0:00 And if people make mistakes with the monetary policy, they don't suffer as a result, I think. 0:07 It's hard to even tell that they have made a mistake because there's no control group or 0:11 anything. And so I think that what Bitcoin represents is this safety valve. It gives 0:19 people an alternative. If they don't like how the monetary policy in their country is being run, 0:24 they can switch to Bitcoin. And if they don't like how Bitcoin is being run, 0:28 they can switch to some other cryptocurrency. 0:45 So hello, and welcome to another episode of Chatter. Today, I'm talking to Paul Sztorc, 0:51 who is an independent Bitcoiner and Bitcoin researcher. I hope I pronounced your name 0:56 right. So welcome to the show, Paul. Thank you very much. No problem. So before we start, 1:03 I have to plug two things really quick. First of all, my book, Brexit, the Establishment Civil 1:07 War, is now available to order. You can get it on Amazon, on bookshop.org, and hopefully in some 1:13 bookstores now that places are opening back up. And also, I have to plug our sponsor, ExpressVPN. 1:19 You currently get 35% off of 12 months of ExpressVPN when you follow the link in the 1:24 description below. So, Paul, we are here to talk all about Bitcoin, since it's been very, 1:30 very in the news. And this is hopefully the first of many podcasts on cryptocurrency and 1:36 decentralized finance that I'm going to do. So why don't we just lay the ground for the 1:40 conversation we're going to have. To you, what is a cryptocurrency? 1:45 Okay. Well, the crypto part of the word, it refers to cryptography, obviously, but that's in direct 1:53 contrast to a government fiat currency. So when you have the US dollar or British pound or euro, 2:01 you basically, at the end of the day, if you boil it all down, you have an account with the 2:06 government. You may have an account with a bank, but that bank has an account with the central 2:12 bank, which is run by the government. So really, at the end of the day, you have an account with 2:17 the government, that's your fiat, your traditional government currency. And this is in direct 2:23 contrast to that, where you have basically an account that is calculated by a software algorithm. 2:31 And so the big implication of that is that the software algorithm, it doesn't have any idea if 2:36 you are physically located in any individual country or breaking any laws or doing anything 2:42 politically subversive. It doesn't know if you're white, black, male or female, 2:48 four years old, if you're not even a person at all, and you're just a computer following 2:52 instructions. So that's the big practical distinction. So where did you first come 3:01 across the idea of a digital cryptocurrency? When did it first cross your radar? 3:07 Yeah. Well, it's funny because people had been telling me about it for a while, and I always 3:12 thought this is the stupidest thing ever. And in fact, the story I often tell, which is 100% 3:18 the truth, is that there was this free state project where a bunch of people in America were 3:23 going to move to the state of New Hampshire and then politically organized to become more active 3:29 there. And they were sending out emails about coordinating this big project. And I had signed 3:33 up for the email list. And one of them was like, if you come, we'll give you free Bitcoin. It was 3:38 like 50 free Bitcoin or something. If you go, this is like in 2010 or something, a long time ago. 3:43 And I literally was so angry. I was like, these stupid libertarians. You can't run money like 3:50 this. You can't just start a new one up because of network effects and because it's a victim of 3:56 its own success. If it succeeded, someone else would be copycats. And so actually, 4:01 I remember distinctly, something like that email stood out as being annoying. And I unsubscribed 4:06 from the mailing list either immediately afterwards or sometime after. I was like, 4:10 this is just so stupid. I can't believe I ever threw in with these jokers. 4:16 But what really changed my mind completely about it was there was an article about Silk Road. 4:22 I think it was in Gawker maybe or Wired. I don't remember. But there was an article about 4:30 Silk Road. And it just explained a couple of things. One was that these people absolutely 4:38 needed Bitcoin to complete the transaction. They couldn't use a credit card. It would have 4:43 their real name on it. They couldn't use like a check. They couldn't use cash because you'd 4:48 have to just mail the cash to someone or whatever. And that's not a great idea. 4:56 And so they absolutely had to use Bitcoin to do the transaction. 5:02 But what also struck me as interesting about it was that a bunch of crazy drug 5:06 dealers and drug addicted people, they had gotten it to work. It was a complicated technology, 5:13 but it worked well. It was user friendly enough to be used. And that really caught me by surprise. 5:19 I was like, huh? Because you thought about it as this complicated thing. But then you're like, 5:24 oh, random guy down the street. I mean, the joke's on you, right? Random guy down the street 5:30 is already using this. And Silk Road was doing enormous amounts of revenue. And it was enormously 5:35 profitable. So just objectively, the economic value was there. And so I thought, well, this 5:41 is going to be for every illegal transaction in the world. But it can also be used for every 5:48 legal transaction in the world. And the illegal, illegal distinction, a certain time and place, 5:56 like slavery was once legal in the United States. In fact, I'm in Connecticut right now. There used 6:00 to be a law that said if someone came up from the South and just pointed at someone and said, 6:06 that person escaped from my slave plantation in the South, you had to help capture them and return 6:11 them to the South. Or you could be fined an enormous amount of money and sent to jail for 6:16 the Fugitive Slave Act. So that was a law at a different time. And all around the world, 6:21 we have different governments who, governments are just not perfect. And societies figure out 6:28 what the law is over time. The law is growing and changing and improving all the time, which means 6:33 that at every stage in its evolution, it has flaws that need to be fixed. But it also includes 6:39 all kinds of stuff like just trying to get your money out of China and escape the country with 6:44 your life or something or anything in, what are you going to do if you're female and you're in 6:52 Saudi Arabia or something? What are you going to do if you're in a country with hyperinflation? 6:57 So this whole legal, illegal thing, everyone likes to, of course, pretend like 7:02 they would never, ever, ever, ever be associated with anything illegal. And 7:08 they wouldn't go out with someone who would and blah, blah, blah. So it's like, 7:12 you want to avoid this thing. But deep down, we all know that there's a lot of tax laws that no 7:17 one obeys. There's speeding on the highway. There's a lot of these city ordinances about 7:23 when you can mow your lawn, blah, blah, blah. So I was just kind of like, oh, wow, this thing is 7:28 taken off. I thought it was so dumb. It's actually so practical. And people are already using it. 7:36 And I just thought, what's missing is that everyone else is thinking as I thought before 7:44 when I got the email. I was like, this is some scam or some stupid thing. That's the mistake. 7:51 They don't realize that the project is already completed. They're already being used in commerce. 7:57 Hmm. Yeah. The idea has already reached its conception. It's not like they're still 8:02 figuring out how to work it. It's more about integration now than it is about 8:08 figuring out how the technology itself works. Yeah. The thing I want to mention about the drug 8:13 dealer thing, it was kind of important because you would think the drug dealer is already criminal. 