WBD653 Audio Transcription

Escaping Hyperinflation in a Rolls Royce with Freddie New

Release date: Wednesday 3rd May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Freddie New. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Freddie New is the Head of Policy at Bitcoin Policy UK. In this interview, we discuss how his childhood experiences living in Zimbabwe and Syria have shaped his understanding of Bitcoin’s unique properties. We also discuss his amazing efforts in setting up Bitcoin Policy UK, a new and much-needed advocacy group promoting Bitcoin to policymakers and the wider public in the United Kingdom.

“Why I feel perhaps Bitcoin and its properties appealed more to me than to some other people…I was lucky to have strange experiences as a kid, which I feel made the advantages of a money which you can carry in your head, or, which you bring with you when you cross a border, or, if the worst happened, and you just had to drop everything and go, what could you take with you.”

— Freddie New

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: How many interviews have you done? 

Freddie New: I haven't done any for about 20 years.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so not on this subject at all?

Freddie New: No.

Peter McCormack: How old are you?

Freddie New: 43.

Peter McCormack: You're a year younger than me.  When are you 44?

Freddie New: November.

Peter McCormack: Just after my birthday, so about a year older.

Freddie New: Yeah, we're both 1970s babies.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, 1978.  We got to live through the brilliance of the 1980s as a little kid, and in the 1990s thinking we're becoming adults.

Freddie New: Pre-internet.  I'm indoctrinating my kids.  We're working them through Back to the Future, we've started on Indiana Jones.

Peter McCormack: Oh, my God!  Are we recording by the way? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah

Peter McCormack: Amazing, we'll just carry on.  Okay, Back to the Future?

Freddie New: Done all three.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, third one shit.

Freddie New: I have a soft spot for all of them, but the third one is definitely the least good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think when I was a kid, the second one was the best but it's the one that's aged the worst.

Freddie New: Yeah, I think that the sexual mores in the whole Back to the Future thing is not something I noticed at the time.  But going back in time and then getting hit on by your mum is... 

Peter McCormack: It's a bit weird.

Freddie New: Yeah, it's more noticeable as an adult as well.

Peter McCormack: I think the first one's brilliant.  Raiders of the Lost Ark is my brother's favourite film of all time.

Freddie New: I was so disappointed at the end of that one, because you remember when the Ark opens and it all goes pear-shaped?  That scared the shit out of me for the longest time.  And then I watched it again with my kids and they just didn't care.

Peter McCormack: It's because things have changed.  So do you remember when you first saw Alien and the alien comes out the stomach?

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying, in space.  I remember when we went to Thailand, my daughter must have been about 8 years old, and she's like, "Can I watch the Alien film?"  I was like, "No".  She's like, "Please".  I was like, "No".  Anyway, she put it on and I didn't realise it was, and I said, "Are you watching the Alien film?"  She said, "Yeah", and it was literally that bit.  I said, "You need to turn this off".  And it bursts out of the stomach and goes across the room, but it looks so shit.  And she's cracking up, she thinks it's fucking hilarious.

Freddie New: That's heartbreaking.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it's things just aren't, you know, cameras have moved on, special effects have moved on, the shitty monster isn't as scary.

Freddie New: My children watch too much stuff.

Peter McCormack: Temple of Doom or Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Freddie New: I'd probably go Raiders.

Peter McCormack: I'm more Temple of Doom.

Freddie New: I like the horror in Temple of Doom.  I think the Kali Ma grabbing the guys --

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You know, what's his name, Short Stuff?

Freddie New: Yes.

Peter McCormack: You know he's the guy just won the Oscar?

Freddie New: I know.  I mean I didn't know until I read about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Are we talking in a foreign language?

Danny Knowles: You're such boomers!

Freddie New: No, we're Gen X!

Peter McCormack: What was the film I couldn't believe you hadn't seen and I made you watch?

Danny Knowles: I think it was Back to the Future.  I watched it.

Peter McCormack: Back to the Future, did you like it?

Danny Knowles: I watched it on the plane.  It was actually pretty good, it was better than I thought it was going to be.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Back to the Future is a good film.

Freddie New: That's the greatest review it's ever had, "Back to the Future, better than I thought it was going to be"!

Peter McCormack: Back to the Future is an incredible film.

Freddie New: I think the second one as well, because you realise they re-shot all the pieces of the first film with the second guy back in time, and then that just blows your mind.  You think, "I assume he was --", well, it depends on whether you ascribe to the first Terminator's linear theory of time, or the second one's loop, or maybe that's the wrong way round.  One of the Terminators has got one theory of time and the other one's got another.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, Terminator one?

Freddie New: The first one's the loop theory, because he'd come back, Kyle Reese had come back and he'd already come back to become John Connor's father, and then no matter what Skynet did it was always going to happen in that loop.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I remember now.

Freddie New: And then in T2, they suddenly realise, "Aren't we changing things now while we're talking?" when they're talking to Miles, "The man most directly responsible is Miles Bennett Dyson".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I loved T2.

Freddie New: The best film.

Peter McCormack: I loved it.  I remember, because that came out at the time -- have you ever seen the South Park movie?

Freddie New: Yes, Bigger, Longer & Uncut?

Peter McCormack: Yes.  But you know the very start where they're excited and go to the cinema?  I had the same experience with Terminator 2, because I must have been 13.

Freddie New: 1991, 4 July it came out.

Peter McCormack: 13, yeah.  Bloody hell, that's weird!  So, I was 13, my favorite band in the world was Guns N' Roses, and so the trailer comes out and they're playing You Could Be Mine from Use Your Illusion II, and there's explosions, the truck goes off the bridge and I was like, "Fuck, we've got to go and see this!".  So me and all my mates, we went down there and got there.

Freddie New: You got in?

Peter McCormack: No, there were four tickets for Terminator 2 and they're like, "How old are you?"  We're like, "15", "Have you got the ID?" "No", and we couldn't go in.  Actually we might not even have got asked for ID, they might have just said no, because that was the days where you didn't really carry ID as a 13-year-old.  So no, I didn't get to go into the cinema and see it, I went to see something really shit instead, like the Little Mermaid.  Oh no, that was a different story.  No, we used to have a cinema in Bedford, that was it, there was a cinema in Bedford that used to have two screens, and you'd go up a set of stairs and you'd take a right to screen two and a left to screen one.  Screen one was unbelievable, it had two tiers in the cinema, big amphitheater.  

Anyway, if you wanted to go and see the adult film, you'd pay for the kids film and go in.  So, flatliners was on, I was 12, couldn't get in; the Little Mermaid was on, so I paid for the Little Mermaid but just walked into flatliners.  That was the good old days.

Freddie New: I haven't let my kids watch T2 yet, but that's going to be a special experience.

Peter McCormack: How old are they?

Freddie New: They're 10 and 8.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, is the 10-year-old a boy?

Freddie New: No, both girls.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Freddie New: They can already do the lines.  I look up at the sky and say, "There's a storm coming", and they'll turn round and say, "I know".

Peter McCormack: Have they watched Die Hard?

Freddie New: Not yet, but that's on as a Christmas movie this coming year.

Peter McCormack: So, the interesting difference with girls over boys is girls love horror films.

So, my son and his mates didn't care, they wanted to watch adventure films.  My daughter, she's now 13, all they want to watch is horror films.  And the worst horror, like literally the grossest.

Freddie New: That's interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, she had them all over for a sleep the other night.  She was like, "Can we watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre?"  I was like, "No, absolutely not".  And then they wanted to watch some other film and I read the description, it was like, "Demonic axe murderer comes back from hell to mutilate babysitter", some bullshit.  That's all they want to watch.

Freddie New: It's funny, my wife said the same thing.  When she was young, she'd absolutely love the Child's Play films.

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah.  Oh, where is he?

Danny Knowles: He's in the back.

Peter McCormack: Is he?  I've got a great story; I've got a brilliant -- do you want to grab him?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I've got a brilliant Child's Play story.  So, my daughter's into horror films, I was like, "You need to watch Child's Play.  That was my film as a kid", and she watched it, she loved it.  And when I was out in, where was I?  I was in Austin and they had one of those stores which had all film memorabilia, you know posters and things from films and stuff, and I walked past the window and there's a fucking Chucky doll in the window.  I'm like, "I'm having that".

Freddie New: Did you meet, last year at Miami 2022, Kyra Gardner; did you bump into her?  She was at the whale party.

Peter McCormack: What?

Freddie New: Her dad did all the special effects of the Chucky films, and she's just made a short film -- oh, my God, that's horrific!

Peter McCormack: Isn't it horrific?  Anyway, so this is the maddest story, right, so I buy the doll and I bring it back for my daughter, and she's like, "That's freaky".  She loves it but hates it.  And so, we go through this process of hiding it in each other's stuff, like I put it in her school bag, she put it in my bed.  And he said two things.  And then about six months after I bought him, he started saying new stuff.

Freddie New: You're joking?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I'll be back, I'll always come back", so that's what he said, he said that.  "I'm going to have a problem with you", didn't say that.  "A little killing, what's wrong with that?" and he did that.

Freddie New: And you still keep it in your house?

Peter McCormack: He never said that, so he never said, "Hi, I'm Chucky, I want to play".  So, I was really pissed off about him not saying that.  I was like, that's the one thing you want him to say.  Yeah, and about six months in, he started saying new things.  And I was like, okay, either one this doll is actually possessed, which is freaky; or two, they've put a time delay on the things he says, which really fucks with you.

Freddie New: That would be really funny if they did that.

Peter McCormack: That really fucks with you.  Sorry, anyway, so this is your wife's favourite, she loved these films?

Freddie New: She loved those.  And yeah, so in Miami last year, I met this director whose dad had done all the special effects for Chucky, and then I think she actually just finally released it, which is great news, because she's really talented.  She's released a documentary about living with Chucky, you should watch it.

Peter McCormack: So that's out?

Freddie New: I think it's out, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I need to see that.

Freddie New: I can't remember the name of the film, but her name's Kyra Gardner.

Peter McCormack: So, I recently watched a documentary about the making of Nightmare on Elm Street.  So they have not aged too well, but the original one is brilliant, the original one's really, really good still, because it's just straight in there.  I mean horror films now, it's always the same.  It's like two blokes, well actually it's usually three guys, two girls, one of the guys is a virgin so doesn't get to talk to anyone.

Freddie New: One of them's a jock, he ends up dying.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and him and his girlfriend always sneak off and have a snog, they're going to shag.  And then there's the nerdy kind of couple who kind of like -- it's literally the same set up every time.  Then they go somewhere and then they're drinking, and it's such a formula.  But do you remember the original Nightmare on Elm Street?

Freddie New: It's fucking terrifying!

Peter McCormack: They literally start with murder straight away, like instant death.  So, they struggled to get financing for that film for a long time, they couldn't get it financed.  They eventually did and it's one of the most successful franchises ever.  Have you seen it?

Danny Knowles: I have seen it, but it was so long ago I can't really remember it.

Peter McCormack: I mean there were like six, and then there was the follow-up, Freddy's Nightmares.

Freddie New: Yeah, the last one was not that long ago.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: But it was a boomer kind of film.

Peter McCormack: Do you have a favorite film?

Freddie New: It's probably got to be T2 if I was put on the spot.

Peter McCormack:  Oh really?

Danny Knowles: I've never seen it.

Freddie New: You've never seen T2?

Danny Knowles: I've never seen Terminator 1 either.

Freddie New:  Oh, please watch them in the right order.  Spoiler free, watch the first Terminator and the second one without knowing anything about it.

Danny Knowles: I'll download them and watch them on the plane back.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what?  I don't mind the third one.  It's not brilliant, but it's not terrible.

Freddie New: I'm with you, actually.  Also, the ending of the third one --

Peter McCormack: It's brilliant. 

Freddie New: -- I won't spoil it for Danny.  That rescue, suddenly you think, "Oh, my God, what have they done there?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it makes it all make sense.  When he's gone later, we'll do the interpretation; I imagine it'll be the same.  I even didn't mind the resurrection one, that was okay, the Christian Bale one, I thought that wasn't too bad.

Freddie New: I mean, I've got to lay my cards on the table, I've never seen a Terminator film I haven't enjoyed.  Although, if you're being a purist, I'd go for the first two.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, first two.  First one's brilliant, second one is uniquely brilliant because the effects are -- I mean, the effects now look shit.  But when he got shot and he had a kind of molten chest, it was like, "How did they do that?"

Freddie New: I mean also, the story of the second one is so powerful.  I try to base all of my parenting around that scene in the desert when Sarah's saying, "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear.  The Terminator would never come home drunk and hit him.  It would never, never happen".

Peter McCormack: How old were you when The Matrix came out?

Danny Knowles: What year was that; 1999?  8. 

Peter McCormack: Do you remember it coming out and watching it?

Danny Knowles: No, I don't remember it coming out, but I've obviously watched it.

Peter McCormack: Did you watch it quite young and think it was like, "Effects are unbelievable"?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, so that was our Terminator.

Danny Knowles: I've not watched it back in ages.

