The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Professor Andreas Park - The Modernization of the Banking System (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Professor Andreas Park, from the University of Toronto, joins me to talk about the banking system and the modernization is needs to undergo in order to keep pace with other G7 nations. Dr. Park has been a vocal that the banks need to adopt new technology, such as blockchain, to enable for cheaper financial solutions to customers If you want to learn more about Dr. Park, check out his website at https://sites.google.com/site/parkandreas/, or visit his X account page at https://x.com/financeutm From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/ Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. I'm Len, and today is a video slash audio, depending which way you're watching or listening to this, with Dr. Andreas Park. And he's a professor at the University of Toronto, and he's currently working out of the Rodman School of Business. And I came across Dr. Park in an interview he had with Bloomberg. And on that interview, it was very short, but he was talking about the modernization of the banking system. And so it piqued my interest, decided to reach out to him, and he agreed to come on the show. And we talked about how we should be modernizing the Canadian banking system and the inclusion of blockchain technology etc and he was talking about how canada is lagging behind its g7 counterparts when it comes to trying to advance new technology in the tradfi

slash banking system and i know this is going to be a little bit on the um offbeat path over here for the canadian bitcoiners podcast we tend not to talk about this. He even talks a little bit about the technology of ETH. He seems to be, I would say, a pre-coiner, if anything. But nonetheless, it was a good discussion. He obviously is talking about what's going on with the banking system, what he wants to see happen. And in my opinion, the banking system, we can't escape it yet. So I think there will be some modernization. My opinion is there's going to be a big and epic failure in the end because the system is built on debt and debt well it can't be

sustained in the long run that's just my opinion we'll see if i am correct uh so with that oh one last thing before i start talking about the sponsors i was wearing a blue shirt that day for whatever reason if you're watching the audio it looks like I have a terrible tan. I think the camera picked up on the blue shirt and gave me a red hue. And I'm in southern Ontario. I don't know where I could get a tan like that or a burn like that at this time of year. But either way, I decided to just run with it. I didn't really care about how I looked.

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So, Andreas, how are you, buddy? Good. How are you, Len? Thanks for having me. I'm great, and I appreciate you coming on. For people that are just listening in or watching this, we're recording this on a Saturday morning. So Andreas has taken the time from his busy schedule to come on and talk to me. So I appreciate that, Andreas. A big thank you for that. So this is going to be fun. No problem. And the reason why I'm bringing

you on is I saw your recent interview with Bloomberg. And you were talking about how Canada's financial system should be modernized it's kind of it's falling behind in terms of other G7 countries so I really want to dive deep into that because that I found an interview to be fascinating but it was rather short so yeah yeah TV interviews are really really short I'm not sure if you've ever done these, but it's actually, it's always a bit of a battle. It's kind of fun, right? Because people ask you a question and sometimes they try to catch you off guard, right?

Or, you know, try to throw something at you that you haven't thought of. And so what you have to do is you always have to kind of pivot towards what you actually want to say. So it's like you have to do like the Tony Blair thing, you know, the former prime minister of the UK, because you ask him a question,

he always gives you the answer that he wants to give you, or he answers the question that he wants to answer. So I'm going to do that with you too, of course, but you have a long-term format, so you can keep pressing on me. Okay, yeah. And feel free to go in any direction you want, Andrea. It's like, this is, you know, we're here to have fun.

We're here to have a very relaxed Saturday morning. Hopefully you have your coffee with you and maybe a croissant or something. I don't know. Just something just to keep you going. But in terms of the banking sector in Canada, this is just a very general question, overarching question. I'm curious, what is the system right now, in your opinion, doing, say, wrong in comparison to their counterparts in other G7 countries? Oh, man. I mean, so, I mean, when we talk about the Canadian financial sector,

there's good parts and bad parts, obviously. You know, I'm doing the economist thing of hedging my bets. Yeah, right. But the big picture is, so the part that I'm really concerned about is mostly payments. And so let's start maybe a little bit in that. So most people probably have no idea how payments even work, right? But fundamentally, if you want to move money from one account to another, from one bank to another,

what you have to do is obviously you tell your bank to do it, and then your bank sends an order. There's different ways how you can arrange payments. There's actually about a dozen different payment systems that exist. And for instance, we have Interact, which is a specific section of payments among large financial institutions and Wealthsimple. It's the only participant there. Then we have the general payment system where banks transfer money between one another.

And fundamentally, the latter in particular involves the Bank of Canada. So one of the major roles of our central bank is that it oversees the payment system. Now, it's technically organized by an entity called Payments Canada, which again, the Bank of Canada oversees. But so the problem, if I may say so, and to bring it down to what we really care about, is that we don't have what's called a real-time rail in Canada. So now what does that actually mean? A real-time rail is a situation or is a technology

by which you can transfer funds instantaneously from one bank or from one financial institution to another. So, you know, and by the way, we're the only G7 country that doesn't have one, right? Now, here's where it goes. Here's the big background story here. In Canada, we have something called the Canadian Payments Modernization Initiative. That's something which started officially in 2012.

And so, you know, when you know a little bit of how this works, it requires financial institutions to work together to get something done. So the work for this initiative would have started probably somewhere between two to four years before that. So let's say from 2009 onwards, people were working on this. And then they went public with the Caymans Modernization Initiative in 2012. And so the purpose of this was to create two things. It was to create a modernized large value transfer system.

And let's not get into the details of how that works, but the large value transfer system is for the very large interbank payments. So for instance, if there is a bond payment, which can involve millions of dollars that have to shift from one bank to another, if there are any securities transactions that have to be cleared and settled

with very large denominations, that runs through the large system, there are any securities transactions that have to be cleared and settled over large, with very large denominations that runs through the large system, large value transfer system. We have, that has been actually accomplished, right, by this modernization initiative. It's a system called LINX now. You know, if you, so just the term, if anybody's interested and wants to chat GPT for an explanation, it's called, it's a real-time growth settlement system. Okay, that works. But the second thing, and this is the part which I'm concerned about, is the so-called real-time rail.

So a real, oh my God, a retail real-time rail. So that is a system by which we can make transactions among one another in real time. And that has not been set up, has not been put public or live. And so we keep pushing the deadline out. When I say that they payments Canada at the behest of the banks. So I think last year, two years ago, I mean, basically, it's always two years away, right? So at the moment, the prediction is 2026. In 2023, it was, you know, 2024. And so on. No, 2022 was 2024. So they keep pushing it out. And that's, you know, problematic. So want to hear why?

