WBD578 Audio Transcription

Why Won’t the SEC Approve a Bitcoin ETF? With Perianne Boring

Release date: Wednesday 9th November

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

Perianne Boring is the Founder and CEO of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. In this interview, we discuss the history of Bitcoin spot ETF proposals, the numerous rejections and changing conditions for approval, and why the SEC won’t approve a Bitcoin spot ETF.

“I think these policy fights for Bitcoin, this is the fight of my generation; and I think it’s absolutely important that we as Bitcoiners, and people who care about this technology, understand these political fights, these legal fights because if we get the policy wrong, it can totally skew our future.”

— Perianne Boring

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: So, one of your favourite books is a Peter Schiff book?

Perianne Boring: Yeah.  Well, one of my favourite economics books is a book written by Peter Schiff, How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes, and it's written almost like a children's book.  So, I majored in economics in a state-run school, the University of Florida, and one of the reasons I majored in economics was because you could take all these maths classes and that was always my favourite subject.  But economics is not maths, economics is human action, it's why you decide to do this over that, it's why you decide to move to Florida and not California, or whatever.  It is human interaction.

So, I think today in the economic field, they highly complicate it into models that have no real-world example.  So, that book is just kind of fun, because it just breaks it down into very, very simple things, like what is money; how does an economy work?  It's not a maths problem, it's human interaction.

Peter McCormack: What is the book called?

Perianne Boring: How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes.

Peter McCormack: I want to get that book.  Danny, remind me.

Danny Knowles: We should get Schiff on to do that.

Peter McCormack: We should.

Perianne Boring: I would like to interview Schiff on that one.  Maybe we can co-do that one.

Peter McCormack: We can co-do that one.

Perianne Boring: I have a signed copy of it actually.

Peter McCormack: Really?  So, I like Peter Schiff, everything about him, outside Bitcoin.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, so I was the same way, so I've read a lot of his books, I followed him for years before I even learned about Bitcoin, I followed Peter Schiff.  He was one of the people I used to listen to to really get smart on sound monetary policy.  So he's a traditional and a classic gold bug.  All of his investments are super-tied into gold stuff.  So, he's got a natural bias there and he would have to walk away from his whole career of promoting gold as sound money.  He would have to make that shift away from gold being the answer to all of the economic problems, to Bitcoin being the answer.  He can't make that shift.

Peter McCormack: It's ironic really.

Perianne Boring: The Schiff can't make the shift!

Peter McCormack: The Schiff shift; it sounds like a dance!  I think he could.  I think there are people out there who are bitcoiners, there are people out there who are gold bugs, and there are people out there who understand both.  I think a lot of people who are Bitcoin only say, "Well, eventually Bitcoin will overtake gold and gold will become irrelevant", but I think we're certainly in a scenario where both are relevant and both can represent some form of sound money, depending on who you are.

Perianne Boring: We should just let the free market decide.

Peter McCormack: We should.

Perianne Boring: Allow all of them to be a competing currency and then let people decide what they want to use as a store of value or as a means of transaction.

Peter McCormack: It's the one shame about Peter Schiff because he's amazing when he's not talking about Bitcoin.  And when he talks about Bitcoin, he's talking from a place of arguing against it.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, and then he's just turned into a full-on troll on Twitter; it's awful!  I don't even follow him anymore because I'm so annoyed by him.

Peter McCormack: I don't mind it because I see the trolling and I think he still offers a lot of value to Bitcoin.  It's not only in sharpening your tools and your arguments for Bitcoin, but actually his understanding of the economy, understanding of the Fed, understanding of government policy.  And we all have a bias, I mean I have a Bitcoin bias, and checking your bias is really hard.  And also, when you've been wrong so much about something like Bitcoin, it's very hard, I think, for someone to walk that back.  He was introduced to Bitcoin when it was like $1 by, what is it, Max Keiser, or something?

Danny Knowles: I think so, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And then he had the debate with Erik Voorhees when it was, say, $30.  He could have made unreal amounts of money.

Perianne Boring: I know, right!

Peter McCormack: And to walk that back is very hard.  But then at the same time, he's not poor.

Perianne Boring: But he could have been a lot more rich, had he listened to people like Erik Voorhees and Max Keiser back ten years ago.  So, it's kind of the same thing with Andrew Ross Sorkin, who I have a lot of respect for.

Peter McCormack: Is he The New York Times guy?

Perianne Boring: No, he's on Skwawkbox.  He's gotten a lot better I would say in the past year, but he's very critical of Bitcoin and I've gotten into tiffs with him on air and it's like, "What?"  But my theory is that he was one of the first people in network broadcast news to interview Bitcoin people.  He interviewed the Winklevosses in 2013 and he wasn't into it, but he missed the opportunity to buy Bitcoin back then when Bitcoin was under $100.  So, he missed one of the biggest investment opportunities of his entire career, he just missed it; so, why would you turn around now?

Peter McCormack: You know what I'm going to ask you to bring up now, don't you?

Danny Knowles: What's that, the Salty Coefficient?!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, bring up the Salty Coefficient.  Do you know the Salty Coefficient?

Perianne Boring: No.

Peter McCormack: We interviewed this guy called Craig Warmke.  He's a philosopher, and he wrote a whole paper talking about how specifically people who had the opportunity to invest in Bitcoin early on and make life-changing amounts of money, specifically journalists he refers to, that because they didn't, over time they become more salty, and therefore their articles become --

Perianne Boring: Ever worse and worse over time!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, here's the Saltiness Coefficient.  And I always think Nathaniel Popper is a really good example of this, because he wrote, was it called Digital Gold?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember what that book was called.  It was a good book though.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was a great book, it was the first book I read on Bitcoin and Nathaniel Popper's now just become I think almost a troll against Bitcoin.  I mean, I'm not a Coinbase fan, but his piece when he went after Coinbase was just terrible.  It was the most woke attack on Bitcoin and Coinbase ever and I just think again, he probably forgot to buy some Bitcoin.

Perianne Boring: Well, I think that Salty Co is also going to impact politicians, so if you look at the makeup of policymakers and maybe I'll just used the US Congress as an example, but I think it's pretty emblematic of all legislators.  Today, in US Congress, we've got maybe 40, maybe a couple of dozen members of Congress who are real champions for this technology.  They understand it, they understand how the technology works and they want to make sure that the US is positioned to receive the benefits of this ecosystem.  And that group is bipartisan, it's people across the aisle.

Then you have a group of people who are very strong detractors, and those are almost exclusively very progressive liberals, and that's a much smaller group, it's a handful of people, maybe half a dozen people.

Peter McCormack: The Squad.

Perianne Boring: The Squad.  That's Brad Sherman, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and they're just anti this stuff, they just hate it.  And then everybody else is kind of in the middle.  But Bitcoin is just technology; it's no different than electricity, or the lightbulb, or the printing press.  It's not good, it's not bad, it's a technology.  It's people determining how they use it is what can be good or bad.  So, if you use Bitcoin to buy --

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a threat.

Perianne Boring: Well, I mean it's a technology, it is a technology, it's software.  It doesn't have feelings, it doesn't have intentions.

Peter McCormack: But it's what it represents, which is a threat, because is there any technology that has ever received this high a bar that it must adhere to?  Yesterday, we had Nic Carter in and we were going through the White House report that he annotated, which was not only very badly put together, the citations they used were terrible; but it sets this bar that Bitcoin or Bitcoin companies have to hit that is way higher than other companies have to hit.  And that to me was one of the questions I was going to come to you with. 

Everything we seem to do, there seems to be this very high bar that Bitcoin has to meet, and I'm trying to understand why.  I think mainly, it's because it's a technology that can make people supremely rich, because not only is it a technology, it's a money and people feel like they missed out.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I mean this industry, from the regulatory perspective, there are very specific examples where we can see this industry and its asset class is held to a higher standard, and I would argue that's discriminatory.

Peter McCormack: It definitely is discriminatory, but it is also a threat.

Perianne Boring: I don't think the technology is a threat.  Perhaps the ways in which people will use it could be a threat.  So, it could be a threat.  I mean, the one thing that's so beautiful about Bitcoin is if you don't agree with the central bank, economic planning regime that we're all currently under, you can peacefully opt out of that today by using this technology.  So again, the technology doesn't have any intentions, but a person's intention of saying, "I don't want to go to a bank, I don't really want to be subject to a small group of people deflating the value of my hard-earned money, so I'm going to choose to put everything in Bitcoin instead".  I mean, how someone would use the technology could be a threat.

Peter McCormack: Which is also a very American idea.  I've always seen Bitcoin as a very American idea, the values of Americans, the fact that you can opt out.  I think in the UK, we're a little bit more subservient to our government, and my understanding and studying, limited studying of the US and the establishment of your Constitution was that you're a little bit like, "The government serves the people".  Not so much recently, which is why I think Bitcoin is a great technology, in that it allows perhaps a reset of American values, but it just feels like a very American idea.  That's why I like it, that's why I like coming over here and talking to people about it.

Perianne Boring: Well, I think at its core, if you could describe Bitcoin in one word, it would be "freedom".

Peter McCormack: Yes, that's very good.  So, what was your attraction to it?  You studied economics, but anybody who studies economics at school doesn't really study Austrian Economics, they study Keynesian Economics.

