EB98 – Robin Hanson: Futarchy, Prediction Markets And The Challenge Of Disruptive Technology

Transcript

this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by hi thought me protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN go to hi dot me slash epicenter and sign up for your free account today and buy shape-shift with no account or sign up required it's the easiest way to buy and sell gems counterparty dogecoin - and other leading crypto currencies go to shape-shift thought I owed instantly convert your old coins and to discover the future of cryptocurrency exchanges welcome to absent a Bitcoin the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving decentralization in the global cryptocurrency revolution my name is bryan fabian crane and i'm ahead Roy

today we have a special guest joining us from Washington his name is dr. Robin Hanson and for those of you who don't know him we could think of him approximately as the nick szabo of the prediction market world he has he has played a role in in the technology of prediction markets for the past 20 years developed some of the main inventions that underlie modern prediction markets and actually experimented with different kinds of prediction markets in different areas like with government with scientific predictions etc we will be talking today about how prediction markets and and and bitcoins can and and bit and blockchain technology is linked

and his experiences developing these solutions for the past 20 past 20 years dr. Hansen we are pleased to welcome you thanks for having me it's great to be here yeah actually it's funny because I was as we often in contact with this guy and about coming on the show is name is Mark Miller and he's deep in the smart contract space and he sent me this talk that I was watching last night from 1997 talking about smart contracts and then in the talk sort of at one point the camera serves over and it shows nick szabo and which is sort of funny right because nick's table was full of us this mysterious person with no face but he's like they're one minute or 30 seconds or

something the camera is on his face and you see Nick so it's like well I'm not so anonymous I guess and then in the end you come out robbing and you have some questions I was like wow so 1997 you're already thinking about some more contracts in this space so I'm not yeah I'm a bit under well well know that yeah but you were also just there at this sort of nascent stage and another thing is when I was reading through your blog you see how Finney commenting there in 2008 and 2009 which of course is when Bitcoin was created and now if any being the first recipient of the very first Bitcoin transaction so so in some

tangential way you have been around that Bitcoin cryptocurrency blockchain space for a long time I'm honored to have known these people and still honored hopefully so perhaps we could begin with what is the prediction market and in your words understand what does it do and what is it good at right a predictor market is really just a betting market but we give it a different name maybe when it has a different purpose so an ordinary betting market on a football game there was the game and that's somebody's gonna win or lose and you could put money on it and your money will increase if you're right if you bet on the team that wins and it'll go away

if you a bet on the team that loses so you make bets and I'm betting market is a place where people can make offers to bet so that the odds adjust to some sort of consensus of what people betting think about the chance of the team winning or losing a prediction market is a lot like a betting market or really stock markets currency markets etc they're all really the same kind of mechanism we call them speculative markets that is something you can buy or sell and the people who buy or sell estimate the value of the thing and the price ends up being an aggregate estimate of what many people think of the value of the asset and you can try to make money by buying today buying low today and selling high tomorrow and a great many of most of the people participating in most financial

markets that are thick are actually speculators there they're there to just buy today sell tomorrow in a month and hope to make a profit on the difference there they're not actually wanting to hold the thing for a long time they're just adding to the information in the price so a prediction market is just a market like that but applied to something else where the reason you create the market is because you want to know the answer to something so you could create a market in a company say you might have a deadline of a project will we make the deadline you might have a let people bet on whether you'll make the deadline and the net effect of people betting will give you some consensus estimate of the chance you make the deadline say 60% and that could be an often is a much better estimate of

the chance of making the deadline then you will get by asking the manager of the project or doing a survey or many other mechanisms for finding out the chance that it'll happen so a prediction market is a betting market on something you care about so that you bother to make the market in order to find the answer to your question so how how did you become interest in that and what do you find so fascinating about this well so I was a you know physics student as long ago as an undergraduate and then I got interested in the you know physics teachers tell you claims about how like science is different than everything else and every you know the rest of the