Well, I just have one quick question. You think a change in government or a potential change in government may alter the timeframe? Well, you would hope so. I mean, I think it could, right? So, I mean, ultimately, okay, so here's the thing, right?

So, I mean, there are legislative differences between different countries, but let me just give you the scale of the problem or lack thereof. Okay. So, Brazil, which is a vastly larger country than Canada, although geographically similar, but with many more people, obviously, and many more banks. It's like 800 different banks or so in Brazil. Okay. different banks or so in brazil okay um brazil pushed out a real-time system within nine months at a cost of less than six million dollars okay so now our banks will tell you it's billions of

dollars of investment i mean and that it's it's not cheap on their end but you know so the number of six million is for the is for the central bank so um it's not entirely on their end, but, you know, so the number of 6 million is for the central bank. So it's not entirely that, right? But they've been able to push out this system literally overnight, right? And, you know, I've actually talked to the guy who is actually a professor who was in charge of that whole thing. And, you know, the difference, of course, is that in Brazil, the central bank has higher powers than the bank of canada right they could actually mandate it essentially what they did is they went out and said look we're going to build this thing and we're going to allow um so it's based on a particular form of account that they created

um it's called a pix account right um it's a p-i-x p-, I think. Yeah, it's for the system, right? And anybody gets an identifier in the system, you can sign up your clients yourself, or we allow fintech firms to sign up clients. And then that will be the major entry point for these systems. And you have to compete. And you either do it or you exclude it from this.

Right? And so basically I put the hammer down, and then the banks complied. And now the banks, by the way, love it because it actually works really well for them. And you have instant payments with this system. Because this is so cool, actually, what they built in Brazil. Let's say a few more things. So Oliver Wyman is a big consulting firm for financial services um they got very famous in the 1990s they did risk consulting they're pretty sophisticated and they estimated that over the first i think i don't know five years or so the

take-up rate would probably be somewhere between 15 to 20 percent the take-up rate in brazil of this pick system is over 70 percent Wow. And people use it every single day for their transactions. So this is just the standard now that everybody uses. Now, it's a public-private, it's a system which is the central bank is not doing all the work, so they're doing a small portion of it. It's not free for them. It costs the central bank roughly $25 million a year to run it. I mean, you know, because one of the costs is the server costs, right?

And, you know, it's not free to run a data center, right? But it's not. This is like a drop in the bucket. And it brought huge benefits to the Brazilian population, right? Because you can essentially now transfer and use electronic payments without a bank account using fintech firms and so on. huge benefits to the Brazilian population, right? Because you can essentially now transfer

and use electronic payments without a bank account using fintech firms and so on. So anyway, so it's phenomenal and it's possible and it's not, I don't buy it that it costs us billions of dollars. Everything here seems to cost much more in comparison to just what everywhere else. But there may be reasons for that.

As you said, the Bank of Brazil, the Central Bank of Brazil has much more power than does the Bank of Canada in terms of having stuff like this rolled out. Now, in terms of the payment modernization initiative that started back in 2012, you were theorizing that it may have looked like it started maybe a few years earlier, maybe 2009.

Is there any correlation between that and a great financial crisis or is just sheer timing doesn't really, you know, it's just sheer luck than more than anything else it came to be? No, I don't think the financial crisis has anything to do with that. It's just a question of can we get payments done faster, right? And it's just a question of the modernization. But just think about just the term, right? We have something that started in 2012.

We call it modernization, you know, initiative. And it's 2024. That's 12 years later. We still don't have the real-time rail. Are you kidding me? I mean, this is a national embarrassment. Okay. So if you want to go, you know the thing about conspiracy theory, sometimes this is always problematic.

But sometimes that turns out to be right. So the question is, you asked me that earlier. So can a change of government do this? And obviously my hope is yes, right? And the reason why I think this would actually make a difference is, so I've tried to dig, I've tried to ask anybody who I can, right?

It's not like I have that much connections to anybody, but what I've hear over and over, it is stuck at the Department of Finance, which is friedland ministry right um and to the best of my knowledge it actually is stuck at the very top so that's her ah so i was kind of hinting that maybe a change of government may hinder it because this started back in 2012 and the conservative party was in power here in canada up until 2015 and then you had, until this point, nine years worth of Liberal government and things seem to be stalled. I was thinking maybe if it switched

over back to the Conservative Party, which seems to be, the tea leaves are saying that's what's going to happen next election, and that this may just get kicked down the road even further. But it seems to me that it might just be our finance minister might be the one that's stopping this, or at least putting the...

And there's even talks that she may not be around much longer as finance minister. That's the scuttlebutt. I'm not sure if there's any truth to that, but... Yeah, I mean, that's just a speculation. You don't really know what's going on. And I don't want to go... I mean, we can probably spend the entire podcast

on discussing various conspiracies or what's going on in the background. But let me just say a few of the problems that arise and why there is resistance from the financial sector in this, right? Because that may be clarifying things and what a new government would have to do. So, I mean, in many ways, it's really just a question of flicking a switch, right? It's to put your foot down and say make it happen right you can do something as the Brazilians have done we say basically look here's a system that we're going to put in place and you know we're going to invite any fintech firm that wants to come we're going to open up the Canadian market the financial market in particular banks accounts and so on and so forth to through arbitrary levels of competition. So either you play ball or you don't.

And then you have to suffer the consequences. So, I mean, this is basically the approach that you have to do, and I think the power is there to do it. Now, of course, a conservative government has to come in. They would have to be prepared and hit the ground running. I'll give you one example where this is exactly not the way it worked. conservative government has to come in, they would have to be prepared and hit the ground running. I'll give you one example where this is exactly not the way it worked. So this was in provincial governments here in Ontario. I'm not sure where you're located. Are you in Ontario? Just outside Toronto.

Yeah. All right. Same here. So when the conservatives came in here, there was actually a lot of regulatory changes on the table that were generally agreed upon by industry and by uh you know the lobby groups uh you know retail lobby groups and so on and so forth and they were generally considered to be good right there were some some parts of the of the code of the laws and the regulations they were just not working well and everybody could agree with this is a problem that we should solve okay and then in came the new conservative government. They high-fived to each other and said, yay, we're in here. Now what are we going to do?

