Rick Falkvinge is a Swedish information technology entrepreneur and founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. He is currently a political evangelist with the party, spreading the ideas across the world.
Transcript
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this week on London real we have Rick Fulk [ __ ] of the Swedish pirate party as long as you follow the rules you will always be at best number two the established politicians do not understand the digital environment the big problem today for a lot of creators for a lot of artists is not piracy it's obscurity Hollywood is not in trouble they're posting record profits year over year over year we have find for things like the right to express yourself without being tracked you can see a lot of overlap between PRI party enthusiasts and Bitcoin enthusiasm they do not understand the internet they do not understand that civil liberties need to be safeguarded more than ever first they ignore you then they ridicule you then they fight you and then you win that's very very [Music] accurate London real presents Rick ful [ __ ] pirate party m Microsoft were absolutely terrified when they didn't see Windows 8 shared on P Bay at all happy New Year and welcome back to London reel it's 2014 I hope uh you all have your New Year's resolutions in place it's going to be a uh very big year I got a funny feeling and uh hopefully you've got a a few of your goals laid out for you to make sure uh you get the most out of it uh we are back with uh a gentleman by the name of Rick fulking and for all you Swedish out there I hope I got the pronunciation right I properly butchered it uh during this interview in the beginning so you'll see that he is the founder of uh the Swedish pirate party and you might know the pirate party now because they have a major representation in Germany and a variety of other European countries but at the time uh they were the first and uh it was a party from what I understand was was founded on um you know internet free freedoms piracy and then was later loosely associated with The Pirate Bay which if you're a yank you might not know that that's based in Sweden and uh it's really fascinating to hear the way that Rick talks about it um because of their incidence of such a high Broadband standard back in the day the swedes really demanded um to have uh a lot of the multimedia at their fingertips and so they set up a lot of these companies uh that allowed you to download movies back in the day he talks a little bit about Napster which is something that I used to actively use which really is was one of the first uh fil sharing uh uh pieces out there as far as a peer-to peer and uh then he talks about how it kind of grew to where uh they became a genuine political party in Sweden uh and he was uh all of a sudden gone from computer kind of tech nerd guy into politician so uh it's a very cool story he's an interesting dude he's got a lot to say about Bitcoin and uh some really fabulous uh life advice at the end you know every now and then uh people uh really drop some uh fantastic uh science when it comes to to things they learned lessons they learned and one of the the great quotes that I put in the trailer uh which you might have seen this week is uh he said um those that make the rules uh make the rules because they don't want you to change the status quo that basically put them in charge so he says uh always break the rules and uh he says if not uh you're always going to come in in second and uh it's a great perspective so uh you can say you heard it here first on London re when you go out and bust up all those rules uh so I hope you Eno enjoy Rick uh please uh check him out on Twitter and he's good friends with Anie michon and uh Max Kaiser and all of the uh the soon becoming regulars here on on London reil so uh that's all good I want to give a super shout out to uh my uh my favorite people on uh the west coast of the USA which are the folks at bulletproof yes I uh continue to be bullet proof I took a break when I was in New York City for a week and uh I had regular coffee and uh you know it's good to take a break every now and then but as soon as I got back to the UK I got back on the good stuff with the butter and the MCT oil and I'm back if you don't know it's a it's a way of uh biohacking Yourself by having the right kind of coffee uh prepared in the right way and having a nice chunk of butter and MCT MCT oil in the morning and uh then you're bulletproof they've also got a bunch of other exciting products including their charcoal tablets uh which I'll be uh showing off here on the show uh very soon and you can get all of that stuff at their website which is upgraded self.com they've got uh a whole new backend very efficient uh they got lower shipping costs in the states and you get all their stuff in Britain as well so go there check them out um it's it's more than just a coffee company by uh a long way uh Dave ase's got a fantastic um podcast uh and I encourage you to check that out he's cranking out two shows a week with some of the top people when it comes and nutrition biohacking you name it so uh check them out I appreciate them uh we're big fans of their product and uh they are big fans of our show so uh good stuff uh all around there and uh that's it we got a few more exciting things coming this month we've got uh Mr Richard Viller who is a doctor but in uh in Britain you don't use the word doctor when you uh say someone's name you say mister this is the guy that went to Haiti after the earthquake he goes in like 24 to 48 hours after a major disaster happens and he's the guy you know operating on people trying to figure out where the water source is I mean it's really intense he's an ex SAS surgeon I mean he's the real deal he was on here before with Patrick Vickers about 6 months ago and uh he just got back from the Philippines for that typhoon disaster and uh we had him back in and he he walked me through you know getting the phone call when he was up in the Lake District in the UK to being flown in Via Manila and right to the disaster state to operating on people and uh it was really intense it's one of my most intense episodes it was just me and him uh I don't think I looked at my notes once cuz I was just like asking him questions that came to my mind so uh it's a really fun show um that'll be coming up soon along with some other exciting stuff that we've got going on uh to keep things fresh on London real so uh there you go kids I will uh call it at that um I hope you guys uh are looking forward to a great year and uh now I'm going to leave you with Mr Rick uh Faulk vinge uh of the pirate party all right let's do this this is London re I am Brian Rose we're sponsored today by the folks at Bulletproof Coffee uh which Rick has just sampled it's coffee that's free of molds and toxins I mixed it up with grass-fed butter uh much to his dismay uh I uh put in some brain octane oil which is like the best of the coconut oil I mix it up and uh boom uh we now have a new fan I believe it's a great way to start your day I do it instead of breakfast it just makes my brain work well and I I don't kind of crash after coffee you had a small bit but you liked it right I liked it I mean it was a very pleasant surprise I I didn't expect that yeah when the butter went in you were giving me some strange looks but uh that's understandable uh but I just want to say thanks to the bulletproof guys they're big into biohacking check out their uh site which is upgraded self.com in the US you can order their coffee and uh yeah uh really appreciate their support on the show uh my guest today is Mr Rick f V is that right it's a Scandinavian name so F but yeah a lot of most Americans say F vinge okay I'll say it right fva there you go okay Rick fvia that's awesome you are a Swedish um it entrepreneur and you are founder of the very first pirate party in Sweden in 2005 uh let me finish you are a worldwide speaker on internet Liberty the right to privacy you're a proponent of Bitcoin and you're the author of swarm wise which is the Tactical manual to changing the world yeah a bit ambitious title but yeah stand by it I can't wait to hear about it um Rick uh welcome to London real thank you so much brand it's a pleasure to be here no it's great to have you you know you have a a fantastic looking CV about all the things you've done but one thing that stuck out in my mind was that your first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 yeah is that true that first of all that that is true I mean I started coding at age eight so I started coding on a Vic 20 that that dates you a little bit it does doesn't I mean I'm old school I coded on computers when you actually had to know them inside out to get anything done but I think that gives you a bit also a bit of an advantage I mean if I were to start today I would be so cuddled in by all of these environments that wanted to help me to start a code in order to get anything done on those 8bit old school machines you had to know them inside out and you actually had to get down to the metal to to get even some scrolling text right and that the the drive was an audio tape