Cory Doctorow - A Visionary Force in Technology, Activism, and Science Fiction

Full transcript: Cory Doctorow on London Real

3:44 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Cory Doctorow, the Canadian-British blogger, journalist, science fiction author, and internet activist. You’ve written over 15 books from nonfiction to award-winning fiction, including the New York Times bestseller Little Brother, as well as Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free and Homeland. You are the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, and you’re a columnist for the Guardian and Information Week.

5:11 You’ve been named one of the web’s top influencers by Forbes magazine, and your next novel, Walk Away, is expected April 2017. Cory, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. It’s nice to be here. It’s awesome to have you here. It’s awesome to have you back in London.

5:25 And I was just wondering what it’s like to be here. I know about a year ago, you left and moved to LA and posted a blog post about why you were leaving. And I just wondered, what’s it like to be back? And has your brain changed thoughts as far as what London still is, or what LA is, like, all that stuff? Well, you know, we did feel a bit like we dodged a bullet when the Brexit vote came down, but of course we’ve had the impending U.S. election through the whole time that we’ve been in Los Angeles.

5:54 And so I don’t want to get too smug about living somewhere where the politics are marginally more sane, because they are manifestly not more sane, at least some of the time in the U.S. You know, it’s not my first time back since we left, and each time it’s a bit of a snapshot. I think that the macro trends still haven’t really manifested in ways that are visible from just walking around the streets. But, you know, I know, speaking to other parents from my daughter’s school, that there’s real problems there because it’s a very mixed neighborhood and there are people on benefits, and the benefits controls are so tight that they’re struggling to make ends meet, and so this is causing trouble in the school.

6:41 I know that there are, you know, real problems with housing still, that even though the top end of the market has collapsed, it’s just kind of put the squeeze more on people who are renting, on tenants. You know, the thing is that when you sort of commit your national wealth to being generated entirely through real estate in the southeast, then you have to figure out how to maximize the return on property, and one of the ways you maximize the return on property is by making it worse to be a tenant because then you make it better to be a landlord, and what that means is that the people who can’t afford the property, which becomes steadily more expensive, get a steadily worse deal, and so it’s kind of the worst of all worlds, and that continues to manifest itself.

7:27 The parents of adult kids that we know continue to really struggle with that, and with the idea that a thing as foundational as shelter has become an asset class to maximize instead of a thing to ensure everyone has. You know, I always think about what it would be like if the government committed itself to doubling the price of food in five years. We would all be aghast, but if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food is just one below shelter, and we do have successive governments who are very committed to doubling the price of housing every five years, and the fact that we can’t see that it’s a problem is one of the great British insanities that continues to grip this country and continues to be part of the dialogue about the post-Brexit Britain when we think about what is going to happen to this country.

8:15 And London is the extreme of that. Yeah, absolutely. But it’s not, you know, I know people who are struggling in Edinburgh, too. It’s not just London. I mean, every city to a certain extent has been gripped by this.

8:27 In part, there’s a lot of offshore wealth that’s been flooded into the market because we have this curious thing where we have a highly liquid property market, and property markets have historically been extremely illiquid. You know, that’s what you… You buy your house with the intention of selling it once, but there are people who buy luxury flats with the intention that they can sell it on five days’ notice if they need to get the hell out of South China or Tajikistan or whatever and take the money and run, and they’re able to do that because there’s someone else from some other quasi-failed state who also wants to get their money the hell out of their national border before the kleptocrats’ grand nephew takes over the national bank and nationalizes their assets.

9:11 And so that means that everywhere that there is property, there are people lining up to push the value of property up. And it’s funny, the only place that I’ve seen that’s a big, livable city where the property prices fell was Vancouver, and it fell after they imposed a very modest transaction tax that came with it a disclosure requirement to disclose the beneficial owner of property because it turns out that almost all of those people speculating on property were breaking their own country’s laws and doing so, and that as soon as you made them disclose their true identity, the market collapsed. And New York Times found this with a lot of those skyscrapers in Manhattan as well, like all those empty floors were…

9:52 Yeah, the Shard too, right? The Shard is owned entirely by transhuman life forms called corporations. I don’t think that there’s a lot of people there. Is London and Manhattan, are we becoming like these emerald cities where no real people live there? Are they like museums?

10:09 Are we going to turn into Venice, where you go to Venice and it’s this museum that no one lives in and at night no one’s there? Wow. I don’t know. I mean, London and New York both still have a lot of things that happen there, and so the crisis is actually in some ways worse, right? Because in Venice, there’s a hospitality industry and people come in and out for it, but here there’s a hell of a lot of people who need to clean toilets for bankers, and the more expensive London becomes, the worse their lives get, the longer their commute has to get.

10:40 There’s a scholarly piece published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society this week that looked at sleep patterns and travel patterns from Medellin and another Colombian city. I forget the other one, but because of the way that rail passes and transit passes and road metering works, they had a whole ton of travel data on everyone in these two big cities, and what they found was that poor people and rich people have the longest commutes, right, in terms of miles traveled, which kind of makes sense. But poor people’s commutes took the longest, substantially longer, and they left for work a lot earlier, and they came home from work a lot later, and that basically being rich doesn’t just mean that you get a bigger house and a bigger car and better food and your kids have a better life.

11:28 It means that you get more sleep, right, like in all of those things associated with sleep deprivation, you know, depression, weight gain, other forms of illness, cognitive impairment and so on are visited on people who have very long commutes. This is why when you move to LA, the first piece of advice anyone will give you if you’re moving to LA is choose a place that minimizes your commute, because your quality of life there is entirely determined by the length of your commute. Mine’s my garage, so it’s a very easy commute.

11:56 How is LA? Like, how are you finding that transition? What’s a pro and con of being in LA? So I don’t live in LA proper. I live in Burbank, which is part of LA County, and it’s close enough that I can get into town.

12:07 We go to the beach every couple of weeks. Without traffic, that’s a 35-minute, 40-minute drive. It’s like, you know, how many days have you got? Burbank is a weird little village in a big megalopolis. As I was saying to you before we started, Burbank was the center for Lockheed Martin, and it was also where all of the skilled trades people for the studios lived.

12:35 And so our neighborhood, you know, Burbank Boulevard has got the union halls for the sign painters and the plumbers and the electricians and the set builders, and so it’s like Maker Town USA. Like, it’s got the best DIY shops you could ever ask for, and it’s got, like, an automotive bookstore and an aviation bookstore, and it’s got two stores that sell gas-powered model plane accessories and two train stores and a die-cast store, three year-round Halloween stores. I mean, there’s only one little grocery store, but, you know, if you ever need a fright mask at 2 in the morning, you’ve come to the right neighborhood.

13:10 We have a two-mile long walkable retail strip, Magnolia Boulevard, that has no chain stores on it. Like, apart from a Bank of America, there’s not one national brand on this whole strip down the middle of our town, and it’s walkable. I have an Olympic pool that’s like a five-minute walk from my front door that’s run by the city. The city is like the town that neoliberalism forgot. It’s highly unionized because of the studios.

13:36 And then the city itself has done almost no public-private partnerships. And so when you need a city service, they send someone who works for the city out, and they come out quickly, and they do an amazing job because they’re responsible to the counselor and they’re responsible to you. And so our tree in our backyard hit the power line. Fifteen minutes later, a couple of guys from Burbank Power were there. They trimmed the tree, and they were like, we notice you’ve only got a little hatchback in the driveway.

14:01 You’re going to have a hard time hauling these branches away. And I said, yeah, yeah. And they said, well, why don’t we just chop them up? We’re not supposed to. We’ll chop them up and take them away in our truck because we got an extra 15 minutes.

14:09 Why not? It’d be a neighborly thing to do. And so apart from the fact that it’s mired in crazy American politics and crazy California politics and there’s a world-killing drought on and maybe in six weeks or two weeks, we’re going to elect a demagogue who says that if he doesn’t get elected, he’s going to burn the country down. And if he does get elected, he’s going to deport 16 million people. It’s great.

14:34 I mean, those are the pros and the cons. We got our green cards, which was tedious and awful and much harder than attaining permanent residence here, although it’s kind of an apples and oranges comparison because I married a British person to get permanent residence here and then became a citizen. And well, I didn’t marry her in order to do that. I married her in that. As a consequence of that, I was able to do it.

14:54 In the US, we had to transition to green cards. And we did it in the easiest way possible. I had an alien of extraordinary ability visa, which has a fast track to a green card. And even so, it took us just eight months to assemble the documents. And the bureaucracy was very frightening and hard to navigate in a way that it was much simpler here.

15:11 Interesting. And political-wise, I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but what’s it been like being there to watch all this happen? Of course, we haven’t really seen anything like this before. Just like your quick take on what you’ve seen and what might happen. Yeah.

15:27 I mean, it’s an interesting question. The real question, I think, is to what extent are people supporting Trump out of a tribal identity or out of the fact that they dislike Hillary, which is a position I’m not entirely unsympathetic with, although I probably dislike her for different reasons to them. But I’m not fond of her coziness to the finance industry, and I think she’s kind of a warmonger. But I don’t think that she’s literally the devil, as Alex Jones said recently.

15:55 But to what extent they’re supporting Trump for that? And to what extent? And so is it a plebiscite on Republican identity or anti-Hillary sentiment? Or are we having a plebiscite seemingly on white supremacy? And that’s a question that’s really hard to answer.

16:10 And to the extent that I’m able to look at it with fresh eyes, it’s because I have to explain it to an eight-year-old, our daughter. And for her, it’s a very easy set of decisions. So first of all, there’s the guy who doesn’t want to deport immigrants, or the guy who wants to deport immigrants, and she’s an immigrant. And he doesn’t like refugees, and my dad’s a refugee. Sorry, I shouldn’t have hit the microphone.

16:37 My dad’s a refugee, right? And he doesn’t like brown people, and she likes brown people. And so all of those make it really easy. And then Hillary’s a woman, and she’s a girl, and she really wants to see a woman be president. And so for her, it’s a relatively straightforward decision.

16:53 But then she’s like, why do Trump supporters support Trump? And that’s a tough one. The other interesting thing has been she keeps asserting confidently that Hillary is going to win because no one she knows supports Trump. And I have to keep explaining self-sorting and homophily, which is where people who are similar tend to hang out with one another, and selection bias. It’s kind of been a good way to talk about statistical literacy.

17:22 But she remains very convinced that she has an accurate sample of America in her middle-class Burbank public school, state school, which I think when she gets older, it will be really interesting to discuss that with her because I think it’s making quite an impression on her. And when we look back in five years, will we be able to explain the Trump phenomenon? Will we be able to point and say, the nation was feeling this, and they panicked, and they did this?

17:49 I don’t believe that America is a nation of white supremacists and all these other things, but maybe I am hanging out with the wrong people. I don’t know. Well, maybe we’ll take a break from digging through the rubble with our long poles looking for canned goods to speculate on the causes of the downfall. Couldn’t be that bad, huh? Yeah, I don’t know.

18:10 I mean, I think that Trumpism is pretty clearly, but in a way that’s difficult to articulate, connected to instability in lots of places. And I had a really interesting discussion about what has, in this election, we’ve started to call the Overton Window, it’s sold political science term, of those things that are legitimate to talk about in politics. Brexit obviously was not within the Overton Window, and then it was, and now, you know, anti-migrant sentiment has moved into the Overton Window.

18:43 But also, like so too, has some, you know, being pro-gay marriage and lots of other things have moved in and out of the Overton Window. And I met this woman who was an activist from the Middle East. She’d been number one on Gaddafi’s kill list. She lives in Canada now. And we were talking about the Arab Spring and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who are, you know, a reactionary party of people whose political ideals are lacking in many ways, but who are also legitimately elected by a significant majority and also deposed through an act of lawless military coup.

19:20 And I said, like, when I look at what happened in Egypt, the only explanation I can find for that vote for the Muslim Brotherhood is that for a long time, the Overton Window in Egypt did not include the extremely obvious fact that their crappy dictator got tons of money and guns from America because he was friendly to Israel. Even though that was completely obvious to everybody on the ground and everywhere else in the entire world, the official party line of all the mainstream political parties was, we support Mubarak because he’s amazing at his job, even though he was manifestly terrible at his job. And that, if the only people who say a thing that everyone knows is true and is moreover central to every fact of your life and especially all the things that makes your life hard is this one fringe group.

