WBD478 Audio Transcription

A Progressive View of Bitcoin with Margot Paez

Interview date: Monday 21st March

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Margot Paez. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Margot Paez is a Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute specialising in Renewable Energy and Environmental Studies. In this interview, we discuss the Occupy movement, a broken capitalist system, and a pragmatic approach to our energy future.

“How do we get to the point where people can talk to each other? The only place where I’ve really seen that happen is in Bitcoin; so to me the social value of Bitcoin is massive because here we’re forced to talk to each other.”

— Margot Paez

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: We're obviously going to talk about climate stuff, but before we get into that, firstly hello, Margot!

Margot Paez: Hello.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming in for this.

Margot Paez: Thank you, Pete.  Now, do you like Pete or Peter?

Peter McCormack: I prefer Peter, but I don't get stressed about it.

Margot Paez: Right, Peter is good.

Peter McCormack: And are you Margot or Maggie?

Margot Paez: Margot.

Peter McCormack: Marge?

Margot Paez: No, definitely not Marge!  Some people call me Mar-got.  I think that's the Swedish way of saying it, or something; the T isn't silent for them, but the T is silent for me.

Peter McCormack: You're a Margot, I can handle that.  Troy, after our interview, he sat down, he was like, "You have to talk to Margot, just get Margot on the show".  And then I spoke to David Zell and David Zell was like, "You have to talk to Margot, you've got to get her on the show".

Margot Paez: They're too nice!

Peter McCormack: Well, we're going to get into some of the climate stuff, which is a tricky area in the world of Bitcoin, but before we get into that, I actually want to talk a little bit more about your article first, because it was very interesting, and I want to hear a little bit about Occupy, because obviously you got involved in Occupy, and it's something me and Danny have been talking about a lot.  I'm interested in the -- I'm essentially a statist, because I believe in democracy and government, although I accept it's completely failing at the moment, but I struggle with ideas around having no structure.  So, there's an article that Lane Rettig gave us that's called The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which was fascinating.

Margot Paez: Interesting, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And we've also spent a lot of time looking at Occupy and why it failed.

Margot Paez: Yeah, let's talk about that.

Peter McCormack: Well, can you tell me how you got involved in it, or why you got involved in it?

Margot Paez: Yeah.  So, I was in my 20s, and I was upset about the Financial Crisis, of course, and I saw that this was happening and I wanted to be part of it.  I've always been somebody who likes to go out and protest, so I was like, "This is great, let's go protest!"  But the thing is, I have technical skills too, and I had a background in journalism, writing for art magazines and pet magazines as an undergrad, and I had some camera equipment because I was dabbling in film-making at the time, just pursuing various interests, and I thought anyone can be a protester, but not everyone can edit video, not every can stand in front of a camera and do reporting, and I liked journalism too.

So, I decided, I'll just show up and participate as a girl, a journalist, and so I was there every single day at Occupy Los Angeles, which was a fairly big protest, alongside the main Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park.  And I was there every day and every night, I would file a report and I would wander around interviewing people; and one of my goals was to try to show a different perspective than what you see on television.  And I think coming from the Bitcoin space, we know what that's like with all the FUD, we know how we get painted a certain way.  And I felt that the people who were going to these protests weren't really getting the best light, in terms of getting good questions, and the people that they were selecting for interviews.

So, I showed up and I started interviewing people, trying to find the intelligent people, and I did.  I found some really great people, and I would ask them just a series of questions, and just talk about what was going on, the various protests.  So, I got to see, over the entire period, the progression, and the shift in how the occupation was going and what they were trying to accomplish, and it was incredibly -- it was one of the most important experiences I've had in my life, because I got to see people really try to come together and form a community and do things that our society and our officials were neglecting to do to take care of each other, and they were trying to figure out how to do that while occupying a park and without any resources.

It was phenomenal, but of course it wasn't perfect and there were problems, and of course the city was also trying to undermine it too, because they didn't want them there.  So, there was a lot of conflict because they were taking the unhoused or homeless people and moving them to the park, and basically making the occupiers responsible for them.  So now, they had to take care of them.  So, they transitioned from being there as an economic protest, to then being a way of, "How do we take care of each other?"  So I think that, to me, was the most important thing, that it was an experiment in a new way of having community with people.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, so the city was moving homeless people into the park during the protest?

Margot Paez: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Was that a strategic decision by them to try and undermine the protest?

Margot Paez: Yes, because in Los Angeles, most of the unhoused community lives in Skid Row, and Skid Row has been there my entire life, and you kind of know where it is.  And they're only allowed to have their tents up until maybe 6.00am in the morning, then they have to pack everything up and move out of the way, because there's business going on and they're not allowed to be there during the daytime.  There's also these criminal laws against homelessness in the city, like you can't sleep in certain areas and stuff.  So, the police were telling them, "Hey, if you go over to City Hall, you can sleep there, you can stay there all day long; you just set up your tent, it's fine".  So, they started telling the unhoused to go over there and to move in with the protest.

Now, the protesters themselves obviously welcomed them, and a lot of the unhoused community got involved with the activism there, and their stories were really important to be heard as well.  But still, there were a lot of problems and unfortunately, the unhoused community has a lot of mental health issues and there's drug addiction of course.  When you're literally living on the street with nothing, you're practically invisible, society just casts you away, of course you're going to suffer.  So, the occupiers had to figure out, "How do we deal with that?"

One of the moments that really stands out for me was that there was somebody there at the occupation, who was dealing with drug addiction, and the community came together and they were like, "How do we solve this?  What do we do?  How do we provide support for them?" and it was just a group of 20 or so people standing in a circle talking this over, "How do we provide for them?  How do we take care of them?"  To me, that was the first time I had seen people my own age, or maybe even a little older, really trying to solve these social issues, and realising that we had so many social issues in the United States that have been ignored by our leadership, our politicians. 

In a way, it was really unfair for them, because they were there to protest the banks, that was the protest, Wall Street, the fact that all these homes had been illegally foreclosed on, the fact that the banks got bailed out, but people didn't get bailed out, and all this was under the Obama Administration, this was a Democrat in office.  And they were really forced to deal with this underlining social issue that has gotten progressively worse, I would say, in the United States, with the fentanyl and the prescription drug addiction that has moved through the country.  And, it was really hard for them to do that.  But no one else was doing it, and that's really what Occupy became was this, "How do we have a new society, a caring society?"

Peter McCormack: The Occupy movement was ultimately seen as something that failed to actually achieve anything, and from my research it seems to be that there were two primary issues, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Margot Paez: Yeah, sure.

Peter McCormack: One was a stand-out mission that people could get behind, it kind of lacked, like I say, just a mission.  And also, there was a lack of structure, which is something that I'm interested in, because whether it's the podcast or whether it's the football team, or whether it's society or it's my family, I always feel that you need structure and hierarchy; I think flat structures usually tend to fail.  But please tell me from your side, correct me if I'm wrong.

Margot Paez: So, absolutely, Occupy was considered a leaderless movement, or it was either a leaderless movement or we were all leaders; that was the messaging.  And, of course, this was also something very new that people had to figure out.  And they had these democratic assemblies, public assemblies, citizen assemblies, that would happen every night, and they would try to vote on things.  And it became very difficult to do, because they wanted to do it via consensus, so everybody had to agree.  If they wanted to go on an action, do a march, everyone who was there at the assembly had to agree on it.

Oftentimes, there was always one person who would completely negate it, and they would do this thing where their arms were like that and that meant, "No, I don't agree with this".  So, it became gridlocked.  And, after a while, there were not a lot of protests happening and I remember walking around counting the tents like, "Well, there's 200 tents here, but there's 8 people that's going to go on a march, so what's going on?"

So, in a way, I think the problem is that you can have low hierarchies, you can, I think that that's okay.  But consensus to me is not something that's good if you want to do things immediately, consensus is something that takes time, and in a way that's good.  You need consensus on big issues, you're going to need to work it out, you're going to need to talk about it and you're going to have arguments and you're going to have to persuade each other.  And then maybe at some point, some people just absolutely don't agree, and then you need to rearrange your society.  That's the ideal look at consensus, and in the anthropological record, that's basically how some of these low-hierarchy societies worked.

But at Occupy, you couldn't do that, because you needed to go on an action tomorrow and you might be evicted in the next three days; you're living day-to-day like, "When are we going to get evicted and what's going to happen when we get evicted?"  So, that was a problem, and I remember thinking, "This doesn't work and these assemblies don't work", and I never participated in them, because I wanted to be there as an observer, even though obviously I was on mission with what they were doing and I was completely sympathetic, and I was there because I really wanted to give them a fair chance in what they were doing and let the public really see a different side.  But I never participated in them, so me standing off on the side and watching it going, I could see them and just being frustrated like, "This doesn't work, why are they doing this?"

Actually, I think what works better and you can still maintain a low hierarchy, or no hierarchy, and this is something that comes out of the Extinction Rebellion, which you may be familiar with.

Peter McCormack: I am, yeah.

Margot Paez: The UK, yeah.

Peter McCormack: They're not popular.

Margot Paez: They're not popular, right.  But with some people, I guess.  In the climate movement, they're very popular!  We can get into that; there's lots of disagreement.  So, Roger Hallam is one of the cofounders of Extinction Rebellion.  So, one of the things he suggested actually was, "Don't have a massive group of people making a decision if you're going to do an action like that, an act of civil disobedience.  Make it a small group, no more than six people, and you guys have to basically all be on the same page, and you're going to decide that we're going to do this, and we're then going to get arrested.  Okay, and now we have a date.  And now what we're going to do is just tell people what we're going to do, and we're going to get them to commit to our action.  Now, let's have lots of small groups of people doing this".

Peter McCormack: So, kind of like cells?

Margot Paez: Yeah, like a node in the network, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Margot Paez: Everybody is working in a small group in a decentralised way on the same goal.  And each group comes up with their own action, and then go out and do it, and then go on a tour and talk about it.  To me, I think that works a lot better, because you can make decisions a lot faster.  So that to me is a solution to the problems that they had at Occupy in that regard, in terms of the hierarchies and the gridlock.

Your other point about them not really having a lot of points of, what was their goal, to a certain degree, that was a problem, at least for Occupy Los Angeles.  I remember asking them early on, "Give me a list of your demands, I want to share them".

Peter McCormack: It was the same for New York as well.

Margot Paez: Yeah, and they were like, "Okay sure, yeah, we're going to get them to you".  A couple of days go by, "Can I get your demands?"  "We're working on them".  I never got them, I never got any, and I think that was part of the whole problem with the assemblies is that, how do you get everybody to agree to this demand?  There were different groups of people showing up having different demands. 

Yeah, it started off as an economic protest against the banks, but then there were people who were upset about police brutality, and then there were people upset about, I don't know, even climate change, we had some people come and talk about climate change.  There were people upset about housing, people upset about the homeless crisis, whatever, and all these people are coming in.  People have said about the Fed, there were libertarians there who burnt dollar bills in front of me.  It's the first time I've ever seen anybody burn money!

Peter McCormack: You need to spend a bit of time with Max Keiser.

Margot Paez: Oh yeah!  Well, I've seen him after Occupy burn money, so now I'm like, whatever.  But that was the first time I saw people burn money.  So, there were people -- everybody has their own pet thing that they're working on, or that they're fighting against, and you can't get all those people to agree on one set of demands.