8:17 So if they could steal the money, they would. Yeah. Because they've got nothing. And also, 8:21 the drug addicts, they really want the drugs. So if they could gain the thing and spend the same 8:26 money twice or something to get more drugs, they would. So you had the situation where actually 8:31 really, really selfish people who had nothing to lose. It was working for them. And so I was like, 8:38 oh, man, that was what made me think the project is already finished. 8:44 So you're saying if there was an opportunity to exploit it for fraud or if there was a way 8:51 to scam people specifically by attempting to make transactions in cryptocurrencies, 8:59 Bitcoin in this case, but like in any other cryptocurrency, that they would have already 9:05 done it. That would have been the first breeding ground for it would have already resulted in loads 9:11 of scams. But instead, it worked. And that's, for you, one of the remarkable parts of it. 9:16 Yes, it was very stress test. Everyone wanted this transaction to fail, the buyer, the seller, 9:23 the government. But it would still go through. So that's what made me really think, oh, I had 9:30 really misunderstood it. And I was like, oh, I have to look into this more. 9:34 And then you look into it more and you learn a lot more about your own. At first, I was like, 9:40 why don't they just use credit cards on this site? And then you're like, oh, of course, because 9:45 your name and your address is on there. But it's more than that. It's like you call up the credit 9:50 card company and just say you didn't buy something, you lost the card. They always make the merchant 9:54 eat it. So there's like this entire world that you don't see if you're like just merely a consumer 10:01 or even just like an upper middle class white guy. You just sail through life and you just think, 10:07 oh, like cash, a check, a credit card, a debit card are all like equivalent to you. But then 10:12 you start to dig into this and you're like, oh, there's all these big differences. 10:18 I mean, I guess the speed of which it can be done is also a bonus, especially if you're talking 10:24 about transferring money around the world. But the big question I want to kind of ask here 10:31 at the start, I say at the start, we've been talking for a while, but anyway, 10:34 is that up until the 1970s in America, and I'm not actually sure when we came off the gold 10:42 standard in Britain, but essentially the money in America, the dollar was backed by gold up until 10:51 the 1970s. I think it was 71, 72, it got removed. And so it was no longer backed by something 11:00 physical. It was just based on each individual's trust in the dollar, like the dollar will still 11:07 be worth $1 in one week, one month, one year, save for a small inflation. It's a safe place 11:18 for your money to be in, the dollar. It's not going to get hyperinflated out of existence. 11:23 It's not going to just, people are going to continue to take it. It's all based on our 11:28 confidence in the fact that the price will remain the same. So what is the difference here between 11:36 Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency now and how we now operate the financial system where our currency 11:46 may be like the central issued currency of a government, but it's not actually backed by 11:50 anything physical? What's the difference here between that and Bitcoin, aside from the obvious, 11:55 like the fact that it's digital? Yeah, well, I mean, the US dollar and most currencies are 12:01 almost completely digital already. And in fact, all currencies are really abstract if you kind of 12:07 think about it, but even like, you know, the cash in your wallet is really like a physical coupon 12:12 for the digital account at commercial bank. Commercial bank has an account at the central 12:18 bank. I think, well, let me see if I can try to answer your question. I mean, both of them 12:24 are really backed by nothing and they're really both digital. That, or we're just to say they're 12:30 backed by the community that would accept them. And the question is, why would someone accept 12:39 something for the first time if no one else is accepting it? But that turned out to have, 12:44 in Bitcoin's case and in fiat currencies case, that had turned out to have an answer, 12:51 which is that people would, you had a reason to believe that people would accept it in the future. 12:55 So I can get more into that if you'd like, but let me see if I can try to drive it exactly with 12:58 your, what is exactly your question is, how is it? I mean, as I said, one is run completely by 13:04 software algorithm and the other is not. And so the other is run by people. And so when you have 13:10 people involved, you have a lot of advantages. People can use reason, they can just get out of 13:15 a bad rule that they don't like. They can just, you know, in an emergency, they can just drop the 13:19 rule if they don't like it. But there's also a lot of disadvantages because you have basically 13:26 corruption. How do you know that the people are running it in the best interests of the users of 13:32 the currency and not in their own interests or in some, someone else, some politician's interests? 13:39 You really don't, unless you join the team and work for 30 years and try to learn everything 13:45 about what they're doing, it'd be very difficult for you to even tell whether or not they are 13:50 corrupt. But in the case of cryptocurrency is there's just this algorithm and a lot of people 13:57 have, the algorithm itself has been, it could be many ways, but the ways that this Bitcoin is, 14:03 for example, they made choices that are like the fixed, the 21 million coin limit, the fixed supply, 14:09 we will only create so many units. And this is now hard-coded into the software. 14:16 So it's a very hard limit, you know, it won't, it won't be changed by any person. 14:21 And so then when people say, well, what do I want to, you know, I have some savings, 14:23 do I want to hold it in US dollar, which can be, you know, of which an infinite amount can 14:28 be created tomorrow and which trillions is being created tomorrow, you know, it's, it's, it's, 14:34 of which an infinite amount can be created tomorrow and which trillions is being created 14:40 as we speak, or do I want to hold it in Bitcoin where I know that this is the exact schedule 14:49 that the money would be created and it won't change at all because it's hard-coded in. 14:56 So what is, what is the idea of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mean to you? Because I've seen 15:02 and listened to a few people talk about it as, as this revolutionary piece of technology, 15:06 that's going to change the world and upend all of our current institutions, financial, political, 15:11 societal, otherwise, that it's just going to change the entire world, upend power structures, 15:18 finish fiat money altogether, that we will all just be using Bitcoin for the future. 15:26 What is, obviously these people are quite optimistic, but I mean, 15:29 they're a lot closer to being right than anyone would have said that they were this time last 15:34 year. So, I mean, I don't think we can rule them out, but what does it mean to you? Like, 15:40 what does the technology represent in your eyes? Yeah, well, I agree with those people. I'm 15:46 optimistic. I'm a believer to me. I really think that it's a lot of things at once. I mean, a lot 15:51 of people would just say it's freedom or whatever, but I think that, I mean, I have a training in 15:56 economics and I have a lot of education training and I've worked in the field of economics in the 16:04 United States for a while. And I think that a lot of economics, including monetary policy is 16:12 pre-scientific, which is to say there's no, scientific to me is like error correction over 16:20 time. And if people make mistakes with the monetary policy, they don't suffer as a result, 16:27 I think. It's hard to even tell that they have made a mistake because there's no like control 16:32 group or anything. And so I think that the, what Bitcoin represents is this safety valve. It gives 16:40 people an alternative. If they don't like how the monetary policy in their country is being run, 16:45 they can switch to Bitcoin. And if they don't like how Bitcoin is being run, they can switch 16:49 to some other cryptocurrency. So that it restores competition, currency competition. 