Freddie New: I watched it again last year, and it's still great.

Danny Knowles: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Did you see the new Matrix?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I did, it was shit.

Peter McCormack: It's horrifically bad.

Freddie New: I haven't seen it yet.

Danny Knowles: I thought the second and third Matrix were both pretty bad as well.

Peter McCormack: They were.  Basically, you wanted them in the Matrix.  Every time they're in that underground place, they're just fucking shit.

Danny Knowles: They're shit, yeah.

Peter McCormack: ET's my favorite film.

Freddie New: I loved it.  You see that was the first 1980s film we showed my daughter.

Peter McCormack: That was a weird film.  So, everyone seemed to see it on pirate before it ever actually came out.

Freddie New: Did they?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: That's funny.

Danny Knowles: ET?  Did you buy it off your ice-cream man, or something?!

Peter McCormack: No, in the olden days, what used to have, my dad will remember this, you used to have a guy who would come around your house with a suitcase, he'd open the suitcase and you would rent a video from him, and he would come back the next night and get it.

Danny Knowles: Rent like a pirated video?

Peter McCormack: I don't know.  Dad, remember the old guy with the suitcase that used to come around?  Yeah, it was pirate.  So, yeah, literally walk in your house with a suitcase, a big suitcase, open it up and it was like a mini Blockbuster.  And you'd go, "I want that one".

Danny Knowles: The original Pirate Bay!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And I remember one time, we all wanted Stand By Me.  Have you ever seen stand By Me?

Danny Knowles: Is that Steven King?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, have you seen it?

Danny Knowles: I think so.

Peter McCormack: You've got to see it if you haven't.

Danny Knowles: I'm like you with names, I can't remember films.

Peter McCormack: So, we got Stand By Me, we always wanted it and my dad got it, but my dad watched it first and we all wanted to see it and he said, "No, it's too much swearing, you can't watch it"!

Freddie New: They riffed on the pirate stuff you were just talking about; did you see that series called White Gold?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Danny Knowles: That was good.

Freddie New: That was good, yeah.  But do you remember, one of the characters was pirating ET up in the office? 

Danny Knowles: Oh, you're right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: There you go. 

Freddie New: Oh, my God, that was true.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was true.  So, I remember it because I remember when it got released.  I was like, "Hold on, I saw this a year ago".  Everyone had seen it pirated.  Do you know the story of the, what was it, the ET computer game that never got released?

Freddie New: Oh, my God, it's in landfill in Nevada or somewhere, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so what happened, you should look it up, so they made an ET game for Atari, it was probably one of the most expensive games to make ever, something stupid like that.  When they eventually released it, it was so shit and they were so embarrassed, they basically wouldn't release it and then put it all in a landfill so no one could get it.  And then someone went and dug it up, so you can buy it.  And it's quite rare, it's like gold dust.

Danny Knowles: No way, more scarce than Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of all these films, I don't know, Danny --

Danny Knowles: It looks really shit.

Peter McCormack: It is really shit.  Danny hadn't seen Gremlins.

Danny Knowles: No, but why would I have?

Peter McCormack: Because it's brilliant.  I've seen films before my time that are brilliant.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, but is that actually a good film?

Peter McCormack: Gremlins is incredible.

Freddie New: Sometimes it's nice to go back and see.  It's like, you give books 20 years to --

Peter McCormack: Mature.

Freddie New: Yeah, exactly, are they going to survive the test of time?  There's a website called Ruthless Reviews I'm trying to work my way through.  It's absolutely fricking hilarious reviews of all these bad 1980s action films.  Then they have a categorisation, you know, entire film described in fewer words than are in this sentence, and then like Top Gun is, "Hot sweaty studs take showers, fly planes"!

Danny Knowles: Oh, the new Top Gun was good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was it was actually.  I had a film block before the podcast, it was called Fuck off, Films.

Freddie New: Oh, yeah, I've heard you talk about that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was called Fuck off, Films and I used to do really offensive film reviews, and then I used to interview the last guy in the credits.

Freddie New: Oh, one of your shows, you spent three-quarters of it talking about movies.  I'm sorry, we've just done the same thing right now, I'm so sorry.

Danny Knowles: That would have been the one with Eric Yakes, yeah.

Freddie New: He's the guy who wrote The 7th Property?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: I really enjoyed that show, but --

Peter McCormack: There were a lot of films.

Freddie New: Well, I like films as well as Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, the funny thing is when we do something like this, what we've been going 10 minutes?

Danny Knowles: 15. 

Freddie New: I'm so sorry.

Peter McCormack: You know you haven't got a time on that?

Freddie New: No, we don't need that.

Peter McCormack: Oh, we had it yesterday.  When we do stuff like this, you get people who write in, they'll be like, "Oh, my God, that's amazing, I loved it.  Do more non-Bitcoin stuff", and then you get half the other people going, "Fucking hell, I only listen to you for Bitcoin.  Cut all this other shit", or they'll put a little timestamp in YouTube, "Bitcoin starts here".

Freddie New: "Bitcoin starts here", okay.

Peter McCormack: So maybe we should do like 30 seconds of Bitcoin!

Freddie New: Can I give you a thank you for having me on?

Peter McCormack: Of course man.

Freddie New: I'm not sure where you are with your drinking at the moment.

Peter McCormack: I'm back drinking.

Freddie New: Oh, you are, excellent.  Just a little thank you for having me on.  That goes very nicely with barbecue and brisket.

Peter McCormack: Wow!  Burnt Ends blended whiskey, small batch, smooth, tender, oh wow!

Danny Knowles: That looks cool.

Peter McCormack: That is very kind.

Freddie New: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: No, thank you.  Hold on, I'm going to have a smell of this.

Freddie New: If you've got some like slow-cooked…

Peter McCormack: Wow!  That tastes like a blend of bourbon and scotch.

Freddie New: It is.

Peter McCormack: Is it?

Freddie New: It is.  It's quite unusual, it was given to me by a Norwegian friend originally, and then I loved it and got a lot more.

Peter McCormack: "Peated and sherry-finished single malt scotch", oh, interesting.  Yeah, I'm more of a -- I find scotch a bit too harsh, but I do like bourbon, but that's actually -- do you want to try it?

Danny Knowles: I don't like whiskey.

Peter McCormack: I know you don't, but you always end up having one when we have it.

Freddie New: Do you have a bourbon with barbecue?

Danny Knowles: Oh, I like that though.  That's a bit sweeter.

Freddie New: Yeah, exactly.  I think it gets the sweetness from the Tennessee mash.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to join?

Freddie New: Oh, yeah, go on then.

Danny Knowles: We can get glasses if you want.

Peter McCormack: Let's just get fucking -- what's the time? 

Danny Knowles: 12:00pm.

Freddie New: We could get little glasses.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm back in the not drinking phase.  No, we can't start drinking.  We can have a little one.

Danny Knowles: Shall I get glasses?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, let's get glasses.  So, we met up in Scotland.  I forgot we met up in Scotland.

Freddie New: I've got my Bedford hat over there.  I bought it from your daughter, actually.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I just thought that was some of our merch lying around.

Freddie New: No, that's mine.

Peter McCormack: Oh, fantastic.

Freddie New: I got lots of smiles on the train, thank you.

Peter McCormack: Yes, you would have coming into Bedford.  They'd be like, "Why's he got a Bedford hat on?"  We're about to win the league.

Freddie New: I know, I follow your updates, it's very exciting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're going to win the league I think on Monday.  So, there's winning it and there's mathematically winning it.  So, three more points and we've won it, but there is a scenario where if we lose every game and the other team wins every game, and they turn over a 40-goal difference, then they can win the league, so that's mathematically.  So, we can win it on Saturday, kind of, but mathematically on Monday, Easter Monday, at home against our local rivals.

Freddie New: That's going to be a big game.

Peter McCormack: You should come.

Freddie New: Oh shit, Danny, can you give me the date.  I'm in Norway.

Peter McCormack: Oh, when do you go?

Freddie New: We're flying on Monday; Monday or Tuesday.

Peter McCormack: When are you back?

Freddie New: The 16th, I think we fly back.

Peter McCormack: Oh, God, you're going to be away for our live event.

Freddie New: Thank you very much.

Peter McCormack: No, thank you, it's your whiskey.  What the fuck are we doing drinking whiskey at 12.00pm?  I'm going to get some care emails saying, "Pete, what are you doing, you did so well?"  Right, so we met up in Scotland at the UK Conference, which I think, by the way, they did a brilliant job on.

Freddie New: Absolutely loved it, it was such a good atmosphere.  Like I say, I was in Miami last year, and obviously that's Miami, loved it.  But the combination of fantastic atmosphere, really great people speaking, really great attendees, it just all came together in Edinburgh.  It was a lovely event. 

Peter McCormack: It reminded me a little bit of the first Bitcoin -- I can't say Miami because it was in San Francisco, but the first Bitcoin Conference, Bitcoin 2019.  That was 2,000 people, 1,900 people, very small, one auditorium that probably held 1,000 people.  It was in like an industrial building, where you kind of went up through a ramp to where the exhibitors were, and then up another ramp, and then there was like a roof terrace with all the food and street food.  And basically, you were either watching a talk or hanging out by the food, and there were only two or three places to go, so everyone kept together.  It was kind of like a hangout, a party, festival, and I've been blown away by how much they've grown this and if I was them, I would grow exactly the same because if you have 25,000 people come in, you're going to be making 20 times what they had, revenue-wise, and that's amazing, but I did miss that smaller intimate thing.

Freddie New: Yeah, it was just so nice to be able to wander around, and I mean that was where I first met you, just saying hi.  And, I was saying to Danny, I met Jeff there as well, had a chat with him, couldn't have been nicer.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, lovely guy, he's here next Friday.

Freddie New: I've timed everything so badly.

Peter McCormack: You have timed it badly, you're missing out on all it.  Hold on, Annetta, you're on the video camera.

Danny Knowles: Wave to the podcast.

Peter McCormack: Wave to the podcast.  Annetta, so we're going to be an hour-and-a-half in here.  What do you want to do?  Okay.  I don't know if you're going to edit that out!

Danny Knowles: I kind of hope not! 

Peter McCormack: That's Anette.  That's my Polish wife who doesn't live here!  She's amazing.  Yeah, so anyway, great conference and we're going to expand ours next year to a full conference here in Bedford.

Freddie New: Fantastic.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've secured, we're not going to announce it, but we've secured three excellent -- well, we've got nods from three excellent keynotes, I'll tell you afterwards.

Freddie New: That's a terrific idea.

Peter McCormack: It's going to be at the Bedford Corn Exchange, probably a two-day event with, what, I believe 600 to 700 people if we can do it, if we can pull it off.

Freddie New: Yeah, fantastic.

Peter McCormack: So next Friday's the test.

Freddie New: Just give us the dates and I'll lock it in.

Peter McCormack: We don't know.  So, what I want to do is, this one's really cool because we've got the event on the Friday and then it's the last Bedford home game of the season, so everyone can come to the event and come watch the football.  It's just got a real nice synergy to it.  Not everyone likes the football thing, but those who do like the football can do both.

Freddie New: But you can spend your Bitcoin at the club, right?

Peter McCormack: You can, you can buy a jersey.  We're going to have some limited edition ones, Satoshi 21 ones.  Hopefully they will say, "League Champions", keep your fingers crossed.  But yes, we're going to do that, but they did a great job.

Freddie New: It's a shame you didn't win the league in 2021.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean that would have been particularly hard.  Firstly, I didn't own the club.

Freddie New: And were there even any games in 2021?

Peter McCormack: Well, so 2021, no, because of COVID.  2021, 2022, yes.  But I guess you could claim it's 2021.  Winning the cup in 2021 would have been good.  But anyway, so how long have you been in the UK?

Freddie New: So came back from Zim in 1996.  So been here for quite a long time now.  As you can tell from my strong Zimbabwean accent, the UK has rubbed off on me.

Peter McCormack: You've got that soldier accent.

Freddie New: Oh interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah I think so.

Freddie New: Well, there's a similarity between the Zimbabwe accent with clipped vowels and the old-school posh, British accent, although both kinds of accents lead to a lot of mockery.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah, that kind of public school lieutenant or colonel or whatever it is you become, I don't know.

Freddie New: Yeah, you've got to wear a striped tie at all times, doesn't matter if you're not wearing any other clothes, as long as you've got on the striped tie, you're properly attired, that kind of stuff.

Peter McCormack: So, Zimbabwe in 1996, is that at the height of the violence and reclaiming of the farms?

Freddie New: Actually, it wasn't too bad back then.  So, the process of moving farms out of white ownership back into black Zimbabwean ownership started, my memory's going to be faulty here, so mid-1990s, and then accelerated towards the end of the decade and then got particularly bad like 1998, 1999, 2000s.

Peter McCormack: Was that under Mugabe though?

Freddie New: Under Mugabe, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But was inflation still hitting high then?