Peter McCormack: Which is why you need leadership.

Margot Paez: So, that is one way.  I think again, having smaller groups having their own thing and maybe coming together as a coalition works as well, like a network, an action network, I think that also is a solution.  There were people at Occupy who tried to be leaders, or who became leaders.  But at the same time, they didn't have a lot of trust from people, because they seemed like they were being opportunistic.  So, there's a fine line there, I think, in these movements of who's a leader and who isn't.

Obviously, if you have someone like MLK as your leader, charismatic, on mission, knows how to use words so eloquently and can move people on a goal, that can actually work.  I can't come and tell you, "There's only one way to do something", there just isn't; there are always going to be multiple ways to do things.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but I think sometimes you have to recognise different people have different strengths.

Margot Paez: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: There are so many analogies about this, but let's talk about a sports team.  There's somebody who's good in goal, because they're great at saving, but they can't strike a ball.  And there's somebody who's a great winger, because they're fast and nippy and they can go round people.  And I think that happens, you can extrapolate that to anything that has a structure and say, "Who's a leader?  Who's an organiser?" so you have those different -- and leaders tend to have different qualities.  They can build momentum, they can stand at the front, they are maybe great with words or great at relationships.  And you can even extrapolate that to look at Bitcoin.  Would you consider Bitcoin low hierarchy?

Margot Paez: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so if Bitcoin's low hierarchy, but you still have the people who are the developers, the people who submit BIPs, you have the people who are seen as opinion leaders, the people who spread messages.  There's no actual leader, but there are definitely leaders in ideas, and maybe you could consider the goal or the mission or the request to be like BIPs, "What are the demands?"  But being an Occupy movement, for me, when you get into things like police brutality, which is obviously a super-important issue, I don't think that was an Occupy issue.  Occupy was about runaway capitalism, the abuse of the system by the connection between Wall Street and the White House, and it felt to me like that should be the mission, something regarding runaway capitalism.

Margot Paez: Yeah, so it definitely was.  That was the sense of why people were there, but there was something that happened.  There was huge working-class support at the beginning, and then it dwindled away, they stopped showing up.  I interviewed a lot of people who would show up after work and they would stand out along the sidewalk with their signs and they're like, "Yeah, this is great, we're here, we support them", and halfway through, that changed.  Unions were coming out and they were doing their protests, and they were really massive and exciting. 

I still don't really understand the shift that happened.  Either it went on too long, or it just became too gridlocked in the decision-making, and it turned off basically the working class and they were like, "This isn't really getting us anywhere".

Peter McCormack: "We've lost our houses".

Margot Paez: Yeah, and here these people are fighting over some order of operation of how to run the assembly, or something like that.

Peter McCormack: I think an important mission behind it all should have been that people should have gone to jail for it.  I mean, one guy went to jail, I know one person went to jail, but probably a lot more people should have gone to jail.  This was a huge crime committed against not just the American people, but the world.

Margot Paez: Yeah, well people are still upset in 2022.  The whole GameStop thing, I don't know if you've perused the Reddit subreddit around that, wallstreetbets, and stuff.

Peter McCormack: I've been on it, yeah.

Margot Paez: So, I was on there reading all the posts and it was phenomenal.  It was literally Occupy Wall Street online.  And some people were a little cynical like, "Oh no, they were just trying to pump their bags", but really so many people posted on there, "I was 14 when this happened and my parents lost their home.  I'm doing this for them" or, "This happened, my family lost all this money" or, "My dad lost his job and I'm still really pissed off at these and I'm going to get these hedges", and that was a huge proportion of the people involved in that who felt that way, and who still do. 

That was a point where I realised, people are still angry, ten years on and they're still angry, this has not been resolved.  And the fact that they're still angry and this has not been resolved I think is a big indicator of why we have so much distrust in society in the United States right now, institutional distrust.  Everything that's happened over the pandemic with mandates and all that, I think all that goes back to the fact that the United States failed to protect the people from what had happened during the crisis.  They saw that the banks got away with it, they're still in business, they're still doing risky speculation, these derivatives are still happening in various ways, and even related to climate change, these carbon markets operate similar to derivative markets.

So, they see that they've been screwed and nobody is coming to save them, so why are they going to trust the pharmaceuticals; why are they going to trust the CDC; why are they going to trust President Joe Biden, a Democrat, when a Democrat was in office after the Financial Crisis, when they had a chance to really bail out the public and they didn't do it?

Peter McCormack: They bailed out the banks and recovered the economy.

Margot Paez: For the banks, right.  The stock market was recovered, but not really for people.  The jobs that came in after the recession were lower-paying jobs with less benefits.

Peter McCormack: I brought this up on the podcast a few times, but I always explain that The Big Short, as a piece of film, did a brilliant thing by entertaining people with the build-up, made it feel exciting what was happening with these derivatives and these products that people were betting on to get super-rich, and some people did get super-rich.  But they did this brilliant thing that they entertained you all the way through and at the very end, they showed that family packing up their house, because they'd lost their house.

Then, we did another podcast series about Steve Mnuchin, did a lot of research into this, and found out how, I think it was people like BlackRock ended up just sweeping up all these houses, and they've moved America more into a -- shifted it more into a rental economy than a home ownership economy.

Margot Paez: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm with you.  Nothing was done.

Margot Paez: Yeah.  I went and did reporting on a number of these homes that were illegally foreclosed upon and it was predatory, it really was.

Peter McCormack: OneWest.

Margot Paez: Yeah, OneWest among other banks, like Wells Fargo as well was really big on this.  And some of the occupiers would go, they were called Occupied For Closure, and they would sit in the homes that were being foreclosed on to try and stop the sheriffs from coming in and kicking the homeowner out.  And these were homeowners who had been paying.  They had been paying their mortgage, but they started charging all sorts of ridiculous fees and it was confusing, and all of a sudden they were being pushed into foreclosure without really understanding what had happened. 

It was so sad.  These were families with kids, or people who'd had their home for 20 years of something, and now they were going to be kicked out, they were close to retirement, where were they going to go?  So, there's a real crime that has been committed against the middle class in the United States and it's really sad, because nothing has been done.  Kamala Harris had an opportunity, the Vice President, had an opportunity to prosecute them.

Peter McCormack: She chose not to.

Margot Paez: She chose not to, and now she's Vice President.  So, what is there for people?

Peter McCormack: But her track record is not great on multiple different policies.  She likes to keep people in jail, she laughs about it.

Margot Paez: She laughs about it, exactly.

Peter McCormack: She should, and could have, prosecuted OneWest; she was recommended to and she chose not to.  I mean, there's a word I could use for her, but in the presence of a lady I'll avoid it!

Margot Paez: Yeah, I'm sure I know the word.  I really don't like her and I don't like Biden either.

Peter McCormack: I don't think many people like her.  Biden, I feel sorry for.  He's like a weird old guy who's out of his -- but she's actually fundamentally a bad human.

Margot Paez: Yeah, she is.  The irony is, her dad's a socialist, or like a scholar.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Margot Paez: Well no, Pete Buttigieg's dad is the pre-eminent Gramsci scholar, but her dad is a Marxist scholar of some kind.

Peter McCormack: Marxist?  Okay, danger territory.

Margot Paez: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, did this shape your views on capitalism, or did you already have?

Margot Paez: I mean, I was already a little cynical, but I didn't have very well-founded or well-rounded understanding of capitalism, I think, until the Financial Crisis and then Occupy.  And I think that really made me feel very angry about capitalism and obviously, not all bitcoiners would agree with me there, but --

Peter McCormack: Well, we're going to go into dangerous territory here, it might trigger some people!  But are we talking about real capitalism, or are we talking about butchered capitalism?

Margot Paez: We're talking about state capitalism, neo-liberalism really.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so there's a lot of nuance obviously to this, because people have to go to work and earn money.  So, you're not entirely against the idea of capitalism; it's the broken form of capitalism we're living under now?

Margot Paez: Yeah, so I like to call the good form of capitalism, "markets".  It depends on who you ask.  If you ask market anarchists, they might call that "capitalism one", but you can have markets, you can have competition and things like that, that's okay.  Having a society that is governed by markets is not necessarily a good thing.  But of course, under liberalism, we have basically become sacrifices at the altar of the economy and the market, so that to me is very dangerous.

I'm personally more interested in finding a way of running an economy and society that is neither necessarily Marxist or state communism or state capitalism, but something that is a blend, that actually centres people in the economy, where you're not, like, you have to work to live or you basically starve to death.  I think that we've gone so far off in one direction where people are just no longer seen as humans in this system.

I've always considered myself an anti-capitalist, I guess, since Occupy, but I try to moderate that a little bit, so that people understand where I'm coming from and why I might call myself an anti-capitalist, but I'm not anti-markets.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we should dig into that.  I think it's important, because there's definitely going to be people who get triggered by even discussing this.  Me and Danny went out to get coffee this morning and Danny is based in Australia; you don't mind me saying that, no?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: And we were talking and I asked him about the mandates in Australia and how he feels Australia has done, and Danny was very much like, "They've done a terrible job".  I was like, I think we have to be able to discuss every response to COVID.  You have to have the conversation to find out what worked and what didn't.  Australia had a very low number of deaths.  I think we looked at like 5,000, whereas the UK's like 160,000.

Margot Paez: The United States!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Now, there are certain people who listen to this show who would say, "Any lockdown is wrong", and I'm kind of with them now, as somebody who supported the original two-week lockdown; I said, "Yeah, I understand this, let's do it".  But there are people who are based in Africa when Ebola breaks out who most certainly need some form of lockdown, because it's crazy dangerous.  So, I think you have to have the conversation and not be scared of the conversation to say what worked and what didn't.  You have to have the conversation to say, "It didn't work in Australia", but you can't be angry about having the conversation.

This is the point here.  People might be triggered about the idea that you're an anti-capitalist or you're a markets person, but you don't believe in capitalism as it is.  You have to have the conversation to test yourself, your own theories of what you think works and doesn't work.  And this is right in the area that we're spending the most time discussing now, because I get called a statist cuck all the time, but I'm not a libertarian, and I'm right in this area trying to understand why I'm not.  So, we should dig into this.

Margot Paez: Yeah, sure.

Peter McCormack: So, what do you mean when you say you're a markets person, but you're an anti-capitalist?

Margot Paez: So, yeah, I think that markets have existed before capitalism, I think we have enough evidence of that going back to feudalism and before it, in the anthropological record.  And the markets have often existed at the intersection of societies.  I bring up David Graeber all the time, because he was an incredible influence on me in my understanding.  And in debt, the first 5,000 years, he looks at a lot of societies, and the areas in which the markets occurred in his descriptions were often at the edges.  So, within the societies, they didn't even have money, but they had all of these -- they had built-in trust.

In a society where you know people, where you know your community and you have whatever guidelines or rules that your community follows, you or your society follows, you may not need a market, because your trust is how you make your decisions on whether you give dowry, like a bribe dowry, you know, if you get married; but there's all sorts of customs around how resources are divvied up and shared.