They had no clue. And then it took years and years to actually get these things out of the way that would have immediately provided value to individuals and to investors and so on and so forth. And you just have to be prepared for that, right? And now my hope is that they're actually doing this already, right? I'm not close to the Conservative Party, except for one of my buddies who's running for MP, right?

But, you know, I don't have anything on the background, but I just simply hope that they're doing it. And, you know, here's the thing, which is i find really worrying about the current government on this is the following um so again we are not talking about bitcoin here but i think it's it actually relates so the the uh um the liberals campaigned in 2015 on the premise of on the promise of um installing what's called open banking, an open banking framework, right? So open banking really just means that as an individual, you have the choice to seek various different financial institutions as they are. They have to provide API access

to their data or your data, really, right? So that you can transfer the data from one service provider to another and obtain the services that you want. And that's essentially what it means. A backbone of that, of that, of open banking would be real-time rails, because without real-time payments, so without the ability to shift money in real time, you know, the open banking itself has no value. And it's been something that the, that the liberal party actually ran on in 2015 and it was one of the things that i actually was really how really happy about and really positive about that i saw them campaigning on this because it would open up our financial sector the financial sector is incredibly important but we were a little behind but we had a lot of fintech firms

here in toronto right uh that were working on really cool products that could help you with your, you know, management of your finances, you know, with, you know, whatever, whatever this, I mean, you know, I don't want to go into details of all the things that you can do, but there's a lot of useful services that you could have had. And they could also increase competition, bring down fees, all good, right? And then they're basically just completely ignored like completely ignored until the last until the 2023 fall economic statement and then freedom went out and said and we're going to about other things all of these things that we're going to do and we're going to have an open banking framework and then literally the entire fintech industry in toronto again oh oh oh finally we're gonna do something yay party you know so it was great and um from the financial sector you heard crickets okay so here's another conspiracy so i get really excited about this um i i ran

events i run events at rotman about um about this kind of topic, right? And so I went out and said, okay, let's have another one, you know, early in the next year. So that's 2024 this year where we discuss what's coming, why this is a good thing. I'm going to bring in some people who have done research on the UK to show what the effects of open banking were. So far, the general consensus is it's a good thing right

it increases competition makes fees lower people get better interest rates for instance for their loans and so on and so forth it's all great let's let's do it right so i was really excited and then you know we have relatively good connections in the financial industries and so i try to find speakers from the banks and just get nothing i mean i literally get ghosted by people who i've had long-standing relation with nobody would answer my emails and then and then i got um you know we have a co-sponsor and then i got all of a sudden i got pressure from the co-sponsor and saying you can't call you can't use the term open banking in this event you can't use it in description we don't want to use the word open banking

and that has never ever happened to me that anybody from the outside world would have pressured me as an academic to not talk about a topic this is how this felt really weird right so it's like and there was a concerted effort so it's like from all sides and you know i i finally found somebody from a bank who would be talking about it, and the person basically said nothing. And then, so I just couldn't believe it. And I just, what is going on here? And so then you saw the budget as it came out, and the provision for open banking was like a half page.

And the amount of money that they put down was a million dollars. Now, in government terms to to provide a study first of all they pushed the responsibility to some regulator that nobody's ever heard of um and you know not a very powerful one right they could do anything so um you know i'm not sure what that that seems really strange number one you could have pushed it to the bank of canada and the bank of canada has a pretty big stick right um and then the second thing is a million dollars like that buys you you know an office space and two secretaries and you spent a million dollars and then a search right you can't commission a report for that you can't pay

for the report you can't do the the research, what that you need to do for $1 million. It's not possible. So essentially, this was the equivalent of borrowing it again. Okay, so Unknown Speaker is there any reason why they would they would consider they would do this? Because if this was one of their platform ideas back in 2015, and we had COVID in 2020. So that side real, the whole bunch of things. And then now 2023, the budget, it mentioned it, the fall budget mentioned it, like, at least a small little bit small section million dollars is gonna be

allocated. Why? Like, could you Because the banks make so much money? Right? So so they make so much money, they don't want competition. Right. So I mean, the general rule is open banking will enable competitors to come up with better products. If you talk to bankers, right, and I've had this, I mean, we had this conversations casually all the time, right? And say, they're basically the thing they say is, why would I want anybody to come between me and my customer?

And now if you in case, so this is sounds like a benign thing to say and an obvious thing to say this is actually the definition of an antitrust violation right because this is is this anti-competitive behavior right but it's allowed somehow this is generally accepted in the banking world we can do it so try doing that everywhere else you get the hammer of god come upon you but here you got free reign unfortunately the perception you have free reign to do it so no 100 100 right so it's like we do everything here in the financial sector to you and to to to to stymie competition and you know anytime a competitor comes up here they get sort of shut out. Their life gets made difficult. When you hear, this is also one of my favorite phrases here.

When you hear people say terms like, you know, we want to have a level playing field, right? That really just means that big guys that have set themselves up for, you know know dealing with regulations and so on and so forth want to have it really hard for any incumbent to come in and compete with them so um yeah so how do i so again i don't want to go into the whole thing about a conspiracy theory and all this but but and we can talk about this also forever but you see you know one of the scriptures of our times is the is something which is called crony capitalism right so just to be very clear i am an economist i am a capitalist i firmly believe in the benefits that capitalism brings capitalism in the sense of it allows people to you know live up to their dreams in an in in a commercial sense that they can do, run whatever business that they want, unless it's lawful, provide and provide services.

And if they are succeeding in the marketplace, it's all the more power to them. And I think this is generally a good thing. Obviously, it comes from somebody who works in the public sector, gets a public sector pension and has a cushy 10-year job. I understand all of that, but I still believe in it. I still believe in the merits of it. And I think it's a universally good thing. What crony capitalism is, is essentially the opposite of this. And it is when firms get big and they can tilt the regulatory state to benefit them.

It goes with the ability to lobby, to have laws and regulation written in such a way that they work for you and not for your competitors or for would-be competitors. It is better for firms to maybe have one or two competitors in a reasonably cushy environment where nobody eats each other's lunch rather than have high competition and having to really work to keep your customers.

So when we see concentrations, when we see Rogers buy up Shaw, when we see RBC buy up HSBC, when we see consolidation in the industry, that is a fundamentally bad thing because it leads to essentially crony capitalism. It's the ability of firms to extract rents from consumers that they otherwise would have to give up to consumers in a competitive environment. And, you know, this is, I mean, you see it in concert tickets with ticket master right we pay thousands of dollars okay well not thousands but kids pay hundreds of dollars for just concerts that say in european countries they pay you know maybe 20 30 dollars for right because we allow uh you know we allow concentration of industries and we don't do anything about it okay so you want to meet me? Can I make another political statement here?

