Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Cory Doctorow: Reviving the Cypherpunk in All of Us

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment.In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 created an exemption under the federal securities laws so that crowdfunding can be used to offer and sell securities to the general public. Republic launched just after the JOBS Act was passed with a goal to create an investment platform which was truly accessible to everyone. This was around the time that companies began raising funds with ICOs, and Republic was among the first platforms to offer a framework for Security Token Offerings.Republic has recently innovated again with their Republic Note product. This is a profit sharing token which allows investors to receive dividends when companies who raise money on the platform make an exit. The tokens are issued by Republic which distributes a portion of the exit profits to investors in proportion to their holdings. This is a similar model to the Binance Token, which isn't surprising since Republic was the first portfolio company of Binance Labs. Ken Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Republic, explains the advantages of crowdfunding over traditional investing, the long term regulatory implications, and the opportunities this model opens up for startup funding.Topics covered in this episode:Ken’s background and his history with AngelListThe implications from the JOBS Act 2016Ken’s vision for Republic and making investment more accessible for more peopleOverview of the US Securities Law and investingThe interaction between Republic and cryptoThe types of start-ups and investors using RepublicThe importance of the community aspect within start-ups on RepublicThe Republic Note tokenRepublic Note’s Reg A offering and what the benefits of this will beWhere Republic Note can be tradedEpisode links: Republic websiteRepublic on MediumRepublic NoteWhen will the Republic Note’s Reg A offering be qualified?Republic TwitterKen Nguyen TwitterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/353

This is Epicenter, Episode 3.54 with guest, Corey Doctoro. Hi, I'm Sebastian Kuccio, and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. On this show, we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level, and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends. If you like Epicenter, the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you're on a Mac or iOS device, the easiest way to do that is to go to Epicenter.orgs. slash Apple. Today, I'm thrilled to have Corey Doctoro as our guest. There's a saying in French for people who have been sort of consistently around for a long time. We say that they're

part of the furniture. Well, when I think of Corey Docter, he definitely feels like one of the central furnishings of the open web. So if you don't know Corey, he's a blogger, an author, a podcaster, but more than anything, he's a cypherpunk and an activist and an overall defender of digital rights, creative commons, and an open internet for all. He's written several science fiction books and a new one's coming out soon, which he talks about during the interview. He was a co-editor at Boing Boing for nearly 20 years. And these days, he's a special advisor to the Electronic Foundier Foundation, and he blogs daily at pluralistic.net. I've been following Corey's work and writing since I was a teenager. And a few months ago, you know, we were very

fortunate to have him at the Reset Everything conference. And he he gave a talk about the COVID crisis and how it was not only a risk to our health, but also our personal privacy and sovereignty. The link to that talk is in the show notes. Well, I was blown away by this talk and I absolutely wanted to have him on the podcast. I wanted to speak with him about his early days on the web and understand what led him to take up such an interest in activism. Well, we got to talk about all that and also got to understand how he became passionate about writing and science fiction writing as a teen. Of course, we also spoke about digital rights and the tremendous change that the web has gone through since its inception about 30 years ago. We also got

his thoughts on crypto and the role that it plays in his broader vision for the decentralized web. And of course, we couldn't help but talk about the pandemic and how it would shape our world in the years to come. Corey is obviously super passionate about these topics and the clarity and sharpness with which he speaks about these very important issues is really impressive. I mean, he can riff for hours without any notes. It's really fascinating to watch. This was a great interview, and I'm sure it'll go down as one of my favorites. As you know, I have a lot of nostalgia for the early days of the web. And so I like talking with people like Corey who were around back then and contributing to the culture in the 90s when I first came online. So with that, I bring you Corey Doctor-Roe.

Corey, you grew up in Toronto, right? Yeah, that's right. So I grew up in New Brunswick, and I'm a little bit younger than you, but growing up in Toronto during the 70s and 80s, what was it about being there during that era that has made you who you are today? And specifically, you know, what kind of things were you encountering there as a youth that got you into activism and hacktivism and interested in this intersection between like, arts and culture and technology and cypherpunks and this sort of thing. Well, I don't know if you saw. I did a threat about this yesterday that went out in my newsletter today, but a lot of it is down to a single person,

a woman named Judith Merrill, who was an American political, radical, and author and editor and critic who had been married to Frederick Pole. And after the Chicago police riots in 1968 at the Democratic Convention, she went into voluntary exile and moved with her kids to Toronto. Judy set up all of these public institutions. So she used to introduce Doctor Who every week on TV Ontario, the local public broadcaster, and talk about the origins of those tropes.

And so I would watch that with my dad as a little kid when I was like six and seven. My mom was in Teachers College and we'd stay home and watch it of an evening. And then when I was nine, we went on a school trip to the library. She found it because she took all of the science fiction books that she and Fred Poll had amassed and donated them to the Toronto Public Library System and created a library. called the spaced out library, which is now called the Merrill Collection. It's the largest public reference collection of science fiction in the world now. The Spaced Out Library? Yeah, well, now it's called the Merrill Collection. She wouldn't let them change the name until

she died. She said, you know, I like my groovy spaced out name, but you can name it after me once I'm dead. So when she finally died, they renamed it. But it's an incredible collection. And I went down on a school trip when I was nine, and Judy was there. She was the writer in residents and she told us kids, if you write a story, bring it down and I'll critique it for you. So this woman who is this titan of the field, and she would put writers who are promising into workshops with one another. And so I ended up in a workshop with Carl Schrader and David Nicol and Peter Watts is there now and so on called the Cecil Street Irregulars. She also founded a writer's workshop through a writers in the school program at the high school.

I went to a public alternative school that kids used to travel from all over Toronto to a attend, and she also founded a movable feast, a six times a year get together for all the science fiction professionals in town that I started going to as a teenager. So it was as close as you could come to having an actual formal apprenticeship for science fiction writing. You know, I don't think there's ever been a time or a place where that was better. And at the same time, my folks were political radicals, that my dad actually, one of the reasons he wanted to watch Dr. Hu when Judy was introducing it is he knew her from the anti-nuclear proliferation movement and the labor movement, which he was acting.

in and still is active in. And so I was always involved in politics. I got beaten up in middle school for being involved in the anti-nuclear proliferation movement because so many of the kids in the school were military cadets and they would call me a communist and throw bottles at my head and beat the shit out of me. So, you know, I was always involved in politics as well. And my father is a computer scientist. So he was one of the first people to get a degree in what was there. then called the applied mathematics program at the University of Waterloo, which later became their CS program. And he became the head of the CS program at a big high school near us, Cedar Bray. And in 1979, Apple gave all the CS heads free Apple 2 pluses to evaluate for the summer.