Freddie New: It was pretty bad even when I was a teenager.  So a lot of my pegging to inflation is associated with pocket money.  So, I've still got the $2 bill that I got when my first tooth came out.  I stuck it in a piggy bank, found it years later.  Rather sadly, it now sits on my wall together with a $100 billion dollar bill, which represents about the same value, but I keep them together on a display.

Peter McCormack: That's some pretty heavy inflation there.

Freddie New: Pretty horrific.  It was running at between 20% to 50% inflation when I was a teenager. 

Peter McCormack: Which is moderately good for Zimbabwe but if that hit us, it would be horrendous. 

Freddie New: 50% inflation is insane.  You'd lose half your purchasing power in a single year.

Peter McCormack: How old were you?

Freddie New: 16 when we left.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but how old were you when -- as a child, I was aware of inflation, I've talked" about this on the podcast.  On the news, they'd say, "Inflation is at just above a target of 2%", and I always just thought it was a sign of growth.  You know, "Okay, great, that's their target they want to see.  I never really paid any attention to it properly until we made this show, and I had no need as a kid to understand it.  But as a kid, did you naturally understand it because of what was happening?

Freddie New: I think from a perspective of knowing your purchasing power is diminishing, and as a kid you're aware that the money you're getting and the money you're earning is diminishing in its ability to purchase things.  So, a silly example I often use is deposits for bottles.  So, Zimbabwe always had a Coke bottle deposit system, and a Coke used to be $2 but you'd get $1 back if you took the glass bottle back to the store.

Peter McCormack: That's a good return.

Freddie New: It's good, it's fantastic, and particularly for scrappy kids like us.  So, loads of people would drink these things at our rugby games at the weekend, and if you stay behind after the match, you'd go around and collect 30 to 40 different bottles.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what the modern version of that is?

Freddie New: No.

Peter McCormack: So, at Bedford Rugby Club they have the reusable cups.

Freddie New: Yeah, they do it at Twickenham as well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you basically see these kids going around saying, "Are you done with your cup?" and everyone's like, "Oh, go on then".  And so, you see these kids walking around with a tower of cups up under their arm going over their shoulder, and you look and you're like, "That's £30 there!"  And so they take them back and they get £1 for each one, and they go around to do it again.  These kids are making £40, £50, £60 at a rugby match.

Freddie New: Yeah, it's a great idea.

Peter McCormack: And you can't say no, "No, I want my £1.  Fuck off, 10-year-old!"

Freddie New: No, I mean the kids are clearing up and they're making some pocket money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, good for them.

Freddie New: But it becomes noticeable when the price of the Coke wildly accelerates beyond the price of the deposit, and that's the kind of thing you notice as a kid; or the fact that instead of getting $2 for a tooth, that's not really buying anything anymore, and you maybe need to be getting $10, $15, $20 for a tooth.  And it very quickly begins to accelerate out of control.  I mean, Zimbabwe is probably the best working example we have in recent history of how it accelerates.  At one point, the government stopped putting out official inflation figures because they were meaningless; they were so big, you can't even imagine the number.

Peter McCormack: And, can I ask what trade your parents were in?

Freddie New: Sure, so you see from my profile I lived in various odd places.  I was raised by my stepdad and my mum, so my parents separated when I was about 4 or 5 years old, and my stepdad's job, he was with the British Council.  So, for anyone who hasn't heard of the British Council, they're like the cultural wing of Britain's self-publicity abroad.  So they organise things like scholarships and they bring plays and performers over to different locations, and they set up links between universities and those jurisdictions and jurisdictions back home.  And so we were sent off to the Middle East when I was 5 and then obviously, various things happened there which we won't go into.  And then, Zim was my dad's last posting and after his posting finished, he retired up there.

Peter McCormack: Would he have been paid in pounds or local currency?

Freddie New: Interesting, so we actually saw both sides of it in Zim.  So, he was paid in pounds when he was still employed by the British Council, but he retired in 1989 and then he took a bit of time out, and then he began teaching, and it was really noticeable at that point.  So, up until then he'd been paid in sterling, and then when he began teaching he was he was paid in local currency, and our family's personal financial circumstances took a massive nosedive at that point.  It actually became quite tough.

Freddie New: Because of the inflation?

Peter McCormack: Well, you're paid in local currency and as we're seeing in the UK at the moment, typically when inflation is going insane, salaries never keep pace with inflation and that's the kind of thing that precipitates the strikes in the state at the moment.  And you know, you will have seen the pronouncements from Andrew Bailey recently talking about, "It would be very, very good if you didn't increase your prices or if you didn't ask for a pay rise".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just stop printing money, Andrew, you fucking prick.

Freddie New: Or did you see the telegraph story yesterday?

Peter McCormack: Oh, my God, did you see that?

Danny Knowles: Oh, I did, I saw you tweeted it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I took that from Dominic Frisby, hat-tip, mate, yeah, that it's got nothing to do with them.

Freddie New: I thought the Telegraph's headline was quite funny, they were clearly taking the piss.  It said, "Rampant inflation has nothing to do with our wanton money printing", or something like that.

Peter McCormack: So okay, you were experiencing that, your father's and mother's wealth is eviscerating before their eyes?

Freddie New: Yeah, pretty much, at an astonishingly fast pace.  I mean, it's difficult to describe, unless you've experienced it, how the loss of 50% of your purchasing power year-on-year feels.  And in Zimbabwe, there's really no free education to speak of.  There are some government schools and there are some bigger privately-owned schools, but broadly speaking, everyone pays to attend school.  Everyone's earning in some Zim dollars as they were then, paying in Zim dollars, and the schools are upping their prices.  

Obviously, the horrific thing with a global inflation is that none of the price increases ever keep up with each other, there are always some that are increasing faster than others.  And the ones that increase faster than others tend to be the absolute necessities, food, water, housing, electricity; and then there's this horrendous lag where your income is not keeping pace with your outgoings, and then what choice do you have other than to strike?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean, this is the highest inflation I've lived through as an adult.  I don't know if it was high when I was a kid, but it's the highest I've lived through, and I'm noticing things.  So, whatever they claim the inflation is, I think they say about 10%.  I think depending on what it is, it's between 10% and 20%.  So, we've seen a massive increase in our energy prices.  I've just bought a bar, which I close on today.

Freddie New: Congratulations!

Peter McCormack: Thank you.  And everybody is raising their prices, and various other things with property, insurance, my insurance has gone up.  I'm seeing it all but at the same time, we're not raising our prices on the podcast, we're not raising our drinks in the bar because we know everyone's being hit.  But at the same time, you have to rethink your staff, they have to be paid.  So, everything you don't want to go goes up, and everything you want to go up goes up hard.  And so, that's my experience at 10% to 20%.  It's annoying, it's survivable, you rethink, reshuffle.  If you took that to 50%, I actually don't know, I can't envisage the consequences, especially if that was year-after-year.  I cannot imagine what that's like.

Freddie New: It tends to accelerate as well.  And there are also all kinds of other second-order consequences, which may be unseen at the beginning of the process, and one of the most obvious is that people stop saving.  So, if you know that your money is going to be worth half this time next year as what it's worth today, why the hell would you put it in the bank?  Spend it.

Peter McCormack: But even at 10% inflation, I'm looking at the money in my bank and thinking I should do something.  

Freddie New: I think it's six years, so at 10% inflation, doesn't the maths work, it's five or six years you've lost half your purchasing power?

Peter McCormack:  Well, because it's compounded though.

Freddie New: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: So, I would have estimated six years, you've lost it all.  I don't know, I'd have to do the maths.

Freddie New: It's a weird bit of maths.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's an inverse, isn't it?  Yeah, you're probably right, yeah.  I mean, I'm even looking at anything I have which is cash now, I'm thinking I should spend it or put it somewhere.  But then, does that compound inflation because you're spending more?

Freddie New: Well again, it gets to the root problem of all of this, why the hell should you have to spend your time thinking about this instead of doing something productive with your time?  It means everyone has to be a financial engineer, and that's a gigantic waste of your time, talents and brain power and people shouldn't have to do that kind of stuff.

Peter McCormack: And so, was this happening prior to Mugabe, or can you blame all of this on Mugabe?

Freddie New: A lot of it was to do with what happened to the economy.  I mean I have to say, cards on the table, I loved living in Zimbabwe.  It was a wonderful place to grow up, it had the most fantastic climate in the world.  Harare is one of the only cities, definitely one of the only capital cities I think, where you don't need heating or air conditioning.  Lovely climate.  And the education system in Zim was terrific.  It was genuinely, hand on heart, a wonderful place to grow up.

Peter McCormack: And, how integrated was it between the blacks and the whites?

Freddie New: For my generation, pretty good.  So we were too young to remember much segregation.  And actually our school had the first black pupils attend in the 1960s, so there had been two or three different generations.  I was at school with a boy called Douglas Chingoka and his uncle, I think, was Peter Chingoka, had been one of the first black kids at St George's.

Peter McCormack: But would it have been all levels of prosperity mixing, or was it the more fortunate, wealthy blacks mixing with the historic white population?

Freddie New: Yeah, that's a good question.  So, independence in Zim happened in 1980, just missed it actually, 4 April I think it was, no 8 April.

Peter McCormack: Were you born there? 

Freddie New: No, I was born in London, and then moved to Syria when I was 5 and then on to Zim when I was 8.  So our class, I was minority white, so the majority of my school was black.  We had a reasonably weak Asian community as well.  But we'd all grown up in a free Zimbabwe that was independent, and to this day we've still got WhatsApp groups going with my class from Zim.  And there's a very good, I think, certainly mix in terms of races, but the economic point you raise is completely valid.

There's a huge stratification in terms of where you sit in the wealth stratum and there was no real middle-class to speak of previously in Zimbabwe.  So a lot of western society, you've got like three strata of societies largely divided in terms of wealth.  In Zim and a lot of other countries of that nature, you tend to have two divides.  You have an elite and then you have a larger group of people at the bottom, and it's very hard to move between those.  In fact, it's harder to move obviously between the lower levels and the elite than it is to move between the classes in the UK, difficult though that can be as well.

Peter McCormack: Right.  Do you know about this, the redistribution of the farms?

Danny Knowles: I mean, yeah, I've heard about it.  I don't know in detail though.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean you should probably explain it better than I would, but my question with regards to that is, I'm fully aware that the programme to redistribute the farms was chaotic, badly thought through, dangerous, led to death, murder of farmers, fear and people fleeing the country, and then a destruction of the productivity of the farms because they were handed over to people who didn't know how to operate a farm.  I'm aware of a lot of that, please add context where I've got it wrong, but was there any validity to the idea that there should be something done to redistribute opportunity? 

Freddie New: I think almost everyone you speak to would say, yes, that should have happened because these were by and large farms which had been taken from, in some cases, ancestral lands.  And people had been forcibly moved off their territory, not necessarily by the farmers who were operating the farms at the time, but maybe by their ancestors or by people 100 years ago.  So the question of distribution of land is very, very difficult to talk about, because I think most people would agree with the aims and goals, which was to try and give people back their land which had been forcibly taken from them.

Peter McCormack: By forcibly taking it from current owners?

Freddie New: It could have been done in a more thoughtful and better way.  For example, your point about giving the farms to people.  So a lot of the farms in this area were absolutely gigantic.  Some of them were the size of small counties in the UK.

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay.

Freddie New: To manage a farm of that size, you need an army of people, enormous amount of infrastructure to manage a farm that big.  If, at independence, people had started to be trained how to manage those farms, and if there had been some form of compulsory purchase of those farms at market value, and then when those farms were purchased, black farmers had been put in who knew what they were doing, and a lot of the farms were split up.  And you lose some of the economy of scale if you split up a gigantic tobacco farm and try and run it as 80,000 small tobacco farms, it doesn't really work. 

So, I think the spirit of land redistribution was right insofar as this land was unlawfully taken, in many cases, from people whose ancestral land it was, but the way in which it happened was unfortunately chaotic and ultimately led to a lot a lot of the destruction of the agricultural prosperity of Zimbabwe, which itself precipitated a lot of the inflation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and where did the idea come from; was it directly from Mugabe, and was it kind of a populist idea; or was there an ongoing generational debate regarding this?

Freddie New: It's an old idea.  So there were a couple of different liberation struggles in Zimbabwe.  They were called the Chimurengas, which roughly translates as liberation war.  The one that most people will be familiar with is the war that was fought against Ian Smith's Rhodesian army.  There was a guerrilla war in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, and to be honest a lot of it did boil down to land.  Black Zimbabweans were moved off land, they were concentrated into -- it was never as bad as Apartheid in South Africa, which was much more horrific.  But black Zimbabweans were treated as second-class citizens, and that's awful, it shouldn't have happened.

Peter McCormack: How is Zimbabwe now?  What do you know?

Freddie New: I'm still in touch with a lot of people there and my friends up here.  Inflation is going nuts again, not as bad as it was.  I think the rate is 150%; at least it was last time I checked.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that's still horrific.

Freddie New: I mean, it's still insane.  And they went through various periods of striking zeros off the notes.  The US dollar was used, as in many developing nations, as currency and then the US dollar was arbitrarily banned.  The government banned people from putting prices up, the tried and tested means of controlling inflation.

