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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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July-August 2018
MEDIA
The answer is Bitcoin.
Now what was the question?
M
AX KEISER is a radical American broadcaster and film
-maker. Alongside his wife Stacy Herbert he hosts
Keiser
Report
, a financial programme on Russian state media
channel RT that features heterodox economics theories
and what they define as ‘Financial War Reports’.
The Inde-
pendent
describes the show as “mischievously seditious” and Keiser
as “America’s most outrageous political pundit”. He boasts a Trumpian
self-confidence.
He also co-hosts the weekly economics programme
Double Down
on Radio Sputnik, presents a weekly show about finance and markets
on London's Resonance FM, and writes for
The Huffington Post
. He
has been an advocate for environmental and libertarian causes. In
2011 he became an evangelist for Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, which is
a type of digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to
regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of
funds, operating independently of a central bank. There are no
physical bitcoins, only balances kept on a public ledger in the cloud,
that – along with all Bitcoin transactions – is verified by a massive
amount of computing power.
He has backed Bitcoin and several other successful, innovative cryp-
tocurrency and blockchain-based (a blockchain is an open, distributed
ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently in
a verifiable and permanent way) businesses through Heisenberg Capi-
tal, and also created the first commercial prediction market and
patented virtual trading currency and securities market, which he
called the Hollywood Stock Exchange and later sold to Cantor Fitzger-
ald. Its technology allows traders to exchange virtual securities, such
as "MovieStocks" and "StarBonds", with (again) convertible virtual
currency, the "Hollywood Dollar”.
His company, Karmabanque (Stacy is "Chief Anarchy Officer"),
intended to short Coca-Cola shares from their then value of $41 to $22
(£11). The campaign said it would "commit to as much money as it
Michael Smith interviews Max Keiser
July-August 2018
4 3
takes to take down Coke". He lived for a long time
in London though he and Stacy left it for a while
last year in fear of regulators, aggressive banks and
energy companies: “the regulators in the UK were
constantly threatening us. Threatening us in a very
belligerent manner. They made us feel as though
our safety was not really secure”. He said he would
return to the US if Trump was elected president,
though he has castigated his fascist and racist ten-
dencies. He now lives in North Carolina.
I met Max Keiser on the periphery of MoneyConf
in June in Dublin. He was engaged, charming and
quickfire at all times.
What do you make of Ireland?
I’ve been coming here for years. I came here during
the 2008 crisis. We were lobbying and rooting for
accountabilit y for the bankers. We felt they had com-
mitted grievous crimes. We got a lot of attention for
that. I did a show with Pat Kenny where I compared
Sean Fitzpatrick and David Drumm to financial pae-
dophiles, that they had the moral character of
paedophiles, that they should be prosecuted as such
– that they should be run out of town.
Since 2008 things have changed. the IMF have pro-
vided the bailout, the property market is back in a
bubble, you had the water charge, the poor are get-
ting screwed once again and the bankers are going
to get another huge bonus again.
Do you think Ireland is worse than other coun-
tries and in what way?
The government in Ireland is one of the most corrupt
in the world. The wealth and income gap is one of
the most severe. The bankers here are atrocious,
reprehensible.
Any particular reason why that’s the case in
Ireland?
I think its because it’s a bit of a backwater and
nobody is really paying attention so it’s developed
into a crony-capitalist culture, and the media plays
along. RTÉ is atrocious, they routinely sensor oppos-
ing views. They routinely give credence to stories
that should never see the light of day – written by
corporations for corporations, by bankers for bank-
ers, by corporations for corporations.
Do you think we’ve handled prosecutions better
than in the US?
There hasn’t been proper prosecution of bankers
anywhere in the world.
Any countries that you admire more than
others?
Bitcoin is the answer. It is self-governing. As the
world shifts over to Bitcoin we can say goodbye to
bankers. We don’t need them.
What is the appeal of “crypto-currencies” like
Bitcoin?
You don’t need a banker. I can send you value, you
can send me value, without an intermediary. There’s
no third party needed to validate the transaction.
Bankers are horrible.
What’s really going on in the global
economy?
Central banks continue to inflate the debt to GDP
Ireland is a bit of
a backwater and
nobody is really
paying attention so
it’s developed into
a crony-capitalist
culture, and the
media plays along.
RTÉ is atrocious’
LOWER
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July-August 2018
MEDIA
Numbers to unsustainable levels – 240%. It will end
in a huge bond collapse. We’re in a 5000-year bond
bubble, that is the bubble of all bubbles. Interests
haven’t been this low in 5000 years. Bitcoin is not
in a bubble: bonds are in a bubble.
What is your political philosophy?