If you wish, this is your show now. No, feel free. Take this whatever direction you want. So if you want to make it. I mean, at some point, we obviously want to talk about, let me at some point, I should come back to the wheelchair and rail and all.

But we're having a discussion here. So the problem is, and this is actually the really, the most disappointing things that actually progressive governments, so people on the left, and I actually think of myself still on the left, like big firms. Okay, they like the situation. You know why? Because then you can't regulate them you can't impose your uh you know all of the progressive uh benefits that you like on small firms um and so i let me give you a balance view

on this sometimes there's a good thing there's sometimes a bad thing to this but let's just say for for for lot for governments dealing with a few large firms is much easier than dealing with a blob of very, very many small competing firms. Makes a lot of sense, yeah. Right? And that actually, by the way, brings us at some point also to Bitcoin and blockchain and the like, right? Because that actually falls straight into this.

But when you want to regulate, you need to have large firms, right? Because you want to have somebody's door that you can knock on, then somebody you have conversations with. If you are a government, you like to have your photo ops, you know, where you march in the executives and you can pictures with them. Because, you know, that's kind of a really nice thing. You can put it on Instagram and you can then govern by Instagram. And then, you know, also, if you leave government, there is, you know, there's cushy board seats that you can get in the future where, you know, if you if you just give these firms sufficiently many quarters of profit, then they may give you a board seat here and there. And then, you know, after you leave your government job, you can get rewarded with, you know, seven figure incomes. Right. So.

And yeah, I mean, I could go dive deep into Bitcoin here. But before I do, I just want to just tie a bow on the payment modernization initiative. And from what I gathered, there's four different pillars in that one of them was the real time rail, but there's three others. And I'm wondering if they have been achieved. I'll just name them out here a safe and secure high value payment system. Yes, supervision of payment service service providers and batch payment systems. Have any of those three been met? Yes. So the large value system is called links. That has been accomplished. The supervisory framework for payment services providers, I would say no. Because what we're really after, so let me explain what that really means, at least in my understanding. So a real-time rail is effective when you allow it to be used not

only by banks, but also by fintech firms and smaller entities that can provide other services. And we don't have that, for sure, right? So because the idea is when you have a real-time rail, you make it actually open. And this is the hope that I think, right? So because the idea is when you have a real-time rail, you make it actually open. And this is the hope that I think actually would come as a side effect of this, is you would open it up to competitors who can offer services. You know, think of Revolut, if you know what that is. It's a fintech firm. It's actually incredibly successful in the UK, transfer-wise. Paytm, which is an indian firm which was so all of these firms were here for a while and they all left because they couldn't

run business here because precisely because they didn't really have access to the payment system um so we don't have that and then the batch system i'm not sure i cannot tell i'm not the you know an expert on every single aspect of payments but for sure we don't have that but look let's talk about one moment about how you can make money and from the lack of a real-time payment system right because what happens is if you send money let's say you have an account at rbc and you want to pay your credit card at td bank that's it right so that's a process which can take sometimes sometimes it takes a day, sometimes it takes two, three days, but it's not instantaneous.

So that creates problems for you potentially, right? So if, for instance, you have a balance on your credit card and you are late by a day, what happens is there's not going to be a fine or charge, right? So that's not how they do it. But because you didn't pay off your credit card immediately, for the next month, they can charge you interest on this. And they can charge you interest for every single penny that you did and your existing balance that you had.

So, you know, there's a lot of money to be made from that, right? There's the issue of late charges for things. There is the issue of, for small firms, there's just a simple issue of collateral management, right? You need what's called working capital in order to make payments to, you know, the tax authorities, to make payments to suppliers, to pay salaries and so on and so forth. So whenever there's a mismatch on when the money comes in, you need working capital. When things happen in real time, you don't have to wait for a check to clear.

You don't have to wait for payment to arrive. So it simplifies your management of your finances. So a friend of mine did some work on that. It's a paper he wrote at the CD How. your management of your finances. So a friend of mine did some work on that. It's a paper he wrote at the CD Howe, for the CD Howe. They estimate that that's several billion dollars worth of costs that small businesses have. The EY, Anderson Young, did the same thing.

They also estimate that there's something between five to $10 billion a year lost to the Canadian economy because of this. and they don't simply eat those charges those everything is passed on to the end user so that's uh yeah this is unfortunately this is money kind of lost in the way but at least kept within the financial sector which is too bad unless you're an investor in rbc or t TD or insert your whatever. So, well, you have to think about what's not happening. It's actually a problem, right? So if you're a business and you have, you could be, I mean, you know, businesses often

operate on tight margins, right? So say you have a business which has a margin of, let's say 20%. And if, or let's say 15%, let's say that's healthy. You can live on that right if you're um if your cost of financing from working capital is 20 because you have to use a credit card and that's the only way you can do it right then this business is no longer viable so there's actually businesses that don't exist and you know the reality is economic growth is really hard to come by these days right income is really hard to come by these days right income is really hard to come by these days you need to have every opportunity to to obtain economic growth

and you know this this you know using the frictions of the financial sector as a wedge to um to to to increase your income is is nothing but rent seeking so it's just so economists use the word, there's a difference between profits and rents. Profits is you provide a service, you provide a product that people want and you benefit off of the benefits that you provide. That's all fair and square. A rent is when you make money,

not by what you do, but what you are. Okay. And if you are in financial institutions are great at this right so they because they can extract money not by any service that they provide but by simply by being in a position of of necessity and that's fundamentally wrong right it's unethical if you ask me right and economists absolutely hate it yeah but it's unfortunate we just learned to have accepted it it seems to be the norm and um i think both you and i are in the

same boat and a lot of people are there's going to be some change within the banking system the financial system there's going to be um an evolution so to speak but i think i i could be wrong i mean please feel to correct me if i am i think the end result i think is going to be i i could be wrong i mean please feel to correct me if i am i think the end result i think is going to be i i have a feeling that there's going to be a an utter and epic collapse of it and based on my discussion with you i mean i could be wrong you think there's going to be a modernization and we'll continue on in some way shape or form in the current system um i just feel that the debt in which the debt-based society we have now in which the financial system is set up, it's not set up for the long run. I could be wrong.