20:19 It’s a bit like Douglas Adams with the towel for hitchhikers. If you’ve got a towel, they assume that you’ve got everything else, that you’ve got a toothbrush and a change of underwear and so on. If you’ve got the one belief everyone knows is true, it gives all of your other beliefs credibility. And I think that if you look at the populist movements that nevertheless had lots of things that were lacking in them, that were triumphant or are on track to become triumphant, Brexit being one of them, but also the right-wing movements in Greece and Spain, that they do say some things that are true that no one in the mainstream in politics says.

20:55 So Trump says elections or politics are governed by money and that the fact that politicians need to spend, in the US Congress, four hours out of every eight they spend on the job, calling millionaires, asking them for more money, influences the kinds of policies that they make. That is so obviously totally true. And the fact that no one else in the mainstream apart from Sanders, who not coincidentally gained a lot of support and nearly took the nomination, is willing to say it, probably accounts for a certain amount of his credibility.

21:26 And the fact that for all the EU’s many beneficial elements, it’s also a thing that imposes austerity and is often a creature of the finance industry and has lots of other areas in which it’s deficient, like the way that it negotiated ACTA and TTIP. That fact is not a thing that Labour talks about, it’s not a thing that Lib Dems talk about, and it’s not a thing that the Tories talk about, but it was a thing that Farage talked about. And all of the other things he said about migrants were just wrong, like you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

22:04 And his facts were wrong, the numbers of people, what they do to the economy, how they affect our benefits and how they affect our services, they were just factually wrong. But he said one thing that was factually right, that was really salient to the daily lives of Britons and that everyone else denied, and I think it gave him some credibility. And I think we have these undeniable contradictions in our world today that have a lot to do with income inequality, with the primacy of finance, with the cult of fiduciary duty that says that if you can make a million and one pounds polluting and get fined a million pounds for having done it, you have a duty to your shareholders to do it so that you can disperse the one surplus pound to them.

22:40 You know, all of these things I think are contradictions that are intrinsically destabilizing. You know, the concentration of political power in the hands of petro companies that are able to deny climate change, these things are salient and they’re not going anywhere and they’re headed for rupture. And one of the things that all of these populist movements have in common, the ones I support and the ones I oppose, is that they have at least one thing that they talk about that’s outside of the realm of our normal political discourse and that everyone can see at a glance has to be true.

23:12 And then all the other things they say take on credibility. And I think that in five years when we look back on Trumpism, we will be mired in more of these weird manifestations. You know, like, so California, you asked me what California is like. California’s got this weird direct democracy thing where they can, if you have enough people who nominate a political issue to be on a ballot, then in the elections, the whole populace votes up or down on these ballot initiatives that take on the force of law and can’t be repealed without a countervailing ballot initiative.

23:47 And in California, there have been a bunch of ballot initiatives. There’s ballot initiatives that limit how much the state can tax and also how much it can borrow and require it to spend a certain amount on education, roads, and so on. And the numbers don’t add up, right? They are required by law to spend more than they can take in or borrow. And having been trapped in this contradiction, they take all of the things that are not mandatory, that are discretionary, and treat them in the most completely bizarre way possible to try and shore up this untenable system so parking tickets in LA are crazily high because it’s one of the few things where the government can levy a fine without having to have a plebiscite on whether or not the fine can pass muster and when you are required to spend a certain amount of money every month and you’re also required not to take in that amount of money every month or borrow it, you have to find it somewhere.

24:41 Every loan shark has figured out that if you break someone’s knees, they’ll find you the money, right? We have figured out a way to find the money in LA and it’s crazy parking tickets where we have these contradictions in our society that are like urgent and salient and cannot be resolved in our normal political discourse. Abnormal things will happen and all of those contradictions are only going to get more urgent over the next five years and they’re interrelated, right?

25:07 Why do we have climate denial? Well, because power is concentrated in the form of money in a few hands of people who benefit from climate denial and the costs of climate denial are diffused among many people and so as a political force, the concentrated wealth of climate denial can outspend the diffused costs of climate change in the hands of the many and so we will always have crazy climate policy until those facts change. Why does the European Union, when it created its privacy directive, why did they create this category of data called de-identified data that is basically you have to treat data in the European Union with an enormous amount of care unless you de-identify it so that the people in the data set allegedly can’t be identified which is a thing every computer scientist who doesn’t work for a surveillance company thinks is totally impossible but they created this category and they said effectively take industry best steps to de-identify your data and you can treat it as though it has nothing compromising in it fold it, spindle it, mutilate it, sell it on, violate your terms of service, treat it as though it has no salience to the lives of the people from whom it was collected.

26:14 Well, the reason is that the costs of privacy breaches are widely born and diffused and they’re small in the individual case, sometimes they’re big, that people in London last year were stealing houses by forging duplicate deeds using information from privacy breaches and then going to Foxton’s who, you know, are exactly the go-to. Yeah, down in Hyde Park. If you wanted to pick one sharp-dealing estate agent, it would definitely be Foxton’s so they went to Foxton’s and they said I’m the rightful owner of this house, I happen to be Iranian and I will be leaving for Iran as soon as you can sell it for 2 million pounds cash and hand it to me in a sack, which they proceeded to do and this person bugged off to parts unknown, probably Iran and the person who owned the house found themselves not in possession of it anymore.

27:02 So sometimes the costs are high but usually they’re low, usually it’s the nuisance cost of calling up and changing credit card or maybe the higher nuisance cost of being stalked by creeps. But the benefits are hugely concentrated, right, into these billion dollar empires. We’ll never get good policy. So five years from now, if we’re not digging through the rubble, we will be shaking our heads and going what are we going to do about these irreconcilable contradictions that have manifested themselves and that with our political system having concentrated benefits in the hands of the people who benefit from us not acknowledging these contradictions won’t allow us to talk about it.

27:41 We will be having more weird politics. In a way, it’s good that Trump is actually getting us to talk about this, can’t be my answer. Yeah, maybe, if he is. But the problem is that he just said that and then immediately went on to say but the real issue isn’t just that. It’s brown people and women and people who you fear and hate and the lack of beautiful walls.

28:09 Right. And so what you do pretty much across the board is kind of point out these discrepancies, like you just described to me now in the last five minutes, of policy, perception, economics, and then all the twisted ways they distribute it out, right, and all the massive injustices that happen on the tail end, sometimes 10 years later, 20 years later. Is that a good summary of what you do? I think that’s not bad, yeah. I feel like we, on the best days, I feel like we inhabit a moment of peak indifference where although most people don’t know about these issues well enough to care about them, the number of people who care about them only goes up from here.

28:49 And so to use a very Canadian metaphor, I want to skate to where the puck is going to be, right? So I feel like our major risk here is nihilism, that like, as with climate, it’s getting to a point now where there are people who are saying, well, the climate’s going to change no matter what. We’ve already put all the carbon into the atmosphere. You know, we might as well eat the last pandas while they’re still around because someone’s going to eat them and, you know, get a boat, right, as opposed to like doing something.

29:18 So they’re just acquiescing. Yeah, it’s nihilism, right? Nihilism, if you’re British. What’s the point in worrying about it? What’s the point in…

29:26 Yeah, if it’s a foregone conclusion. And so I feel like all of these contradictions do have solutions, right? Like they are tractable. And moreover, that they can only be solved through collective action, right? Like we’re not going to…

29:40 No one’s going to solve climate change by recycling, right? We’re going to solve climate change by coming up with big globe-spanning accords that have us all working in cooperation. I mean, we’re not going to get renewables that work unless we can forge deals between the places where the tides are high and the sun shines and the places where they aren’t. And given that we only have one atmosphere between all of those countries, whether or not the sun shines there, whether or not the tides are high, we do have to have those agreements because if we leave out the places where the sun isn’t shining and where the tide isn’t high, then they will pollute the rest of us to death.

30:16 And so we are going to have to figure out a deal and we can do it, right? We’ve done big projects before. We solved ozone depletion. We can handle challenges like this. A great British science writer, Oliver Morton, wrote a great book last year on the pluses and minuses of geoengineering and where it’s going to go and how we could do small-scale geoengineering that wouldn’t destroy the planet if we got it wrong and how that’s going to require global cooperation.

30:43 And I think he’s right. I think that like that’s our future. And we can get there if we all work towards it, but we can only all work towards it if we don’t all believe that it’s a foregone conclusion that everything is going to melt, and therefore we might as well just not even try. Might as well enjoy ourselves while we can. How do you get people’s attention when it comes to that?

31:04 How do you snap them out of that nihilism? Well, fiction is a useful tool for it. Did you stumble on the use of fiction, or did you always know by reading fiction how powerful it could be? I mean, science fiction in particular, like Heinlein said, the three modes of science fiction are what if, if only, and if this goes on. And you have Orwell and you have Shelley right from the earliest days of the genre when it was trying to figure out what it was about.

31:33 You have writers who are trying to do something explanatory or to make a warning or to inspire. And there’s this story science fiction readers and writers sometimes tell themselves that science fiction is a predictive literature, which I think is just manifestly wrong. I think that science fiction writers, they’re like Texas marksmen. They fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the pellets have hit, tell everyone what a great shot they were.

31:59 Science fiction makes a lot of predictions, and most of them don’t come true. It would be amazing if you made that many predictions if some of them didn’t come true, though. But prediction’s not a hugely interesting thing to be in the game of because it implies that the future is unmalleable, that it’s fixed. If you can predict the future, you can’t change the future. And science fiction’s greatest job and greatest trick over the years has been to influence the future, to inspire futures or to warn people about futures.

32:27 You know, Gene Roddenberry didn’t predict that Motorola’s engineers would design flip phones that looked like Star Trek communicators. That would be pretty boring. What’s super exciting is he turned a whole generation of telecoms and hardware engineers into ravening Star Trek fans who wanted to do everything they could to build Star Trek communicators. That’s way cooler than predicting it. Predicting it’s fortune telling, right?

32:49 Inspiring is way more interesting. Which is what he did. Which is, yeah, what he did. And so, you know, the thing that fiction can do is it can provide a kind of emotional fly-through of technological change or of a social change. So, you know, writers aren’t making accurate models of the world as they will be in the future.

33:15 It’s more like a diagnostic exercise. Like when you go to the doctor with a sore throat, she takes a swab off the back of it, she rubs it in a petri dish and leaves it for the weekend, and she comes and she looks at it under a microscope on Monday and can tell you something important about what’s going on inside of you. But she isn’t doing that because the petri dish reflects accurately how your body works. It’s because it’s inaccurate in a really useful way.

33:36 One salient fact about your body is the whole world in the petri dish. And what a science fiction writer can do is pluck a single technology or social factor out of the world and spin up a world in a bottle where that one fact becomes the overwhelming fact. In the old days, writers like Harry Harrison used to write novels like Waterworld and Techworld and, you know, Spaceshipworld where it’s just like one thing would be there, right? Writers take this one thing, they expand it to take over the whole world to give you a sense of what that world might feel like, to give you a way of interrogating how that technology or that social change might affect all the different pieces in your life.

34:17 So imagine it was like 47 and the peace dividend was on us, the war was over, we don’t have to spend money on, you know, bombing things or figuring out how to dig out rubble anymore, and we’re trying to figure out what to do. And someone comes along and says, I have this amazing idea. We have these new TV cameras that we developed in the war, we have new screens and wireless technologies we developed in the war. We’ll put a camera in every sitting room, in every corridor, on every corner, and we’ll be like men as gods.

34:43 We will see everything. No sin will go undetected and therefore unpunished. You know, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, God’s eye is on the sparrow. Our eye will be on the sparrow. We will be divine in our ability to see all that happens in the world, right?

34:57 At the time, all the arguments about why you would want to do that are pretty abstract. Like, it would feel creepy. I can’t really tell you why, but that feels wrong to me. But then, later in 47, a guy named Eric Blair, writing under his pen name George Orwell, publishes a book called 1984. And like a year after that, we could explain why that was wrong.

35:19 We could say it would be Orwellian, right? He gave you the kind of blood and sinew in the argument that’s missing when you’re talking about it in the pure abstract. And that’s an amazing thing to have done. It persisted all the way to the Blair years where, you know, for some reason we decided that 1984 was a manual for statecraft. But up until then, it did a really good job of helping us discuss this.

35:40 Yeah, I mean, you know, the pilot episode of Yes Minister, or a second episode, season one, episode two, is called the Big Brother episode. And it’s about a plan to build a database of all of the personally identifying information and potentially compromising facts of everyone in Britain and how this minister can’t possibly defend it because it’d be so ripe for abuse. And in the end, the plan collapses, right? And so this was Yes Minister, right? This was like really early on.