16:57 Something that's kind of been erased in a way over the past sort of 20, 30 years with the, 17:03 like for in Europe, for example, they've erased nearly all of the European currencies in favor 17:09 of the Euro. The dollar has become like really, really widely used around the world. I mean, 17:15 I can't, I still can't get over the fact that I was in Vietnam, like the country that was 17:19 terrorized by America for 40 years and aside from their own currency and sometimes even more. 17:24 So they want the U S dollars. I still find that such a bizarre thing. I was like a bizarre concept 17:32 because you're so far from America. You're seemingly no link, but people, people trust 17:36 the dollar so much that for whatever reason, I mean, maybe that'll change with how much of it 17:42 is being printed at the moment, but it's it's hard to imagine something other than that being, 17:50 being the world currency. Do you, do you really see like a digital currency becoming 17:56 the global standard in a, in, in a way? Well, I think it's, I certainly think it has the 18:02 potential. I don't think it's inevitable, but I do think that it it's absolutely possible. I mean, 18:10 how it would happen would be these lower, but you can see how, like, if there's many, 18:15 let's say there's 200, let's say there's 150 currencies that whoever's in last place. 18:24 No one really wants that currency other than the fact that they, the local people that they trade 18:29 with often are using it, but that's vulnerable to being taken over by like the U S dollar 18:35 then low, or something like Bitcoin that is kind of everywhere at once. 18:40 So you can see it just working its way up the list and having these lower currencies die 18:44 and get observed and absorbed into the larger currencies. And then you can just see, maybe 18:50 there'll be a world where there's only like, you know, the British pound, the Euro, the Yen, 18:56 the U S dollar, the Chinese R and B and like couple currencies and then Bitcoin. 19:08 And then you can just see, you know, it'll just, there'll be a new, there'll always be a currency 19:14 on the list that is the lowest rank. And that one people will just think, well, maybe I should hold 19:21 Bitcoin with my savings. And then if I want to hold Bitcoin, maybe I should accept 19:28 Bitcoin cut out the middleman. And then they just think maybe I should try to earn Bitcoin 19:33 since that's, maybe I should try to, now that I have all this Bitcoin, I want to spend it 19:36 cut out the middleman that way. So yeah, it has that potential. 19:44 So how close or how long do you think we are away from like a more mass adoption? 19:51 We're, we're kind of, we're obviously in the middle of like a big crypto boom at the minute 19:55 over the past six months. We're like the, the, the, the market cap of both individual 20:01 cryptocurrencies and generally is just skyrocketing. Like I can't believe Dogecoin 20:07 made millionaires out of people. That's, it's just madness. I know my brother has a, 20:13 has a hardware wallet that he can't access with a whole bunch on that he'd mined in like 2013. 20:18 So he's not particularly happy about that. But yeah, exactly. I mean, my mom, my mom can't get 20:25 the heck their head around the fact that he can't get access to it. She was like, Oh, why can't she, 20:29 why, you know, why doesn't he have a backup code or why can't he email someone about it or, or. 20:34 Email someone. Yeah. 20:35 Yeah. Yeah. But. 20:37 Can't email anyone. Yeah. 20:39 Yeah, exactly. But it, it, it begs the question for me then, 20:45 where do you get that, that crossover point where not just, you know, like internet, 20:53 you know, denizens and, and people who are obsessed with technology, when does it, 20:58 when does it become, or can it even bridge that gap? Or are we simply just going to wait 21:03 for the people who like legacy money, as I'm not calling it and to sort of just. 21:11 Die off. 21:12 Die off essentially, or just, or, or succumb or. 21:16 Max, I think it's commonly misattributed to Max Planck, but didn't he say, someone said 21:23 science progresses funeral by funeral. Yeah. 21:26 I think he didn't actually say that, but. 21:28 I guess one funeral at a time, I think is the, is the quote, but yeah. 21:35 And well, I think, you know, you have to consider that, consider like other things, 21:40 like the car, but, or also the internet though, basically it's a big one. You know, you can see 21:46 how in, you know, in the seventies and eighties and nineties, the people in the, who got involved 21:54 in the internet were very atypical. But now today, you know, you can't, you can't exist 22:01 without, you try to open like a bakery or something, and you don't have a, you don't 22:05 have a website, you know, you, you basically can't. So, you know, that took a while, but 22:15 there's a lot of reasons to believe it would be faster with Bitcoin, because first of all, 22:20 the, all technological progress is changing at an accelerating rate. So it's just later, 22:25 but also the internet never like really, really, really, really disproportionately 22:31 rewarded you personally, if you were early, like in, in like secret, untraceable internet, 22:38 untaxable, like eCash or something. So there's like a huge incentive to like learn really, 22:44 really quickly. I think that will obviously a second factor that would make it go much faster 22:52 than internet adoption. Obviously there's an enormous learning curve, but think about the 22:57 learning curve with the internet also. There was all this stuff about everyone had to learn about 23:02 like how to unplug your router and plug it back in and like how to like what were all the things 23:10 that people, you know, people had to learn like how to use a web browser, how to use, you can do 23:14 this now, but I remember when you couldn't, like when you used Google, you couldn't like type in, 23:19 like, you know, where is the nearest bakery or something, question mark, enter, like you can, 23:25 you can do that now, but there was a time when you couldn't do that at all. 23:30 You can type that in, the results would just be nonsense. And, but you had to like learn how to 23:35 use Google, like, okay, most important word first, second word. I always put like troubleshooting, 23:41 if it's about, put the name of the software program, you know, they're like, oh, the stuff 23:45 that we all know now that we had to learn over a long, many people had to learn how to type. 23:51 Doctors in America didn't know how to type at all until like many of them still don't 23:54 really know how to type because this is considered like assistance work. They just 23:58 write it out and someone else will type it. So, you know, yeah, it's laughable, right? That you 24:04 could have such an elite professional, but they had to do, when they did the electronic medical 24:09 records, they had to have like talk to speech dictation software. This was like 20 years ago 24:15 when that software was like cutting edge and it like basically sucked. They had to do it because 24:20 so many doctors could not, you know, type. It sounds incredible, but that was reality 24:29 because this was just considered like a secretary skill that you wouldn't do if you were the elite 24:34 doctor. I don't, you know, you should talk to someone who was in the industry. I don't know 24:37 that much about, but that was like a, that was like a shocking, you know, there's just all these 24:43 things, you know, society is always going to change. Remember like barcodes were invented, 24:46 you know, in like the fifties and sixties. That was like a weird idea at first. So I don't know, 24:53 you know, you ask like how long is it going to take, but I think probably, 24:57 you know, we look at how far it's come in the first 10 years. 