This is why I Bitcoin, but that's just my thoughts. But in terms of blockchain and how this could be implemented into the financial system, What are your thoughts on this? Because I know you've said a few things, you wrote, written a few pieces, you talked about it. Like, I want to hear your thoughts on how this could be used to make it easier for us as an end user to get access to our capital and make it cheaper for us to get access to it. Yeah.

Okay, so let me let me start with actually something really general, because I think it's important, maybe to also level set where I stand and how I think about this whole world, right? So, and this is very general, okay? But, you know, the internet is awesome, right? Because it allows us to connect without any intermediary, to send information, messages, to communicate without anybody in between. It's actually an incredibly liberating technology. And, you know, and so just you're too young, right? As you can see, I grew up when dinosaurs still went, you know,

walked over the archaeological coast. I'm 37. We're close. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, you look very young then thank you but no no i'm ready to retire in the next year too all right oh wow good for you no no i'm kidding anyway but okay so okay so then you will remember right you remember a time without the internet right um so now i grew up in europe right i would not be here without the internet

right in canada um because you know you i i you know for a scientist this is like such a godsend technology because all of a sudden we can express and exchange our ideas without having to go through a journal without having to send paper around the world we can find each other it's just it's phenomenal right so and and you know the fundamentals of the internet were peer-to-peer or well i mean I mean, that's the first thing, right? That was in chat rooms, right? So where you can find one another. Then you had websites where you can find one another.

Now we have social media, which is pretty close to peer-to-peer, right? Except, you know, in some form intermediated. Longer story. Let's set that aside for a moment. But it's a really phenomenal tool to cut out middlemen, right? So you have an opinion? You put it on a website, on a blog. You put it on Medium.

There's nobody intermediating it, like a journal or a newspaper or the like that has to vet your opinion if you want. And now let's think about value. So the Internet is great for exchanging information, but we can't exchange value. So we can't make payments. We can't purchase anything over the internet. And it's just bizarre, right? I mean, we have this wonderful technology

that we can use for information, but for nothing commercial, really. So, and, you know, that was actually a real problem when the internet came up because, so I remember this in the 90s, right? Late 90s, we said, oh, well, you know, you have this internet thing, but you can't sell anything over the over the internet it's just you know you basically shift programs and information around there's nothing right

um and along came you know paypal and then there were solutions built over time from and basically they've all boiled down to using financial institutions as an intermediary to make your payments and you know this is weird right so because we have this new technology uh which is entirely digital and we're using as a backbone for our commercial activities we need to use institutions which have been around for 500 years or more and and let's face it i mean banks are you know so so with technologies you know they say they're very very high tech not clear right so they're high tech in the sense of it works for them and you know damn the customer if you want right so that's strange right and um so we don't have anything peer-to-peer that we had peer-to-peer and by the way in the physical world where we have peer-to-peer

information paper right and we have peer-to-peer money in the physical world with cash right but we don't have that with anything in the digital world unless until bitcoin came bitcoin was the first solution to actually give us peer-to-peer value transfers right and so that's kind of you know this is why i think bitcoin is such a phenomenal in uh invention if you want or protocol construct whatever you want to call it right so it's really clever and then ethereum is the next iteration of it right so it's like bitcoin is like email in a way right you can the only thing you can do with bitcoin is really just send a message to one another right using the network and ethereum is a it is just a generalization of it. You can do anything with it, right?

You can do any value transfer, value creation, value management of any sort. And to me, this is like, this is a financial infrastructure. Okay, so that's fundamentally what I think. So now, back to payments, right? You know, I mean, Bitcoin can obviously do payments, right? You can change and switch money around with Bitcoin. You can't do very much else with Bitcoin, right? So I think this is where it starts to become a little tricky as a single-use technology.

I mean, you can, but it's really, really hard to do anything other than transferring Bitcoin using the Bitcoin blockchain. And Ethereum can just do arbitrary stuff. Okay. And it's not perfect. Right. There are, you know, Ethereum faces challenges. There's obviously other blockchains and other technologies like Solana, which has, you know, higher throughput, lower decentralization challenges, and so on and so forth.

But fundamentally, all of these blockchains are the equivalent of an internet, where you have a resource, which is the ability to push stuff around digitally, which can be used by a large number of different parties to create products right um in the information space we have it with blogs whatever uh publications podcasts right all of that right um with uh you know with with with blockchain you can do financial contracts right of any of any kind very broadly defined and so and you can do this in real time too right so i think so you know if you and i've heard this been said by central bankers um by i mean other people than just me i mean obviously as you know there's a certain subset of academics like me are really excited about this because we see that this

is that there's this general use case of it it's just you know, it's just a good thing, right? Because it moves frictions. We're moving frictions we all love as economists, right? Better risk sharing, we love that as economists. All of that is good. But I've actually had a guy from the IMF give a presentation at a conference. And he said, you know, when we looked at blockchain, I mean, it came after the Libra shock. But let's say just generally, when we started actually thinking about this seriously we thought wow actually our financial architecture

in terms of the infrastructure is really bad and blockchain is just better and i think this is this is really the the you know the four words that anybody should repeat right blockchain is just better right um and so you know then there's just the question of how can we make better work right um and obviously there's challenges and so on and so forth you need security and you need you don't want to be defrauded and you don't want to have your money lost and all that but but that's problems that we should solve, right? We shouldn't say, well, the technology we shouldn't do because reasons. So now, how can we actually use this instantaneously already? So I think one of the problems that we always face is you kind of need, you still need a connection between the existing world and the blockchain world.

It doesn't live on an island if you want. So here's how I imagine this would be a really cool alternative to our real-time our current banking world. So stable coins, transactions with a digital representation of a fiat

currency, you can do on blockchains, right? You can do this on, say, and I'm going by Ethereum for now, right? Because that's close to what I'm interested in. You can have layer two solutions. You can build an entire payments network, a real-time payments network

using layer two solutions, right? You can, that technology is there. It can have very high throughput. You can do this now, right? Now, like today. You can actually also do this in a way that is privacy preserving. It's a little more complicated. Technology is not 100% ready, but you can do it while having full KYC.

