BREAKDOWN: State Power After Coronavirus, Feat. Peter McCormack
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2020
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter McCormack is the host of What Bitcoin Did and the Defiance podcast. He recently returned from travel to a number of countries in South America including Venezuela and Colombia as well as the Turkey-Greece border.
In this off-the-cuff and wide ranging conversation, Peter and @NLW discuss
- Bitcoiner politics and the bitcoin community’s reaction to the potential for increased state power in the wake of Coronavirus
- Which types of state power growth we should be most concerned with
- How to push governments to retract power growth on the other side of crisis
- How travel around the world has informed Peter’s perspective on bitcoin and politics
- Why nuance is both disincentivized and sorely needed in times of crisis
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. |
| 0:15.0 | The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:20.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown. |
| 0:22.5 | It is Friday, March 20th, and today I am joined by Peter McCormick. |
| 0:29.0 | Now, my guess is that most of you know Peter McCormick from his podcast, What Bitcoin |
| 0:34.0 | Did, which is one of the best and one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts in the space, Peter also has a new podcast slash video production called Defiance. And Defiance is about |
| 0:45.7 | a world in upheaval, right? And going out and finding the stories of people who are trying |
| 0:51.7 | to exert more agency and sovereignty and liberty over their |
| 0:55.4 | lives, right? And it seems clear for those of us who have been in Bitcoin for a while |
| 0:59.5 | how these different ideas connect together. But Peter really wanted a space to actually tell |
| 1:04.8 | a different type of story. And so Peter recently got back from a bunch of different travel, |
| 1:09.9 | both around Bitcoin and the |
| 1:11.5 | Defiance podcast, that took him to the border of Turkey and Greece, as well as all over South |
| 1:18.0 | America. |
| 1:19.0 | So my original plan was to ask him about that travel and what he learned and how it related |
| 1:23.2 | to Bitcoin and just kind of have a catch-up conversation on that, what it turned into, and this |
| 1:29.1 | is both introduction and warning, I guess, is much more of an extended conversation between |
| 1:35.3 | friends around what it's like right now trying to make sense of politics in the age of the |
| 1:42.5 | coronavirus. So I think if there's one main thread that |
| 1:46.6 | goes through our conversation, it's the idea of nuance and specificity and being willing to |
| 1:54.5 | not let yourself or being unwilling to let yourself be boxed into any one ideological label when everything incentivizes you to do that. |
| 2:04.5 | And questioning whether on the other side of this coronavirus, whenever that happens, |
... |
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