25:00 So the first 10 years went from totally being written off by everyone to now today, where it's still mostly misunderstood, but you do have a big difference today. 25:07 I think Elon Musk like really was like a watershed moment or a milestone or whatever metaphor you want to use, because he happened to be the richest person on the planet, but he's also like inescapably serious person. 25:23 Like, obviously he's very funny on social media, but he, he like means business, right? Like he's not screwing around. Like he will get the rockets to land right side up. If he wants to start, you know, a company that puts a microchip in your brain, or he wants to start a company that, you know, 25:47 Bill Gates wouldn't get away with that. 25:49 Yeah. That's the irony. There was a funny meme about that. That was like all this, like whatever Bill Gates. And then it was like the skepticism of the vaccine brain control. And then it was like, Oh, I called my beer or whatever part of Elon Musk would like. 26:06 I'm going to volunteer to direct brain surgery on electrodes. So, but he'll just like, he'll just be like, what do I want to see in the world? Okay. I want more solar power. I'll just build it, you know? So, so something like that. 26:24 It's so, it's so mad to have that level of resources. And I've heard that there's some big thing coming with solar batteries and Bitcoin combined. And I have no idea what on earth that means. I've just seen it in about like, I've seen like six different things about it. And I couldn't, I was like, well, what on earth are these people talking about? So, I don't know. I'll put the link in the description below of what I read, if anyone wants to check out and maybe they understand it better than I do. 26:52 So, do you see this technology, not specifically Bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain as just new money? Or do you see it as something beyond that? 27:08 Yeah, this is a commonly debated thing. Like, will it just take over? I don't know if my point of view is the same as most. Many Bitcoiners are only focused on the money part. But I do think, and I have written about this on my blog a little bit, that I do think it could take over a lot of anything where you would want to have digital property. 27:31 So, Satoshi Nakamoto himself mentioned the domain name system. Like, if you want to buy a domain like google.com or whatever, you have your own domain. Again, right now, you really have like an account with someone who has an account with like ICANN, who has like, if you have an account with someone, you don't really, you own the name because they have decided it's in their best business interest to not, to let you buy one and then not give it away to someone. 27:58 So, that's the whole reason they can sell them for enormous amounts of money, because they don't just, they take good care of them. But really, they're running this whole scheme. Satoshi was part of the invention of something called BitDNS that later became Namecoin. 28:15 That was like, you could do the same thing where instead of owning coins for money, you would really own the domain and the algorithm would calculate very easily. You'd be able to figure out who owned what domain and how to get to their server and stuff. And so, you wouldn't have, like, right now, the domains can be seized by the government and closed down. In this, they could not. They'd have to find the server and seize that. But you could hide the server behind TOR or something. 28:43 So, I think anything, like, if you want to, like, all of your, there's a project, David Vorek, I know, is doing this project, SIA, which is like storage on the blockchain. So, all of your private files, all of your logins and your identity. Obviously, we have, like, the NFTs, which is like digital collectibles. But also, you can manage, like, a cap table of, like, a startup or a company that way. You say, who owns what equity? 29:10 Well, we'll just have this, we'll have the blockchain take care of it. And then if you want to sell it to someone else, you don't even have to, you don't even have to let me know. Like, say, I'm the CEO. I give someone equity. I'll give them 1% of the company. They can do whatever they want. They could lose it. They could sell it to someone else. You know, and I wouldn't even need to know necessarily. They would just own it. And no one else would need to know either. Like, you know, the lawyers or the exchange or something. 29:35 So, I think it could do that. I'm a big proponent of these things, prediction markets, which say that you could have this scheme all inside, hermetically sealed inside the blockchain, where it would be safe from tampering. And people can bet on who they think, you know, what decisions they think should be made and what the consequences would be. 30:03 So, as a result of that, it'd be very easy to figure out, like, who we should vote for, or what law we should have, or who should be the CEO of a corporation. Because you could just say, if this person was the CEO, the stock price would be this. If that person was the CEO, the stock price would be that. And that way, it would have an enormous impact on something that wasn't money, right? 30:25 Because if you were the CEO, you wouldn't want to be fired, right? You'd want to protect your job. But there'd be this thing out there that you wouldn't be able to stop that would say, if they fired you and replaced you with someone else, the stock price would go up. And now you have to work very, very hard. You have to work very hard every day to make sure that you are making the company more valuable. 30:50 Can you go back there a second? I kind of lost you. I heard what you said. I just mean, I didn't quite follow through what you meant. So, you're saying that the blockchain could be used to make companies more secure? 31:05 Well, right now, we have a problem where – so, you can imagine a giant pyramid with the CEO at the top, or the president, or the prime minister, or whatever at the top. And then they have their people that work for them. And then people that work for them, and their staff, and then they produce something that they sell to the customer at the bottom. 31:28 And if you are the CEO, and you don't like what your employee is doing, you can replace them. So, as a result – and you live it every day. So, you're going to work 24-7. Even if you're not there 24-7, you're thinking about your job 24-7. And you have a lot of control and ownership over everything beneath the pyramid. And that's very efficient if the guy at the top is a good person. 31:58 But, of course, we don't always get the best people. It could be someone like, I don't know, Kim Jong-un or something. He's running it very well, but for himself, and not for the benefit, or not for any other – the point is, it's only being run for himself, instead of any other thing it could be run for. 32:13 Now, the question is, how do you know – people always disagree about who should be this top person. And some people say, well, it should be someone from the labor party, or whatever. And some people say, well, it should be this guy, my friend. But then they all disagree. 32:33 And it's very hard for a normal person to know who should be the leader. Especially, just think of the corporation case. One person says, what if someone said we should actually replace Elon Musk with this senior engineer at Tesla? Because he's actually even better than Elon at running the company. 