world is a big mess but in science we've got this way to figure out the truth not always always appealed to me and then digging into it you try to say oh okay what is it about science that's giving us the truth with other people come get and you get various mumbo-jumbo but I wanted to figure that out so I finally went into philosophy or science graduate school say well you know what is all this stuff and in the end it turns out it's a big complicated social institution that doesn't have any particularly simple answers for why it works and there's just really all sorts of things can go wrong with it and then you finally realize in the world there's all these people arguing about global warming and policy and everything else and you you get you realize that these things don't work very well that the institutions we have

for figuring out what we should think about the Pope or Russia or China or anything else they they're just messed up in all sorts of ways and so you get interested well how could we fix that and I was involved with the world wide web in the very early years before there was a world wide web but you know with project Xanadu and their vision for making the world better was to say well debate would be better if if you could find rebuttals of things so their simple theory was we have bad beliefs about things because people say stupid things and you can't find the rebuttals somewhere else so they were hoping that backlinks on the web would make it easy to find rebuttals and that would fix our

bad debate outcomes and so I was hanging out with them in Silicon Valley in the very early late 80s and listening to this vision and it was exciting and then eventually decided maybe that doesn't work so well backlinks seemed to me a little that they wouldn't be sufficient to make debate work and and to make people not believe stupid things and so I wondered gee what would work and so hanging around this world with there were mostly libertarians I naturally I think came on the idea what if we were to bet on these things if we were to bet on these various issues we were debating wouldn't that create good incentives and even in scientific questions and so I

began to explore that idea back then and started to you know write about it and give talks on it and I find that I I was basically a nobody I was just a software engineer research off for an engineer in Silicon Valley and so I decided I would go back to school and get a PhD so that I could have contexts and credentials to talk about things like that which I eventually did and so eventually that became part of you know my agenda to in my research agenda and elsewise that we could improve the world by taking the issues we argue about and then that on them in addition to just arguing and that there was a huge potential to apply that to a very wide range of topics that we weren't exploring in the

past what kind of prediction markets have you experimented it what are some of the projects that you have done with prediction markets and what what came out of these these projects well what we know in in total about prediction markets is of course the sum total of all the different related projects that have happened over the last thirty years say because that's the period of time over which people have taken this idea seriously that you know the project I've been personally involved with or a small fraction of all those projects and so you know we learned from all these projects but I I originally was motivated to deal with science and public policy questions and so I originally talked about doing that on these things and then you know was

trying to explore how to do that the very first things I got anybody to do was Xanadu group had some internal markets there at the company on whether they were gonna make their deadlines for delivering software and they also had some science questions on that and so that were the first internal corporate markets in the early 1990s at Xanadu then a group of people who were software engineers are Reds and things I had written and then wrote the firt one of the first web markets I think it was the first web market and they called it idea sphere now at least that's the name now you can still look it up at ideal sphere com and that was on science and

technology questions longer term and then other people have you know developed other prediction there was the Hollywood Stock Exchange that was developed around then and got popular and it was betting on movie markets a number of smaller private markets were tried to create it and say within pharmaceutical companies then in the around nineteen late 1990s I got involved with DARPA who set up a call for proposals to try out markets in the Defense Department and that created the policy analysis market project that I was involved with and that was exploring technology to apply to the Defense Department and you

know in the last few years I've been involved in an ir Pro funded project to apply these technologies or to explore them for intelligence gathering and first in foreign affairs and then in science and technology but over the years I've been involved in consulting with lots of companies and projects trying to apply prediction markets inside various organizations so I've I've heard a lot about a lot of projects that I wasn't greatly involved in and so your question was what have we learned which is a broad question so I mean so meaning like perhaps perhaps it's it's easy for me to specify the question a little further like like

there's there's two parts to the questions a what have we learned about the accuracy of prediction markets and B what have we what are the reasons why prediction markets have not succeeded on them on a major scale and and the challenges faced by some of your projects in specific so you know the idea of a prediction market just to be clear is you have a question and there's some way in which later on you will know the answer to the question and but you want an estimate on the question now and so in order to get that an answer to your question now you set up a betting market basically and the and you subsidize it sufficiently so that the consensus price will exist and enough activity will be set and then you can

look at that current price as the estimate to you future questions so that idea has excited a lot of people and and drawn a lot of interest and so a wide range of people have been interested in talking about that idea and exploring it and that's produced a set of research in academia where people have tried to test the idea in lab experiments and test some problems that could occur in lab experiments and then develop the technology ie work on mechanics and tools that would make various problems less and very harder cases easier etc and they're still is a large intellectual and academic pursuit of the idea that's somewhat

