prepared to Kind of come to an accommodation with it because he thought it was better than communism.
Yeah, and I liked your description in Neoreaction of Basilisk where the same way that Ayn Rand's objectivism is like a photographic negative of her view of Soviet communism, Austroeconomics is like a photographic negative of their view of Marxism.
Just take everything in reverse the polarity, because if you take stupidity and reverse it, you must end up with genius instead of like the same stupidity but the opposite.
Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that, yeah.
My analysis of Austrian economics is that it's the branch of marginalism that is most directly concerned with being a reactionary form of political activism or political praxis, and that emerges from the fact that it emerged in fanatical Austria, and you can relate it to stuff like Freud, because it's another kind of radically subjective But it's also a direct reaction to Austro-Marxism and stuff like that.
And yeah, there's all sorts of contingent reasons, but definitely Austrian economics is the strand of marginalist economics, which is kind of the rejection of the classical idea of the labour theory of value from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which Marx renovates and changes quite radically.
But marginalism is the idea that develops in the late 19th, early 20th centuries that becomes the neoclassical orthodoxy now, which is that value is basically a... economic value is basically... it's based on what they call marginal utility, which is like the... it's basically a form of radical subjectivism.
Economies are based on a radical subjectivist idea that Something's value is fundamentally determined by how much people want it, mediated by how much of it they already have, which is in itself a complete rejection of the material basis of economic value.
But Austrian economics, because it completely detaches it from maths or empirical data or anything like that, it ramps that up to infinity, basically, in my opinion, as it does that as part of a directly reactionary project.
And that is the basis of libertarianism.
Yep.
One day, Jack, I'm going to make you listen to some Jared Howe clips.
Jared Howe, who is Chris Cantwell's last remaining friend on Earth, I believe.
And he will be coming up very shortly, I assume.
But Jared Howe is The embodiment of everything you just said about the Austrian school.
He is holding on for dear life to the Austrian school and to those kinds of ideas.
And I think you might have a stroke listening to him for more than 35 seconds.
So that'll be a fun episode one day.
Maybe we do that one for 88.
That would be a nice change of pace.
Right.
Anyway.
Daniel, why do you hate me so?
What did I do?
You gazed into the abyss and became a professional abyss gazer.
I think that's kind of what all of us have managed to do at this point.
So David, before I interrupted you, you were going to make a point of probably some kind.
One of the things I like to be clear about on this episode in particular, but as always, is that I am the dumb one.
I am always the dumb one on this podcast.
And David and Jack having that conversation should convince you of nothing else but that.
Anyway, David, please continue with where you were going before I rudely interrupted you.
So, Austrian school economics is into being gold bugs, and the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard.
I was delighted, I did a conference in Greece with a bunch of Greek anarchists in the audience, and you know, Greek anarchists are fucking hard bastards, you don't want to cross them.
But one of them said, anarcho-capitalism?
What?
That doesn't make sense.
And I went, I know, right?
You know, it was just so good having someone who would just say, this makes no sense.
You know, my theory is that Rothbard read Peter Kropotkin chapter three, part one, misunderstood everything and ignored all context and ignored the rest of the book.
And then he stole the name anarchist for anarcho-capitalism.
Rothbard basically misunderstood everything he ever read, from Kropotkin to Locke to the Salamankins.
Everything, basically.
It was fantastic.
Heterodox Economist, which is an economic jargon term meaning a crank with a job.
So anyway, actual Austrian economics fans don't actually like Bitcoin very much.
They can talk to Bitcoiners because they have similar ideas and they get along fine.
And they find Bitcoin perennially interesting, but they don't want it because they want actual gold.
Also, Austrians can see the obvious thing that Bitcoiners can't, which is that you might have a limited supply of Bitcoin, but you can copy and paste the code and make altcoins.
What are called altcoins, which are basically different coins with slightly changed parameters, and there are thousands of these things.
You know, you can print your own money, and so Austrians don't buy into that.
But Bitcoiners say, no, no, Bitcoin is special.
Why?
Well, reasons, and it gets all very hand-wavy.
But the bit we're interested in is that being gold bugs, of course, goes back to international banker conspiracy theories.
Now, can you guess what the term international banker means in this context?
I think it might have three parentheses around it.
I was going to say, parenthetically, I was going to say.
That is the better joke.
Should have let Jack go with that one.
Yeah, but yes, yes.
So yeah, basically, it started in international banker conspiracies, starting from the ideas of the John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins.
And every time Eustace Mullins said banker, he meant Jew.
But Bitcoiners mostly don't know this.
Like, this is where their ideas come from, but most of them are not anti-Semitic cranks.
Just a few of them.
So they only occasionally rant about Zionists, so that's good.
So these ideas were also common in the mainstream.
Bitcoin was started in 2009.
At this time, Ron Paul had been coming into the mainstream and pushing sort of banking conspiracy ideas, end the Fed, audit the Fed, that sort of thing.
So it was in the air at the time of Bitcoin's founding.
Now, in general, all the ideologies come back when there's a place for them to slot into.
Like someone rediscovers them and goes, yes, yes, this is brilliant, this explains it.
So a bunch of this weird gold bug nonsense was slotted right into Bitcoin from the start.
So you have people straight-facedly repeating conspiracy theories as if this was proper economics.
In 2009, like culturally in the United States, 2009 is kind of the beginning of what became the alt-right as well, you know, and, you know, it kind of There's a complicated history in terms of what the alt-right was in its early years and what it became in 2014 or 2015.
Interestingly to me, not to drag us astray, is that the Nazis, in my experience, the alt-right people, the major figures, the guys from the Daily Show, for instance, Started off as sort of like edgy libertarians.
Started off as just racist libertarians.
And their early episodes and their early writings are kind of deeply entrenched with this idea that, you know, that they're essentially Austrians.
They kind of agree with most of Austrian economics.
And then they...
Gradually, they see the contradictions in that, and they start to go, no, we actually just want the government to do things for us.
Now, Mike Enoch or Michael Pinovich, who's kind of the head of the right stuff, he's the head of the Daily Shoah, he is the head of the National Justice Party, they call him Chairman Mike.
He's like a big modern monetary theory guy now.
That's the thing he's pushing more than anything else.
It's like, we got our problems with MMT, but that's a long way to go from the Austrian school.
And it is kind of interesting that in 2016 and 2015, they would argue all the time as they were going out of this kind of Austrian phase.
But when they hype up Bitcoin, they're not talking about like, we need to get on the gold standard and get away from the Jewish financial institution because there's something inherently wrong.
With the, like, the Jewish financial system, quote-unquote.
It's, the Jews are oppressing us and we need to get away from that and basically just have our own thing, right?
And, like, we won't have usury and we won't have all these, all these kind of other things.
But, like, you don't get the same, like, the same kind of, like, wackadoodle craziness on economics that you get from the Austrian school, from the libertarians that I was kind of tracking 15 years ago.
And like the kind of quote unquote mainstream Nazis, the biggest name Nazis, are not talking about the same kind of things.
They get sick of that argument like 10 years ago, basically, which is kind of an interesting, interesting phenomenon as well.
So Bitcoiners are not sick of this argument, which is again, it's not a Nazi subculture.
Right.
Even if the Nazis have decided that now actually what they want is socialism, but with a certain national character.
Right, right.
So, yeah.
On the politics of Bitcoin, I must actually put in thanks here and plug David Golombia's book, The Politics of Bitcoin, Software as Right-Wing Extremism.