Perianne Boring: And I learned that on my journey.  So, we're in my home state, I grew up here in Florida.  I'm from Lakeland, Florida, which is central Florida, very different from Miami.

Peter McCormack: You're a Gator!

Perianne Boring: I'm a Florida Gator, went to the University of Florida.

Peter McCormack: Did they win yesterday?  They played Missouri, right, because we got kicked out of a bar!

Perianne Boring: We did win yesterday.  We watched the game on our phone in the car on the way up here.

Peter McCormack: We went to a bar to watch my soccer team, and they said we had to be done by --

Danny Knowles: Sorry, you're "what" team?!

Peter McCormack: I'm trying to help them understand; I'm speaking the local language, come on, man!  My football team; you understand what I mean by "my football team", right?

Perianne Boring: Soccer?  Actual football where you use a foot to kick the ball.

Peter McCormack: To kick a ball, yes.

Perianne Boring: Yes.

Peter McCormack: No pads.  So, we had to be done by 12.00 and we were like, "That's no problem, it kicks off at 10.00, it's an hour and a half game, we'll be done".  And then our linesman got injured and we had a 15-, 20-minute delay.  So, a game normally finishes on 90 minutes.  Ours finished at, what --

Danny Knowles: It was like 110, or something!

Peter McCormack: 110 minutes.  And then the bar just said, "Look, this place is going to get busy", and it just filled up with all these young Gator fans!

Perianne Boring: Oh, you went to one of the Gator bars?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, one of the Gator bars, but we got out.

Perianne Boring: So, the University of Florida Alumni Association, in every town, you can join the Alumni Association, there'll be a Gator bar, and the Association will organise with the bar and say, "We're going to organise all of our UF Alumni here, we're going to watch the game together".

Danny Knowles: It must have been one of those, because they even had someone selling merch and stuff!

Perianne Boring: Yeah.  Oh, man, you all should have invited me, I would have gone to that!

Peter McCormack: So they won?  So, we didn't stay, we had to come and make a show with Nic.  So they won; they beat Missouri?

Perianne Boring: They beat Missouri Mizzou, yeah!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, fuck Missouri!  I don't even know where Missouri is!  Is Missouri where they filmed that, what's the series with the lake?

Perianne Boring: The Ozarks?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, is that Missouri?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Is the Ozarks Missouri?

Perianne Boring: I don't know, I'm from Florida, not my state.  But Mizzou was just brought into the SEC a couple of years ago, so the Southeastern Conference is the dominant college football conference.

Peter McCormack: The SEC?

Perianne Boring: The SEC.

Peter McCormack: How apt!

Perianne Boring: Not to be confused with the Securities and Exchange Commission, yeah, that's a different SEC.  But the SEC in terms of the revenue they bring in, it's more than all of the other conferences put together.  So, the Southeastern Conference dominates college football in a huge way.

Peter McCormack: Are they paying players yet?

Perianne Boring: No, they don't pay players, not college.

Peter McCormack: Because I watched a film which alluded to this, about how a lot of these college conferences make a lot of money and the players help them make a lot of money, but not everyone makes it as a pro footballer and they get injuries, etc.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, it's a big debate.

Peter McCormack: There's an argument they should be paid.

Perianne Boring: Well, they just changed the law to where the players can now be paid on their likeness so they can have different types of sponsorship deals and things like that.

Peter McCormack: I think that's right that they should be paid.

Perianne Boring: You should pay people when they work, yeah, I agree with that, not a fan of slavery; not America.

Danny Knowles: We've got a coffee delivery!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've got a coffee delivery; that's nice!

Perianne Boring: All right, coffee break.  It's 9.00am, so we're doing coffee, and stuff scotch?

Peter McCormack: We can do scotch.  I don't think I should do scotch after yesterday.  He we go; delivered.  I interrupted you.  I prefer talking about sports sometimes.  Sorry, I interrupted you.  So, you're from the State of Florida.

Perianne Boring: Oh, we were talking about my journey into Bitcoin!  Okay, we were not talking about sports, we just went on a tangent.  So, yeah, I went to the University of Florida, studied economics and for me, so I was in college during the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the State of Florida got rocked by the Financial Crisis, because a lot of it was the housing market going bust, and that is one of Florida's largest economies here.  So literally, every single person I knew was impacted in a big way. 

We're a middle-class family, so nobody went hungry, nobody was homeless, or anything, but my grandmother still lives with my aunt and uncle and their house went underwater and they had to move; they were completely displaced, which was very unfortunate and they had to downsize, and our cousins, and it was just a huge loss for them and it was really sad to see that.  The company my brother worked for went out of business, so my brother lost his job.  He's gainfully employed now, everyone's fine, but seeing how this impacts real people, it had a big impression on me at a young age.  My parents didn't inherit anything, they worked for everything they had.  Half of their life savings just evaporated with the stock market collapse. 

So, I'm in school, studying economics, reading these maths books written by Ben Bernanke, who was the Chairman of the Fed at the time, and me and a couple of my friends were like, "This isn't explaining what's happening in our hometowns right now", and we started getting in arguments with the professors, because there was a lot of friction in the classroom.  So, there was a small group of us where we said, "Okay, we really do want to understand what's happening and we weren't getting the answers in school.  So, we started just searching whatever information on the internet and in the library that we could find.

The first person we found who was able to explain what was going on was this guy who was running for President; it was actually an OB-GYN doctor, running for President, who was talking about ending the Fed and auditing the Fed and that was Dr Ron Paul.

Peter McCormack: Wow!  Okay.  Was he an independent at that point?

Perianne Boring: He was running for the Republican nomination, but he had a very large platform.  Thankfully we were able to find him, but he was able to answer a lot of questions.  And if you start reading about him and his talks, he would talk about Austrian Economics.  So then we got introduced to all the great writers of Austrian Economics, from Mises and Rothbard, and that was the answer.

I'll tell you the thing that was so difficult for me, that really put just a really bad taste in my mouth, was that the school didn't even bother to tell you that economics is not science, it's not maths, where there's just one answer, like two plus two equals four, there's no other way to do that equation; it's a theory, economics is theory and there are different theories of economics, but they only teach you one and they don't tell you that there are others out there.

Peter McCormack: And which is the one they teach you?

Perianne Boring: Well of course, Keynesian Economics.

Peter McCormack: Who does that benefit?

Perianne Boring: It benefits the current system in place. 

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Perianne Boring: We looked into that too, we were like, "Why is this?" and I wouldn't quote this stat, I'd have to go back and look and see if I can find it, but when I did the research on it several years ago, I found that it was up to 50% of all PhD economists today, and a lot of those are working in universities and in academia or in government or other places, but about 50% of all economists working today are somehow on the Fed's payroll.

Peter McCormack: Incentives matter.  We've been talking a lot about incentives recently.

Perianne Boring: So, I moved to Washington.  So, my senior year of college --

Peter McCormack: Hold on, can we just roll back a second.  So, with your college professors, would this be in-class or outside of class where you would challenge them, and did you specifically ask them about Austrian Economics and, "Why are you not teaching us this?"  My view is, look, I dropped out of university and the university I went to wasn't particularly great.  But I look at American universities with a certain romanticism because of Hollywood, where you would see these amazing professors, who would create debate within the classes and inspire their kids.  And I just always imagine if you went in, you would be in these big amphitheatre auditoriums, where you would have these electric debates and they would inspire you.  So, I would hope you would go into one of these and you would all be there debating these issues.  Did that happen?

Perianne Boring: I mean, Florida State-run schools, these are very large schools, so we had about 45,000 students at the University of Florida.  So, your first couple of years, you're in these big auditoriums, there's hundreds of people in your class.  You don't really get a lot of one-on-one time to have conversations with the professor, you don't really have those debates in the classroom.  But by junior, senior year, the classes get a lot smaller.  So, by senior year, they were smaller, we could have more in-depth conversations.  I mean, there was definitely friction in these conversations.  I just remember us being really unsatisfied with the answers.

Peter McCormack: So you didn't have Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society?!

Perianne Boring: No, not in the public school system here in Florida, definitely not.

Peter McCormack: That's what I imagine it's always like here.  Okay, so you completed university?

Perianne Boring: I did graduate from college, the only one of my siblings that graduated from high school!

Peter McCormack: I'm the only one who dropped out! 

Perianne Boring: All right!  So, senior year, did this study of what's happening in the economy, was introduced to Congressman, Dr Ron Paul, who was running for President, and what I learned on that independent journey of what happened in the financial system, what's going on in the economy, how does our economy work, I was very upset.  And I really did not feel like the world we were living in represented the values that I was taught in my public school education and I wanted to fight for something better.

So, I applied to be a White House intern.  I was the only person in the State of Florida that interned in the White House that term I was there.  And after that, I went to Capitol Hill and worked on the Hill, and I was fighting for a better economic and financial future; that's what I decided I wanted to do with my life, I was going to advocate for better economic policy, and I'm still on that journey today.  For the first several years, it was looking at, how do we get to more sound money policies?  And on that journey, I learned about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: So, would this have been under Obama?

Perianne Boring: I interned at the White House when Obama was President.