separate from real organizations who have actual questions applying it to their questions inside their organizations so that SEP second path unfortunately is much less well-funded and difficult but it's the path that needs to happen so when organizations like DARPA or I ARPA have decided or even grant other grant agency decided to fund work in the area they typically fund researchers to go study things and develop tools but they don't aren't very interested in funding like real organizations to actually try it out and figure out the real problems so most of the applications and real organizations have been done on you know shoestring budgets and by small groups usually by somebody who just excited by the idea

and it finds an opportunity to try it out so in those projects they usually of course wisely ignore most of the complexity of the elaborate mechanisms that researchers have developed and they you know don't go for the sophisticated problems or deep you know obstacles or issues they just opportunistically try the simplest things they can simple mechanism simple questions and simple applications and they have had a somewhat consistent experience I would say which is that well first of all the typical person who wants to set one of these things up usually doesn't have much of a budget they just have a lot of enthusiasm and so they might you know

set up a market throw some questions out and offer no not really much incentives others just play money or something and then when something like that happens they'll they don't really even have strong organizational support and they just say hey come and play and your lunch hour or something and you know it's a typical thing that happens there as it crashes Birds nothing happens nobody trades nobody's interested that doesn't do anything but there have also been markets where somebody higher in the organization had Authority and some budget and could push it and say you know encourage people to participate and offer larger incentives financially and also just praise in an organizational recognition and those markets have typically produced accurate estimates in the sense

that whenever they've compared the market estimates to some other source they had for estimating the same thing at the same time the markets have done as well or better so there's a there's have been a very consistent track record of accuracy in these markets also a consistent track record of user satisfaction that is if they ask people what do you think about it are you enjoying it you feel like your voice is being heard etc people send to like those too but in addition there's also been the negative part of this track record is that if you go and consult for these organizations you say great you want to set up a prediction market let's talk about what what questions are important to your organization and what where could the high value be in your organization that you could achieve by asking important

questions they immediately shy away from the most obvious important question saying you know that well it's a little sensitive and we don't want to start right there and that could make people upset and so they shy off to the side of relatively safe interesting engaging questions but questions are not really gonna bother anybody so so what kind of patients do - shy away from well you know most straightforward what are your big projects are they gonna happen on time or are they gonna succeed in delivering the benefits promised you know what are your major products and what are the sales gonna be you know sort of who are you gonna put in charge of the products and whether they make a difference are you gonna change the requirements definitions you know the the key big questions on projects and

products and again those tend to be sensitive those tend to have somebody who and so for example the one of the most consistent set of accuracy successes in these markets is estimating whether a project will happen on time I'd just add it simple deadlines forecast and there's been a lot of examples where prediction markets were set up and the official management forecasts of whether they make the deadline was optimistic and yeah we're pretty sure to do it looks like we're on track and then you open the prediction market and the odds just go down to a few percent saying no way not gonna happen and those are the arc of course consistently right they they were they were they weren't

happen but usually this embarrasses somebody the guy in charge of the project it makes it look bad he was saying it was gonna happen on the market say no way and of course it doesn't happen and you might think the management above that layer would be grateful to hear this news from a new source an independent source but in fact usually the guy who's mad that the project like made him look bad complains about it and gets it killed and so the you know and his mark his his manager is part of getting it killed he's saying no we don't want this sort of embarrassment to happen and the project goes away so you mentioned that there's been a lot of the research interest and there hasn't been so much on this sort of these actual

projects that then drive decisions is is this why do you think it just makes people uncomfortable and it disrupts too much existing organizational structures that people just don't want to do it well I mean this is the key question so that's why we want to dive in a little detail I mean the you know we have a technology here and we want to apply it in real organizations and we want to understand the barriers to adoption and in general when technologies have to integrate with organizations part of the barrier to adoption is that your initial concept of the technology and the way