So he'd been teaching his kids on PDPs. They would punch cards during class. And then the cards would be sent off to PDP offsite and run, and then they would get the output. And that's how they would learn to program. And so Apple had this idea that people who were teaching programming with batch mode might prefer to teach interactive programming, even if they couldn't afford as many devices. And that was a huge seller. And we got a modem around then. Before then, my dad had been bringing home teletype terminals connected to the University of Toronto. So I had an acoustic coupler and a terminal, no screen, just, you know, a thousand feet of paper. My mom was working as a kindergarten teacher by then, and she would bring home rolls of

paper from the bathroom. And so you'd get a thousand feet of brown paper towel, and you'd feed it into the line printer, and you could compute for a thousand feet. And then when you were done, you'd turn it over and compute on the back. And then you couldn't compute anymore until you got more paper. So, you know, I was in the right place at the right time for all of those things, for science fiction, for activism, for technology. I was able to drop out of university and walk into a job programming CD-ROMs and from there to become a gopher programmer

and from there to become a web programmer and then a CIO and then found a tech company during the dot-com bubble and then from there into EFF. So it's not like a linear progression, but it was definitely very much of its time. When did you leave Toronto? I sort of oozed out.

So in the mid-90s, I started working for a Silicon Graphics Integrator in Silicon Valley doing pre-press stuff. So I was a Unix administrator and integrator. And so I started spending more and more time down there. And then I started doing more contract work down in Silicon Valley. And then the company I founded opened an office in San Francisco and I moved down to run that. Greater and greater stretches of time away from Toronto starting in the mid-90s.

And by about 99 or 2000, I was full-time. Certainly by 99, I was full-time in San Francisco. Talked a little bit about your childhood in this early. kind of contact with, you know, science fiction and technology. I was listening to your talk, again, you know, that you did put a reset everything. And, you know, you talked there quite a bit about this idea of, like, you know, technological optimism. And, like, you know, you were critiquing it, this idea that, like, you know, technology is just going to, like, make things better. What do you view as the role of technology sort of in the development of human civilization?

and like how has it changed from when you were like a child and having this early contact with technology and its impact on our species? Well, I think it's a very science fictional approach I take because at its best science fiction is concerned more with what technology or who technology acts on behalf of and who technology acts upon. And what technology does is only a small piece of that story. I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on what technology. technology can and can't do, but the social and economic relations that it's embedded in are the things that determine what it does do. And so over the years, I think I've become much more alarmed about what would happen if it went wrong. I think that in the early days, there was a real sense of alarm that it could go terribly, terribly wrong. I mean, neither Neuromancer nor Snowcrash or

manuals for statecraft. And people who found organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, don't do so because they think it's all going to be awesome, and so they just want to have a front row seat. It's because you're afraid of what happens if goes wrong, right? You know, you may be excited about the potential, but you're frightened about the potential for evil as well, or that potential thwarted. Over the years, as the social context has changed, I've become more worried. And one of the specific things that's made me more worried is market concentration. We had something like an equilibrium in the early days of the tech revolution because we still had pretty vigorous pro-competition enforcement. And what that meant was that the collective action problem you had to

solve in order to conspire to screw over everybody who used technology was really big. There was always someone who was willing to defect from the consensus. You know, think about how printer ink works, right? That there's only a few printer companies and they can all get together and decide either implicitly and tacitly or explicitly with real conspiracies that your ink should cost more than vintage Vuvclico. And if the sector is small enough, that's a thing that can happen, that convergence on that bad policy outcome. One of the other things that you get, a kind of epiphenomenon of that concentration is that you both get monopoly rents, right? The firms now have all that excess revenue from the overcharging on ink. and you have a much easier collective action problem to solve when it comes to deploying those monopoly rents to attain policy outcomes that favor your monopoly.

So you can then go and lobby to make it illegal to make third party ink. And so you get this vicious cycle where as industries become concentrated, it's easier for them to gang up and screw the rest of us. And it's easier for them to suborn the regulators who are supposed to stop them from doing it. And lather rinse repeat and you end up with a web that consists of, you know, five giant, websites filled with screenshots of the other four. And that, I think, was not something I saw coming. I feel like I had a pretty good handle on a lot of things that were going on at the start of the tech bubble and what we should be worried about. But I confess that I did not pay enough attention to the direction of travel in antitrust enforcement and pro-competition enforcement.

And I think a lot of us took our eyes off the ball on that one. And 40 years later, every single industry from professional wrestling to eyeglasses has become incredibly concentrated down to a small handful of firms that do routinely abuse both their supply chains and their customers, crush new market entrance and suborn their regulators, sometimes with really terrible consequences, right? Like the reason the Sacklers were able to suborn medical authorities to allow them to sell dangerous opioids without adequate protection was because of this market concentration phenomenon, which both allowed them to gang up on the regulators with their colleagues in notionally competing firms, also allowed them to have the excess rents, the additional profits

from murdering people that they could spend on that project. Are you familiar with Ben Thompson and his aggregation theory? I know about Ben, and I know Straterey, but I have not read anything about his aggregation theory. Is it a kind of first-mover advantage? His aggregation theory is basically kind of, you know, sums up the points that you're making. I wonder if you think that this kind of aggregation is inevitable in capitalist system. All capitalist systems have rules, right? There is no such thing as a market without market rules. And so you kind of have to ask which capitalist system. I think that one thing that we've learned over the last 40 years is that if you allow firms to do the things that antitrust law

used to prohibit, then the things that antitrust law was supposed to prevent will happen. So 40 years ago, companies weren't allowed to merge with major competitors. They weren't allowed to gobble up nascent competitors to neutralize them before they could grow to be threats. And they weren't allowed to create vertical monopolies. They were subject to structural separations. So if you ran a rail company, you couldn't also have a freight company that shipped freight on your rails that competed with your other customers.