Like, he's got his pitch right there in the title, you know.
He considers... Another very good book I would recommend.
Yes, it's a great book.
I knew I had to write a libertarian chapter in Attack, and I could have written it without his book, but he basically did the reading for me.
He supplied the bibliography.
It's great.
It's one of these books I tell everyone about.
So yeah, there's this idea in Bitcoin, and this is an idea Bitcoin has put forward, that Bitcoin is software designed to achieve political goals, money that works a certain way.
And that if you use Bitcoin, you will adopt their ideals by the process of using Bitcoin, because of the way Bitcoin works.
Columbia agrees, except he thinks that that's actually quite bad, actually.
And like he's spoken of how he saw leftists who heard about blockchain ideas and the idea of decentralization and freedom from governments.
And they got into blockchain and they all magically transmuted into spouting closeted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and worrying about their altcoin portfolio.
And so that was one of the things that provoked him to write the book.
And it's taken off, so that's good.
Wow, that is economic determinism for you.
Yeah, it's just like really disconcerting.
Because, you know, that sounds good until you know the details.
I mean, I literally did not understand that libertarians in the American sense were actually real until I got on the Internet in about 1995 or so at the age of like 28. I literally did not understand that libertarians in the American 28.
It's like, I thought that was just an amazing satirical parody of some sort, but it turns out they're real.
That's quite frightening.
Yeah, it is disconcerting when you realize that, although they are mainly real on the internet.
Well, I don't know, that's probably not true anymore, depressingly, but it used to be true.
They're quite amazing.
So, yeah.
As a recovering teenage libertarian, I can say that libertarianism works best when you're a teenager, and I've never actually Yep.
So basically, Bitcoin ideology bought fully into the whole Federal Reserve conspiracy package, right?
Yeah.
But the greatest protection against these ideas taking over the world with Bitcoinery is that Bitcoin doesn't work and can't work for various technical reasons.
And also all the people involved have never done the reading.
They're enlightened by their own intellect and by the intellect of their fellow Bitcoiners, whose phrases they repeat ad nauseum, as you'll have seen in your Twitter mentions whenever I come up.
Indeed, yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to be awful and I'm going to be one of those middle-aged men that quotes Blackadder, but it does remind me of that line from Blackadder, there was one tiny flaw in the plan, it was bollocks.
There was one tiny flaw in Bitcoin, it was bollocks.
So, now unfortunately we have to get on topic, because the main use case for Bitcoin, well the first use case for Bitcoin is buying drugs.
Right?
You had the Silk Road Darknet Market, which was on the TOR network, which basically lets you hide a website where it can't be traced.
This was actually built by the U.S.
Navy for U.S.
Secret Service purposes, so their agents could communicate back home by a secure channel.
But they released it in general so that people could just use it.
So one guy, Ross Ulbricht, who was also an anarcho-capitalist libertarian who'd been really big on Ron Paul a few years before, worked out that if you had a hidden site and used bitcoins, you could sell drugs without it being traceable.
Now, I've already said earlier what the problem with this idea was, and that is it's 100% traceable.
But they didn't figure that out at the time.
And in 2020, I think, was the last time someone was busted for their Silk Road dealings.
Silk Road shut down in 2013.
They're still busting people's years later.
But the thing was, when you couldn't use actual money, Bitcoin was a good substitute currency.
And that's how the Nazis mostly use it.
I will stress again, most Bitcoin use is not Nazis.
And do Nazis use dollars?
Yes, whenever they can.
But they use Bitcoin because they frequently can't use actual dollars.
So let's be fair there.
So this came to a lot of public attention in 2019 when Brendan Tarrant, whose name we'd normally not say, but this is IDSG, so we all know who these guys are.
The Christchurch Massacre.
The Christchurch Massacre.
And as part of his manifesto he talked about how he'd done very well investing in cryptocurrency.
So this was almost certainly just a joke.
But there was actually something that, it works as a joke because Nazis do in fact use Bitcoin.
Because they can't get dollars so well.
You have some Nazis who got into Bitcoin early because they were also techies.
I think one of the most prominent is Weave, Andrew Onheimer, who was a hacker.
He had a lot of hacker friends and then he went to jail and came out full Nazi with a great big swastika tattoo on his chest and a lot of his friends dropped off for some reason because that was a bit too far even for them.
And he has a bucket load of bitcoins, but he's also so antisocial that last, I think he was spotted in Transnistria, which is the sort of Russian bit of Moldova.
Yeah, he and Andrew Anglin were, you know, thick as thieves kind of back in the day.
I don't think Andrew Anglin has been seen in public in about three years at this point, and all the assumption is that he's somewhere in that same general area of the world.
I kind of have the working hypothesis that he's still living in his parents' basement, and he's been stuck in the Martin Scorsese Coke years with the foil on the windows.
That's kind of my hypothesis for Andrew Anglin.
But yeah, no, very much that same kind of phenomenon.
They pretty much dropped off the map soon after Unite the Right.
They were getting followed around by feds everywhere.
Yeah.
So Anglin, of course, takes money for the Daily Stormer, his horrible news site, in bitcoins by preference or in other cryptocurrencies because he can't get real money.
And Weave has a ton of bitcoins and there isn't a lot to spend them on in Transnistria, particularly when you don't speak Russian or Moldovan or Romanian.
But yeah, it's a great life for a Nazi who's hiding out.
So, the thing was, there were a lot of white nationalists getting into this stuff during the Bitcoin bubble in 2017.
Because the money, it was going up, and people worried that Nazis would become incredibly rich from having gotten to Bitcoin years before.
So they sort of did, but they also sort of didn't, because they couldn't spend it very readily.
So just as PayPal keeps cutting off Nazis, so do a lot of the more reputable Bitcoin exchanges.
Coinbase, for example, which is the biggest consumer Bitcoin exchange, regularly cuts off these people and proudly declare that they do so.
So they have a lot of trouble turning stuff into actual dollars.
There's a guy who traces...
So can you just expand that slightly for the audience?
I understand the issues there, but would you just highlight what the issue is with converting bitcoins to dollars?
How that process works and what walls are put up in the place of that?
Just again, for the less technical audience.
Okay, so Bitcoin is not easily convertible into dollars back and forth.
The places you convert it are called Bitcoin exchanges, which do what their name says.
You can exchange Bitcoin, trade Bitcoin, try to make money as a trader on Bitcoin.
You can totally make money in cryptocurrency by the way, it's just you'll probably lose because it's a pool full of sharks, it's unregulated, and every market shenanigan that's hilariously illegal elsewhere happens all the time.
But if you just want to use Bitcoin for payments, which is the main neo-Nazi use for them, then the idea is you go to a crypto exchange, you put Bitcoins on there, sell them, and take out dollars.
So this has a number of issues.
If it's a US-based exchange, or if it even deals in US dollars, they will absolutely do know your customer, and they'll get your name, address, probably a copy of your ID, photo of you, that sort of thing.
If you're on a sanctions list, you are unlikely to get very far with this.
If your bitcoins trace back to a sanctioned entity, because remember, every transaction is traceable, then you're unlikely to get very far with this.
If you're a Nazi, it's likely people will complain about you using the service, and you'll get kicked off the service.
So this is why a lot of issues come out for Nazis.
Because Bitcoin used to be completely unregulated, and that was the idea, to be completely unregulated.
But it turns out, when you touch the world of real money, governments are interested in you.