drive wasn't it the first one was yeah I mean you you could buy a disc drive for the same price as the whole computer my first uh computer was an Apple 2 plus with the double floppy disc drives with the green screen my daugh yeah my daughter the other day she uses an iPad and I said this was my first Apple computer and I showed her a picture on on Google images of course and you know what she said she said ew well I can see kids at today saying that's not a computer this is a computer like Crocodile Dundee style yeah that's a knife yeah yeah so it's a big box my screen was literally green there were two choices on the screen green and black uhhuh and uh but I showed her some of the video games I used to play probably the same ones you used to play these old school crazy quite a lot of imagination and you had three and a half kilobytes of ram to play with so you couldn't fit a lot in there could you no but they were fun they were still really fun and and better than anything that was offered in say the arcade at the time because there was adventure games and lots of right and you know it was groundbreaking I mean even at age eight I was absolutely thrilled by how this machine would respond to my my my wishes I I would Press buttons and it would do exactly what I told it to do so as I started going through my teenage years I realized that you know what they they may they may think I'm a geek and nerd now but this is really going to change society and obviously it did right and the guy was the limit with those computers cuz unlike an Atari or you know you couldn't really code in Atari could you but with a Vic 20 you could really go anywhere with it but most people would find it too complicated to even jump in they might they might but I mean if if I'm talking to people from from that time and I mention like the um RQ Vector of 0314 0315 a lot of people will go very nostalgic okay if I'm talking about Hardware Hardware wired registers like d020 they'll remember all the tricks they pull on the screen and stuff okay so it's a good way to you to bond with those old scho absolutely okay you know I want to hear about the pirate party first of all it's a really cool name you've got a really fascinating story you know it happened in Sweden obviously the first time I heard about the pirate party was actually when it was in Germany so like I heard about it after the fact but I wonder if you could walk us through how it all started why you came up with the name and and what caus you to do this sure I mean it's it's a bit of a long story but it's I I think you need to um see how it developed to to picture how it all grew I mean Sweden was very very early in Broadband roll out we had fibers to apartments in 1998 1999 my my apartment was fibered before the turn the century most Apartments out in Europe still aren't right okay so in this environment Napster came about and imagine what we used it for I mean Sweden was third in household bandwidth After Japan and South Korea by 1999 wow so it's it's really no wonder that the par appeared there because when you give that kind of technology to not just to Geeks and nerds but to everybody it kind of kickstarts a public discussion on how this technology should and maybe even could be used okay now for our younger listeners can you explain what Napster was I remember it well that's that's a good point actually I mean Napster was the first large large scale file sharing program I mean think of it as bit torent but kind of old school so what was new about that I mean this this was with relatively very very small hard drives still sometimes measured in in the megabytes instead of terabytes of the day so we were mostly sharing music and but what was revolutionary at the time was that we' type an artist and a track and we could immediately listen to it like you do on YouTube today but only we we would get an emp3 to our our hard drive right which was big back then which was absolutely Big B I mean this was an evolution up from modem times where you'd essentially not even use the internet but amateur networks and share fils between one another so the idea of sharing your car drive and pooling your music collection with thousands of other people tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of other people so that everybody had access to everybody's collection and just pooling it was revolutionary at the time and it was the beginning of file large scale file sharing today 250 million Europeans and about 150 million Americans are doing that much to as many of the copyright industry but there's now putting the genie back in that bottle right so Sweden was an early adopter of Napster um Napster never had servers there though right with their servers in in Holland or I don't remember what I don't remember where they were I just remember the how this came out of f sh Fanning in um Bay area but I don't even remember if it was the Bay Area I remember it was yeah I think it was yeah Sean so because of the Broadband that you had in your country you kind of it kickstarted this need and this want ex and if if you look at sociological studies you can all often observe that shifts in values tend to follow developments and Technology mhm so I mean when the cite industry established their Lobby firm in 2001 in Sweden which was called the anti-pirate group no anti-pirate Bureau the anti-pirate bureau right they were so late to the game it was ridiculous and everybody was laughing at them but they still got some media as in they were making ridiculous claims what was funny about that was that was that a couple of musicians decided that they wouldn't take the these outrageous claims lying down so 2003 a bunch of cultural workers and musicians founded a Counterpoint to the Lobby's anti-par Bureau and what was what would be a better name than the pirate Bureau okay all right so as in they would go really provocative stating isn't it great that we can all share share music right I mean this is the best thing this is the greatest library ever invented and their points would go straight on media because this was a media logic hit you would immediately have this point and Counterpoint so you'd have the debate format straight off the bat and because it was Sweden you you felt you had the right to this to this information because you had been sharing it for so long for so many years I mean you're you were talking about EVC 20 that's when the sharing started you were talking about how we' used cassette types I mean this idea of having music on cassette types the old cassette you everybody can look them up on Wikipedia basically a small piece of plastic with a magnetic tape inside yeah but I mean they basically don't exist anymore but early on we were storing computer programs on those two right so I mean if you were used to sharing music on cassette tapes you would immediately know how to share computer programs on cassette tapes the the cassette tape players of the day even had a big red copy button so you'd bring your original you'd bring a blank tape you you'd pop them into two different slots and you'd press press copy I mean they were made for copying right okay so piracy has been going on for a long time right so the culture has been there since since I basically learned to walk okay now the pirate party how did that come about and was that I know that wasn't initially um equated with say The Pirate Bay one of those but later you kind of became right one I don't know how did that all work so so the thing was that the PIR sorry the pirate Bureau had a smash H with media and everybody they basically become Heroes with a younger generation because they were were speaking the net Generations language as opposed to the old stale old stale people in uh from Hollywood who were trying to Pedal outrageous lies in media so in 2005 there was yet another copyright Monopoly harshen in Sweden making downloading illegal if it wasn't from an unauth if it wasn't from an authorized source and I mean how are you supposed to know if the source is authorized or not we don't punish people who listen to the radio if the radio is unlicensed we punish the radio so this was a direct strike on Independent Artists and politicians were too naive to see it for what it was and this was Deb this was discussed everywhere in Sweden at the time in 2005 I mean at universities at family dinners of over coffee at workplaces you name it uh everybody took part in the discussion except for one group and that was the politicians and that struck me as IM L odd because politicians are usually the one group in society that kind of hold their finger up to the wind like this and see what what feels important to a lot of people right now so what struck me was that how can you make them understand that this is actually important to a lot of people what would it take to make them realize that they even have a blind spot because they don't know that today and then I realize that they are they're not evil they they just have they just do what everybody does when they don't know something they ask around and the copyright industry has just been very very good at happening to be there when these politicians are asking around so I