Peter McCormack: So, when you interned at the White House, are you actually working inside the White House; help me understand?

Perianne Boring: Yeah, so you're in the Executive Office.  Of course, in terms of the physical buildings, there's lots of buildings beyond just that one White House where the Oval Office is.

Peter McCormack: I know, yeah.

Perianne Boring: But you're ingrained into -- part of what they teach you when you get to intern at the White House is how the White House works, and there are a lot of different offices, from the National Economic Council, the Office of Science and Technology Policy; that's the paper that Nic did, so that office.  You have an advanced team who helps organise the schedule.  There are all these offices and then you get to rotate through a couple of them.

Peter McCormack: And were you pro-Obama when he came in, because you're from a red state?

Perianne Boring: I did not come from a political family.  I would say at that time, I probably would not have been able to truly define how I would identify politically.  Today, I am a solid libertarian.  I'm like a Ron Paul libertarian, which is neither a Democrat or a Republican.

Peter McCormack: You can be mildly Republican; there are some synergies between some of the ideas of the Republicans.

Perianne Boring: But it also has synergies on both sides, so libertarian takes pieces of Democrat politics and Republican politics.

Peter McCormack: Actually in fairness, Lyn Alden's tweet thread the other day is probably a fair representation of that.  Yeah, okay.  And when you were working there, did you become sceptical that any change could happen, or did you manage to actually achieve anything that you hoped you would achieve?

Perianne Boring: When I was interning, granted you're an intern, so you're just barely at the top of the iceberg in terms of what you get to do in the couple of months that you're there.  I would say though that one of the most important things I took from that experience, as someone who grew up in central Florida, from a middle-class family, worked for the things that I had, had a lot of great opportunities though, have been incredibly fortunate in my life; but being able to meet the first African-American President of the United States and I had the opportunity to shake President Obama's hand and have a conversation with him, in that moment my biggest takeaway was that you can do anything you set your mind to in this world and in this country.  If he could become the President of the United States, then me, a girl from central Florida, then I can change the world too.  So, that's still the journey that I'm on today, and today I'm dedicated to doing that through Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think that's a uniquely interesting thing about America and I don't know what it is or why it works, but everything me and Danny have built with this podcast, the entirety of it happened in the US.  We've built this successful career in the US; I go back to the UK and no one gives a fuck!  I've had no success in the UK, you haven't had any in Australia, but we come here and there's -- and I think what it is, is in the US, people celebrate success and they want you to win, but they want to win alongside you.  I think somewhere like the UK, people kind of slightly resent winning and they want to crush you and then beat you; it is weird!  But we do it with a really nice smile, we're really civil about it!

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I think that may be the socialist influence in the economy and the culture, and it's probably more the EU than the UK, although I would say the UK has more socialist policies than the United States; EU more so than the UK.  But that is one of my pet peeves when I'm debating policy with people and you have these folks who are saying, "We should just socialise everything and have the government just take care of everything".  I'm like, "That is socialism, and if you're pro-socialism, go live in Paris, go live in this beautiful city and go live that socialist lifestyle, but that's not what America was founded on".

Peter McCormack: But democracy should allow change.

Perianne Boring: It should allow change, but with limited government influence.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  I've now experienced the healthcare system in both countries.  Can I tell you the differences I noticed; we should probably tell people what happened?

Perianne Boring: All right, let's have a healthcare debate.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, we're not going to have a debate because I'm a terrible debater.  But just so people know, you and I were meant to record an interview yesterday and I had to postpone it because I have a thing, I've talked about it on the show before, I have these SVTs.  I'm not sure if it's a condition, but basically my heart just goes a little bit crazy sometimes, and about once a year I have to go to hospital when it happens, just to check that I'm not having a heart attack and dying.  We had one yesterday and I was sat there getting these chest pains.  I said to Danny and then suddenly I deteriorated very quickly.  My lips went cold, I started trembling, so it was like, "Shit, we need to go to hospital".

I'm used to this, so I'm not thinking -- like the first time it ever happened, I thought I was having a heart attack; it was eight years ago.  Now I'm like, "Fuck, it's another one of these".  One day it will actually be a heart attack and that will be the end of the show!

Danny Knowles: And you'll go, "Oh, I'll be fine"!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you'll turn up and it will be Danny interviewing you!

Perianne Boring: I actually told that to Danny yesterday, I was like, "Well, you can interview me", and he was like, "Yeah, no"!

Danny Knowles: If I could use the cameras, we would have been on!

Peter McCormack: Actually, it's funny, because me and Jeremy were sat there in the hospital and we actually had that conversation, because there is a conversation; me and Danny have a plan.  If anything should happen to me, what happens to the show?  It is an asset which has value, therefore my children have an inheritance.  Obviously, my son or daughter are not going to present the show, although Scarlet would be pretty fucking awesome.

Danny Knowles: She'd be good.

Peter McCormack: So, we've often talked about who would take over, and we've suggested names who could be offered the slot and host the show.  But actually, Danny's now the natural successor because he's now part of the show.  Me and Jeremy had that conversation and said, "Actually, it would be a different show, it would be a little bit more intelligent".  Danny's better on the financial side than me.

Perianne Boring: "What Danny Does"!

Danny Knowles: I've been trying to poison him for ages!

Peter McCormack: But Danny isn't as funny, so it would be a bit more dry!  But anyway, so I'm in hospital and obviously I'm facing the reality of like, "Okay, I'm going to have to get a bill here".  Firstly I'm like, "Shit, did I get travel insurance?  I think I've got travel insurance".  So what happens is, in both scenarios, you turn up, you spend a lot of time waiting, they know most people coming in with chest pains these days aren't a heart attack.  If you're having a heart attack, you are actually having a heart attack and you need resuscitation.  Most people coming in with chest pains aren't -- some are early stage, but aren't having a heart attack. 

So, they make you sit around and you get an ECG; they call it an EKG in American hospitals, even though in medical training they call it an ECG.  Suddenly when you're in hospital, they call it an EKG.  So they strap you up, they do a blood test and then this is where the differences happen.  The blood test in the UK, they take three vials of blood.  In the US, they took seven vials of blood.  In the UK, you sit and wait for your blood test.  You have your ECG, the doctor says, "What's going on in your life?" and then you go home.

But here, I was given paracetamol and I was given nitroglycerine, was it, Jeremy?  And I said, "So, in the UK, I'm not given this", and she said, "Yes".  And funnily enough, she was from Manchester; did he tell you that?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, Jeremy told me.

Peter McCormack: And she said, "Yeah, the difference here is people sue you if you get things wrong".  I was like, "Oh, okay".  And then when I leave the UK, you just go, whereas here they gave me a whole pack, and then obviously you get a bill here.  So the differences are, I think because our system's socialist, they want to give you the minimum to save cost; whereas in the US, because you have to pay for medical care, I think they want to give you more stuff so they can raise the bill.

Perianne Boring: Raise the bill and also reduce the risk of litigation; we are a very litigious culture, that is true and that is not a good thing.

Danny Knowles: From the outside as well, the place was pretty gross.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I actually asked Jeremy that.  I said to Jeremy, "Is this a typical hospital?" and he said, "No, this is a bit more run-down", but it was way more run-down than any hospital I've been to in the UK, which surprised me, because my picture of America is you're paying for medical care, I assumed they'd all be like some spa hotel, very clean.

Perianne Boring: You have to pay extra for that.  You have to make a big donation and get a wing built in your name for that!

Peter McCormack: But generally speaking, the hospitals look the same, feel the same, have the same staffing issues, have the same response times.  Everything feels almost exactly the same, but the money changes the incentives.  We're trying to cut costs in the UK, America's trying to make money, and that's another interesting thing.  When you go to a spa, you go for a massage, get your nails done, you look at the menu and you get a price list.  When you have medical treatment, you just get a bill at the end.  You can't say, "I don't want the blood test".  I still don't know how much my bill's going to be.  I assume it's going to be about $1,000, but it could be $5,000.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, so I was in the White House the day the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, and I was there for all of the campaign work that went to get that bill passed.  So, our healthcare system, it's not a free market healthcare system, it is a blend of heavy funding from government and private sector, so we're kind of in the middle.

Peter McCormack: The worst of both.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, you get the worst of both.  Actually, after that was done, I thought about going into medical school, because I said, "Our healthcare system is broken and it would be good to have a doctor in the family", but it's not really my interest or my field of study.  But our medical system is absolutely broken.

Peter McCormack: I also think ours is broken.  But the things that stand out to me are that when I'm in the UK and I have one of my SVTs, I go to hospital, I wait and I go home.  I have travel insurance here, but if I didn't have insurance and I wasn't particularly financially secure, I could see a scenario where I go, "I don't want that $1,000 bill, so I'm just going to stay at home and breathe and meditate, or whatever I need to calm myself down", but there may come a time when one of those SVTs is not an SVT and I have a heart attack.  So, that thing I don't like, and this is just a blood test and an ECG; there are obviously other things that are particularly more expensive.