32:54 Well, most people would just be like, I mean, I don't know. That could be true. That could be false. They're going to stick with the devil they know, probably, versus the devil they don't. But no one really knows is the problem. So the problem for the corrupt CEOs is that we don't know which are corrupt and which are good. And the same for the politicians. There's no way of replacing the bad politicians. 33:19 So what you do to solve this problem is you have all this betting. You make all these contracts. Some are worth more money if you replace the CEO. And some are worth more money if you keep the CEO. And some are worth more money when the company does well, and some are worth more money when the company does poorly. 33:37 You multiply them all together in this big matrix. And it's not very easy to describe on a podcast using words, but it's actually pretty – if you just look at it visually, it's – and I'm writing software to make this a lot easier to understand at the moment. But it's not super – I mean, I have slides and visual aids and stuff. 33:56 Would you send me them? I can splice them in when I'm editing this. That would make it more useful for people. But I think I get what you mean. So let me just like – 34:05 Yeah, let me just say the last piece is that you have something out there that pays off a ton of money if the CEO – if you replace the CEO and the company does very well. 34:19 And if that thing is trading at zero dollars, like it would pay off an enormous amount of money, but no one wants it, then this is a clue to you that actually that person wouldn't make a good CEO. 34:33 But you need the whole matrix of prices to really think of it. But that's just what it's getting at. You say, well, I can – you just look at the prices and you just say, well, this is worth money if we replace the CEO and the company does well. 34:45 But you say that we'll never live in a world where the CEO is replaced and the company does well. What if you say we're going to replace the CEO with a monkey and then this is going to pay if the stock price doubles, but otherwise it's worth zero and currently it's trading for zero. 35:01 This is a clue. It's very hard to explain. 35:05 No, I kind of get what you mean, but is this not – so essentially you're asking people or you're going to create a system upon which you can bet on specific smart contracts in a way that have an intrinsic value dependent on the performance of, say, a company in this case. 35:29 And if it – then you're using the betting market or the market of purchase on these smart contracts in order to determine the prevailing sentiment about how that company would do in the case of whatever outcome is listed in the smart contract. Is that – 35:50 Yeah, basically. I mean, you could do all this today. This is called conditional prediction markets. You could do it today. Anyone could do it without the blockchain tomorrow. 36:01 But the trick with the blockchain is it's uncensorable and it's private. You can just say – because everyone is going to be saying – like let's say you work for this corrupt CEO. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to complain? The CEO will fire you. 36:17 Are you going to go over the CEO's head? You're going to try to talk to the board of directors or something and say, well, this guy isn't actually that good. Well, the board of directors is going to think, okay, maybe this guy is right, maybe he's not, but he's going over people's heads. That's not through the proper channels. 36:34 And then you get fired anyway. So most people have just learned over their life, except for like the autistic people or whatever who are immune from this whole – they don't even perceive this horrible political world that we all have to live in every day. 36:48 People have learned all these social skills that help them just live in this world where they have to keep track of who their allies are and do favors for people, be loyal to people, which is all well and good. But often when running the country or when running a big corporation, it just immediately leads to inefficiency. 37:16 So you're essentially allowing the people within a company to bet on its performance with their – isn't that essentially like insider trading? 37:27 Yeah. The original – there was a website called Intrade, and that was the joke of the – Intrade.com, that was the joke of the title as I perceived it, is that it was about insider trading. 37:39 And they pioneered a lot of this and they were closed down in the year 2012, and that is the year that I sort of started to get really interested in blockchain, Bitcoin for the first time. 37:50 So that was when I sort of got into it all the way back then. And so it has a very long history. And yeah, insider trading is a very complicated idea. It's not – but yeah, but you want all the information in the market to be aggregated into one price. 38:08 So it's also irrational to care about where the information comes from. That's the ad hominem fallacy. But yeah, that is part of a – I wouldn't exactly describe it quite that way. But think about it. This is the good information that's being suppressed by a tyrannical leader. 38:27 You want it to get out. It's really whistleblowing is more what it really is. Think about it. If you're the good CEO, then you actually aren't afraid of this at all. It will just show that you're the best. You have to keep working as hard as you can, but you were doing that anyway because you were a good CEO. 38:44 So you're now immune from actually being challenged if you really are the best, and that's how it should be, right? 38:50 I wonder how the betting would look on Citadel's company right now if it was possible. 38:57 Yeah. Well, there are many – I mean for many of these – for large organizations that just the sheer size means it's more – and the sheer complexity, it means that it's almost impossible for a normal layperson to actually figure out, as I was saying before, to figure out who – what the people at the top are doing. 39:14 What if someone said that the US government shouldn't be involved in some military conflict or another? I mean how on earth does a regular citizen even have any idea? As far as we know, I have no idea. Maybe there is something really important there that in 30 years it's all declassified and then we're like, oh, well, that was really important actually. 39:37 No one actually knows any of this. It's too complicated, especially when the organization is big, but also a corporation. A corporation could say – you'd say like, oh, why is the CEO getting paid so much or why are they having this giant lavish party? 39:51 Well, maybe the party is just corrupt. Stealing is just a misappropriation of funds for a party, but maybe there actually is some incredibly clever – like it's essential to make some kind of sale or to trick someone from an arrival company into like doing something or else or who knows? 40:16 You don't actually know which – that's the problem. You don't actually know what is the corrupt thing. And the people in charge don't know how to justify themselves either because they know – like they have the plan. They have the plan for what to do. Their plan might involve throwing a big party like at a strategic moment. 40:34 Maybe to reward their employees, maybe to reward themselves, maybe for some other – just to get a bunch of people in the same room and this is the only way to get all the right combination and this guy's wife is going to ask this other guy's wife and there's this big plan involved that's half subconscious or something. 40:54 And now, what if you had to say something like they have to explain everything in writing to the shareholders? Well, they can't because they have a big strategy that's constantly evolving and it's half secret. 41:07 So, yeah. I like the idea. I actually really like the idea. The one concern I have just off the top of my head like thinking about this and you can correct me if this is a poor assessment of it. 41:21 It's just that one of the things I don't like about the way our modern economic system works, especially in Britain and America, is the increased financialization of everything. 