realize you can't get on their agenda that that's not going to happen because their inbox is filled to the filter the brim with people demanding everything from a carbon tax on hamsters to give to help the environment to tearing down that bridge that shouldn't have been built in the 70s anyway okay so they're not necessarily in the back pockets of the record industry they're just too busy exactly I mean they're not evil they're just doing their best to to do do a good job and who's lobbying for these efforts is it like this Association that's funded by Hollywood and the recording industry then goes goes internationally absolutely yes it's not a government organization is it or or is it there is there are some governmental organizations like the wio the world intellectual property organization which I prefer to call the world industrial protectionism organization okay but in general yes it's just shills okay so there you have it I realized that you can't get on their agenda in their day to five in their 9 to5 time frame you got to go outside their box you got to aim directly at their power base you got to do something that affects them personally if you want to get their attention so I figured the only way to get their attention was to to stop trying to talking to them instead directly to the voters and challenge the politicians on Election Day over their jobs on this issue but you had never been in politics before well I was partying with some I was partying with the youth league and and my teens I I don't think that really countes as politics that more kinds like being a teen teenager was the creation of this party a ruse or was it something that be was a ruse that turned into something real or when you actually did it what were your intentions no no as in I've done the math I mean I'm an entrepreneur I found my first company h16 I i' done the math okay as in yes you need solid ideas but if you're going political then you need the number okay I mean politics is a public spectator sport you need the quantity of votes and that's harsh if you don't get that you fail if you do it you succeed it's black and white so we had George Galloway in here who's a a me me a member of parliament in the UK and he said um politics was show business for ugly people but then for what for ugly people and and then he said then he said but what would I know about that but that's Galloway for you that's a bit cynical yeah it is but I'm sorry so you were saying so it's a numbers game so right it is op so I I mean there were 1.2 million file shares in Sweden at the time now there's 4 million but out of a population of six uh n nine out of nine so roughly roughly half okay and these and these people probably Vote or they're younger right right exactly so I figured if just 1/4 of these people are tired enough of being demonized like this by the entire establishment as was as they were at the time if just one forth decide that enough is enough then we'll have a new party in Parliament we needed about 225k votes to get there and in our later in our breakthrough in 2019 we got 225,000 05 and and uh the it went online on January 1st 06 so the in the early days we were it was basically Amateur hour I'm not going to pretend otherwise but hey that that's what it's like learning a game you know right it's a movement it's a startup really it's a startup it's exactly a startup I mean all of my entrepreneurial skills were were just stra went straight into the box okay so and when when did you uh I guess not Cai but when did Pirate Bay become relevant and how did that affect your party and what happened and what year was that just for a history less right I mean early the par Bay was founded in 2003 and quite rightly I must say the par Bureau and the par Bay people were very skeptical of the par party initiative at first I mean was this a joke did we have the stamina to write it out were we serious were we in this for the Long Haul and did we have the capacity to deliver so having built quite a cult status around themselves and and their argumentation they were rightfully wary at first okay but as As Time passed on and and they realized that we can we can play this game we're we're we're serious about this then we gradually grew closer and um uh we actually did something with the Pare after our breakthrough in 2009 when we put two people in the European Parliament uh before before then we'd been on completely separate tracks but in 2010 ahead of the national elections and this kind of funny the uh the copyright industry were hunting the isps of the P Bay quite relentlessly okay they were just basically just trying to smoke them out so it it took on average 20 minutes from the P Bas signing up with a new ISP until they got the first threatening phone call from from the copyright industry that's when we stepped in and I mean we're we're Tech saavi right we we were Geeks we already had everything we needed to set up an ISP so we did we started we as as the pyate party became the ISP the internet service provider of the P pay and uh that was basically throwing the glove at the copyright industry saying come and get us if you want us to give us a ton of attention ahead of the election and they realized that's what it was so they just backed down immediately okay this is 2010 it is it is it's ahead of national and is that when Pirate Bay was shut down or attempted to be shut down or the cerate industry attempted to shut it down as as they tend to do okay that was 2010 or is that something that happens every year oh it keeps happening okay and I mean they call themselves the most resilient torren side in the world and there's a reason for that okay now from now and moving forward what are like the tenants of the pirate party is it all about just protect our cop we don't believe in copyrights or protect our right to information or there are more things going on because now you have seats in European Parliament Germany has quite uh I mean it's quite a mve that's when I first heard about it when I looked at the numbers it was like a very large percentage of the vote they got seven or eight% I know I mean in 2009 we became the largest party in the youth demographic in Sweden I mean we took 25% of the sub30 vote and that just came out of the blue for the establishment and in some we were the third largest party and coming from nowhere to become the third largest in the proportional system in three and a half years I mean that's a really big deal yeah it's unheard of so what what are the T of party so you're so yeah we got seats in not not just the European Parliament from Sweden we have seats in in Germany like I say 45 seats in state Parliament then in the Icelandic Parliament we have a senator in the ja Republic and we've we've taken seats a little here and there so basically if if you're asking me what we stand for it's something as simple as making sure that the civil liberties that we have offline carry over to our to the online World our children live in and let me take an example to illustrate when our parents sent um sent a message to their friends or colleagues they would actually write something on a physical piece of paper they would take a pen and paper write the message by hand and put that paper piece of paper in an envelope write an address on the envelope put a stamp that costs money on the envelope for delivering this letter seal the envelope and and physically carry that letter into a mailbox and put it there and it would be carried by Postal Services physical to thepan okay now I actually have I actually feel I need to explain that because most people don't do that anymore so so when you did that that letter had certain characteristics first of all it was Anonymous you and you alone would determine whether you identifi yourself as Center of this on the inside of the letter for only the recipient know on the outside for the entire Postal Service to know or frankly not at all or you could write a phon name that was your prerogative entirity it was untracked in transit nobody had the right nor for that matter the capability or means to track who was communicating with whom in real time it was absolutely Secret in transit it was unheard of that you would open all letters just to see if some letter contained a copyed drawing unless you were thinking of stazi in the old East Germany and we don't we don't think of those in in fign terms and last but not least the mailman was never ever responsible for the contents of this message which you can observe that the National Post services are are still each European country's largest distributor of Narcotics because they are not held responsible for the contents and that's by Design we hold the sender and receiver responsible okay now once you observe that these four were pretty much inable rights with with the the sealed letter we are arguing that it's not rocket science that these four characteristics these four civil liberties should carry over into the online world of our children because we don't determine what civil liberties we have based on who gets to make a profit or not that that is on a different different topic entirely okay so when when you say this to the um