Peter McCormack: Which never works.

Freddie New: Which absolutely never works.

Danny Knowles: It's down to 92%.

Peter McCormack: Oh, that's good.  Yeah, I mean look, we've seen loose calls for price controls in the US.  I think I saw Elizabeth Warren talking about price gouging with it.  I mean it's always the same, the problem is caused by the fuckos within government, and then their ideas are the ones which exacerbate the problems, which is just a typical story that's repeatedly told country to country.  But it's really interesting to meet someone who's lived through it. 

When I went out to Venezuela a few years ago, what was super-interesting to me is everything is priced in the bolivar and you have to use the bolivar, but everyone wanted the dollar.  Actually, there were five currencies.  There were people using the bolivar because they had to; people wanting the dollar because they knew it was stable; some people were using the Colombian peso, because they wanted that because they're a border nation; you had that the petro, that ridiculous cryptocurrency that didn't work and people just --

Freddie New: Does it still exist?

Peter McCormack: I don't know, but I mean one lady had it and she just reclaimed the money from it.  And then you had Bitcoin of course, and then obviously a plethora of other shitcoins.  But the people were choosing what they wanted to use, but they had to use the bolivar.  But what they naturally knew is, "I wanted the dollar.  I wanted the dollar".  There's never been a time in the UK where people have been like, "Oh, I need an alternative to the pound because the inflation is high".  Yeah, some people say they need Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is a weird thing where you've got to get all the timing right and you've got to be patient.  It's not like an instant, it's not like, " I know inflation is going to hit me every single week, so I want the dollar".  You can buy Bitcoin to avoid pound inflation and be down the following week.  So it's a weird alternative. 

But I've also seen in Cambodia.  When I went out to Cambodia, it was similar in the cities, people wanted the dollar.  So I've experienced that scenario and I've seen it.  When you were there, were people trying to get alternative currency?  Was it harder?

Freddie New: It hadn't got to the point where it was an existential need.  So, when we were in Zim, we were faced with problems like capital controls getting money out of your country.  It's a fairly obvious point, but there's not a huge demand for Zimbabwe dollars outside of Zimbabwe.  There wasn't even in the 1990s.  One of the great things the US obviously has is that there's gigantic demand for US dollars all over the world, as you've just described, and that enables them to export some of their inflation because they've artificially increased the demand for US dollars in multiple different jurisdictions, like Zimbabwe, who need dollars. B So, if you want to leave Zimbabwe it's very hard now, and even when we left, it was extremely difficult to do so.

Peter McCormack: You mean, difficult to leave in terms of what you take with you?

Freddie New: What you take with you, yeah.  So actually, the way we did leave --

Peter McCormack: Danny told me this morning!

Freddie New: Did he?  I've got a picture of the car.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you've got to show me that.  Well, tell the story.

Freddie New: I'll tell the story.  So, like I said, my dad had been in the British Council, retired up there, we bought a little chicken farm which we ran for a few years.  We had five or six acres, an orchard, bunch of chickens; my dad was teaching and then he eventually retired from teaching as well.  He read a book, randomly that was how I met Mugabe actually, when I was 15 --

Peter McCormack: You met Mugabe?

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I always thought it was unusual that he decided to be only the second person to have a moustache in that -- I always thought it was unusual, as a tyrant, to decide, "Actually, of the all the moustaches I'm going to choose, I'm going to match Hitler".

Freddie New: The thing is, he was a popular president.  And again, a lot of Zimbabweans will feel conflicted about Mugabe.  The guy was a war hero and he won his country back from the British, and I think that underlines a lot of the policies that came later.  He fought against the oppressor and he won, and that carried him an enormous length of time.  That enabled him to stay in power even though the economy was collapsing and there was some opposition, and he eventually began to repress that opposition quite violently.

Peter McCormack: Power corrupts, my friend.

Freddie New: To this day, I personally don't really know what to think about Mugabe, because I grew up in a country that was wealthy and prosperous, in no small part through what he and ZANU had done.  But then, Zimbabwe is suffering now.  It's very sad, to be honest.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's that really tricky thing.  This is where I look at El Salvador with guard, because I've obviously met Bukele on a few occasions, I've interviewed him twice.

Freddie New: How many dictators have we met between us?

Peter McCormack: We've met a few!  I haven't met Rishi Sunak, but anyway.

Freddie New: He's not a dictator yet.

Peter McCormack: His Conservative Government are displaying --

Freddie New: I've met Sunak.

Peter McCormack: Have you?  I think he's fucking terrible.

Freddie New: He's very small.

Peter McCormack: Is he?  But I'm quite small.  I think everyone's small compared to you.

Freddie New: I don't know, I consider Danny --

Peter McCormack: For anyone listening, Freddie's shoulders are about the breadth of this table!

Freddie New: Who could deadlift more; me or George from CoinDesk?

Peter McCormack: My money would be on you.  George is about Danny's build but a bit shorter.

Danny Knowles: But yeah, he can shift some tin though.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but this guy's arms are like my legs!  So, I've obviously met him and in preparation for the interviews, I've done my research on El Salvador, the history of corruption within the government, presidents fleeing and hiding out in Nicaragua or arrested or accidently dying, who all pilfered the country and had essentially never given El Salvador a chance.  And the thing about Bukele is, he's certainly showing the traits of a dictator, but potentially a benevolent dictator, which only time will tell and he will be judged in time, but at the moment he is changing the fortunes of that country. 

He's made it significantly safer, he's brought tourism into the country, he's boosted the economy.  I mean, he has changed the fortunes of El Salvador.  There are questions with regards to human rights, with regards to the rounding up of gang members and imprisoning people without fair trial, etc, which Alex Gladstein has highlighted.  But he's changed the fortunes of that country.  The Constitution says, "Only one term", and they've found ways around that to have the second term.

Freddie New: People do.

Peter McCormack: Which, by the way, I think he needs a second term.  I mean, one isn't enough to do the job he's doing, and he could be replaced by somebody who would screw up everything he's done.  I think the test of time will be when times turn bad and people turn on him, how does he react?  Does he accept it and step down; does he arrest journalists; does he imprison opposition; does he go down that route that many previous dictators, tyrants have gone down, or does he accept it?  I mean, I like the guy, I hold him with high regard, and I wish the best for him and that country.  But I'm also very guarded because history has told us how this plays out again and again.

Freddie New: Yes, that's completely true.  I mean personally, I don't feel I can judge Robert Mugabe.  My memories and feelings towards Zimbabwe are coloured by the very happy upbringing and childhood I had there, and I know that his popularity was in no small part to begin with because of what he'd done.  I mean, the guy was a political prisoner for quite a long time, and I have to withhold judgement.  I loved growing up there, I know that terrible things have happened, happened in some very difficult situations.

Peter McCormack: But Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned, a political prisoner, fought for South Africa and died a global hero, somebody who stood up for fairness, democracy, human rights and was somebody everyone -- I've never heard a post-release criticism of him.  Of course, I've heard criticism of him as a freedom fighter, or he was accused of being a terrorist.

Freddie New: He was, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But from his release, I've never heard anyone say anything bad about him.  Mugabe has kind of gone the opposite direction, and I don't know the history, you know better than me, but I think he destroyed that economy and he has to take responsibility for that, or he had to; I mean, he's dead now.

Freddie New: Yeah.  And to be honest, the facts speak for themselves.  Whether you attribute blame to a particular person or to a particular policy, the economy did collapse, the currency did hyperinflate and as Danny said, 90% inflation is not brilliant.  And the country's gone through waves and waves of economic collapse, not just single but over a couple of decades now.

Peter McCormack: Was his party ZANU-PF?

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Are they still the ruling party?  Yeah, there are a few.  I mean Morgan Tsvangirai, he was Head of the MDC, the Movement for Democratic Change, and he made some strides towards having a second party, but it's a complicated place.

Peter McCormack: Right.  Have you been back?

Freddie New: I went back for wedding to the northern border of Zambia, so sadly I've never been back to Harare, but I have friends there who are talking about, random example, the municipal water supply is now so poor that people are sinking boreholes in their gardens, which it wasn't like that when I was there.

Peter McCormack: So you may have a reason to go back?

Freddie New: I mean, I'd love to go back particularly with my kids so they can see where I grew up and why I have a weird accent!

Peter McCormack: I'd like to go.

Freddie New: It's a wonderful country.  I mean seriously, go to Hwange, to the National Park, go to Victoria Falls, the Eastern Highlands.

Peter McCormack: I've not actually been to Africa.  We were planning to go out there and make films in April, was it April 2020 or April 2019?

Danny Knowles: No, April 2020.

Peter McCormack: And obviously all the borders closed.

Freddie New: Well, the potential for Gridless, for example, to start hydro mining in -- I mean, we have a Zimbabwe Bitcoin group and I keep on banging on about, you know the Kariba Dam? 

Peter McCormack: I mean, I don't know the name.

Freddie New: One of the biggest dams in the world.  So Lake Kariba is the size of Wales, and the hydropower from that dam powers a gigantic amount of Zimbabwe's electricity.  It's just made for sticking a Bitcoin mine in there, and that's instant foreign currency for the country.  And the Eastern Highlands are full of little rivers, all of those could be dammed.  They could have a small Gridless mining unit stuck on them.

Peter McCormack: Well, we're planning to go out there.  So our next film, should be out in the next few days, covering mining out in the US, and we want to follow that by looking at what Gridless is doing in Kenya.  So, if I go, I'll let you know.  If you want to come out and you want to meet me in Zimbabwe, I'd love to go.

Freddie New: That would be epic.  We should bring your kids.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we should do that.  I don't know if I'll bring mine!

Danny Knowles: We need to get into the car.

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, the car.  That was a long story!

Freddie New: Yeah, so it was a long intro.

Peter McCormack: Danny's like, "Show me the fucking car"!

Freddie New: I'm so sorry, I am rambling a lot.

Danny Knowles: No, it's good.

Peter McCormack: So…

Freddie New: I'll start at the beginning.  We planned to come back to the UK for us to finish school and go to university, and so on.  I'm the eldest of four kids.  And we sold our house and then you're you left with this problem, I've got all these Zim dollars, which is depreciating like 40%, 50% a year and how the fuck do I get them out of the country?  I'm allowed to swear?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: Okay, thank you.

Peter McCormack: I mean I get written to all the time, "Can you stop swearing?  I'm listening to this in the car with my children", I'm like, "Yeah, fuck, sorry". 

Freddie New: But if I swear in a posh voice, it doesn't really...

Peter McCormack: It's barely a swear word.  What was it, Stephen Fry I think, he said, "Why are all words relating to making love considered swear words, but words relating to murder and death aren't?"

Freddie New: That's a good point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's fucking right!  Yeah, look I just have a foul mouth.

Freddie New: So do I.

Peter McCormack: My father's learned of how bad it is recently.

Freddie New: My children put a swear jar at home, and I'm repeatedly penalized!

Peter McCormack: Is the jar full?

Freddie New: It's brimming over.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, my children swear and I tell them not to, but occasionally a little one slips out here or there.

Freddie New: Mine just think it's so funny.  Sorry, anyway, Danny.

Peter McCormack: Get to the fucking car man!

Freddie New: So, one thing that a lot of people in Zim do is they buy a car and then you drive it over the border, and literally all of your wealth is sitting in that car.

Danny Knowles: So there's no facility to send Zimbabwe dollars to the UK at that time?

Freddie New: You could exchange, the exchange rate was terrible and it was getting worse every day.

Danny Knowles: So was there a black market exchange rate and a real exchange rate?

Freddie New: Yeah, as in most developing nations.  And it's also very hard to get your bank in the UK to give you pounds for Zim dollars because the bank in the UK says, "There's no market for Zimbabwe dollars".  So (a) there may be no market, and (b) the exchange rate is deteriorating day by day.  So we bought a Rolls Royce, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, and then we drove over the border.  We packed all of our stuff into a shipping container and then said goodbye and legged it.

Peter McCormack: How far did you take the car?

Freddie New: 2,500 miles roughly.

Peter McCormack: To…?

Freddie New: So we drove from Harare down through Zimbabwe through Mashvingo, Great Zimbabwe which is near where Anita Posch was.

Peter McCormack: Oh, she's amazing.

Freddie New: Well, I pinged her some sats.  She was staying at Great Zimbabwe, which if anyone hasn't googled it, it dates back to the Middle Ages and it's a gigantic set of stone fortifications and buildings down in the south of country.  Yeah, she was on Twitter and said, "I'm in Zimbabwe", and I said, "Oh, fucking hell, stick an invoice in", so she did and I pinged her some sats.

Peter McCormack: She's an absolute Bitcoin hero.

Freddie New: She's brilliant, isn't she?  I love her.  So anyway, we drove down through the whole of Zim, crossed the Limpopo River at the south, Rudyard Kipling's, "Great grey-green, greasy Limpopo, if you know your Just So stories.

Peter McCormack: No, I don't.  Did he make cakes?!