Because it turns out that if you're dealing in finance, Society has very strong ideas on how you conduct yourself in finance and expects you to behave, so we have regulations.
And even quite anarchist-leaning people who go into trading rapidly realize why a few regulations exist, so you can get on with business without having to worry about your platform stealing your money, for example.
So, it's only the more reputable exchanges that are even allowed to use US dollars these days.
Like, the less reputable ones have real trouble getting banking, because it turns out banks worry about crypto because it's full of crooks and drug dealers.
And Nazis.
Does this answer your question, or would you like more detail?
No, no, I feel like that gives a good background.
It's just, you know, the description of like, well, if you have Bitcoin, why is it difficult to get it to convert it to dollars?
But of course, that does describe it.
Yeah, no, I think that's fair.
I just want to, you know, we were criticized for moving a little bit too fast the last time we were hanging together, so I thought we'd just slow down and make sure that was clear to everyone that it is not trivial to pull your money out of these things because of the unregulated and untracked nature of Bitcoin, because it is supposedly anonymous and because it is used for these nefarious purposes, once you try to convert into an actual currency that you can use to go buy a cheeseburger,
you're suddenly entering the regular economy again, and the governments you're suddenly entering the regular economy again, and the governments actually want to know what you're doing with that.
So, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, that's clear.
Even quite normal people have trouble dealing with Bitcoin exchanges and banks, because a lot of banks, if they see a crypto transaction come into your account, like they might fire you as a customer.
This happens quite often.
I've spoken to bank compliance officers, the natural predator of the Bitcoin user, who have said that they love seeing crypto transactions come in because they just know this guy is going to have a ton of violations and they can really go to town on his ass.
Yeah, Chris Cantwell, in the months after Unite the Right and after he was released from jail the first time, he actually played some audio on a show at one point about where he had gone in to complain about not being able to get an account in a bank to where he could process credit card payments.
For his Nazi website, and the reason he was not allowed to have an account at that bank was simply that he had too many Bitcoin.
At least that was the reason he was given by whoever he was speaking to at the time.
And, you know, he storms out of the bank and yells like, it's 20 fucking 18!
Or words to that effect.
And yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty glorious.
Don't you wish reality would start operating according to first principles the way it's supposed to?
It does, just not theirs.
But yeah, it was like, it's great, he could get a credit card process and we're fine with him being a Nazi, but touching crypto, that was a step too far.
Yeah, we have no problem with the content of your show, we have no problem with anything with your criminal history, with all the rest of the stuff, but hold on man, you got cryptocurrency.
We draw the line somewhere, sir.
So basically that's why exchanges like Coinbase, which is desperately trying to go public in about a month, or later this month, they have stated that they actively seek to remove the violent extremists from their platform.
And that's a very libertarian organization founded by actual principled libertarians with a lot of Principled libertarian stuff, but they also have to comply with the rules.
So, they do actually try to remove, like, blatant Nazis from their platform.
They removed Gab, like, in its entirety, after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
The Tree of Life shooting, yep.
So, the guy who said, screw your optics, I'm going in.
Like, he was a customer and he wasn't anymore.
So, I'll mention one of the guys who traces this stuff, John Bambenek.
Now, he's an ordinary computer guy.
He does computer security, but he also doesn't like Nazis, because he's a decent fellow.
He has started the Neo-Nazi BTC Tracker, which is at NeoNaziWallets on Twitter.
And he loves doing that because these people are so traceable.
If they put a public address on their podcast or their show notes or whatever, he adds it to the list.
This is why Stefan Molyneux on his show on BitChute with his 10 followers or whatever he's got keeps saying send more cryptos because he can't get actual money either.
Right.
And Baminec, I spoke to Baminec about this because I wrote up the Tarrant Bitcoin thing for foreign policy in 2019.
And he said the thing that surprised him most was that these guys absolutely have no self-restraint.
They put $14.88 on everything.
Yeah, you can learn a lot just by tracking all the $14.88, you know.
You literally can!
Some version of $14.88, you know.
Yeah, no, clearly.
They absolutely cannot bear the thought of going out without their ass hanging out.
Um, back in, again, in the early days, the Daily Show used to read out the individual donations they got from people, and they were always, you know, all the Nazi numbers.
So it would be 1488, or some multiple of 1488, or 8814, or 80 or, you know, something like that.
that or it would be years um that are considered you know 1945 1941 1933 1865 1861 sometimes uh 1451 uh you know various various things like that so yeah if you if you start tracking the numerology they they literally are just that dumb with uh we're going to use this untrackable untraceable to that
we believe untraceable ability to transfer money where the jewish banking industry can't get us and we're going to put 1488s all over it because no one will ever figure out that clever code yeah
Yeah, I mean, there's a journalist, Brenna Smith from Bellingcat, she's actually done a lot of tracing Nazi crypto usage, and she's wrote about how the myth of the, there's a myth in Nazi Bitcoin circles, not in Bitcoin circles, but Nazi Bitcoin circles, I'll specify yet again, of the Bitcoin Fairy.
Who blesses right-wing people with bitcoins.
And one of them donated 14.88 bitcoins to the Daily Stormer in August 2017.
$60,000 worth!
But yeah, 1488s, they just can't stop themselves.
So it's like Baminec said at the time, these guys can't help but identify themselves.
It surprises me they're such an odd combination of arrogance and incompetence.
Like Nazis have the operational security of absolute dipshits.
It's incredible.
I mean that that that goes I mean that that actually I mean we could we could go off and on to some distance on that I mean it's one of the things that you run into when like tracking the like the Capitol rioters or the the Whitmer kidnapping case in which these people are literally plotting federal crimes.
On, like, Facebook Live, right?
They're literally sitting with unsecured chats online and chatting about, like, we need to kidnap the governor.
And, uh, you know, after the Capitol riots, they're literally, like, uploading video of themselves committing horrible crimes because they believe that they are protected by the state.
They believe that they are ultimately, um, that the state will, will side with them and that the, that the government, that the justice system will not touch them the way it would touch All the bad people, all the leftists, and all the brown and POC people and the trans people, etc, etc.
Those are the people that the government is going to go after, not us, because we are Well-respected white men who wear white polo shirts and khakis, etc.
I mean, you know, there is this just kind of basic fundamental psychological flaw, which is very, very fun to exploit when you realize they have absolutely no operational security and they just commit their crimes right there in public, you know, where anyone can find them.
It's incredible.
So yeah, but getting on to the large Bitcoin payments.
Sure.
The next guy we've got to talk about is Laurent Bachelier, also known as Pancake.
P-A-N-K-A-K-E.
Pancake with three K's.
Man, that must be a coincidence.
P-A-N-K-A-K-E.
Like, he's an open source programmer.
He killed himself in December because he had trigeminal neuralgia, which is called the suicide disease because it's pain that you cannot stop and painkillers don't work on it.
Which is terrible.
And he also, he said, the second necessary condition to suicide is not just the terrible pain in life.
It's having no hope and no reason to go on.
And he was deeply, deeply upset and concerned that the world just wasn't racist enough for him.
Yeah, I have the Google Translate translation because his suicide note was in French.
Oh, he put up an English version as well.
Oh, did he?
OK, I didn't see the English version.
I only saw the French version.
I can't avoid noticing the decline of Western civilization.
It took some time to accept it, maybe more than my own fate.
I won't try to convince anyone here.
What I see is almost worldwide Weimar Republic and the existence of evil, capital E. The enemy is within.