So in the sense of that, you can try to keep the criminals out because we don't want those either, right? So, and, you know, for instance, and, you know, not that I want to advertise, say, Coinbase or the like here, but you can imagine Coinbase has a solution where with a company called Bridge, they provide bank, where Bridge provides bank accounts to Coinbase users. The key part here is not that they become banking partners, but that there is an immediate on and off ramp to the existing financial world, right? So that you have direct transfers, fast transfers. And so with that, you could essentially build a real-time payment system for businesses, for individuals.

You can have payments for business payments, generally speaking, that could be based on where you go, a stable coin to a wallet, wallet, bank account, or bank account, wallet, wallet, bank account, right? And that would all happen essentially instantaneously. And so you basically have the real-time payments infrastructure that costs billions of dollars to build

and is so hard to do, blah, blah, blah, right? And you can have that overnight. And I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be a replacement of the existing one, but it's an alternative. So you have competition, and that's just generally competition is a wonderful thing because it does wonders to, you know, the services that it's provided to customers, right? One thing you didn't mention, it's a four-letter word in our show. It's CBDC. Ugh. So it's a four-letter word in our show it's cbdc

so it sounds like you're not in favor because you're kind of talking close to it but not quite so in terms of that i mean it sounds like you're not in favor of such a technology Here's a version of CBDCs I can live with. Okay. You take a stable coin manufacturer, whatever that is, right? You give them a special account at the Bank of Canada, right? The Bank of Canada basically puts reserves into that account and says, you know, and maybe for a fee or whatever it is and say you know here you can use this thing this is where you're basically um we're allowing you to back a stable coin based on these reserves so this is government money right um and now you stable coin provider you do create your tokens and let people do what you want with it, right? And that's basically it, right?

So basically you use stablecoin providers as a way to distribute digital cash. You have no, as a central bank, you don't know what is happening, what the stablecoin provider is doing, who is holding this assets, none of that. So that is something I can live with okay I cannot live with is and and I don't think the central bank can either by the central

bank creating its own infrastructure and its own network and its own technology to run essentially a money system right you know I that's something which I don't think is used it's actually i don't think it's useful right because i think you know you don't create the network effects that you need you don't create the interoperability that you need with other financial contracts and systems i think a blockchain has that can do that right um and then you also create as a central bank all kinds of other problems you you know there's a question of privacy and and surveillance state and so on and so forth because

you know i talk to people in the cbdc space and say yeah i should be private but you know not too private because we need to know what's going on and then you know very soon you basically surveil what people are doing and then you have a government come in and say hey these people protest against me or they say mean things about me can we please censure them and i think that would be terrible i mean that would literally get us into a dystopian world right so i think for that and i agree with you in terms of like the surveillance and stuff like that that goes along with it it could be abused in a in the wrong hands i Will be abused 100%, right? 100%.

I think a way to sell it, and I'm not trying to justify its existence or the role out of it, but to have the general population buy into it, you can say, look, if you're an honest citizen, it's not going to impact you. It's going to impact the people that are buying guns with cash

and getting these illegal transactions or trying to skirt the system and not paying taxes. We will capture that and make sure in the end you will not pay more. You can just do it in such a way we will harm criminals, we will harm tax evaders, and you as a commoner, you're going to get the benefits of all this. I think that's one way they could do it. This is the same thing how we sell the online harms bill right um basically by saying like oh yeah but this is really only about the guys who are you know criminals who i mean it's like the the people that sell child pornography right and

or the the people that are terrorists and all and you know we can all live with this but basically all that you do is you're saying we're trying to protect the weakest and you make the strongest possible arguments and you tell the worst possible stories so that there is consensus. I would say we can all agree on that. And we can agree. I agree to that, right? But what comes after that is just,

you know, it's just an uncontrollable beast. And so I fundamentally believe that a government should have as few touch points as possible with its citizens. And that is not to say that I don't trust governments. I think governments can be built for good. I think the idea of democracy and democratic institutions is one which serves everybody. The problem is there's always people in between. The idea of democracy and democratic institutions is one which serves everybody, right? The problem is there's always people in between. People are fallible, right?

People have, you know, they're good people, bad people. The government has good people and bad people. And bad people will abuse and will do wrong things, malicious things to regular people. And when you have to, so think about, so, you know, if you have a problem with your bank, you can go to another bank, right? You can go and fight with your bank. Your bank has an interest, you know to to keep you as a customer because they're making money off of you right um and so you know there's there's a certain give and take when for whatever reason and say wrongly so you get in trouble with your cbdc for whatever reason

you do something which is flagged by an algorithm as this is money laundering, this is crime or whatever it is. And it's done wrongly. So you have to deal with a government that is very expensive and very difficult, right? And if the CBDC is the thing to use and you lose access to it, you basically lose access to the economy. You lose access to the usage of the financial system that cannot happen right um i think this is this is really bad and you will have fine situation and so you don't worry about a cop car if you've never been stopped by a cop right rightfully or wrongly but if you've ever been stopped by a cop right rightfully or wrongly but if you've ever been stopped by a cop right for you know a

small infraction and it's made a big deal or even nothingness right you get nervous every time you see a cop come okay and and so when there is and when you run a cbdc system which will have the involvement of a government and some level of surveillance, you will have false positives. This is just in the nature of the beast. And every time you have a false positive, you impose costs on citizens, which you can never recover from, right? You know, you know, if the government does anything wrong, and they cause you tens of thousands worth of damage, it's not like they give you compensation for it, right? I'm going to say, oh, sorry, whoopsie, right? You lower the trust in government.

And I think that's toxic for our society, right? So we need to trust our government. We really do. It's not like a private business where you can move somewhere else. And so the more patch points you have for the government, the more you have possibility for false the government the more you have possibility for false positive the more you have for engagements and all of these create mistrust in government so and that's so you know what i'm saying it's like oh yeah this is this is

this is why this becomes even for the most well-intended approaches this will become a negative so andreas do you have more time or you're up against as long as you want i can go well intended approaches, this will become a negative. So Andrew Lane- Andres, do you have more time? Are you up against? As long as you want, I can go a little bit longer. And this is I mean, we could talk about Bitcoin and I will in a bit. But I could just tell you, anecdotally, when I read this is personal, actually. We tried to open a business. So we did open a business and then we tried to open a bank account on

the said business. And we so we did open a business and then we tried to open a bank account on the said business. And we've been shut out from all financial institutions because, well, we're a Bitcoin podcast. We cannot get a bank account. It's nuts, right? It's like,

how is this possible? Where's this coming from? I agree. And if you look at CRA's guidelines, they say you have to separate, um, business and personal, uh,

bank items. And, and then we can't. So it just, it's So it's stuff like that. And I'm going to just tie it back to Bitcoin. That's why Bitcoin is because with that, I could separate myself from the financial rails where it's an independent network that is run by nobody.