Bitcoin – it’s self governing, it’s self deterministic.
Be your own sovereign.
How has your background influenced you – how
did Bitcoin become so central to your life?
I have an extensive background. As an entrepreneur
you’re always looking for freedom to express your-
self, entrepreneurially. It’s been frustrating having
to deal with banking corruption and regulatory
corruption.
Can you talk to me about Israel?
Palestine is an ongoing conflict. US interests would be
best served by taking on board all stakeholders in the
region and finding some equitable way forward. The
Palestinians don’t have any agency in this struggle
and the US could is in a position to provide them with
it. I’d like to see more equitable discourse. No-one is
going to win. It’s simply causing continued conflict
not serving anyone’s interests.
What is Heisenberg Capital?
Heisenberg Capital is a first-generation crypto VC
fund.
Hmmm.
Tell me about Sweet and Sugar
Sweet is a platform that is just launching. It allows
artists, for example musical artists, to reward their
fans using a sugar token which can then be used to
buy stuff online. It has a growing list of artists and
brands as partners, most recently the Black Eyed
Peas. The Sweet platform is the first marketplace
where artists, brands, and cultural influencers can
recognise and reward fans with a digital token
(Sugar) for performing meaningful social and user
actions.
It’s a way to reinvent social media so that fans
can be compensated for being fans. I advise on the
economy. The Sweet economy is a $20bn token econ-
omy. I’m advising the company about the best way
to manage their economy. Of course I have extensive
experience in virtual economies having invented
one. They also are looking transition to a public
blockchain, and I’ll be helping them.
What is Karmabanque?
Karmabanque was a project that star ted in the early
2000s. It is a way to monetise dissent by allowing
people to focus on the weapon of no-cost, the boy-
cott, and to turn that into an effective monetary
and financial weapon by organising boycotts
around two key metrics: companies that are vulner-
able to a boycott and companies that are the most
hated. Karmabanque is a database that selects com-
panies that are the most hated/vulnerable and
exposes them to a universal boycott. It simultane-
ously encourages hedge funds to make negative bets
against, or short-sell, that company. Customers
remove their sales from the company, the stock price
goes down and shor t sellers benefit. A portion of the
short-sell profits are used to expand the boycott.
You’re marr ying hedge funds and activists to redirect
how money flows in an economy to suit the
activists.
How did it work?
The hedge funds loved it but the activists hated it.
I went to the then President of Greenpeace who told
me that Greenpeace survives on the $5 street con-
tribution and they cannot be anywhere near
associated with high finance. It would alienate their
basic $5 contributor on the street. I explained to him
that his system had been around for decades and it
just doesn’t work. The ecology is still collapsing and
maybe there is a need to consider another strategy
at which point he said he was not interested. The
problem was the activists. Activists want to feel
good - they don’t really want to do anything. Green-
peace, liberals in America… they want to feel good
but they don’t want to do anything, change anything
– it’s all about virtue signalling. I’m all about entre-
preneurialism, doing things.
Talk to me about the politics of finance as an
exclusive mechanism for tackling environmental
problems.
It’s a mechanism that should be given more serious
consideration because the political avenues have not
worked so I think it’s time to consider something
new.
In addition to conventional means?
You know, my Karmabanque strategy is to redirect
the economy in ways that suit the activists. But I
found the activists are just not interested. They’re
interested in continuing to feel good, in saying they
want to change. They don’t want change. There is
not a critical mass of people who want change, there
are people who don’t want change and there are
people who say they want change but do not want
change. There are very few people who would
Open-source is still free – that’s the
freest expression, the greatest hope
against a purely tyrannical State
We try to help
free-market
enterprises to be
censorship-resistant,
permissionless and
State-threatening
July-August 2018
4 5
actually pursue actual change – usually that occurs
on a local basis: one individual decides they can
invent a new light bulb made from recycled plastic
bottles and it has a huge impact in Africa and it
catches on for a year or two. Or Micro-financing in
Bangladesh was a fantastic financial solution for
empowering women but it got taken over by big
banks and they drove it out of business.
Do you have a normative view as to what
should be society’s standard store of value? For
example carbon has been mooted as the ulti-
mate store, that gold really has no intrinsic
value whereas carbon is scarce and
life-determining.
A store of value allows you to spend money in the
future. According to Aristotle gold was the perfect
store of value and form of money because it was: fun-
gible, divisible, portable and desirable, and so carbon
misses out on a couple of those things – portability,
though a diamond is portable – the fungibility is not
great with diamonds because there are many grades.