But in the market haggling, I think was the word that he said, its origin was not the nicest origin.  It was something that you would use only with a stranger, like you would kind of rip them off.  So, I think that markets exist where trust is low, which goes back to where Bitcoin is don't trust, verify, kind of thing, or it's trustless, there are built-in mechanisms so you don't have to necessarily trust the other person you're exchanging with.  And I think in those areas, markets will have to exist, will always come up spontaneously, because there's no human trust between strangers necessarily.

So, in that sense, I think markets naturally exist and there's plenty of evidence that markets have naturally existed, and there's always been rules in markets too.  In feudal times, they had rules against monopolies, so there have been rules, or what we might call regulations, but it depends on who's enforcing them.  We have regulations now enforced by the state.  So then we have state capitalism, and we have now finance capitalism. 

We started with industrial capitalism, where we were manufacturing everything in the United States and there were jobs and at that time, the economists, the classical economists, it was popular then to think that, "Capitalism's going to naturally progress towards socialism", because it's cheaper for the employers to have the state provide these services to their workers, and they need workers to at least be healthy and fed and clothed and housed, so they can come and produce the manufactured goods.

But then, the society in the United States and globally has transitioned to financial capitalism, so our economy is now very much finance-based, it's all done with the banks, with Wall Street and now there's no incentive really to take care of people, because you can make money off of rent, rent-seeking.  So, Michael Hudson, he's an economist who's actually more like a progressive-type economist, he wrote this amazing book, called Super Imperialism, that talks about how we got off of the gold standard, and how the Treasuries were used basically to fund our deficit spending, and of course wars.

So, he looks at Wall Street and he's like, "This is basically where the central planning is now in the United States", and he says that this is a rentier economy, and I agree with him.  In finance capitalism, you're going to make money off of interest, you're not really making money off of tangible goods.  So, this has led to, I think, the situation that we're in, where people don't really matter so much, so long as they keep certain aspects of the economy going.  That, I think, is very troubling, because in order for this type of capitalism to work, neo-liberalism, you really need the state involved. 

So, there's a symbiotic, parasitic relationship here, where the state and the banking industry, but also other corporations, like the fossil fuel industry, are closely intertwined to make things favourable for finance.  For example, when you look at how the money ends up going towards the fossil fuel industry, there are all sorts of really bad incentives that the government enforces, with tax breaks and subsidies, that makes it a pipeline for funds and loans from banks to go towards the fossil fuel industry.

So, issues that we have with new coal plants coming online are because you literally can imagine pipes pushing the money in a particular direction.  There are paths that have been built because of the government.  So, there are so many things that are happening in this particular system that are destructive, not just people losing their homes and never getting their home back, or banks stealing their property from them; but also with fossil fuels, the fact that we have $5.1 trillion worth of subsidies every year for the fossil fuel industry.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Margot Paez: Yeah, globally, but it's like $5 trillion every year.  So, we have a really screwed-up system.  You can call it capitalism, you can call it crony capitalism, call it whatever you want; the existing actual system that we live in is totally broken.  So, I have called it capitalism, so I'm anti-capitalist, because I'm anti this system, but you can call it whatever you want.  Maybe you're anti-crony capitalism, it doesn't really matter; anti-neo-liberalism, it doesn't matter; whatever this system is right now.

Peter McCormack: You're anti the broken bits of capitalism?

Margot Paez: Yeah, this is broken.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Margot Paez: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: What kind of pushback do you get from people when you discuss this, because everything you're saying makes sense?  We all recognise it, even bitcoiners recognise it's broken, but when you say you're anti-capitalist, that's going to trigger people.  

Margot Paez: Oh yeah, I learned that in Bitcoin, because I came out of the left and for us, it's like they're naturally anti-capitalism, we all understand what we mean.  But if I say that to somebody who is a libertarian, oh my gosh, their head's going to explode, "How dare you say that"!  Then, if I tell them, "I come out of the left, I'm very anarchist leaning", I mean I was definitely more a democratic socialist for a while because of Bernie Sanders.  And if you say that, people get really triggered and they're like, "Oh my gosh --"

Peter McCormack: "You're a commie!"

Margot Paez: Yeah, "You just want to tell me what to do and take my property away" and things like that and, "No, I'm not really interested in doing any of those things".  Or they're like, "Oh, you're going to come and mess up Bitcoin's monetary cap, you want just free money and stuff".  No, I don't want that either, because obviously the money printing is partly why we're here.  So, it's been really great actually to be more involved with people in Bitcoin now, because I really got more into Bitcoin in 2018, but the first time I tried mining Bitcoin was something like 2011, 2013 in that range, and I have a range, because at the time I didn't know what I was doing and I was, "It's just another thing on the internet".  So, it wasn't something that really registered with me, but it was something that --

Peter McCormack: Damn it!

Margot Paez: Yeah, I know.  After the fact, I was like, "God, yeah, I really blew that".  If only I understood money then!  But it was something that I always just followed until I really needed it in 2018.  But anyway, I really didn't get into Bitcoin Twitter until 2021, and even then I was doing it anonymously, because I was afraid of all the pushback I might get from all the people in the climate movement. 

But once I started interacting more and going on Spaces and stuff and seeing people's responses to certain things that I would say, I realised that we are so polarised, especially in the United States, and in this polarisation we have our own vocabularies.  We're using the same words but they have different meanings, and we are completely turned against each other, even though fundamentally we agree that we all have this problem that we're facing.

Peter McCormack: I think people agree a lot more than they think they agree.

Margot Paez: Oh, yeah.  I was so surprised how many people would DM me the first couple of times I would speak in Spaces and they were like, "That was great what you said", and I would just talk about the stuff I'm talking about now, like finance capitalism, about these low interest environments create a lot of room for speculation, and the fact that innovation has been stymied, because it's so easy to rent-seek instead of investing in actual productive areas of the economy.  People were like, "Yeah, I totally agree with you".  

Or, if I would say something like -- people like Alex de Vries complains about the e-waste thing, but he blows it out of proportion, and I would say, "Obviously, Bitcoin is not the only place where e-waste is a problem, and it's only a very, very tiny, like 0.5% or something, like everything else that Bitcoin does is only 0.5% of the global impact".  And I would say, "But yeah, obviously this is not good, we cannot deny that throwing away these old miners is a good thing, we should be recycling them.  But then again, we're not recycling anything.  We have very low recycling rates for e-waste in general, so it would be better if we had things like more modular miners, things that we could just replace parts.  But we have a whole society that we have to shift".  And people were like, "Yeah, I agree with you, of course".

But none of the people who are agreeing with me would probably call themselves a socialist or an anarchist or anything like that or, "I've read Marx", or whatever, or a progressive even, but they're agreeing with me.

Peter McCormack: But this is the problem with division.  People have lost the ability to sit down and have a conversation and figure out, "What do we agree on, what do we disagree on, where's the compromise?"  I did an interview yesterday talking about that it's much more of a problem here in the US; it's not as big an issue in the UK.  And again, I say it's because we don't have a two-party system and we don't have such divisive media.  But here in the US, it's very divisive and I think sometimes people are trapped by their own political ideology in that, "I can't fucking agree with that person".

But what tends to happen is, they can't agree with them on Twitter, but you get them in a bar and you get two people round a table and have a conversation, and you start to figure out what you agree on and what you disagree on.  And like I say, I think we all agree on a lot more than we disagree on.  I think the majority of people would agree that war is bad.

Margot Paez: Right.

Peter McCormack: I think as long as people aren't deniers of climate change being caused by humans, they could agree that it's wrong and solutions are needed.  So, if we could get to those points, we could actually have these conversations.

Margot Paez: Right, and the thing is, how do we get there; how do we get to the point where people can talk to each other?  The only place where I've really seen that happen is in Bitcoin.  So to me, the social value of Bitcoin is massive, because here we're forced to talk to each other, because we've all come to this place because we know that at least the central banks, fundamentally, are screwing things up, and are propping up an economy that doesn't work, through quantitative easing.  And quantitative easing is basically the greatest wealth transfer that has ever happened.

Peter McCormack: Well, what is it Travis Kling says, "It's Universal Basic Income for rich people".

Margot Paez: Exactly, we're propping up the stock market.  This whole pandemic has been what's called a K-shaped recovery.  If most of your investments are in Wall Street or on share markets, equities, whatever, you're going to be okay, because we just pumped a bunch of money.  If you are a worker at a grocery store, you probably don't have any shares of any meaning, you've got nothing.  You've got $1,400.  Oh, good, that's really going to pay your bills, that's really going to keep your kids fed.  Of course it's not.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is what I discussed with Lyn Alden on her last show, was wealth concentration, and we got into the weeds, but it's super-extreme wealth concentration leads to civil unrest.

Margot Paez: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Every single time, probably in every single country in the world, if you go back and you look at times of extreme wealth concentration, extreme wealth disparity, you have massive civil unrest, because you erode the middle class and you destroy people's ability to live a decent life.

Margot Paez: Yeah, and they remember what it was like to live a decent life and that's the thing in the United States, especially with the white working class.  And it's something that the Democrats have completely failed to understand.  The only person who did really understand it was Bernie Sanders, and he was called a racist for it and a sexist.  But the thing that people on the left and progressives and Democrats need to recognise is that, there's a group of people here who had something good.  Okay, yeah, black people were red line; they didn't benefit as much from the new deal, of course, there's no denying.  But these people did. 

Then, the manufacturing industry left them behind, they moved away to where it was cheaper for them to produce their goods, and they got nothing, they got absolutely nothing, and they have seen a decline over the last 30 years or so, and that's not even a full generation of people, that's not a full lifetime.  And so, they know what they were supposed to get.  They were supposed to get the middle-class life that was promised them in the 1950s and 1960s and part of the 1970s, and it was taken away from them.  So, what do you expect them to do; how do you expect them to feel about this; and this is happening in rural America?  They've been completely ignored by the two-party system.

The Democrats, who claim to be representing the working class, have failed them and ignored them, and have mostly focused on the urban areas.  So, yeah, these people are going to be upset, because all you're talking about is, black people, gay people, etc.  But what about them?  Now they feel like, "I'm the bad person", and it's almost controversial to say this too, in some corners, because it's like, "Oh, you're --"

Peter McCormack: You're in a safe place.

Margot Paez: "-- a racist".  But it's not racism, it's just looking at the fact that yes, white people can be disenfranchised too, and it's an economic thing, and they're economically being disenfranchised as working-class white people.  And what are their options?  To join the military, or what?  They have no options.  They stay in poverty too, like the Appalachia is incredibly impoverished.  They have no insurance, they can't get their teeth fixed, they lose all their teeth, they have to have these free clinics to come and help them out, and they're completely abandoned.

When Bernie ran in 2016, the areas where he got a lot of votes were in rural areas, and that was used against him to say he could only get white votes.  The thing is that Bernie was talking about a big picture.  He was really trying to address the real economic issues, and he was talking about wealth inequality, he was talking about wealth concentration, and he was going on tour across the United States, meeting with people in all of these places, not just in urban areas but also in rural areas.

Peter McCormack: Why do you think the DNC didn't want him?

Margot Paez: Well, because he's talking about taxing corporations and stuff, and the Democratic Party gets a lot of funding from Wall Street and corporations, and he was attacking Wall Street too.  So, going back to the discussion about Occupy failing, Occupy actually in the immediate sense failed; but in the long-term sense, it didn't fail, because I don't think that Bernie Sanders could have run without Occupy.  So, he was really the Occupy president, he was addressing those issues that Occupy tried to address, but he was addressing it in an electoral way, as running for President.