Collectively, it's run. It's taking money away from the people that currently are controlling money, which a lot would argue they're doing, it's run it's taking money away from the people that currently are controlling money which a lot would argue they're doing a um you know not the best of jobs i mean those are those are their arguments um and just bitcoin because of scarcity and just for a number of different reasons um it just provides a better option for individuals so um just based on that i mean you've done enough research on bitcoin how could that not be the next iteration of what we use as money moving forward so i mean

first of all i've not done um an awful lot of research on bitcoin we're very honest about this i find bitcoin fascinating but also a little boring right it's fascinating in the sense of how it works and this is such cool technology and uh but it's a little boring in the sense that you can do very little with it um and so you know let me just make a pitch in favor of traditional finance. Okay. So fundamentally, banks have three functions, right? All related to intermediation. They do something called term, size, and risk intermediation, right? And the reality is that we all need money at some points in our life

when we don't have it. And at other points in our life, we have money and, you know, and we don't need it, let's say, right? And so, I mean, fundamentally, this is a bank basically takes deposits from people and lends them out to other people. You make deposits when you don't need the money and, you know, they lend it out to people who need the money and they reward you as a depositor with a deposit rate and they lend it out to people who need the money and they reward you as a depositor with a deposit rate

and they take a cut and they charge the other side some interest and they take a cut in the middle and everybody's better off, right? So they do this. I mean, there's the time dimension, right? When you're young, you're making money and you may want to save for your retirement

so you don't need all your money. So this is a savings motive. It makes perfect sense that that money which you save is then passed on to people who want to build businesses. Because you have a business idea, but you need money in order to start your business. Where's the money coming from? Then there's the size issue.

So a lot of small depositors cannot pay for a large business. In your podcast, you're small, but if you want to build a factory, you a lot a large loan so again banks do the size intermediation and then there's the risk component too right so you don't want to give your neighbor uh you know a loan for their mortgage right you know whatever happens to the neighbor is your risk right but you're probably happy if you give it to a million other people as you know everybody has a small amount of risk and they do that too so i mean and so this is what financial institutions do and the research is very clear that that countries which have a developed financial sector or which and if you look at development developing nations

and the ability to make the financial sector work, the better your financial sector is, the better is your economy, the better is your standard of living and so on and so forth. So banks are just fundamentally important. Or bank is a big word. Some form of this financial intermediation is important right um so that so i so for that reason i think i don't want to throw out the i don't want to say that we should throw out the financial sector and bitcoin is the solution to everything um the problem arises then um okay so if you want to go and have a system with credit and with intermediation of some form you need to think very hard about how do you get

repaid? How can you make sure that stuff doesn't get lost? And so on and so forth, right? And, you know, we quickly end up with questions about identity. Because, you know, the reason why you get credit, right, is because you have an identity if you don't make your payments they can come after you your credit score goes down they know who you are they know where to find you if you're completely anonymous there's nothing that guarantees your repayment so you know so there you can already see that without identity no credit right and so you know so the the blockchain solutions there are you know people are working on them and they're trying to develop them they're not there yet right and now when it comes to

bitcoin if you want to look very narrowly the throughput the amount of transactions that you can run even if you had a lightning network is really very minor. Right. So I think in many ways, it's almost like the biggest promise, if you want to use, if you really are interested in saying that we can use Bitcoin for payments, let's say we want to, right? I think the biggest obstacle is still the throughput of the Bitcoin network. Right. the throughput of the Bitcoin network, right? And so the way this will unfold is you have a, let's say, a network like Ethereum,

and then you take a layer two solution, like a roll-up, and within this roll-up, you create wrapped Bitcoin, and then you use that roll-up to have high speed, high throughput transactions using the roll-up. So that's kind of the way how you can envision that Bitcoin payments can actually happen. But they kind of build,

unfortunately not on Bitcoin, but they build on another technology which basically just has representation of Bitcoin. You're 100% correct in terms that the throughput right now with bitcoin is would hinder global adoption and the way i envision and you know i've been wrong many many times i'll be wrong again this would be a slow and uh progressive way to get to having bitcoin

used it wouldn't be just flipping a switch and happening overnight it just wouldn't work on a global scale it there has to be i still believe in bitcoin in terms of solutions built on it um because i i truly like the decentralized nature that bitcoin offers and i feel that there is enough ideas enough people behind it that we could find solutions to it it's just it will take time it will happen over time and just that's just a reality of it but um yeah so look i mean um there is such a thing as you always have the issue that if you want to have very very high throughput which you want for payments for instance you know having them with full decentralization is incredibly difficult and it's costly um and it's they're just some

if you want there's some bounds which are very hard to to to get rid of right so it's costly um and it's there are just some if you want there's some bounds which are very hard to to to get rid of right so it's like the the size of the data that you need uh the capacity of parties to um to to to try to to process payments um geography or physics is a problem right because you need if you want full decentralization on a sphere like the planet, right? You need to send data around. You need to send data around quickly. That takes time, actually, right? It takes, you know, milliseconds or seconds to send it all around the globe, right?

To send data. And then you need to have a coordination. If you want to have fully decentralized network, you need, I mean, and full decentralization, we're talking about, say, 100,000 nodes or so, then that's very hard to do, right? And so there are some cases where full decentralization

is not beneficial, right? So there's a trade-off. All I'm trying to say, there's a trade-off. Oh, for sure. Right? You don't need fully... It's not all roses

and chocolates for everybody. There's going to be some growing pains along the way and you have to give up something too. Well, but you also have to respect constraints, right? And so all I'm trying to say is, you know, full decentralization, there will always be a trade-off that you have

between throughput and decentralization. And for some transactions, you want full decentralization. For others, you're happy with having a lower decentralization and for some for some transactions you want full decentralization for others you're happy with having a lower decentralization yeah that's fine right because then decentralization comes at a cost yeah right um you know you want to send so let's put it like this right so you want to buy a coffee in the coffee shop right with your bitcoin um you know both the coffee shop provider and you you're probably happy to you know not have that run through the main net bitcoin you know full decentralization on chain there's no need for that but if you want to buy a house and you're spending like a million

dollars on that you probably want to have it as secure and therefore as decentralized as possible. Right. So, you know what I'm saying? It's like. No, a hundred percent. Yeah. This is a technology which requires really careful thought. Yeah.