But, you know, you can have an app store and you can also make. make apps that compete with the apps in your app store. So, you know, 40 years later, after ceasing to enforce antitrust law, you got the thing that antitrust law was supposed to prohibit, and there are a lot of exotic theories about why that is, you know, first mover advantage, network effects, information, asymmetries, and so on, that are highly specific to tech, and I would find them a lot more compelling if it didn't also happen to professional wrestling. If the reason tech is concentrated is first mover advantage, why is double-y advantage, why is double- WWE, the only wrestling league left in the world, right?

Is that, did they have a network effect or a first mover advantage? Or did they just do what they used to be prohibited from doing, which is buying, you know, merging with their major competitors and buying their nascent competitors and creating vertical monopolies? I just find that kind of tech exceptionalism to be exceptionalist. I am skeptical of tech exceptionalism in people who use it to wave away the sins of tech. and I am skeptical of tech exceptionalism when people use it to locate the source of the sins of tech. So when people say, oh, well, you know, the reason that, you know, tech is so concentrated is that ad tech set out to create a mind control ray to make selling fidget spinners more efficient.

And now it subverts the capitalist mechanic whereby intelligence about prices and demands are aggregated through market transactions because the firms can just, use their fidget spinner mind control ray to make you buy stuff. And so therefore, tech is a rogue capitalism, you know, run by supergenuces who invented mind control rays. And by the way, they're willing to sell those mind control rays to Cambridge Analytica to turn us all into racists. And I think that, like, that's a pretty exotic explanation, especially when there's a more Occam's Razor compatible one, which is tech is a monopoly. It became a monopoly by failing to adhere to anti-monopoly principles, and monopolists get to distort markets and monopolies and communications get to distort our discourse, and they don't need mind control rates to do it.

They just need like sorting algorithms, right? If you never find a certain thing when you search for something related to it, if a fact never surfaces when you search for it, then that fact will become less well-known. And if an incorrect fact is routinely surfaced when you search for it, then that fact will be more widely believed. But it's not because someone walked up to you and said, you know, although you don't know it, you can really fly. And then you walked around telling people that you could fly and convinced that you could fly like you'd just gone and seen a stage mentalist in Vegas. It's just because they lied to you.

And you didn't have any way to check the lie. And like the answer is, have competition so that when companies lie, someone else can tell you the truth. in this podcast we mostly talk about you know blockchain and decentralized technologies and cryptocurrencies I would say the kind of prevalent view is more around that regulation has been kind of used to serve maybe the incumbents and the large companies and you know maybe protective banks and that actually by kind of stepping into some realm that's like outside of the control of governments and regulation, you can have a system of like more competition and more freedom and more choice. Do you agree with that view or like, what are your thoughts on that?

I'm skeptical of the conclusion that says some regulation is bad, therefore regulation is bad. I mean, that's like saying putting leeches on you doesn't work therefore medicine is a bankrupt enterprise. I mean, the fact that some regulation is bad doesn't mean that that regulation can't be good. I think, for example, that the reason that I'm not dead. hundred times over of Listeria is because of regulation. So if we can make regulation about intense technical subjects, and I hasten to point out, food safety is an intense technical subject that no one in Congress or in most parliaments has any expertise in. It's not like we elect food safety specialists to high office routinely. Instead, what happens is we have a regulatory apparatus that finds

neutral experts to adjudicate competing claims from partisan experts to produce fact-based outcomes that are turned into recommendations. And those recommendations are why you don't have lead in your water. There are why planes don't fall out of the sky. And like when you look at planes that do fall out of the sky, like the 737, it's because they were allowed to sidestep regulators. So I think that we need a much more nuanced account than once we get rid of the regulation, things will go well. we need an account that talks about how regulation gets suborned, how regulation can be improved, and what you do to make regulation fail safe, because the other piece of a good regulatory apparatus is it has a means for evaluating new evidence as it comes to light, and revisiting the

factual conclusions that are reached from the regulatory truth-seeking exercises. As to whether you could just get rid of the regulators and replace them with cryptography, this is another thing that I'm very skeptical of. You may be familiar with the idea of rubber hose cryptanalysis, which is that like irrespective of your key length or how hard your passphrase is to guess, if you live in a place where there is no rule of law and someone can come and tie you to a chair

and hit you with a rubber hose and you tell them your passphrase, then your passphrase will become known. And so we clearly need an apparatus that produces rules and that enforces them. And again, they can be good rules or bad rules, and the bad rules are we should avoid, and the good rules are rules we should seek out. But the idea that no rules produces a good outcome is clearly not the case, right? Now, one of the major ways in which rules are suborned, rulemakers can be wrong, they can be foolish, they can be venal, or they can just be unlucky in how they seek out the truth and all of those things can cause them to make bad rules. But one of the

major ways in which rules are made bad is when industries become super concentrated, everyone who has qualified to make rules about them is drawn from the upper ranks of the industry itself. And everyone who is in charge of any of the firms in the industry is probably a veteran of most of the other firms. So if you look at telecoms, for example, everyone who runs a telecoms company, everyone in the C-suite of the three or four telecoms giants that run all of the telecoms in the U.S. used to work at least two of the other ones. And they're generally married to or godfather of or executor of the will of executives and the remaining ones. And everyone in the upper echelons of their regulatory apparatus, the ones I agree with and the ones I disagree with,

are all veterans of the same firms, rather. You know, there's that photo, that infamous photo of Donald Trump sitting in Trump Tower around a boardroom table. with all the tech leaders after the election. And a lot of people looked at that and they were like, well, how can Tim Cook espouse a great belief in human rights and still sit down with Donald Trump? And, you know, that is what it is. But I think a far more alarming thing about that photo is that everyone who runs tech fits around a single leatherette boardroom table at the top of Trump Tower. That itself is like a very scary thing. The rule that we have that makes all the other rules work is a rule that stops firms from becoming monopolist.

and by lowering the power of monopolies, we increase the power of the demos. We force firms to reckon with pluralistic power exerted through elected democratic authority as opposed to the non-pluralistic democratic power that we have now, where between citizens united and industry concentration, everyone who is in a position to make those rules, generally speaking owes a very large debt to a very small number of people and either tacitly or explicitly operates on their behalf and this accelerates the process lather, rinse, repeat, so the rules get worse and worse. But abandoning the rules isn't going to make it better,

right? Abandoning the rules will just allow the people who currently have all the authority. It's like having a game where the referee let the cheaters cheat until they had a complete advantage and had crippled all the players from the other team without ever getting a foul. And then to solve this, you get rid of the role of the referee altogether, after all of your players have been crippled, and you hope that the victorious cheaters will just go easy on you and let you recover. I don't think that's going to happen. I think they will press their advantage.