Yeah, and the global Weimar Republic is, I mean, that's a very standard Nazi meme.
They see, you know, they will often refer to the United States as Weimarica, meaning that we are, you know, just as decadent as the Weimar Republic.
And then they highlight all the supposed awfulness of the Weimar Republic, like accepting gay people and trans people and sex workers and, you know, those kinds of terrible degenerate things.
And like the United States is further along even than that, and that the entire world is now degenerate and is now just going to be destroyed.
One of the other references in that bit is the wooden doors, which is a Holocaust denial reference, just to be clear about who this guy is.
Because Bachelier was basically an alt-right troll, and he couldn't help but say a sentence without sprinkling with memes and jokes.
Shades of Breton Tarrant right there.
It's the same thing.
Absolutely.
Barcellai had a bundle of bitcoins.
He had a pile.
He was an early bitcoin guy.
He was famous from bitcoin talk back in the day.
His charm and his knack for making friends were legendary, even in 2013.
He ran an operation where he offered to trash companies' reputations if they would send him bitcoins.
He would also accept bitcoins to stop trashing their reputation.
And the response from one company was, I couldn't be bothered dealing with a neo-Nazi teenage troll screaming accusations.
Bachelier was 28 at that time, but you know, he was still a teenage troll.
They're all teenagers at heart, right?
They absolutely are.
So, I mean, he came out because in December he sent a whole bunch of bitcoins to people like Nick Fuentes, The Daily Stormer, VDare, and this caught a lot of people's attention in the wake of the Capitol riots on January 6th.
Like, this came out in the news on January 14th or so.
It's sad that he suffered the disease and was depressed to the point of suicide, but he was an arsehole.
I mean, what can you say about this guy?
We can feel, you know, plenty of people have this disease and don't turn into Nazis.
It turns out.
Yeah, I mean he was saying in a kinder gentler society and I mean, you know, obviously the disease is the disease but in a in a Properly socialist society that would support people who have these kinds of degenerative illnesses You know, maybe maybe Maybe that's the kind of society.
He should have supported instead of you know, like spewing hate everywhere indeed or sending making the world a worse place or sending $250,000 to Nick Fuentes Yeah, yeah, well, you know, and does it doesn't that also like tell you a little bit about Nick Fuentes who pretends he's just sort of this edgy college Republican type who just makes jokes about cookies and how many cookies it how long it takes to cook six million cookies, but In reality is a full-fledged neo-nazi.
He's just pretending not to be one What a guy.
What a guy.
We will cover more of him in the future, I'm sure.
I've been kind of holding off on doing more and more Nicky Boy.
But yeah, we've done a few episodes about Nick Fuentes, so go back in the archives.
So yeah, Bachelier was also an open source programmer.
He did an apparently quite useful package called Web Out of Band, which lets you download web pages offline and stuff.
Web Out of Band, of course, sat acronyms to Weeboob.
So he did a page covered in breasts and he filled the code with sexual references and slurs and error messages, called people fags, and it's just awesome.
He made a lot of friends.
So he managed to go so far as to get kicked, his package got kicked out of Debian.
Out of Debian Linux.
Which really takes some doing, but you know, Debian don't actually put up with obnoxious trolls a lot.
The distribution of kings.
Yes, I'm running Debian currently, so, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, he charmed everyone who knew him, is the only way I can put it.
Right.
I am told that Weeboob was actually a useful library, but nobody wanted to use it after they had any interaction with any of the people coding on it, who were also, at least certainly, alt-right jargon users.
That's a good way of putting it, based on the evidence.
Do we know if he had any direct connection with Fuentes or with Andrew Anglin or anything like that?
Has any of that come to light?
No, it hasn't really, because his blog basically was empty from 2014 to 2020 when he posted his suicide note.
In the meantime, he was basically just trolling people as they were trying to kick Weeboob out of Debian.
He basically just believed this stuff and probably distributed some bitcoins to people.
He talked about how donating his money in his suicide note, he talked about, this is one of the things that has radically changed about me in the last few years.
What happens after I die interests me.
This is why I've decided to bequeath my modest fortune to certain causes and certain people.
I think and I hope they will make better use of it than I do.
That suggests that he just sent his whole stash, $500,000 worth.
I would not be surprised if he had more than that somewhere, but.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it was, it was kind of a, it's weird, like, how the story just kind of came out, it kind of hit, and then just sort of disappeared.
Well, there isn't much of a story.
The guy's dead.
But the question is whether he was the Bitcoin fairy who blessed the Nazis previously, and Brenner Smith thinks he wasn't.
And of course, this is all being thoroughly traced because you can trace everything on the blockchain.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, just to be just to just to kind of highlight that just to kind of go back to that very slightly.
I mean, you would hear stories from these guys like, you know, the fascination boys once, you know, said, Oh, it turned out we got a $5,000 Bitcoin donation that I just missed because I didn't check it for a few weeks.
Right.
And so thank you to anonymous person who gave us a $5,000 Bitcoin donation.
So we know that there is someone out there funding these guys, you know, synonymously or anonymously, you know, you know, the mathematics of how these guys have money to continue with their lives doesn't make sense unless they have, you know, kind of unseen benefactors just to a certain degree.
Because we know that some of these guys essentially do this full time and you know, we know kind of what the financial dynamics of those kinds of things look like so.
We know that there are people out there using Bitcoin and using other cryptocurrencies to fund this kind of far-right activity, fund this far-right propaganda, whether this guy, whether Pancake was one of, whether he was doing it way back in the day or whether he just kind of like, you know, was one and done, who knows?
But it would be fascinating to learn if he did, if he was one of those, you know, sprinkling the Bitcoins around to terrible people.
It's eminently plausible, because, like, there's only so many of these guys, and a lot of people got into Bitcoin.
A certain proportion, a lot of them were definitely libertarians, and it's quite possible some of them crossed over from libertarian to actual full-on neo-Nazi, because quite a lot of the people you talk about literally followed that path.
But we don't know for sure, and no one's actually fingered Bachelier as any of the various Bitcoin fairies.
Indeed.
So what else do we know?
Do we know anything else about this guy?
I think that's about it for this guy, but he really was in the news a lot in January.
I think that we can finish up with some happier and more entertaining news, which is about the Cantwell news for the episode, because Watts and I don't speak German without some Cantwell news.
Oh, wow.
Some unexpected Cantwell news.
Wonderful.
Well, actually, it's Cantwell Olds.
So there was a bust recently, like in late March, of a bunch of activists from the Free Keen movement who wanted to turn Keen, New Hampshire into a libertarian paradise.
It turns out they were ground under the status jackboot just for using sound money on a website.
More specifically, they were running a Bitcoin exchange and Bitcoin ATMs across the state without going to any of that oppressive bureaucratic licensing that the statists are so fond of because they hate freedom.
And something about where they were opening bank accounts in the names of churches, like the Shire Free Church.
Or the Crypto Church of New Hampshire.
Or the Church of the Invisible Hand.
Or the Reformed Satanic Church.
And telling the bank that the money coming in was tax-deductible religious donations.
So, you know, the usual governmental overreach.
Right.
And these are the Don Nazi friends of Chris Cantwell.
Like, Chris Cantwell, they mostly disavowed.
They kept him at arm's distance, at the very least, when he moved from libertarian to racist libertarian to full-on Nazi.
But they were still on speaking terms with him.
And in fact, one of the guys, Ian Freeman, had him on his show a couple of times.
I believe he even did a phone call from jail after he was arrested in 2020.