As antithetical as this is to Bitcoin and as much as it triggers some people who are bitcoiners, I do like the fact that in the UK, anyone, whoever you are, wherever you are, you can go and get medical treatment.  I think our system is broken in that there are people who can afford to pay for private medical and they should, because private medical care in the UK is amazing, it's unbelievably good, and it's cheaper than health insurance in the US.  I also think there are lots of inefficiencies, but that's the part of socialism I like, is medical care for all; because I think of a country as its resources, and some people have had a chronological benefit to accessing early resources.

My kids will have to worry about money less than me because of my work, and my parents too.  There is a chronological benefit, there is luck, there's all these different factors, but we all build our success off the same set of resources.  I do like the idea that people get universal healthcare, and I'm sure you don't!

Perianne Boring: I'm not going to advocate for socialist policies.  I mean, that has been one of the biggest debates here in the United States of my generation.

Peter McCormack: What do you think the perfect system is?

Perianne Boring: I'm always an advocate of limited government.  I think the government's role really should be limited to basically defence, protecting the borders, protecting our communities, having a solid rule of law.

Peter McCormack: Because…?

Perianne Boring: Because the private sector, the free market, is going to be more efficient than bureaucrats planning anything or running anything.

Peter McCormack: There is that trade-off though between efficiency of private institutions and then the warped incentives of private institutions, private companies.  So, whereas a company who is particularly more efficient, I always bring up the example of Dupont, the classic case of Dupont, the company that poisoned the waters that led to the cancers and deaths to a lot of people within their communities because they were just a greedy corporation.  Now, I'm kind of with you, I think we should have much more smaller and limited government and their role is to protect communities; I think healthcare is protecting your community.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, and we haven't really had this probably since the founding of the United States, because you're constantly getting more government influence as time goes on in different industries and different businesses; but I don't think we would have these big businesses, these companies that are too big to fail, or get to a point where they can cause systemic risk, unless they have backing and influence by the government, unless they have regulatory capture, unless they have special agreements with the government to maybe share your information, share your data, provide surveillance of its users, in exchange for being able to grow and become bigger and make more money for shareholders. 

So, that's the crony capitalism, which is very much where we are today in the United States, and that's not the answer and that's certainly not what I'm advocating for.  I think if you go back to a true, free market economy, we would have more community-driven businesses, because businesses are going to be incentivised to do the best for the people around them, for the people that they serve.  And it's really hard to do that en masse, so I think you have more communities of businesses and I think that's also led to the degradation of a lot of our morals as a society.

Peter McCormack: I actually agree with you a lot.  I think you could rename it Pelosi Capitalism, rather than Crony Capitalism!

Perianne Boring: No, this is like Ron Paul Capitalism.

Peter McCormack: No, I'm being sarcastic!  But no, I can agree with you because there's loads of examples you can see.  You can see the benefits that Amazon has when they try to negotiate preferential tax treatment because of the creation of jobs, which ends up eroding the local businesses there, which they can destroy.  I completely agree with you, you saw it all during COVID, where large-scale companies could very quickly put in systems and ordering procedures to allow them to operate during COVID, whereas small mom-and-pop businesses couldn't; we saw so many collapse.

Perianne Boring: In so many industries we have so many oligopolies, where just a couple of very large businesses control everything, you don't have the small community-driven businesses. 

Peter McCormack: And we're also seeing the insidious influence, I mean we saw everything yesterday with PayPal; did you see that?

Perianne Boring: I did.

Peter McCormack: I saw a really great tweet where somebody was saying, "I'm going to be closing my PayPal account.  You don't get to tell me what I can say, you don't get to steal my money, we're not China".  It was a very good tweet, I completely empathise with you.  I think I'm becoming more libertarian over time, it's just that in the UK, we don't have a culture of libertarianism.  It's not something I'd ever heard.

Perianne Boring: Well, it's a very small culture here in the United States.  I mean, when I worked on Capitol Hill, I felt like a total freak as somebody who was saying we've got to do something about -- 15 years ago, I was walking the halls of Congress trying to get people to coalesce around, "We've got to do something about inflation".  Nobody gave a shit about inflation; I was like a pariah, people were like, "You are freaking nuts!"

Today, according to one of the last CNN polls, inflation is the number one issue for American voters today; it's inflation.  It happens very, very quickly and once it gets out of control, it's really hard to rein that back in.  So, I think this libertarian idea of getting government out of everything is something that has maybe become more popular.  But I don't know, I know there was a lot of setback during the last election, when you saw all these young people get behind Bernie Sanders who, I would argue, was the socialist candidate, but I think a lot of the young people were like, "He wants to get rid of all my student loan debt, so that's good for me, I'm going to vote for that", but that's the complete opposite of libertarian; so, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I think what the difference is as well, freedom is a very important word for Americans, it's not something we discuss in the UK.

Danny Knowles: It's not the same.

Peter McCormack: Not in the same way.  But Americas will often talk about their freedoms being eroded, politicians will.  We don't really tend to talk like that, we tend to talk more about togetherness.  We're collectivists.

Danny Knowles: I think we should talk about it more though.

Peter McCormack: No, we should, we absolutely should.

Perianne Boring: Well, the people who cared about it left and came here generations ago.  So, the people who are still there, that's the families of the people who fought against that concept.  So, I think that that makes sense.

Peter McCormack: But also when you talk about it, you come across as a psycho.  My friends think I'm a psycho.  I had a massive argument one Christmas with my brother talking about some of these issues.  They think I'm a conspiracy --

Perianne Boring: Well, that was me working on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, talking about inflation.

Peter McCormack: Well, imagine the leap.  The people who listen to my show, the Americans, they think I'm a libtard; and then in the UK, my friends think I'm a psycho conspiracy theorist.  So, imagine the leap to go from one to the other!

Perianne Boring: I get it!

Peter McCormack: I'm walking this middle line, trying to get the people of the show not to hate me and think I'm a massive socialist, whilst at the same time trying to orange pill people who they really would have an issue with, and walking that line from one to the other is very difficult.

Perianne Boring: So, after leaving the Hill and then becoming an advocate for Bitcoin, and going back to a lot of my old friends who were still on the Hill and saying, "Hey, would love to talk about Bitcoin with you, I definitely felt like a psycho back in 2013, 2014, where everyone's like, "Okay, I heard about Bitcoin, I heard about these meetups; what are you guys really doing; are you okay; what's going on?"

Peter McCormack: "Are you in a cult?"!

Perianne Boring: Maybe, a little bit.

Peter McCormack: So, the bitcoiners were right, let's just be very fair about this.  I think we can say objectively, they were right.  They've been talking about inflation for a long time, way before these transitory 8%, 9%, 10% --

Perianne Boring: Yeah, decades before it showed up in a CNN poll.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and then here it is.  We have very high inflation, we have a lot of issues in the economy.  I mean, Bitcoin was born in the 2008 Financial Crisis, we know what Satoshi wrote in the Genesis Block and we know that everything's happened since, and they all predicted it.  So, what I would ask you is, there is being right theoretically, but then there's also believing that a system built on Bitcoin will actually fix these systems; do you believe both?

Perianne Boring: So, I believe this technology can address many of the systemic issues in our global financial and our monetary system today, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Great.

Perianne Boring: I mean, at its core, I think Keynesian Economics is evil.

Peter McCormack: Agreed.

Perianne Boring: This is another thing that really upset me as I was learning about economics, understanding how these things work.  Inflation is theft, make no mistake, it is the government stealing from you, from its people.  And if you think about that, what is money to most people who work for wages, just normal people, not the super-rich?  You work, you get a paycheque, you put it in your bank account and then the government prints more money, so the money in your bank account that represents the hours you worked is being taken from you.

Peter McCormack: Money is purchasing power.

Perianne Boring: It's almost a form of slavery.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  You work to earn money to buy stuff.

Perianne Boring: And then they take your money from you.  It's like taking your work from you, because you can't get that time back.

Peter McCormack: Well, they double dip, so they tax you.

Perianne Boring: They tax you too, yeah.

Peter McCormack: They tax you and then they shadow tax you.  No, I completely agree.

Perianne Boring: When we talk about inflation today, and I wrote an article about this eight years ago about when we say, "What is inflation?"  So, when the Fed says inflation rate is whatever percent this month or this quarter, they're talking about the CPI, the Consumer Price Index.  So, when I worked on the Hill, I actually had the opportunity, I was like, "All right, I'm going to figure out what this CPI thing is, because it sounds like BS, because when you're in school, they teach you inflation is the supply of money, how much money is in circulation.

The Feds printed what, like 40% more money in the past couple of years since COVID, so I would argue inflation is more like 40+%, but the government will say, "No, it's 4%, 6% or 8%", I mean it's changing, but we've been in that range for the past couple of years.  So, the CPI is just a basket of consumer goods that people purchase, and it's a very, very big basket of stuff, it's all sorts of stuff.  It's a lot of food and groceries and commodities, things consumers buy.  

I sat down with a statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask some questions like, "What is the formula" and it's actually not publicly available.  They won't even make it available for Members of Congress and their staff.

Peter McCormack: Why is that?

Perianne Boring: I didn't get an answer on that!  And then if you also look over a period of time at the goods, as things like beef get more expensive, so previously it was a more premium cut of beef, is what would be used in the formula; and then they would change it to a lesser costly cut of beef, like crown beef.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's two ways of looking at that.  You could say they've done that because they want to reduce the impact of the inflationary figures on their calculation; or you could say they've priced people out of the premium cut now so they can't use it?