I think rules are needed, very much so in the current context. I wonder, though, to what extent you think, in the way governments currently organize and the elected officials that often sit in governments, if these people are competent enough to regulate tech. I'm sure you've watched the congressional hearings that happened in the U.S. last week. Looking at that, one can't help but think that the people asking the questions were not necessarily the most well-informed when it comes to this particular topic, which was antitrust and tech. Sure. Well, but let's get back to Listeria, right? The reason you're not dead of Listeria is not because Congress is full of epidemiologists.

or, you know, microbiologists. The reason you're not dead of Listeria is because Congress has an honest process to adjudicate complicated factual claims. One of the things that Congress did last week and has done through the course of this antitrust investigation is move a bunch of facts from secret silos operated by the firms and into the public domain. There's a million pages of documentation that was subpoenaed. A lot of that is going to come to light. And so that, gives things like the FTC the power to act. Now, will they act wisely? It remains to be seen. But the FTC is certainly capable of hiring really good experts, right? The inaugural CTO of the FTC was Ed Felton from Princeton, right? The guy who broke SDMI, he's an eminent cryptographer and computer scientist.

He's a, you know, tech and policy specialist. And, you know, could that hearing have gone better? Sure. I mean, one of the reasons that hearing went really badly is that Newt Gingrich 20 years ago killed the Office of Technology Assessment, which was the non-partisan arms-link congressional body that advised Congress on technical questions. And he kind of said, well, we don't need that. We can just ask lobbyists for industry to tell us how tech works. That is clearly not worked out really well. And again, it's one of those things where we took away an element of the rulemaking apparatus. And the rulemaking apparatus started to fall apart. Our answer shouldn't be to take away more of it and see if it gets better, you know, if we took a part out of the machine and the machine

broke down, to a first approximation, the next thing we do is put the part back in and see if the machine starts working again. Let's go to the topic of like cryptocurrencies and kind of blockchain technology. Like, how do you look at them and what role do you think they should play in our future? I confess I'm not a big cryptocurrency person. You know, I think the math is relatively solid. I am a believer in peer review in information security, and I think that if you subject a mathematical proposition, cryptographic proposition to widespread scrutiny, that it will reveal the flaws, and they can be remediated, and it will improve it. So when people say a cryptographic algorithm performs as advertised, I'm inclined to believe them if it's been subject to

widespread peer review, I'm also willing to believe that implementations, especially free and open or software ones that can be freely audited by third parties and where there's no legal jeopardy for pointing out defects that might arise as a result of something like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act where you're free of those concerns that both of those make for robust implementation. I'm willing to believe that cryptocurrency does what it says on the tin, you know, notwithstanding the odd problem with Coinbase or whoever, you know, one of the wallet companies having leaks. I don't know if Coinbase was one of them. know that there's been a string of them. Was Coinbase one of the ones that had leaks? Did I just malign them

unfairly? You're sort of inclined to believe that the, you know, the public protocols work, but then you think that like some of the exchanges that actually are like... They've had problems. We could maybe even make an exchange that worked. I have some technical, some economic, and some political disagreements with cryptocurrency. So I am skeptical of financial secrecy. I understand that there is a role for it. I have a colleague who tells a very inspiring story about how in West Virginia teachers could get fired for being gay. And there was a campaign to overturn that law that was ultimately successful. And all the money they got in envelopes with no return addresses in the form of cash because the teachers who were gay didn't want to join the campaign openly. Right. So I understand that

that financial secrecy has a rule. I think that if we look around the world, the major role for financial secrecy is looters hiding their money from authorities. And so if we're worried about corruption, right, if your claim is like we're, we can't trust the rules because the rulemakers are bad at their jobs, then gutting the states that employ the rulemakers and evading them is not going to make the rules better. And in particular, if you want to make sure that you have the democratic and human rights fundamentals that stop someone from tying you to a chair and hitting you with a rubber hose until you tell them your passphrase, I think that you all, you all also need to acknowledge that financial secrecy is one of the major corrupting influences

that undermines the kind of democratic fundamentals and respect for human rights that stop people from tying you to a chair and hitting you with a rubber hose until you tell them their passphrase. So that's kind of my political challenge to it. Just to clarify on that point, you mean, because it would be much easier if I tie somebody to the chair and hit him with the rubber hose and they have, you know, Bitcoin and they can send me to Bitcoin or like, even better, maybe. Some anonymous... Oh, no, no, no, no, not at all.

No, no, no, no, not at all. No, no, not at all. No, I mean that if you help warlords steal from their governments and take them to their knees and then smuggle their money out of the country and buy luxury flats in London that are empty safe deposit boxes in the sky, then the ability of that state to respond to the corruption represented by that is undermined. and that means that you get more of the kind of leader who has both the authority and the willingness to tie you to a chair and hit you with a rubber hose, then you would if states were able to enforce laws against people who were doing criminal things. Right. Of course, it can go the other way too, right, where maybe if you have like a suppressive regime, like, you know, let's say take China as an example and where the knowledge of financial transactions, you know, could be extremely powerful tool to suppress people. Yeah, but I think that, you know, when you look at there, there were long periods when Remindby were the major fiat going in the, in the on ramps into Bitcoin.

And I don't think anyone argues that the people evading Chinese currency controls was doing so because they were pro-democracy advocates hiding from the pull-up bureau. They were corrupt local officials stealing money and then buying flats in Vancouver, right? That was the actual like path of that of that renminbita Bitcoin trade. Okay. Yeah, that's my political problem with it, right? That if we want responsive democratic pluralistic states, that financial secrecy, although it has a role in pro-democracy movements and pro-freedom and anti-corruption movements,

financial secrecy on balance is more of a tool of those who seek to undermine democratic fundamentals than those who seek to uphold them. although I, you know, again, stipulate absolutely that people who advocate for human rights also benefit from financial secrecy. And I would welcome a discussion, a robust discussion in the cryptocurrency world about how to, you know, downregulate the use of cryptocurrency to corrupt states in ways that will lead to people who have cryptocurrency wallets being tied to chairs and hit with rubber hoses, right? Like not even out of respect for human rights more generally, just like how do you stop illegitimate authority? authorities from showing up and taking your cryptocurrency if that's what you want, right? So that's my kind of political question. But as I say, I also have a technical and an economic question about cryptocurrency. And the technical question is the one that I think comes up most often, which is the