it's implemented was based on some abstract concept of its use that wasn't very didn't accommodate much the actual details of how these things are actually used in the actual issues so and this is true for almost all technologies if you don't have a very good image of how it will actually be used and you'd create some prototype versions of the products and you try to get people to use them you'll often find that you just missed misunderstood how these things are used and one of the important features the product what are the important costs and benefits etc this project this product is a product to produce information inside organizations and that's a kind of product that we just have especially poor understanding of and especially prone to lie about that there's a lot of

complexity in how organized organizations produce and share and use information and the simple idea that if you just tell them that their projects going to fail and they'd want to hear it is somewhat naive relative to the real political barriers and and processes going on in organizations so I think fundamentally academics and idealists sort of start with their initial concept of what these things are for and useful for and then they just make a product and then they often as engineers want to do just throw it over the fence and say okay business now it's your job to figure out what to do with this and you know the wreath at least half of the real engineering tasks for any product is thinking about how it actually gets used relative to your absolute your

conceptions and working out the details to make sure that it actually can be valuable so I would say prediction markets have not yet worked on very far in the in the in the distance of figuring out what the real desires and needs for information organizations are figuring out what the real problems and barriers did from using information organization and finding ways to change and adapt the product so that it can you know give the things people really want to need so when you came up with prediction markets and you started exploring that idea what were your expectations why did you think this was gonna lead did you have mmm do you think this was gonna turn out quite

differently well I mean I was young and idealistic and I'm perhaps definitely older and perhaps a bit less idealistic but still substantially so you know I I I thought perhaps naively that there was just more broad-based enthusiasm for the generic idea of knowing answers to important questions better that is we're in a were complicated world we have all these big questions that matter for our organizations and national policy and all over the place and a lot of the barriers to making good decisions is not knowing answers to key questions and I would have thought that there would be a lot more enthusiasm for ways to get

answers to those questions but that's based on a naive concept of what people's concerns are and how these processes are going on so in fact people are really you know focused a lot on how things make them look and how they can support their allies and oppose their rivals and show their loyalty and show their ideological commitment and show their you know a wide range of complicated social processes that information is involved in and prediction markets are just naively I mean it's it's basically an autistic sort of lack of social savvy they just sort of blunder in and tell the truth

when that's not the socially acceptable thing to do let's take a short break to talk about her brand new sponsors hi dot me personally been using them for about a year so I'm really excited to have them on you know you know we sometimes take our privacy and security online for granted I know that I did I often tell people if you use public Wi-Fi you might as well assume that your data has been compromised in some way there's so many ways people can attack you nowadays I mean if you're using website that isn't SSL people can on the same network as you can pretty much see anything that you're doing on that website and even SSL websites like your bank's social media or Bitcoin wallets for example can be vulnerable to certain types of

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sponsor we're excited what they're doing and of course we would like to thank them for their support of episode of Bitcoin so in the indie indie Bitcoin and in the cryptocurrency field there is this belief that prediction markets have not succeeded because they're like you say there have always been wasted parties that do not want to see or have public the results of what these markets are of these markets because as you say they can sometimes be autistic they give the bare truth to your face there's this belief in the field that if you make a decentralized prediction market that is censorship resistant then then the market can go on even when the person

whose life would be influenced by the market doesn't want it to go on or the market will go on when the government that will will be influenced by the market doesn't actually want the market to go on will this kind of censorship resistance actually help prediction markets go into the mainstream what do you think well I think people overestimate the degree to which there is a vast pool of rebels waiting to resist the you know the repression of authorities just eager for any chance to show their faith in the ideals of their society it it's you know lot weaker than that so you know in most organizations

uh you know there are people who at lower levels might want to be honest and tell the truth who might want to even pay a bit of a cost so career-wise or socially in order to say honestly what they think about the organization but it's easy to way overestimate just how enthused they are about that and how eager they are to do that so you know if if into an organization we could create this prediction the organization could pay to create this prediction market on the deadline and then you know somebody gets embarrassed and they cut off the funding for that prediction market now we'd say well what if employees lower in the organization they can just go off to

this website and make and make a market in whether this project will make the deadline and the authorities can't shut that market off and so it'll just you know shout the truth well I mean in a sense you know they could have already been doing that just going on to an external website with some sort of anonymous market so it's not necessarily that they couldn't have already done that but they show relatively little interest in bothering I mean they could have just done that by setting up a chat site outside the company where they just talked about whether the projects was to make the deadline and they don't bother to do that either so yes of course an outside chat site and the firm could let people talk about whether the project will make the deadline they could have set that up they could have had a