So, that is a threat to the Democratic Party, because that's where a lot of their funding comes from.  This is something that I think people who come from a different perspective in Bitcoin, like libertarians and so on, have to understand that the Democratic Party is not progressive, it's not a left-wing party.  It's a very centrist, corporate-backed party.  And of course, they're not going to do anything for you, they're not going to do anything for their base either, so they're just operating based off the people that give them money, and that's reality.

But they cloak it in identity politics like, "We're going to have the first African-American woman Vice President" or, "We're going to have the first African-America black President" or, "We're going to nominate all these people of colour to all these offices.  Look what we're doing, isn't that great diversity?  We're being inclusive".  But that's just the veneer.

Peter McCormack: It's not policy.

Margot Paez: Yeah, it's just role models.  Okay, in the one sense that's great, but in the practical sense, the Navaho nation still doesn't have access to water; that coalmine that was decommissioned, what's happening with the remediation of the coal there?  These people have been completely ignored, and what about the working class in general?  Does having Kamala Harris as Vice President change their status, the black community?  Are they being uplifted by her being Vice President?  So far, I haven't seen that. 

So, that's the Democratic Party's playbook, is just to give this sense, present themselves as the diverse party, and every now and then throw a bone at the working class, but they really don't do anything.  They haven't really done anything substantial, I think, in a long time.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is where it's very easy to have a lot of sympathy for libertarians, because it's a completely broken political system, the financial system is also completely broken, based on successive governments from the left and the right.  There have been multiple wars over the last few decades.  It's very easy to point at the failings of government, and I have so much sympathy.  I think the libertarians absolutely have it right on paper; I just don't think we get to the society -- I don't fully understand the society they picture, and I don't think we can get there.

So, my view has always been, "How to we rebuild democracy; how do we make it stronger?"  I think, if there was a strong libertarian party pulling at the strings of government to make government smaller or more responsible, I think that would be a good thing, but I struggle with their whole idea.

Margot Paez: Yeah, the libertarians, yeah of course, they have fundamentally a good idea I think, and of course their ideas come out of anarchism, which was originally anti-capitalist.  But the thing that I think is problematic is that their solution is, "Let's just cut out all the laws, let's cut out all the regulations, and just this bare minimum and then everything is going to be fine, the market's going to take care of it". 

Peter McCormack: We know historically that's not true.

Margot Paez: It's not true, climate change is the greatest market failure we've ever seen.  We do need rules, and historically markets have had rules.  Like I said, even in feudal times, we had rules against monopolies; now we don't have rules against monopolies.  Well, we do, but they're not enforced.

Peter McCormack: If I can just jump in, I'm also pro-regulation.  I was talking about this with the guys on the way over.  I watched the documentary about Boeing on my flight on Netflix, and one of the important things in that documentary is the role of the FAA.  Every opportunity that businesses and capitalists have to make money to cut corners, they will, but there are certain areas you can't cut corners.  You cannot cut corners in the manufacture of planes, you have to have regulation, because otherwise planes fall out of the sky and people die.  I don't think it's acceptable to say, "Well, people won't fly on those airlines, because their reviews will say, 'You shouldn't fly on this plane'".  I don't think that's acceptable.  I think you have to pre-emptively prevent as many planes as possible falling out the sky.

Margot Paez: Of course.

Peter McCormack: There's other similar things that you get from central authorities, which I think is super-important, which is regulation around, say, nuclear or nuclear waste.  There's high regulation in the management of nuclear waste here in the US, whereas I think in Russia they just pour concrete on it!  The management of air traffic control, weather systems.  Now, that's not to say that everything should be controlled by the government, I think we've gone too far.  There are too many regulations, and the government has too many centralised bodies that can't be trusted.  But the answer for me isn't to burn it all down, it's just to fix what we have and make it better.

Margot Paez: Well yeah, I agree.  With anarchism, it's not necessarily that you have just no rules, or anything like that.  It's like that saying, "Rules without rulers".  So, what are regulations?  They're nothing more than rules.

Peter McCormack: But who makes the rules?

Margot Paez: That depends on the society.  In this particular society, we've given up some of our liberties to the state and to representatives to make those decisions for us.  In a differently organised society, we would decide those rules by different means, but there's still rules nonetheless.  So yeah, in that aspect, I don't agree.  You can't just cut everything out and expect it to just naturally work, it just doesn't.  That's really not how society works, in that sense.  And I think the libertarians will hate me by saying this, but that's a little utopian.

Peter McCormack: You're not allowed to say that!  We're going to have Michael Malice back on the show soon, and I'm going to be discussing this stuff with him, because one of the rabbit holes I've been going down in the positive versus negative liberty, because a lot of libertarians believe in negative liberty, freedom from people imposing rules over me.  And I was watching a YouTube video about this, and there was, I can't remember the guy, there's a book about a guy from the era of slavery.  When the slaves were freed he said, "Yes, I'm free, but I don't have anything.  I don't have any money, I don't have any land, I can't get anything".  So, the idea of positive liberty being that freedom too.

There's a lot of criticism of negative liberty in that, whilst it's absolute liberty, it puts you in a position whereby you actually empower the strongest and the wealthiest in society.  But what positive liberty does, it creates that opportunity and that more level playing field that everyone has a chance.  I'm lost in it, I'm very early studying it, but I'm trying to get my head around it, and my belief is that you have to have government to have positive liberty, because you have to have a way of structuring society to give people the opportunity to live a free life.

Margot Paez: Right.  Well, I think you don't necessarily have to have a government as structured and hierarchical as the one we have now to provide that.

Peter McCormack: No.  A lot smaller, you could do it.

Margot Paez: And, there's again, in the anthropological record, there are societies, even in the Americas before the French Revolution, where they had these much more low hierarchy societies, where your freedom is defined by your relationship to other people.  I think that's the difference between what maybe the libertarians think of, or what Michael Malice thinks of the freedom, it's like, "I'm free to do whatever I want".

But actually in societies, historically your freedom was really defined by your relationship to somebody else.  So, what I do affects them and I'm responsible to them, so I actually have to define my freedom in the sense of, is what I'm doing going to hurt the people around me, or hurt my society?  I think that's actually the kind of freedom that happens in the real world, and it's not so much this, "I do whatever I want" freedom.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's consequences.

Margot Paez: Yeah.  And for example, and I believe this example comes out of the new David Wengrow, David Graeber book, called Dawn of Everything, and I haven't read it yet, but I've watched Wengrow's interviews and read a number of reviews.  In the book, they talk about how they dealt with murder in this one particular study in the United States.  So, if you murdered a family member of mine, you wouldn't go to jail, but your entire family would have to compensate my family for that murder.  So, the damage that you did has to be shared by your family.

Peter McCormack: What if you don't like your family?

Margot Paez: You're screwed!  Well, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: No, your family's screwed.

Margot Paez: Well, they're screwed, yeah.  If they don't like you, they're still responsible to pay for what you did.

Peter McCormack: But you could just go around killing people and your family has to pay for it?

Margot Paez: Well, apparently it worked in this society to minimise deaths, or to minimise murders, because the consequence was shared.  So now, people in your family have to keep you in check and they're like, "Don't do that".  Maybe they murder you?!

Peter McCormack: Well, maybe.  How big is that society?

Margot Paez: I don't know how big they were, but they must have been pretty big, because they were interacting a lot with people who were coming over from Europe, and they had a pretty big influence on the enlightenment in Europe leading up to the French Revolution, because actually in a way, they thought that the Europeans were a little barbaric, because they really didn't have this concept of freedom or liberty in Europe at the time.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure I can buy that as a solution.

Margot Paez: No, I'm not saying that's a solution.  I'm just saying that in the anthropological record, that was one way that they did it.  Maybe it doesn't work for you, but it worked for this particular society.  So, I'm just saying, there are alternative ways in which societies can operate, and it really depends on the people who are in those societies to make those decisions.  So, I guess it's just an example that there are different ways that you can approach this.  It doesn't necessarily have to be a highly structured, bureaucratic government, it could be governance by different means.

I think it's important for us to think about all the different possibilities in which we could run our lives, because for so long, we've lived within this structure.  And this particular structure, I think it's failing, so we have to figure out, if it's failing, what comes next?  And if we have a chance to shape what comes next, we should really start looking at how other societies have operated in the past and try to get ideas of how to fix the problems that we have in this next step.

Peter McCormack: Doesn't Bitcoin fix this?

Margot Paez: Bitcoin fixes some things, absolutely.  I think the great thing about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is a decentralised network, right, but I don't think of it as just a description of a network topology.  I think of it as actually a philosophy that actually rubs off on everyone who comes in, interacting with the network or participating the network, and it changes the way you think about things.

Peter McCormack: A lot of things.

Margot Paez: Yeah.  I mean, myself as well, it's changed a lot of how I think about energy for example.  And I think that this is a little bit of a Trojan horse for figuring out how to run society in a less centralised way, and I think that that can actually help us.  And, one area that I think it aligns very well with is something called communalism, which Murray Bookchin developed later in life, I guess in the 1980s or 1990s.  He came up with this idea, which is like radical municipalities, or basically it's like bringing more of the power of governments down to the municipal level.

Peter McCormack: Isn't that localism?

Margot Paez: Yeah, localism.  So, that was something that he defined pretty early on, and he had a really good understanding also of the climate crisis before people started calling it a climate crisis, or really understood climate change on a national discourse level.  He was talking about this in the 1980s.  So, his solution was…

So, originally he came out of the Marxist lot, he became disillusioned with them, and then he became an anarchist, and then he started developing these ideas.  And he was like, "This is one way that we can do some form of anarchism within the existing structure", and he called it communalism.  He had a really hard time getting other anarchists on board with this actually, which I was kind of surprised with.  I think maybe because it's somewhere in between.  It's not no hierarchies, I think it's more like low hierarchies, but it can exist within the existing United States.

It's basically, take over your local government and start creating more of these local neighbourhood assemblies, get people locally involved in their community, and make decisions on that level.  And that, I think, actually works very well with Bitcoin, because it already has the idea of decentralisation, and so you can start doing this.  If you're going to transition into a new society, well you're going to have to build that society alongside the existing society.  So, if we can incorporate this type of localism, and this type of communalism, where we have more democratic input from the people who are actually living in those areas, then we may actually be able to fix some of those problems on the social side.

Then, combine that with Bitcoin which is a decentralised money, it's a stateless money, and mining, you can maybe have some self-sufficiency within those communities, if you're mining and you're using those mining rewards to give back to the community, like buying whatever is needed or funding parks, or whatever.  So that, to me, is a potential vision for what a society could be like that incorporates Bitcoin at a local level.  And I'm still thinking this through, so this is early stages, and I'm trying to understand more of Murray Bookchin's work.  But to me, I think Bitcoin fixes this in the sense that it can incentivise more localism.