when you say this aloud in particular the top the copyright industry tend to say that you can't be serious you can't allow anybody to send anything to anybody else we'd go out of business and I say so what an entrepreneur's role is to make money given the current constraints of society and Technology you do not as an entrepreneur get to dismantle civil liberties just because you can't make money otherwise that's not how it works okay and you're specifically talking to say the Hollywood movie movie industry or to the the music industry and you're saying they need to move past an old an old business Paradigm is it kind of that kind what you're saying they need to accept the new reality well to be frank I don't think the copyright I think the entire copyright industry is obsolete so I I don't think it's much use for me to talk to them what I'm because they'll hang on to this old construct where they've legislated their place in the market but they don't add value anymore I mean mean seriously we don't need an we don't need an entire industry to ship us bits of data on stupid discs of plastic across the Atlantic we can do that that ourselves at the cost of a trillion of Cent okay now that's distribution now I'm going to I'm going to hit you with the Devil's Advocate cuz everyone's going to want to ask you this question uh I'm a Hollywood studio I'm about to make the next X-Men don't ask me why why I would go see that but that's a whole different issue that's past my generation but I'm going to spend 200 million on this film uh the reason I'm going to spend that money and produce these amazing effects and hire these horrible actors is because I'm going to produce this product that I I obviously uh need to be paid for need to get my 30% return which makes me want to make the investment in the first place right if my copyright laws are broken then I don't want to make the investment therefore you're not going to get the quality of the movies and then it's going to break down what do you say to that right so I'll I'll respond on three levels to that first people have always created not because we make money off of it but because of who we are you get 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube just to YouTube every minute so the myth that you need to make money to create is simply not true that doesn't mean we don't think it's nice to make make money creating but the myth that we create only because it's a dull and boring job that is a plain myth perpetuated by by the copyright industry doesn't hold a shred of truth to it the second question the second layer is Hollywood is not in trouble they're posting record profits year over year over year and that's Des that's despite the fact that file sharing is just growing again year by year by year so the idea that what if people were copying freely that is not a wh if that is what the terrain looks like and we are trying to change the map to match the terrain third a lot of these Blockbusters make their all of their investment and more back on opening weekend before it's physically possible to have a digital copy out in the wild meaning that yes we' seen the numbers you can make the investment back and fourth we don't adapt civil liberties to maintain a certain form of culture people have enjoyed different forms of culture for as long as we have written history it was it was Opera it was operates it was musical it was rock concerts it was radio plays it was TV shows it was feature movies and we're moving into video games there's no there's no hard and fast rule that we need to lock in legislation to make sure that today's preferred form of culture becomes the always preferred form of culture that's not how it works should there be any copyright period for someone creating you know a piece of media well um I'm skeptical to the concept but we have a c to abolish all of it tomorrow uh is much too large a step to take given how much inertia there is in the system but we have a proposal that I think is reasonable proportionate and solves 99% of today's today's problems what which says that drive this Monopoly because it is a monopoly has nothing to do with the property rights this is a monopoly distribution and and duplication Monopoly that limits property rights that's very important to understand and which is the Monopoly the there are six specific rights that are Ser that are reserved for the copyright Monopoly holder regard regard of whose property a copy of a movie is okay I mean if you buy a DVD at the supermarket it's your property you hold a receipt in hand it's your property inside and out only different laws limit your property rights to this to to this disc that's why it's Monopoly and not prer but um where was I I think we were talking about oh what you would what you would like as far as a copyright proposal we so we have a very reasonable proposal which says that push this Monopoly back into where it was 15 years ago it needs to concern itself with commercial distribution only frankly this Monopoly does not belong in honest people's bedrooms it need to needs to get out of of the civilian population so reduce this Monopoly to only cover commercial activity meaning that non-commercial sharing which everybody does today should not just be legal but encouraged peer-to-peer sharing peer-to-peer sharing yes uh the lengths of today's Monopoly is ridiculous I mean they're ridiculous five years are they 20 years or they even further than that um I mean today it's life plus 70 and there're they they're saying that this Monopoly the purpose of it is to incentivize for example an author to write more books and that might sound fine until you realize that this if you write a good book the idea is that you should have a monopoly on selling this book so you get money to write more books if it's popular but this Monopoly lasts for the author's life plus another 70 years and to be honest I don't know I don't know if any writer that keeps writing books after they're dead and buried okay so the Monopoly lasts for at least 70 years too long okay when you say Monopoly you mean that one person owns the rights to that media that they that they created that's when you use that term Monopoly yeah I mean okay what about Grand Theft Auto 5 it just came out it was a huge hit obviously people wanted the game they bought the game but if they go in and they're not going to pay the £55 for it and they can get it illegally free now there's no opening weekend there's none of that is there is there anything that says to you they should deserve some type of profit for making that game versus getting it for free you don't deserve a profit for making no nobody deserves a profit that's not how it works there's 500 people that created that game they deserve to to get paid a salary well if they deserve to get paid a salary that's between them and their boss but they need entrepreneurship doesn't work like you make a huge investment so you deserve a profit not that's a that's a business calculation okay so so I mean the the games industry is very very very special in that right that they have only existed when sharing has been rampant I mean we talked about the Vic 20 and comer 64 recently and when something was released on that it took three days for it to spread around the globe from the release point I mean 72 hours that's what you got when we didn't have the internet when people were actually carrying copies by hand so you're saying this is just something that's been happening for a long time it's been happening through the entire games industry and it hasn't it it's probably detracted from the revenue but they're still making it a great business a lot of people want to pay for the the I'm not going I'm not going to agree to the fact that it detracts from their business I mean you maybe it aids you're saying maybe it maybe it maybe it detracts maybe it's neutral I I'd say that that depends entire that depends a lot on the individual business case but there is absolutely no solid case saying for for for the fact that sharing is always a loss today a lot of culture I mean we've got such a huge supply culture like I like I said 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube Every Minute not all great how do you find the gems you I mean the big the big problem today for a lot of creators for a lot of artists is not piracy it's obscurity right so you want to get your stuff out there you want to get it to be known a lot of software developers are horrified when they don't see their stuff shared because that means it's it's not wanted Microsoft were absolutely terrified when they didn't see Windows 8 shared on py Bay at all no because nobody wanted the stuff okay that's a very good point it's funny because Game of Thrones I think is the most pirated piece of media right you and the producer loves it because that means that it's not a problem at all it's hot and it probably builds their brand and it probably D HBO and drives people and all completely and I mean HBO subscription mod fits hand in glove with with piracy as an advertising model that's a very interesting point to make one that uh that the critics don't often bring up so uh no that that is good point