[I say I’m talking about trading carbon emissions]
That’s a whole different scheme, the carbon credit
scheme. There’s a school that thinks Bitcoin is not a
store of value like gold, though I think it is – it’s a store
of value. It is a good medium of exchange, or is it nei-
ther? A carbon credit scheme is using the financial
markets to transfer the cost of carbon emissions from
emitters to create credits available to individuals as
credits. They then can use that to buy, it becomes
money to them. It’s an income transference scheme
like a universal Basic income scheme. When it was first
introduced I supported it in the
Ecologist
magazine in
the UK under Zac Goldsmith. It’s a really great idea and
it could easily be done. I think the vested interests of
the energy industry will do what they always do to
ensure it will get any traction but of course it’s a great
idea.
How central is equality, particular the redistribu-
tion of resources in accordance with need?
Equality can take many forms. This brings up the two
major socio-economic and political schools of the last
100 years. Broadly, you have communism/socialism on
the one hand and capitalism on the other. Socialism is
very much concerned with equality and capitalism is
not. But I disagree.
In Socialism because it’s a top-down hierarchical
structure, power is not distributed as advertised.
Power ends up concentrated within a very small group
of people who are then trying to do something impos-
sible – to create prices for the market. No-one can do
that so it fails. Only the market can create market
prices. You don’t see the equalit y promised. Show me
an example where it worked. The Northern European
countries are mixed economies, not pure socialism or
communism.
Let’s look at capitalism. Capitalism has the chance
of equality because you’re distributing goods and ser-
vices and ideas in a way that market forces are
determining accessibility and, let’s call it, price. Price
can mean availability. In Africa which has been
plagued by top-down dictatorial governance, you
introduce cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin which can be
traded freely over cheap phones and internet ser-
vices. These economies grow and thrive – there’s
equality of a price. The price that farmers in Africa
can offer to the market 100 miles away – transferring
funds using Bitcoin; and that works. That’s equality:
that’s equality of opportunity, equality of price.
[I say
that it is not equality of outcome]
The outcome is that
all those want to par ticipate in a sustainable economy
that is self-nourishing are free do so. It doesn’t pre-
vent anyone from participating in that economy,
whereas in socialist economies not everyone can be
Max, Stacy and friend on Russia Today
There is not a critical
mass of people who
want change, there
are people who don’t
want change and
there are people who
say they want change
but do not want
change
4 6
July-August 2018
the leader of the Communist Par ty for example. That’s not equal-
ity of outcome for everyone – that’s a rigid hierarchical system.
It doesn’t work. That’s why China went a different model. The
government can’t decide the price of a commodit y, good or ser-
vice, in a rigid way because it leads to distortion.
Do you think people are more naturally inclined to free-
dom than equality?
People are going to mimic nature, and nature mimics free-mar-
ket capitalism. Look at photosynthesis for example. It breathes
in carbon and the green leaf exhales oxygen. It’s a perfect
market.
Where will the media be in ten years?
The media has now overlapped the surveillance state. It’s not
about pricing any more. It’s about human rights. Initially free-
dom of speech was considered a human right, now it’s not
merely being mispriced or not made available, it has been lit-
erally eviscerated, destroyed, by the surveillance state. At this
current rate I see the media and free speech being eliminated
within ten years.
Do you still believe that
the media are going to the
price point called free?
I said that in Los Angeles
when Napster was intro-
duced. The studios were
fighting Napster and of
course free music had
transformed the music
industry but it did not get
rid of Bittorn and other free media and you see the spirit of
free access is available in open-source projects like crypto-
coins such as Naxcoin. Naxcoin was created by fans of the
Keiser Report and everyone is contributing to that freely. It’s
creating a product that will be easily accessible and you can
exchange value on it. That trend of moving towards freedom
is alive and kicking in open-source software development.
That’s where you see the clearest expression of it right now.
Why did Microsoft buy Github for $7.5bn in June? Because
they couldn’t compete with Free. What they do with it will be
interesting. They kind of messed up Skype when they bought
it. Open-source is still free – that’s the purest expression of
free speech, the greatest hope against a purely tyrannical
State. If there are enough people living within that open
source community, they will be the ones doing battle against
the surveillance state. But the surveillance state clearly has
many tools that it can use.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I don’t see much change to Max and Stac y. We’ve been doing
this for ten years. We travel the world and report. We report
on financial hotspots, on Fintech and Bitcoin. We try to give
people an insight into what’s happening on the ground in
these locations where there are pockets of resistance. Bit-
coin is the currency resistance. We try to a place where we
are channelling the best of the best: that’s entrepreneurs
that software developers the best builders of products that
will help free-market enterprises to be distributed, censor-
ship-resistant, permissionless and State-threatening.
MEDIA
At this current rate I
see the media and
free speech being
eliminated within ten
years