Peter McCormack: Well, I agree with that.  I mean, we saw that essentially in El Zonte, which you wrote about in your article, which we will share in the show notes, because it's a thought-provoking article.  And, we're going to cover the climate stuff, we are getting there, which is the main reason I want to speak to you, but just one question before we get to that.  In the Bitcoin world, there are, as we said, lots of libertarians who believe, some in no government, some in smaller government, there are people on the right who generally, even though the right now, the Conservative, Republican side, are big government, but these people do believe in small government and, "Leaving me the fuck alone", kind of stuff. 

I think Bitcoin has struggled to bring progressives in, and this is one of the reasons I want you on the show, it's one of the reasons I've had Ben Arc on the show recently, I've had Anita Posch on the show, I will happily have anyone, I don't care, I'll have anyone on, because I think it should bring us all together.  But why do you think we struggled to bring progressives into the Bitcoin world?

Margot Paez: I think part of it is that progressives are looking towards using government to create protections for the working class, and they see that as the main way to do that in this society.  And, they're wary of anything that even sounds libertarian, because that's the opposition.  Of course, the other problem for them is that the FUD is telling them two things: Bitcoin is bad for climate change, it's going to melt the planet; and Bitcoin is just a speculative asset, it's just for speculation, it has no real-world value.

Well, speculation, okay, that's triggering because we're opposed to Wall Street as progressives.  You don't like Wall Street, you think it should be better regulated, they're part of the problem, and so all they're hearing is that Bitcoin is just a tool for Wall Street, it's just another game, another market in which they can play and have fun and make money, and they're not getting anything from it.  So, how do you get them through all these layers of FUD?  It's a lot of layers, it's very, very hard.

I got a text message from a friend in the last couple of days, it completely blew my mind.  Last year, I sent him an article that I wrote about climate change and Bitcoin, and called it A Financial Hail Mary for the Climate - Bitcoin Adoption.  He read an early draft and he was like, "Why do you think Bitcoin's going to save the world?" he was super-sceptical.  Actually at some point, we couldn't even talk about it even more, because he would get really upset. 

So, he sent me a message, he was like, "Margot, I'm so sorry, I just want to apologise for what I said.  I didn't understand".  He was like, "Now I'm seeing how all these Russians are using it to be able to get around some of these sanctions that are happening, banks freezing assets, freezing their money and stuff like that, or dissidents", he's seeing now in the news or on Twitter, he's like, "Basically, now I understand and you were ahead of the game", or something like that. 

I was like, "Wow!"  I never expected this from someone who was completely cynical, really thought that Bitcoin was really bad for the environment, that it was nothing more than a tool for capitalists to play with.  And now he's telling me, "I'm so sorry, I got it wrong".  So, I think that what that means is that we just have to keep having these different voices speaking about Bitcoin from within the language that they understand.  And the thing that he said was, "I think that what you wrote made it possible for me to have an open mind, to be able to get to this point".

Peter McCormack: Is that paper available?

Margot Paez: Yeah, it's on Medium.  It's under my pseudonym. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you tell me afterwards, you tell me secretly and I'll go and read it, and I can't share it in the show notes.

Margot Paez: Yeah, you can share it.

Peter McCormack: I can?  We're going to expose your nym.

Margot Paez: Yeah, well originally I was using this nym, because I was worried that climate activists would hate me for writing it, and I was involved in the climate movement, I used to lead protests and stuff.  And I thought everybody in climate hates Bitcoin, because they think it's melting the planet.

Peter McCormack: Well, we need to get these positive messages across to people.  People are resourceful with money.  If you're in Lebanon and your currency's collapsed, or you're in Turkey and your currency is collapsing, or Argentina, you find ways of protecting your wealth.  People will always find ways of protecting their wealth.  People in Russia right now will be finding ways of protecting their wealth, or trading.  They'll be trying to find out -- and in Venezuela, there's access to five currencies, people use there.  They find ways, people are resourceful.

Criminals will always use money, they will always find a way.  I mean, Elizabeth Warren, she's like chief FUD promoter at the moment, whether it's sanctions, whether it's climate change, whether it's criminals, she FUD promotes about all these people can do, all the things they do with Bitcoin, they can do with the dollar.  But the great thing about Bitcoin, we cut out a lot of the incentives that come from government that fuck with the financial system.

Margot Paez: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: So, we have to work much harder to get these messages across.  I would say, on my show, it's very easy for me every week to have a libertarian on, or someone on from the right, talk about their ideas, but they're out there.  There's 20 other podcasts covering this.  I think that right now, it's more important for me to have people like you on and start speaking to progressives and start saying to them, "Bitcoin isn't the big, scary monster, and there's actually a lot of good things Bitcoin can do that you could care about, that hopefully it reduces wealth concentration, it supports activists, there are all these things".  So, I think it's a much more important conversation to be having.

Margot Paez: Yeah, and it's really important, because a lot of those people who could benefit from Bitcoin are going towards Ethereum and going towards DAOs and going towards NFTs, because the DAO governance feels like a community.  And in Bitcoin, we're a little individualist in a way, and that's not appealing to them.  So, when I wrote that progressive article for Bitcoin Magazine, I wanted to highlight that, yeah, there's individuals, but there are individuals in a community and there's a lot that Bitcoin can do for a community.

Peter McCormack: Well, great example, look at what's happened in Ukraine at the moment.  They're trying to raise money, the army.  $50-odd million was donated.  Look what's happened with the truckers, people donated.  People come together outside of government and work together in Bitcoin to help the causes they believe in.  They probably do a far better job and probably more money that gets donated, and they're probably just a better group of people deploying capital.  So, it's just about replaying these messages and reinforcing them, and cutting out idiots like Senator Warren, who I think she's the enemy of progressives.

Margot Paez: Well, she's an opportunist.  She completely destroyed Bernie's chances in 2020, because she didn't endorse him, she ran, and then she waited so long to drop out, and then she called him a sexist on stage and created all of this drama, and put him in a terrible position that was based off of nothing.  And she really damaged her reputation with progressives and Bernie's supporters, because they liked her up to that point.  I liked her up to that point, because for a while, she was very strong on the banking industry.

Peter McCormack: She went after Mnuchin.

Margot Paez: And now, ever since then it's like, "Who are you really?  You're just some opportunist, you're just here to make yourself -- you just want to be in the limelight.  What are you really trying to do?"  And now, she recently did call out the big banks, because they were putting all of these horrible fees on people during the pandemic, when work was difficult and all these people were out of jobs. 

But she completely doesn't understand Bitcoin, and I think maybe it's because she thinks the only solution is the Federal Reserve, a central money system, things like that.  She is really for that, and I'm sure she would be for CBDCs; I wouldn't put that past her.  But yeah, she's done a lot of damage.  I mean, she's done a lot of damage to the progressives, I mean she's doing a lot of damage on Bitcoin, and yeah, to me she's lost all credibility.

Peter McCormack: Just retire, Senator Warren, just retire.

Margot Paez: Yeah, you're not helping the situation.  Your reputation is just in the dirt at this point, for a lot of progressives, a lot of people that supported Bernie.  So, I'm super-disappointed in her and, yeah, go, go away.

Peter McCormack: Go away.  Right, so we need to talk about climate stuff, which I'm really looking forward to talking to you about.  It's going to be another triggering and tricky subject, but I think it is worth talking about.  It's a subject important to me, but I'm fully aware I'm a hypocrite.  I'm personally pretty shit at my own carbon footprint, and it's something I need to think about, but it is an important issue that needs to be talked about.  It's not something high on the agenda of a lot of people in Bitcoin, but there a range of people, so let's be fair about this.

We have people who believe climate change is happening, is caused by humans, is an issue, and if we don't deal with it, there are going to be severe consequences for the people of the planet.  We have people who believe climate change is happening and it's cyclical and it's nothing to do with humans.  We've got people who believe in climate change as an issue, but are very nervous about centralised government creating policy, and also abusing it and exploiting it.  But then we have people who are outright denying there is any issue, and that we should just keep burning fossil fuels and not care, etc.  I suspect, like me, you're nearer the start of the list as somebody who's concerned about it?

Margot Paez: Yeah, the upper edge!

Peter McCormack: So, for context, just explain why you're credible in this area, explain what it is you do so people know.

Margot Paez: Right, yeah.  So, I'm a physicist.  I actually started my PhD at Georgia Tech in the physics department.  I was working on robotics, intersection of robotics and physics and biology, studying sand lizards and snakes and their locomotion.  I would build robotic models, so I have sort of a mechatronics background.  And I was doing that for a while.

So, when I started, it was 2016 and Trump was elected.  Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, put out this video, it was like, "Climate scientists, come to the United States, we believe in climate change, come work with us", and this was my first year.  I thought, "Yeah, that's great, I wish that I could do that".  I even looked at the application form and stuff and I thought, "What good am I?  I'm just a first year PhD student in physics, I have nothing to offer".  So, I just kept focusing on my research.

Then, I started feeling like the government is not doing enough, and I'm not doing enough and my work, as fun as it is, and I had -- my goal was to go back to JPL, to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, because I loved it there and I wanted to work on space stuff and astronomy and astrobiology.  And I was in an astrobiology instrumentation group and we had an instrument on the Perseverance Mars Rover.

Peter McCormack: That's pretty cool.

Margot Paez: Yeah, I got to contribute to that and I loved that experience, and I wanted to go back there.  So, I was even working on a NASA project for a little while in that research group as a side from this sand locomotion stuff, and it was a Moon Rover, it was a Lunar Prospect, the Lunar Prospect Rover, or something like that, and it was going to patrol for water.  Anyway, that got cancelled.

But I was doing that, and I was starting to feel, "I'm not doing enough, this is not meaningful, this is not going to have an impact on people, and climate change is getting worse and governments aren't doing enough".  So, I switched departments and I ended up in a group in the civil and environment engineering department, so in the water resources programme.  I joined that group, because my adviser was the lead author on the 2014 Climate Assessment Water Chapter.

So, the United States, every set number of years, puts out these climate assessments, so he was on the 2014 one.  And he had a letter from Obama that was thanking him for his contribution and everything in the office was stuff related to climate change and water.  I thought, "This is my chance to do something".  I actually got there, because I was looking for a summer job on campus, because I was trying to figure out what to do after I was going to leave and I needed funding.  So, I actually got hired to be a web developer for them, so that's how I got there in the first place.  When I walked in and I saw all this stuff, I told my mum, I was like, "Mum, this reminds me of JPL, these people remind me of JPL.  I think I have to figure out how to stay here", which was what I said at JPL.  I was like, "I have to figure out how to stay here and never leave", and I felt the same thing. 

So, I got there and my adviser liked me enough to let me in his programme, and I had to start over, I had to take a whole new qualifying exam, do whole new first-year classes in water resources, and had to learn a little bit about the climate and the water cycle, hydrology, learned about coastal structures, things that happen.  Like, "How to structures survive a tsunami?" for example, or, "What are the evacuation structures that can be built, and what are the regulations around that?  How do you make these empirical calculations?"

Engineering is all empirical, and that means that it's not based necessarily in a theoretical equation.  You have to go out and collect data and figure out, what are some sort of governing empirical equations that we could use to estimate these things?  So, there's a lot of that, like deciding how high up you should build one of these evacuation buildings, so that if the water runs up from a tsunami, that it doesn't topple, or that people are able to stay above it.