Go back and look at that.
I may have some of my timing slightly off, because it's been a while since Chris Cantwell has been primary in my head, because now that he's in jail, where he could hurt far fewer people, I don't tend to pay him too much attention.
He actually got COVID in jail, which is amusing.
And that's, I guess, the one bit of news, the news segment that we can cover that he did while he was in jail.
He did, he did.
Oh no, that's a terrible thing, and that's an awful thing that it happens, but...
Not for any reason, because it's Kate Well.
Right, right, right.
But yeah, no, these are the libertarian people in the freaking movement.
So these are not even full-on Nazis who are doing this.
When I saw the churches, like the several, like they were trying to do like the fake church thing, and launder money through that, launder Bitcoin through that, my immediate response, and I think I tweeted it at the time, is like, when you've definitely read way too much Robert Heinlein.
Because Heinlein had several characters do such things in a number of his books.
Um, dating from the, uh, the early 60s, Stranger to Strange Land has like a long section on that.
And some of the later books also kind of do some of the, some similar things.
Um, and of course Heinlein, uh, especially later in his life, uh, definitely a major, major gold bug as well.
Um, deeply entrenched in this kind of Austrian economic stuff.
Um, and, um, yeah, no, the, uh, turns out we could also talk about, uh, you know, Nazis and fascists in science fiction if we wanted to, um, you know, um, So, yeah.
It spans slightly.
But a lot of these things that are happening now in this Bitcoin world, I just think, like, that was a subplot in a Heinlein novel in 1973, you know?
First as Heinlein, then as farce.
Yes.
Well, you know.
Or, you know, first as farce and then as farce.
But anyway, anyway.
Yeah.
It was great because Ian Freeman, which isn't his original name, it is his legal name now, he renamed himself Freeman on the land.
I don't know, but he's Ian Freeman now.
He was found with 1.6 million dollars of bitcoins and 178 thousand dollars in a safe when the FBI raided his house where they all lived.
They all lived in one house together.
The house was owned by the Shire Free Church of Monadnock.
Now, in a pure coincidence, the same house was raided by the FBI in 2016.
You know why they raided the house then?
I do not.
They were investigating child pornography.
This must be one of those coincidences that I've heard so much about.
Why does that completely fail to surprise me?
It's strictly coincidence.
Honey swatting.
Honey swat.
But yeah, it's heartwarming and awesome.
So yeah, Ian Freeman was a friend of Cantwell's.
He was one of Cantwell's last friends in the world.
And he showed up as moral support at Cantwell's recent trial and threw him under the bus when he was convicted.
And Freeman told the press, yeah, I never liked that guy.
I was never one of us.
No, no, no.
I never heard of him.
But this was bollocks.
And even the press printed it was bollocks.
Well, I mean, this group is very well known in Keene.
I mean, I have gotten, you know, I can't speak too openly about this, but I will get messages from, like, kind of random people who live in Keene who will say, you know, who will talk to me about, like, I think I have a Cantwell sighting or something like that back when he was around.
Like, I think I just saw him.
I think he was in the post office.
It's like, okay, what do you want me to do about it, right?
You know?
I spotted the libertarian shite hawk.
I spotted the Nazi.
Oh my god, what do I do?
Well, I mean, you know, there's not a whole lot you can do and there's less that I can do, but thank you for keeping your eye out.
The one really amusing one was I got a message from someone who said, I just saw Cantwell and he has a chihuahua.
He has like a toy chihuahua.
And I went, I've never, like, this was when he was, this was like 2018 or something, right?
So he's not in jail.
He's not, you know, this is a while back.
And I said, he has never referenced a dog on the program.
I've never heard a dog bark.
And if he's got a tiny chihuahua, I guarantee you at some point I would have heard that dog bark.
I just don't, like, if you can get me a photo of this, I will, it will go viral, I promise you.
But it turned out it wasn't him.
It was somebody that just looked vaguely like Cantwell, apparently.
So it was like, okay!
Cantwell spotting was kind of a thing in Keene, and I think the Free Keene squad and that group was kind of well known as the group of quote, lovable, in heavy air quotes, cranks, locally.
So it does not surprise me that Law enforcement was kind of on top of them at that point.
So yeah And the child pornography stuff doesn't surprise me either because that's I mean, that's just rampant and in those circles I mean, you know when you know, I need to be free to do exactly what I want.
And what I want is you know Naked photos of people who are underage.
That's the that's clearly, you know We never got into really mentioning, there isn't a lot to say about him.
Cody Wilson was an awesome guy.
He was the guy who founded Hatreon, the Patreon for people who had kicked off Patreon for hate crimes.
And he also made 3D printed guns.
And he was also a libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist and a keen Bitcoiner.
And he was also Convicted of screwing children.
Yes.
Again, this must be pure coincidence that it just one of these coincidences that keeps happening over and over and over.
Can't imagine.
Can't imagine how it works.
You know, this is pretty routine.
And I mean, it is because these guys claim, you know, Western culture is, you know, degenerate because trans people are allowed to exist.
And yet, you know, within all these spaces, you start looking, you start looking closely at all and you find child porn everywhere.
One of the greatest bits of the Cody Wilson story was when I said, yeah, so screwing children, part of the Bitcoin values.
And I had all these Bitcoiners in my Twitter mentions telling me how this 16-year-old hussy had seduced this poor, innocent 30-year-old Bitcoin ancap, probably on the orders of the government.
I had multiple of these.
I think they were serious.
I would believe you, because you get very similar things out of the... No white person ever does anything bad, if you listen to the Nazis talk about it.
It's always a federal honeypot.
They are all federal honeypots.
Atomwaffen Division, federal honeypot.
All this stuff, it's just, no, it's the Feds, the FBI, it's just inducing people to do these terrible things.
They're just doing these things, and why don't they ever go after the real criminals, like Black Lives Matter?
Like, that's the... Know the wrong wives?
Honeypot.
Well, they have all kinds of conspiracies around that one, but we can move on because that is not related to Bitcoin.
But yeah, no, this is, you know, Cody Wilson, I do remember these guys talking about.
It's funny how much of this is, like, 2018, 2019 drama.
And, like, I'm just, like, thinking, like, my God, so much has happened since then.
But, I mean, again, just to kind of reiterate and kind of get towards the sort of, like, wrapping up point.
They don't, they rarely talk about Bitcoin in this ideological way, like the Libertarians will, but the Nazis, it's purely just, we would rather be on mainstream platforms.
We want to just use fucking dollars, but we can't because nobody will do business with us because we're genocidal racists, you know?
Nazis just want the Bitcoin payment use case.
They do not care about Bitcoin any more than drug users cared about Bitcoin.
They wanted their drugs, you know?
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, yeah, agreed.
But, um, I mean, I think the thing to finish with, can you tell us about Cantwell and his guns?
Because that's a beautiful story.
I think that'll wrap us up nicely.
Cantwell and his guns.
Um, God, which, which reference are you thinking of?
Because there are so many.
He got out of jail.
Cantwell and his guns.
That could be, you know, five or six different stories.
He used to give, he used to give gun advice on the show.
And I, you know, I'm not a gun person, but I would, like, kind of, like, send clips to people and go, like, is this even, does this, this doesn't sound right to me.
And they go, yeah, he's, he's, he's a poser.
Like, he's a complete poser.
You know?
But he used to, like, pose with his guns on camera on his show.
He had, he had guns behind him.