Freddie New: It may have been a remote cousin!  This is even older than boomer stuff, Danny, sorry!  And then we drove down through the whole of South Africa over a space of about two weeks, absolutely incredible journey through the Drakensberg Mountains, through the Garden Route, the Boer War battlefields, Zulu battlefields, the Isandlwana, Rorke's Drift, you mentioned the Michael Caine film, Zulu.

Peter McCormack: Yeah of course.

Freddie New: Yeah, so been there.

Peter McCormack: Please tell me you've seen that?  You have not seen Zulu?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: We're watching that tonight.

Danny Knowles: Okay. I've never even heard of it.

Peter McCormack: You've not heard of Zulu?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: I promise you, it's incredible.

Danny Knowles: All right, we'll watch it tonight.

Freddie New: It is good fun.

Peter McCormack: I think it's Michael Caine's best film.

Danny Knowles: Wow.

Freddie New: I have some Zulu spears that were supposedly picked up from one of the battlefields.  My great-grandmother had been born in South Africa and had collected various weapons and bits and pieces.  And then we ended up in Cape Town with the car, drive the car into a container and then we sailed from Cape Town all the way around Africa, and then we arrived in Tilbury, the most random…  I mean, it was such a weird end of the journey, it was cold and gray and rainy and utterly fucking bizarre, because they unloaded our car, opened the container, my dad walked into the container and then reverses out and then we drive off.  And no one stamped our passports, there's no record of us coming into the country!

Peter McCormack: So, were they right-hand drives?

Freddie New: This was exported.  So, I'm sorry to the people listening, that's the car in Barberton, that's the town where my --

Peter McCormack: That's absolute classic Rolls Royce!

Danny Knowles: That's very cool.

Peter McCormack: We'll have to show it to the camera.  That's an absolute classic.  It's funny, I'm going to imagine, tell me if I'm wrong, that car journey is one of your best childhood memories.

Freddie New: Oh, without a doubt, it was just astonishing.

Peter McCormack: We did a similar one.  We went on holiday to Yugoslavia, pre-Balkans war, I must have been, God, what I have been, 5; do you remember the year?  So we had a Yugoslavian family move in next door to us, I've told this on the podcast, and my mum made a real effort to make them feel welcome, like help them learn English and settle in.  And after a year or so they moved back to Yugoslavia and they invited us out, and I still don't know why we didn't fly.  Did they not fly there?

Oh, I remember.  In Yugoslavia, you can't get good things like cameras and TVs and stuff, it's all absolute shit.  And so the guy, the father, wanted some of this stuff.  So we drove and it was a two-day drive.  I can't remember, we probably went through France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, went through all these courses all the way to Yugoslavia.  It took 48 hours; it was a two-day drive, and it's one of my happiest -- I don't remember much from being 5, but I remember this, so many little bits.

I remember the sausages that were disgusting that we ate in Germany.

Freddie New: What year were you doing this?

Peter McCormack: Well, I would have been about 5, so about 1983, 1984.

Freddie New: Okay, because we did a similar drive when we went to Syria.  I would have missed you by a year, but we would have been the same route.

Peter McCormack: A similar journey, yeah.  And we drove all the way there.  I can't remember hardly anything from being 5, but I remember that.  I remember the bunk beds we stayed in; I remember in the car, because back then, no phones or anything.  We were all in the back of, was it the white Mazda?  Yeah, back of a white Mazda.

Freddie New: There's no headrests!

Peter McCormack: Was it the Renault; the Renault 18?  Yeah, so I'd sleep on the parcel shelf, my brother would sleep on the back seat and my sister would sleep in the footwell.  And my equivalent of an iPad was an Etch-a-Sketch!  So I'd be playing with an Etch-a-Sketch, and I remember getting to Belgrade and we went out and we got watermelon; I remember us going to the coast and we needed matches, and me and their son went out and went into every tent, stealing, we had like an arm full of matches.  I remember so much of that, and I can't remember much else of my childhood, but that; such distinct memories.

Freddie New: Yeah, very much so.  I mean, my brother was the same age when we did this drive and I think this is one of his earliest memories.  He was 5 when we left.

Peter McCormack: So you got into the UK and sold the Rolls Royce and rebuilt the life?

Freddie New: Yeah, although did notice it took my dad quite a long time to sell the car.

Peter McCormack: Did he not want to sell it?

Freddie New: I suspect not, he absolutely fucking loved it.  I mean it was a gorgeous machine.  Eventually, under pressure, he bowed down and the car was sadly sold.  But that represented our life in Zimbabwe, in that vehicle.

Peter McCormack: And what was it like trying to resettle in the UK?

Freddie New: Pretty hard.  I mean I've been here for a long time now, and I still feel like a bit of an alien.  I spent the majority of my childhood overseas with people who had very different values, very different obsessions.  I mean not being mean about the UK, but it is a very easy place in some ways to live compared to some of the places where I grew up.  And again, I don't want to judge anyone for having the benefit of that ease.  Actually, slight segue, I don't know if you've read the SAS Survival Guide to surviving in different jurisdictions?

Peter McCormack: No, I mean we're pretty safe around here in Bedford!

Freddie New: Well, yeah, that's kind of the point of the story!  It goes through various different environments in which to survive, and then the bits on basically the UK and Western Europe is incredibly dismissive.  It says, you know, "Survival is easy [full stop]" and then it goes on to more interesting places!

Peter McCormack: We skipped over Syria as well.  We'll come back to settling.  What was Syria like?  Was it obviously very different from it is now?

Freddie New: Very different.  I mean possibly the easiest way to describe Syria is it's so old, it's been inhabited for such a long time, and there is so much ancient stuff there.  It is mind-boggling on the one hand, on the other I feel desperately sad because I'm aware that a lot of that may have been destroyed in the wars.  I find it difficult to talk about Syria because I was there when I was very young and it's probably the place I've lived where the worst things have happened, and like my friends at school, for example, I don't even know if a lot of them are still alive.  I was so young, I don't know a lot their surnames.  I can remember their first name.

Peter McCormack: How old were you?

Freddie New: I was nearly 7 when we left.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so quite young.

Freddie New: Quite young, but I didn't really get to say goodbye to any of these people.  I don't know, is it worth going into a bit of how we left or why it happened so abruptly?

Peter McCormack: Is it pertinent?

Freddie New: I think it's pertinent.  So I raise Syria and Zimbabwe because I think they have an interesting segue into Bitcoin for two reasons.  So Zimbabwe, I think, is a useful illustration of how difficult capital controls can be and how extraordinarily difficult it is for a lot of people to live in the world to move money from one country to another.  And part of the reason for the long and elaborate story about the Rolls Royce is that those capital controls and lack of demand for the Zimbabwe dollar result in you having to take quite outlandish steps to move money from one country to another.

Peter McCormack: That is your Bitcoin in 1990? 

Freddie New: 1996.

Peter McCormack: 1996, that's your 1996 Bitcoin.

Freddie New: Yeah, so today I could cross a border naked with that in my head, but back then that wasn't possible.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: I raise Syria not necessarily to talk about the country or my experiences there, but the experience of leaving it.  So very briefly to recap, in mid to late 1986, there was something called the Hindawi Affair happened.  It was an international incident when a guy called Hindawi attempted to bomb an aircraft by putting some explosives into his pregnant girlfriend's luggage.  Thankfully, he was caught, the bomb was defused, no one died, thank God, but the result of that meant that Syria broke off diplomatic relations with the UK and the UK likewise.  So the embassy knew that they were going to have to get out, they were all being evacuated, we didn't know that we were included with the expulsion order, because like I said at the beginning, we weren't quite connected to the embassy.

But I can still remember an official from the embassy coming to our house.  We lived on the ground floor in this block of flats called the Quwatli Buildings in Damascus.  And this guy comes and knocks on the door and my mum and my dad are both immensely agitated, and they come in and they just start grabbing packing cases, you know, we'd moved there two years before.  Packaging cases come out of the cupboards, and they just start going for it, and we were given 48 hours' notice to get out of the country.

Peter McCormack: Holy shit.

Freddie New: To leave everything, and this was my home at the time, I could barely remember London.  Yeah, and so my parents, they stayed up for 48 hours, they packed the whole house.  There were soldiers in the garden, Syrian army soldiers, and then we were escorted to the border by the Syrian army.

Peter McCormack: Turkish border?

Freddie New: Tartus, there was a port on the coast.  Yeah, and stuck on a ferry and told to fuck off.

Peter McCormack: Jesus.

Freddie New: And that was it, 48 hours, start to finish, boom.

Peter McCormack: Wow.

Freddie New: So, I've raised that as I think a lot of the ideas behind our chat are sort of angling towards why I feel perhaps Bitcoin and its properties appeal more to me than to some other people, my contemporaries working in the City of London or in finance or in law.  I was lucky to have strange experiences as a kid, which I feel made the advantages of a money which you can carry in your head, or which you can bring with you when you cross a border, or if you if the worst happened and you just had to drop everything and go, what could you take with you?  I think that's what it boils down to for me.

Peter McCormack: So, we've traveled a lot making this show and the hardest place to explain Bitcoin to is here in Bedford with my friends, it's just it's so difficult.  I try and explain to them, I've told them for years about inflation that's coming, I've told them about risks of banks, I've told them everything; but you almost have to go through more horrific experiences, more a genuine crisis to understand it and I just can't get them to consider it. 

When I was in Argentina, or I wasn't there, I was in Uruguay, but talking to Argentinians, and you explained and they're like, "Yeah I get that.  We bought a house for cash, we never kept money in the bank", or most places in South America, it's very easy.  People like Anita will tell you, in Africa it's very easy.  When I was at the border with Venezuela and Colombia in Cúcuta, very easy.  It's very easy to explain to these people who've gone through crises, that suffered forfeiture, suffered hyperinflation, they naturally get it.  It's almost like I'm waiting for a crisis.

I can sit there and explain to people everything I've learned about the banks, central banks, high inflation, CBDCs, it's like I'm fishing without bait.  I feel like I've got the best bait in the world and like nobody's taking the line. 

Freddie New: It's the difference between show and tell.  If someone has experienced something or you can show them a story, that's so much more powerful than lecturing them about it.  And to be honest, I've spent a lot of time, I think poorly lecturing people about why they should read about Bitcoin.  I don't even tell people to buy it, I say, "Just go and read about it".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I mean, on the Real Bedford website now, I've written an article called Why You Should Not Buy Bitcoin.  And the whole article is about why you should learn about it.  Even if you don't want to buy it, just learn about it, because it's going to arm you and better prepare you for the world we live in.

Freddie New: Apart from anything else it's absolutely fucking mind-blowing.  I mean, fucking hell, I think a few years ago I thought I knew so much about it, and then it's like a Socratic dialectic; the more I read about it, the more I realise how ignorant I am, and the more Bitcoin humbles you, doesn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I think the more I learn, the more I realise how insidious central bank control over money is, how insidious our governments are.  I think you get to peer through the veil a little bit more, or behind the veil a little bit more, and I think it's like in the Matrix when you can disseminate everything.

Freddie New: Everything's going to green numbers.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and in the green numbers you can just see stuff.  I mentioned the other day, I went to the shop to get a coffee in the morning, one of those Costa crappy machine ones, and there's a guy buying three newspapers.  He's buying The Times, a Mirror, or was it The Star?  He got a broadsheet, he got a highbrow broadsheet, he bought himself the lowbrow Daily Mail and then a tabloid.  And I just thought, "You're going to read these and accept it, and I assume you're going to move on.  But I mean, I'm making an assumption here, but I just watch the news and I'll see Rishi Sunak, or whoever, and I just know the bullshit that's being said to us now, I just see it, and that's because of Bitcoin I think I can see it.

Freddie New: Oh, completely.  I mean, something as simple as, I think in some ways it's better to start with thinking about money rather than thinking about Bitcoin.  And starting with something as simple as house prices, there's an argument to be made to say that you can draw a direct line from the unaffordability of housing straight to the bank's ability to create new money without any cost to themselves.  And if you break it down into small logical pieces, I think it can flow quite logically.

So obviously you start with housing is expensive.  True.  How do most people buy houses?  They get a mortgage.  If no one could get a mortgage, what do you think would happen to house prices?

Peter McCormack: They would fall.

Freddie New: They would fall, exactly, and that's a good thing.  So when you go to a bank and you ask for a mortgage, where does it get that money?

Peter McCormack: Well ideally, it would be lending based on depositors.

Freddie New: But we know that's not true.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's partially true, It's leveraged depositor income.

Freddie New: Did you read the Bank of England's paper on stablecoins a couple of years ago?

Peter McCormack: No.

Freddie New: There's a really interesting paragraph in that at the beginning.

Peter McCormack: Does it say, "We're fucking liars and we're going to fuck you".

Freddie New: No, they're quite honest. 

Peter McCormack: That would have been honest!