36:11 We were using Orwell to talk about how that technological change might happen. That’s what we can do to get people to care. It’s the thing I can do. It’s the one thing I know how to do to get people to care. Right.

36:22 And so you saw that when you read a book like that. I guess it’s because we understand narratives so well as humans, like those click in our brains. And so when he tells us this story and we imagine this world, all of a sudden, like you said, it’s Orwellian, whereas you can explain it ad nauseam without a story behind it and we can’t connect with it. Without a person behind it. I mean, when you think about fiction, fiction’s weird anyway because it’s, by definition, it’s inconsequential, right?

36:48 Nothing that happens to fictional characters matter because they’re not real people. So like the most tragic death in literature, Romeo and Juliet, was less tragic than the yogurt you ate with your breakfast because that was alive and now it’s dead. And Romeo and Juliet were never alive and so they never died, right? And yet we have this like super limbic response when we read, like we cry, right? And we laugh and our heart pounds, this like autonomic response when we consume fiction.

37:17 And it’s a mystery when you think about it that way. And my theory about it is that the way we experience other people is by trying to model them in our minds, right? Like, you know, if you ask yourself, what would my mom think of what I’m doing now? You’re interrogating a kind of model that you built up of her. And this modeling happens continuously without any conscious intervention, very naively, right?

37:41 If you go to school and someone says, if you met the new kid, she’s weird, you’ve already got a stick figure with a sign hanging over it that says new kid and then parentheses weird. Even though you’ve never met the person, the person might not even exist, right? We have models of people who are dead, we have models of people who will never meet, and our subconscious builds that model when we’re reading. And we experience empathy with other people through those models.

38:07 When something bad happens to someone you love, if you get a phone call and your dad says, your cousin Fred fell down the stairs and broke his leg, the feeling you get of empathic sympathy for him is because you’re imagining your model of Fred in pain, and you can see how much that hurts him, and so you can feel it too. Ironically, I think the same thing happens in reverse for writers. When you start writing, it’s like you’re doing a puppet show for yourself, like, hey kids, let’s go on a quest, that sounds great, right?

38:39 And as you work, I think that this model in the back of your mind, it’s just building up this dossier on your characters, because it doesn’t know that you’re making them up. All it knows is that there’s information appearing in front of your eyes, the words you’re typing, about these people. And so writers sometimes say this in a very precious way, like, I tried to make my characters go this way, and they all wanted to go that way. What they mean is that they went from that easy flow of imagining what the characters would do and then having the fine details taken care of them for them by this modeling system in their mind, back to that very awkward thing of having to, in a very premeditated way, try and predict what their characters are going to do.

39:20 So we give people empathy in stories for imaginary people who are in imaginary situations, but it helps them think about how they themselves might experience real ones. And you as a writer, you’ve become the same way. Sure. They start as puppets, but they end up as people you really care about. Yeah, and this is why the whole debate about fanfic, I think, is so mistaken.

39:46 So fanfiction, fans will write their own stories about writers’ characters. And the writers say, but those are my characters. You can’t write stories about them. You’re putting them into situations that are wrong. They feel wrong to me.

39:58 They feel wrong to me because I know what those characters would do. Which is to say that when I transmitted this model from my head to your head, it arrived in a slightly different state so that they’re not in sync anymore. But the reason you want to write fanfic after you’ve finished my book is the same reason you can imagine what your mom would do even when she’s not in the room, because the characters are alive in your head. A writer whose audience doesn’t have the characters alive in their head is a writer whose audience didn’t enjoy the book, didn’t have the aesthetic experience of caring about imaginary and consequential people in a way that felt consequential and real.

40:36 And so that’s how we get to good literature. That’s where the aesthetic experience of literature springs from. And the insistence of writers that readers not assert that they know what the characters would do better than the writers is really contrary to the business of trying to get people to give a shit about your characters. They should take the compliment. Yeah, it just means it worked, right?

40:59 I had the author, Ervin Welsh, in here, and he said that he actually constructs playlists for his characters, like audio playlists, and he listens to them when he wants to get in their headspace and stuff. That’s really cool. Do you go that far? No, you know, so I started selling novels really in earnest while I was doing a startup and then while I was being European director of a non-governmental organization, and I was traveling really hard, like 27 days a month, and I stopped plugging in my fridge.

41:27 I was traveling so much. And so I had to be able to write whenever there was a moment, like literally on the escalator running up from the tube, whatever. I would try and write a page a day, which is a novel a year, 250 words a day, and in order to be able to just sit down, put my fingers on my keyboard and start writing whenever there was a moment, I had to really flence myself of any kind of ceremony. I just made having the right music or back when I was a smoker, having a cigarette or having my first cup of coffee or having to be at a certain time, I made all those things optional.

41:59 And if I found myself associating a habit with writing, I tried deliberately not to make the two associated so that writing was its own thing. Writing is the thing that I do. And, you know, writing when you’re inspired is great, but you’re not going to be inspired most of the time. And I think that it’s natural that writers want to be inspired writers because when you start writing, it’s almost always because you’re inspired, right? You have an idea for a story and you start writing, and it feels great.

42:28 I mean, being good at something is just not noticing that you’re practicing because it feels good, right? No one’s got talent, right? Talent is just not realizing that you practiced. And so, you know, that feels great, and that’s how you get to the point where you’re like, oh, I really want to write. But at that point, if all you do to make yourself whole and sane and employed and keep a roof over your head and feed your family is work when you’re inspired, you are going to be miserable and desperate, right?

42:57 Because one thing about inspiration is it rarely strikes when you’re unhappy. And one of the things that makes people really unhappy is feeling uninspired. That doesn’t end well, right? And so, you have to figure out how to write when you’re not inspired. And one of the ways that I got there was this key realization that when I looked back on my work, I knew that there are days when I’d written when I felt really good, like angels were directing me.

43:19 And then there were days when I felt like the words were being pulled out of my fingertips with fish hooks, and they were just terrible. Each word dumber than the last. But six months on, I couldn’t tell the difference. Right. So you read it, and you couldn’t tell which chapter you wrote.

43:31 It was endocrinological, right? This reflected my stress levels, my sleep levels, and my caffeine levels, and my blood sugar levels, but not the words. So realizing that in the moment I was unqualified to judge the quality of the words that I was writing was what kind of gave me leave to be able to write whenever it happened. And you know, dustmen and surgeons have days when they don’t feel like doing their jobs. But no one’s ever said, I’m sorry, sir, your gallbladder is staying in.

43:56 I’ve got surgeon’s block, right? Every professional figures out how to work with an inspiration. And those really hard professions, like being a surgeon and going to uni for eight years, that’s a thing that you only start because you’re passionate about it and inspired. And so they have to figure this out, too. And it’s really just in the arts where no one’s really confronted the possibility that a lack of inspiration is no excuse for not doing your job.

44:21 Yeah, Steven Pressfield has two books, one called The War of Art, one called Turning Pro, where it’s just like, do the work. Yeah. And all the great artists that we know, the great art that we know, probably came because they did the work, not because they were inspired that day. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I won’t say that all work only comes from people who work regardless of inspiration.

44:42 There’s definitely some good inspired books out there. I just don’t think that there are any happy artists who only work when they’re inspired. I think that those people are miserable and desperate and worried that they can’t figure out how to lure them use back into the room before the landlord comes and chucks them out of their house. You are very prolific when it comes to writing. Mm-hmm.

45:00 And it’s probably the reason that you’re so successful. It’s probably the reason you speak well, I’m guessing, just because all of that writing, this 250 words per day, I just want to make sure everyone understands, you write those 250 a day, you’ll stop mid-sentence. Yep. Will you write them on a phone? Will you write them any way you can?

45:16 Usually on my laptop. Writing on a phone is a thing I struggle with, only because I’m a very good typist. My dad was a computer science teacher. We had like a terminal in the house in 1977 and I never really learned to write cursively and I learned to type really early. Did you take a typing class?

45:32 No. On a 75-word-a-minute self-taught typist. I saw you typing out on the stoop hour. Oh, yeah. So this is true. Cory really does.

45:39 We have five minutes. You were jamming away. I don’t know if you were vlogging or something. No, I was writing a column for MIT Tech Review, a feature for MIT Tech Review. Okay.

45:47 Yeah. So you really do write and you put in those 250 words and again, for people that want to know, that’s a novel a year. Yeah. My page a day is about a novel a year. Which adds up.

45:56 Yeah, and it’s not always 250 words, sometimes it’s longer. I wrote Homeland, the Sequel to Little Brother, 2000 words a day and I wrote most of it while touring Germany with my novel For the Win. And the way that that worked, I was doing two cities a day. So I got on a train in the morning, go to a school, go to a bookstore, get on a train, go to a school, go to a different bookstore, wake up in the morning, do it again. And I traveled with my German translator and he would read for half an hour in German, I’d read for half an hour in English.

46:22 And while he was reading in German, I had nothing to do on the stage, so I wrote Homeland. And, you know, no one minded, right? Like, at first I was like, are they going to think this is weird? But inevitably, some kid would say, you know, hey, Dr. Professor, Dr. O, what are you writing on the stage?

46:36 And I would say, oh, I’m writing the Sequel to Little Brother and they go, oh, it’s so cool. You know, so it was great, right? So you type on stage while you’re speaking in German. Yeah, because, I mean, I speak enough German to like order a beer or tap water. I grew up speaking Yiddish, so I can speak horrible Germanic sounds that almost turn into German words.

46:54 And so I kind of understand, but not well enough, that it distracts me and I would just right, you know, while I was going. And that was, you know, that was hard work, but it was also good. If there was an Olympic board fidgeting event, I would probably take home the gold for Canada, so it also gave me something to do for half an hour on stage while someone was reading a thing I’d already heard 16 times in a language I didn’t speak. And so how many days did it take you to write a homeland then?

47:22 It was a couple of months. A couple of months, okay. How important is it for people to publish? I mean, you’re what I would call a key person of influence. You have a lot of published works.

47:31 You must meet people sometimes that have great messages, but no one ever hears about them because they don’t publish. How much of it goes hand in hand? Yeah, if you could just tell me. Well, you know, it’s interesting. I think when people think publish, they think print, that they’re the same thing.

47:46 And as many people who fall in for self-publishing scams know, having a garage full of books with your name on them is not the same as being published. The root of publish is making things public. My editor at Tor Books at Macmillan, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, told me this. And making a work public is the act of identifying a work and identifying the audience for that work and taking whatever steps are required to make the work palatable for the audience and put it in front of them.

48:15 And so by that definition, for example, Google is one of the world’s most prolific publishers, because they take all of these works and all of these audiences and connect them together, onesy-twosy, right? Yeah. Like, you know, one reader, one writer. They’ll be helping people watch this episode in the same way with YouTube. There you go, yeah.

48:30 Yeah, and so I think that, like, if you have the thing that defines whether or not you’ve been published, as opposed to whether or not you are working as an author, right? Whether or not you’ve been published is whether or not the audience for your work and the work have been connected. They’re not necessarily the same thing. Not everyone who wants to do one wants to do the other. And there are many people who are way more interested in the audience and the work connecting.

49:01 You know, an example would be people who write religious tracts, right, are way more interested in making sure that everyone reads their religious tract than they are in making sure that they’re getting paid every time someone reads their religious tract. And so for them, publishing involves a lot of fairly improbable low success rate activities, like leaving piles of them in bus stations. And, you know, one of the things the Internet has done is actually improved the reach of that.

49:27 I mean, you know, this is a lens through which to see the rise of weird extremist movements, too. I mean, people have struggled to find audiences for neo-fascist works. And now audiences and those works migrate towards each other, too, using all the same tools and systems that allow other works to migrate towards each other. It’s a weird world, but I think that, like, when you take this much broader vision of what it means to be published, then it gives you a means by which to pursue that.

50:02 So if you have a group of people who you think should be reading your ideas, there are many more ways to reach them and more efficient ways to reach them necessarily than publishing a book about it. Okay, but yet you still choose to do that every year. Yeah, I mean, I consider what I do to be both publishing and art. I consider myself a working artist. Writing fiction is one of our art forms.

50:27 Then it passes that threshold by a number of tests, but one is that it’s like this foundationally non-market activity. Like, more people do it than could ever conceivably get paid and there’s no economic rationale for doing it. It’s that likelihood of making money from writing is so infinitesimal, like all the people who try versus all the people who succeed, that the only way we could have an industry is if it were like a non-market activity, because the head rate’s too low.