But what you and I probably would like to see is that that can actually unfold, that we allow it to unfold and that it can actually go this way. Right. So let me. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. actually go this way right so let me yeah oh sorry go ahead yeah so and so let me let me actually go back you know all the way to this interview that i had and that um that that we had that basically prompted you inviting me for this one here right um so let me just say this right so you and i we both want this to unfold we want the ability to people to use it. We want technology to be used to its fullest extent and give us the benefits that we hope for. that are pro-crypto is that there is a real risk that the debate and the conversation is

not going towards the benefits that attribute to us but that it goes again in a in a just that it unleashes a speculative frenzy of some form without creating any value. Okay? So very, very loosely, I would say the Bitcoin world has essentially two parts, right? Or not the Bitcoin, the crypto world, right? So there is the part of people that, like me, I'm interested in what are the benefits that the technology can bring? What is the utility that people can have?

What are the economic, you know, what's the good things about it? And how can it be done? And how should it be done? So that's very serious work. And it requires a lot of careful thinking um you know understanding that the trade-offs and building right although of course i'm an academic i don't build anything but i know that but i like i would like people to be able to do this right i like to be able to to build an application a technology like to be able to build an application, a technology, a service without having to fear that somebody goes after them after the fact and yells at them and said, you're a

criminal, right? So you need that kind of safety. On the other hand, you have a lot of, you know, token pumpers that just keep talking about, oh, this token and that token and Bitcoin price and higher and da, da, da, da. And let's just be very clear. A token by itself provides zero value. Okay. I can create a token. You can create a token that has zero value. It only provides value if it does something that you otherwise can't do. Right. And so this whole debate about where should I invest, where should I put money, what's the price of the token, this,

doing that, doing and so on and so forth is entirely counterproductive. It's not counterproductive. If people want to do that discussion, it's fine by me. But if it absorbs the entire discussion, you give people on the other side, the opportunity to say,

ha, scam us. And how they just, you know, there's get rich quick themes and, oh my God, look at this person. I lost their money and so on and so forth. And and how they just, you know, there's get rich quick themes and oh my god, look at this person and lost their money and so on and so forth. And then you know, therefore everything in the crypto world is evil and bad

and so on. And I don't want to see that happen. Right? I want to have a focus on what is it that we can do that we can have the benefits. It's the next step in the financial system. And I think you and I both agree that there's going to be something that's going to be done. And the way it is right now, especially in Canada, there's going to have to be a little bit more modernization that will take place. One kind of question that's kind of related, Tiff Macklin, do you think that if he were to be replaced, do you think that anything would change within the whole framework in Canada in terms of modernization? Because there's talk that if there's a change in government, that Pierre Poliev would

turf TIF. So I'm wondering if, you know, is he stopping things? Or is he neutral to anything? I'm curious your thoughts. So I know TIF personally, right? You know, okay. Yeah. Well, he was the dean at Rotman. And I met with him on many occasions. And we to anything i'm curious your thoughts so i know tiff personally right you know okay yeah i see well he was the dean at rotman and i met with him on many occasions and we're on very good terms okay right um i really like him i think he's a very open-minded person um you know he uh you know he was part of events that i ran on crypto and blockchain he He is very interested in it. Okay. So, um, you know, so I would not imagine that he is a roadblock, right? Um, he, so, so, and this is just my personal experience. He kind of, you know, and obviously he liked, I think he likes me as a person and he repeatedly tried to help me along in my job, in the initiatives that I had

and was supportive of it, right? Now, of course, he did this as a dean of a business school where your job is to promote science and to enable your scientists, right? So at the central boundary, it could be entirely the other way around. But I would like to say that I don't think he is the roadblock here. If he was, then I would have to have a conversation with him. And I'm sure he would listen. Well, Dr. Andreas Park, I appreciate you coming on. We've been at this for a little bit over an hour. I was scheduling this to end at noon.

We're now almost at 1218. I appreciate you taking extra time to talk to me. Before we close this off, I just want to pass the baton over to you. Where can people find you if they want to reach out to you for anything that we talked about? Or maybe, you know, just anything else? But where can they find you? And what are you doing these days um well i mean i'm very easy to be found right so you just google my name and university of toronto and i'm going to come up right away right um you can you know if you if you're interested having conversation with me you can find me obviously on by email right um you can find me on twitter at finance utm i'm also on linkedin um so do engage with, you know, people.

Unless, you know, I mean, the problem with email is as often emails just sink in my inbox. So if I don't, if you write to me and I forget and I don't respond, don't take this personally. Just sometimes I get several hundred emails a day. And if they come at a time when I do something else, just go and there's the black hole. Right. Right. So just write to me again. I'm very happy to talk to people, to anybody about any of this.

No question. Right. You've been very forthcoming. Like I reached out to you on Twitter or X and almost immediately you replied back and agreed to come on the show. Like you've been very forthcoming. I appreciate that. Are you currently on break? Because it's now December 14th.

You want a Christmas break or holiday break, whatever you want to call it? So I never stop working, if that helps. So, I mean, obviously, I like my work. So therefore, I'm not working. Temporarily. We'll see you next. No, no, no, no. What I'm trying to say is when if you like what you do, then you never work a single day.

Right. I got it. So it's I see my work just as much as, then you never work a single day. Right. So it's, I, I see my work just as much as work as I see it as my hobby. Right. So, so therefore I usually work seven days a week. I usually work over the Christmas Christmas break only when I'm really away with my family is when I'm not working. So in that sense, but I, I am, if you're asking me about presence, I usually don't go to campus, right.

I live in the suburbs and, you know, going into presence, I usually don't go to campus. I live in the suburbs. Going into Toronto, as you know yourself, is a nightmare. But again, I'm easy. I always have projects that I'm interested in and that I'm trying to finalize or start anew and so on. There's so much to do. If the day had more hours, then it would be better for me. Well, Andreas Park, I appreciate you coming on. So there's lots of, there's so much to do. If the day had more hours, then it would be better for me. Well, Andreas Park, I appreciate you coming on and for everybody tuned in. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We went a little bit off the beaten path here.

We tend not to talk about traditional finance all that much, but this one was fun to talk to and I hope you enjoyed it. So with that, take care. Thanks for having me.