Freddie New: They talk about the nature of money.  If you can't put it up, I'll find it for you.  It was their consultation paper on stablecoins.  I think it was in paragraph one, and they talk about the two kinds of money that exist in Britain at the moment, and this is true for most developed economies, "The first kind of money is a liability of the central bank".  So they're not lying, they're not trying to hide this, they're quite open.  The pound in your hand is a liability of the central bank.  And I think the one thing I'd like to try and move away from is the concept of fiat money towards liability money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I like that.

Freddie New: Versus commodity money, which is Bitcoin.  Every single £1 note, or £10 note that you hold is a liability of the central bank.  It fucking says it on it, "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £10".  Even worse than that, the next paragraph they go on and they say, "The second kind of money is created by commercial banks when they make loans".  I thought commercial banks lent out deposits.  No, it's liabilities all the way down.  Every single piece of sterling that exists is someone else's liability.  And once you get your head around that, you suddenly realise the attraction of a money that doesn't have any counterparty risk, that you can access 24/7, that no one can confiscate from you if you use it properly, and if you custody it properly. 

So I mean, coming back to the mortgage point, these fucking banks are creating money out of thin air at the moment you sign your mortgage paper, and they are creating as much money as a normal person will earn in their entire lifetime, because you may only pay your mortgage off just before you retire, and the second-order effects of that are astonishing.  That money is pumped into the system.  I mean, like I said, you could draw a direct line, unaffordability of housing straight to the bank's ability to create that money.  I mean, fucking hell, if you're putting a £100,000 deposit down and you're buying a £1 million house, £900,000 have been created by that bank and pumped into the system at no cost.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to do a top up?

Freddie New: I think we should probably have a small one.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what the weird thing is; you finished that glass and I don't think you've stopped talking and I haven't seen you pick it up!  There's some kind of voodoo going on there.  Have you seen him pick that glass up and drink it?

Danny Knowles: No!  I quite like that.

Peter McCormack: It's really nice.

Freddie New: Oh, I'm pleased.

Danny Knowles: It's the first whiskey I've liked.

Freddie New: Well, it's the weird blend of the rye and the --

Peter McCormack: Well, you might be a scotch guy then.

Danny Knowles: I constantly have imposter syndrome around bitcoiners who drink whiskey.

Peter McCormack: Danny will have an Old fashioned, or maybe a Whiskey sour.

Danny Knowles: I actually don't mind that, that's alright.

Freddie New: I love an old fashioned.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  That's like me having a latte when you have a black coffee.

Danny Knowles: Black coffee maxi.

Peter McCormack: Okay, the counterpoint and counterargument to that is credit, the opportunity to access credit, can drive productivity, in that credit makes things available to people starting businesses, buying a home, being able to afford a home.  So that is the counterpoint to that, is that a lot of credit has created productivity and when credit dries up, economies stall.  We've had a dry-up of credit right now with interest rates so high.  Now look, there's a good side to that because these shitty Silicon Valley startups, who raise an enormous amount of money and end up IPOing before they've really made any money -- I mean look at Twitter at the moment, it's worth $44 billion, still not profitable, has it ever been profitable?

Freddie New: Well Twitter, I think the acquisition debt there was about $19 billion, so I don't know what the coupon on that interest is, but they're going to need to make a gigantic amount of money every single day in order to service that debt.

Peter McCormack: Isn't it $1 billion a year to service this?

Danny Knowles: Is that right?

Peter McCormack: Or is that the interest on the debt?  It's either to service the loan or the interest on the debt, which is why he's pushing so hard this Twitter --

Freddie New: To monetize it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, which I've fallen for.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, $1 billion dollars a year.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, $1 billion dollars a year, yeah.

Freddie New: Fucking hell, that is crazy.

Peter McCormack: But yeah, so the good side is that --

Freddie New: That's true.  I mean, have you read Varoufakis' book, Letters to My Daughter?

Peter McCormack: No.

Freddie New: He's really interested in credit.  So, he's got quite a nice story there where he talks about creditors pulling tomorrow's profits to be able to spend today in order to grow your business.  And to be honest, I think it's undeniable that there are benefits in that.  I bring up house prices because I think that is a particular sector where the increase in prices has been disproportionate to the benefit to the general population.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and one of the areas has been people with fabulous amounts of wealth knowing that they can't park it in the bank because they're not going to get any interest, so they might as well buy houses.  Houses are another form of Bitcoin in some ways; they're a store of value, they always tend to go up in price, we're not building any new land apart from in the South China Sea.  And so they are a good investment, and they are a solid investment.  I mean, I don't have a second house, but I've thought of buying a second house.  Is that a place to put money?  And so, you have this mass ownership of properties by landlords now.

Freddie New: Well, it's the financialisation of everything that we talked about earlier.  If your money is continually using value by you sitting in the bank, you need to find other things to do with it.

Peter McCormack: What's the quote, the Jeff Booth one?

Danny Knowles: Oh, "When money isn't scarce, everything else is", paraphrasing.

Peter McCormack: Paraphrasing, yeah.  And so, I mean I remember growing up, there was an advert on YouTube for one of the old building societies and it said, "7.4% interest on your deposits" so whatever, you could earn a high interest so there's an incentive to save, which was obviously a good thing, and then there was a cost to borrow.  And so, whilst we've hit these 4% to 5% interest rates, which have scared the shit out of people, especially people who are going off fixed-rate mortgages to variable-rates who are trying to renegotiate them, actually historically this is normal to have a cost of capital, which we should have.  And I think it goes back to Steven Lubka, doesn't it, where Steven Lubka talks about 0% interest rates, they distort the market, there should be a cost of capital.

Danny Knowles: But it's the rate of change, that's the problem.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's two problems.  The rate of change out of 0% was really hard and it's fucked a lot of things up; but going to 0% interest rates was putting off the inevitable market correction that's required.

Freddie New: It's a bit of a toss-up, isn't it?  Would the pain of not dropping interest rates during those periods of general global crisis and calamity have been worse than the pain of the unwind?  Both scenarios I believe are painful.  I'm of the view that we probably should have taken that first pain and not dropped to zero.

Peter McCormack: Boom-and-bust, it's economics 101.  I studied boom-and-bust cycles, Ray Dalio talks about boom-and-bust cycles.  You have a boom, you have credit expansion, then you have the correction, you have credit contraction.  And look, there are good times and there are bad times, but I think, and this is me from my uneducated point of view, I'd much rather Lyn Alden explain this; but from my simple point of view is, what I've seen is as we kick this can down the road, which I think is a problem of the political cycle, nobody wants to lead us into a recession, but as we've kicked the can down the road what essentially we do is we widen the wealth gap to unacceptable levels.

Freddie New: Between those who have assets and those who don't.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Freddie New: And returning to the liability point earlier, once you understand and acknowledge that all fiat money is essentially a liability, either of your commercial bank or of your government, then the next conclusion is that reliance on the liabilities.  You're all fine and well until you begin to lose faith in the person on whom you are relying, or the person who owes you that obligation.  Commercial banking is an example.  You deposit £100 into Barclays, you don't own that money anymore.  What you own is a claim on that money against Barclays.  So you are a creditor of Barclays in respect of that £100, and we've seen very clearly over the last few months that as soon as lots of people suddenly realise that Barclays may not be good for that £100 anymore, out it comes.

Peter McCormack: Up to £80,000, you're protected.

Freddie New: Yeah, yeah, but do you really want to go through the ball-ache of waiting for the government to reimburse you?  No, if I can get my money out, I'm getting my money out.  That's how bank runs happen as we all know. 

Peter McCormack: Well I don't know if you've prepared for it, but I have, I'm a financial prepper now.

Freddie New: Do you have eight different banks?

Peter McCormack: No, but I have a couple of banks.  But I also have pockets of cash distributed around the country, random locations, like really weird and random locations.

Freddie New: This is interesting.  I mean, obviously, I would never say that on a podcast, but I hope these locations are secure.

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, one, they're secure locations.

Danny Knowles: Is there a treasure map?

Peter McCormack: No, well actually my brother has the treasure map; but secondly, they're not amounts so large that it's worth coming around with a $5 wrench.  I might as well buy the $5 wrench off you.  It's just small amounts of pockets, but any time I need, I know I can go and get it.  So if the bank closes down and I need cash, I'm like, "There's that location, there's £1,000 there.  It's a two-hour drive, but I have to go and do it".

Danny Knowles: Why not just have Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: No, I have Bitcoin as well.

Danny Knowles: But why do you need the cash?

Peter McCormack: Because I want every scenario.

Danny Knowles: What scenario would there be that you need cash, not Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Going to the shops and buying a loaf of bread.

Danny Knowles: But with this is like financial Armageddon prepping.

Peter McCormack: No, bank failure.  A bank failure, I can't get any money out of the bank that day.  Truckers, I do something in the line of our business that means I get my bank account switched off, and that happened.  People had their bank account switched off and they couldn't pay their mortgage, they couldn't get money out to buy groceries.  I think it's a far-out risk that's getting nearer.

Freddie New: You're talking about tail risk?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: I'm obsessed with tail risk.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I've got plans, I'm just increasing my plans for every single one.

Freddie New: I have six months of food in my basement and a generator.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you're an actual prepper, tinned pineapple!  Have you got a shotgun license yet?

Freddie New: I haven't got a shotgun license.  I have some, well, you know.

Peter McCormack: Explosives!

Freddie New: Just for the record and speaking as a lawyer, I have no explosives on my property.

Peter McCormack: Do you have a Rolls Royce just in case?

Freddie New: Sadly no.  Tail risk is an interesting thing to explore, and I think it appeals to a lot of people who understand the value in Bitcoin.  So, like we were saying about the UK, why is it so hard to explain to people in the UK why Bitcoin is useful?  And Danny Scott is good on this as well, isn't he; CoinCorner?  We live in a country where we don't, in many cases, need Bitcoin yet.  I'm being completely honest, and this is a person who loves and obsesses about Bitcoin much more than my wife is happy with. 

We live in a country where, by and large, you can tap your card on a point of sale terminal and that works.  And broadly speaking, technologies are adopted when and if they become useful, and for many people in the world Bitcoin already is useful.  It's a store of wealth, your currency may be evaporating at 70% a year; in Lebanon, you can mine Bitcoin and you have access to a global financial system that is permissionless and you can just participate in; in Zimbabwe, I mean they're running out of physical currency now, so you don't even need a smartphone, you can use a feature phone.  Bitcoin Ekasi, you have kids who are finally being able to get paid for services and not have the other people, the other eight people that live in their rooms, stealing the money from them.  To those people, it's obvious?

Peter McCormack: This is what particularly pisses me off about someone like Elizabeth Warren, with her anti-crypto army, which by the way most bitcoiners are in an anti-crypto army; but what particularly pisses me off is she doesn't understand the second-order effects of what she's doing.  She thinks in the USA that she wants, for whatever reason, I don't know her intentions, but for whatever reason she's taken it upon herself to attack Bitcoin.  But she doesn't understand that this is a lifeline for people living under authoritarian regimes or activists around the world, people living under hyperinflation, people living in Lebanon can mine Bitcoin and buy their groceries.  She doesn't understand how important at all this is.

Freddie New: But that's why I care.  And I mean, I feel like I judge myself a lot about this.  I feel as though my wife says I come on far too aggressively about how brilliant Bitcoin is.  So I think in some ways, I need to dial back and start talking about the money instead or about the benefits and about how exciting it is.  I mean my pinned tweet is @ElizabethWarren.

Peter McCormack: My film coming out in the next week is called Dear Elizabeth.

Freddie New: Is it the Texas mining one?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've delayed it by about a week.

Freddie New: I need to watch it.

Peter McCormack: And it ends with a letter I've written to her.

Danny Knowles: It should be out when this show drops.

Freddie New: Oh, fantastic.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we've spent a long time getting to this point, but the real point is, we've taken more of an interest in the UK recently in that we've neglected it.  We're a media company that makes a Bitcoin podcast that cares about Bitcoin that spends most of time in the US, because that's where a lot of the activity is; and in doing so, we've neglected it.  I don't mean this as a flex, but we have one of the largest shows, maybe the largest dedicated to the subject, and it's in Bedford, it's from Bedford, UK, and we've neglected the UK.  So we've been trying to build a relationship with Danny and Molly at CoinCorner and we've been trying to build a relationship with British people, we're starting to put events on here, we've got the football club, we're trying to do more here.

But I feel like we're so behind the curve here in the UK.  I fear legislation more than here, because at least in the US there are some people, Senators in Congress, that are doing something to fight and protect Bitcoin.  And I feel like we've got lobbying associations, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Coin Center, who are working to actually educate people on what this is and why it's important.  And I'm fully aware that we're not doing anything here.  Well, I'm not.

Freddie New: You're doing more than you think.  I mean, I was fanboying at the beginning about how much I love the show!

Peter McCormack: But I'm giving you a lay-up to say --

Freddie New: Shall I give a bit of -- I probably should have started at the beginning of the show with a bit of background.  But if you haven't stopped listening to the show at this point --

Peter McCormack: The poshest show we've ever done!

Freddie New: Am I really the poshest person you've had on the show?

