Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 145 of the Free Cities podcast.
Brought to you as always by our wonderful sponsor Veritas Villages.
Veritas Villages are off-grid, energy-self-sufficient, luxury communities in Latin America designed for freedom lovers.
Bitcoin is accepted at all villages, including for the purchase of property.
What's not to like?
Anyway, more info at www.ecovillages.life forward slash free cities.
Please mention us.
If you do business with them, everything you could need is in the show notes.
And if you want to meet these guys in person, well, Patrick Hibbert, he's the creator of Veritas Villages.
He'll be speaking this year at the Free Cities Conference in Prague, 31st of October to the 2nd of November 2025.
yes it's just two months away believe it or not seems like last year is still fresh in my mind
this year is definitely shaping up to be something special by the looks of it
it's going to be a year of announcements i can't give too much away obviously but if you've been
to the conference before you'll know that we normally have a lot of focus on our few flagship
projects the most famous being prospera and ciudad morazan who will of course be there in force but
big things have been happening behind the scenes this year and i suspect that some exciting new
developments may be revealed that could really broaden the map of free cities projects going
forward anyway our conference is where you'll get the inside track on all of this stuff and
meet everyone in person which is pretty underrated as far as i'm concerned if you're on the fence
about attending? Well, this year, I would say this is the one. Our network is growing. And I would say
that currently you're lucky enough to be what I would call a first adopter in this space. So come
and be a part of it in real life before it gets too big. I watched this happen in the Bitcoin space.
Early on, everyone was friends and we all knew each other. Now, when you go to a Bitcoin conference,
Sometimes there's 50,000 people there and you can't get to speak to who you want to.
Anyway, our conference gets bigger every year.
This year is going to be the biggest one yet, but it's still pretty intimate and you could
take advantage of that yourself.
Anyway, on to today's show.
I managed to get Freddie New to sit down with me in the Free Cities podcast chair.
Bitcoiners amongst you will know him.
He's the head of policy at Bitcoin Policy UK, but for everyone else, he's a lawyer and a political strategist.
Often heard publicly voicing his concerns about unchecked bureaucracy and government overreach.
And let me say this episode is no different.
Here's what my AI made of it.
This episode explores why the state is failing from bloated regulation and surveillance to economic fragility and the erosion of personal freedom.
We examine the dangers of the online safety bill, the risks of data collection and algorithmic enforcement and the creeping possibility of a social credit system.
system. We look at how debt, currency debasement and government overreach threatens financial
security, while tools like Bitcoin, VPNs and Freedom Tech offer individuals a path to sovereignty.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about responsibility, resilience and the urgent
need to reclaim liberty in a world where control is tightening. Yep, that sounds pretty good or
as freddie put it he's a fellow brit we don't live in a police state yet now it's amazing i think that
these conversations are even being had but hey here we are this is the world we live in now is the time
to probably sharpen your wits a little bit i actually do honestly believe it's important to
think quite deeply about the strategies that you will be using to navigate the next epoch of human
history yes really right thanks to all our wonderful subscribers and please if you're a
value for value listener you can pledge just six dollars a month for the subscriber benefits one of
which is bonus episodes a new one of which is coming out right now and it's part two of my
amazing conversation with a gentleman by the name of gg bitcoin is once again will know him and this
one goes very deep is a quick ai summary just for the curious if you're wondering about subscribing
this episode dives into the fallout from robert breedlove's bit clout controversy it was a really
interesting uh discussion that because it was fresh in the news at the time and the debate over
bitcoin's energy use and the surprising spiritual dimensions of bitcoin from questions of trust and
sustainability to profound personal awakenings the conversation explores how bitcoin challenges
power reshapes world views and even sparks religious like experiences yes uh gg actually
talks about what happened to him when he discovered bitcoin and i'm i'd never heard it anywhere before
um i definitely had a lot of fun listening back to this episode in fact it was the first time i'd
listened to it since it was originally recorded and there's a lot going on there anyway i think
you'll like it gg's one of the most important thinkers in the bitcoin space as far as i'm
concerned right that's enough from me time for the alpha and this week you might want to listen
to this one from inside your wonderful faraday cage because the powers that be aren't going to
be very happy with you. You will though, of course, as you sit back, relax and enjoy my
conversation with Freddie New.
The core of the Free Cities idea is governance, competition between governance. We know competition
works in the world and everywhere else. It's just in government, they don't really have
it and and in governance they don't really have it because you are sure you can move country
it's not a lot of options um of of different types of governance models you get a lot of um obviously
um democracies but modern democracies are i mean you just have to look at our democracy currently
in the uk to see that it's not working because hardly anyone cares as we see voter turnouts
low and the people that win win on a small amount of the constituents who actually even voted let
alone people that actually live in the country so it doesn't serve you you know um so you've got
you've got limited options the main um interesting thing that the that we promote are private cities
there's a couple of them around the world they get independent jurisdiction status legal status
from the host government so they can change their own regulations the free zone in dubai
at all similar to that well free zones yeah they are i mean dubai is almost one whole free zone now
there's this but they they they were part of the evolution for sure they were the special economic
zone aspect the newest sort of evolution are special economic zones where you reside at the
moment special economic zones you if you were a business like when you came to dubai financial
district you brought your capital over and you got preferred deals and you got i mean the main
reason that they were so successful is because they they did away with sharia law within that
small bit and brought in common law and that's what attracted people but as a there was no resident
tax breaks or etc i mean obviously did biden have any tax anyway so it was all good
but the new the new versions the new iterations which are two main ones are in honduras now
are independent from the government of honduras on legislation regulation they still have to abide
by all the laws of, you know, don't murder anyone, don't do this, don't do that.
But businesses can come and start with various regulations.
They can choose from OECD regulations from around the world.
And also, as a resident, you get the same tax breaks.
So you get 2 tax there or 2 corporate tax You know it what I mean ideally what we want to see in the next hundred 150 years are thousands of competing smaller places And I think I heard you talk
about this, actually, the, the, the idea that one of the things that that's kind of broken about
what's going on now, I mean, God, I'm in fact, actually, it's very difficult to know where to
start because it's such a huge subject but i think it might be useful to use our own home country the
uk as an example of how a place can be run particularly badly um not in it and i'm not
i'm not even pointing fingers i don't i don't when you look at all the problems with the way that
governance works um i don't necessarily blame the people that are doing all this stuff i think there's
a lot of well-intentioned people doing i just think the incentives are there and easy to take
to run the country as they are.
And I think, you know, in a nutshell,
the way things have evolved now is you've basically got
productive people, entrepreneurs,
staying clear of the government
because they don't want to go anywhere near it,
but feeling the wrath of the government,
which is run by the other group of people
who tend to be career politicians, non-productive people.
And they are, the whole thing's a mess now
You've got people struggling to run a business or people struggling to create a better life for themselves because the people who they don't even like or respect or certainly don't respect as business people are creating all these legislations and laws that make their life even harder.
And the result, really, when you actually look at it, is they go away.
They go somewhere else.
I don't know many people now in the UK that I know who have the stay and fight attitude
there's not many of them left not if I took a survey of my friends most people are like right
this is this is very difficult there's a limit to how long I can pursue this it's easier for me just
to move if they have the kind of situation in their life where they can move obviously if you've
family and all that kind of stuff i don't know you you're you're kind of quite heavily embedded
i think in the world of you form a lawyer right you are still a lawyer yeah but also you you do
work with the governments you advise you do all this kind of stuff i pester is probably a nicer
way of probably more accurate way very low but should we get rolling um yeah let's go we already
are just tilt the mic up a little bit so it's going a bit more towards you i say but yeah so
just start there start there sure um yeah so as you say i'm i am a lawyer so fairly embedded in
uh the way that the system works uh just to clarify though i'm not a lawyer who necessarily
drafts laws or who litigates i'm uh i was always a transactional lawyer so i started off in m&a
uh moved into special situations which are you know effectively trying to rescue collapsing
companies and then became more and more involved in the regulatory side, more on the critique
rather than the drafting.
So a lot of the work I do with Bitcoin Policy, the group that I set up with Susie, whom we
recently had on, Bitcoin Policy UK, is trying to advise regulators and politicians who are
drafting bad laws and how to make them better.
because as you've rightly pointed out,
the incentive for any politician coming in,
and actually while you were saying that,
it occurred to me, I forget who said this,
but the raison d'etre of a politician is to create more law
and I think it's impossible to point to a single government,
maybe Millet is doing it, a single government anywhere
where there are fewer laws in the statute book
after they leave office and before they arrived.
The whole purpose of you being in parliament is to make more laws.
And at some point, it seems to be that that is the only reason for your being any longer.
And if you fail to make more laws, somehow you failed as a politician.
I think that's an idea that's well worth re-examining.
Well, it's also the fact that...