where is the pirate party in the UK Rick where is it do I need to start it there is a pirate party UK the problem in the UK is that I mean let's go back to the original hack in Sweden I mean we were founded as a par as a parliamentary hack essentially we wanted to get 5% of the vote and there are two party blocks in Sweden pretty much like like Republicans and Democrats in in uh in the United States only there are blocks of parties okay and what we wanted to get was 5% as a wedge in between those blocks because they're always very closely tied for power and we if we would have that wedge both of those blocks would need our support to to form the next government right a classic political scenario exactly we wanted the tiebreaker position we wanted to be the kingmakers and that would enable us to sit down and play who wants to be a prime minister and since these we've seen that these issues are plainly not important to the politicians that's why they don't that's why they don't care about it that's why they just listen to the lobbyists and do whatever lobbyists say so they would give us anything we wanted okay so our the original hack depended on getting 5% of the proportional vote because in most of Europe if you take 5% of the national vote you get 5% of the national seats and that's very important not true in America or in the UK exactly exactly so in in United States in France in the UK and a couple of other countries the the majority gets everything right exactly you have a constituency system where the winner takes all in a particular geographical area neighborhood a county it depends a bit and in such a place you need 34% rather than 5% to get a single seat and that's a different ball game entirely okay but you have the European elections coming up in the UK and proportional so the power party UK is gearing up for those elections and I think that'll be very interesting I mean they're hell late late May May next year pretty much six months out actually okay all right watch that space for this why is uh Bitcoin something you talk about is Bitcoin is fun it it is fun as hell and we we've had Max Kaiser on here we've had a lot of people talking about Bitcoin I love to talk about it but why is it such a a big part of the pirate party well we're not talking about Bitcoin pirate party is not having Bitcoin as part of its platform directly right but you can see a lot of overlap between PR party enthusiasts and Bitcoin Enthusiast disclosure I have a rather large Bitcoin prision I invested all my savings in it early 2011 you did yes you were one of those guys I was one of those guys did you just take the leap one day and you're like this is going to happen and yeah I sort of looked at it and and I mean it was so many new Concepts at the time so okay there's no Central Bank what what do you mean it's just math what do you mean it's a transaction system do you mean I can actually transfer a value of a cup of coffee to a friend in India and a Sunday and the seed immediately what do you mean the government can't seize the money okay this is getting interesting what if we put this together and I put it together in my head and thought about it for the better part of a week and then went wow this is going to hit I'm going to put I'm going to take all my savings and put it into this how long did it take you to buy those Bitcoins like weeks to get your savings into that because it's it's hard to buy a lot of Bitcoins that's the problem isn't I mean you have this you have this very much so I mean you have this Legacy banking system and you need to transfer money to a a an exchange in Slovenia or one in Japan to actually buy the Bitcoin but once you have them I mean you have such a you have like I said the first time I had the Bitcoins in hand I bought bought a little just to test it out and I sent the value of a cup of coffee to a friend in India on a Sunday and they saw the money instantly they didn't see who it came from they just saw the money I knew I had sent it so just seeing what didn't happen I mean I did not log on to a bank of any kind I did not pay an international transfer fee in fact I didn't pay any kind of fee yeah there were no bank holidays involved there was no delay at all actually no government had the ability to seize the money no money because they couldn't see it in the first place right so no moneya laundering investigations none of that right and you have Micro payments for that are enabled for the first time ever because this is going to what's interesting here is that you in an economy you today you essentially have four layers of players at the top have the government which works in collaboration with a second layer which are the banks to collect money and run the government they collect money with the help of the banks to to fund the government and hand out Social Security fund the military police and various various services in society beneath that you have the third layer which is which who are corporations that are essentially just Gap engines in the economy and then you have the fourth layer which are people who do the actual work but what's interesting with Bitcoin is that corporations are who are dependent largely on uh credit card companies today see a means to cut them out of the loop and credit card companies typically take between two and 4% of every transaction every transaction yeah and sometimes a minimum fee right right right there's a minimum fee and there's then there's a propor then there's a percentage on top of that so which to the average person doesn't sound like a lot but if you told that to a corporation I mean that's the profit margin of Tesco I mean like exactly exactly so when you're talk when you're looking at a corporation that has a profit margin of between three and per three and 5% which is typical and ask an executive would you like to double your profit margin sir they you'd kick you'd kick out because they didn't believe you even had a believable proposition but once you realize that this payment system is going to double the profit margin of Corporations they're going to jump at it so initially it'll be a competitive Advantage for those who only deal in Bitcoin so the corporations will want the Bitcoin the corporations will absolutely want the Bitcoin because it allows them to split this gain and profit margin between them and the customer right and and that means the customers us can get a lot of expensive stuff for lower prices so we will flock to the corporations dealing only in Bitcoin right because they can get all off lower prices and so the competitive advantage will will gradually face out credit cards all over the market and at that point the banks are out of the loop we have a parallel show here at London re called silicon reel and we are right in shortage with the tech community and the big thing here is fintech and we had a company on called transfer wise the guy was the the first employee of Skype uh funny enough his name is Tav hris and they're trying to quite simply cut out these huge margins when it comes to bank transfers for even these startup companies to set up bank accounts I mean it's just it's from the 18 I know I know I mean if you want if you want a horrible use case I mean look at look at when we're buying from something from China today the Chinese manufacturers are absolutely outraged at the Legacy banking system I mean they they're they have to wait between six and 8 weeks for payment and they have to pay on the order of $100,000 to a bank just to channel the payment Bitcoin just erases that right and it's interesting because these small companies are taking on these Bank and I I worked in the banking industry for 9 years and it's the constant innovator dilemma the young company wants to try it a new way the old company wants to save and protect your profit margin you don't even do it you don't even really think about it it's just like the banks don't want to move because this is a great business to be in and and and the young guys are trying to change it the Bitcoin people that kind now and the banks probably W even recognizeing it until someday they'll buy the company they exctly capitulate I mean you have this you have this heavily regul ated Finance banking industry right and Along Comes Bitcoin and it becomes this clash between what you can do and what The Regulators think you can do because the regulations were set up to Pro to protect the consumer but that was four decades ago right so you have this you have this paradoxical situation where the regulations are actually preventing Innovation it's it's like uber in Paris I mean the taxi company yeah or taxi similar to taxi company so Uber's trying it to make a taxis available to everyone and then Paris they're running up against taxi legislation exactly exactly and in Paris they they they've so out competed the Legacy taxes that they actually were struck regulation saying that they may not pick up a passenger until 15 minutes have passed from the the taxi call so they have to wait by the curb side for 13 minutes before they can pick the people up and that's way old school right and and that's a that's like how these old Regulators see how they are