Not, not quite that Lauren Bobert thing that happened, where she just had the gun, like, propped up on the, on the bookcase.
But he used to keep pistols right there.
And, uh, oh, are you talking about when he sold his guns?
Yes.
So he got out of jail after Unite the Right.
So after Unite the Right, just to re-summarize the story very quickly, he pepper sprays some people on the night before Unite the Right, and he eventually goes to jail for that for 107 days.
He pleads guilty, he gets out, and then he has a shitload of legal fees to pay.
Because he couldn't just go with it.
He had to.
He racked up a ton of money.
He's also part of the civil suit, the Science v. Kessler suit, which is still ongoing.
He has spent more money than I... I think he has spent more money than I will make in the next 10 years on lawyers in the last three years.
So that should give you a sense of how large a legal bill he has amassed.
And his lawyer, Elmer, Omar Woodard sold his guns to Bargain Basement Prices, apparently, in order to collect money that he was owed for his legal fees.
And those guns ended up on various forums, and Cantwell's big feeling of anger at this was, He should have sold those as collectible items, like, the crying Nazi owned this gun, he was carrying it, as seen in the Vice documentary, and Elmer just went like, fuck that, I don't care!
He just sold them as guns, yeah.
He just sold them as guns!
And, you know, when you owe this much money to your lawyers, and when you are living, you know, this, like, this...
Frugally, apparently, he was constantly whining that he couldn't, that nobody would give him money, and that he could, he was cut off from all the payment processors, and so he had to get Bitcoin, and so he spent countless hours trying to convince his fanbase to get into crypto, and send him all the crypto they possibly fucking can.
He, like, incessantly, for about a year, he's doing this, could not get enough money to service his needs, and yet was buying Many, many guns.
And I don't, I think you might have the actual number in front of you as to how many guns they actually confiscated when they arrested him.
No, no, I don't.
Oh, okay.
It was more than 20.
I think it was like 26 guns or something like that they found in his home.
Wow.
And these were not inexpensive guns.
He had amassed an arsenal yet again.
It was particularly fun because he got out in December 2017 and worked really heavily into buying all the Bitcoin he could get his hands on.
Every penny he put into Bitcoins.
And this was December 2017.
It was absolutely the peak of the 2017 bubble.
Like Cantwell turns out to be the guy who bought Bitcoin at $20,000 at the peak of the bubble.
He lost so much money and that's why he was totally screwed when he had to pay his lawyer's bill.
He thought he'd be rich from this.
It turned out he wasn't.
He and his fanbase, at least some of whom had bought in because they believed him and because he's saying this is going to go up, believe me.
I know economics.
I'm of the Austrian school.
I'm a Nazi.
This is the wave of the future.
A bunch of people lost their shirts because Cantwell convinced them to buy into Bitcoin at $20,000.
So the road from reasoning from first principles leads us to buy high and sell low.
It's the formula for Bitcoin success!
And I think there's the, I mean, you know, this is not something that, God, I'm just remembering all this now.
I apologize for kind of losing the track a little bit, but God, this is such like memory lane for me because, like, he would get calls where people would say, like, I bought into Bitcoin and it's going down.
Do you think we should, do you think I should sell?
And it's like, no, no, just hold on, just hold on.
It's going to go back up.
It's got to, if you can manage it, you should manage it and give me all you can, et cetera.
Eventually, eventually.
Of course, he was in jail on his other crimes at that point.
But I suspect that the loss of money and this increasingly pathetic grifting for Bitcoin was probably part of what made his audience leave him over that year and a half or so.
People just got sick of listening to him whine about his money woes.
That's heartwarming.
That said, Patreon.com.
Do we have anything else to add here?
I think we've got an episode here.
I think we've more or less covered it.
I think there will be a lot of Bitcoiners.
We're in another Bitcoin bubble at the moment, and I could talk for another half an hour about why that happens, but nobody cares.
Basically, Bitcoin's price is up.
It's completely synthetic and inflated.
You won't get rich.
Don't try unless you're really brilliant or really stupid.
Particularly if you're stupid and think you're brilliant, then you should probably try and it'd be hilarious and I'll point and laugh.
If you're a Nazi listening to this, what we're saying is if you're a Nazi listening right now, you should buy as much Bitcoin as you possibly can.
Absolutely.
All the Bitcoin in the world, buy it.
Everyone else, I'd hold off a bit.
Yes, so Bitcoin is currently at, I think, 60,000 this weekend, and that's really thin and it's not a substantial price.
It's a bubble.
Bubbles pop.
But you can't time them, otherwise you'd be much richer.
So we'll see what happens.
So there's a lot of Nazis who have way too much money right now, even if it's not in a very liquid form.
But it'll collapse at some point again, and then maybe it'll bubble again in 2024.
Who knows?
Just in time for the return of Donald Trump to the political life, I presume.
Oh, Jesus.
Whatever happens, it'll be the Fed's fault.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene is, you know, a presidential candidate, we'll be talking about Bitcoin yet again.
Yeah, yeah.
Probably not Matt Gaetz though, I think he's done.
Oh wow, I was going to mention, you know who took down Matt Gaetz?
His mate Jack Greenberg, his Bitcoin bro.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Seminole County tax collector, who armed the Florida tax collectors.
A Bitcoin miner in his office.
Yes, yes.
Where he was also trading photos of young underage women.
A lot of 17 year old friends.
Allegedly.
Yeah, a lot of 17-year-old female friends who needed fake IDs.
Looking out for young ladies who need moral guidance from good Republicans.
Yeah, he's just protecting the youth of America, David, don't you understand?
This is just very wholesome, completely above-board activity.
Protecting youth across state lines.
You know what, Pache Mises, I think I might feed data into my analysis at some point.
Because I'm noticing some patterns developing.
Jack, you're clearly wrong.
You're using this Keynesian nonsense, you know, Keynesian Marxism.
They're the same things.
Ask an Austrian.
They're the same thing.
Keynes was a Marxist.
Absolutely.
That's right.
All right.
David, tell us where we can find you on the internet and how we can give you money.
Not Bitcoin.
Not Bitcoin.
Actual money.
Sadly, I'm not set up for cryptos.
So you can find me on Twitter as David Gerrard.
You can find my site at davidgerrard.co.uk.
My books, you can get them from the site.
They're on Amazon.
You can even buy signed copies from me if you want to pay a fortune in postage, but it's well worth it.
Non-fungible tokens in paper form.
Oh yeah, we should have done some NFT talk.
Maybe we'll do that at some point in the future.
They're just off-topic, Daniel.
As cool as they are, and artistically valuable.
I don't know of any Nazi NFTs.
Isn't that a blessing?
Even the Nazis are smart enough to get into this NFT bullshit.
So, anyway, the best thing that will happen to the NFTs is that little bubble's already collapsed, so they can get on with doing something actually artistically interesting with them.
It won't be as good as the KLF burning a million quid.
They could burn a million NFTs, but it just won't be the same.
I'm sorry, please continue.
Please tell us where we can find you on the internet.
Again, we can go off on tangents all night, but we should probably wrap this up.
Absolutely.
So that's where you can find my blog, davidjeroy.co.uk.
I have a Patreon, where if you send me $5 a month, it's like buying me a drink, and it's good.
We can't go to pubs yet, but if we could go to pubs, we can do it virtually.
You can just send me the money for the drink.
Sounds good, yeah.
Actually, I consider this a pub right now.
If you're listening to this episode, you're in a pub with the three of us.