It's interesting, on this podcast, I've interviewed a lot of people who came from former communist regimes.
and it's in as a as a as a brit it's fascinating to hear what what it was like and one of the things
everyone talks about the pettiness of the superhuman number of laws that start appearing in the late
stages of it and i not being funny mate but i woke up recently and i looked and i was just i
don't know reading twitter looking at what was going on and thinking it's happening it's happening
the the the kind of stuff that you know like i looked a few up earlier before this interview
there was like it got to the point where they were banning blue jeans haircuts had to be a certain
length you know we're not there yet but i for me the canary in the coal mines already singing you
know there there's talk of banning vpns ever since the the new bill came out to the online safety bill
i've heard already people are reporting that right vpns need to be banned you know i've i've seen that
kind of mentality in china and i remember thinking wow this is full on you know this is full on this
is this is obviously not good vpns are absolutely fine i've used vpns for years and my whole family
does and it's purely to stay anonymous and to not have our data leaked and just it's none of your
business what i'm looking at online it was officially encouraged by one of the firms that
I worked at whenever we went on a foreign trip, take certain steps in order to protect
the data that's on your phone because it's valuable.
And so is your personal data.
You mentioning banning VPNs, I don't know if you saw a post recently by a human rights
activist who works for the Human Rights Foundation about Myanmar.
They brought in a new rule that the police can stop and search you and they can look
at your phone.
And if they find a VPN on it, there's grounds for arrest immediately.
So if the UK wants to put itself in the same bucket as Myanmar,
we're doing a bloody good job of it so far.
Well, they are.
This is what I mean.
They are.
The online safety bill is ridiculous.
You know, it's porn and kids.
That's the way they sell it.
But it's not.
If you are someone who just uses a normal internet connection,
many websites that you go to now, which are nothing to do with porn,
are saying, give us your credit card details.
And this is already happening as far as I'm concerned now.
This is it.
Yeah, it's worth drilling into that a little bit.
I don't think many people will have read exactly what the legislation says.
You know, why should they?
I think it's as long as war and peace.
Probably.
Yeah, and probably less well written.
But if you look at the scope of what can potentially be bound,
is extraordinarily wide and is left largely within the purview of Ofcom and the Secretary
of State who can increase the ambit of what's deemed to be harmful content. And it's interesting
you mentioned the kind of websites that are being stopped. The day it came into force,
I went on to Reddit's craft beer and I posted a screenshot of what happened. I can't read
about craft beer unless I prove my age. I saw a record of a hamster owners forum, which
which they had to take the form down because they said, you know,
we're just a small organisation.
We cannot fund the cost of compliance.
So the only option we have is to come off because otherwise we'll get an enormous fine.
I had a rather interesting thought that, you know, Mumsnet, the forum.
I know it too well.
You know it too well.
Too well, yeah.
Well, I'm always quoted Mumsnet.
That's one of those things that my wife, well, less so now actually,
But when we had small kids, I used to get the Mumsnet quotes all the time.
I mean, we all, you know, I think our children may be of similar ages.
It occurred to me that probably Mumsnet's going to fall foul of this as well,
because they talk a lot about wine and gin on Mumsnet.
Too much, probably.
I'm actually not joking.
Because the rules apply to any forum that allows user-generated content,
which could potentially be harmful,
and that would include talking about alcohol, according to the Reddit.
I suspect the Guardian comment sections,
to the extent that they enable you to mention wine and beer,
should probably, actually, maybe it'd be a funny exercise
to troll them and report the Guardian to Ofcom.
But do you think, then, that that is part of the plan?
I mean, in the end, it's obvious to me, at least,
that there will be ID to surf the internet if you want to do it the legitimate way.
There'll be a million and one workarounds, obviously,
but just like there are now in China and behind the Great Firewall,
you can still do most of what you want to do if you just know how.
And like you say, if you were a foreigner going in,
they might even advise you to do that.
A governmental employee might even be advised to do that.
Just don't do it at home.
It's not what we do.
Yeah I think there a non risk of that happening which is terrifying It the equivalent of requiring a license to leave your house and to walk around the streets I not talking about driving a car
you know, proving that you have the necessary skill set in order to operate a piece of potentially
dangerous machinery, I think is generally a sensible thing. And the same with a pilot's
license. You know, you want someone operating that machinery to be changed. But that speaking
is not something for which anyone needs particular training,
and having ideas is a natural human thing to do.
And the attempt to police both of those things, I think, is terrifyingly shocking.
And because of the very clever way that this has been done,
and again, I'm often at a bit of a loss here,
I'm torn between the two ends of the spectrum.
On the one hand, as you mentioned earlier,
I think a lot of this was originally well-intentioned.
We want to prevent suicide alleviation, for example.
I think that's an honorable aim.
Anyone who's experienced self-harm or suicide in their family would, I think,
support wanting to prevent people being encouraged from hurting themselves.
And again, no one wants children to see unsuitable material online.
So I think we can agree that those things are honorable aims.
but then extrapolating that out to an attempt to stop people thinking things,
free consenting adults from reading things and having opinions that an authority figure doesn't like,
that's very chilling.
And certainly in the UK we get a bit, I think we get a bit complacent with the fact that
we've lived in a relatively free society for so long.
We don't think that can happen here.
We're recording this in a former Soviet Socialist Republic.
and it's within 1991 i think latvia finally got independence after the war came down
it's very very recent in what is now a member of the eu where these kind of things happen so we
know what was the quote that the tree of liberty must be perpetually refreshed with the blood of
patriots and hopefully it won't come to that but but complacency develops relatively easily if you
haven't been tested doesn't it you do find i don't know whether you've spoken to many locals
but we we work a lot out of prague and everyone in those kind of countries it's still fresh in
their minds and you get phenomenally solid good people there and um you know you're right uh
nobody back home would consider the same thing happens in it's happening in canada right now
canadians think they live in the most of them still think they live in the best country in the
world and it's a beautiful place no doubt about it but the way it's run is is creeping and it's
the creep that does it the worst the most insidious part of it um but interestingly talking about the
the online safety bill again really what's happening is it's gonna come down to the compliance
which is really bad because the rules could be stupid which they are we can look at them now and
that's ridiculous and stupid but people will enforce it now and the more they enforce it the
more ridiculous it'll be and the less likely that there there'll be a backtrack you know are they
gonna do you think they're gonna relinquish the sort of craft beer reddit forum do you think
they're gonna say do you know what let's let them off no they can't really do that unless the whole
country goes this is ridiculous but most people probably especially brits you know aren't going
to and before you know it's going to be so late they're going to be what we are going to be arguing
with talking to Susie about this yesterday there was someone ranting on Nost the other day about
a parcel delivery that came to their house that they had to sign for because it was an over 18
item and the guy insisted on I need ID I need to photograph it for their app and he's like
I mean, I'm 50 or 45.
I'm more than 18, obviously.
No, no.
Computer says no.
And in the end, he just had to turn this package away.
And that's what it comes to.
You get these ridiculous situations.
That's what happened towards the end of the Soviet empire.
These ridiculous rules that people then enforce.
And this burgeoning set of people who are enforcing the rules is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
they're like oh justify my job let's we need to do this oh that would be a good idea let's do this
and you get this horrendous situation which i think we're we're we're i wouldn't say we're in
the late stages of well possibly we are but we're in a we're living in a world now where
you have to think about so many rules and it's and they're quite punitive as well it's not like
that a lot of them aren't obvious a lot of them are just ah you've discovered the rule
and you've broken it this is your problem and you're like there's 450 000 rules what what you
want me to know all of them you know and and it's it's it requires and this is the the really
disturbing part of it it requires a complete rehashing of of everything it appears to me
and i don't really know how you do that i mean you the two options are collapse or leave isn't it
It's like as an individual, the whole thing either collapses and starts again.
And that's seldom a good thing, actually.
I think even the results of that kind of system, you normally get the void filled by something similar.
Or you leave and you go and look for a place where, in my case, it would be you either go where lots and lots of really rich people are.
or you go to a place where lots and lots,
where a country really hasn't got a system ingrained yet,
somewhere that's, you know, to be left alone.
You've either got to be very rich
or you just go and live somewhere that hasn't quite made it yet.
It's surprising that it's so difficult just to be left alone.
Yes, which is the base of it, for sure.
Yeah, exactly.
So how do we get left alone then?
Quite a few things to pick up on there, actually.
So before we sort of segue away from the online safety bill,
the key reason why I personally am so opposed to it is actually one of privacy and data collection.
My general principle for giving information away on the internet is that you should assume that
anything you give to an organization, whether that's a corporation or a government, is going
to become public information relatively quickly. Because we can demonstrate, I can reel off a list
as long as my arm of recent data leaks. They include data leaks from the Ministry of Defence
in Britain. If the Ministry of Defence can't protect information, who the hell can?
HMRC leaking data continuously.
The NHS leaking private medical details and blood sample records.
You can go on and on and on.
I think the biggest one I saw recently was Ticketmaster, which leaked more email addresses
than there are people on the planet.
it uh so i mean that so basically with that if you if you give and and this is this is where i
think the act is so dangerous if you give your age verification details to any of these websites
you are creating and have i think in just two or three weeks that the act has been live
huge data pots will already been completed because i think your port of my compliance is completely
right. A lot of people will simply tart and roll their eyes, and they'll age verify, they'll give
their name, they'll give their driving license. The people who are incentivized not to comply are,
you know, 16-year-old boys, or people who care about the privacy, and I think that's always going
to be a relatively small subset. But what's almost inevitably going to happen, and your question as
to what's going to happen to this act specifically. When the act begins to affect the way that the
people who made it live their lives, then I think you have a chance for changing it. Because I
suspect most of the politicians who voted for this didn't realize the full implications of it.