Perianne Boring: Well, we don't know because the public doesn't have the opportunity to look at these formulas to really understand that.  But there are definitely a lot of tools that they have to make the numbers more favourable, or to manipulate the numbers.  So, it's really important, I think, just for normal people, people who don't have the opportunity to spend hundreds of hours reading and studying Austrian Economics, just to know basic things about, "Well, what exactly is inflation?  How am I subjected to it?  How do I protect myself from that?  How do I plan for my future?" and I think that is the opportunity of Bitcoin, because it is a way to protect yourself from that type of government influence and our money, which is something that, at the end of the day, it's your work.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, we've just made a film about inflation.  Me and Danny sat down the other day to write the script for the monologues over the top, and one of the things we talked about is, "Inflation is personal".  There is no formula that can explain it, or can calculate inflation for everyone, and it's a pointless number.  What you spend your money on is entirely different from what I spend my money on.  And actually, this is where it should get quite easy, because you should be able to create the list of things you buy, how much you spend on rent, your car, food, you should be able to put that in and then calculate what your personal inflation number is; that should be very easy.

I think we would all probably expect that to come in at around 20% now, perhaps, in the last year, and I think that's what we need, is your personal inflation number.  And this is what Eric Weinstein was talking about for a long time to us.  He's like, "Inflation is personal".

Perianne Boring: It is, that's an interesting idea, people sharing that.  Actually, I saw a tweet not that long ago from a business owner in the EU, it was a restaurant owner, and they said their electric bill was double what it was the month before.

Peter McCormack: That's lucky.

Perianne Boring: That's kind of a different issue, the whole energy thing, that's a whole other conversation.

Peter McCormack: There's way worse ones than that.  There was one lady who put up a thing, and her energy bill had gone from -- the café had gone from 10,000 to 58,000 or something?

Perianne Boring: You have to close your doors, you can't pay your power bill.

Peter McCormack: There are many, many people in the UK who have closed their businesses because they cannot pay their electricity bill; they cannot afford to make their goods.

Perianne Boring: And I think that is one signal of the things that are to come.  I think that we're at the very, very beginning of our economic calamities globally, which is why what we're talking about, what we do is just so important for this time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I need to read that Dylan LeClair article.  He's talking about unwinding the greatest bubble in history, and that's essentially what's happening.  I mean, you are right, the energy thing is different.  The energy problem in the UK, Danny's not experiencing that in Australia, you're not experiencing the same here.  I mean, I know there are energy problems, but I mean ours in Europe are an absolute crisis, but that is due to lack of --

Perianne Boring: Bigger issues, yeah, it's a bigger set of issues.  But it's still a result of central economic planning.

Peter McCormack: And a bit more than that.  Yes, central economic planning because we don't have energy sovereignty in the UK anymore; but also, geopolitics has played into it.  But it still comes down to fucking government!  I am becoming a libertarian!  We should talk about your paper.  That was a long lead up to that.  It took about an hour to get to that, that was fantastic.  I could talk about that stuff all day, by the way.

Perianne Boring: The intro was an hour?  Wow, okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean some of the interviews are usually an hour.  So, you've worked on this paper.  Can I pull you up on one thing?

Perianne Boring: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Why use the term "crypto", The Crypto Conundrum?

Perianne Boring: As opposed to Bitcoin?  Well, just to make it relevant to a larger group of people.  I mean, this paper was written for policymakers, so to them --

Peter McCormack: They don't see the difference.

Perianne Boring: Well, I think most understand the difference between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but many of them don't, they just loop it all in the same bucket.

Peter McCormack: Actually, Gensler does, he's one of the few people who does understand the difference.  Okay, just so people understand, because you work for the Chamber of Digital Commerce, or you run the Chamber of Digital Commerce?

Perianne Boring: I'm the Founder and CEO.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, explain what they do; who they are and what they do.

Perianne Boring: So, the Chamber of Digital Commerce, we were founded in 2014.  We're the industry's first advocacy organisation for Bitcoin digital assets and blockchain technologies.  We represent about 200 companies across the industry.  We are a non-profit, we're headquartered in Washington DC and we're the advocates for this technology in our nation's capital.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so people who listen to this show, it's What Bitcoin Did; it's not What Blockchain Did and not What Crypto Did.  You know what they're going to say because you've probably had the same arguments and criticisms, etc.  And then as a libertarian, I would say, why are you focusing on anything outside of Bitcoin; why are you advocating for blockchain and crypto, because Bitcoin is the thing that can fundamentally make the difference here; crypto and blockchain isn't, I would argue?

Perianne Boring: Well, I would argue the free market should decide that.  So, the laws and the regulations governing Bitcoin and other digital assets, the laws aren't written -- I mean, if you look at the images, for example, in 2013 it was FinCEN who wrote the first guidance for Bitcoin and it didn't use the word "Bitcoin", it used the term "convertible virtual currencies", which would encompass Bitcoin and other digital assets.  So, I mean our position is technology-neutral.  I mean, I'm a huge Bitcoin believer, the majority of my net worth is in Bitcoin.  I am a Bitcoin maximalist at heart, but I'm a free market person at heart too.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's fair.

Perianne Boring: So, I don't think it's the Chamber's role to pick which cryptocurrencies are going to be the winners and losers.  Our job is to make sure we have a legal development that allows for the further development and investment in use of this technology in the United States, and then consumers can decide where they want to put their money.

Peter McCormack: Do you own any shitcoins?

Perianne Boring: I have --

Peter McCormack: That's a yes!

Perianne Boring: I have a small amount of other things.  I've got a little bit of Ethereum.

Peter McCormack: I've got 0.25 ETH.

Perianne Boring: 0.25 ETH?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, someone sent it to me and I've just never done anything with it.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I mean I watch it pretty closely, because when you -- I think Bitcoin is different than every other cryptocurrency.  Bitcoin's in its own bucket, Bitcoin's application is a store of value, and I think in terms of -- I mean, there's been a lot of cryptocurrencies who have tried to compete with Bitcoin to be the dominant store of value application.  Bitcoin is one and we know that.  20 years, 100 years, 500 years from now, Bitcoin is the store of value.

So, when you look at Ethereum, Ethereum was built to be a smart contracts platform, but there is a lot of competition there with Avalanche and Polkadot, Solana and many others.  I think we will have a dominant smart contracts system.  Will it be Ethereum; will it be something else?  We don't know.

Peter McCormack: So, you're an advocacy group and I guess the work you're doing, do you consider yourselves similar to Bitcoin Policy Institute and all these other people who are trying to ensure there's accurate information that gets to policymakers, rather than the bullshit we see in the mainstream media?

Perianne Boring: Oh my gosh, there's so much FUD, it's so bad.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's terrible.

Perianne Boring: We launched in 2014, so we were the first group here in the United States to operate and be advocates for this technology.  2013 was the year that the idea for the Chamber came together.  We were coming off of Silk Road and Mt. Gox, and there were three hearings on Capitol Hill in 2013 about Bitcoin and Silk Road, looking at the illicit finance issues related to Bitcoin.  And most people in Washington just thought that Bitcoin was the currency of choice for criminals; that was its only use case, was to buy drugs, it will never amount to anything more than that; or, it was dead because Mt. Gox collapsed, and that was some of the headlines back then, "Bitcoin broke, it was a hack, it was dead".  It was like, "No, this was an exchange, it's not the technology itself".

So, there were a lot of misconceptions, there was a lot of misinformation.  So, when we launched in 2014, we were addressing a lot of those early narrative issues, and today they've evolved and they're a lot more complex.  The biggest one we're looking at now is the ESG garbage, of how this impacts climate issues.  We argue it doesn't, but to me, as someone who worked on Capitol Hill, as someone who has been in DC my entire career, it's really important that we have industry professionals on the ground, serving as a resource to our policymakers so they're being educated by us, by people who know the technology, who work on the technology, not the media or not other groups who may have different incentives.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you decided to write a paper on why the SEC has not approved an ETF yet, something that has come up a lot.  And actually, bitcoiners have mixed feelings on this.  Some people absolutely don't give a shit about an ETF, don't want it; some people do.  One side of the argument is that an ETF would open up the opportunity for more people to have exposure to Bitcoin; other people would argue that it breaks some of the founding principles of how you should interact with Bitcoin.  Why did you decide to write this paper; what was it that appealed to you in writing this?

Perianne Boring: When you listen to the detractors of Bitcoin in Washington, a lot of them are saying, "We need more investor protections, we need more consumer protections.  This technology is dangerous, there are so many scams and we're not going to support the growth of this technology until there's better investor protections and better consumer protections in place".  So, I think the whole spot Bitcoin ETF debate really exposes that Washington double speak; because if you were really someone who wants to see better protections for the millions of people who own Bitcoin in America today, the easiest way, the best way to provide those investor protections is to allow retail investors to have access to a regulated product, which is the spot Bitcoin ETF.

So, if you're saying, "We want investor protections", but then you block the means of getting there…

Peter McCormack: Why do you think they've allowed future ETFs but not spot ETFs?