leveling the playing field with the old inefficient dinosaurs whereas in reality they are preventing Innovation they're preventing progress so this is where I see Bitcoin Bitcoin coming in because they don't basically care about regulation the exchanges the bridges to the old system are affected by regulation but you can't really regulate once you go all Bitcoin right now Bitcoin now so you you've been upfront with us you have a big position in Bitcoin you put all your money in Bitcoin it's it's almost hit $1,000 of Bitcoin in the last few days it's gone up quite a bit in the last actually it's past a, so it's it's gone four or five times in the last month or two or um well in October it was at 109 at its bottom so it's it hit 1070 today so it's practically a tenfold in slightly less than two months and one of your Twitter followers that twittered out something tweeted out something today said uh at what price will it will it remain stable and you said something like between $2 and $5 million of Bitcoin yeah that's why most people would fall off their chair hearing two to 5 million dollars of Bitcoin but why why do you say that and why is that possible for valuation well I mean a lot of people are just seeing the charts and thinking how high will it go what I'm doing is counting backwards I mean this is a transactional this is a transactional currency and it is a store of value as such it is a product and a service competing on a very tangible market for stores of value and for transaction currencies so what is the what is the size of that market right and this is important and how much how big a market share can Bitcoin realistically take within a a uh foreseeable time frame when you ask that question then you come up with a with a market cap of Bitcoin total and then you divide that by the number of Bitcoin in circulation by that by your estimated time and seeing how Chinese are buying Bitcoin like crazy I actually had to adjust this number upwards but then you come up with a number of about2 to5 million doll per Bitcoin now there's about 21 million Bitcoins currently outstanding there will be 21 million Bitcoins outstanding at the end today we have about half of that 12ish cuz when I used to hear about the Bitcoin story I mean I did the same math you did when at aund at $100 a Bitcoin with say 10 million outstanding that's like what a billion dollars of total capital I mean that's not that's not even the market cap of Apple that's 100th of the market cap so I was like this can't exist cuz it's it's not big enough like you said to be a but when you start getting up in the numbers you're talking about you're talking about trillion dollar yeah I mean it's it's kind of replace International Trade right so it has to get that big in order to be a real currency and since it's infinitely dividable it doesn't it doesn't really matter the actual number of Bitcoins is doesn't in the slightest I mean you're going to be dealing in micro Bitcoins before soon so whether they're 10 million or 100 million or it doesn't really matter doesn't matter I mean you're it's divisible to easily divisible to 16 decimal places today and you can extend that as as long as right what worries you about Bitcoin or what don't you like about it something you would change if you could redesign it well it's going to be it's going to create a lot of turmoil and I mean we're talking about a world where governments can't forcibly collect taxes any longer where they have where they can't just swoop into your bank account and take what they like but where they have to rely on making you sorry for not voluntarily paying what they would like you to pay and they were a world where government can now longer look into your economy they can't see your wealth your debt your income your expenditure you may report it you may report it to them but they have to take your word for it so they say on Wall Street there's two sure things in life death and taxes right right right right and when you say this to a bureaucrat they'll just they'll they'll just blink their eyes and then they'll do a double take and then they'll come up with something but we'll we have to you must create new laws for this and I go again you don't understand you cannot you can it's it would be like creating a law to change gravity it is not technically possible for you to see people's wealth and then they go blink again and then they say but we have to repeat out no see them so that's going to change a lot what about the regulation right now I bought a couple Bitcoins uh before we had Kaiser on and I bought him through bit bargain and I went back there a few months later and it wanted like photoc copies of my past he wanted a picture of me holding my passport I was like what are you kidding me so I didn't do that but is it are they making it harder and harder to buy these things or no this is standard banking regulations this is European union and uh I'm not sure if it's worldwide but the European Union banking regulations have something called kyc know your customer and that means essentially that you have provide proof of ID proof of Resident residency address if to buy a Bitcoin to buy a bcoin the first time I just trans money from my account sell it okay so this is this is when you run into leg Legacy regulations this is not Bitcoin per se this is about if you're a fin financial institution and you want some protection from just having police essentially move in and close your business okay so will will that Prevail or will people be able to trade Bitcoin without all these disclosures that's the thing right this is only necessary for the bridge to pound sterling to US dollars to Swedish Crona to Japanese Yen and whatnot once you're once you're in Bitcoin doesn't matter then you're fine then you're fine and um what do you see let me let me provoke you another bit there I mean today the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world and the United States dominance def depends heavily on the fact that if you want to buy something from China then you first need to buy US Dollars and then exchange those US dollars for what you want in China and that is essentially fueling the entire do current dominance of the United States now why is that because the the Chinese won't accept that currency or the the the the Yanks have all the Chinese currency or well it's just an international standard okay I mean it's more or less agreed on that that International Trade happens in in US Dollars I don't think the dollar is going anywhere for the record and if you want to try that if you want to trace that back it dates back to the something called the Breton Woods agreement that happened after World War II where us had power exactly and you us offered the EUR Europe very cheap loans in exchange for tying them tying their currencies to the US dollar and there was was gold involved and whatnot yeah EUR Europe destroyed each other and the US walked in and said we're going to exactly exactly scenario it was very profitable for the United States but this posision is threatened by Bitcoin so I think Bitcoin as a technology has the potential to change the world a lot more than the internet did and I real realize that's a bold statement but but let me get give you the third picture of this I mean i' I told I've said already that governments stand to not be ble to collect taxes that will cause a huge change the United States dominant power caused by their currency to be the international standard of trade is that dominance is threatened by Bitcoin and that that's again that's going to be a huge change but the most interesting change is that all the Geeks Who went into Bitcoin coin early are going to be billionaires that is scary and I mean talking about yourself too that's a possibility you'd be like Kim like a billionaire Mogul well well that's that I I won't I'm going to be honest yes I I might be one day I might be one day I'm not today where is that Corr continue so so the the interesting thing is that the wealthy people of today are the ones that went into oil early in the 1800s the same the same way people are going into Bitcoin early today the ones that went into oil early are the ones that accumul culated huge wealth I mean Rockefeller had over 1% of the wealth in the entire United States you couldn't talk about the 1% because Rockefeller had more than that he wasn't even the 1% he was the 1.46% he alone all of him all of him right so there were no others exactly okay exactly so every project every funding every Innovation since has been greenlighted or redlighted by Heirs of the oil barents the ENT the automotive industry H and the oil industry has basically decided where Humanity goes H interesting what happens when this wealth shifts to the Geeks and nerds what happens when the hacker spaces decide where Humanity goes which projects get funded and that's going to be interesting that's creepy you know you got some really interesting light on you right now when you were telling me this I went into this science fiction piece and I was like Jesus you're freaking me out Rick there's going to be all this like totally Geek Squad and they will literally be running the