In fact, there was a very interesting exchange that I had on Twitter with a sitting MP who didn't
realized that it also applied to technology companies was i mean actually she deleted this
post after she made it um she said what exactly she said it only applies to porn and age verification
happens all the time why is the harm you know each of those three limbs of her post were incorrect
she clearly hadn't read the act it's not just for porn it's for all kinds of things effectively an
ever-expanding set at the discretion of the Secretary of State. And I mean, the danger of
huge pots of data is completely obvious. So I think there's going to be a very interesting
piece of news to watch out for when, I think as is almost inevitable, Pornhub's data set is going
to be leaked at some point. There's going to be a lot of fun to be had going through that and
how many MPs are in it.
They not going to give Seriously I mean it bad enough giving your details to Reddit let alone to Pornhub I mean the moment you tapping in your details
must be a sad moment.
Well, exactly.
And what's doubly horrific,
and I don't want to get too graphic here,
but a lot of these sites are actually using age estimation,
using your face.
Are they?
Yeah, they are.
How are they doing?
Oh, you mean when you click the button to sign up?
So not to take control of your webcam.
who in their right minds gives control of their webcam
to a third-party company.
You, you know, unless you're very, very...
I think it's too late.
Well, yeah, it's terrifying, isn't it?
Yeah.
That data, they allege is deleted.
Most people don't understand how difficult it is to delete something
once it's been recorded on a hard drive.
I don't think it ever gets deleted.
Well, why would it?
Why some, you know, data storage exists,
and if it's not full why not store everything exactly and most people don't realize that when
you hit delete on a file on your hard drive that the file isn't deleted it's just that the pathway
to it is cleared so that it can be recorded over again um anyway so where i'm going with this is i
think there's a very very substantial risk that these data pots which have been collected by
embarrassing websites will be leaked and they will contain details of people who potentially voted for
this and that's the point at which i think they may consider that perhaps it's gone too far and
maybe we should think of a different way of achieving this really though i mean i think at
that point it just gets more absurd i i don't i mean i i've i've my first thoughts of the kind of
surveillance state happened probably in the 80s when i look back people were talking about it then
being tracked and monitored and etc etc and i remember feeling quite depressed about it back
then i was only i was like in my sort of i was an 18 year old boy thinking yeah this does make
sense and that was even before the internet really started kicking in because once that happened you
see the ability to monitor it just increases exponentially in fact it scales forever that's
the terrible thing about it i think when you look at a lot of previous authoritarian regimes they
often collapse under the weight of their own size because they can't find enough people to enforce
what they're doing but actually algorithms are infinitely scalable and you can see that the
whole system will turn into a way of testing compliance is what it is you so you're you're
i mean i could easily predict for example that the next step when they realize that the online
safety access is an absolute shit show they'll go do you know what the easiest thing saves us money
just everything you look at like so you have to sign up for the internet then we don't have to
worry about this that and the other and then they've got you because at that point now you
can integrate all that data into a are you being a good citizen score which we see already starting
in a number of countries around the world and if you're not you lose access to this you lose
privileges you lose this this is the and then the law you're a lawyer you see the law suddenly
disappears and it becomes an algorithm you know here's here are the rules when you break them you
lose privileges and you don't even need to enforce them through through legal means the you know i
mean i'm going way into the future there like no but you're right and the cost of enforcement is
something i return to a lot and it's historically been a relatively decent defense against bad law
frankly um so you know obviously we're we're here for a bitcoin conference at the moment and one of
the one of the key things that bitcoin is going on about a lot is uh executive order 6102
obviously the uh the confiscation of private ownership of gold in the united states
which was actually a relatively ineffective law because it did it thinking about it it
functioned in a very similar way to the online safety act a lot of people complied a lot of
people didn't. Now, the cost of enforcement of 6102 was vast. The government, even the US
government, couldn't send agents on house-to-house searches, so they relied on a relatively large
proportion of compliance and wrote off the non-compliance without house-to-house searches
in order to find your gold. And in a digital sense, until relatively recently, house-to-house
search equivalents of going through vast amounts of digital material was again relatively hard and
often human driven but I think you correctly point out that if we're moving into a world of
algorithmic searching and enforcement as we clearly are the it comes out of data processing
functionally the processing of facial recognition data for example is reaching quite scary levels
and is also being rolled out at scary levels in the United Kingdom.
Big Brother Watch, with whom we've worked on a few important ventures,
pushing back against CBDCs, for example,
they are campaigning to try and roll that back.
But it's an uphill battle because, as you say,
if a government's given access to lots of data that it can process extremely quickly and powerfully,
why not?
They want to control their citizens as much as possible.
This is a complete inversion for me of Alan Moore's famous line out of FIFA Fendetta.
People shouldn't be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.
They are our servants as long as we live in true democracies.
And the idea that they are there to tell us what to do and how to behave and what to think and what to say is completely abhorrent, I think, to anyone who feels the way that we do.
You say we shouldn't be afraid of our governments.
At least I did show signs of fear of my own government yesterday.
I found myself saying something on this podcast about VPNs,
and I let it roll, but in the back of my mind I was thinking I might have to cut that out.
I then went, fortunately, I checked.
It's not illegal to bypass the online safety bill yet.
Not for you.
Right.
Okay.
So it's using a VPN.
So I'm going to leave it in now. But my instant thought after that is, well, you could in the old days, I would have said, let's say I've done like 150 episodes of this podcast. It's like, yeah, little things slip by, they disappear. You know, you can't really be held accountable. It's too difficult. Now, not true at all. An AI would take 10 minutes to scan everything I've ever said and pull out the parts where I said things that are illegal. As in, you know, that's why I had to check.
thought crime yeah well the thought not even a thought crime a real crime me admitting to using
a vpn like i say had i have gone online after that interview yesterday and discovered that yes
i was committing an offense i would have pulled it out of the episode i would have just cut that
bit out and um that's that is me being scared of my government right exactly that's wrong
for totally wrong because because they can be far more petty than me and when it comes down
to things like um if you have any kind i mean governments tend to leave you alone until you
start garnering attention from a certain number of people i suppose there's a limit and suddenly
right this is a person of interest now as soon as you're a person of interest in a way you you
you're doomed in many senses of the word because at the at the very last moment um they're there
they've got more resources than you i'm not even sure how you defend yourself against um against
that an attack a big attack from the state like that if you're someone who's got a big mouthpiece
a lot of people are listening to you not least because they could bankrupt you legally just take
you to court over some ridiculous thing let it run for so long that you know i think you have to go
into exile you right exactly you move to another country and then you start reporting from there
or whatever. But that's not good. And that shouldn't be happening in our country.
Absolutely not. On your worry about VPNs, I don't know if you saw this immediately after the act
came out, Politico did some digging into MPs' expenses. And it turns out rather amusingly that
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, and Sarah Champion, just to name two people,
are not only using VPNs, but they're also charging them back to us as expenses,
uh which is nice um this was revealed on the same day that peter kyle went on um all of the news
shows and basically said uh this is a paraphrase not a good you know if every time you use a vpn a
child dies yeah i i think you posted that one on twitter didn't you yeah click it's so grating
though it's so like the the worst thing about that whole sentiment is that and you're a parent
It's none of the government's business what your kids are looking at online.
It's your business.
You're their father.
You have a chat with them.
If they're rebellious, you ban them yourself.
You don't ask someone who really doesn't give a shit about you to try and ban them ineffectively.
Because they don't even know them.
They're not even close by them.
I don't know if you saw this.
Someone has...
actually set out in relatively significant detail how they would have gone about protecting children
from unsuitable material, and a lot of it's to do with certification.
So, for example, an adult website is required to broadcast as part of its data package
when you try to access that website.
This site contains 18 plus material.
and then you can set your router and your devices either to accept or reject 18 plus or 18 below
material so your child's phone for example you could put a setting there to say that this
this phone is used by a 12 year old and material for 12 and under only can be viewed on this
and then the device will ping the website and once that certification has been recognized and
knowledge then it's it's parental guided access to unsuitable material which i think is what we
should all be doing you you should you care for your children you decide what they can and cannot
see it's not up to the states to tell me you know if my 17 and a half year old wants to read about
craft beer it the craft beer one is very it's horrible but i mean the other thing is as well
that your that certification method also doesn't work because plenty of websites aren't going to
certificate you know like people think porn hub everyone uses porn hub i think yes a lot of people
do but there's probably more porn websites than any other genre on the planet i mean i'd assume so
and uh i mean i assume so well
so i just thought this data set there are
I forget as well.
The actual volume of material on the internet that's not crawlable,
for example, by Google search engines
and is only accessible through Tor is mind-blowing.
But that comes back to a point you made earlier
around the majority of people won't use Tor
and they won't know how to access the dark web.