climate question, right? That the proof of work is intensely energy inefficient. And the more people there are doing proof of work, the more energy you have to consume in order to stop someone from gaining control of 51% of the network. And so over time, you see this activity of maintaining a ledger that is trusted because of math and not because of legitimacy, right? Like, we have a lot of ledgers that we trust because of legitimacy, right? We just trust that the referee isn't cheating. So, you know, you have to weigh this against the complexity and cost of other anti-cheating measures like, you know, pluralism and democracy and good government. And you have this ever-increasing portion of the planet's energy budget allocated to replacing

referees with math. And I question whether that is the most efficient technical solution we have. Sure. I mean, just sort of like two thoughts on that. I mean, first of all, this was also for me, like one of the big things that made me like uneasy about, you know, Bitcoin and proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. But I think over time, that is kind of like lessened a lot. And here's the reason.

So there have been a bunch of, you know, studies where they've looked at like, you know, actually where does the energy come from in the Bitcoin and proof-of-work networks. And I think you have these weird property in cryptocurrency that, you know, the ideal thing you want, is like really, really cheap energy. Like that's the number one thing you care about. And you can kind of like go wherever the cheap energy is. But that's different from the kind of way that energy normally works, right? Because normally you need the energy like in a particular place.

And that sort of like what has happened a bit, like if you look at where have people put a lot of crypto energy mining, you know, there's a lot in like Iceland, right, where they have these. like thermal things. They put a lot in China where they built some sort of hydro dam where they wanted to have a city, but nobody showed up. And now they had this like power plant

that basically was, you know, pointless. But, you know, you could basically then go and put. Or, you know, they had in, I know in the U.S. There's some mining companies that have come up that basically would go where they produce natural gas. And in that process, I guess, there's like this extra heat

and stuff that produced, and then they would have these mobile mining rigs. So I think as a result, like the most of it, at least from the studies that I've seen, looked at it, said that, like, you know, the vast majority comes from, like, renewable sources. Well, I mean, but so I would question the underlying assumption that the energy is fungible and that there are no other users for these, this, you know, I guess you could call it the dust of energy, right, the leftovers of energy. I mean, for example, aluminum smelters have done, exactly what you just described, because aluminum is only cost effective to smelt when you have excess energy, like you've got spot markets where the prices are super low. So you see,

you see aluminum smelters next to dams all over the world. And when they can't use up their energy, they smelt aluminum. We need a lot of aluminum smelted, right? Centering concrete, right? Like, low carbon concrete, we're going to have to, like, in the next 50 years, we're going to have to move every coastal city in the world 20 kilometers inland or uphill, right? Like, we're going to need a hell of a lot of concrete. And basically, like, by Fermioprox the total carbon budget of the planet is a rounding error on aluminum and concrete. And both of them are completely amenable, right? You could absolutely imagine a plant that just cinters, you know, concretes or smelts

when the sun is out or when, you know, when there's excess gas or whatever. And then those prefab slabs get turned into cities somewhere as we as we cope with the fact that our planet is swiftly being rendered uninhabitable. So I just think that it is rivalous, right? I think that ultimately there is rival, that those are rivals for other energy uses and that there are lots of ways we can, you know, use energy opportunistically for purposes other than, you know, proof of work calculations. Right. Yeah. I mean, of course, the other point to make here is that, you know, many of the up-and-coming and, you know, some of the largest crypto networks don't use proof of work. No longer they use proof of stake, which actually doesn't use up energy. Of course, Bitcoin still does. Right, sure.

Who knows if Bitcoin will ever move to proof of stake, but... Right. But isn't proof of stake all based on... I don't understand proof of stake, I confess, but isn't my very vague understanding of proof of stake is that you have some proof of work asset that you then use as your proof of stake. Isn't that right?

No. No? Okay. The way I would describe proof of stake is almost like... So let's say if you take... the Bitcoin network, right, and you look at the distribution of the hashing power in the Bitcoin network. And it's like, oh, you know, this miner is doing like 10% of the mining, some other miners doing 2% of the mining. And like, let's just say you've virtualized, like you said,

now you can only mine sort of in proportion to how much you have of a particular token, but you don't have to do all the work, right? So you're almost like virtualized is like block production rights. and then, you know, if you have to basically hold a certain amount of some asset to produce blocks, but you don't have to do all of the proof of work anymore. And then how you create the asset, I mean, for the most part, it's been sold. You know, I just sold in, you know, these kind of token sales, or, you know, often it might be some mix between, you know, like some of it is sold, some of it is development teams, some of it might be like ecosystem funds and bounties and communities and community grants and like lots and lots of different stuff.

Right. All right. I mean, that I will certainly look up more about proof of stake. It does sound fascinating. As I say, you know, I only have a very cursory understanding of it. I think I sat in on one talk of it about it at devcon in Prague a couple of years ago. But it's like one of a million technical things I'm trying to keep track of. Well, we've got lots of episodes about Bruce of Stake. I'll go back and listen to them. Well, I'll go and check them out. But then the last piece is economic, and I am a modern monetary theory deficit hawk skeptic who thinks that government programs are not paid for with taxation, that the deficit budgets are not a problem, or aren't necessarily a problem, that they're extremely poor proxies for whether or not you're creating that the inflationary pressure. And that particularly now with so much of our economy imploding and our economic activity imploding,

I don't think that having arbitrary limits on the monetary supply is good for our civilization. I actually think that it's potentially terminal for our civilization. You mean fixed supply crypto assets are? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that like the story of money is really that governments create money when they type zeros into spreadsheets. and that then when they tax money, they annihilate it, and that the thing that creates pressure on prices

is when governments try to procure things that the private sector is trying to procure. And oftentimes there are things that the private sector is not trying to procure, and the government can spend as much as they want on that. Like, for example, the labor of people who are unemployed is not an asset the private sector is seeking to procure. And so you can type as many zeros as you need into a spreadsheet to procure that. labor and put it to productive use and spare people the incredible indignity and harms of protracted unemployment, which, you know, there's, there's pretty good evidence that it's second only to the death of a spouse in terms of the toll it takes on your mental and physical health.