Peter McCormack: You just sound posh and you're making me speak posher, and my proper accent is a proper Bedford accent, mate, but I think Americans will be like, "These people are so posh"!

Danny Knowles: So civilized.

Peter McCormack: British people are like, "Who are these fucking twats?"

Freddie New: Yeah, so two-second potted history.  So, I'm a lawyer by training, I spent a long time working in M&A in the city, started off in private equity and then during the Financial Crisis, moved into special situations, so a lot of insolvency and restructuring work.  And then segued out of that, spent nearly a year looking after my kids while my wife was starting up a business.  And then I wanted to work in startups and in fintech, and I'd been interested in Bitcoin for a long time.  I started reading about it in 2013, started node-running in 2015.  I had been working -- I don't have a huge public presence.  I'm generally quite a private person and had been doing a lot in the background, as I imagine a lot of bitcoiners do. 

Then I landed a job at a fintech firm called Curve and we helped to put together their first cryptocurrency product.  We were sponsoring Miami last year.  You may have seen, we had a tent out in the food court.  But I know another Curve; are there multiple Curves?  Yeah, there's a DeFi Curve.

Peter McCormack: Is there a gaming Curve?

Freddie New: There may be.

Peter McCormack: An old client of mine from my old days in advertising, a guy called Stuart Dinsey works for Curve, but I think they're gaming.

Freddie New: Yeah, they're gaming.  So Curve, the Curve I work for, I was saying to Danny earlier, they're basically a digital wallet with a physical card on top.  And the idea is that you can provision whichever of your digital cards you want to act as the payment vehicle behind your Curve card.  And the reason we were in Miami last year was because we'd come up with a crypto cashback.  Unfortunately, I was not able to sway opinion at Curve that it should be a Bitcoin cashback.

Peter McCormack: God damn it!

Freddie New: I mean, mate, I basically had to get our CEO to wear a muzzle, not to have him talk about Solana!  Anyway, so the basic principle, the selling point for Bitcoin is you could earn cash back on your underlying cards and also you could earn Bitcoin cash back on your Curve card, and that would just be provisioned into your wallet and we've just enabled withdrawal to self-custody as well.

Peter McCormack: So that's available now; you have a card you can get Bitcoin cash back?

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Wow, I want that card.

Freddie New: I'll send you a referral link.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do, awesome.

Freddie New: I'll show you after the show.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean, I've got a BA Amex one and my BA points, they're fucking so shit.  I've got so many of them, there's a limit to how many you can use, they're always on shitty flights at shitty times that you don't want.

Freddie New: Never in the school holidays.

Peter McCormack: Never in the school holidays, yeah, they're just a waste of fucking time.  I've got them there, they're just doing nothing for me.  Give me sats, man.

Freddie New: I'll show you after the show.

Peter McCormack: Alright, cool.

Freddie New: Anyway, sorry, I appreciate I've been burbling on a bit.

Peter McCormack: How long have we been going?

Danny Knowles: We have been going for an hour-and-a-half.

Peter McCormack: Bloody hell.

Freddie New: I'm so sorry.

Danny Knowles: No, it's good.

Freddie New: I'll try and be quicker.  We haven't even talked about any of the law yet.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Freddie New: Then we'll get me a real hard-on once I start talking about the law!  Anyway, so I've been working at Curve for a while and then as part of my work with Curve, I started to respond to a lot of the government consultations on cryptocurrency.  So I submitted evidence to the FCA CryptoSprint, which they held last year, to HM Treasury, to HMRC on taxation of crypto assets, and to a big piece of evidence to Parliament.  So I'd begun to do some legal advocacy, and my main aim there is that I want to help politicians.  Politicians by and large do not understand cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin least of all. 

The current legislation, which we can talk about in a minute, I know you've got a few of the bills that are currently going through Parliament.  A lot of those are not necessarily bad pieces of legislation, but I think some of them exhibit a lack of understanding of how Bitcoin works at a protocol level in particular.  And once you begin to understand the protocol level, you understand that legislation is perhaps not appropriate for what they're trying to regulate.

So what I want to try and do is to ensure that politicians have the tools and education available to them to make a good regulation.  I'm relatively libertarian, but I'm also conscious that regulation is coming and if it's inevitable, I want it to be good regulation and I want it to be made by people who are informed and know what they're talking about.  So the pinned tweet I mentioned earlier to Elizabeth Warren, that was a game I played with my two daughters.  Have you done that?  We sat down with a coin, I put a zero on one side and a one on the other, and we flipped it 256 times.  Have you ever done this?

Peter McCormack: No.

Freddie New: It's absolutely fucking mind-blowing.  You generate a binary number 256 digits long, write that down, feed it into a piece of software that converts it into hexadecimals, you take that hexadecimal number, you feed it into another piece of software, and it spits out a private key, and then you put that private key into BlueWallet, and then there's a fucking wallet there.

Peter McCormack: Danny, what's he talking about?!

Freddie New: The process of doing that literally blew my fucking mind.  And the one thing I couldn't get my head around was, before we'd written down that number, did it exist; did it exist in the universe of potential numbers that exist within the search space of the Bitcoin elliptical curve cryptography, or did we create that number?  So what I did with my girls, okay I've got a wallet so I put some sats in there, and then I deleted the wallet and I said to the kids, "You've got to recreate the process of what we just did.  You've got the binary string.  Christmas treasure hunt; if you can complete that process, then you get the bitcoin.

Danny Knowles: That's amazing.

Peter McCormack: That is very, very cool.

Freddie New: They did it. 

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Freddie New: All I gave them was the websites they needed to go to to put the numbers in.  Seriously, it's just so much fun.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're going to have to do this.  Have you ever read the book about the Winklevoss twins?

Freddie New: The Bitcoin billionaires?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Freddie New: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: The whole part where they're trying to come up with their private keys and the rolling of the dice.

Freddie New: With this air-gapped computer.

Peter McCormack: The air-gapped computer.

Freddie New: I wasn't air-gapped, I'm sorry.

Peter McCormack: Trying to avoid any scenario where there could be camera -- thinking that whole thing through blew my mind.

Freddie New: I mean, it's like I was saying earlier; the more I learn about Bitcoin, the more ignorant I realise I am.  I mean, I got the idea from GiGi, one of his, and the legal reason for that story is the impossibility of banning Bitcoin.  So when people say, "The government are going to ban it --"

Peter McCormack: They'll make it hard.

Freddie New: They can make it as hard as they like.  But at the same time, if I can sit in my room and generate a private key by flipping a coin, and then once I've generated that private key I can transact with anyone in the world freely without any KYC, I mean…

Peter McCormack: It's unstoppable.

Freddie New: It's unstoppable.  And I think once politicians realise it's unstoppable, then when you sit down have a sensible conversation, "This technology has been invented, it's out in the wild, you cannot shut it down.  Let us see how we can use it to our advantage, rather than to fight a fruitless fight against something you cannot win".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well also, in a time where, post-Brexit, we have this opportunity to lead across Europe and you occasionally see these little flirtations with it from within government, "Yeah, we want to be leaders in Fintech [or] crypto", and then nothing ever happens, I just think these fucking idiots are missing opportunity.

Freddie New: Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the legislations that have to go through Parliament?

Peter McCormack: Please do, I mean I've not looked at my notes once!

Freddie New: Please control me if I babble, or if I'm --

Peter McCormack: Everything's fine, carry on.

Freddie New: So I think that, so the notes I had, so a lot of this started with the Kalifa review, which was a review commissioned in order to look into fintech opportunities in the UK.  And all I did was say that we should probably come up with some laws to regulate this stuff.  Fine.  The two big pieces that we're working on at the moment are a response to the Future Financial Services consultation and a response to CBDCs.  And by we, perhaps I should go into the big reveal, which is that following the Bitcoin Collective Conference in Edinburgh, and I have to shout out to Jim Duffy and to Jordan Walker here.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I love both of them.

Freddie New: Brilliant guys.

Peter McCormack: Jordan's coming down on Friday.

Freddie New: Is he?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: Oh, tell him I say hi.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Jordan's a great guy.

Freddie New: They're both great guys.  They're fantastic.  So I've been doing a lot of advocacy and a lot of response consultations, writing a lot of pieces.  And then I reached out to Jordan after the conference.  I wrote a piece for the Bitcoin Collective.  And then Jordan got a bunch of us up to London to talk about maybe putting together a UK equivalent to the Bitcoin Policy Institute in the US.

Peter McCormack: Which is desperately needed.

Freddie New: We have something pretty much ready to go again I think by the time this show airs, we should have a minimum viable product out there.

Peter McCormack: How do we help; how can we help; what can we do to support you?

Freddie New: Hopefully by having an ongoing relationship with us.

Peter McCormack: That's done, that's already done.  We're friends, so consider that done.  How else can we help?

Freddie New: Well, shall I talk through a few of our initiatives?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do.

Freddie New: Some of our initiatives are academic and procedural in nature, so we're splitting our work, and by our, I'm talking about the loose collective of people that have come together after initial chats with Jordan and Jim.  So the committee at the moment consists of some lawyers, tax experts, environmentalists, some miners, we're in touch with the guys at Scilling Mining who are great.

Peter McCormack: The Irish guys?

Freddie New: Yeah, love them; and a podcast host from Canada who's a Brit.  So we've got a wide variety of different skill sets and we've split our projected activities into three buckets: one is policy; one is mining environment; and one is education and next-gen.  So we want to try and focus on each of those three areas.  We're all volunteers, none of us are taking salaries, we're doing this in our spare time, and we're going to try and keep the running costs of the company as low as possible.  And we're setting the company up as a not-for-profit, so any money the company does generate will be kept within the company to fund its activities. 

So taking one by one the policy side of things, the first pieces of work we're doing are responding to government consultations.  And that's in the arena of what I was just talking about, making sure that decision-makers and regulators have got good information about Bitcoin and about how it is differentiated from other centralised cryptocurrencies, and why it should be considered in a different way. 

Secondly on mining and environment, this kind of ties into how we might look to fund the enterprise and potentially somewhere where we might look to you for help.  So like we were saying earlier, I think it's always more powerful to show someone something than to tell someone something.  So we want to try and fund the company by initially setting up some Geyser funding, not asking for donations as such, but we want to try and establish several different small proof-of-concept mines in different locations.

Peter McCormack: Are you aware of how much wind energy is curtailed here?

Freddie New: I had a meeting last week with someone who works on the wind farm just off Brighton and he was talking about curtailment and how much of it he said he's seeing there and it just showed up is that it's producing far too much for the grid.

Peter McCormack: It's literal millions of pounds.  I mean, I'm sure I saw something before, like Christmas Eve or something or New Year's Eve, and it was like £9 million.  I was like, "What the fuck?  I'll buy that from you.  I'll get some ASICs". 

Freddie New: Cheap ASICs.

Peter McCormack: Do you know how much it's going to cost to operate this?

Freddie New: So, maybe starting at the beginning.  So, we're in talks at the moment with a landowner who has some hydropower on his land, and he's interested in putting some ASICs on that hydropower.  So our first user fund is going to be, we're going to look to try and purchase two small ASICs and get into effectively a power-sharing arrangement with him, so he can in some instances sell to the grid, or he can mine Bitcoin with hydropower.

Peter McCormack: When you say two machines; as a proof of concept?

Freddie New: We're going to start with start with two machines, but there's capability to build that out.  Depending if we raise enough money, we will put more machines in there.  Secondly, we want to investigate proof of concepts on landfill methane, curtailment of wind and solar, and potentially socially useful uses for the waste heat generated by the machines.

Peter McCormack: But this is a commercial business; it should be a commercial business.

Freddie New: The reason why we're doing this is partly because of listening to David Zell and how much time he has to spend fundraising.  So our activities are not going to cost a huge amount of money, but they will require some time and to the extent we want to pay fellows of the Institute to write academic papers for us, we will need a source of income.

Peter McCormack: Have you spoken to Adam Wright?

Freddie New: Vespene?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Freddie New: Not yet, but I would love to.

Peter McCormack: Well we can introduce you.  I wonder if Iris can help with this at all.

Danny Knowles: Possibly.

Peter McCormack: You know our new sponsor --

Freddie New: Iris Energy?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So I wonder if I'll have a chat with them and see if there's any interest in that.

Freddie New: That would be amazing.

Danny Knowles: I just had a look, and it was £215 million of turning wind farms off last year.

Peter McCormack: £215 million?  Jesus.  I mean I want to get ahead of you, I want to front run you and just sell this as a commercial enterprise!  But you know what'll happen, if you approach some of these people, you going to say, "Can I buy that energy from you?  You just dump it, I'll buy it from you at 10 pence on the pound, whatever; I'll give you money for it that you're just dumping", they'll probably be like, "Really?  Okay, great".  "Yeah, I just want to put a datacenter there", "Yeah, fine, what's in that?"  "Bitcoin", "Oh, no, no".