That's my consideration.
I have a real owl right next to me.
King Goblin, 6.6%.
It's like, basically, it's like- Oh, that's the higher gravity version of Hop Goblin, right?
It's like Super Larger, except for beardy BBC Pearl programmers, I think.
Hang on a minute, this is turning into beer talk now.
I've just sat through more than an hour of Bitcoin talk.
This can't go this way.
I do offer to DM Jack a Spitfire, but you know.
All right.
I guess that's it.
I guess all the other information we need is going to be in the show notes and the final crawl there.
Jack, sorry, I kind of took over the interview.
Do you have anything to add here?
No, no, that's fine.
That was a great show.
Thanks, David.
And yeah, if you're listening to this, you know where to find Daniel and I, and I strongly suggest that you do so and find David, too.
Thank you both.
All right.
Come back.
Come back soon, please.
We'd love to have you back.
Cheers.
I have to think of a topic next.
I'm sure there's enough bullshit in the world.
Yeah, but has it got Nazis in?
That's the thing.
It's got to be on top of it.
It's all got Nazis in it.
That was I Don't Speak German. - I mean, I mean, we've been shifting more to the IDW lately anyway.
So yeah, and I think the tech industry and like sort of like terrible fascism in the tech industry is always From First Principles Thinking has so many brilliant and wonderful results.
They're works of art.
documentary on hulu yesterday and it's like my god it's the same fucking story it's just the same fucking story over and over again from first principles thinking has so many brilliant and wonderful results they're they're works of art you can make an nft of them what if we made like really fancy office space uh really like sleek design
we undercharged for it based on a bunch of venture capital because we're selling ourselves as a tech company and then uh big question mark and then at the end profit somehow and we'll just string on investors until uh you know and then it collapses after 10 years for no reason It just collapsed.
I don't know how that happened.
Yeah, that was the WeWork documentary.
It was great.
Sorry, we're not really on the show anymore.
We wrapped up already, but it was a fun documentary.
I just posted a blog post on a popular Twitter thread yesterday about the liberal response to our present economic troubles, which is basically fucking idiots who want returns, but there aren't any, so they buy into bullshit, like SoftBank's entire investment history SPACs, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, which are literally a company for, um...
Achieving a great result, but no one to know what it is.
And Bitcoiners get into that.
They sell, uh, we'll sell you DeFi, which nobody knows what it is, but it gives you great returns.
And it's, they're selling bullshit because there's no real investments anymore because governments are completely oriented towards giving money to the rentiers, not to the people who do stuff.
And our mate Adam Smith and his mate Karl Marx and both their mate Thomas Piketty had a number of things to say about what that does if you're trying to run an economy.
It turns out that feeding your parasites results in fatter parasites.
Yeah, yeah, like, you know, at the dawn of marginalism you have Bukharin and he writes this book, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, and it's, you know, it's a detailed book and there's some good stuff in there and there's some bad stuff in there, but like, his basic theory about marginalism is that it's It's a theory that derives from the class position of the rentier people, who basically just don't do anything.
They're just consumers, essentially.
So their entire outlook on economics is just based upon the idea that value just pops out of the air.
It just appears, and they consume it.
I mean, I think that's basically right!
And of course since then the world economy is not really, obviously it's still based on production, but it thinks it's based around consumption and consumption of stuff that just kind of appears out of nowhere because we've sent all the actual factories to the east.
Yeah and it's like I wrote this post that was just liberaling liberally with citations and it's the sort of stuff that gets people on Twitter calling me some sort of SJW commie and literally it was just liberaling liberally and basic economic stuff like if you want to do a capitalism then just do what Keynes told you and you probably won't get guillotines and people setting shit on fire and
Which should be obvious under controversial statements, but then the rentiers wouldn't get all the money and therefore they must be wrong.
Well yeah, all you need to do to get called an SJW commie now really is to just kind of maintain the existence of external objective reality, isn't it?
That's enough!
Marxism is now the belief in the existence of things outside your head.
I have literally had Bitcoin Austrians put Marxism and Keynes into the same box as two varieties of the same thing.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, like a lot of bullshit, there's kind of a germ of truth in that, because a lot of people who call themselves Marxists, when you actually get into their economics, they're basically Keynesians, but... You know, Keynes was... it turns out Keynes was a very successful investor in capitalism, and he did really well, and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, and he very, very resolutely and explicitly was not a Marxist, or anything like that.
Although Marx also played the markets and won at them and he delighted in that, so you know.
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I was delighted when I found that one.
Yeah, that's beautiful.
I haven't read any... I've not read my Marx.
I've read... I survived Wealth of Nations and I think... I nearly died but I made it through.
Yeah, it's not a page turner.
Those smart 18th century guys, we should have introduced them to the concept of editors and word counts.
Yeah, sentences that don't last a page.
That would have been nice.
Maybe that's what Moldbug was basing it on.
It was just like, if we produce as much volume, if we produce the volume of words that Marks and Smith did, then Listen, I will read Adam Smith at his most boring over Moldbug any day of the week.
Fuck that guy.
Honestly, just aesthetically, fuck that guy.
In 2021, Adam Smith would be a Lib Dem.
He would be from the soft, fluffy wing of the Lib Dems, you know?
He'd be the liberals, not centrist wing of the Lib Dems.
He totally would fit into there.
The most bizarre thing is when people read Adam Smith and go, that was my libertarian conversion.
I go, what the?
What did you read?
I honestly don't know how you can do that.
If they say that, they don't know what they're talking about.
Adam Smith can be quite caustic about capitalists.
He's under no illusions.
Yeah, he was a fan of capitalism, but he was a very liberal version of it.
Where he realised there were problems, that regulation is good actually.
All that fluffy pretty bourgeois stuff, you know.
He absolutely believed in regulation, as indeed did a lot of the Austrians.
Like people talk about, you know, Mises, he's contradicting himself when he does it, but Mises concedes that you do need a lot of regulation, you do need stuff done by the state.
Hayek's the same.
Hayek, you know, goes in for like variations on what we would now call universal basic income and stuff like that.
A lot of these people that say they've read these guys and they've taken inspiration, they're just bullshitting, honestly.
I've seen Ancaps call Hayek a socialist because he thought, like, society existed and was probably good.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Hayek's far too left-wing for some of these people, yeah.
Hayek, who's like... Hayek's kind of ideal society is explicitly a kind of cross between a gerontocracy, where people get the vote once in their life, and sort of a chilly Pinochet-style plebiscitary dictatorship.
You know, he's not shy about saying that.
But yeah, for some of these people he's a raging socialist.
It's like you have to read, to learn economics you have to read Hayek even though he sucks and he's a terrible fucking writer and I can't stand him and I had to read him for the Libra book because his terrible dumb book The Denationalization of Money proposed a Libra-like scheme except dumber.
Actually dumber than what Facebook came up with.
Oh my god!
And he anticipated the ICO boom of 2017 because he thought a whole bunch of private companies doing their own currency would be a great thing because they all compete and people go for the best soundest money.
Whereas what actually happened was it was a race to the bottom making the worst shit coins they could come up with in the quest for dollars.
As if you couldn't predict that if you'd ever met a human.
And it spoke.
Well, you know, we don't even need to predict it.
That's basically what they did in the United States.
The United States had a load of separate currencies before... You need to predict wildcat banking.
Yeah.
And it didn't work.
That's why they changed it.
Yes!
It turns out that all of regulation exists for a fucking reason!