41:38 So, the size of – it's not just the stock market anymore. It's the stock market and then there's the futures market and there's the options market and there's just like – there's that scene in the film The Big Short where they say, oh, you know, if you could have – if you had like $50 million worth of CDO on the market, how much would be betting on it? 42:02 And he's like, a billion dollars. It's like 20 times the size of the market, this gambling, betting, financialization, whatever you want to call it. 42:14 And I'm concerned that that sounds like this is making that even larger. Maybe I'm wrong because maybe the structure would be different if the whole financial system was based on cryptocurrency and blockchain. But yeah, what do you think of that? Is that a bad assessment? 42:35 Well, I don't know about that, a bad assessment. I mean I think – well, there's a different angle. One angle is that there has been the increasing – you could argue that the increasing financialization has made the world less barbaric. 42:46 So in the past, if you live in a tribe and if you like broke your leg or something, people would take care of you just because you're a part of the family. But instead, we would have health insurance today or – I mean the United States is like the exception that – because we – no one knows what we have. 43:06 No, I don't know, certainly. But you either have some kind of health insurance or you have like a government thing that is like health insurance where people – this thing, something will come in and take care of you until you get better. And life insurance – so life insurance used to be – it was invented in somewhere in the UK, I think Scotland or something in a church. 43:28 But it was hated at first because it was thought that if someone – it's like you're making money if your spouse dies or something or if your parents die. So it was like, oh, that's sinister. It had a sinister angle to it. 43:44 It's only sinister if you want your spouse to die. 43:47 Yeah. Well, it's like if the person dies, the church would take care of the kid. So the community would. So why do you need money? This money kind of is like setting people off. Similarly, when the – but you see today, if you didn't buy life insurance for your family, if you didn't, you would be irresponsible and kind of crazy. 44:05 So it's flipped 180 degrees. And people thought that the stock markets were just gambling. But if you really boil it down, like let's say you have a rich guy who has money that he doesn't need and you have someone else who has an idea. 44:21 And that person is currently like whatever, a low-paid janitor or laborer or something. Should they really have to work for 20 or 30 years and slowly save up enough money so they can launch the idea with their own money? 44:37 And the rich guy, meanwhile, he can't do anything with his money. He has to sit there doing nothing. The rich guy can just be an investor. The guy can try his idea immediately. There's no reason for you to be – it's requiring a kind of coincidence that someone have good ideas about production and also be independently wealthy. 45:00 It's like only the independently wealthy people are in. But if you have capital markets, then the ideas are there in their own league, and then the money comes to them. 45:11 So people are often upset by financialization, but similarly, there was a securitization for the – this partially created the housing crisis and financial crisis in the world. 45:25 There was this securitization that you had these mortgages. They would become the CDO, and then anyone could trade it. But what that was supposed to be doing and what it did to some extent – I did go horribly wrong, but what it did do is that – again, let's say you live in like Tulsa, Oklahoma or something, and there's a bunch of people who live in New York. 45:47 Why is it the case that only the savers in Tulsa, Oklahoma can fund mortgages in Tulsa, Oklahoma? 45:56 If you want a mortgage, you have to live in a place where people are saving money. That doesn't really make any sense. It should just be one pool of money that's available to everyone at the best rate, the lowest interest rate. 46:12 It's no different than buying the cheapest, highest-quality apples from a supermarket that are shipped in from wherever. They can be obtained the cheapest way. 46:22 So obviously, that did go wrong because it deleted a lot of information about the mortgages along the way, and then it opened the door to all the scams. 46:29 But I think you can't – to really answer your question, I don't think you can go back. Society can't go – if you want to go back, you have to go all the way back. 46:40 Like as Karl Popper said, you have to return to the beasts, and you have to just give everything up and just – if you want to really defeat the finance people, I think you have to use their own weapon against them, which is the entire financialization thing. 46:58 You just have to make sure it works for you. I mean, you could say like, oh, I don't like being trolled on the internet, so we should just smash the internet to pieces, right? 47:05 But then you have like spam filters, reputation, something. You have to come up with some new thing. Like every problem has a new problem. 47:13 So this isn't really even – this is like a – it's funny. It is a financialization because it's like what Enron was trying to do where they're like monetizing the weather or something. 47:23 This is like that. It's like betting on real-world things that haven't happened yet. But I think the key is to just go problem by problem, and this problem that people don't know how to choose the leader is – obviously, it's like among our biggest problems on the planet. 47:42 And by solving it, we will open the door to new – just as the internet has new problems, if we solve the problem this way, we would open the door to new problems. 47:51 But I don't think that – it's very hard to say like what on earth is – where is it going wrong in finance because money is involved, right? 48:00 It's not like if you do someone a favor, you have to have a good opinion of them to redeem the favor or they have to have a good opinion of you, whatever. 48:08 The point is you always have like this kind of clause. If there's no money involved and there's just friendship, there's always this clause where you say, if I don't like this person, I can just walk away. 48:19 It's funny if they sell you a car, a bad car or something, they can take the money and spend. You can never get your revenge, so I think it's just everything involving money has a kind of suspicion to it and rightly so. 48:35 But you want it to be that way because that's the only way you can get through these other problems like groupthink or whatever. 48:41 Now, this is a rambling answer, but – so I think it won't – I think it's not so bad. I don't think that – I don't think it actually increases financialization significantly. 48:51 And I think instead, a lot of what you had was in the past was a problem of companies, people not caring about how their company would do in the long run. 49:04 A lot of those – in the financial crisis, a lot of people were just like, we're just going to try to get a higher return than the next guy. 49:11 We'll push the leverage because it doesn't matter because I already have an enormous network. 49:16 And I have CEO clauses that are like the golden parachute clauses and stuff that are like, if I get fired for any reason, I get $50 million immediately. 49:28 So they're just like, I don't care. So a lot of it was run badly. So that was – so who knows? 49:35 But I think you can't just go back. Like what are you going to do? 49:38 Like what are you going to do to stop me from even inventing this or to stop the tide of financialization? 