And the huge worry, I mean,
and quite apart from the honeypot issue that we raised earlier,
the huge worry is the people who actually want to access this material are now going to be driven
into places where a whole lot of other most horrific stuff is also lurking so not only is
the act illogical it's unenforceable and it's arguably worse than the situation we had before
i i think that's par for the course these days i could i could quote you a number of things like
that in the modern world that don't work um that i mean the the most obvious one of late was um
taxing wealthy people and then ending up with less revenue i mean yes um there are incompetent
people not in i don't know whether incompetence the right word there are people who have risen to
positions of power in at least our government who don't understand who don't they just don't
think things they they don't think things through they they kind of stop at the original idea it's
like i know let's tax the rich yay right let's get that sorted without necessarily wondering that
the the rich might leave at that point and the answer yeah the answer is well the rich shouldn't
leave because that's not that's not right it's like the rich are going to leave people are going
to do use vpns people don't really care what you say like they do it because you're bigger than
them and they want to comply to make their life easier on the whole but a lot of what you say
is complete nonsense and nowadays i don't i couldn't tell you a single politician who says
anything coherent that who says actually that's not true that's not true there is a kind of
there is a new sort of group of politicians coming through we see it in the uk now it's a bit like
what happened in america with trump a number of interesting people are actually starting to speak
on alternative media i'm talking about the kind of the mainstream if you turn the tv on if you
listen to talk radio you hear nonsense you hear that double speak you hear people skirting questions
it's so obvious now that you have this world where there are people who can talk candidly for two
hours and people who can't and the people that can't talk candidly for two hours are currently
in charge and the people who can talk candidly for two hours so you know listen to anyone for
two hours you get a good sense of who they are and they're there they're there and their arms
are up in the air going what the hell's going on but but my worry is we have a we're obviously well
according to me at least we'll have a regime change at the next election and it'll as far as
i'm concerned it'll go to one of the new parties i think everyone's underestimating how quickly a
change like that can happen but they'll get into power and they'll just hit a brick wall like
everyone else and go oh my god this is a shit show well i can't just stop doing what everyone
else has been doing well i think a huge problem i've spoken about this before i'm interested to
here you'll take on it too. The real power in the United Kingdom is the bureaucratic civil service,
and it's utterly unaccountable to the electorate. It's unaccountable in many ways to ministers and
to MPs. So there's so much focus is on who's in power, which government is there,
but we always forget the faceless people who sit behind them. My contemporaries,
my friends from university who went into the civil service at the age of 22, 23, and are going
to stay there for 40 years, entrenched in these enormous buildings, incentivized to keep their
jobs and to keep adding to the numbers of civil servants that there are. We've increased the
number of civil servants by 150,000, I think, between 2019 and now. Why on earth? We now have
half a million civil servants in the United Kingdom. We used to run the entire empire on 40,000.
why do we need half a million civil servants do you probably need them because they're they're
not doing the job well enough they probably need more people to do a simple job i mean exactly right
did you see the headline recently uh reeve says that she's going to have to massively increase
the size of the civil service to address the inefficiency problem you i mean i thought you
i thought you were going to mention that headline but that's exactly well that's a real headline
That's a real headline, yeah.
I think it was a telegraph.
That's ridiculous.
Yeah, well, maybe that's a hit piece, isn't it?
Yeah, perhaps.
But, you know, what you said.
Did she say it like that?
No.
I mean, did she literally say it like that?
I mean, maybe we can look it up and stick it in your show notes afterwards.
But, yeah.
I mean, I don't care anymore.
I expect that now.
You expect bullshit from these people because I think what the life they're living in them is just full of these.
non-complementary ideas and and paradoxes and you know it's like all terrible regimes they they fall
down with honesty kills them you can't just come out and say like i'm i'm longing for the day that
someone just says the truth out there or like do you know what um we we could have done better but
we tried our hardest and this happened and now these people have been disenfranchised but we're
going to try a different way or or mille you know mille is like bulletproof when you look at the way
he's dealing with things he really doesn't give a shit and he doesn't care to burden that
uncomfortable feeling that maybe um a lot of people are going to dislike him the i suppose
the advantage in in argentina was a lot of people were looking for change i'm not sure what's your
take on how many people in the uk for example are looking for change i think it's i'm a bit
more optimistic actually i think it's a i think it's a non-trivial amount now and i say that
partly because if you look at the the speed of collapse and support for labor even among
left-leaning people you know i'm reasonably left-leaning myself i i categorize myself as
a left-leaning libertarian uh i think the state does have some some functions i tend to devolve
to the Hayek and four or five key functions as the principal ones
and maybe toss in some healthcare and education
for those who can't afford it on top of that.
But even among my own relatively left-leaning friends,
the collapse in support for labour has been catastrophic,
and I think it's largely because they've had 14 years to prepare,
have come in, and I don't know if I can swear on the talk,
but utterly fucked everything up.
your Laffercove tax point is a perfect example.
That's first order thinking only
without following the consequences through.
But I really think a lot about both the kinds of people
who go into politics and who go into the civil service.
They are individual human beings like you and I.
I genuinely believe most people want to do a good job
and they want to do good things.
I think the number of people who go into power wanting to trample on the faces of the poor is hopefully relatively small because most humans aren like that
But there's something about the inefficiency of a monumentally disorganized state that means, you know, when you...
I think a lot of it is throwing your hands up in the air and just accepting that this is the way that things always have been, and so this is the way we do things here.
And you see this not just in governments, but in very big organizations as well.
Actually, Microsoft is an interesting one to look at.
Microsoft, obviously, under Gates and Paul Allen, very nimble originally, became incredibly dominant.
And then it became extraordinarily moribund for a very long period of time.
And part of that was that people would join Microsoft full of vim and vigor and good ideas
and get bogged down in an extraordinarily lengthy approval process
to do and change anything,
which Nadella has actually reinvigorated and turned around
by stripping away some of those inefficiencies.
So we do have real-world examples of scenarios
where companies have taken the wrong path and can go the other way,
and I think we're beginning to see some of them in nation-states.
Argentina is an example.
um el salvador i'm still in two minds around how el salvador is working um obviously some people
are of the view that bukele is is a dictator he's obviously got a very very strong law and order
focus um but at the same time he's drastically reduced the murder rate and made it a safer
country to live in so um you pay his pipe and take your choice yeah i mean what you're describing
in a way is a natural life cycle of an organization and the question is what happens at the point of
death is it death or rebirth is it change is it transformation you know you're i was just trying
to think whether or not i thought argentina was transforming or was it i mean there was no bloody
battle obviously so um and also we have to wait to see the problem with all these things i i'm with
you on bukele i think um in i've been to el salvador a number of times and every everyone
i've ever spoken to loves him there so i'm fully on board with that the only worry i have is that
he is still a leader and a politician and i remember various countries in central america
on South America who had in the beginning had similar scenarios everyone super excited you could
even say what happened I mean it's happened to us even do you remember things can only get better
I was working in London I was a journalist then I worked for the independent and I remember getting
swept up in all that shit you know and thinking wow change is coming or Trump you know change is
coming you know and then or government's going to get smaller doge is going to smash everything
oh wait a sec government's getting bigger we're spending more money you know uh in the end do do
we do we get to trust any of these people it's very difficult to see how how they can how we can
and in some ways i believe the only choice you have is to be as independent on an individual
basis as you possibly can, whether that's remaining where you are and living your life
as freely as you can, or unfortunately moving somewhere else. And I think it's a supertanker
problem. The state, and by the state in the UK, I mean the civil service and the government is so
preponderant. And again, returning to a lot of my friends who work in the civil service,
they're generally good people. I've been friends with some of them for 25 years.
So I trust them implicitly as individuals.
But they're stuck in an organization where to make the simplest decision
requires five different levels of approval, 18 different forms.
And three of the people who need to approve those forms are not in the office
because they've done their 25 hours for the week in the first three days.
So they get the rest of the week off.
And then they get a much bigger pension than I will when they retire,
which will be funded for by continual debatement and dilution of the currency.
I mean it's impossible to
and you mentioned
the Soviet
Socialist Republic before
it's just you get to a point where the bureaucracy
is so completely
incomprehensible that you
can't get anything done
try to build anything in the United Kingdom
I return again to the idea that
high energy is
high quality of life and high income
there are no low energy high income
countries on the planet
it. So the whole idea that we need to be using less energy is, to my mind, completely absurd.
We need to be using more energy. It's not as though energy is a scarce resource in the universe.
Fundamentally, everything is made of it. That's the mass energy equivalence equation, for God's
sake. It's a question of harnessing it and storing it and deploying it. Obviously, storing energy is
hard, and there are various solutions for that. Trying to build a new nuclear plant in the United
Kingdom, which to my mind is what we should be doing everywhere, Rolls-Foyce, one of the builders
of SMRs, is, I mean, God knows how difficult it's going to be then to deploy their SMRs in the United
Kingdom, because our planning regulations are literally Byzantine. You talked earlier about
collapse. It's interesting to look at previous collapses of extraordinarily complex bureaucracies,
and the reason we call these things Byzantine is because it was the tail end of a 1400-year-old
empire filled with grand viziers and and strange eunuchs who had extraordinarily complicated job
titles and no one knew what they did you can learn a lot of lessons from the past though the the the
places that lasted the longest um ran in a specific way i'm thinking of places like venice
that were run by merchants basically you look at dubai now in a way it's run by merchants
in a way i mean it's run by families but there's no politics to speak of if you're an immigrant
90 of dubai is for is immigrants and you go there to make money you don't go to vote on anything
um there are i mean this is why in the free cities movement private cities are is is one of our big
things thousands of competing small jurisdictions not necessarily cities but just makes sense because
the reason that all this stuff we're talking about, the bad governance is happening, is because
there's no competition in governance. There's no accountability in governance, especially in the
civil service. I mean, the civil service, as you mentioned, is the worst out of all of them.