world right and it's not going to be about who creates the better battery powered car it's going to be who who spends the most money on teleportation right that's pretty creepy um okay so that's going to be the future Bitcoin I don't think the Dollar's going anywhere for a while but I do think not for a while not for a while that this has but it's undermines the fundament and has a very unique way of threatening it I mean taxation to America I mean it's it's the backbone in the bread and butter of that country and as inefficient as they are as a bureaucracy they will find you if you don't pay your taxes so right they they will and they'll make you sorry for not paying your taxes the difference is they can't swoop in and just take them without asking you right right it's fascinating all right I want to shift gears a bit and I want you to tell me something I don't know about Sweden you know we've always we've seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and most people haven't visited especially the Americans listening what is Sweden like what is it not like you know I worked for Microsoft for a couple years okay uh in my defense I didn't apply to work for Microsoft the company I worked for was bought out by it but on the other hand I got a great project management training at Microsoft I'm not complaining they took very good care of the employees at least at that time but the Americans I work with had three key takeaways described in three Swedish words it was F which is a Swedish Swedish word that can be anything from a meeting a corporate meeting to a date and it's when you sit sit down over coffee and this happens at least twice daily for most Swedish okay and it can has such has such versatility that it's just a Meeting of Minds or a romantic date or anything like that okay the second word is logum and it doesn't really translate what it means is that everybody has a sense of community so they contribute enough and take take away enough for the community to continue so logum means that it's if you if I were to translate it it would be something like not too much not too little use your gut feeling for what is appropriate okay and there's no such thing in the United States nor is it nor is there something like that outside of Scandinavia that is a bit also a bit anti- entrepreneurial I mean it can go overboard and say if somebody steps up and say I can do this much better than anybody else which would be the American dream in the American way and to be honest a bit a little bit of my my attitude then it tends to be looked down on in Sweden okay because it goes outside of these cultural norm the third third one is sble and it literally means somebody you live together with and marriage is kind of being faced out in Sweden you're you're just moving in with your respective other and that's it people don't get don't get married as they did 40 50 years ago you Mo you move in together you have kids you live as if you were married and maybe you do get married some 10 or 20 years later but the uh there there's a legal framework in place to protect you the the instant move move in together as a couple okay and that's what the Americans saw that was very different right right and the first one those three words were that takeaway the first one is that is that of U the people are taking the time to just have a one-on-one meeting of the minds like it's important for them to sit down and have that conversation communication absolutely I mean it's social it's corporate it's it's competitive it's you can even hammer out business deals over F okay but it's in person always in person always in person always in person interesting all right those are very uh they very interesting three words what about the movies do they do you guys any justice the dragon movies I prefer the original myself oh you've seen it uh yeah yeah I mean yeah the original one in Swedish is harsher a bit darker a bit more unpolished perhaps right in in a positive sense that it's not it's not um as um friendly right but but yeah I mean that is Swedish Society very very much okay although you wouldn't see the those misog enic parts okay I mean they're very exaggerated and I while they do exist it's very very it's rare to the point where you don't encounter them okay and Daniel Craig did he do it justice in the American remake to be honest I haven't seen the all right that's a good answer um Rick there's a question I always ask all of our guests and I'm going to hit you with that same question if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Rick and give that young man a bit of advice what would you tell him to do buy Bitcoin in 2009 okay that's good advice what else would you tell him what was he you doing were you starting company okay so pulling a bit of Life advice yeah uh obviously you want you want to know the stock market ahead so that's not very surprising is it um I have a motto saying that this took a bit took me a while to flesh out but one my primary living rule is that if you play by the rules you will always lose because the rules were written by somebody else to maintain the status quo and part of that status quo is that they maintain their position as long as you follow the rules you will always be at best number two wow that's powerful and have you always lived your life that way I think uh I think I always have but on the other hand I think I articulated it fairly recently okay I like that one so if you if you follow the rules you will always lose is there a limit to Breaking rules it's not as as much breaking them as ignoring them as in not accepting the framing of reality that these rules impose on you uh again Bitcoin is one example that no we're not going to open a bank we're going to drop KCK the entire banking system we don't care about the banking system we're going to create a new way of trading I mean the the P party was one such nonacceptance of the rules right you just don't even agree to any of the assumptions that exactly so you instead you you put on your entrepreneurs had and think I can do this better if I weren't Bound by the rules assumptions and and constraints of the day how would I build this I like that a lot um best advice you've ever received wow um there's so much to be honest but one of the one of the better advice insights I had was that don't worry if people don't like you if if people don't like you it's it's because you're making a difference and people don't like people who make a difference people like others who maintain the status quo if you're standing up for something and you should that means that some people will like you some people will dislike you and that means you're on the right track to something I think you could quote Gandhi on that actually who said that first they ignore you then they ridicule you then they fight you and then you win that's very very accurate did you get that advice early on or was that something you realized later I I probably Came Upon it later and realized that yeah this matches my experience yeah no I I completely agree with that I mean you you have to have some people hating on you or you're not doing something right exactly exactly when when people lash out at you that's a sign you're on the right track yeah it's hard sometimes though especially if you're new to the game and you're getting lashed out it can be not a nice experience at first but that's good advice the last bit of the advice question you're making it through the gauntlet is uh to the 20-year-old listening right now out wherever in the world China America UK Sweden what advice do you give them whether if they want to grow up and be like Rick or if they want to get involved in the pirate party what advice do you give him whether you believe you can or cannot change the world I think you're right it's all in the mind whether it's about whether you accept the limits placed on you or you don't accept those limits and the instant you realize you don't have to accept the limits put upon you by others it's such a liberating experience it's like finding cheat codes to life I mean you can start ignoring pretty much a lot of the rules and regulations and you feel Untouchable it's literally like feeling you found the cheat codes to life itself I'm thinking about that right now um I'm going to think more about this later um that is very good stuff what are you doing then in in the next couple years what what's next for you Rick and and so what I really enjoy doing right now is traveling and speaking I mean I led the P party the Swedish P party the first of 70 part 70 P parties for its first five years I led it through the into the European Parliament which and that elector Victory night dinner was the night of my life I mean the roof lifted with with the Euphoria as we saw that bar up on screen I really realized we made it this is 09 this was 09 this four years after four years you've been working on that right so so uh I pulled the P party through another election national election that we didn't make learned a lot from that failure though so so there no hard feelings in that in that regard and then step down to focus on what I really enjoy doing which is traveling and