And that that work can go into things like remediating the climate emergency, which we're going to need a lot of, and that you can only do that if you can control your monetary supply. Let me sort of share my fault in that, which I, I think. think it's shared by many in the crypto space and which I think this term was made up by like nick zabo of like contillion insider but basically I think this was some economists who argued that you know when you have newly created money that enters society that you know there's sort of like some place it goes first and if you kind of get it first or like if you have to sort of access this printing press that then you have this enormous advantage

And that then the effect we've had was that, you know, maybe there's like some banks and financial insiders and stuff that are able to like monetize their, you know, proximity to the money creation process and that that is actually a massive driver of, you know, inequality. And that then if you have, you know, like cryptocurrency systems that are like competing with each other, you know, that then you kind of maybe get rid of this source of inequality. Well, I mean, I think that that is true for the primary market for bond sales, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about automatic stabilizers, right? Like we try to do offsets for public spending through bond sales as a way of effectively sequestering money. So the

government spends some money into existence. And then it invites some people who have money in what amounts to a checking account at the Fed to move it into a savings account, right, to buy interest-bearing bonds. And, you know, there's some good stuff about interest-bearing bonds, right? They're like a good safe asset if you're trying to fund a pension plan. I would just rather fund the pension plan the way that we fund the military, right, just by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. In fact, I'd rather we stop funding the military and start funding pension plans. But other way that money gets spent into existence is through automatic stabilizers. So you have part of Medicare, not all of Medicare, but some of Medicare.

for example, is fully funded. It doesn't have a trust fund. It doesn't have an allocation. It just has, there's a mandate to fund it, which means that Congress doesn't allocate for it. You know, 70% of Congress's budget is non-discretionary. This is a piece of it. So Congress passed a law saying, however much Medicare costs this year, the Treasury will make that much money. They don't sell bonds. They just make the money, right? And so the person who's in close proximity to that money is a doctor treating a patient, right? And I'm not going to sing the praises of the American health care system here. But, you know, that is not what we think about when we think about the primary bond market and inequality. If there were a jobs guarantee, then, you know, that was federally funded and locally

administered where, where instead of maintaining a buffer stock of unemployed people, you maintained a buffer stock of shovel-ready jobs, that the day you lost your job, you could just walk into another job that your community needed and that it had voted on and that was made through close Democratic control. And that was fully funded by Congress and order. Yeah, Congress could sit down and make a new congressional order that changed it. But there's no primary bond market that exists to offset that. It just gets spent into existence. And so the person who's closest to that money is unemployed people. Yeah. I mean, we did a podcast with, you know, the Spencer Capitalist called Albert Wenger a while ago. And he has a he has a

proposal in like a book he wrote that he thinks the money creation process should work by basically just giving people like sort of as basic income the money directly right so that all the money is kind of created through that mechanism yeah i mean the the problem with basic income is that it in a highly unequal equality exacerbator so imagine two people one of whom has all of their basic needs met and is in fact, you know, socking away $100,000 a year in a 401k, and you have another person who cannot meet their basic needs and whose basic needs are now met through a UBI, and they both get, you know, the Andrew Yang $1,000 a month, right? And assuming that that's enough for the person who can't meet their basic needs to meet their basic needs, they now have all their basic needs met.

the person who doesn't need any extra money just puts $12,000 extra a year in their 401k, and with compounding interest at a pretty modest rate, 10 years later, that person is a quarter million dollars richer. Like, I'm not a big fan of means testing, because means testing produces all kinds of grotesque outcomes, but it suggests that the UBI is not going to make a, you know, address the inequality that we worry about, And so if you're not going to address the inequality that way, you know, yeah, I'd rather have an unequal society where the people at the bottom have their basic needs met. But is there an alternative to means testing that we can use to produce positive outcomes? And that is universal services rather than universal income. So we know that, for example, that the health problems that are both comorbid with poverty and exacerbate poverty don't appear in societies with universal health care.

So rather than universal income that you spend on health care, you just give every. one universal health care, free at the point of delivery with a single payer or state administered. And then you just don't have those exacerbating effects, a universal job guarantee, as opposed to a universal income guarantee that would not displace disability payments or unemployment payments, but would instead be a way for people who are actually looking for work and who the private sector doesn't want to employ, can just walk in and get a job that is paid at a socially inclusive wage with a full suite of benefits, and that is funded as a financial stabilizer, would not need any kind of, you know, explicit intervention beyond the set and forget part of

creating this program and a routine exercise of laying out community jobs that the program would fill. And so what you get is the instant that the market collapses, right? The day after coronavirus sends out layoff notices across the country, that very day, everybody who's been laid off can have a new job and Congress doesn't need to act or even assess it because it finds an equilibrium. When the private sector recovers, you know, there's this argument, oh, well, now the private sector has to bid against a socially inclusive wage. I'm actually not opposed to the private sector having to pay a socially inclusive wage in order to have a business. If your business only survives, if your employees are on food stamps, you don't have a business. You have a government subsidy.

So, you know, we then, the private sector as it recovers will have a stock of potential employees. Yes, they will have to offer something over and above what a jobs guarantee would pay, but they would also have a stock of employees who hadn't been out of work. So one of the things we know from the literature and that we saw very explicitly after the great financial crisis is that employers would rather pay a premium to employ someone who's already employed, right, to poach someone else's employee than to hire someone who's been out of work for six months or, more. The premium is actually pretty goddamn high, right? Once you've been out of work for more than six months, you are damaged goods and you may permanently exit the workforce. And so, yes, employers might have to beat the socially inclusive wage, but they also have a much larger stock of employees to

choose from without having to suffer their perceived problem of hiring people who are, you know, chronically unemployed and therefore damaged goods. I'd like to bring this back to the governance issue. I mean, we've been talking about, sort of going around that question, but I'd like to bring it back to crypto and government specifically. And I'd like to throw this idea at you and see how you respond to it. I look at the web as a technology that disrupted companies that previously were seeking rent on information. And so, you know, we see this with like the publishing industry, the newspaper industry, the music industry, the movie industry specifically. And for me, crypto is like the next step in disrupting big, powerful. organizations. And these are the big powerful organizations that govern the world. So, you know, governments, central banks and the financial system. And I wonder if, you know, with all of these sort of criticisms that you have about, you know, how democracy functions and, you know, regulators being corrupt, et cetera, like influenced by lobbyists and all that, if you think that crypto as a tool for governance could bring good in the world by eliminating some of the, you know, the flaws of