meeting a secret meeting where they all came later on and talked about it they could have a prediction market outside that's a play money market or they could have a real money you know blockchain based prediction market in a few years but the question is well will they want to bother I mean it's not enough just to make it possible they you have to make something people care enough about to bother I guess did the use case people think more about this maybe not so much inside your organization's but then when you talk about you know political things I guess that's also where in trade the prediction market that has been most successful so far like the politics was very big on there like elections right so maybe in something like that do you think I guess the question then becomes

- right is this just a betting site and then what's a prediction market about it you know if it's making let's talk about that so you the world of someplace like in trade you know it was offshore but they had realm any questions and so a place like in trade could have had betting markets all sorts of policy relevant topics that people might care about I mean they you know a large fraction of the topics that show up in newspaper articles or in academic journals that people argue about there could have been bets about those things but in fact the vast majority of bets on places like in trade or all these is basically sports bets

there are really very few bets on anything but sports and then when they are betting on something that isn't sports and maybe elections but it's really a much in the sports vein of betting on a contest or a race and the large space of abstract intellectual questions that people could bet on there's just very little demand for them that over the years they did try a number of those I suggested a few and they just produced very little trading interest so so to be specific I got some someone to subsidize create and subsidize some markets on in trade on the some consequences of who would be of whether the Republican or Democrat would be President so there were markets and the oil prices and stock prices and troops abroad and things like that and that those are arguably you know very

basic policy relevant things to argue about in terms of who to elect so there were big markets of course in whether the Democrat Republican would be elected but these markets in if the Democrat was elected how many troops would be abroad or what would stock prices be or oil prices be there was just very little interest of that and those were markets that could basically settle quick soon after the election so when people go betting they want to bet on things that are things that will resolve quickly and that they're things that other people are arguing about so if you if you walk into a sports bar and and you argue about who's gonna win up you know which team is gonna win this Sunday you can get a lot of people argue about with you if you if you start talking about health

insurance mandates and whether those will reduce costs you'll find it hard to get anybody in the sports bar to take a bet or argue with you about it I mean it's just not what they're arguing about right so I think it's somewhat naive to expect that there's just this huge groundswell of demand to want to on important policy questions there's a mild demand for it but and hopefully if we can make the cost low enough that demand will be realized but I have more hope about organizations who want to know things paying themselves to get the answer to the questions they want to know as opposed to they're just being a lot of people out there so I'm more what to convince firms that they do want the market in in their project deadlines and

they want to pay for and they want to structure it and get them to try that out then the idea that if the firm doesn't pay for it even resists it and tries to repress it that the employees from the ground will all demand and create their own offshore off-site betting market that they all insist on you know playing every day because they are so into telling everybody about whether the project will make the deadline yeah I mean it reminds me a lot when you talk about prediction markets and I think that's also why I wanted to spend some time on that and explore this all is of course the the Bitcoin case because I I remember when I learned about Bitcoin I mean I was I didn't have an role of course in Bitcoin like you had in prediction markets but when I

learned about it it was immediately wow this is amazing and incredible and it seems like people are just discovering about that because the price is going up it's like it's pretty obvious to me that this is what the world is going to use and it's gonna happen very fast and so far it hasn't really happened and most people don't care and even if people care in the abstract that they like the idea they don't actually care to use it and so it's it seems interesting that there's this seems to be a big similarity there so is this a little bit how you look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so it's it's it's a bit

like the thing you try to do with prediction markets is like idealistic radical thing that actually doesn't satisfy real demand well I would just say more generally that there's just a large space of you know engineering and simple model inspired innovation which then has to go through a big second stage of working out what kind of products people actually want and the variations that will actually work so it isn't specific per se to prediction markets or bitcoin there's just the larger world of innovating in most innovators start with some simple concept of what products are for and what the use of what what we do with various things and what kind of things