50:55 That’s a good definition of art. Yeah, it’s like… People do it not for commercial gain as a majority. Yeah, or no, not with a rational expectation of commercial gain. Okay, yeah.

51:05 Right? And so, like, I think that, you know, so I’ve done some work for Disney Imagineering, and if you want to distinguish the art from the craft of theme park design and you go and you look at a Disney theme park, there’s stuff that if you look in the edges and the corners are just there because the people who made them felt that everything would be better. Not that there’s like a dollar in revenue that could be attributed to them, but it would be a better theme park if we add this flourish, if we just got this detail right, if we make this great in this way.

51:39 And that’s the art part of a theme park as opposed to the craft, which is just making sure the characters are all on model and that the architecture is well-designed and doesn’t blow over in a hurricane. Right? That’s just technical stuff, but the art is the stuff they do that no one’s going to ever pay an extra dollar to Disney for, but they do it anyway because the people who are making it feel like they are artists, and this is where they derive their satisfaction.

52:06 They wouldn’t do it if they couldn’t do that. And so, yeah, I think of myself as a working artist, and I work in a medium, and that medium is relatively accessible. It’s not as accessible as like movies. Movies teach you how to watch them. The first time you watched a movie, you knew how to watch a movie.

52:21 You had to go to school for like between two and five years to learn how to read a book. So it’s kind of an abstract art form, but it’s pretty widely enjoyed. It has a low technology threshold. You know, the codex, the paper-bound book, is a thing that we can produce relatively easily and distribute relatively easily, and we don’t need a lot of technology to play back. It has lots of advantages, and it’s very old.

52:47 So it has a very rich tradition that goes back a long time, longer than printing. You know, we’ve had books and novels for longer than printing. And so that’s pretty cool, too. And so that’s your art. That’s the art form I practice.

53:01 That’s the art form. You’re the co-editor of the blog, Boing Boing. Yeah. How does it feel? What is the difference between blogging and publishing a book?

53:11 Well, so blogging is… I think of it as keeping a commonplace book or a notebook where I impose on myself the rigor of communicating to third parties, which makes the notebook better for me. So every time I see something that niggles at me and feels like it’s a piece of something larger, I try to write down the part of it I found interesting in a way that communicates that to an unknown third party. And unlike making a scroll and a notebook for yourself where you can cheat and you’ll go back later and you’ll be like, what did I mean by that?

53:49 If you have to make it public, if you have to show your workings, then you approach it with a kind of rigor that helps you recall it later and also helps you identify for yourself very quickly what it is that’s important about something that has snagged your attention. It makes you better at interrogating things that might be synthesized later into something bigger by teasing out the significant elements at a very high rate of speed. And so I feel like it turns my subconscious into this kind of super saturated solution of fragmentary ideas.

54:27 And every now and again, two of them will knock together and nucleate and crystallize into something that’s bigger and better than just those fragments. That’s a speech or a short story or a novel or an essay. And this is like my raw material. So I don’t tend to do prospective research. I tend to do retrospective research.

54:52 So rather than having an idea and then researching it, I research everything that seems interesting, which gives me ideas. And that also lets me work very quickly. Every now and again, I’ll run up against a fact that I don’t know the length of a tower bridge or something. But for the most part, I know all the things that are going into a book because I’ve been researching it without knowing it. And when I get to the length of the tower bridge, I just type along and then I type TK feet.

55:23 TK is old journalist shorthand for to come. TK instead of TC because TK doesn’t occur in a lot of English words except for Atkins. And so you can search a document for TK and find all the instances pretty quickly. So I just type TK feet and keep going. And that lets me stay in the zone and just keep working until my words are done.

55:44 And that’s like a very powerful way to work. And so you get those blogs done as soon as possible. You have a realization. You try to get it down. But it’s not like you’re scribbling a notebook where you don’t have to later come back and kind of justify it.

55:58 Decipher it. And someone’s going to read it. You’re like, okay, I have to make my point. I have to be coherent. And this has to be relatively intelligent because I’m putting my name on it.

56:06 So that helps you with your own discipline. Well, I mean, I think that that’s true in lots of cases. Doing something for someone else makes you approach it with a rigor that doing it for yourself, you take shortcuts. I mean, think about like you and your spouse probably trade off like dinner cooking at home when you eat at home. And it probably gets kind of into a rut.

56:25 And there’s three or four things each of you make. And then you stick them on the table. You tear off kitchen roll for napkins. And you throw the cutlery down. And then you have a friend over for dinner.

56:35 And all of a sudden, you get out a cookbook. And you fold the kitchen roll into triangles. And you actually like maybe put a candle on the table. And then when you eat that dinner, it’s not just better for your guests. It’s better for you.

56:50 You’re like, this is a better dinner. I spent one extra minute on dinner tonight. And I had a better dinner than I’ve had all week. Making your work public is really powerful. You know, it’s what gave us the Enlightenment, right?

57:03 Before the Enlightenment, we had alchemy. It’s a lot like the Enlightenment, except you don’t tell other people what you thought you’ve learned. And so you take shortcuts. And you kid yourself that they don’t matter. This is how alchemists learn for themselves they shouldn’t drink mercury, right?

57:15 And why none of them learned it from any of the other ones because they wouldn’t tell each other, right? And when they started publishing, they started telling each other what they thought they knew and subjecting themselves to adversarial peer review where your enemies call you an idiot for having made mistakes that your friends have gently pointed out to you. That’s when, like, the base medal of alchemy was transformed into the precious medal of science, right?

57:37 That’s the Enlightenment. So, yeah, exposing your workings, it’s a powerful thing to do. I was just thinking of martial arts. Like, so until the UFC came around 20 years ago, everyone had their own martial arts style, but it was a bit like alchemy. Right.

57:51 Because, like, my Taekwondo guy will always win. And they were in these little pockets. Yeah. They weren’t peer reviewed and they weren’t tested. UFC comes along and says, let’s put everybody in a cage and we’ll see what happens.

58:00 And all of a sudden, everything started getting exposed. Hybrid vigor. People also started learning at massive rates and adopting, and now we have probably the best fighters ever in the history of man because of, yeah, publicity. Yeah, because of cross-fertilization, because of hybridization, because, I mean, it’s the same reason. I’m just reading Tim Harford, who’s a London economist.

58:23 I think he lives in Oxford now. But a British economist writes on the FT. He’s got a new book out called Messy, and I’ve just been reading it here. And the opening chapters, one of them is about team building and team performance. And the data on team performance is pretty strong on the idea that heterogeneous teams of people who have very different points of view are performed better than very homogenous teams.

58:49 And that’s because, like, the easy way to understand that is when you get to a problem that if you all have the same point of view, then when you get to a problem that that point of view can’t handle, all of you are stopped in your tracks. But if you have different points of view, then it’s unlikely that you’ll all fail at the same point. So each of you will push the group forward in ways that all of you together couldn’t if you had the same point of view.

59:10 And the thing is that hanging out with people you like who have the same point of view as you is more fun than hanging out with people you don’t like who have really different points of view to you. But it’s less effective. And it’s kind of a paradox. You know, I’m not a martial artist by any stretch, but I’ve done a little training in one or two. And they’re different, right?

59:32 And people like the reason there’s more than one of them is because people have different needs. And they have different learning styles and different things they’re looking for. Cultures, yeah. Cultures, yeah. Different physiological limitations, right?

59:44 And so they do this instead of that. You know, Tai Chi is not Taekwondo, right? You practice them for really different reasons, right? And yet, as you see, when you get everyone together, you get better martial arts for everyone. But the subjective experience might not be the same, right?

1:00:04 And so it’s this weird paradox. The study that Harford cites is of the very faddish California investor clubs that sprang up during the stock bubble of the 90s. And so they were stock picking clubs. And there were two kinds. There were workplace kinds that were very heterogeneous.

1:00:22 And then there were friend kinds that were very homogenous. And the interesting thing about stock clubs is they have a really empirical measure, right? How did their shares do? And the heterogeneous ones pick better shares. And they pick better shares in part because they didn’t mind arguing with each other, right?

1:00:38 Friends don’t want to call each other idiots for having dumb ideas about shares. So, ah, we’ll go along with Bob. He’s got a thin skin, and he got in trouble at work this week. We don’t want to give him a hard time. And, you know, Bob has picked pets.com to push all the money into, and then you’re all broke, right?

1:00:57 That’s a weird point. Yeah. Speaking of meals, is it true you make a four-course breakfast every morning for your daughter and wife when you’re at home? I used to. You know, since we went to California, that’s really changed, in part because the food that we eat has really changed.

1:01:10 We have a lot more fresh produce. So breakfast is a lot easier to make. It’s a collection and not a cooking process. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

1:01:18 Yeah, much more so. And we tend to rotate the duties more. At the time, my wife had a much longer commute than I did. She still does, but hers is now 10 minutes, and mine is one minute. But it’s, you know, we don’t, neither of us have a very long commute.

1:01:31 She was coming from here in Hackney to White City at the BBC. And so I was getting up early to cook because she had to get up early to get ready and get the heck out the door. And now we tend to rotate the duties more. And she tends to work later, and so I’m more likely to do the evening stuff and then I’ll do the morning stuff. But yeah, I used to.

1:01:51 I used to really do that more. Also, our daughter was a lot smaller then and couldn’t help as much. And so it was like we had, there were more things to do, not just helping with food, but like getting her teeth brushed and getting her dressed and all the rest of the stuff you do in the morning. We had to block out a lot more time in the morning to wrangle a kid. And now she’s at the age where she is semi-self-wrangling.

1:02:14 And so that has really changed the breakfast calculus as well. Talk to me about MIT and the Media Lab. You have a role there now. I was telling you, when I graduated in 93, I don’t think there was a Media Lab or it was maybe brand new. It was brand new if it existed, yeah.

1:02:31 Also, the internet didn’t really exist when I graduated and an email was just starting to get used. Right. It’s weird to think of MIT without the internet as in like, you know, but in a weird way, it’s also not weird because there’s so much pure science there. What’s it like to be associated with the Media Lab and what’s your role there? Yeah, I have this really interesting role and the Media Lab is not the Media Lab that it was under Nicholas Negroponte, its inaugural director.

1:02:54 Its new director, Joey Ito, is a very old friend of mine and Joey is a polymath and also autodidact. He doesn’t have an undergraduate degree. I don’t know if he ever finished high school. And as someone who spent seven years in a four-year high school and then dropped out of four undergraduate programs without getting a degree, I feel really empathic with Joey. I feel like we’re on the same path here.

1:03:18 And he, you know, he’s like an entrepreneur. He started the first major ISP in Japan. He is kind of a cultural gadfly. He was Timothy Leary’s godside and arranged to have Leary’s ashes shot into space. Successfully?

1:03:32 Yeah, yeah. He was an early investor in LinkedIn and in Six to Start, which did movable type and a bunch of other early success stories. And he’s politically pretty radical. He was Creative Commons’ international director. And when he arrived at the Media Lab, he brought with it this academically and politically radical vision of how the Media Lab would do business.

1:03:59 So the Media Lab’s motto used to be demo or die. And everyone had to build these demos out that the lab’s corporate sponsors would come out and see and some of them would be commercialized. That’s where Lego Mindstorms came from, along with a lot of other super cool technologies like Scratch. And then his became develop or die and then just became develop. And so it’s all about people making stuff fast, iterating quickly, and cross-pollinating.

1:04:27 And he’s got, like, he and I have very different work styles. I’m a caveman, misanthrope, self-exiling dude who goes, like, when I’m not on the road, I speak to four humans a day, more or less. You know, my wife, my daughter, the barista, and the lifeguard at the pool, right? And when you’re on the road, you speak to 400. I speak to 400, yeah.

1:04:51 But, like, I do get, like, as you can see, I’m very garrulous and if I run into a friend, we can talk all afternoon. But that’s one of the reasons that I arrange never to run into friends so I can get work done. And so I’m, like, really head down, kind of working guy. Joey can’t live without continuous social interaction with other people. So he will give any student office hours, but only, I think, it’s 10 minutes.

1:05:16 And so they have to basically write a TED Talk of their problem. And he sits in his office all day and just gets the brightest kids in the world show up and present their ideas in the most intense way. And then he advises them really intensely. And he is in hog heaven. So he started this project there called the Forbidden Research Project.

1:05:38 And its immediate catalyst was what happened to a mutual friend of ours, another entrepreneur and scholar and activist named Aaron Swartz. So a very bright young man. I met him when he was 12 years old and he had been contributing to some of the core internet infrastructure, something called RSS. So one of the applications of XML, and it’s now woven into things like podcasts. Yeah, iTunes users.