49:45 Like what are you going to do? You have to go further into it and try and win. 49:51 And then just wait because there'll be a new arena soon, I think. That's just part of the accelerating. 50:00 That was a rambling answer, wasn't it? 50:02 No, it's all right. Don't worry. 50:04 So say somebody wanted to step in and regulate cryptocurrencies as if they were a security. 50:13 Say the SEC, for example, as they are attempting to. 50:19 How successful do you think they could potentially be? 50:23 We were talking about like going back. Do you think the genie's out of the bottle? 50:28 Like is this just – because I see certain governments kind of scrambling to get up on this. 50:35 Like America's talked about a digital dollar. 50:38 Like Britain has said we're going to make Bitcoin, which is hilarious. 50:42 You've got the digital yen being pushed. 50:45 And it feels like all of these nations are now just suddenly waking up to what this is. 50:52 And they're scrambling to either get a piece of it or put a lid on it. 50:57 Do you think that's even possible? 50:59 That's a good – well, I mean I think we are going to find out, right? 51:03 That's like what we're here to find out. 51:06 But I think it was – it's important to keep in mind that this is what makes Bitcoin different from its predecessors, namely EGOL, Liberty Reserve. 51:16 What was that called? 51:19 There's a whole list. I used to know the whole list, and I used to rattle it off to people, but now it's been so long. 51:24 It got me back to my Bitcoin, which I don't even remember exactly what it was. 51:28 But there were a lot of things. 51:31 But Bitcoin was designed to be decentralized so that it doesn't really – it's not an account with a server somewhere. 51:38 So there is no single spot that you could go to. 51:41 Now, every single spot, it's all peer-to-peer. All the nodes are equal. 51:44 So you have to close down. Instead of just going to one spot and closing it down, you have to close it down to a single spot. 51:49 And that's what we're trying to do. 51:53 It's just designed to be difficult on the internet, especially when they're all in different countries. 51:56 Many of them are behind Tor, and you have no idea where they are. 51:59 But Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized so that it doesn't really – it's not an account with a server somewhere. 52:02 So there is no single spot that you could go to close it down. 52:05 Now, every single spot, it's all peer-to-peer. All the nodes are equal. 52:08 So you have to close it down. Instead of just going to one spot and closing it down, you have to close it down to a single spot. 52:13 And that's what we're trying to do. 52:16 It's just designed to be difficult on the internet, especially when they're all in different countries. 52:19 Many of them are behind Tor, and you have no idea where they are. 52:22 Like Silk Road, the website, that was one server behind Tor. 52:25 And it took them many years to find it and close it down. 52:28 But I think there's like 30,000 or 40,000 Bitcoin nodes behind Tor and like 100,000 that are out in the open. 52:34 And of course, once they start closing it down, people would react to that and start starting them up. 52:43 And if Switzerland and Iran and Brazil are the three countries that allow them all, then it doesn't just spin up more nodes there. 52:53 And then people can VPN into them. 52:56 So there's something, Alan Turing's universality of computation, that you can make anything. 53:03 All the computers can do the same thing. It doesn't matter what country they're in. 53:07 It can all be encrypted to look like something else. 53:10 So it was designed to evade being closed down so that if you live in a country that makes it illegal, you can still access the service. 53:24 And so it was designed specifically to be that the blockchain itself would continue to work regardless of whatever laws are passed by anyone. 53:36 And the blockchain has no idea who you are and if you live in that country or if that law is passed or not, again, on purpose. 53:43 So they could, you know, the SEC can pass whatever law it likes. It could ban Bitcoin from the country. 53:49 But it's kind of like banning like the French language or like banning chess from the country or something. 53:56 It's like, you know, like you can go and find people who are that guy. 54:01 You can put them in jail or you can burn, destroy all the books. 54:04 But, you know, French is like, you know, it's an abstraction. So you can't get rid of it. 54:10 So that's but the other thing is we have many now where many people have been flipped. 54:14 Now there's so much money is involved. We have like senators from Wyoming, the state, you know, the small states. 54:21 And we have like a mayor in Miami. So people have flipped and now they're pro Bitcoin because of the campaign contributions. 54:31 So with the wealth comes the all that corrupt stuff. 54:36 So it's been working for Bitcoin, you know, kind of like for better or for worse or however you feel about that. 54:44 But that now has and you never really know, like a politician could say whatever they like. 54:50 But maybe they after they're done speaking on C-SPAN on TV, they go home and they buy Bitcoin. 54:56 Maybe you have no idea. Like it's hard to tell who the real enemies are or how much they care or what. 55:04 You know, the governments are, of course, mostly distracted by their own. 55:08 Their own issues, you know, have the left versus right, and then we have the entire geopolitical world. 55:14 They're all like worried about all that other stuff. An interesting thing that you brought this up at the very beginning of this question that you asked, 55:20 which is that it's so difficult for most people to understand that by the time it filters into this like weird bureaucratic thing. 55:30 Most of the people in the United States Congress are very old lawyers. 55:34 Yeah. And they, you know, lawyers are kind of like very far away from engineers, especially like Internet Protocol, like researchers. 55:45 So they're going to have to rely on other people. Many people are really confused about what to do. 55:53 And there's also a lot of there's a lot of fear, like cyber attacks, cyber security in the. 56:01 I mean, at least in the public conversation that I can see again, as I was telling you before, I have honestly no idea what they're really doing in Congress. 56:07 But I know what I hear about, you know, they're worried about China. 56:10 Like what if if if what if like you have like China, Japan, Europe and the United States, and it's like whatever China bans, like Japan will probably push. 56:24 And similarly, like so this is part of the cleverness of the design is that you have all these people and these different interests, but it's all on the same Internet. 56:34 So anyone runs, no, even if it's only Japan that runs all the nodes, it doesn't matter. 56:38 The thing will survive. And that adds a kind of futility to trying to ban it. 56:42 And then now you would see a lot of business. So then people want to be pro jobs, pro business. 56:48 So I think it's an answer to answer your question. I would say, yes, the genie is probably out of the bottle. 56:53 But, yeah, again, rambling answer. That's right. 56:56 Who honestly, honestly, how would anyone know? But, yeah, something dramatic is going to happen at some point. 57:02 Some country will make the mistake of trying to of going further and further down the path of trying to suppress it when they are the only one. 57:10 If you would, you'd really have to do is start a big international movement to ban it. 57:15 But that would require a lot of negotiating, you know, like coordination. 57:21 The meetings that would take months and months of transparency that would take years to do best case scenario if they ever do it at all. 57:29 Well, they've been so quick on fixing. Yeah, they've been so quick on the global agreements to to deal with climate change. 