Do people lose their jobs in the civil service? I don't know.
No, they get promoted, actually. It's funny you mentioned that. You probably saw recently,
there was an MOD official who emailed the Taliban a list of the enemies of the Taliban,
including our own spies from MI6.
Why? Just did a chat by mistake.
It was worth looking up.
That was why, and this was covered up by a super injunction for three years.
This was why we pulled a whole load of the Afghans who'd been our allies into the United Kingdom,
because they were at risk of being murdered, obviously,
because all of their names and addresses.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
I read that.
So that story.
It's worth looking at what happened to the chap who sent it.
I believe he's now been promoted.
Yeah.
Well, fact-checking me on that.
Well, I mean, name me a politician who'd done a shitty job
who didn't end up in a nice job straight afterwards.
Well, I mean, you mentioned Tony Blair earlier.
Oh, my God.
How much is he worth now?
He's also, I mean, he's a really nasty character.
I used to, I worked for the Independent, right?
And I, we did a lot of politics.
I was a, I was a photographer and one election cycle, it wasn't the things can only get better
one.
It was another one.
I was on their bus.
Yeah.
Well, we all got assigned to different buses.
That was, I don't know whether they still do that now.
Do they, I mean, but there was like 20 photographers back then there's, there's probably one agency
guy now who does it.
And we used to go to the conferences and I, you know, I, I spent a fair bit of time with
Tony Blair in, you know, in, in relatively intimate situations.
Not that he would know who I was now, but he's a really nasty character now.
I didn't notice it at the time.
I wasn't really looking.
But if you look at what he does in the world, he's that kind of, he's our guy that we send out to convince other countries to do this, that, and the other.
You know, during COVID, he was massive on digital ID.
Whenever you hear Tony Blair say anything, it's like, did you ID, did you ID, did you, you know.
he's one of those guys i know what your views on the world economic forum are but he's one of those
guys who's a slimy weff kind of guy and i always thought he was slimy to be honest but even back
in 97 yeah i didn i was i was swept i think i was swept up in the wow change is coming you know i mean he he yeah he he in fact if you look closely there a picture of me on the internet shaking his hand and it nothing to do he just an award i got he was just giving an
award but it does look like i'm like but but no i shouldn't probably shouldn't say that but no he
yeah he what i mean what do you think of the world economic forum and all that kind of stuff i mean
are they as bad as everyone makes out you know uh i not as perhaps i should have um should have
spent more time watching what they say i i mean i i tend to have focused on them from a sort of
cbdc perspective uh and the i think they share characteristics with other people in government
that i also find worrying and troubling in in a nutshell um so you know a couple of quotes from
various different WEF forums over the years.
There was a chap talking about CBDCs,
and he was getting very excited that you could permission tokens
to be used only for food, for example, or for water,
which I find extraordinarily chilling.
It cuts against the very nature of money for me,
which is the most saleable good and can be freely exchanged
for anything that you need or want.
And there's another guy whose name I can't now remember.
But he was, I think he was an ex-Indian central banker.
And it's worth digging up the clip of him.
He's got this horrible smile on his face when he's talking about how excited he would be to prevent things,
to prevent money being used to buy tobacco or alcohol or other things.
So I think that's a characteristic that a lot of those people who speak in these forums would share with the worst privacy offenders in our own governments,
which is that they have an
and it comes back to a point we made earlier
a politician's raison d'etre
now seems to be to make more laws
so if they've made laws
the existing statute book
never gets smaller it only gets bigger
so they need to keep on looking for new things
to make laws about
and one of the areas they're obsessed with
making laws about now is personal freedom
to do what you want, go where you want
and to spend what you want as you see fit
so I think
there was a bit of a long winded answer
No, but all those things you just mentioned are all part of the same thing, which is, for want of a better word, a social credit score.
They're all to do with that.
Travel, you know, what you can and can't do, basically.
And algorithms will enforce them.
You won't need a knock on the door by the police to say you've used up your carbon allowance today.
You just won't be able to buy a ticket.
and when you get to the station if you've got a fake ticket the facial id will say no that's not
your ticket you know is it i i'm i'm i'm really i really don't know i used like i say are you i used
to be quite depressed about it then bitcoin appeared in my life and suddenly i was full of
hope and now i feel i feel like i've got over another hill in the in the life cycle of all this
stuff and it is yeah bitcoin's still phenomenally it's hope no question about it but if you can't
spend it because you are wading through a sea of bureaucracy and kyc and i mean it already happens
now you can't buy a car with bitcoin anonymously unless you know a friend who's selling up a bitcoin
you can do small transactions anonymously and you can do 100 billion dollar tractions
100 billion dollar type transactions you know they're not taxed at that end of the spectrum
But in the middle there where the government derives taxes, they want to know every single thing you're doing.
And that's the thing that most people, when they look at it to begin with, go, yeah, that seems fair.
You know, they've got to know what we're spending our money on.
But you and I and people who care about that kind of stuff know that that is horrendous.
And even just morally, that's wrong.
I mean, you know, we lived on cash for years.
We lived on gold coins for years.
No one knew who was swapping what.
It's really important.
It's really none of anyone's business.
It's a total mindset of liberty that most people don't seem to have these days,
or it's been beaten out of them, at least in our country.
That point about cash is fundamentally important.
The reason cash exists is because it enables people who don't know each other to transact with each other.
the whole conceptual ideation of a banknote
is that you and I don't know each other.
We don't need to trust each other.
I don't even need to get your name
if you come into a shop and hand me over a £10 note.
You definitely don't need your name.
It's none of your business.
Absolutely none.
But people have, I think,
part of the process of moving away from cash
and into tapping,
people have lost sight of the fact
that money is a KYC-less technology.
And as you were talking there,
I also kind of, I think I'm with you on,
having gone over that second hill,
I became very excited.
And I'm now more cognizant of the fact
that we are very much on the back foot
in terms of preserving, frankly, you know,
our ability to transact.
I go on about this a lot,
but I think that's a very, very fundamental freedom.
the train ticket point you made.
I know in Hong Kong,
when people were going to the pro-democracy protests,
their travel was being monitored
and they developed a system
whereby you'd leave spent tickets in machines
for other people to pick up
to try and throw people off the track.
But being able to,
I think for merchants accepting Bitcoin,
is a huge Trojan horse to keep this going forwards.
Because once you can pay for things
in a currency that's not controlled by the government,
that's quite a powerful pushback against it.
And you said, obviously, the government wants to know
exactly what we're spending.
The reason they want to know what we're doing with our money
is because they want it.
They want to cut off it.
Yes, exactly.
Government is fundamentally a non-productive enterprise.
Governments only make money either by tax
in their population or by borrowing.
Which is getting harder and harder for them.
Both of them are getting really difficult.
And you asked earlier, do I think a change is coming in the United Kingdom?
I really do think that we are on the verge of some kind of sovereign debt crisis.
The extent of our indebtedness is enormous.
By sovereign debt crisis, I don't mean what the man in the street might typically say,
oh, the UK is bankrupt.
Governments that can print their own currency and whose debts are denominated in their own currency, as you know, don't go bankrupt.
They just print more and more money.
Weimar Germany didn't go bankrupt.
They just...
It's a big balance sheet.
Yes, exactly.
And we're already getting to the point where, you know, you'll laugh a curve point.
We're getting to the point where it's very difficult to tax anyone anymore.
largely because even regular people are beginning to notice that they can't afford anything any
longer so to my mind the only way of fixing this is via an enormous debasement of the currency
that's the only way that our unfunded civil service pension liabilities are going to be paid
personally i'm you know i'm in my mid-40s i don't expect to be getting a state pension
i don't see how it's fiscally possible i don't see how it would be enough either really really
I mean, it's one thing getting a pension.
It's another thing being enough to actually live.
I mean, that time is gone, I think.
You can live poorly on it if you want, but if you had any kind of life, you know, I think, yeah.
I mean, that's a whole other point.
I was just, as you were speaking, then I thought of something.
What were you just saying then about?
Were you talking about unfunded pension liabilities, talking about?
Oh, yeah, the slow looting of everyone, basically, which is what's happening.
And so your result would be some form of collapse in the form of a debasement or a conscious debasement.
I think that, I mean, historically, that's what people have done to solve this kind of indefinite problem.