1:06:02 Yeah, yeah. So he was helping to develop RSS and he was coming to San Francisco for these meetings, these XML meetings. And his parents were understandably nervous about their teenage, their young teenage son showing up. And my girlfriend at the time, this woman, Lisa Rine, was his great and good friend and mentor and mother figure. And so he would come and stay on her sofa and we would squire him around town and we’d introduce him to all the most interesting grownups and he would amaze them with his interestingness.

1:06:33 And he went on to help found a company called Reddit that did very good things and then when they were bought out by Conde Nast he found that he didn’t want to be in corporate harness and he unceremoniously quit by like refusing to show up for work. The way his Bosch found out that he was presenting at a conference in Berlin was when he went over his desk and couldn’t find him and then one of his freelancers filed a story about the presentation he was giving in Berlin that day and then went on to do amazing scholarly things. So when he was in residence at Stanford he scraped this huge corpus of law review articles and what he was looking for was the relationship between funding of law departments by oil companies and law review articles that supported oil companies’ arguments about their lack of culpability for climate change and he wanted to see if there was a connection between these and so he did…

1:07:28 The Pelican brief or something? Yeah, well big data Pelican brief. Because he did it programmatically, he was a hacker. So he sucked down this huge corpus and then he used early text mining technology to do this groundbreaking work and then he became a real advocate for open access. So in the US court records are not copyrighted or copyrightable because government works…

1:07:52 We don’t have Crown copyright in the US. Government works belong to the people. But the court documents, which are the law, the law isn’t just what Congress writes. It’s what the courts interpret. You can’t know what the law is without being able to read the judgments and the proceedings.

1:08:09 So the court documents are locked up in a system called PACER which charges 10 cents a page to access it. It was a penny a page and it went up from there. Maybe it was 8 cents a page and went up from there. Which is hilarious, right? How can data retrieval become more expensive as the years go on?

1:08:26 But there was a loophole which is that you could get pages through the library for free. And once you had them, you could do anything you wanted with them because they weren’t copyrighted. And so some researchers created a tool called RECAP which would take pages from PACER and put them in the public domain. And then you had a browser plugin and if you ever requested a page from PACER that was already in RECAP, it would preferentially go to the free page. And if you requested a PACER page that wasn’t yet in RECAP, it automatically put it there.

1:08:54 It’s really cool technology. And Aaron and his accomplices got millions of the most widely cited law, millions of pages of the most widely cited law out of PACER and into RECAP by going to libraries. A million dollars worth of PACER liberated and put into the hands of the people who it governed. And the FBI investigated him. And he made fools of them.

1:09:17 And then he was at Harvard down the road from MIT and he would walk down the road to MIT and use their public network as he was allowed to do and he would download documents from another scientific repository, JSTOR, which he was also allowed to do. But he violated their terms of service which said that he could only access them one at a time by hand. He wrote a short computer program, a few lines to download these articles so that we don’t know why he was downloading them.

1:09:42 Some people think he was going to publish them online for free. Some people think he was going to do another thing like his law review research but maybe about different kinds of climate change, maybe about climate science and the connection to oil company endowments. No one knows. How old is he at this point? He was in his mid-20s by then.

1:09:57 And so what we do know is that the FBI got involved. MIT swore out a complaint against him. MIT where they had this tradition of maverick intellectual curiosity and rule breaking, right? There’s these things, the MIT hacks, which you must remember from your time there. People build full-scale fire engines on the roof of the dome.

1:10:16 They dye the fountains purple. They do all kinds of crazy, amazing things that are called MIT hacks and they’re celebrated. In fact, MIT has a book called Night Work that was published by MIT Press that’s an oral history of MIT hacks. It’s this incredible book. And so Aaron who was like in the MIT community and was down the road at Harvard and was doing this intellectually curious things, MIT hung them out to dry.

1:10:42 Even after the people whose data repository Aaron had been scraping said that they had no interest in pursuing a claim against him, MIT kept it up. And Aaron was facing 13 felony counts, 35 years in prison for checking too many books out of the library at MIT. And in the end he hanged himself after he was spent into penury, all the money he’d made from Reddit and every dollar he could borrow from his friends spent in a legal proceeding that was dragged out and dragged out by the prosecutor until he hanged himself.

1:11:16 And Aaron wasn’t the only kid who’d ever been hung out to dry by MIT. It was part of an MIT tradition of hanging students out to dry when they broke the rules in ways that went beyond the pales. So MIT had this thing where we’ve got your back until you cross an invisible line that will never articulate and then we’ll throw you to the wolves. So a woman named Starr Simpson had been at the MIT Media Lab in the wearable technology group making textiles that were smart.

1:11:41 And she had designed a piece of jewelry that had LEDs in it. And she wore it to the airport to pick up a friend to Logan Airport. And she’s darkly complected. She’s an indigenous Hawaiian or at least some of her ancestry is indigenous Hawaiian. She had short hair and someone phoned in a report of an Arab looking young man with a bomb around his neck.

1:12:03 And she was thrown to the ground by a SWAT team that pointed machine guns at her. And the MIT, this was her work. This was her research that she was wearing. It was a wearable, little wearable computer. And the MIT council’s office threw her to the dog.

1:12:18 She never finished her research. They, before she’d even been released from her questioning, they’d already done a public statement condemning her. Bunny Huang is an amazing scholar and researcher who did his PhD in electrical engineering at MIT and is now celebrated as one of the world’s premier hardware designers and hardware hackers, a great entrepreneur who’s deeply involved with people from the west who want to do manufacturing in China, high quality electronic manufacturing in China.

1:12:46 And one of the things he did as part of his research when he was there is he broke the copy protection, the user controls on the original Xbox so that he could install Linux on it. And again, the general counsel there hung him out to dry. So Joey showed up and he said, these are the kinds of researchers that we want at the Media Lab. And he started a project called the Forbidden Research Project. And he tapped Reed Hoffman, who’s the founder of LinkedIn, one of the founders of PayPal, to endow a quarter million dollar cash prize for Forbidden Research.

1:13:19 It’s the largest cash prize being offered at MIT right now. And he asked me to help him with it. And so I became MIT’s activist in residence and I draw a small grant that pays for the work I do with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We can talk about that too. I’m working with them to help sue the U.S. government to overturn a really crappy law.

1:13:40 And our client is Bunny Huang, the guy who was hung out to dry all those years ago by MIT. It goes around and comes around. It’s pretty amazing. So this is kind of your effort in reversing this kind of injustices that MIT showed over the years and really changing the course and rewarding students for doing these maverick-like activities. Yeah, and to really make MIT accountable to its best nature.

1:14:07 At its best, MIT has encouraged the kind of intellectual curiosity without boundaries that has produced the great success stories of its alumni. And you know, what we, or alumni rather, and what we want to do is help it be true to that principle, to navigate that fine line. So one of the things MIT has done in the last couple of years is set up a law clinic for students whose research gets them into potential legal trouble, which also helps young lawyers learn to be better lawyers, better tech lawyers.

1:14:40 What is tech law all about if not figuring out how to help nerds whose imaginations have gotten them into trouble with the law to navigate those very difficult waters? Did Aaron’s death affect you? Yeah, really profoundly. I had known Aaron for a really long time. He had written the Afterword to a novel that came out two weeks after he died and had really helped me write that novel.

1:15:09 It was a sequel to the Little Brother book called Homeland. And I had this placeholder in the book because I wanted the character to come up with an amazing next-generation, internet-based, electioneering platform that he would help an independent candidate for the California Senate use in a by-election. It was the kind of plot point I wanted it to turn on. And I rang up all the electoral strategists I knew, and I know some super-smart electoral strategists who worked on some of the biggest campaigns, you know, the data-driven big campaigns, because they all come out of the same place that I do, this kind of early dot-com technology story.

1:15:45 They’re good people, and they’re super-smart and imaginative. And I said, what’s your, like, if you had a candidate who would go along with your craziest idea, what would your craziest idea be? None of them were crazy enough. They were all inside the beltway, inside the Overton window, inside the box thinking. And then I, like, you know, kind of at my wit’s end, I wrote to Aaron, and I said, what would you do?

1:16:10 And he sent me back, like, shovel-ready ideas, you know, like six paragraphs that I literally just lightly rewrote and pasted right into the book, because it was perfect. And the last line of that email was, I’ve got to go now, I’m going to go build this. Right? So he was this amazing guy, a real force of nature. I mean, he wasn’t an angel, right?

1:16:31 I disagreed with him now and again, so had lots of other people, but he was an amazing guy, and a hero in many ways. And what he faced was so radically unjust, and he was hounded into it by a prosecutor who he’d made a fool of when the prosecutor worked with the FBI to come after him for his pacer work, and who had decided that he was going to score political points. And it was disgusting, you know, and awful. And it galvanized us, right? It galvanized a whole group of people into making sure that the next Aaron would be protected.

1:17:08 And, you know, I’m very wary of cults of personality, and I don’t want to write Aaron’s hagiography here, but the inspiration that people have taken from Aaron has been amazing. And I would give anything. I give all that inspiration to have him back. But we’ve, many of us, taken it upon ourselves to make sure that his death wasn’t in vain. So, you know, the young Russian woman who started scihub.cc, which is taking all the publicly funded science that’s been put behind paywalls and making it available for free, she spoke at our Forbidden Research Conference.

1:17:46 She said, I’m doing Aaron’s work. This is what Aaron wanted to do, and I’m doing it too. We don’t know if that’s what Aaron wanted to do, but he clearly inspired her to do it. It’s an amazing thing. And that’s what you’re doing at MIT, basically.

1:17:59 Somewhat, yeah. I mean, I’m not doing it just because of Aaron or just for Aaron, but Aaron’s never far from our thoughts when we think about this stuff. You know, and I work with Aaron’s brother, Noah, at Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I know his dad, and, you know, like, they’re all remarkable people, and they all see this as the best thing we can salvage from it. I mean, the thing I’m wary of when I talk about how Aaron’s death has turned into this inspiration.

1:18:30 So I don’t want people to think that when all else is bleak, that the best thing you can do is commit suicide and be an inspiration to others or a warning to others. Aaron’s committing suicide was the stupidest thing he ever did. He did it in a moment of extremis, and he did it in a moment of sorrow, and a moment of, you know, depression. Aaron was really good at solving problems, and that was a dumb way to solve this problem. It didn’t solve this problem.

1:19:02 Like, dead people don’t get to act on the world, right? Only living people solve problems. Dead people are dead. They’re inert, right? And so all of the problems that Aaron had in him to solve in the future will be left unsolved forever because he made a really dumb choice.

1:19:22 And anyone who’s watching this or listening to this and thinking about this, remember that you cannot solve your problems after you’re dead, and that there are suicide prevention hotlines and there are people who will talk to you about your problems. There are so many of us who I think Aaron felt like he would be burdening us if he talked with us about his problems, but who would have been delighted to take a phone call at any hour to talk to him about his problems. And, you know, if you’re watching this and you’re feeling suicidal, your friends will listen to your problems, and the Samaritans will listen to your problems, and you will not be a burden on them.

1:20:02 You will do them the honor of helping you because someday they’ll need some kind of help too, and they’ll understand in their own way that having helped you, that it’s not a burden on other people to go to their friends for help either. So it’s an important thing to keep in mind here. And the other legacy of Aaron is that I think he improved the self-care, the standard of self-care among his friends. So many of Aaron’s friends, for example, now campaign on behalf of Chelsea Manning, who is a whistleblower who was sentenced to 35 years in prison when she was 26 years old and was held in solitary for many years and who recently attempted suicide and was put in solitary again as punishment for attempting suicide and had to go on a hunger strike.

1:20:49 And I think a lot of us feel very scared and nervous for Chelsea, but we also worry about each other. And I’ve noticed that in the wake of Aaron’s death, that a lot of us will call each other up or email each other and just check in and make sure everything’s okay. It’s hard to notice the absence of something, right? It’s hard to notice that your friend hasn’t been around lately talking in all the channels where they normally talk. It’s easy to just miss that fact in your Twitter stream or your Facebook wall.

1:21:21 But you can make this conscious effort to keep in mind the friends of yours who are going through rough times, to check in to see whether they are absent, to call them up and make that explicit effort and make sure they know and go through the awkwardness and the sort of Californian touchy-feeliness of saying, I’m here if you need to talk to me, because it’s worth it. It’s the thing that keeps us all sane and it’s the thing that will save us all. Yeah, and I think a lot of us have had that time in our life where we’ve been thinking things like that.