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but certainly financial regulation.
Well, financial regulation exists for a reason.
It's like Bitcoiners go on about how the oppressive status jackboot of the SEC and the CFTC.
It's like, this is a capitalist country.
These are government agencies who literally see their job as helping you make money, you know?
It's in the SEC's mission statement.
Facilitate capital formation.
We are trying to pour more money your way.
That is our entire job.
But you have to not break the laws that exist, because when you break them, shit breaks.
And we don't want shit to break, because it's bad for business, you idiots.
That's their whole thing.
And it's like, this is a very anodyne basic message, and bitcoiners can't fucking cope with it.
Well, you just look at the history of capitalism, you know, it wouldn't be here.
It never would have existed in the first place.
Certainly wouldn't have grown to be a world system without the state, you know.
It's just not possible.
It's like saying, you know... It's like saying, well, you know, buildings would have a lot more space inside them if we didn't need, like, you know, infrastructure or girders or shit like that.
So we just take them out and then there's more room inside, you know.
It's gonna fucking fall down, you know.
Vegetables would be so much better if we didn't have to grow them.
Yeah, well, that's what I put in the Austrians essay, you know.
If we didn't, you know, I can't remember it now.
I can't remember my own fucking epigram.
But, yeah, if we don't grow the vegetables in soil, then we won't have to wash them.
Yeah.
Of course, these libertarians you talk to, they'll say, ah, but hydroponic.
Yeah, I've, that's, they've actually, I've had that.
I've had that.
In reality.
What about aquaculture, moron?
When we have nanotechnology, it'll be awesome, you fool.
We just need the Star Trek replicators, but instead of it being for all to use, we'll just use it to make stuff to make money.
That's where I left out of the Less Wrong episode, Daniel.
Your chemistry degree particularly equips you to deeply appreciate Les Rong's love for nanotechnology, by which I don't mean material science, I mean Drexler's magical robots, sci-fi robots that can't exist.
I've got a friend who's a chemistry professor, a physical chemist.
He used, I forget the name of the tool, it lets you assemble molecules in a 3D thing.
Oh, it's been a while since I took PChem, but yeah, I've used similar tools.
In like a toy lab setting.
I don't do that professionally.
He went through all of Drexler's examples and they all collapse immediately to the bottom of the screen.
Because they defy science.
They defy quantum physics.
They don't, I mean, once you actually start to understand quantum mechanics, because I had to do, like, basically P-Chem, like the 4,000 level P-Chem is, like, you do a semester of thermodynamics and then you do a semester of quantum mechanics.
And then, you know, you do a lot of, like, heavy chemistry at the end of that.
It is absolutely infuriating because it's a fascinating subject that is never ever taught well by anyone doing it because the people who become physical chemists This is Dr. C.D.
Armstrong on Twitter, who you'll see in my mentions occasionally.
He's a good chap.
They're fucking whack jobs who do not know how to teach worth a damn because they start their life with thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
This is Dr. C.D. Armstrong on Twitter, who you'll see in my mentions occasionally.
He's a good chap.
I met him on Rational Wiki.
I'll give him a follow for sure.
He's trying to work out how the hell to do like, be a chemistry lecturer by Zoom because that's what you have to do now.
But yeah, he went through this stuff and he has done the arguing with less wrong transhumanists about nanotech and having to prove like basic science.
But the other one you'll appreciate, you're fully equipped to appreciate, is Yadkowsky's quantum physics sequence.
I would definitely have to go through that.
He uses misconstrued quantum physics, and he has people correct him in the notes, and of course he never incorporates the notes, because he's not there for the comments.
To prove his version of why different copies of you are the same person, and this is part of what makes Roko's Basilisk possible.
I must have missed that part.
You will fully appreciate why this is as amazing as it is.
You have the training.
Is there a mumble mumble and then we don't do equations anymore portion?
Or are there equations in it at all?
That would be the other question.
There are simple equations and you get some wrong.
Okay.
Because you have to, like, start with Diffie Q to do quantum mechanics.
And, you know, if you're not starting with, like, and this is Schrodinger's equation, then you're doing it wrong.
Right?
So, firstly, he does it wrong.
Secondly, Yad Kasi does have some mathematical talent.
He's entirely self-taught, but he's not- he can do this stuff, you know?
He's not unintelligent.
He's just stupid.
Yeah, sure.
I will have to take a look at that at some point.
He's got a lot of mathematicians in it, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where they do no research on machine intelligence whatsoever.
And basically it's where mathematicians go for their mathematics to die, as far as I can tell.
Like he sucks in people who are PhD quality mathematicians and then instead of like getting a highly paid job in the bowels of the NSA, they go and work on bullshit for him.
It's sort of sad.
Sam Harris brought a couple people on who are hyping a vegan meat alternative.
They have a company and they're basically doing the kind of basic research that they're then going to try to sell to major agribusinesses like Tyson in order to make properly good tasting vegan meat alternatives.
Okay, whatever.
One of these guys literally has like a background it's like TED talk and you know he's got kind of various Very boring sending things and then one of the places where he has worked previously was the Y Combinator And I went oh right now.
I know how you were connected.
Yeah, that's I don't even have to look any further I know exactly who you are So, Y Combinator occasionally funds companies that do a useful thing that's good for the world, like Dropbox is one of theirs.
And Dropbox is actually great, and I'm a happy customer.
But they did Airbnb, which is sort of questionable in some ways.
It's destroying the world.
I mean, it's very convenient, but it's destroying.
Like, when you look at, like, the number of, like, places... I've seen, like, these, uh, these, uh, like, kind of walkthroughs of, like, various cityscapes in the U.S., and, like, how much property is actually just Airbnb these days.
That looks like it should be places where people live, but it's not because it's just hotels that aren't regulated like hotels.
Exactly.
Where have we heard this before?
It turns out they're racist.
It...
I'll tell you what, being into Bitcoin has turned me into a massive statist.
Because suddenly I'm realizing, oh yeah, there's reasons why all this shit, you know?
Like, I don't want to be told.
I don't like being subject to rules that I don't personally understand.
But I'm beginning to appreciate this a whole lot more.
Because it turns out that when you don't, you get these bozos.
Right.
Well, and housing policy is its own kind of like weird thing, because like, and then the state kind of gets involved and they make a lot of the same, they do a lot of the same fucked up shit, like build highways everywhere to reduce traffic.
Yeah, I've been following this engineering podcast that's, well, there's your problem.
It's one of my like favorite.
And it's a literally it's it's like a podcast with slides and they go on the YouTube version is the way you want to go, but they did a Yeah, they do a lot of episodes that are basically like and then here's where this bridge collapsed and one of the bridge collapse and it's like capitalism So it's either capitalism or racism is the answer to all the problems.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's like, yes, the bridge collapsed.
Yes, there was a mistake.
Why was the mistake made?
It's like, well, somebody cut a corner somewhere.
Somebody put off some maintenance.
Somebody did a thing and it's all destroying the world.
That's always the answer.
It's great.
In Britain, it'll be capitalism, racism or old Etonians.
Right.
They did, they did one on the Greenfell Tower fire, which is one of their best as far as I'm concerned.
If you want to just Google one and see, you know, check it out.
Yeah, it's, you know, when you talk about, like, what is the most depressing podcast in existence.
That sounds like it.
It's always, as always, you know, behind the bastards, you know, I don't speak German, you're wrong about, and well, there's your problem.
Those are, like, the four, right?
Anyway.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
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