would be useful how and you know unless they're staying pretty close to an existing product if they're moving away from existing products and generating a whole new product category then they are generating that based on some abstract idea of what people might want and there's there's just usually this disconnect where people's abstract idea of what people might want is usually rather far from what they end up actually wanting and so many product ideas are stillborn in the sense that you you try it out and nobody wants it and you just quit and other ideas have more promise and then you need to adapt them to find the variation that people will want and part of this barrier is not just ignorance it's not just that you know most people who have ideas for products just you know it's a big

complicated world they don't know all the details of it often the barriers is we have idealist ideals we have these theories in our head about what things should be for and what people should want and if we are overly confident in that then we will push too far for what people should want so I don't know the Bitcoin world as well as I do prediction markets but yes obviously many of the concepts for Bitcoin and blockchain based products are based on the kind of product people should want when the kinds of features are that they should want as opposed to what they do want so I'm I know there's reasons there are differences but I'm always struck by the you know product from 20 or 30 years ago of like PGP and private email and private communications because that was

based on the concept that people should want private email and they should be willing to pay a little of extra trouble to download some differents offer and go through a few extra clicks to support their private email and of course that there was perfectly reasonable to believe that many people cared somewhat about privacy I mean people all the time talked about how much they cared about privacy and how upset they were that privacy was broken and they in the last few years people claim to be upset that Snowden discovered the NSA was reading everybody's emails etc and fought on phone calls they they say they're upset and they say they they want do something about that and they'd rather find it you know they talk all that but then of course they talk a little bit more than they do so uh you know the things like PGP have still been

pretty marginal over the last twenty years and so I mean that's an obvious example of people saying basically people care a bit about privacy but a lot less than they the noise they make when it seems like somebody else has taken their privacy without their permission this kind of reminds me about there was this classic book that was written in the 90s called mega mystics by guy called Stephen schnoz and he had this idea that most new technologies or concepts are gonna fail and only those technologies that improve on some aspect of somebody's life lives by a factor of 10x like 10 times I'm gonna are going to succeed like it should make something

that the user cares about 10 times better than the current alternative out there and and maybe like the problem Bitcoin is having is you're not finding that 10x improvement in the life of a Bitcoin user yet well I think with Bitcoin you have you have such strong network effects because as having in Bitcoin is you always see like you see this world where everybody uses Bitcoin and then it's very easy to see these 10x improvements everywhere right but to get there it's not clear how you get there and before you're there it's not 10x improvement it's actually a worse in

most case right in most case now you have to deal with these you know private keys and and whatnot it's actually interesting Sabathia sent me this radio lab podcast episode which was hilarious it was about this woman some older Ukrainian woman in Boston that got this this virus it was like cryptolocker sort of so basically encrypted all her files and it asked her to pay a ransom in Bitcoin and so the woman talks about what an ordeal it was to get these horrible bitcoins and now she had to send her passport and then she got finally like $500 worth of Bitcoin and that she wanted to pay but then the the

price had dropped and she could not make sense how like this pain was not worth 500 anymore so she didn't have enough and she only had 490 and it was quite malaria's and it almost sounded like the worst part was not that her files are encrypted but that's yet to go through this ordeal of trying to figure out how to use this Bitcoin thing so I think that's that's a problem we have right then the other problem is of course you see it's like if everybody used it would well 10x improvements everywhere but before that they're not here right so RB I don't know if prediction markets are similar in that there's such strong network effects maybe maybe not I mean

there's there's definitely effects of the forum when only a small number of people are using them it's a lot more expensive to do so a lot less social support infrastructures you know tools etc so it's not quite the same as a network effect but there's definitely things get cheaper when a lot of people use a product and service even when it's used individually so I definitely think so I like to make the comparison with cost accounting in firms if nobody did cost accounting in firms and you propose that this project in this particular firm have cost accounting applied to it you'd be basically saying somebody's stealing here and we need to check find out who that is and that might be pretty unwelcome advice or news you know you're basically accusing somebody right here

stealing in a world where everybody does cost accounting and you say let's just not do cost accounting on this project how about that guys you'd be basically saying I'd like to steal a little is that all right with you can we cover that up and that also wouldn't go over so well so you know it matters a lot what the usual thing is whether you can do any one thing different in any way in place so in a world where nobody does prediction markets if you say we should do prediction markets here you're basically saying you know our usual way of talking about this stuff and then deciding what is it's we keep lying to ourselves so we need something else not such welcome news in world where everybody basically always did a prediction market on a project to see if it was gonna make the deadline if you