1:21:52 And a lot of people have come out about it. I even know Tim Ferriss came out and said he had a moment when he was at Princeton where, you know, just a little bit on the edge and some people checked up on him. And so I think it’s an important point to make. And again, you’re right, you can’t solve your problems after you’re dead and you can’t make it better for any of us either if you’re not with us to help us with the fight. So it’s a big point to make.

1:22:14 I mean, you know, I don’t believe in an optimistic or a pessimistic view of the future because I don’t think I can predict the future because I’m a science fiction writer and I already said we suck at predicting the future. But I think that, you know, in computer science we have this idea called hill climbing algorithms where if you don’t know which way to go and you’re trying to find the highest point, you can look around and see if there’s anything that’s a slightly higher point than the one you’re in now and take that step. And from there you get a new vantage point in which you might spy another higher point and take the next step.

1:22:47 And I always believe that if you don’t know how to get to the top but you can see how to get a little higher that you should take that step. That, you know, the first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack, right? The route you plot from here to your goal is going to be destroyed by exogenous shocks, right, because you don’t live in a static universe and you’re probably underestimating how much work it’s going to be anyway. But if you, rather than planning all the way, just try and find what your next step will be.

1:23:18 You will always be able to find another step. And if you run out of room and you haven’t gotten to where you are then maybe you’ve found the top of a pitcher’s mound instead of a mountain. And maybe you have to go down a couple of steps to find a new way to go up. But, you know, it’s still a good rule of thumb. I like that. I’m going to use that hill climbing algorithm.

1:23:37 Yeah. Your title at MIT is activist in residence. Are you an activist? Do you describe yourself as that? And what does that mean to you?

1:23:45 Sure. I am an activist in the sense that, like, I explicitly take on as some of my jobs to make a change in social problems that I worry about. And I think that’s as good a definition of an activist as you could hope for. I think some of the fiction I write is activist, which doesn’t mean that it’s not also driven by this aesthetic desire to make the best story I can, but it is always also about this wider thing about seeing how I can help make problems that I worry about a little better.

1:24:22 Yeah. It was two incidents you kind of cited to me. One was your campaign against SOPA and one was another realization you had with Mozilla and some other people when it came to trying to convince them to change policies or not go the way at Netflix and BBC. Can you just summarize those two? Sure. Well, SOPA was another campaign Aaron worked on.

1:24:41 Right, Aaron. SOPA was this, like, terrible… It was like a lot like the Digital Economy Act that was passed on the last day of the Gordon Brown Parliament. It was this really bad sweeping copyright law that would have materially broken the internet as we understood it in the U.S. And I was in D.C. the week before I was introduced.

1:25:02 We all knew it was coming. We’d seen the discussion drafts. And all of my hill rat D.C. friends said, like, go home and figure out how to live in a world where SOPA is law. Don’t try and figure out how to stop SOPA from coming into being because they have the votes.

1:25:21 The industries that back this have given so much money to the congresspeople who have signed on to it that there’s no way you can win because they can’t get reelected without campaign dollars. And Aaron helped design this tool that let us black out people’s websites if they were worried about SOPA. When you visited the website, it would black the website out and it would say, my website will have to go dark if SOPA passes. Tell me what your postcode is, your zip code, and I’ll tell you who the senator and congressman are and where they stand on this.

1:25:51 And with one click, you can phone them and give them a piece of your mind about my website disappearing. And we put eight million phone calls through to Congress in 72 hours. And those congresspeople realized that as hard as it is to get reelected without campaign finance, it’s much harder to get reelected without votes. And SOPA died like that. It was amazing.

1:26:11 That impressed you, that you were even able to do something like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, it talked about blowing up the Overton window. Nobody knew what to make of it. It was funny because I helped organize that campaign and I have a pretty good insider’s view of how it played out.

1:26:26 And at the very end, Google put a tiny text notice up on their homepage, which was definitely helpful. But Hollywood’s narrative about it, the entertainment industry’s narrative, was Google killed SOPA. They literally could not understand that those eight million people had phoned before Google put their notice up and the reason they’d done it is because of people power. It was like absolutely incomprehensible to them. And then a couple of years later, in 2013, the World Wide Web Consortium, which is this body that makes open standards for the web, and their openness is really why the web has been as open as it is.

1:27:04 It was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who’s invented the web, the British physicist who was at the CERN Institute in Geneva when he came up with this idea and famously never patented it so they could be open to everyone. They, in a moment of very poor judgment, decided that they would cave into pressure from major rights holders groups, including Netflix and the BBC, to add what’s called digital rights management to the core standards for the web. And this is the stuff that tries to stop you from playing out of region DVDs on your DVD players.

1:27:39 It’s what HP installed when they, last March, they pushed out a security update to many of their inkjet printers. And then as of September, after it silently counted down month after month, all of those printers spat out their inkjet cartridges, refused to use third-party inkjet cartridges. It’s anything that teaches a computer to disobey its owner. And DRM is governed by some very special, very weird laws. In 1998, the U.S. passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which has a clause section 1201 that says tampering with or removing DRM, even on something you own, even for a totally legitimate and lawful purpose, is against the law.

1:28:22 It’s a felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for first offense. And in the EU, they enacted the European Union Copyright Directive in 2001, which includes Article VI, which has substantially the same provisions and became the law of the land here in the UK. And so it’s all over the world, these laws. It’s a kind of plague of crappy internet law. The U.S. trade representative has rammed down everyone’s throats.

1:28:45 And so once you have a product or a standard or a technology covered by DRM, it means that extending it or improving it or even doing security research into it to reveal the defects in it can all be potentially both civil and criminal crimes or violations. And we can’t afford to have this in the web, right? We can’t afford to have several billion internet users whose web browsers can’t be researched by security researchers whose defects can only be disclosed if the companies that make them decide that they’re okay with being embarrassed by revelations about mistakes that they made, mistakes that might incur liability against them.

1:29:30 We can’t afford to have this technology governed by laws that prohibit institutions that serve people with disabilities from expanding them and extending them to enable them to adapt to people with disabilities. So, for example, with video, a famous security researcher named Dan Kaminski met someone who had color blindness. And he realized that every color blindness is different but that a computer could measure the color blindness. And then once it had been measured, it could change the video’s colors to match their color blindness so they would see it properly.

1:30:03 And the person he designed it for, when he first showed it to her, she burst into tears. She’d never seen anything that beautiful. But he can’t add that technology to video defined by this World Wide Web Consortium standard without permission from the companies. And if they withhold it, then he’s just out of luck. And he’s just the first of many people who are going to come up with adaptive technologies.

1:30:25 And it means that people who have legitimate ideas for making the technologies better that the companies don’t like will be frozen out, that the companies get to decide who gets to compete with them. So you’ll remember when Netflix launched, their business was shipping DVDs around. It was like Love Film here in the UK. And the studios hated it. They said it was a crime.

1:30:44 They said it was wrong. They said it was immoral. They said it would put them out of business. And Netflix said, that’s not our problem. And now Netflix has said, well, if you want to invent a legitimate add-on technology for Netflix, like a PVR that lets you save a show for later, when you’re on a plane or when you have better bandwidth or whatever, they say that even though that activity is legal, recording a program in your sitting room is legal, that’s why VCRs and PBRs are legal, that because you have to bypass their DRM to do it, and because bypassing DRM is against the law, that they can stop you from doing it.

1:31:22 So the World Wide Web Consortium took this terrible decision. And Mozilla, who are a nonprofit foundation that has done some of the most important vital work to keep the web open, including creating the free and open browser Firefox, which is the standards bearer for openness on the web, they decided that they would go along with it, too. And for the first time in their history, they started pushing proprietary, non-open code that no one was allowed to look inside with their browsers to support this because they thought that without Netflix support, they would lose too many users and cease to be relevant and cease to exist.

1:31:57 Really? That was why. Yeah. And this is a disaster because we can’t afford to allow companies to define our relationship with their products after we’ve purchased their products. Because the way the law stands now is if you have a product that has a copyrighted work inside of it, anything with software, and you design it so that you have to bypass digital rights management to modify or reconfigure that software, that you can design the product so that any modification that undermines the business model of the product is a felony.

1:32:36 We have allowed corporations to decide that they can force us to order our affairs to use our property in the way that is most commercially beneficial to them. Now, when Blackstone wrote his classic treaties on property in the 18th century, in the 1700s, he defined private property as that which we have sole and despotic dominion over, right? A thing is yours if you are its dictator and get to decide how it’s used. But in a world of universal digital rights management, the dead hand of the manufacturer lies on top of your property forever, and it ceases to be your property.

1:33:14 It becomes something that you are a tenant of, right? Like in the old feudal days, only lords could own property, and the tenant farmer could use that property in the way the lord permitted them to. We’re ushering into being a world in which the only organizations that own property are corporations, and private individuals can only use the property in ways that corporations deem most advantageous to them. We are one RFID sensor away from dishwashers that reject third party dishes.

1:33:44 We are one machine vision system away from a toaster that rejects unauthorized bread. And the way that we’re going to control all of those is with browsers, and the World Wide Web Consortium and the Mozilla Project are both leading us along with Google and Microsoft and Apple and all of the other major web technology companies into a world in which all of those technologies will be regulated in ways that will be antithetical to both good security, there’ll be off limits to security researchers, and all the ways that you can be harmed by vulnerabilities in them will be illegal to disclose to you, and also antithetical to innovation and adaptability, openness, and private property itself. And since most of our property is going to become intellectual property, but then now it’s not even our property anymore, we lose the value of pretty much everything.

1:34:34 All of these assets are being controlled by other people. It ceases to be ours. It becomes someone else’s.

1:34:43 If you look at the way Hewlett-Packard is talking about these self-destruct mechanisms they put into their printers and then just detonated, they say, well, our printer didn’t have the feature of printing with third-party cartridges. Well, my mixer doesn’t have the feature of mixing paint, but the manufacturer doesn’t get to tell me whether or not I could do that. People did amazing things with inkjet printers that were not in their feature set. People invented how to put in edible inks in them and that’s how you get those sheet cakes with high-resolution photos.

1:35:18 They figured out how to put conductive inks in them and that’s how we’re printing circuits. None of those were features of the printer. They were all backformed by subsequent innovators, right? And by definition, innovations are never in the feature set that the product began with. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be an innovation.

1:35:37 Hence the innovator’s dilemma, right? Yeah. And I was about to ask you before you brought that up, what do we have to look out for the Googles and the Apples and the Amazons and the Microsofts of the world for the next 10 years? I mean, this is obviously one of them. What else comes to mind?

1:35:50 I don’t know how to solve the problems that they’re creating. And they are creating some really serious privacy problems and problems of corporate control and data control and surveillance. Surveillance, right. But I know how to make sure that we can’t solve them and how to clear those impediments that keep us from solving them. So laws like the DMCA and Article 6 of the EUCD make it a crime to change devices in ways that protect your privacy or challenge monopolies.

1:36:19 Now, if you can protect your privacy, it doesn’t mean you will. And if you can challenge monopolies, it doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. But if it’s illegal to do either of those things, you absolutely won’t protect your privacy and you absolutely won’t be successful in challenging monopolies. So we need to clear that law off the books. The other thing that we need to clear is something called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which also has parallels in the UK.

1:36:42 And that’s the law under which Aaron Swartz was charged. In 1983, Matthew Broderick made a movie called War Games where a kid in his bedroom was randomly dialing phone numbers hacked into the Pentagon and nearly started World War III and killed everyone alive. And off the back of this, Congress decided that they needed to pass an anti-hacking law literally to stop real-world Matthew Brodericks from starting World War III. And they created this law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1:37:09 They didn’t know how to make it future-proof. They understood that if they prohibited certain kinds of conduct, that that conduct would be probably obsolete by the time the ink on the bill was dry because computers would move so fast. And so they took this very broad view of what was hacking. And what they said is, if you exceed your authorization on someone else’s computer, you have committed a potential felony. And corporations and prosecutors took the view that your authorization to use another person’s computer was the Terms of Service, the end-user license agreement, 35,000 words of boilerplate that no one has ever read in the whole history, including the company, and I’m not making that up.

1:37:48 Companies frequently have never read their boilerplate, one of the things that often happens. Yeah, you know, the first round of the Twitter Terms of Service described how you could use Flickr. They missed one in their copy and paste in their search and replace, right? So literally companies have never read their Terms of Service. And they’re kind of like self-replicating viruses of dumb law.