There's sort of two related solutions, Israel in the 80s and I think maybe started in the 70s, but definitely in the 1980s.
they had a short period of very, very high inflation, which effectively wiped out a lot
of their national, or the real value of a lot of their national debt. And then certainly in 1920s
and 30s Germany, we saw three or four different currencies, I believe, until eventually the third
or fourth stabilized. But that was after an enormous period of horrendous hyperinflation.
And I'm sure you will have read When Money Dies. Yeah, fantastic, but I recommend that to people
all the time harrowing yeah and really interesting to notice how people live through that kind of
situation i find that fascinating because we there a very sorry to buy and there a slim version of that happening right now And in as much as in our country groceries have doubled since the pandemic That goes without saying now
I know that from my own bills that they've doubled.
And that means my income is halved, potentially, because everything's doubled.
You know, inflation doesn't happen in just one sector.
It happens everywhere.
And in fact, it happens more in a lot of other sectors rather than things like food.
so and we and you've noticed my me start to change the way i live my life already i know it's not
hyperinflation where you spend your paycheck the moment you get it and just stock up on xyz but
there are versions of that happening now and the meme that assets are where you store your wealth
is suddenly happening all over the place it's bizarre i think and this should be considered a
positive thing i think in a way but 10 years ago i don't think my father-in-law ever spoke about
assets it wasn't something i mean if you're in the financial world it is second nature but the
average person if you're a teacher or a bus driver or whatever you don't the most the nearest you got
to investing was buying british telecom shares or whatever premium bonds premium bonds yeah exactly
But all of a sudden, and a lot of it's to do with Robin Hood and things like that, but all of a sudden, people get this idea that people that have been staying rich have been leveraging their assets.
They haven't been holding on to cash.
They've been XYZ.
And suddenly, it's common knowledge, it seems anyway, which is a good sign because I think that can happen with absolutely everything.
And I think the next stage after that is, why is this happening?
Oh, my God, it's the government.
yes you know and and then you get that point where and that could be for us next election cycle
where people go right i want i don't want those guys because they were terrible and i don't want
the guys that are in there now as well because they did they did even worse who we got and there's
some interesting folk coming through but but i'm not sure they have a whole government coming with
them if you know what i mean i mean where do they find where well i don't know do you have you must
have seen the latest electoral map predictions for the next election i haven't but are they all
in it's i think the latest one i saw had reform at close to 400 seats wow which would be a total
wipeout for both labor and the conservatives and i believe that poll was conducted before
jeremy corbyn's new party which would leak this doesn't exist does it well it'll steal some vote
from labor no but it doesn't his new party is just the there's a it's like a white paper isn't it
well yeah it doesn't exist yet he's just said i'm gonna do this i hate it's like the the
announcement before the announcement yeah but you know by the time when you know incredibly we've
got was it four years until the next three four years until the next election 29 well there's a
petition online now of people saying we need another election already you know one of those
online petitions where they have to i know nothing will happen but um it's got i saw it yesterday it's
got 500,000 signatures on.
Well, that itself is indicative.
Which is almost as much.
Well, you know, I mean, how many people voted in the last election?
Anyway.
Yes, but that shows, to your point, are we seeing a desire for change in the UK?
The fact that that poll's got 500,000 signatures in the space of about a week, it tells you
how, because that's just, that'll be a subset of the people who are discontent.
That's a relatively small subset of people who are motivated enough to find that poll,
to bother to click on it, and then to verify their email address.
So those 500,000 people have gone through quite a lot of hoops
in order to get their names in that poll.
There are vastly more people who are discontent.
I wonder if it had online safety on it, because you have to be 18 to vote.
Oh my gosh, that would be hilarious.
Is it harmful stuff?
I mean, voting is pretty harmful if you think it's going to change anything.
Well, it's harmful if you're in a government that's about to lose power.
Yes, for them.
My big worry, though, is that we obviously tried the Conservatives
and the coalition government for 14 years.
That was a disaster.
Labour is an unfolding disaster at the moment.
Whoever comes in is going to have one chance
before people completely switch off,
and we effectively get into...
And I actually don't know what the conclusion there will be.
If you get voter turnout of 9% or 10% at subsequent elections,
because people say, well, we've tried literally everyone
and it's all been terrible.
And the country is clearly run not by whichever bunch of idiots
we vote into power, but it's run by a faceless grey mob
of bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.
But the civil service doesn't change, right?
No, no, it doesn't.
That's the whole point.
I think that's that.
Because I know they're not allowed to be political,
but they are political.
Everyone's political.
You have a leaning, don't you?
And they're almost all well-educated Oxford people who lean slightly left.
Which is, you know, I'm not making it.
That's not a value judgment.
It's just an observation.
Lastly, it was a lot of them my friends.
So if you come into power and you did something about the civil service,
I think that would make a really interesting change.
Like Vivek Ramaswamy, I don't know if you saw a couple of interviews with him
while he was still running for president.
he said his plan was to come in and he would,
I forget how he was going to do it,
he was either going to do it via random selection
of social security numbers or give everyone an A and a B.
And then he said, right, all the B's are fired.
That's a kind of Millet move, isn't it?
That's a kind of thing Millet would do.
Yes, and then see if the apparitions.
But he didn't get in, did he?
No, he didn't.
And he didn't get anywhere near getting in either.
I mean, he was liked by people,
but at the end of the day,
the competition was won by the you know the celebrity guy which doesn't i mean what what's
your take on america and because america is the place for me in my mind anyway it's it's the
libertarian country it's the one with the interesting it's the one that took our model
and improved it and implemented it and it's still the place that has an identity of liberty
on the whole when you go there it's like you you can say there's a large section of the population
that actually believe in this stuff and are prepared to defend their houses if you come
and tell them what to do you know and stuff like that so what's your take on that because
like i said earlier my worry with anything happening in the uk is that a similar but
more exaggerated version of what happened in america recently happened which is trump's
really exciting because he's he's going to smash the blob he's going to destroy the deep state
and then you realize now he there are some things that he appears to be doing especially in the
bitcoin space and that's my meter that i would look at because that's all i really care about
i'm a single i'm a voter of i think if if someone's pro bitcoin i'm going to vote for them
because i think bitcoin is a long-term solution whether they know it or not to the problem of
government um mainly because it takes away the ability to fund yourself by just basically creating
money out if you're from your mates you know and the flip side of that if someone's opposed to
bitcoin they're probably a wrong one yes and that yeah without and you can see that now around the
world where is bitcoin forbidden do you want to live there yes no yeah that's right well it's
heuristic i know i mean it's an obvious one yes it's it you know really so so i would i do use
that as a signal. But what's your take on America? Do you think change is actually happening
there? Or do you think that it's, as a lot of people think, you know, it's the Roman
Empire thing, it's the declining end of an empire, biggest government that's ever existed,
I think?
I mean, I find America fascinating for a lot of the reasons that you've said. I absolutely
love the founding principles of the United States.
Me too.
The Constitution is a phenomenally well-drafted document, and I profoundly admire the minds of the people who created it, who decided how much power they were willing to see to the state and how much they would.
As far as I know, it's the only country where people voluntarily chose how much power to give up to the state rather than finding themselves oppressed by the state from the moment of their birth.
and a lot of the Americans that I know and like hold those principles
and actually think about them in a way that British people don't.
And I wonder sometimes if that's because all of the British people
who thought and felt like that went.
Went, yes.
And the people who stayed,
and we are the descendants of the people who stayed behind.
I wonder if there's some kind of evolutionary selection pressure.
Almost certainly.
I mean, it almost certainly is,
because I think that's why the attitude is in America.
it's it's it's something you're born with there in a very subtle way it's not something you
necessarily learn you can learn it but well I mean I'm not sort of weird at this end of sort of
obstreperous colonials myself my family had various stints in South America and in Africa
twice in Africa my great-grandmother was born in South Africa and then my family I grew up in
Zimbabwe myself.
Wow, Zimbabwe.
Yes.
Wow, that's...
Were you in Zimbabwe when all the shit was going down?
Some.
Actually, you were mentioning earlier around...
It was when we were talking about Bukali.
I remember something about Mugabe.
When Mugabe came in, people forget that he was a popular president.
And when I was a kid, Zimbabwe was a wonderful place to live and to grow up in.
and unfortunately as he clung on to power his government became increasingly
sclerotic and repressive and undemocratic so we saw a sort of live fire exercise of
what happens when you know a popular freedom fighter basically comes into power
and then suddenly decides to ruthlessly stamp down on opposition and then obviously the
hyperinflation but it wasn't as bad when i left it was about inflation was running about 50 60 percent
uh in the late mid to late 90s when uh i left but a lot of my friends stayed there so i left just
before sixth form still there now very few one or two um but yeah close friend of mine actually i
know for a fact his his family had savings which were entirely wiped out and that's true for the
majority of people who had who had cash savings at the time i think at its worst hyperinflation
got so bad that it was no longer possible to put a number on it it and i mean it was just an
extraordinarily weird i've got a hundred billion dollar note actually i bought it in um in um
what do you call it uh amsterdam was there's a i found a shop in amsterdam it's a lovely little
a place that sells old currencies.
And I just, I walked past and I went on the off chance.
I even got 100 billion.
It cost me like 60 euros.
Yeah, it's a lot more than it would have been worth at the time.