So, I took classes like that.  And then my research, I kept telling my adviser, "I want to do climate change stuff, that's why I'm here.  I don't want to work on this other stuff that other people are working on, which is absolutely interesting, of course", but it was not directly climate change.  So, I've been working on a model, it's a statistical model.  So, it's different from the climate models that you hear about, which use a lot of physical equations and stuff, and there's models for clouds and they take a long time to run.  These are statistical models that can be run in shorter periods of time, and then you can actually incorporate them into management software, so that people can actually use them locally, so there's a water manager.

So, we have these decision management softwares that we've done, or previous people in the group have done, that help them decide how much water you should release from the dam, depending on the historical weather.  And now, we have to design them in a way that is adaptive, because you can't rely on the historical record anymore, because of climate change.  So, my model's statistical, and I take sea-surface temperatures, and I look for correlation, so statistical correlations, which means like, is there a relationship between these points of temperature on the surface of the ocean; are they related in some way to some other climate variable, like rainfall? 

If there's a high relationship between them, or high correlation, then I build a linear model, so I'm pretty sure I'm losing most of your audience here, but it's just a model.  And then, with that model, I can try to use that to make predictions about something that's happening in the future, with new sea-surface temperature data, or new rainfall data, or something like that.  So, that's what I work on, and the goal there with this particular project is to try to forecast frequencies of hurricanes over the next coming decades.  So, we want to know, are we going to see more hurricanes?  Our understanding is probably, we're seeing a lot more extreme hurricanes happening around the United States, like the Gulf of Mexico and places like that.

So, that's where my research is right now, so it is climate-change-related.  We focus on the water side.  I'm not a climate scientist in the sense that I study the atmosphere, or I study glaciers.  I'm a physicist who works on climate change in the civil and environmental engineering department, and our goal is a little more practical.

Peter McCormack: But you're in a community of people who consider a range of issues to do with climate change; you're exposed to a lot of different people?

Margot Paez: Yeah, I mean like I said, my adviser wrote the water chapter of the 2014 Climate Assessment, so that's all about what is going to happen in the United States with rainfall, with droughts, floods, things like that.

Peter McCormack: But there are a lot of people who just outright deny there's an issue, or have questioned previous models.  I mentioned to you Michael Mann, people bring up his cooling article, which he now debunked and said it was wrong.  But other people say, "Well, we've had so many models in the past and they haven't been what people have said".  When we had Eric Weinstein on, he was saying, "Well, can people actually model this stuff?"  Can you model this stuff?

Margot Paez: Yeah, that's the Jordan Peterson line too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm a bit disappointed with Jordan Peterson recently.  Personally, I feel like -- you mentioned I interviewed Katherine Hayhoe, someone I hugely respect within this field, and she refuses to even debate climate deniers.  She says, "Why would I do that?  Most people with common sense wouldn't debate a flat-earther, because it's nonsense.  For me in my world, this is absolute nonsense.  Climate change is happening, it is caused by humans, and there are very severe consequences that are coming".

So, for those people who, even using the word "denial" will be used against you, but people who are sceptical, what do you say to them?

Margot Paez: It's hard, it depends on how sceptical they are, how much they deny it.

Peter McCormack: Super-sceptical.

Margot Paez: Yeah, you have to -- I haven't really interacted one-on-one in person with people who deny climate change.  Most people I come across on Twitter --

Peter McCormack: Let's try now, I'll be that person.  I'm going to be like, "Margot, this is bullshit, this is bullshit".

Margot Paez: Well, I guess I'd be, "Well, why is it bullshit?  What aspect of it do you not get?"

Peter McCormack: Well, climate's always been changing, and if we go back and look into the soil samples from 400,000 years ago, we had similar, etc.

Margot Paez: Yeah, right, so people say that.  Of course, yeah, we've had high concentrations of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere in the past, but first of all, that was before humans were even on this planet.  Second of all, if you look at over a long period of time, you can actually see how the emissions have ramped up considerably, or how temperature has ramped up considerably.  It's exponential growth, and you have never seen that in the climatic record, or the ice core records of the paleoclimate.  You've never seen that.  It has never, ever shot up like, what do they call it, like a hockey stick. 

That is a sign that something has changed.  So, you can show people that, you can show them.  Like, "Look here, look over these millions of years, this has never happened.  Now suddenly here, where humans exist, since the late-1800s, we're seeing this exponential growth, so what is the cause of that?"  And then, depending on how much they spend looking through these climate denial websites, they might come up with something else, and then you have to tell them, "Well, that's taken out of context, or that just doesn't -- I'm not even going to worry about that, that doesn't even make sense", there's a lot of that.  So, there's a lot of layers that you have to peel back.

Peter McCormack: And there's dishonest actors who disseminate disinformation with regards to climate change, who are paid by lobbying groups.  I interviewed Nathaniel Rich, who wrote a book on climate change who, I think back in the 1970s, the oil companies had consensus.  And scientists at the oil companies knew they had a problem.  I can't remember the name of the book, Danny will look it up.

Danny Knowles: Losing Earth.

Peter McCormack: Losing Earth, the Decade We Had…?

Danny Knowles: The Decade We Almost…

Peter McCormack: It's like, The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, or something.

Margot Paez: Yeah, I think I've heard of this book.

Peter McCormack: I mean, he's a great writer.  He wrote the article that led to the film Dark Waters about Dupont, poisoning the waters around the factories and killing the cows.  The film came from his article.  He wrote this book, he also did an investigation into Quadriga.  He's a fantastic journalist, fantastic writer; but in that book, he was saying there was consensus with the scientists working at the oil companies.  But due to policy change, or fear within government, this was all kind of pushed back, and then we lost the opportunity at that time to attack this.

What I've become aware of is, there are people out there spreading falsities about the environment, which is problematic.

Margot Paez: Yeah, that's a whole other issue, misinformation online and just outright lies, making things up and presenting them as facts.  That happens in a number of spaces, I mean even with the reporting on Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  It's really hard sometimes to know, "Okay, did that actually happen?  Was that actually Ukraine?" because there were a lot of clips that were from Palestine actually, early on.  So, I don't understand the motivation for spreading lies like that.  Confusing people seems to be the main goal, and with climate change, that has been happening over the last several decades.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's incentive models as well.  I think it depends on what we're talking about.  If you're talking about a war zone, we're talking about propaganda as a weapon of war.  You have guns, you have tanks, but you also have propaganda.  And the Ukrainian Government are also clearly disseminating propaganda, but you can't help but say, "Well, they're being attacked by one of the largest armies in the world".  If they have to use that weapon, you can kind of understand it and defend it.  But when it comes down to things like climate change, there's clearly incentive models, financial incentive models.

Margot Paez: Yeah, in that case you can, you can see a little bit more why.  It's not as confusing, like the goals I think.  But the goal obviously with climate change is to stop action, and Exxon knew, in the late 1970s and 1980s, they knew what they were doing.  And even scientists knew even at the turn of the 20th century, the late-1800s.  There was a newspaper clip that said, "These CO2 emissions are probably going to have a major effect in 100 years".

So, we've known all this time, really since the start of the Industrial Revolution, that what we were doing was going to change the chemistry of the atmosphere, and was going to have certain effects.  And so these models obviously were developed and these models were not wrong.  In fact, the models actually have been very good and if anything, they have been too conservative in their forecasting of what will happen if we remained on this particular trajectory of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

People like Jordan Peterson who say, "Oh well, what's the climate?  The climate is everything and you can't model that, because there's too many variables, so how can you rely on this?"  That's completely false, that's a complete denial of statistics.  Statistics play a really important role in understanding the results of these models.  And if you actually look at the IPCC reports, or if you look at the Climate Assessment report that my adviser wrote, you'll see that they always measure their claims, their findings, by high confidence, medium confidence, low confidence, because these are all probabilities they're forecasting.

So yeah, as you go over time, you do have uncertainties.  Of course, that's just natural, because the farther out you get, you really don't know what's going to happen, so you can only project and say, "Well, if we stay on this trajectory and nothing else changes, this is what's going to happen, and so this is a way for us to make decisions about the future now".  And for some people, it seems like those uncertainties mean that we shouldn't do anything.  But for me, I think these uncertainties actually mean that we should, because we don't know for sure if it will happen sooner than what we are projecting.

Peter McCormack: I know it's a big question, but where are we right now?

Margot Paez: So, in terms of the models, I think right now, we're at a crossroad of where we can go.

Peter McCormack: Danny, can you look up that recent report that just came out, because I can't remember who produced the report, but there was a new report that came out that claimed that we're actually now at the point where certain things are irreversible, we've reached the point where certain problems caused by climate change are irreversible, but I don't know the detail.  Danny, can you have a look?

Danny Knowles: The IPCC one?

Margot Paez: Oh, yeah.  So, the recent IPCC report came out as an adaptation.  They basically have admitted, I think for the first time, that there are some things that we can't change.  We have already damaged things, or the climate has already changed to the point that we're not going to be able to go back to the way the climate used to be, and that's really significant.  It's a major admission that in some ways, we have to adapt to what is happening, we're going to have to adapt to the fact that we're going to have more fires, more extreme weather, we're going to have more droughts.

In Madagascar recently, they had a horrific famine, climate-change-related.  The boreal forests are catching on fire, they start becoming carbon sinks.  Like Brazil, the forest in Brazil is now a source of carbon instead of a carbon sink, because of all the fires there.  So, yeah, there are things that we've already lost, and people don't really understand that.  And the more you look at this whole picture, with the renewable energy transition, the more you realise, or the more I realised that even if we want to move faster, I think there's a limit to how fast we can move in the transition, which means there are going to be more bad things that are going to happen to people, more damages, more climate refugees, more people who are going to see their agriculture collapse, because we're not going to be able to stop the emissions fast enough.

I don't think that most people really understand that this is the case, that we've already damaged our planet to an extent where we somehow have to manage that damage.  That means that a lot of people are going to get hurt, and it's really sad, because we had all this opportunity to fix it.  If we had started this 20 years ago, the speed at which we were going wouldn't be so big of a deal.

Peter McCormack: How would it be fixable, because obviously there's been a big push for renewables, wind and solar, hydropower, but we know wind and solar are not reliable.  There's been a pushback against nuclear, where we know nuclear is arguably one of the -- again, it's arguable, because it depends who you are, but some people say it's the best form of energy generation we have.  Others say it's not worth it, because of the risks that come with nuclear.  Obviously, I'm out of my depth here.  From your point of view, how do you think it should be solved?

Margot Paez: There are two separate issues that have to be tackled.  Obviously, we have to stop burning fossil fuels, and we need to transition our grid to a renewable-energy-based grid.  And, yeah, it's intermittent, so there are issues that have to be addressed, but I think they can be addressed and they are being addressed, but it's a little slow.  And Bitcoin plays a role in that, obviously like we're seeing here in Texas with ERCOT.  We're seeing Bitcoin mining play a role in balancing the grid.

Peter McCormack: Isn't that one of the most unbelievable outcomes from Bitcoin that not even Satoshi could have predicted.  It's just fucking beautiful.  I'm sorry, I keep getting emails from people saying, "Can you stop swearing on the show, please?"

Margot Paez: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a lot. 

Margot Paez: Oh, wow!

Peter McCormack: I tell them to fuck off!