Freddie New: Well, we're early days and we need to map this out properly and put it into a business plan.  The intention for the small mines is twofold.  Like I say, we don't need a huge amount of income to run the company, but we want to be able to pay fellows for their academic work.  We want to host their academic work on websites, and the company will have a few thousands of running costs per year.  So with the mines, if we can do two things: firstly, we can generate a small amount of income to fund our advocacy; secondly, I want to have a number of sites in the country that we can bring politicians to, so getting towards actual lobbying. 

I met Lisa Cameron in Edinburgh, I love her, she's got her heart in the right place.  She is focused, for those who don't know, she's the Head of the All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK who are looking at cryptocurrency.  As you would expect, Bitcoin is lumped in with all other cryptocurrencies as well, of course.  I really struggle not to be mean about this, but I remember it took me a long, long time to understand why all other cryptocurrencies are pointless, and that's where they are at the moment.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, didn't they just have some event in London?

Freddie New: I think they did, yes.

Peter McCormack: They were covering CBDCs there, I think in a positive light, and I think Liz Cameron was criticised. 

Freddie New: Interesting.  Well, I'm not surprised the governments like CBDCs, it's a brilliant excuse for surveillance, control and confiscation.  Why would a government not like that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, love it, it's perfect.

Freddie New: Yeah, brilliant.  This actually highlights one of the problems we have.  You have to tread very carefully the line of advocacy because if you take what Bitcoin is to its logical endpoint, it is effectively not something that the issuer of a government currency would like.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but my headspace isn't that the endgame is the end of government currency, that's not my headspace.  I'm still in a place where I see that you will have sovereign currencies that sit alongside Bitcoin as a commodity currency, but you will still have local currencies or some currencies adopting the dollar, and that will give you the difference between certain economies, it will be your fluid cash.  But I think what it does is it makes central banks more responsible, and it makes governments more responsible.  I think it's a lens into the mistakes they've been making.  I mean certainly in the midterm anyway, maybe long term, I'm wrong, but in the midterm...

Freddie New: No, no, I agree with you, And we can use existing examples to support that view.  Gold exists, gold is perfectly legal for you to hold as a British citizen, and you can hold gold and use pounds.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but pounds are more liquid, it's hard to use gold as a currency, like a day-to-day transactional currency.  Bitcoin is arguably not as easy as digital pounds, but it's catching up.

Freddie New: I think that, sorry to segue slightly away from our advocacy work, but that's an interesting point and do you mind if I spend a couple of seconds on that?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, do it.

Peter McCormack: So polite, so polite!  "Would you mind?"

Freddie New: It's because I was beaten at school.  Can't beat a good caning next to the cricket pitch!

Danny Knowles: Definitely the poshest guest we've ever had! 

Freddie New: So on payments, I think Mark Morton at Scilling Mining is interesting on this.  He says a lot of the advocacy work he now does focuses on the commercial benefits, and I think that's a brilliant idea.  Like I said earlier, technology is adoptable, it's useful; there's a reason you don't see cars with square wheels.  But when Bitcoin becomes obviously useful for people, it will be adopted.  So, one of the things I wanted to chat about was how absolutely absurd the current payment system is.

So here, you go into Costa and you've got a bank card.  You tap your bank card on the point of sale terminal, pay for your coffee, and then you leave.  To you, that is a nice, simple process.  What happens behind the scenes is an absolute sausage factory of different rent-seeking.  So ordinarily, what you've got there is a four-party transaction.  So you have yourself as the customer; you have Costa as the merchant; and then in between the merchant and the money actually getting to the merchant, you have an acquirer; so these are terms used in the payment industries, you have an acquirer and an issuer; and then you have the scheme rules, which are Visa, MasterCard, Amex are the most well-known. 

So you've left Costa quite happy with your Grande Latte, and then there's an obsessive sequence of messaging that is happening.  So there are two things happening: there is messaging; and then there's transfer of value.  So the point-of-sale terminal has frantically messaged your acquirer, and the acquirer has then messaged the issuer, which is the bank where let's say you use your bank card issued by Visa, and then the issuer frantically sends messages back to the point-of-sale terminal saying, "Actually, yes, Peter's got enough money in his account to pay for his coffee.  It's okay, you can authorise that transaction".  It's authorized, you leave, you've got your coffee, everything fine.

Every single point and person on that chain is taking some money away from the merchant who sold you that coffee.  So, Visa and Mastercard fees range between 1.5% and 3.5% I think now, Amex's are even higher.  And the acquirer gets a fee, the issuer of the card gets a fee.  And the settlement, the actual money, doesn't transfer for some time later, in some cases, days.  And then if you contrast that with a Lightning transaction, there's two parties, possibly three, because the node runner might take one or two sats.  In a Lightning transaction, the money moves from you, Peter, to Costa completely seamlessly, instantaneous, final settlement, almost for free.

Peter McCormack: A little fee taken by the miner.

Freddie New: Yeah, my Lightning node payments were one sat, I would charge.

Peter McCormack: It's obscenely cheap to do it, makes the entire process -- I mean if the currency is the Bitcoin currency was stable, it would be the best payment system in the world.  Well, it is the best payment system in the world, but stability of currency does present issues, we can't avoid that.

Freddie New: That's true, but volatility is a price for being early.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you know what, I was using CoinCorner this morning because somebody wanted to buy a ticket for our event, and they wanted to pay in Bitcoin.  I could have done it to a wallet, but I just wanted to have a proper transaction set up.  So I phoned up Danny, I was like, "Can you set me something up quick".  So I did it all and then bosh, bosh, it's done, they're done with Bitcoin.

Freddie New: Nice.  I've obviously got a Bolt Card.

Peter McCormack:  Yeah.  Have you got a Real Bedford Bolt Card?

Freddie New: I haven't actually.

Peter McCormack: We've got some here, do you want one?

Freddie New: Absolutely, I'll pay you for them.

Peter McCormack: You can have it for free.

Freddie New: So generous, thank you.

Danny Knowles: I'm curious, why did you need to speak to Danny for that?

Peter McCormack: Because I needed the account set up, they've still got to set up the KYC.

Danny Knowles: To receive payments?

Peter McCormack: No, no, to get an account so you can create the invoice.

Danny Knowles: Oh, I see.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so they still have to do the KYC stuff.  But, yeah, I mean I could have just sent somebody my wallet, but what's happening, I'm sending them an invoice.  And at the time they choose to pay the invoice, then the amount of sats they have to send is done at the time they go to pay; whereas if I send them like, "Here's an address, you need to send me this many sats", it just has a proper process to it.

Freddie New: How much time have we got left?

Danny Knowles: As long as you want, yeah.

Freddie New: Oh, happy days.  So I think maybe to wrap up the slightly backtracking to the advocacy point, the third bucket that we wanted to focus on was next generation and education of younger people.  I'm slowly admitting that I'm no longer the youngest person in the room, so to speak. 

Peter McCormack: Papa Smurf just put his hand up!  Danny's the youngest person in the room.

Danny Knowles: I mean, you started the conversation talking about ET, you can't be the youngest person in the room!

Freddie New: No, no, I'll admit that.  And so we're leveraging some of what the Bitcoin Collective team did in the past and looking to ensure that we leverage as much of the previous material, and there's a hell of a lot of good stuff out there, the Nakamoto Institute, the Satoshi Action Fund, and the Looking Glass stuff that's being done by Greg at the moment.

Peter McCormack: Have you got a name for it?

Freddie New: This may surprise you, but it's called Bitcoin Policy UK.

Peter McCormack: That's fucking brilliant.

Freddie New: I know, it took us a long time to come up with that name.

Peter McCormack: Do you have a relationship with the Bitcoin Policy Institute?

Freddie New: Only incidentally so.  Margot has been working with our environmental team.

Peter McCormack: You should definitely talk to David Zell.  And how much time has my brother spent talking to you?

Freddie New: So, I've been messaging with your brother in quite some detail and we had a really nice call about a month ago.

Peter McCormack: I can imagine he would want to help.

Freddie New: So, a lot of this started off October when we were speaking to the Bitcoin Collective team.  I reached out to Neil, obviously great to meet you in Edinburgh as well.  Initially I thought Neil might be keen to sort of spearhead it, but if he's able to stay and add advice and guidance and wisdom and so on, that would be...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's definitely more on the -- yeah, I think he would like to be involved somehow and he's brilliant, he's a resource; use him.  Okay, I mean so syncopating as much as we possibly can, the policy team are going to be doing a lot of written work.  I say to my wife a lot of the time, "I want to live in a world where Bitcoin is dull, where no one knows what they're paying with", and she says, "You've already achieved that".

Peter McCormack: She's kind of right!  We think we're scientists, everyone else thinks we're fucking nerds!

Freddie New: Yes, I'm happy to be a nerd.  The reason I got involved in Bitcoin first was because I used to like building computers.  I'm a massive nerd, I'm very happy to be a nerd.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, did you finish on that point?

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I mean, look, you have our full support, anything you need.  You have my number, you have Danny's number, probably best to go through Danny; you tell us.  I mean, the Bitcoin Policy Institute guys have been on our show a lot.  We've had Margot, we've had Matthew Pines, we've had Zell on multiple times, we've had Troy; we think these people are brilliant, they're at the forefront of ideas with regards to where Bitcoin should go, and they have our full support, and you have our full support.  So anything you need, just stay in touch.

Danny Knowles: And if you come to the football on Monday, Regulatory Jason might be there. 

Freddie New: I can't come, I'm flying.

Peter McCormack: You're literally flying on one game and returning on the other game and missing the event.  Well, look, I'm very grateful for the support.  I feel I owe you more whiskey after this.

Peter McCormack: No, and this would be great, but I'm a little bit tipsy; 1:00pm!

Freddie New: Well, we could help that perhaps by going beyond tipsy to the next level.

Peter McCormack: I have to do another interview.

Freddie New: Oh, God, I'm so sorry.

Peter McCormack: Is there anything we've not covered you wish we had?

Freddie New: I think the only thing that I wanted to cover was one of the pieces of legislation which is coming.  So, like I say, my long-term goal is to make Bitcoin boring and to ensure that you don't need to think about what you're paying with when you're paying with Bitcoin.  And in that spirit, we can talk about a little bit of legislation. 

So the Economic Crime and Transparency Bill is currently making its way through Parliament.  For people who aren't aware of how laws are generally made in the UK, bills will start off in the House of Commons, and then they'll move to the House of Lords, and finally they'll get Royal assent.  So, it's broadly analogous to the two houses in the US and then the President signing the bill at the end.

So the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill is currently fairly far advanced and there's a lot of provisions in there relating to seizure and freezing of crypto assets.  I've read all of the relevant pieces, and I won't go into detail here.  I think the important takeaway for any bitcoiner is that you should consider any sats that you have in a custodial wallet or in an exchange potentially subject to freezing or seizure.

Peter McCormack: If you've committed a crime, or suspected of committing a crime, or just because they feel like they want to take it?

Freddie New: Well, that's the worry.  If you've committed a crime, yes, but I think you need to be prepared for all eventualities.  And if holding Bitcoin were to become illegal, then you have committed a crime by owning it, and that Bitcoin in your Coinbase wallet will then become subject to seizure and control.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Freddie New: So this, I think, ties into our third limb of the Bitcoin Policy UK efforts, which is we want to try and educate people on best practices, how should you use your Bitcoin; how should you preserve your privacy, how should you conduct yourself in an environment where all of your money may be subject to surveillance, seizure or debasement?  These are things that are obvious to a lot of people who have been in the space for a long time, but if you're just buying your first Bitcoin, they may not be very obvious to you; you may think it's fine to leave it in Coinbase or Kraken. 

I won't go into detail on the provisions of the bill, but it's very clear that the government's going to have quite draconian powers if they suspect you of committing a crime, of trying to get the exchange to freeze your account, or confiscating hardware or software that they find in your home and appropriating the Bitcoin out of those wallets.  So, Gigi refers to this as hygiene.  In terms of internet hygiene, I think it's very important that we encourage the community to learn how best to use, control, and hold their Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Not your keys.

Freddie New: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Not your binary!

Freddie New: It's a cliché for a reason.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, listen, this was great.  If people want to find out more, where do you want them to go right now?

Freddie New: So, our website should be live by the time the show goes out; that's bitcoinpolicy.uk.  Twitter handle is easy as well; that's @bitcoinpolicyuk, and same on Instagram as well.  We will have a Nostr, we'll put our own pub in our Twitter.  I don't tweet very much, relatively, but I'm @freddienew.  I either shitpost or I post about Bitcoin, so take your pick.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, this has been great.  Anything we can do to help, you let us know.  I really enjoyed this, and I think we should probably go and have a game of croquet.

Freddie New: I would love that.

Peter McCormack: On the lawn!

Freddie New: Oh, maybe the last thing to say is, we don't have it quite set up yet, but we'll put our Geyser fund on, so maybe I can send it to you for the show.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, send it over.

Peter McCormack: All right, Freddie, loved this, man, thank you.

Freddie New: I've loved it as well.  Thanks so much for having me on, it's been brilliant.

Peter McCormack: Brilliant, we'll do this again soon.

Freddie New: I hope so, thank you.