1:38:12 And yet, corporations have taken the view that violating them break the law, and since the conduct that they prohibit is so expansive, you undoubtedly commit multiple felonies every day. And what this means is that corporations become guardians of who gets to talk about and investigate their services. And so Aaron was charged because the Terms of Service said he couldn’t write a script to download these files that he was allowed to see. He could only download them by clicking.

1:38:39 And so that became a felony, 13 felonies with 35 years in prison on the slate. And then another security researcher was looking into his AT&T mobile phone account, and he saw that the URL that he loaded when he visited AT&T ended with a number. So he tried changing the number, and he was looking at someone else’s banking details, their financial details for their mobile phone bill, all of this personal, private, sensitive information. And he changed the number again, and he was looking at another person’s, and he found that millions of people’s data had been exposed by AT&T.

1:39:18 And when he blew the whistle on them, he was charged with criminal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations and put in jail. And it wasn’t until Electronic Frontier Foundation, the charity pressure group that I work for part-time, represented him that he was eventually sprung. And so, again, if it’s against the law to figure out how a service is using your data, and to tell people when it has material defects, then we will never be able to solve the problem of companies spying on us or abusing our data or treating our data without sufficient care.

1:39:51 I boil these down to two principles. The first one is that any time someone gives a computer that they own an order, and that some remote party gives a different conflicting order, the person who owns the computer should always win. You should be able to always tell your computer what to do, not anyone else. Not the police, not the government, not a corporation. Not because it wouldn’t be useful for the police to tell the computer in your car that it’s time for you to pull over, but because when we create that facility, that anyone who can successfully impersonate a police officer into your car can carjack you across the entire internet or crash your car into the median or do any of a million other mischievous things.

1:40:33 Computers should be designed to be controlled by their owners. And the second rule is that true facts about the security of computers that you depend on should always be lawful to disclose. There should never be a circumstance in which things that would inform how you used a system and whether you trusted it are things that you’re not allowed to know. You know, a car that had faulty brakes that you knew about is a car that you can drive to the garage very slowly and carefully, taking only back roads.

1:41:04 But a car that has faulty brakes that you don’t know about, you will discover those faulty brakes in the hardest way possible on the motorway. So you should be allowed to know about defects and products, even if we don’t know how to fix those defects, because it’ll help you govern your own conduct so that you don’t get into trouble, so that you can cabin off the trouble that that insecure system can make. And so I think that there will be people out there who have lots of great ideas about how to solve it.

1:41:27 Good laws that we could pass, political movements, ways to start businesses, ways to educate people and give them good ideas. But none of that stuff is going to matter if it’s against the law to reconfigure your devices and against the law to tell you about defects in your devices. Those two things have to be preserved first. We need to fight for that. Yeah.

1:41:47 You mentioned 1984 earlier, where we’re going to this Orwellian world. There’s also a different version of the future, which is kind of the brave new world version of the future. Which one do you think we’re going towards more? Well, I don’t think you have to choose. I think that, you know, if you look at Netflix being the impetus to put secret control software in browsers that control things as varied as voting machines and pacemakers, you can see that entertainment law can usher in completely totalitarian systems.

1:42:18 I call it being Huxleyed into the full Orwell, right? You can get both of them with like a side dish of Kafka, all for the asking in the 21st century. You tricked into one. Yeah. Okay.

1:42:32 And what is your view of our current state of social media and use of the Internet and all that kind of flow? And is that going to continue at this exponential rate? Sure. Well, I mean, it’s clear that, like, as people, we are intensely interested in other people. I mean, the other reason that fiction works is that fiction is usually about people solving problems.

1:42:52 And we’re just nosy. We like to watch other people solve problems partly because we’re wondering if they’re going to fail and partly maybe because we want to figure out how to solve that problem if we ever get into it and, you know, we can figure out by watching them how to avoid some pitfalls. So we are clearly very interested in each other and social media has been enormously powerful by giving us ways to express and kind of feed into that interest, not always in the healthiest way, but also not in the least healthy way.

1:43:20 And I think that, like, one of the things we’ve seen from Facebook and the way young people use it is that, contrary to popular opinion, kids are super interested in their privacy, but they want to be sociable, and they’re pretty bad at figuring out what privacy choices are going to come and bite them in the butt in the future. So this amazing social scientist named Dana Boyd, who for 15 years studied marginalized kids who use social media, wrote an amazing book, her Ph.D. thesis, that Yale Press published called It’s Complicated.

1:43:56 She’s also open access. You can download it for free or buy the hard copy from Yale. And she shows how young people go to extraordinary lengths to keep their data private from one another, from kids that they don’t trust, or ex-boyfriends or girlfriends or people they’re on the outs with. Facebook has this thing where if you resign your account, if you cancel your account, you can pick it back up again anytime for the next six months and it’ll restore you to where you were with your friends list intact and all your posts still there.

1:44:23 So she talked to kids who every time they got up from their computer resigned from Facebook so they would disappear from the service unless they were there to control how their data was flowing, right? So Facebook has rigged the game so that you will end up disclosing more than you intend to and so that you can’t control your data because that’s a feature I think lots of people would want. Facebook’s never going to give you that. If you go into Facebook’s privacy dashboard, it looks like nothing so much as a craps table.

1:44:52 So if you go into like a casino and ask someone to explain craps to you, if you know anything about statistics and maths, the thing you will realize is that every rule of craps is there to make it hard for you to figure out if it’s a good deal or a bad deal. It’s complicated. Yeah, well, the way that you make a proposition bet, which craps is, the way that you win a proposition bet is you confuse the person who you’re betting against about whether the odds reflect the odds that you’re offering them, right?

1:45:18 The only reason to add complexity to a proposition bet is to confound the other person’s statistical intuition. Facebook’s privacy dashboard has 10 million checkboxes on it and every one of them is there to confound your ability to figure out whether or not you’re making a good privacy bet or a bad privacy bet. So kids do in fact care a lot about privacy. They’re just bad at it, which is not surprising, right? Because privacy is hard to get good at.

1:45:43 You know, privacy is one of those things like smoking or overeating where the effects and the causes are separated by a lot of time and space, right? If every puff on a cigarette gave you a tumor, no one would take a second puff. It’s only because you get cancer 30 years from now that anyone ever starts smoking. It’s very hard to attend to those future effects. We tend to discount them heavily and we also tend to like not be able to learn from them until they’ve happened.

1:46:12 You know, no one got good at penalty kicks by kicking the ball blindfolded and running home and then having someone show up six months later and telling them whether it went in the net, right? It’s cause and effect, closely married that create expertise out of practice. It’s why when cameras were film cameras and we developed two roles a year, you know, one at Christmas and birthdays and one on the family holiday, people were rubbish at taking pictures. You get your snaps back from the lab and you’d be like, good one, good one, bad one, bad one, bad one, bad one, bad one, good one, good one.

1:46:41 You wouldn’t know what you did to make the good one unless you had a notebook where you wrote down the good ones. You never got good. But you take your distraction rectangle out of your pocket and you take a picture of someone and you see immediately what that picture looked like. Well, pretty soon you’re so good at it that people started a multi-billion dollar company based entirely on applying filters to them to make them not look quite so good because they all started to look like posed portraits from a Sears studio.

1:47:03 We got so good at taking our pictures. They didn’t even look like pictures anymore as we understood them. And so people aren’t good at privacy and kids aren’t good at privacy. And so kids make dumb mistakes. And then we do this terrible thing to them which is we call them digital natives.

1:47:18 And we say everything they do on the internet because they were born after 2000 or 2006 or whatever year we’re calling digital natives this year, everything they do on the internet is mystically true by dint of them having been born after 2001 as though an adolescent’s propensity to make errors somehow ended at the turn of the millennium. This is a terrible injustice to visit on children, to not give them the space to be wrong. And the outflow of that is that we assume that when companies exploit their fallibility that this is like this emergent phenomenon of the digital native phenomenon in which they know intuitively that the people they should be worried about are their teachers and not future employers, future ex-boyfriends, and future police states, right?

1:48:13 Well, like, they’re just wrong. They’re 17, so they’re wrong. I was wrong when I was 17. And so, yeah, I think that, like, if social media has a future, it’s gonna be about solving that conundrum. Privacy’s a big issue.

1:48:27 Tell me, what does the future look like in Walkaway? What does this world look like and how are people behaving? Yeah, so Walkaway is a story that keys off of a lot of things that I’ve been reading and thinking about. One was a conversation with Tim Harford, the economist I mentioned earlier, where he said, very matter-of-factly, well, you know, if the people who own the robots get to keep all the things the robots make, and they’re the only ones who benefit from it, then there won’t be enough people who own robots to buy all those things the robots have made.

1:48:59 So we’re gonna need something else. Otherwise, the whole system collapses. We can’t have markets if only the supply side has money, which I found very profound. And then David Graber, who’s this anthropologist who lives here in London, American anthropologist, he’s an amazing guy. He wrote an essay called Bullshit Jobs about how all the jobs today have no social purpose.

1:49:20 They’re bullshit in that sense. The world would not be a worse place if no one was doing them. And then, you know, I started thinking about wealth inequality in Thomas Piketty and his book Capital in the 21st Century, such an amazing book. And I wrote this story set in a future in which the world no longer needs its people. And the people start walking away from the system.

1:49:44 So they call themselves walkaways. They literally walk out of the cities and towns into brownfield sites that have been left behind by industry. And they start harvesting the material out of the world’s waste stream and repurposing it using high tech into beautiful, super luxurious, kind of what some people call fully automated leisure communism, where they’re building these incredible inns and theaters and towns. And when someone comes along and says, hey, that’s my private property, we’re kicking you off, rather than fighting, they just walk away again because there’s an inexhaustible waste stream supply and there’s an inexhaustible supply of brownfield sites where they can build.

1:50:28 And they premise this future on the idea that when ideas can be rendered into material form with a minimum of effort, then there’s not really any reason for any of us to do anything except try to entertain and please each other. And it draws a lot of its inspiration from the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, which I think gets a bum rap, especially from people who’ve never been there, but it really has these core principles about radical inclusion and radical participation and performance, and everyone is just trying to find ways to delight one another. It’s really very different.

1:51:07 I think maybe people in the UK think about Glastonbury and try and draw a comparison. It’s about as different as two things can be. They’re both good in their own way. Have you been to Burning Man a lot? Not unlike, yeah, yeah, I have.

1:51:18 How would you describe it then? I call it, my friend Catherine Morana came up with this. She’s very brilliant. I call it a dress rehearsal for a post-scarcity society. And define post-scarcity for people who might not understand.

1:51:30 Well, it does what it says on the tin, where the things that are valuable are things that are abundant. If you’re old enough to remember Napster, Napster had this really weird dynamic, which is picked up a bit in BitTorrent, which is that normally, if there’s a thing that lots of people want, the more they want it, the less available it becomes. So when everyone wants to eat at a restaurant, the line gets longer. Napster, when I downloaded a song from you, if I kept my Napster client running, then someone who searched for that song could find it either on your computer or my computer.

1:52:05 So the more demand there was for that song, the more of that song there was. And demand and availability were functions of one another. Oftentimes, demand is a function of availability, but rarely is availability a function of demand. And so you see this a bit with BitTorrent, where the more people who join a BitTorrent swarm, the faster the file downloads, and it took its inspiration from that. And so imagine if everything was like that.

1:52:30 Imagine if the more people valued something, the easier it was to get hold of. There are some goods that economists talk about that are only valuable because of their scarcity, right? Sometimes they’re called positional goods. Is gold one of those? No, gold is different.

1:52:45 Gold has like a whole bunch of reasons that people value it. One is like this fear of inflationary debt service, that if you run up a big debt rather than paying it off, you’ll just inflate your way out of it. So it’s considered a kind of check against unrestricted inflationary spending by governments. Basically, it’s what you do when you’re worried about quantitative easing. But no, like Vuitton handbag, where part of the reason that you value the bag is that other people can’t have it, and they know it, and they think differently of you because you have one.

1:53:20 And it’s actually kind of interesting. Or owning football teams. Something like that, too, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So positional goods, they’re interesting because although the manufacturers of them hate counterfeits, there’s good economic reason to believe that counterfeits are responsible for the ongoing positional goods market.