Margot Paez: Yeah, good.  It's your show, man, do whatever you want!  But yeah, oh my gosh, when I realised that Bitcoin could be useful in climate change, it was not really because of renewable energy, it was because I thought that Bitcoin could be a transition that would help us get out of one system into a new system.  And I was mostly, in that essay I wrote about that, was firstly just saying, "Look, the incentives for Bitcoin are such that it's going to look for cheap electricity, and renewable energy is the cheapest, so obviously it's going to move towards that direction", etc, as we know.

But then later on, I started learning about the renewable stuff and I joined the Bitcoin Policy Institute, that was becoming more and more a focus.  It completely blew my mind, and one thing that I would love to do is a full-scale study, like collect data from the miners who are working at ERCOT, and really look at how they are really playing a role; because right now, all we have are news articles.

Peter McCormack: Well, what's stopping you doing this?

Margot Paez: Funding!

Peter McCormack: Well, I always say that this is one of the problems with environmentalists or scientists who believe in climate change, they're really just after funding dollars.

Margot Paez: Well, you want to know how much I get paid?

Peter McCormack: What would it cost to fund this?

Margot Paez: Oh well, it depends on the scale, but at least the equivalent of my stipend!

Peter McCormack: I don't know what that is.

Margot Paez: Well, I get paid nothing, I get paid after the university takes their cut.  I get like $25,000 a year.

Peter McCormack: So, what would it cost you to go and do this study?

Margot Paez: It would take at least $30,000 on top of that, because it would be a full-time project.

Peter McCormack: So, it's not even a whole Bitcoin to go and do it?

Margot Paez: No, it's not even a whole Bitcoin.  If you want to just throw away part of your Bitcoin at this, you can do that!  But yeah, I would love to do a study on that, because we don't have any peer-reviewed papers on what's going on in ERCOT, and it would be fantastic to fight the FUD if we could have a few more peer-reviewed papers out there, really examining on the ground what Bitcoin mining is doing in the renewable energy transition, how it's balancing the grid, how the miners are turning off, based on price signals, how they're interacting with the grid operators.  It's a wonderful --

Peter McCormack: How long would it take to do?

Margot Paez: How long would it take?  Well, it depends on how long it takes to collect the data, and then depending on exactly what direction we want to go, and the study could take like six months, it could take a year, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Well, we'll just get you the money to do that.  If it needs to be done.

Danny Knowles: Surely, we can get 1 Bitcoin?

Margot Paez: Yeah, I've been talking about this with Troy.  I really want to do a case study of ERCOT, because we really need to have a legitimate paper come out of this.  Because, everything that we have in terms of Bitcoin is based off of models, and some of them are egregiously wrong, and some of them are really exciting, because they're looking at how Bitcoin can be used in curtailment with solar or wind, or how it could compliment battery in the renewable grid overall.  Or, could it bring on infrastructure, like new powerplants, without having to wait for connection to the grid?  There's all these possibilities, like how to balance those negative price signals with mining, all that.  But it's all based off of models.

But here we have a real-life experiment.  This is the sandbox where Bitcoin is actually doing something with renewable energy, here in Texas, and we have access to the mining companies.  We've talked with Shaun Connell, Troy and I, at Lancium.  We are a community, we're all connected in Bitcoin.  We're not so many degrees away from each other where we couldn't get this data and do this actual work.

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, Shaun Connell, was he the guy that Nic Carter retweeted the other day?

Danny Knowles: Yes, he was.

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen.  I'm going to say this with high confidence that after this interview, you can go and do this, because finding $30,000 is easy.  And if no one will help, I'll just fucking pay, I'll give you that money.  We could put you on the payroll of the podcast for six months if you can go and do this.  If you want to do it, then once we're finished, we'll talk about it afterwards.  So, yes, this should be done.  I think the Bitcoin Mining Council would probably appreciate this work.

Margot Paez: Yeah, well I've been talking with Troy about getting in contact with them to get a hold of their data and get in contact with their miners, because we've been looking at Alex de Vries' research, and he is the number one generator of Bitcoin energy FUD.  I consider him my arch nemesis, because he and I are both PhD candidates, but we come from different backgrounds.  He's a central banker, and I'm an actual physicist, so I'm a scientist and he's a central banker who's writing all this FUD. 

He writes these really terrible, lazy journal pieces that get published in a journal called Joule.  It's a low-impact journal and it's almost like a magazine article.  He hasn't put a lot of emphasis, or there's not a lot of academic rigour going into his research, and there are a lot of assumptions that he's making.  And then he qualifies them in his papers, right.  He's like, "Well, maybe this and maybe this".  But then it gets picked up by the news --

Peter McCormack: Of course it does, because they want this stuff.

Margot Paez: -- and it's like, "It's dirtier than ever", and then they quote him and he's saying, "Oh, yeah, those miners are gaslighting me".  I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is insane".

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, you're going to be able to do this now, so that's fine, so we'll talk about that afterwards.  Okay, so that's the paper you want to do, but what are the solutions?  What should be the energy mix, where should it be coming from?

Margot Paez: Yeah, so we definitely need to electrify everything as much as possible, because that's a lot more efficient on the energy side.

Peter McCormack: Like cars?

Margot Paez: Yeah, like cars, but also our homes, heating, everything that isn't run on electricity right now, we should transition to.

Peter McCormack: I think we'll struggle with planes.

Margot Paez: Planes is going to take a little while, yes.  But there are some experiments going on there, so we need more investment in that.  But we also need a shift in the way that society works, and part of that is again, we have these really bad incentives.  And the way the economy works is this economic growth idea, like you have to keep growing, your business has to keep growing, your profits have to keep growing, because you have to keep up with inflation, because the money-printing aspect of it, that's a problem.

Peter McCormack: I think this is the area you're going to really struggle with winning hearts and minds.  I think changing the energy mix is doable, because it doesn't affect people's lives, as long as they can have energy, as long as they can drive their car, as long as they can heat their house.  Trying to give people the idea that you're going to shift society away from growth and the importance of GDP, that's a toughie.

Margot Paez: Yeah, it's tough, but I think Bitcoin is useful in that because of the monetary cap.  So, Bitcoin can grow in a way that could possibly track our energy needs over time.  And this is not so detached from something called "degrowth", which is a big deal in the climate movement.  And for the first time actually in this recent IPCC report, they actually mention degrowth.

Peter McCormack: What's degrowth?

Margot Paez: So, degrowth, basically it's this idea where certain aspects of the economy have to stop growing, because their resource use is too much, it's very wasteful, like for example, fast fashion.  And in order to grow the economy, you also need to use energy.  Now, it's not really a question of whether we have enough energy.  Energy abundance, obviously we have the Sun, and renewable energy, and obviously it's a matter of getting these resources online.  But the way we use these resources is incredibly destructive, because the whole goal is for maximising profit. 

So, you have to disentangle that, you have to break that connection.  And the best idea that I can give for bitcoiners really is Jeff Booth's book, and his ideas about deflationary economics and deflationary technology.  And I think that the stuff that he's talked about align very well with the ideas from degrowth. and again, going back to these ideas of localism.  I think that's actually really important, because the level of consumption that we have in the West has really damaged other parts of the world, in the global south.

Our plastics, we ship them off, they're supposed to be recycled.  They get shipped off to South Asia, or whatever, and where do they end up?  They don't really recycle them if nobody's buying them, so they end up just being piled up in their countries.  And, Lyn Alden has talked about this, how countries ship off their high-energy, or their carbon-intensive industries overseas, to make it look like they're actually reducing emissions.  So we, as the rich West of nations, are just polluting these other places for our desire for things that just can be easily replaced.  So we have to change how we operate in society, that's really important.

I think that's obviously going to take a long time to do that, but I think that Bitcoin incentives are aligned with that process.  And when I talk to people in Bitcoin, they're really onboard with that.  People are like, "Yeah, I don't like the way our society works, I don't like that we're so consumeristic.  We used to have products that lasted a long time".

Peter McCormack: That is a universal truth amongst bitcoiners, I find, is that this consumption society is bullshit, it's a fiat --

Margot Paez: Exactly, it's like bad fiat incentives.  So, degrowth is really aligned with that.  But my thing is, how do I get the degrowthers to understand Bitcoin, so we can all be on the same page?  Because unfortunately, some people in degrowth think that MMT is the answer, which it is not.  They're completely missing a whole other aspect here.  Oh sure, yeah, maybe we'll have a jobs guarantee maybe, but what about all those wars?  That money printing is still paying for that.  How are you going to deal with that?  The United States military is the biggest carbon emitter, the biggest polluter.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that came out of Abby Martin.  She was on Rogan's show, she's got a documentary.  Is it out?

Margot Paez: I think it might be out now.

Peter McCormack: Can you look it up, Danny.  I've had mixed views on Abby.  I think she's quite cool, I liked her documentary regarding what happened in Palestine, but she's got a documentary --

Danny Knowles: Earth's Greatest Enemy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, is that out yet?

Danny Knowles: I can't see.  The trailer is, I'm not sure the full documentary is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm very intrigued to see that.  You've not really answered my question on nuclear.

Margot Paez: Oh yeah, let's talk about nuclear.  I also want to talk about coal, but let's talk about nuclear, go ahead, ask me again.

Peter McCormack: Just, are you a fan of nuclear?  Do you think we should be investing in nuclear?

Margot Paez: Yeah, I think it's necessary.  There was a lot of hope for nuclear in the 1940s, and my dad had a book.  It was a 1943 almanac, I remember looking at it one day when I was younger, and in there, everything was about the atomic age.  Our cars were going to be run on nuclear, it was going to be in our homes.  This was cutting edge, this was the future.  Obviously there's risks, there's risks with dealing with the waste, that's important to be addressed.  There's risks of whether the country -- whether uranium can be used to make bombs later on, and it's also very expensive.

So, I don't think it's ever going to be cheaper than renewables, so that's something that we have to understand, and also it takes a long time to build a nuclear facility, at least a big one.  Maybe you can have these small reactors, which people are talking around a lot.

Peter McCormack: These Generation IV reactors.

Margot Paez: Yeah.  Any newer technology has got to be safer than the previous plants.  So, that's something to be optimistic about.  But I think that again, there's always caveats around these things, and we have to understand that there's always risks.  And if we go back to talking about regulations, and who cleans up the mess, that's a big problem that has to be really dealt with and out in the open with lots of transparency.  But I think we do need it.  I think if we could do it right, that would be great.  The Mars Rover has a nuclear reactor on it.

Peter McCormack: There you go!

Margot Paez: So, it makes scientific sense, we just have to be safe about it.  And if that powerplant doesn't explode, great!  That means that the civil engineers who've designed it have designed it to withstand a war.  And if your nuclear plants can be designed to withstand a war, then we're doing pretty well in that regard.  So, I'm hopeful about it.  I think we do need it.  It would be easier to manage than the intermittency of the renewable powerplants.  The alternative is hydrogen.

Peter McCormack: Fission?

Margot Paez: No, like hydrogen gas that would be produced by renewables.  But that's also something in the future; that's not ready yet.  Obviously, nuclear, we know how to do that, but it's going to take us a long time.  Each of these plants is going to take like a decade, and we already have solar and wind, and solar is the cheapest renewable energy on the market right now.  So, we should be bringing on as much of that as possible.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  And what do you say to people who think there's a lot of waste in the production of solar and wind production?