57:36 Yeah, I know. I deal with sweatshops and all these other problems that we've had for years that they dealt with immediately. 57:44 We can look with confidence to the exact record of success. 57:49 All right. So, of course, that's exactly what I'm saying. Like, you know, right. 57:53 It's a very theoretical like they could all meet and coordinate to ban Bitcoin. Yeah. 57:57 Right after they do all that other stuff. Yeah. 58:00 But then one of the one country will go, we should just buy some Bitcoin because it will skyrocket once everyone else bans it. 58:07 Thailand or whatever. And they'll be like the Bitcoin country. 58:10 And then, you know, like it's like, you know, it'll be to many of these other countries are run so badly. 58:15 We have the problem in Venezuela. We like Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria. Right. 58:20 Zimbabwe, these countries. No offense to their leaders, but they're just, you know, they're just run badly. 58:27 And there's like an open insurrection by the people that just like ignore. 58:34 But, you know, so those people are now into Bitcoin. 58:37 I mean, as an American, I don't think you're in a position to talk about insurrections being ignored. 58:46 We had a we had like a lot of insurrections. It's a sad thing. 58:51 Those people were just so sad that, you know, you can really. 58:56 Because those people do have to like you see how those people have to go to prison for a really long time. 59:01 But at the same time, you can really just tell that they were just like having fun and they really didn't even know what they were doing. 59:08 And the weird thing is, I don't know. It's an interesting thing. 59:13 That event probably, you know, destroyed a lot of the support for Donald Trump. 59:20 Actually, that's how those things go. So if you whether you liked it or not. 59:27 I mean, we all learned something. Oh, yeah. 59:32 And yeah, one of the things was that it's just actually really easy to just break into that building, you know? 59:38 Yeah. I mean, by the looks of things, they just like I felt I feel bad for the people because they just sort of. 59:44 It looks like the police just sort of opened the gates after a while. 59:48 Like, yeah, go for it. And the people just sort of idly stumbled in. 59:52 But this is part of the thing. There was actually an incredibly complicated, like game theory going on, because if those were actually like, you know, soldiers from the Chinese Communist Party or something, there would just be like all this machine gun. 1:00:05 They would never have gotten in. Actually, they'd be like people flying in on helicopters, shooting missiles and stuff. 1:00:11 But it was because it was like so non-threatening. 1:00:16 That the police were like, I don't want to be like the guy who just opens fire on a protester and just kills them, you know? 1:00:22 So it was because it was so objectively not a threat that paradoxically they were able to like. 1:00:28 So there was a lot of like kind of complicated stuff, a lot of context going on. 1:00:32 But it's sad because you can't you can't like carve out an exception for people say, oh, you know, if you're only having fun, then you don't have to go to prison. 1:00:42 It's like, you know, like yikes. And it just gave it it's annoying because it actually gave all those those people that gave a lot of people a lot of political fuel. 1:00:54 You know, like now the left in Congress could say. 1:01:01 See, we told you so, you know, he was Adolf Hitler the whole time. 1:01:05 Now we need to put in and they closed everything down. If you go to Washington, D.C. 1:01:09 Now there is like they have like barricades and it's very 1984-esque. 1:01:13 They're very well protected now, but it looks creepy and annoying. 1:01:18 So that's it. Yeah, it was. Well, that was obviously an interesting event. 1:01:23 Yeah. It's a testament to America, though, that most people wouldn't. 1:01:27 Americans have a very healthy disdain, actually, for the whole thing anyway. 1:01:32 And so even if someone took control of Congress, most of most people just wouldn't care at all. 1:01:37 And they were doing even like most governors probably wouldn't care. 1:01:41 Every state would just keep marching on the same way. Yeah. 1:01:44 Before it's part of we have our free speech and we have our Second Amendment. 1:01:48 People would just people would just be like, I don't care. 1:01:51 Yeah. I mean, I'll take I'll take the horns guy over Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. 1:01:55 Right. Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people just hope like this, like the State of the Union. 1:01:59 We're all in the same room. It's like a common joke to just help. 1:02:02 Like, why can't we have just the meteor fall and just get rid of all of them? 1:02:07 And if you ever watch Designated Survivor, that doesn't go well. 1:02:12 But anyway, I feel like we got a bit off topic and we're we're. 1:02:16 Yeah, I'm hoping to shoot on here in a little bit. 1:02:20 So do you want to just give people some info about what you do, where they can find your work? 1:02:27 And, you know, plug yourself a little bit before we finish. 1:02:30 Sure. Yeah. I mean, I have a I have a blog. 1:02:33 I try to write about my controversial Bitcoin topic. 1:02:35 So it gets very advanced, just like accidentally, because that's what interests me. 1:02:39 But I have a blog, Truthcoin.info, and it is mostly about people's attempts to change Bitcoin into other things. 1:02:48 So these it's like Bitcoin versus Ethereum and all this other stuff was was what it was originally about. 1:02:56 And the block size debate and things are very complicated. 1:03:03 Things like that. I have a Bitcoin project called Drivechain, and they're all the sites linked to each other. 1:03:09 And the drivechain.info is the site that paradoxically or perhaps inevitably, 1:03:15 that is a project about how Bitcoin can copy these other projects and simulate them. 1:03:21 So you would send some Bitcoins to a different piece of software that would just pretend to be like Ethereum or something. 1:03:27 And then you could do whatever you could do on Ethereum. 1:03:30 You could do over there and then you could get the coins back and it would all be with just the one currency unit. 1:03:36 And so you'd only ever have to invest in one currency. 1:03:39 That's the idea behind that idea. drivechain.info. 1:03:44 And then all that prediction markets betting stuff, that is a project that is now called BitcoinHiveMind.com. 1:03:53 And there I have a cool little, I do have a bunch of videos, but there's one that's 20 minutes that tries to explain that plan that I was telling you about. 1:04:04 And I gave that at Anarchapulco in 2019. 1:04:08 So that's the site and then I'm Truthcoin on Twitter because that paper was originally called Truthcoin and the blog became Truthcoin. 1:04:16 And my last name is impossible to spell. So yeah, I'm Truthcoin on Twitter. 1:04:21 Okay. Yeah, I'll put the links for everything in the description below for people, anyone wants to check that out. 1:04:26 But yeah, Paul, thanks very much for your time. It's been a pleasure. 1:04:31 Yeah, thanks for having me. 1:04:33 Thanks so much for listening. 1:04:34 If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, follow me on Twitter or sign up to our mailing list. 1:04:39 Thanks a lot to our sponsor, ExpressVPN, the number one most trusted VPN. 1:04:44 Get lightning fast connectivity with servers in 160 locations across 94 countries. 1:04:50 Keep your browsing privacy safe with ExpressVPN and get a 35% discount on 12 months of ExpressVPN when you follow the link in the description below. 1:05:00 Don't forget my book is now out and available to order on Amazon and on bookshop.org. 1:05:06 That's Brexit, The Establishment Civil War. 1:05:09 And most importantly, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.