speaking I mean I love igniting that fire in people's eyes as they realize they're they they they don't have any limits if they have a passion for doing something it could be bringing clean water to a billion people teaching a billion people to read bring Humanity to Mars whatever it's totally doable and and I really enjoy people when I speak about this and make people realize that they can do it I mean I wrote this book swarm wise which we mentioned briefly what is that book this is swarm wise the Tactical manual to changeing the world right you're going right into it so what is that so one one of the key takeaways from our putting people in the European Parliament was that we became the largest party for people under 30 in Sweden in the European elections that was just a drop kicking of the enti establishment they didn't see that coming everybody's gunning for the Youth but we became the largest out of nowhere and what really strikes me what that this wasn't just any competitor we had a campaign budget total of 50,000 and the combined competition had 6 million between them and we beat them that means that we had a way of working that had a cost efficiency advantage of more than two orders of magnitude we're not talking about shaving a a few percent of the cost here we're talking about being more than Factor 100 more efficient so swarm wise the book is uh my experience with how you build such an organization how you gather volunteers and energize them to change the world for the better you want to make a difference then why you're still sitting here come along I'm I'm I'm standing up I'm going to change the world who's with me and that's leadership at its core and what I'm writing about is leadership is not something you're born with it's a skill everybody can learn and these very tangible methods that I describe in swarm wise shows how anybody can stand up decide to change the world for the better and get those tens of thousands of volunteers that make it happen Okay do you miss Tech do you miss being an IT guy do you miss being a startup guy oh I I still code I mean I code on a reg on a pretty much a daily basis because I I just think it's too fun to let go of okay but you're going to be doing this speaking I've actually sat and talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that have the same story that said you do they loved making the companies they did a bunch of companies but they really get a lot out of inspiring other people you sound like that's where you're at right now absolutely I mean I started coding I like like we discussed my initial motivation was making these machines work for me and they were so they they they were so shapable into whatever I wanted them to do but as somewhere around age 20 25 I found out that what I really enjoy doing is making people stand really tall about what they've accomplished as in turning problem companies around from where you have people who have a slightly hulky stature and are kind of a ashamed of yesterday's mistakes and you turn that around to making people feel pride in their workmanship and they you you it's a complete turnaround and I I mean I can live off off of a year of making people realize that they're actually a very skilled Craftsman that's fantastic that's fantastic um the last thing I wanted to ask you is you're one of two people that send me pgp encoded emails every single time it's you and former MI5 agent Annie michon every time get the pgp going I know it's one of you guys um and I so I wanted to know just as a close here what do you recommend people do as a basic for privacy should they use the tour browser should they pgp their emails just basic stuff I mean the information hygiene is such a huge feel today nice basically what you want to what you want to do is to be aware of who are who else is you sending who else are you going who else is going to see this information who else are you sending this information to a lot of people when for example when they enter their pin code on an ATM are not aware or don't consider the fact that they're not just entering their ATM to the bank they're also entering it to the ATM and anybody who wrote that ATM can listen to it so when you're sending an email you're letting everybody in the way see that email in in the chain of delivery so when you're browsing a website and entering personal details it's not just the website you're giving that information it's the entire company behind it and all the coders there so and the NSA now as well well and the NSA now as well so my basic advice would be to start thinking about who else can see this information and and go from there like when you under pin code on an ATM do you know that it's not taken out no you can't there's no way of knowing that and once you realize that you can't know if it's taken out then you start making sure that it's not possible to take it out and that's when you start encrypting your email that's when you start not communicating over unencrypted channels at all so if I wanted to recommend three specific pieces of software it would be for people who use Android phones it would be two pieces of software from um open whisper systems they're called text secure it's encrypted text message meag in and it's red phone from open whisper systems which is encrypted phone calls and that lets you not worry because if I make uh an uh a red phone call to you then I know that my phone is encrypting the phone call and your phone is decrypting it I don't have to worry about who's listening in between and what are they going to do with what I'm saying same thing with Tex secure and the third would be if you're if you're sending sensitive stuff in mail use well pgp would be the standard today it takes a while to get used to but yes like you say I've once you set it up and once you have it's as part of your routine then it's it becomes totally transparent so yes I always sign my email digitally and I don't even have to do it because my setup takes care of it for me okay and uh tour browser is that a standard for you not yet I think it's a very good idea but as it is I turn it on only when need to be anonymous that's a problem arguably because the default should be encrypted the it shouldn't be that you turn on encryption when you need it it should be that you turn off encryption when you absolutely sure you don't need it yeah so we we need to move to a state of default privacy we're not there okay um Rick thank you so much for coming it's been an enlightening hour to say the least you had some definitely some perspectives this the one especially that's going to hit me is going to be all the wealthy Bitcoin people in the future I got to think about that that and um you know not agreeing to the rules of of any kind of a even an argument to not accept their uh right there's a lot of implicit framing that's going on and once you start looking at it you you um you realize how much you can step out of it well put implicit framing um how do people get a hold of you Twitter how do they buy your book swarm wise how do they find out more about Rick swarm wise is easy to find it's swarm wise one word nine letters you can download it off off my website for free if you want it in PDF format or you can buy buy it off of Amazon or a number of other book sites if you want it in paper format okay uh on Twitter I'm faling that's f l KV i n g nine letters my just my last name and on my blog f.net F KB n g.net you can find a lot of other ways to contact me if you like and on your Twitter you got the ey patch as a picture right yes I I got the pirate ey patch so know it's me immediately do you still wear that every now and then or it's just a photo gig but but it's it works right I mean it's one of these silly little stunts that oh there's the pirate and people recognize it immediately yeah it's very smart um Rick uh thanks so much for being here I wish you well on your speak so much for thank you so much for inviting me to sh Brian real real pleasure my pleasure I hope we get a proper pirate party going on in the UK we got the European Parliament elections coming up soon so let's do that I wish you I hope you make billions on your Bitcoins we're going to be watching this Market it's uh it's fascinating to me too so uh as we say at London real it's about the journey and uh I hope we see you again soon take care this week on London re former MI5 intelligence officer turned whistleblower Annie michon what we're looking at now is a dayao police state you know all the laws are in place they're just not applied to most citizens yet I think it's not a case of having anything to hide it's having a case that I have a right to privacy and I can't guarantee my government will uphold that right therefore I need to take the steps to do it she talks NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden he would die for his country he wants to try and improve the way his country operates within its own boundaries and protect its citizens and we seem to forget and think that human rights are a luxury not they're fundamental and privacy is one of them on Sunday London re presents Annie michon whistleblower so it's a very British mess is the short answer