1:53:41 So imagine if there were no counterfeit handbags. Once you had the handbag, there’d be no reason to ever buy a second one because it would continue to have high positional value for all of eternity. But the reality is that successful designer products are quickly knocked off, and their positional value declines sharply, which means that people who want to display their position have to buy new positional goods, which creates an ongoing market for new positional goods.

1:54:13 And so there are lots of mainstream orthodox economists who believe that the marketing counterfeits is the reason the positional good market is as large as it is, and it’s in spite of the luxury company’s legislative lobbying that they have as much money as they do, not because of it. I’ve heard some interesting things similar to that, too. I’ve heard also the Game of Thrones and HBO, they thrive when Game of Thrones is actually pirated, and it increases HBO’s revenues when that pirate market exists because it keeps it relevant, keeps it talked about.

1:54:49 I think there’s something to that. Well, and also it helps them scout future markets, which is a thing Netflix did for a long time as well. They would secure the rights to things that were being widely pirated in other territories. That’s nice. It’s kind of market data.

1:55:03 But this is slightly different. This isn’t about lost leaders. This is about if you can buy as many 5,000-pound handbags as you want because you’re a squillionaire, you only need one unless the one that you have becomes naff six months later, in which case you need one every six months. And so that’s their core market. They’re like 20% who buy 80% of luxury handbags are those people, and luxury suits, and luxury cars, and luxury whatever.

1:55:32 And the way that people are incentivized to buy more is not just that this year’s designs are so cool, it’s that last year’s designs are so naff, and the reason they’re naff is because they’ve been knocked off. So back to the post-scarcity world. Burning Man is post-scarcity, so things are valuable that aren’t scarce, the opposite. Yeah, well, things are valuable. The value then resides in transactional activities, experiences, making other people happy.

1:56:04 And so for example, although the kitchens are largely automated in these inns that they build, you can tweak them and make them better and kind of play them like an instrument. And this role is fiercely competed for because if you’re the person who, when everyone turns up for Sunday brunch, makes a virtuoso breakfast, then everyone holds you in high regard. And you accumulate kind of social capital, and you get lots of strokes from your friends. And so in the same way that things that used to be work become play when we make them into sports or games, you know, a bit of Tom Sawyer in the fence here, this stuff becomes a core activity.

1:56:53 And the tension in the novel comes because research scientists who are working on practical immortality for the hyper-rich realize that they can’t look themselves in the mirror while they’re helping the human race speciate into poor mayflies and eternally long-lived millionaires, billionaires. And so they steal fire. They take these secrets of the life extension technology, and they go walk away with it. And they set up their own independent research institutions to do this work, because most of it’s computational anyway.

1:57:27 You don’t need a lot of wet laboratory gear. It’s just computing, raw computing power that makes it work. And this triggers, this is the ultimate positional good, infinite life. And if everyone can have it, there’s nothing else to be had. And so this sparks a kind of global panic, and it takes the low-level harassment of walk away, which is thought of by the ruling classes as a kind of harmless safety valve for society, where the useless can go and kind of quietly do their own thing into an existential threat and out come the hellfire missiles and the final countdown.

1:58:08 So the book has got very good early notices. It’s my publisher’s lead title in April. They’re reissuing all my back catalog and matching covers, and it’s got good blurbs from science fiction writers like William Gibson and Neil Stevenson and Kim Stanley Robinson, but also from well-known thinkers Edward Snowden gave it a very good blurb. It’s one of the sort of hot books I’m told this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so we’re expecting lots of translation deals.

1:58:33 And it’s going to be done by the head of Zeus here in the UK. That’s super exciting. Yeah, yeah. Also, if you can answer some questions about Cory. Sure.

1:58:43 I mean, a lot of people watching are probably like, how can I grow up to be Cory one day? And I just wanted like 10 years ago, you mentioned you never graduated undergrad and you went to different courses and stuff. Did you always hope that you would become who you are today? Did you see ever early parts of it and were things that you changed about yourself or your game or your life that got to where you are, whether that’s publishing regularly or talking more?

1:59:08 These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. Just to close, I had Andreas Antonopoulos here, the Bitcoin guru months back, and he’s coming back in December, and he doesn’t disclose where he lives. He won’t even say what city he lives in.

1:59:46 And a few guys that talk about Bitcoin are like that. And I just wondered what it’s like for you. Do you ever feel unsafe? Do you ever feel watched? Do you ever feel these things that sometimes activists feel, especially when you’re going up against huge organizations, huge governments?

2:00:02 Or do you really check anything that happens and say, okay, no, that’s paranoia? Well, I do try not to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence. And there’s oftentimes things go wrong, and the more paranoid people in my social group will say, well, clearly you’ve been targeted. And I’ll say, no, someone made a dumb mistake. The reality is that I am a white, middle-class, well-educated dude who works for impact litigator filled with ninja lawyers.

2:00:34 And of all the people in the world who are vulnerable to state reprisals, I am at the very bottom of the list. And it’s not that I think that’s fair. I think it’s grotesquely unfair that I can talk about Black Lives Matter without the kind of reprisals that actual black people talking about Black Lives Matter face. And that’s one of the reasons that the Black Lives Matter movement matters. But I don’t flatter myself that I am either dangerous enough nor vulnerable enough to be the person who has to worry all that much.

2:01:15 There are specific contextual moments when I worry. I worry about protests, because although I grew up in the protest movement, I think that governments have become so pants-weddingly terrified of protests that the sight of a few thousand people exercising a democratic rights stirs this kind of weird militarized beast. And I grew up going to protest with my parents. I took my daughter to one protest, the photographer’s march on Trafalgar Square, to protest the law that was going to ban taking photographs of public buildings.

2:01:45 But I haven’t taken it any since, and I feel bad about it. But they’re potentially dangerous. I think it’s an important way to understand your role in civic society, is to manifest your beliefs with your feet on the street with other people who feel the same way as you. But yeah, I really worry about undue police reprisals, especially as a migrant. I worry that I’m very legally vulnerable.

2:02:12 But the other time that I’ve taken some special measures, I was the opening act for Edward Snowden’s first public appearance after he came out of the cold at South by Southwest, and me and Barton Gelman, who’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, I interviewed him on stage at South by Southwest, and Snowden came on in the Jumbotron. And I flew from here, from London to Texas, and I thought, and we’d done it all by encryption. It wasn’t public that Snowden was speaking.

2:02:42 It wasn’t public that I was gonna be his warmup. But I did think, like, if there’s one guy in the world who they’re really watching, it’s Snowden. And so if there’s one guy in the world who you’re associated with, maybe you get a hard time, it’s him. It was literally the first time he’d spoken in public after the revelations. And so I wrote my lawyer’s number in 11 places on my body, and I memorized it, and then I took a blank laptop and a phone that I powered down when we landed.

2:03:16 I powered it up when we landed and texted my lawyer and said, I have landed. And then she knew that if I hadn’t texted her again in one hour that she should, you know, contact ACLU of Texas and send them to the Dallas airport to do something, because I was being held. And there was no trouble. It was the world’s greatest anti-climax. I was thinking, like, here I am, you know, ninging my way into the US.

2:03:40 And there was just no trouble. The guy was like, what you doing here? And I’m like, I’m going to South by Southwest. And he said, you know, y’all eat some good barbecue. And I was like, I will.

2:03:47 And that was it. Well, it’s been a good rush, though. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty adrenalized. And that’s probably decent tactics going through with sending that text and just being ready. Yeah, I think of all the ways I could have done it.

2:03:59 But, you know, it has this prerequisite that you know an awesome lawyer, right? And I think that’s not a scalable solution. Yeah, true, true. I always ask everyone a question at the end. I’ll ask you the same, Cory.

2:04:10 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Cory and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Always keep a trash bag in your car. No, just kidding. That’s Steve Martin’s one piece of advice. Is it?

2:04:23 From the jerk or something? No, it’s just front of the stand of things. Always, no, no, never, no, no. Always, always keep a trash bag in your car. I’ve never heard that and I’ve asked that a lot.

2:04:34 What would I say? You know, the things that I learned in my 20s are manifold and it’s hard to narrow it down to one and they’re all kind of banal. But like right every day, carbs will make you fat as hell when relationships aren’t working out, you do no one a favor by sticking around. Like those are kind of my three big pieces of wisdom. Those are strong.

2:05:09 Yeah. Very strong. Yeah. That’s very good. Just a second part of that, best advice you’ve ever received could be from a colleague, a parent or someone.

2:05:18 It was definitely right every day. That was advice. So the thing about right every day is this is not like my discovery. Writers for centuries have been saying just right every day. Just right every day.

2:05:28 Things you do every day become habits. You get them for free. It gets easier and easier. And like young writers who’ve learned to write by being inspired are like, yeah, yeah, and if I had an infinite amount of time I’d eat six servings of vegetables and four servings of fruit and do one hour of aerobic exercise and write every day. Now, what’s the realistic plan?

2:05:46 But the reality is that like if you can’t write every day at the number of words that you’ve been planning to write, write fewer words and still write every day. Habits are things you get for free. 250 words a day? Whatever it is. 20 words a day.

2:06:01 Just write it. Just write it, yeah. I might start doing that. Final one, to that 20-year-old that’s listening to us on iTunes, watching us on YouTube or consumes us, however, in the future around the world, could be in China, South America, anywhere. Thought mail.

2:06:14 Yeah. What advice do you give to them? You know, they’ve listened to us. They’re obviously really thinking about a lot of their technologies of surveillance, some of these huge technology companies. What advice do you give to them if they want to, you know, make sure that their future is protected, that they’re not going to wake up with that lung cancer of a privacy concern or these other things?

2:06:36 Well, the cool thing about computers, the new thing on this earth about computers, is that cryptography works. And cryptography allows us to take computers that are so cheap they’re virtually disposable and use them to scramble our private thoughts and messages so thoroughly that if all the hydrogen atoms in the universe were turned into computers, and they did nothing between now and the heat depth of the universe but try to break that message and find the key that we run out of universe before we run out of potential keys. But cryptography has generally been used by people who are technical enough to know why they had to worry.

2:07:13 And so it was designed, all the privacy tools were originally designed on the assumption that you were already a super nerd if you wanted to use them. So they could be super nerdy in their interface. The same way that before desktop publishing, like all desktop publishing software assumed that you were already a typographer. It was the only people ever at delay at a page were already typographers. And much of what’s in crypto technology is like typography technology.

2:07:39 It can be made comprehensible to normal humans. And so there is an increasing practice of making crypto and privacy technology that is aimed at normal humans. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a thing. Excuse me. There goes my jet lag.

2:07:57 It maintains a thing called the surveillance self-defense kit, which is broken up into playlists for different applications. If you’re a queer kid in the closet with intolerant parents, if you’re an activist in a repressive regime, if you’re a high school student trying to not get bullied, it has different playlists that take you through how to use it. It’s translated into 11 languages. It’s free. It’s open licensed so you can reproduce and adapt it, print it out, sell it, anything you want with it.

2:08:25 And it’s a great place to start that makes all this stuff easier. And if you find any of it harder, keep checking because it’s getting easier by the day. I’m on the board of a nonprofit called Simply Secure that’s developing free, open, usable interfaces and methodologies for making usable interfaces so that normal humans can use privacy tech. Tor Browser has been a big thing for that. Tor Browser, GPG, Signal, and other cryptographic communications tools for messaging.

2:08:53 I’m on the board of a commercial one called Wicker that is used by a lot of people in industry. They’re all super easy to use these days. Tor Browser is much easier than Tor used to be even a couple of years ago. Everybody should be familiar with Tor, should pull it up, and then GPG. I had Annie Michon on here a few years ago.

2:09:14 She was formerly my five age and she used to always send me encrypted emails and like over and over again and she’s just like you really should look into this. It’s getting easier, right? Five years ago it was a lot harder. It’s so much easier now. There’s a thing called Keybase.io that’s making one of the hardest parts easier.

2:09:30 There’s big changes afoot in the way that this stuff works. Yeah, it’s important people look at that. Cory, thank you so much for your time. I just want to acknowledge you for all the work you’ve done. When I go on YouTube and look at you, you are constantly lecturing and you don’t do small lectures.

2:09:48 You do hour minimum, two hours usually. Oh, sometimes in 20 minutes, but I do, yeah, sure. When you’re all over the world, you’re talking about these issues in countries all over Europe and America and all these things and we didn’t even cover all the things that you do. Just wanted to say thanks for all the work. Thanks for having me on. It was a real pleasure.

2:10:04 Yeah, it was really nice talking to you. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours. Come see us again next time again. Thank you.

2:10:11 Appreciate it. Thanks.