Perianne Boring: Well, it's not logic and reason, I can tell you that.  There are a lot of conspiracy theories that have shown up on my feed over the past month or so since we've released the paper, and it's hard to say why.  I mean, some of the conspiracies or theories that I've read are that the SEC knows what this would do for Bitcoin.  I believe when we do get a Bitcoin ETF, and I say "when" because it's inevitable we will, it's just when, it's going to open up potentially trillions of dollars of buying power on Bitcoin, because you have all the money that's sitting in brokerages under the financial advisors, a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

Peter McCormack: A wall of money.

Perianne Boring: There's a lot of pent-up demand for exposure to Bitcoin through the brokerage, and we know that because there are many other ways people are getting indirect exposure to Bitcoin today, by buying things like shares of MicroStrategy, which is indirectly a way to get exposure to Bitcoin; or buying the Bitcoin mining indexes; or GBTC; or other indirect ways to get exposure to Bitcoin.  So, I think the SEC knows that this would take Bitcoin to a whole new level of adoption and they're blocking it.

Peter McCormack: So, they're politicking?

Perianne Boring: It is absolutely politics.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so Gary Gensler's an interesting character.  He showed up as somebody who was educating people on blockchain.  Was it at MIT, he had a course?

Perianne Boring: Yes, he was a professor at MIT.

Peter McCormack: So, he turns up at the SEC, somebody who seems to clearly understand Bitcoin, and clearly understands the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Perianne Boring: Oh yes, absolutely, he is very smart.  He does understand this at a technical level.

Peter McCormack: And the assumption is, without knowing, that he has some bags of Bitcoin, I assume.  And he joins the SEC with a very pro-Bitcoin Hester Peirce, who I think is a real ally to the industry in a fair way.  I believe, having interviewed her and spent time with her, her belief is that she understands what freedom means for Americans, so she sees Bitcoin as a freedom technology and she believes they should have access to it.

Then, everything I see from Gensler, one individual who's holding back the free choice of people to buy and have access to a Bitcoin ETF, is based entirely on his career aspirations.  That's my outside observations of his character.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, maybe.  So, he was asked under congressional testimony earlier this year, in Senate Banking by Senator Toomey, who's the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, "Why don't we have one?"  He was asked a question about Bitcoin ETFs.  And his response was, and this is not verbatim, but he said he wants to have oversight of the Bitcoin markets, and if he had that, he'd be more comfortable with moving forward with the Bitcoin ETF.

So, first off, Bitcoin is a commodity.  Chairman Gensler has said that as well, so he agrees Bitcoin is a commodity, under the CFTC's jurisdiction, a different agency.  So, he's saying he wants jurisdiction over this.

Peter McCormack: So, he wants the exchanges regulated under the SEC?

Perianne Boring: Yes.  And only Congress can really give him the authority to do that.

Peter McCormack: What's the complexity there, in that people have been very clear that Bitcoin is a commodity, but shitcoins are very clearly securities; and exchanges dealing in one commodity, like Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken --

Perianne Boring: Right, so they have Bitcoin plus other cryptocurrencies, so they have the registration regime --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a commodity, multiple securities; who's jurisdiction; is it multiple jurisdictions?

Perianne Boring: Yeah, so I've had the opportunity to meet directly with Chairman Gensler just in the past couple of months, as well Chairman Behnam, the Chair of the CFTC.  I had the opportunity to ask them privately and directly some of the conflicting statements between the two agencies, where Chairman Gensler has said Bitcoin is a commodity, but he thinks everything else is a security; and then CFTC Chairman Behnam has said Bitcoin and Ethereum are commodities, and then there's many other cryptocurrencies that are also commodities, without specifically naming them.

So, I asked Chairman Gensler, "How does the private sector navigate this when you look at exchanges who have the listing of multiple tokens?  They're getting different statements from two different regulators; how do you move forward?" and this is one of the most I think important regulatory debates for the industry happening in Washington today.  And it's clear that the way the exchanges are regulated today is going to change.

Peter McCormack: How; how do you think it's going to change?

Perianne Boring: So, what I understand to be, and I can't speak for Chairman Gary Gensler, but what I understand to be his agenda, well he has said multiple times that the exchanges need to come in and register.  But then you ask, "Well, register as what, because they're not ATSs, they're not national securities exchanges, so how do they register; what do they register as?"

I believe he is working on building a whole new type of registration for crypto exchanges, crypto markets, that will have -- and he outlined this the last time he testified in Senate Banking just a couple of weeks ago.  He talked about this dual licensing, where you would be registered with both the CFTC and the SEC.  So, a lot of this is what is being built today in Washington, and there's going to be winners and losers in this process.

Peter McCormack: What does the registration mean; what is it that he's trying to achieve with these registrations?

Perianne Boring: So, if you're registered as some type of exchange, an ATS, a national securities exchange, a crypto market, you're under the SEC's jurisdiction.  So that means that everything listed on your exchange has to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  So, you're subject to the full disclosure regime as well as other laws and regulations.  It's the whole SEC regulatory framework.

Peter McCormack: Do you think the security frameworks are helpful, or do you think we've moved on?  Because, the SEC rules, or the creation of securities goes back like 100 years, I don't know, you'll better than me?

Perianne Boring: Yeah, almost a century.

Peter McCormack: Are they fit for purpose now; what purpose do they serve?  Is this just investor protection and do we need protection?  I mean, as a libertarian, I assume you say no?

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I mean from a philosophical perspective, I think we need a solid rule of law.  And I think when it comes to making investments, the individual should be responsible for how they decide to invest their money.  I don't think the government should be involved in steering people in a direction of what to invest in or not; I think that's a personal decision that needs to lie with the individual.  But in order for the individual to have a fair way of doing that, you need a strong rule of law.  So, if you have bad actors or you have people who are lying or committing fraud, we need a way to apprehend them, we need to get that out of the system.  So, enforcement is important.

Then, you also need fair disclosures.  So, when you're investing in a company or something else, I think it's important that you know everything about that company before you make the investment so you can make an informed decision.  So, that's part of the SEC's purpose, and we detail that in the paper.  We go into the 1934 Act; so you have the 1933 Act and then the 1934 Act.

The 1934 Act details the role of the SEC and at its foundation, the SEC is a disclosure regulator, as opposed to a merit regulator.  So, a disclosure regulator, meaning the SEC is not picking the winners and losers, they're not going through all the different things that investors want to bring to the public markets and say, "Okay, we like this Bitcoin thing, but we don't like this Ethereum thing, so you get to go forward and you don't".  That's not how the SEC was designed by Congress.  Again, they get their authority from Congress.  Everyone is subject to the same disclosure regime, so the investor meets the disclosure requirements.  Then the public is to decide what they want to invest in.

So, the spot Bitcoin ETF is one example where the SEC is acting as a merit regulator, so they're operating outside of their mandate, outside of their jurisdiction, and it's important that Congress reins this in; because if this keeps going, if they continue to act as a merit regulator, this could have implications for the entire capital market, not just Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so in terms of Grayscale, I know there's been lots of applications for ETFs, but Grayscale and Barry Silbert has been very clear that he is suing the SEC.  What's the status of their application; and is there any historical precedent where the SEC has been sued before and lost?

Perianne Boring: Their ETF was denied, so both Grayscale and Bitwise had spot Bitcoin ETF applications that were denied this summer.  There's a lot of history there and that's what we detail in the paper.  But Grayscale has appealed the denial, so it is going to court.  It's probably going to be a long process, it's literally just getting started, but ultimately the courts will decide if this goes forward or not, if Grayscale gets to convert into an ETF.

But they're appealing on two grounds: one is a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, so the SEC is acting arbitrarily and capricious, so they're picking winners and losers, they're acting as a merit regulator not a disclosure regulator.  The Administrative Procedures Act are the laws that apply to the agencies, to the regulators themselves.  You have to follow a certain process to operate, or to bring new regulations, or new laws onto industry.  So, I find it kind of interesting that the regulators are being alleged of not following the rules that apply to them as they are trying to put new rules on all of us.

Then the other piece that Grayscale is appealing on is Discrimination of Issuers, in that they're treating the Bitcoin ETF issuers different than other commodity ETF issuers.

Peter McCormack: Which goes back to our earlier point, that Bitcoin has constantly been set this higher bar in almost every area where it touches government?

Perianne Boring: Yes.  So, this is a very specific example of where Bitcoin is being held to a higher standard.  You mentioned Commissioner Hester Peirce, who I think served an incredibly important role at the SEC today, because she is who's calling out this bad behaviour.

Peter McCormack: Constantly calling it out!  What is it she said, I can't remember what she said, but whenever there's a decision where she disagrees, she puts out one of those --

Perianne Boring: A dissent.

Peter McCormack: A dissent, yes, "I dissent"; I love that.

Perianne Boring: Her dissent of Bitcoin ETFs, these denials, she has said, "We are holding this industry to a higher standard, so are we going to do this moving forward with all other ETFs or other asset classes?  What about everything that came before it?"  So, maybe I'll just walk through a little bit of the history of what exactly I'm talking about.

Peter McCormack: Yes, please do.

Perianne Boring: So, in 2013, that's when the first Bitcoin ETF application was submitted to the SEC and that was by the Winklevoss twins.  There's the timeline right there.  When that was denied --

Peter McCormack: It took four years to deny it?