Right, exactly.
But it's a phenomenal looking thing.
And it's a pristine one.
It's an A.
It's like never been crunched up.
Not that they were being used anyway.
They were just bundled up in piles, weren't they?
No, people were using the US dollar.
In fact, the physical US dollars in the country are now beginning to collapse.
And actually, the paper's disintegrating because they're used so much.
Wow.
Do they use stablecoins down there?
Or is the technology not really?
Beginning.
So a friend of mine, actually, a school friend,
set up a business called KuvaCash,
which is designed to help with cross-border remittances,
and they'll use stablecoin and Bitcoin as well.
And I'm in touch with the Bitcoin movement in Zimbabwe.
I've joined a few calls, done a few spaces with them.
Hopefully I'll be going back to the Africa Bitcoin conference this year.
I attended in Kenya last year,
although sadly there weren't many Zimbos.
A few friends from Zambia, some guys have crossed the border and are now actually mining in Zambia in some instances.
Bitcoin mining.
Yeah.
Yeah, you've got to be careful when you say mining.
Yeah, actually it's funny.
I mentioned my great-grandmother.
Her dad then moved from South Africa to, as it was, northern Rhodesia.
There's a mine named after her mother somewhere.
He was a copper miner.
But yeah, so back to my slightly random point, I feel a little bit different from a lot of people I went to school and university with.
the UK and I think partly because you know I'd grown up in these slightly rough and ready places
where you know something goes wrong you fix it you make a plan you don't I mean we used to our
cars were held together with you know chicken wire and ingenuity and unfortunately you see the same
in countries like Cuba which is devastating impacts of both the political situation and
and poor government.
And you mentioned Trump coming in
and everyone thinking he was going to drain the swamp.
I mean, fundamentally, I think gigantic bureaucracies
only ever kill themselves.
I can't think of an instance where someone has successfully come in.
Well, Millet is a work in progress.
Is Millet actually reducing the size of government?
I mean, has anyone...
I know that he's got inflation down and I know that people love him and this is all good.
But is he actually reducing the size of government?
Because I think that is the solution.
The only solution I can ever come back to is the government is too big.
Because if the government was, and as you said, as a sort of left-leaning libertarian, you know roughly the real purpose of a government.
When it comes down to it, the government shouldn't be telling your kids not to look at porn.
the government should be defending private property on the whole yeah or or maybe a few
other bits and bobs as well you know a lot of people are undecided about that the main point
is it's it should be tiny in the same sense of the founding fathers there was no need for
to to fleece people of money to sort of like fund themselves they had very limited job titles
and it and it worked beautifully um but well i mean there was a lot of you know there was a lot
of inviting and stuff i suppose but um i don't know where i'm going with this it's just yeah
the government needs to do small basically yes i mean it's an interesting observation at the
moment so we're talking earlier about dubai and the free zones trying to map countries which have
relatively low tax rates uh against where against sort of energy producing nations is an interesting
mind game to play i mentioned earlier that governments are an unproductive enterprise but
if the state owns, if the state effectively has an energy monopoly, everything for me always comes
back to energy. If the state's able to fund itself through its energy resources, then it technically
doesn't really need to tax anyone. I often return to the idea that the only reason, it's a bit of a
facetious point, but I think there's some truth in it. The only reason the state needs to tax people
is to prove to the international bond markets that it's going to be good for the money,
that it can service its debts that other nations are buying
and can pay the coupon on those debts.
Because I mentioned earlier, obviously, most states only have two sources of income,
bond markets and their own citizens.
To the extent, and I'm far from a fan of state-run enterprises,
and again, we're in a country where there's a living demonstration of why they don't work,
But to the extent that you have energy-rich nations, they don't need to tax their population
so much because a lot of their income is derived from oil, and Saudi Aramco is a perfect example.
Obviously we not in a great position for energy abundance in the United Kingdom as we seeing in terms of our electricity bill So maybe the UK is not a good example there But to the extent and again I don necessarily want governments to have more money
because they'll probably just spend them on more civil services.
Yeah, but don't forget that Dubai has began in this sphere, but then pivoted.
And one of the places it innovated the most was in financial services,
Dubai Financial District.
well the uk's got a massive financial hub you know why not like dubai is a i know people either love
or hate dubai but i think you should look at dubai from the governance perspective and see
it's basically a family run seven families that run seven jurisdictions now a lot of people don't
like that already because they think it's undemocratic well you know tough shit you know
kings and queens run countries often much better than democracies do because they get to think
longer term they can decide right let's my son's going to inherit this we've got a good hundred
years of governance here the problem with those kind of places if you get a bad guy
your son's an idiot he can run the place into the ground and that does happen
but on the whole like i said earlier people go to um go people go to dubai because they receive
a good service. Government should be a service. They go there to receive a good service. If the
service is bad, they often will leave as quickly as they went. If Dubai starts spiraling out of
control and turning into an absolute nightmare that they don't like, people are going to go.
And that's the way governance should work in my head. Government should be competing for you,
not seeing you as just a way to generate income. And unfortunately, Dubai has that option. It had
some wealth behind it from resources doesn't need to do it and it treats its own citizens incredibly
well like emiratis they're only 10 of the population there but they are given a lot of stuff
same with qataris actually right yeah and and as a result they're happy all the incomers are happy
because they're they're hardly being taxed at all the only reason they're actually being taxed is
because of pressure from the rest of the world to say hey it's not fair you know about that right
They would be happy if there was a single tax rate for the whole world that everyone had to comply to.
And all that is, is doing away with competition again.
And it's like, this is the thing that keeps coming up.
Governments want to eradicate competition between them and other people.
And the problem that they run, they run like that.
They don't need to compete.
They don't care.
if if if the if your local council runs out of money they're not going to lose their job
the guys aren't going to lose their job they're they're going to just charge you more for a bin
and the people who cause the problem will probably be the ones who are paid to try and fix it and
yeah exactly and they're and and they're they've got a pension they were during the pandemic they
were treated very well it's almost like the rules were based around those kind of jobs you know
the whole thing is is is an absolute shit show i don't we're so far down the route anyway back to
the question about america are you positive do you think something's happening there is something
good happening i'm yeah i'm generally quite sanguine about it i'm certainly given the
contrast between you know by but the biden administration the trump administration
you know weirdly i'm i'm i'm obviously not an american voter and my opinions of the biden
administration were mainly based on his aggressive pursuit and attack on on bitcoin uh and and the
industry in general nothing wrong with that like i say it's the canary in the coal mine yeah it
really is and the i think you're completely right you know it was your your one second test as to
whether it's a good place yeah or a good person yeah good person yeah i mean if it if you do it
with a person if if i i don't like speaking about him but um he's come up a number of times recently
on this podcast, Gary's Economics.
Oh, Christ.
Yeah, but he's a perfect example
of someone who speaks authoritatively about Bitcoin
and doesn't understand it at all.
Yeah, no one's saying it.
Right, so that's my red flag
in a personal relationship as well.
It's fine to not understand Bitcoin,
but if you talk about it authoritatively,
I doubt everything you're saying now.
Well, exactly.
It's completely undermined my belief in the FT.
Are they backing him?
I didn't even know that.
Oh, no, no, I meant their incorrect attitude towards the last 15 years.
I thought he was becoming a columnist at the MT or something.
It got to the point where I was thinking, you know, the old joke,
those who can do and those who can't teach,
and if you can't do either, you work for the FT.
Right.
But anyway, you're completely right.
He speaks about it with great authority and great conviction,
and he looks like the kind of man who's never even turned on a computer.
He's also a closet socialist, and I'm not sure he even understands that. But the reason I think Gary's a really good, interesting example is he defaults to the government solving the problem without even a thought, I think. And this is important because I think a lot of people think the same way.
when a problem arises they look to the government and there's a much bigger view of that whole
equation which is is it the government's problem is it their fault should they solve it but people
don't they they it's we especially in the uk we live in such an ingrained system where the
government solves problems like i'm poor right the government's not helping me you know like
that's the kind of natural response to it from so many people whereas you find in america it's a bit
more of a you know pick yourself up by your bootstraps kind of place well i think i know i
grew up in a country where if you were poor no one was coming to help you if you were poor you lived
on the freaking streets and i think that's very deeply ingrained into me from when i was a small
child i grew up in a scenario with it in a country where there were no free schools every kid when
went to school, their parents paid even a small amount. The government schools were
charged fees. There was no free health care. It was a tough place to grow up. It forged people
who were incentivized to change things. So your point is completely correct. We do have this
mental attitude that someone will look after us someone else will fix this Why are the roads full of potholes Now you see Rod Stewart at the front of his house filling in holes
Yeah, there's a video from somewhere
filling in a pothole outside his own house
because the local council isn't able to do it.
And in this terrible state of our system,
I wouldn't be surprised if someone from the bureaucratic system
came to stop him and said, it's our job.
Yes.
I mean, this is how ridiculous everything's becoming.
And when you look at that, it's basically the collectivist versus the individualist.
The individualist says, oh, there's a pot outside my house, right, I'm going to go and fix it.
The collectivists are like, wait a minute, wait a minute, no.
Whose job is that?