the discretionary aspects of our political financial monetary system that are so interwoven with one another? I don't see how. I'm willing to be convinced, but let me tell you why. So we do have another form of money creation in our economy, which is credit money that's created by banks, right? You know, they have fractional reserve requirements. You know, again, in the same way that governments don't take in your taxes and use them to pay for services, like that would be like Apple collecting your iTunes gift certificates and then circulating them out again before they can sell anyone a new iTunes. In the same way, banks don't take our deposits and lend them, right? Banks, banks, you know, when you get it, when you take it a mortgage, the bank just adds

some zeros to your balance. It has a, you know, capital reserve requirement, but it doesn't, it doesn't give you, it's not Jimmy Stewart and it's a wonderful life. You know, your money is in Fred's house and Tommy's bar, right? It's just like, your money isn't a spreadsheet. And the thing is that there is a sector between the private and public sector. All of the money in circulation today is money that the government spent and didn't tax back

or it's money that the banks created. And the money that the government spent and didn't tax back didn't cost anyone anything, right? If you get some Medicare benefits and then you spend them and then the person you spend them with uses them to buy a candy bar, nobody collected rent on that money. But bank money

creates rents, right? Loans create rents. And so the austerity movement is as much a movement about having a source of income from other people's need for capital. When you look at governments that have attained so-called balanced budgets like the Clinton government, what you see is that for every dollar they withdrew from the economy by dialing down spending or dialing up taxation was a dollar that the economy didn't have left to spend, right? that that was no longer in circulation. And where that created a shortfall of dollars, somebody made rent by lending dollars, right? The government's fiscal agent, the bank, right?

Banks are all chartered by governments, were then able to take the fact that the government wasn't spending enough money into existence or was taxing too much money out of existence to charge rent on every business that needed capital for its operations. And so they became a gatekeeper to a successful firm because firms need access to credit. And so when it wasn't available, your credit need goes up when there's not as much money in the economy. And so you then go and you get your money from the bank. The bank charges you interest on it. So I think that if we're worried about rent seeking from money, then we have an answer, right?

that that is to have public money instead of private money be the thing that provides enough money into our economy. And we use automatic stabilizers to figure out when we need more money and when to take the money out. Well, I know we are kind of at the end of our time. I think there's like so much more. I would love to talk with you about. But I guess we'll have to wait for some other time.

Maybe one thing to wrap up here. I mean, you've done like so much interesting work. and, you know, there's probably a lot of things, you know, from your novels to maybe your kind of daily email or like some other things that, you know, people may want to check out. What's the best place people can learn more about your work and, like, what are you spending most time on, like, thinking about and working on these days? Yeah, well, it's a real split. So I have a new novel about to come out, which is the third little brother novel. It's coming out in October. It's called Attack Surface.

and it's about the young woman Masha, who's at the beginning and the end of the other two novels. In the first novel, ends up working for the DHS as a spy, and in the second novel, goes to work for a military contractor. In the third novel, we learn her story, learn how she did that, and how she is today working for a company, much like Palantir or the NSO group, developing cyber weapons that are deployed against pro-democracy revolutionaries in the former Soviet Union. And she comes back to San Francisco, where her best friend, her child, best friend is now a Black Lives Matter organizer in Oakland and who is being targeted with the same cyber weapons that this woman developed to use against democratic revolutions in the former Soviet Union and against jihadis in Iraq. And she has to reckon with having worked for the wrong side for all

these years. And what it means now that that stuff has come home to roost for her, I think it's a good book. I mean, I really do. I had this sense that it's a book that's really of the moment. You know, I finished a book that turned out to be about cyber weapons being used against Black Lives Matter organizers a year ago before the current round of things, and it feels like I really put my finger on something. The afterwards to the book are written by Runa Sanvig, who's from the Tor Project, and who previously was in charge of Opsack for the New York Times newsroom, and Ron Debert, who run Citizen Lab, who are the forensic specialists who unwind the attacks by cyber weapons against pro-democracy movements around the world, including in Egypt and

in Ethiopia and in the U.S. and Mexico and Canada. He's an amazing expert on this stuff. And both of them sort of in there afterwards said, this is very representative of my work. My work is underappreciated. It's very important. And this book feels like it surfaces it. So at the risk of sounding a modest, I'm very excited about this book. And I'm working on a new novel that will come out after it called The Lost Cause. That's a utopian post-green New Deal novel set in Burbank, California, where I live now. That's about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias. And I think that's also an important question that we're going to have to reckon with,

is what do you do with people who are on the wrong side of history? Like even assuming that Trump is defeated, all the people who think Trump is doing a, good job, are not going to dig a hole, crawl in it, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves. So what do we do with people who hold odious beliefs that we disagree with after our beliefs are ascendant? And, you know, this is not a thing anyone's figured out. It's an issue that's very salient in respect of Me Too and with other revelations of historic abuse. And it's not a question as a society we're good at answering. So I'm trying to answer this in fiction as well. I write a daily newsletter and blog called Pluralistic. It's an open cross-platform, no surveillance

way of finding out what I think is important. You can read them as Twitter threads. That comes with surveillance, although it's just from Twitter or not from me. If you visit my Twitter page, Twitter.com slash Doctoro, every day there's a pinned tweet that has links to all the threads I posted that day, and you can read them that way. But you can also sign up as a newsletter. there's no tracking, no analytics. You can go to pluralistic.net, which is a WordPress site with no embedded tracking or analytics. I don't even embed YouTube videos. I rotate my logs every 24 hours, so there's no surveillance there. And it's also available on Mastodon and on Tumblr. Obviously, Tumblr has a terrible amount of surveillance as well. So I would encourage you to use one of the

low surveillance options, but they're all identical and they're all posted together in real time. So you can follow it that way. Great. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Corey, and we'll keep following your work. I've certainly been following you for quite a few years. And I love this your pluralist newsletter. I check it out once in a while. Thank you. Yeah. And I'm sorry I'm not more bullish on Bitcoin. I mean, it's not like I don't like the people who like Bitcoin. But I hope I gave you a good account of what it is that I worry about in respect to Bitcoin. It's not reflexive. It's thought through. I may be wrong, but I don't hate it just on general principles or something. I, I, I hope. I have specific articulatable objections. And thanks for sharing them. Yeah, absolutely. And it was great talking.