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I guess so.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Perianne Boring: When it was denied, the SEC in their denial stated the concerns of market manipulation, that Bitcoin markets are subject to manipulation.  But in their denial, they outline the path forward and it said, "But if you had these surveillance-sharing contracts in place, then that would be a path to address our concern".

Peter McCormack: And in fairness, the markets were pretty manipulated back then, back in 2013; although, you could argue all markets are manipulated!

Perianne Boring: But is this the same way they're treating every other commodity ETF?

Peter McCormack: Well, that's what I'm saying.

Perianne Boring: It's not.

Peter McCormack: They probably are all manipulated.  But I just remember back in 2013, it was pretty obvious what was going on.

Perianne Boring: So, they wanted these surveillance-sharing contracts in place.  So, in 2017 is when the Bitcoin futures contracts were launched on the CME.

Peter McCormack: The top.

Perianne Boring: So, when the CME launched the futures contract, these surveillance-sharing agreements were in place, that infrastructure had been put in place.  So then the industry tried again after that to bring in an ETF to market.  So, they had met the standard that the SEC had laid out before and now they said, "Okay, we have these surveillance-sharing agreements in place, let's try again", and they got denied again, the industry got denied again.

In the next set of denials, and this is not verbatim, but basically they're saying, "Okay, you don't have to just have the infrastructure to address market manipulation, you have to essentially prove the market manipulation is not happening again".  No other industry has been told to do this.

Peter McCormack: "Here's the goalposts, we're just going to put them over here".

Perianne Boring: That's exactly right.  So then the SEC in their denials put forward the criteria of, "How do you address this issue of proving the market manipulation isn't happening?" and they said, "We want to see that price discovery is happening on the CME where the futures contracts trade, not on the spot exchanges", and there's five Bitcoin exchanges that make up the reference rate for the futures contracts: Kraken and Coinbase and three others.  They're detailed in the paper, I don't have them memorised.

Peter McCormack: Maybe Gemini?  Binance?

Perianne Boring: No, Binance is not.

Danny Knowles: Probably Bitfinex, I guess?

Perianne Boring: I don't remember, there's five of them.  So then the industry spent years developing the research to show where price discovery is happening.  Fidelity and Bitwise both conducted their own independent studies, and they were able to show, with empirical data, to a statistically significant basis, that price discovery happens on the CME, not on the spot exchanges, and there were nine reports that looked at the exact same thing.  One was an academic study, there was one that had a flaw; they're all in our report.

Peter McCormack: We will put it in the show notes so people can access them.

Perianne Boring: But all that information was provided to the SEC.  And then this year, Bitwise and Grayscale had their applications and they were denied, so the goalposts were moved again.

Peter McCormack: Because…?

Perianne Boring: The same, because of the concerns of market manipulation, is the inherent issue, the inherent concern.  And then, he already stated this, but Chairman Gensler was asked, under congressional testimony by Senator Toomey, why; and he said, "Now, I want to have jurisdiction over the Bitcoin exchanges", which the SEC doesn't have the authority to do that, only Congress can give the SEC the authority to do that, because they'd have to expand their jurisdiction.

Peter McCormack: Didn't Avik talk the other day to us about a new thing that was put in for the CFTC to have jurisdiction?

Perianne Boring: Of spot market oversight?  Yeah, a whole other conversation.  That's the Senate Ag Committee that's introduced that bill.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so it's very clear, do you think they don't want it to happen, or do you think Gensler is just trying to play power games?

Perianne Boring: Under the previous Chairman of Jay Clayton, so the companies, the issuers who had Bitcoin ETF applications, if you talk to them, they will tell you that they believed they were going to get their applications approved.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and Jay Clayton was engaging with the industry.  I mean, didn't he even come to consensus?

Perianne Boring: He was engaged, yeah.  So, the SEC was working very, very closely with the issuers.  They were on the final, final details of bringing these details to market, but then the administration changed.  And when Gensler took back the helm, the term some of the companies have used is, "The iron curtain came down", and they were no longer in communication with the SEC, and they no longer have a path forward.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what are the next steps, because you're saying this is inevitable; what do you think the steps are to getting a spot ETF approved?

Perianne Boring: Right now, it's going into two different directions.  There's the iron curtain at the SEC, and it seems pretty clear they're not going to move forward.  So now, it's going to the courts and it's going to Congress.  So, Grayscale is the first to initiate a legal action and the courts will weigh in.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, on that, how independent are the courts on these kinds of issue?  Are they politically influenced, or are they completely independent?

Perianne Boring: Well, they're supposed to be completely independent.

Peter McCormack: I'm aware of that but like I say, is there historical precedent with the SEC being sued and has anyone been successful?

Perianne Boring: I assume so.  I mean, I haven't documented every legal case against the SEC but in terms of our industry, I think in our industry that hasn't happened yet.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and then the other path is Congress?

Perianne Boring: All of the SEC's authority comes from Congress, so Congress could pass a law changing the direction that the SEC is taking.

Peter McCormack: Is there any action, are there any bills that are being considered for this?

Perianne Boring: We have shared this report today with 100 different members of Congress and we are getting bipartisan support across the aisles.

Peter McCormack: Great.

Perianne Boring: I have both Republican and Democrat members who have said they believe this is an injustice and they want a spot Bitcoin ETF to come to market.  So, there are pretty significant efforts brewing in Congress to bring oversight to the SEC and to get this to market as soon as possible.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there's any potential that a spot ETF for Bitcoin, while good for American investors, is potentially not good for Bitcoin?  Let me explain where I'm coming from with this.  A wall of money, as we've talked about, could come in for Bitcoin.  But ideally, Bitcoin is decentralised.  We want mining to be distributed around the world, but we also want ownership to be distributed around the world, we don't want large pockets of centralised Bitcoin.  Is it 40% of Bitcoin mining now is in the US?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Now, when 40% was in China, people talked about this a lot.  Now 40% is in the US, people are talking about it less.

Perianne Boring: I'm not sure it's that high.

Peter McCormack: I think it might be; can we find that out, Danny?  But either way…

Perianne Boring: You don't want centralised pockets of people holding other people's Bitcoin, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Also, if Bitcoin, as people believe, will be the future money of the world, I don't know the answer to this, but is there a risk not only to Bitcoin, but would it create a disparity --

Danny Knowles: So, Cambridge estimate it's 37%.

Perianne Boring: Okay, all right, as of December 2021.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it's probably higher now.  Is there a risk in that there is a disproportionate held by America, say 50%; I wouldn't even know what the concentrations of ownership are.  I wonder if you can find that out? 

Danny Knowles: Hard.

Peter McCormack: But if a wall of money came into the US, you could talk about a large, very significant percentage of Bitcoin is held by America by Americans or American institutions, and I wonder if that's ultimately good or it doesn't matter?  I don't know, I don't know the answer.

Perianne Boring: Well, the United States is the largest economy in the world today.  A lot of the world's wealth is here in the United States, so I think that's just more emblematic of how different economies are dispersed today.

Peter McCormack: But there are negative consequences for other nations; the high price of the dollar at the moment and the dollar being the global reserve currency, that causes problems for other countries, not just dollarised countries.

Perianne Boring: That's the exorbitant privilege.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is.  So, I just wondered if an ETF brought a wall of money, I don't know, there'll probably be some smarter people than me who can write in and understand this and say it doesn't matter.  But I just wonder if that creates some kind of disproportionate power?

Perianne Boring: If too many Americans hold Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Not too many Americans hold Bitcoin, but too much of the total amount of Bitcoin is held by -- I think every American should hold Bitcoin, but I want every Bangladeshi to hold Bitcoin and every Indian and every English person.

Danny Knowles: And I think the point is, it wouldn't be every American holding Bitcoin, it would be one company holding Bitcoin and everyone has exposure.

Peter McCormack: And who has that exposure; is it just rich people that are going to get that exposure?

Perianne Boring: Right.

Peter McCormack: We want to close the wealth divide.  One of the areas that I'm really interested in, we've been trying to introduce more progressives into our show because it doesn't matter whether you're conservative, libertarian or progressive, Bitcoin is getting exposed to a wider group of people, and a lot of FUD comes from the progressives, so we've been trying to get more progressives on the show to defeat the FUD.  And one of the areas that you can use is that actually progressives hate the wealth divide, they blame billionaires.  But what they don't understand is a lot of the policies they advocate for makes the wealth divide worse.

One of the things about Bitcoin is reducing the wealth divide, so ideally Bitcoin would reduce the wealth divide; but would an ETF be counterproductive to that, because it exposes -- who uses an ETF product; is it people with money already?

Perianne Boring: Well, it's retail investors, that's who this would benefit.  In my opinion, a spot Bitcoin ETF, the biggest benefit would be for the retail investor.

Peter McCormack: But what is the demographic of retail investors; is it middle class, is it middle to upper class? 

Perianne Boring: It's everyone that's not an accredited investor.

Peter McCormack: But who's in that retail class of "not accredited investor"?

Perianne Boring: Just the normal people.

Peter McCormack: But normal people could be anything from lower to middle --

Perianne Boring: Yeah, it's a mix.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I don't know that mix.