Margot Paez: Yeah, these are all good points, but again, our society's incentives are messed up.  So, how do we address that?  We have to address the whole picture.

Peter McCormack: And is it like, which is the worst scenario?  Okay, we can accept e-waste over climate change.

Margot Paez: Yeah, for now.

Peter McCormack: Is that considered e-waste, the turbines?

Margot Paez: I mean it's not e-waste in the sense that they're not electronic, but it's a manufacturing waste, I guess.

Peter McCormack: So, whatever happens, whether it's renewables, we're going to have manufacturing waste; whether it's nuclear, we're -- do we ship all that off?

Margot Paez: I mean, I don't know how any of that's disposed of.  These panels, they have a lifespan of about 30 years, so these are things that we have to deal with and figure out over the next 30 years.  Of course, some of them will go bad in the meantime, obviously.  I don't know a lot about how they're dealt with when they're disposed.  I guess some of them get buried in the ground, I don't really know, I'm speculating, but yeah, we do need to deal with that.

Anything that we do in our environment has a negative effect.  We just have to manage it, we have to figure out how to manage these negative externalities, because I build a home, well I just disrupted the environment.  I probably built my house on top of an ant colony or something.  I did some minor damage there, but I need to live in a home.

Peter McCormack: Murderer!

Margot Paez: Yeah, exactly!

Peter McCormack: The massacre of those ants!  So, what about coal then; you said you wanted to talk about coal?

Margot Paez: Yeah, so coal is a big Bitcoin FUD, and every time a coal plant gets brought back to life with Bitcoin mining, I get an email like, "Did you see this?  What do you have to say about that?" from friends who are sceptical about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: It's your fault, Margot.

Margot Paez: It's my fault, I'm working against the climate, I've lost my way!  And then I have to go and I have to spend hours digging through these stories, trying to figure out what's really going on.  And the thing with coal again is bad fiat incentives, bad government incentives.  And not only that, it's a just transition issue in some parts.  There was this recent coal plant in Montana, where Beowulf teamed up with Marathon.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I remember, they brought it back online.

Margot Paez: Yeah, and so that was a big deal.  And some people in the community were upset about it.  Okay, but here's the problem.  That power plant was funded through state bonds, and it was to do repairs on it.  And the only way for them to get -- I guess the city was doing the bond.  The only way for them to get that money back is through tax revenue.  But that company, or that utility that was running that coal plant had not paid taxes since 2016 or something.

So, they went all these years with no tax revenue from them, and then there were people employed at the coal plant; we'll say like 100 people.  And now, once that powerplant shuts down, where do they go and find work?  So, that's a just transition.  If we are going to do this transition right, we have to take care of the coal workers, we have to take care of these small towns, because what's going to happen to them if they have no revenue?  They need something to replace it, and nobody is dealing with that.  The federal government isn't dealing with that, they're being completely ignored.

So, what option do they have in this society and in this economy, if you don't have money?  Your only alternative is to starve and become homeless.  What option do you have but to bring your coal plant back, and I think that's what really happened there, was that there was a deal made, because coal is not, right now, especially with more regulations on coal, it's not economically viable.  It's more expensive than renewables, and then you have to deal with paying for how to deal with the coal waste and stuff.  These companies end up going bankrupt.

One way to bring it back is obviously with mining, so that's what happened, but it's a complicated story.  It's not that Bitcoin mining is bringing back coal plants, because there's only really a handful where this is happening in the United States and each one has their own unique story.  It's that there are really bad incentives that are built into the government, and it's making it possible for these things to happen.  Or, it's because of government neglect of people, going all the way back to the beginning of the story, with Occupy and the Great Recession and all that, people being left out and the abandonment of the working class, and people in the white working-class areas.  This is what is happening.

This is a prime example of how that is happening, and how these people are really just looking for a lifeline.  So, in a way, you can say that Bitcoin is providing a lifeline for these people.  Is it the right lifeline?  Is it right to bring back this coal plant because of the carbon emissions?  Of course, obviously we don't want to put more carbon out into the atmosphere, any more CO2­ into the atmosphere, because the more CO2 we put in, the more problems we have going down the line, and the more the average warming of the planet increases, so we don't want that.

But at the same time, you have a human issue here where people are in trouble and we're not helping them.  So how can we help them?  Maybe a UBI is necessary for coal workers for now.  You know, a lot of people on the left are not really fans of UBI for various reasons, and they prefer --

Peter McCormack: And the right.

Margot Paez: And the right, and they prefer a federal jobs guarantee.  But these people may have to leave their home to go and take that job, whatever job the government might guarantee them.  Of course, that's better than nothing, but why not just give them some money so at least they can stay home and keep their families together.  Because, once you start splitting up families, because now you've got to go and work somewhere else, like in the big city or something, I don't think that's really good for the cohesion of that family unit.

But that's speculation on my part.  Obviously, I'm not a sociologist, I'm not a psychologist or anything like that, I'm just a scientist.  But it seems to me, why not just let these coal workers stay home, pay them to stay home and have that money that they need, until something else comes into town.  Maybe there's some state initiative that brings a new manufacturing facility into town, or like something that happened at the Navajo coal plant, and they brought in a manufacturer of homes, like prefabricated homes, to take over that plant.

So, these things can happen, but really the state needs to be involved, and they're being ignored.  So in that case, yeah, it looks bad for Bitcoin, but actually it's more complicated, and all of these coal stories are very similar.  Like with Stronghold, that's a coal waste remediation plant.  The Energy Justice Network had opposed any of this type of coal waste plant in Pennsylvania.  But their alternative was something called Seagrass, I think, and they were like, "This is more natural.  You can just let the grass take over, and it will fortify the soil", and things like that, it will look nicer.  But there's no real scientific studies on this.

I went and dug through the literature trying to find research on this type of grass as coal remediation, and I found next to nothing.  There was one article that said that only the invasive species on this one area where there was coal waste, there was only invasive species that were taking hold there, not any of the native plants, so that's a new problem.

Then the other issue is that these piles of coal waste can spontaneously catch on file, and they're leeching into the water, they're leeching into the soil, and they're contaminating groundwater, which is a major problem.  It's very easy to contaminate groundwater.  It's not that easy to get that contamination out of the groundwater.  There's research that's done on just how to do that, and I know professors in my department who work on that, and it's not easy.  And that groundwater is not "renewable" in the sense of a human lifespan.  It takes hundreds to thousands of years to recharge or refill those groundwater aquifers.  So, you don't want that pollution to get in there, and that's heavy metals and things like that.

The alternative, the only viable alternatives, are these waste coal plants, and that's what Stronghold has been doing.  They're running a waste coal plant.  And they're not meant to be profitable, they're meant to operate on margins, because they're really a remediation.  So, these guys who are running Stronghold, I heard them speak, Nic Carter interviewed them.  And they give a really compelling case and they seem very sincere in what they're doing.  I'm really interested to see some of their studies, because they're claiming a 90% reduction in certain emissions, like sulphur dioxides, which is a very strong greenhouse gas that gets stronger over a certain timescale compared to carbon dioxide, so you don't want a lot of that emitted.  But if they're claiming a 90% reduction, that's massive, that's a really big deal.

So, this right now is our only option to deal with this, because you're polluting the environment, and you're causing people to develop health conditions, cancer; and then, they catch on fire spontaneously.  So now you're emitting CO2, just burning it with nothing, no regulation on that.  At least coal plants had some.  So, that's what I mean.  Everything we do is a compromise.  We have damage, no matter what we do, and these coal plants and the coal waste has been around for 100 years or something.  This is damage that's done, we already did this damage.  We have to figure out how to deal with it in the least harmful way possible.

This right now is the only way we have to deal with this, and I think this is really hard for some environmentalists to understand, because they really want to see a natural way to solve this problem.

Peter McCormack: Well, our mutual friend, Troy Cross, he has an idea.

Margot Paez: Yeah, what his hashrate war?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Margot Paez: I love troy.  I call it the hashrate war!  Let's have this green hashrate war, where we push out all of the fossil-fuel-dependent mining.  But I think he's great and in fact, one of the first times I interacted with Troy was over that paper and I was like, "Troy, let's do a solar farm, and then we can sell hashrate with our solar farm".  But anyway, that was one of my pie-in-the-sky ideas!  But of course, now we work together at BPI. 

But yeah, he's got a really fantastic idea, he and Andrew Bailey, also at BPI, and absolutely it sounds like since his last interview, he's got a lot of people who are interested in trying to make this happen, and I know it's been talked a lot on Twitter.  So, it's really exciting to see where that goes.  The more people who hear about it, especially those who have the money to make things like that happen.

Peter McCormack: Well, he's coming back on with Nic Carter to discuss it again.

Margot Paez: Oh, perfect, that's going to be exciting!  Yeah, that's great.

Peter McCormack: Wow.  Is there anything I've not asked you about that you wish I had?  We've covered a lot.

Margot Paez: No, I think that's most of everything.  There's a lot that we can talk about obviously, but I really wanted to mention the coal thing, because there's a lot of FUD around that, but it's very complicated on the incentives.  Obviously, subsidies are a major problem.  They just funnel banks' money towards these industries and I just hope that people who are listening can be a little bit more openminded about climate change, because it is happening, even if you don't believe it's happening; it is, and it can lead to economic grief for the entire society.  And it's not just for the global self, for us too.  Every time a town burns down in Canada, or in California, or wherever because of these wildfires that are getting bigger and bigger, that's a massive economic loss.  So, if you only care about economics and money on that end, well that's really bad.

Peter McCormack: Let's change the incentives then.

Margot Paez: Yeah, we have to change the incentives.

Peter McCormack: If people want to follow you or read any of your work, where should they go?  Are you going to declare your nym right now?

Margot Paez: Yeah, I'm @jyn_urso on Twitter.  And my previous writings were under a name called @magusperivallon and you can find that on my Twitter page, Twitter profile.  I have it linked there to my Medium articles.  I've also written an article about CBDCs from a progressive perspective, countering Yanis Varoufakis, so I have that up there as well.  And of course, I'm with the Bitcoin Police Institute, and Troy and I will have a white paper out soon there, and hopefully and op-ed soon, once this work calms down.  So yeah, you can find me, @jyn_urso, just like the movie, the Star Wars movie, but with a U.

Peter McCormack: Well, this was fascinating, so thank you for coming on.  When this comes out, I would probably recommend, don't go and read the YouTube comments.  There will be some good ones, I've got some crazy people who follow me on YouTube, and there will be some shitty comments.

Margot Paez: Oh yeah, I'm sure.

Peter McCormack: You're probably used to this.

Margot Paez: Yeah, it's okay.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, thank you.  We will do this again, you're a fantastic guest.  I can't believe this is only your second podcast, which is unbelievable.  Just good luck with everything.  Basically, once we've finished up we'll talk about this, because we'll have you funded so you can go and do this piece of research.  Even if people 100% disagree with you on climate change, I still think those people will want to read that report, because it suits everybody to know about what's happening.  So yes, we will get that funding to go do it, and stay in touch and we'll talk about this again sometime in the future.

Margot Paez: All right, sounds great.  Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter McCormack: No, thank you.