And we've also over-regulated to the point where if you fill in a pothole with incorrect material,
then perhaps that is now going to create a health and safety problem where some other regulation has been tripped.
You know, that's been filled in with gravel, not with bitumen.
You know, that's not going to meet with, you know, the highways agency standards for road composition.
And you have so many different interlocking layers and rules that effectively,
there's something that a lot of the Silicon Valley company directors talk about.
It's a bias for action.
As a country in the United Kingdom, we've completely lost our bias for action.
We now have a throw your hands up in the air and wait for someone else to fix it attitude.
and unfortunately I mean if I had to sort of
sum up a lot of my frustration with this
is that we need to take more personal responsibility
for actions and really look at the way
that our system functions
and understand what it is about the system
that stops us from taking those actions
and is there then anything that we can do about it
and actually returning to something we said recently
if a government comes in and really decides
to make those kind of changes,
to try and reduce the size of the civil service
or get rid of unnecessary...
Some regulation is good, for example.
I think it's sensible that we have a legal system
which protects people's rights to own property
and, you know, I know to have those property rights
enforced in a court of law, fine.
The back tunnel, I return to a lot.
Have you read this story?
on HS2.
They had spent £100 million
building a tunnel for some bats
which may actually not even be there.
£100 million?
£100 million, yeah.
I know people that have been done on bat houses
when they've been doing an extension
on their house.
And that was like £60,000
but £100 million?
It was because
the line was going to run through
an area of woodland in which it was
alleged some of these endangered bats might live but it wasn't proven that they were actually there
but this is why we can't do anything in our country well interestingly you know i was speaking
to michael monnelly the lord mayor of london yes on the last pod he he's he's into being into
regulation and understanding that and he did make a really valid point that i hadn't really hit home
on me prior to that conversation which is most regulation arises out of the industry you think
of regulation as being something the government does it's something that they might enforce
but really most business most you know sectors create regulation because they want their products
to be good and they want some kind of you know like people to believe in them or you know the
perfect example is cruise ships which are private floating cities basically and there's no guy from
the government on board enforcing the regulations but they create their regulations they're they're
in order that their customers have a good experience
and they don't lose their customers, which was, you know.
So the regulation things are often quite misunderstood.
It's just always, oh, it's bloody regulation.
It's terrible.
Yeah, I'd agree with that from maybe two perspectives.
One sort of standardization, which I think is a good form of regulation.
And that's the kind of experience that I think you're describing
on like a Carnival cruise ship.
You know that the industry has certain standards
which are then enforced by the courts and by the government.
The other southern negative flip side of that, where I might sort of challenge him slightly,
is that, yes, industries often do push for regulation because it creates a regulatory moat and reduces competition.
So that, I think what he said is true, but it can have positive and negative outcomes.
If what you're doing is creating a moat such that no new entrant can ever break into your company.
And actually, interestingly, this is what we saw.
Oh, God, I'm going to get the technology wrong.
it's worth the United States Postal Service I think tried to push back against either Telegram
or the email you probably know the story I don't but I was going to say email I could have been
that uh there was there was some form of I'm so sorry I can't I can't recall the exact story but
it's worth worth digging up it's quite quite an old story and it was around um whether or not
email should be effectively run by a particular bot. And obviously, the war was successfully
fought. The SMTP protocol is an open protocol, and anyone can use it and build on it.
But that was an interesting example. And I think, returning to the money question,
Bitcoin undermines the state's monopoly of money, which is why a lot of defensive states
don't like it and tying that back into america the fact that america has now looked at bitcoin
and seen all of its manifest advantages i think is a hugely positive step forwards
because usually where america goes the world follows even reluctantly i did though here
recently which was an interesting take i think it was preston pish was saying that
the us's interest in bitcoin and particular stable coins because they're so closely
related is to do with them requiring liquidity for um sovereign debt oh i completely agree right
okay but it's not all no i think a lot of people would look at what you said and think wow they
support bitcoin they believe in liberty and freedom and all this kind of stuff well i think i think
that i think president's point i completely agree on the stable coin front uh it's very important
for there to be global demand for united states dollars um and i think they've got some very very
clever people who've looked at the stablecoin market
and realized that it is only going to grow exponentially.
And it a fantastic way of creating US dollar demand in countries that can normally access US dollars It basically the same as the Eurodollar market in the 70s and 80s You enable offshore entities to create US dollars via
making bonds denominated in dollars. The US doesn't know how many, no one knows how many
dollars were created in the Eurodollar market.
I don't think many people knew it existed until recently. I think it's just been talked
about.
It's kind of a geeky thing that people, I mean, even I was in the future.
But it's a really important thing to understand.
I don't understand it.
I've dug into the euro-dollar thing, and I kind of get it,
but I don't really understand it.
I don't really understand how it functions.
I mean, very few people do, but at its simplest,
let's say you're a bank in Luxembourg, and you make me a loan,
and you denominate that loan in US dollars.
You've just created some US dollars.
But that seems really weird.
It is.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, I find it all delightfully weird,
but you know that they're sort of weird i mean this is why i can't why i don't have conversations
at the dinner table because if i start talking about this kind of stuff my wife will just get
up and leave but i find it all geekly fascinating i i we're running we're over an hour and a half
and we did you've got a hard stop i know i i want to leave on a positive note though um from your
perspective from where you are and like i say you're you you've got a unique perspective because
you you know you know you were you're in that sector that a lot of people don't have access to
i think um what how do we how do we deal with this going forward and i mean this problem of
constant state encroachment bad governance and those are the two main things what what does the
individual do the normal person who's just trying to run a business or just living their life what
What should they do?
Again, trying to end positively, I did just sort of two fronts, one macro and one individual.
So on the macro level, I think it's very important to try and make it clear to the people for whom we vote
that there is an increasing groundswell for a reduction in the cost of running the state,
however that's achieved.
And that covers all kinds of things that we've been talking about,
the impossibility of building infrastructure in the UK, the fact that there's no money for councils,
the fact that pension liabilities are unfunded, the fact that we have too many civil servants,
and that getting those, I'm sure, good civil servants to do anything is borderline impossible
because of the loopholes that they have to go through. So reducing the cost of running the state
is hugely important. And voting for people who have in the manifesto they want to do that,
I think is an important step. It may not be successful, but it's a step in the right direction.
And then on an individual level, I mentioned earlier, well, we are very much on the back foot in terms of privacy and surveillance, but there are a lot of new pieces of what's commonly called freedom tech coming to market.
Jack Dorsey's BitChats is a great example.
If you haven't downloaded it, you probably have, actually.
But any of your listeners, that's a fantastic piece of software.
It sits on your phone and enables you to create a mesh network using Bluetooth with other people who use it.
that kind of technology is going to be extraordinarily powerful your point earlier
was what made me think about it about around needing permission to go on the internet
other forms of internet communication exist and a localized mesh network is one of them
and using facilities like starlink is another the to the extent that you can reach outside
a firewall that your country may be intending to impose.
Learn about those kind of technologies now before you need them.
There are lots of them out there.
There is a list of them in my pinned tweet at the moment.
An increasing number of companies and people and programmers and developers
are working on this kind of stuff.
And it is possible to use a browser like DuckDuckGo or like Opera,
which have built-in VPNs which don't track you.
You can pay for VPNs like MulVad using Bitcoin
without surrendering your personal information.
Explore those, understand them,
learn how to buy Bitcoin KYC-free.
Prudently, if you're going to buy Bitcoin,
I'd suggest that you maintain a KYC stack
and a non-KYC stack.
You can then, if, for example,
you ever need to sell any,
you can prove chain of title for the KYC stack.
explore operating systems like graphene os that you can use on an android phone which again won't
track you won't surveil you won't sell your data to other people and again a lot of this i think is
precautionary steps as an individual can take we don't necessarily need to use them yet because
we still don't quite live in a police state but if we ever did it's just as well to have made that
those preparatory steps first and know that you're a little bit ahead of the game rather than
how everyone else will be.
Freddie, many thanks.
Thank you, Jim.
I've enjoyed talking to you.
I've enjoyed it as well.
I really enjoyed it.
And I'm surprised you're being so candid
about things like that.
When I hear people say things like that,
I think, dude, they're coming to get you.
Well, I put a lot of this stuff
after the online safety hack came
and then I thought, maybe,
I hope in my photo I don't have a fire.
Maybe that's to do with your past
and where you grew up and stuff.
you're kind of you're used to living a little bit on the edgier side perhaps but i think it's
important and remember that you know there are more of us than there are of them correct but
as as i always think i've decided to put myself in a public arena um but that makes you a target
and makes you a very simple and easy target in fact and one that might be chosen because you can
being made uh and you know an example out of but it is important for people to publicly talk about
these things it's just it is it's just a it's just a horrible horrible situation to be in i find
although staying positive yes there are still things we can do i'm like that guy i know the
painter yeah what's that with the fuzzy hair and in the end i painted the thing yeah
right we're ending on a good one and freddie thank you very much indeed and thank you so much
And yeah, I look forward to hearing your talk today later at Honeybetter.
Thank you.
Real pleasure to have me on.
Thank you.