And I am going on vacation the week after next, but I purchased your little broader books. So I think I'll be reading that one. Oh, very good. Well, I hope you enjoy them. Thank you. Yeah. So as someone who maybe wasn't so familiar with Corey's work and who just kind of got

introduced to him recently, what did you think of this interview? before we did this interview i you know you you all did this reset everything event right a few months ago where corey doctor spoke and at the event i saw like the last 15 or 10 minutes of this thing but like i watched this actually we should put that in the show notes yeah definitely uh the link to that video because he did a like just an outstanding job there and like he's so uh like so sharp so fast with his mine. So I was really impressed. The guy you certainly can riff. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm actually really excited to sort of, you know,

have discovered him and to be exploring his work a little bit. And, you know, I look forward to reading some of his novels. And yeah, so I think my tendency would be probably more, a bit more, you know, libertarian leaning than he is and maybe less bullish on regulation and policy. But, but, yeah. Yeah, I think I'm looking forward to learning more about, you know, his perspective and his work. Yeah. I mean, Dr. Corey certainly does have some Marxist leanings, you know, in some respects. I think that kind of shines through a lot of his opinions and his works.

And, you know, he is the son of some Russian and Ukrainian, you know, immigrants. So maybe that has something to do with it. But, no, I mean, I've been following him for. for years, kind of like, you know, not, you know, religiously, but, you know, following his, like, because he was formerly like a writer at Boing Boing and quite active on Twitter. And I also really kind of started, you know, getting a sense of his, you know, political views during recent everything. So that was kind of like the first time that I, like, got to talk to him and interact with

him in a meaningful way. But what I like about him is, like, you know, he, he kind of embodies the, you know, intersection, we kind of talked about this at the beginning of interview, he kind of embodies this intersection of like art and technology and cypherpunk culture that for me is like very reminiscent of like the 90s internet. And it just like it conjures up all these like memories of like being on the internet as a child and like, you know, the mid 90s. And, and you know, at the time, like he, you know, was much older and like, you know, it was kind of like in his early 20s or something. But, you know, It's like, Corey, for me, kind of represents, like, the early blogger, you know, like, the people who were, like, the emblematic bloggers of, like, the early 2000, things like that.

So, yeah, it's like, he's kind of, like, part of internet history for me. Of course, I think he would probably disagree, right, with the Marxist thing, right? Because he says, you know, I mean, that's a interesting thing, right? He very much says, like, oh, it's about more competition and, like, more regulations about more competition and stuff like that. Now, I, like, I kind of like understand that argument sort of in theory, but I'm a bit skeptical of its, like, validity. You know, I mean, if you've seen now in the last year, you know, you've actually had Facebook and like these big tech companies and Google and, you know, they say like, oh,

we want more regulation. Like they've literally said that. And of course, if you look at GDPR as an example. example. Actually, when GDPR, when I learned a little bit about GDPR, so GDPR for those who don't recall, it's a sort of European data privacy law. And when I originally kind of like read about that and the way it's done, I was like, actually, this is pretty good, right? It's pretty like sensible in many ways and it tries to give like sort of control to people over their data. But then if you look at the reality, I think it just creates like a big administrative burden. People like click

their rights away in some way. And, you know, it's not, it doesn't really actually impact businesses like Facebook at all. And so I think in reality, what I'm afraid of much more is that, you know, you create more regulations and rules. And it just makes it actually, it sort of, solidifies the position of the incumbents makes it harder to compete. And in the end, it doesn't actually, it does maybe the opposite of increasing competition. I guess he would say that's because the particular policy is wrong and you make good policies and it has the opposite effect. But, you know, I'm a bit skeptical there.

I mean, I think in the case of GDPR, like GDPR, I agree with you. It does little to protect people's rights because it actually just lets people sign the rights survey. Also, GDPR has like, you know, if you go at a higher level, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's in it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, sort of like you're, as, as a, as a, as a user, you don't have any clear visibility about, like, who actually has access to your service. Once you click your, once you've, once you've consented your data away, uh, unless you're keeping a ledger of who has access to your data, it's very hard to kind of follow the, the, to follow it. And there's a whole bunch of other problems with it. In, in,

With regards to the, you know, the sort of current antitrust, you know, debate that's happening, certainly around the congressional hearings and things like that, I think that the problems that that exist in tech these days has more to do with, you know, like what we're saying during the interview, it's like this absence of respect of, like, anti-trust laws, right? Like companies like Apple and Facebook are able to have, antitrust behavior and it goes mostly unchecked. The evidence of this is that during the congressional hearings, most, you know, a lot of the questions that were aimed at Tim Cook had nothing to do with antitrust while I think Apple probably within all the companies that are there is

the one that has, that is in most flagrant, you know, like doing antitrust, having antitrust for behavior, like, for example, in SaaS store, et cetera. So I think that's the bigger issue that needs to be resolved in order to create more competition. It's a tricky question. I think there's definitely like a part of me like things that, okay, but, you know, if, if some company like Apple abuses its market power, like too much, it actually, you know, would create a competition.

I mean, there's definitely sort of like, you know, a question in me whether, you know, if a company like Apple abuses this power, like too much, then it creates the competition. Like, it creates the incentive and the opening for someone else to come in and disrupt that. And so that, like, maybe socially, you know, it's not such a bad thing. But of course, it gets complex. And, you know, in the reset everything example, like, you. Hito was talking about the instance of like broadband and like where maybe you have these clear monopoly situations and like there kind of the abuse gets you know gets obvious and of course

there's like an interesting question of like you know is in what way is that similar to something like a smartphone I think it is very similar to something like a smartphone where you know there are you know for all intents and purposes two platforms which exist those platforms have monopoly essentially on anyone who wants to create a sustainable digital business, you know, through their app stores. And whether or not you're able to be on those app stores is very much at the discretion of those businesses, of Apple and Google. But yeah, there's an entire conversation to be had around this.

I think that goes beyond the scope of this interview. But it's definitely something that I think is very important. really interesting. And I would encourage people to check out, and we mentioned during the interview, Ben Thompson, he does a lot of work on this, and I think it's like one of the really sort of sound and reasonable voices around like these

antitrust issues. It's got a great newsletter, stratakery, that you should subscribe to, if you know already. So we wrap this up. Let's do it. All right, cool. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,

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