Perianne Boring: It's wage earners.  It's mostly people who have a job that comes with retirement benefits and 401(k)s.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that would be an interesting demographic to understand.

Perianne Boring: So, it could be everything from a schoolteacher that makes $30,000, $40,000 a year; it could be someone who --

Peter McCormack: But they can already buy Bitcoin.

Perianne Boring: They can, absolutely.  So, you can buy Bitcoin directly through going to an exchange, you can go to a famous Bitcoin meetup.  You don't need an ETF to buy Bitcoin.  But the challenge with that is, in order to understand how to safely navigate through an exchange to buy Bitcoin today, you have to do some research, and there's a lot of landmines out there, there's a lot of frauds in this space.  If you don't understand just how the technology works, like if you lose your keys, you're screwed.

So, for some people who want to go down that path to understand how this works, they should be able to buy Bitcoin directly and self-custody.  So, this is for everybody who's not willing to do that.  Or, a lot of people when they make investments, they do so through their financial advisors.  They have separate money that's set aside, it's their savings, it's what they invest to protect their purchasing power, and they have professionals who have a fiduciary responsibility to oversee those funds.  So, this opens up an opportunity for that money that's set aside in retirement funds, managed through brokerages, to invest that directly in Bitcoin.

If you want to buy Bitcoin today, you can't do it through your financial advisor.  If you go to your financial advisor and say, "I've been reading about Bitcoin and I want to allocate part of my savings to this, can you go and make that for me?" they say, "We can't help you with that, I can't even talk to you about it, I'm not allowed to".  They have to go and do that on their own.

Peter McCormack: But isn't that a good thing, that we encourage people to do the work, we encourage people to understand what Bitcoin is, to understand what a node is, to understand private keys?  If we make it too easy, do we potentially risk weakening Bitcoin?

Perianne Boring: I think in a strong and healthy economy, you have many options and you allow the individual to pick which option is most appropriate for them.

Peter McCormack: Come on, we're all lazy, we'll end up picking the easy option.

Perianne Boring: Well, not everybody.  I mean, you didn't, I didn't.

Peter McCormack: I didn't have a choice.

Perianne Boring: And, when it comes to spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States, we're behind because there are ETFs trading all over the world today.  So, the US typically is the first to bring new, innovative products to market.  But when it comes to Bitcoin, we're not.  And so, we have spot Bitcoin ETFs that are trading in Canada, in Germany, in Switzerland and many other places, and we can look at what those demographics look like.  And today, there have been no reported instances of hacks or thefts or things going wrong.

Peter McCormack: Oh no, I understand that, but at the same time, "not your keys, not your Bitcoin", thank you, Andreas, is a very important flag for Bitcoin. 

Perianne Boring: It is, I agree.

Peter McCormack: We talk about that a lot, we talk about managing your private keys.  Now look, I empathise with what you're saying.  My dad, there is zero chance he could buy, store and protect his private keys.  If you're listening, dad, I'm really sorry but you're rubbish!  He can barely use a remote control.  So, I get it.

Perianne Boring: But there are going to be people who either don't have the means, don't have the capabilities, or don't have the time or the interest.

Peter McCormack: But do you know the solution for my father?  It's that I do it for him and I manage his private keys.

Perianne Boring: But you can't manage everybody's private keys.

Peter McCormack: No, but I can do my father's, I manage my children's private keys, and they're gradually being educated and at some point, I'll hand their private keys to them.  But I'm only challenging you because this is what other people will bring up.  I see the benefits of both sides, but whilst we want to advocate for a strong economy and advocate for an expansion of Bitcoin, also we should be advocating for a strong, decentralised, robust Bitcoin and a community that manages its private keys.  And I worry that an ETF warps some of that.  And that is somebody knowing that my net wealth will take a massive leap if there's an ETF approved.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, well again, in a strong economy, you have lots of different options.  And that also includes lots of different Bitcoin ETF options.  I think it would be detrimental if you only had one, if only one company moved for it.  I think there's been 16 companies in the US, issuers, who have applied for a spot Bitcoin ETF, so you want many different options.  You want strong disclosures so investors can make those decisions, and this could be the first step for a lot of people.  It's like going and managing your own private keys; that's like swimming in the ocean.  A lot of people are afraid of the ocean, because they can't see, they don't know, but they're more comfortable getting in a swimming pool.

The Bitcoin spot ETF is like getting in a swimming pool.  You get comfortable with the water and then once you're comfortable and you start learning about it, then maybe they'll be more comfortable jumping in the ocean and managing their own private keys.  But I think it is important that we have many different options for many different ranges of people, because we're a very diverse economy.  And again, the government coming in and saying, "You can't have this [or] you can't have that", that's not the role of the regulator.

Peter McCormack: That's fair.

Perianne Boring: And we need to ensure that they are operating within their mandates and their authority, because if that goes unchecked, that can have significant consequences for society.

Peter McCormack: Being the first approved ETF has a massive advantage.

Perianne Boring: Absolutely.  We saw that with the Bitcoin futures ETFs.

Peter McCormack: I can't remember who the first one was, but I know that every one which followed it, when you compared the trading volumes, they were significantly --

Perianne Boring: It was over $1 billion.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, do you think when we finally get to the point where one is approved, they will have to approve them all at the same time?

Perianne Boring: I sincerely hope that the SEC has organised enough to have a fair process in place to say, "Okay, the industry's been working for a decade, there are 16 companies who have tried to do this, we need to come up with a process to ensure that we do this in a fair way and we don't create a Bitcoin ETF monopoly".

Peter McCormack: Because that is the risk.

Perianne Boring: So, one of our advisory board members is Paul Atkins, who was an SEC Commissioner.  And we had the opportunity to talk to him, and he was there when the first gold ETFs were brought to market.  It was a similar kind of situation, where there was one company who had been working for years to bring one to market, and then several years later there were a few more who went.  And just the way that the timelines worked out, it was one of those companies that came in at the tail end, and they were going to be first.

Paul said, "Wait, we can't just let this company go first when there's another company who's been working for years with us to get all the infrastructure in place", so they came up with a process to bring them out in a fair way.  So, I sincerely hope when this moves forward, there is a process to ensure it's done in an equitable way for the issuers.

Peter McCormack: Well, if somebody wants to know more about this --

Perianne Boring: This is a critical on-ramp.  So, in 2013, a critical on-ramp was unleashed and that was Coinbase; we saw the Coinbase effect.  2013 was a massive bull market for the industry because before there was Coinbase, you had to go to Mt. Gox to buy Bitcoin, which was not a great place.

Peter McCormack: Local Bitcoins.

Perianne Boring: Or, you had to go to a sketchy Bitcoin meetup and do this whole thing, this whole dance in person, definitely not the safest way to do anything.  So, the ETF will have another effect, it's a way to open up an on-ramp.  So, the more on-ramps, the more ways we have for people to get exposure to Bitcoin, the better.

Peter McCormack: I'm still going to challenge that.  I think the more ways we have for people to access and hold private keys, the better.

Perianne Boring: But you've got to meet people where they are too, because that is a big leap for a lot of people, and it's putting a lot of expectations and the same expectations on everybody, and I think we've got to meet people where they are if we want them to go on this journey with us.

Peter McCormack: I still challenge you, but I understand what you're saying, but I still challenge it.  But okay, fair enough.  I'm just conscious of time.  If people want to learn more about this, where would you send them to?

Perianne Boring: So, this paper is available for free download on our website, digitalchamber.org.  This is one very specific example where I think we've been able to really highlight where this industry is being treated differently.  But this issue is happening across the entire federal government.  You're seeing it in AML laws, you're seeing it in the tax laws, you're seeing it in a lot of the legislation pending before congress today.  I think these policy fights for Bitcoin, this is the fight of my generation, and I think it's absolutely important that we as bitcoiners, and people who care about this technology, understand these political fights, these legal fights; because, if we get the policy wrong, it can totally skew our future and it's going to have an impact on how people have access to this technology.

So, we're really fighting for fair access so everybody can participate in this peaceful opting-out of the central economic regime.  And you see this in all areas of law, and this is a very significant undertaking for any organisation, but that really is the purpose of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, to be on the ground, to understand these legal fights, to understand these policy fights and to fight for the absolute best laws possible for the industry.

Peter McCormack: You just made a trailer there with your last one minute, that we could put out to advertise this, which is brilliant.  That wider conversation, I think that's a whole new podcast and I think we should do this again.

Perianne Boring: Yeah, I'd love to.

Peter McCormack: We will be back around January time and I would like to sit down with you more again.  I'd like to expand on the start of the conversation we had as well, because I think that is super-interesting.  Perianne, this was fascinating and I really appreciate you coming on.  We will direct people to the Digital Chamber of Commerce, direct them to the paper and direct them to yourself.  But some people are lazy and don't check the show notes; are there any specific addresses you want to send people to?

Perianne Boring: So, we're active on Twitter @DigitalChamber, or my personal is @PerianneDC.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we will share those in the show notes.  Good luck with this, this was a fascinating chat and, yeah, hopefully we'll sit down and do this again soon.  And sorry about yesterday!

Perianne Boring: Yeah, no worries.  I look forward to it.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.