said I think we should do this project and let's get going but let's not do a prediction on market on this one please let's just skip that step be basically saying we're not gonna make this deadline but let's not talk about that okay guys and that would look bad too so you know yeah the more we can create a standard of people using it so that's also of course true of you know encrypted email you know if almost nobody's using encrypted email and I tell you hey how about you and I use encrypted email why don't you download this offer all the sudden you're going you're you know what's he trying to do here what kind of Secrets is you want me involved in do I want to be involved in that and you know all sets up sort of red flags if every if everybody's email is automatically

encrypted then there's nothing strange about talking to somebody that way it's just the usual thing and it doesn't raise any questions so any similar issue of course with blockchains you know the question is what are they going to be used for and is that gonna be a typical enough thing that it's okay to just use it for usual things so that it doesn't make you look weird or suggests you're doing something different so at the moment people could say oh I'm just into it cuz it's new and cool and that's a reasonable excuse and so it doesn't look too bad to be using it if you're saying I just like I'm a techie guy and I like things that are new and cool but after a while that's gonna go away and you know and you're trying to avoid the situation where you say I'm using Bitcoin and somebody else

thinks ah you're doing drugs you know because hey that's what the only thing everybody you ever uses this thing for right so you definitely have to create this wider set of common applications that are accepted that don't flag you as being something illicit merely by using it today's magic where it is you tarkey fut AR CH y head over let's talk Bitcoin comm to sign in enter the magic word and claim you're part of a listener award let's take the time out to imagine a world in which people are using

prediction markets and they have broken through into mainstream society as you alluded to and you have this proposal of how government would work in such a society and you call it food turkey so we'd like to know what what a society that has adopted few turkey would look like how would it make decisions how would it make laws okay so let's first talk about governance as opposed to government because governance happens in all sorts of scales and so few turkey is a proposal for governance and eventually it could be applied to the largest scale governance issues like national governments and even international but since is a governance mechanism it can

and should be applied first at much smaller scales so the predictor markets again our markets that produce information and of course the value of information in standard decision theory is that it helps you make decisions there's not much point just collecting information because there it is you want to collect information that sits next to a decision you're going to make the closer you can get to a decision the more valuable the information so if you have a project that might go over a deadline the reason why you might want to know if it's gonna go over a deadline is because there's something to do about it if it's not gonna make the deadline then you can delay the marketing of the product or you can change who's in charge of the product you can kill the product is there's things you can do if there's nothing you can do about it

there's no point in bothering to find out if you make the deadline you just will or won't and live with it so fundamentally the reason why we want information is because we make decisions but most of the prediction markets that are typically created there's a substantial distance between the information we're asking about and the decision you're going to make and usually you just people have often just thought what might I want to know and they make some markets on that and they don't think very much about what I could use it for and they often realize later on that they didn't really want to know it wasn't something that was actionable they couldn't do much with it so they quit they just give up and that's one of the reasons prediction markets are often don't last that long at organizations is even if they don't bother somebody they

turn out not to be useful because they didn't actually ask the questions people cared about so decision markets are a way to make prediction markets very close to a decision so let me give you a concrete example of a decision market because it's has a lot of ways to explain in applications which is one of the biggest decisions most firms make is whether to fire the CEO so CEOs make a big nishan to firms when the feet CEO isn't doing well or not not a good match it's really important to fire the CEO and so it's important to decide whether you should fire the CEO now it's what's well known that most boards of directors are shy about firing CEOs because often the CEO put them there or if they try to

fight the CEO he'll fight back and he's got a lot of weapons and so they usually just let him go and so CEO stayed too long so you could have a prediction market related to how the seat firm is doing you know and predicting the future outcomes of the firms but that's not very directly relevant to should you fire the CEO so a decision market on should you fire the CEO could be productive constructed and it would go the following you you could have say a stock market you could have a public company for example and could have a stock price and that stock price goes up or down as people expect the future of the company to do well or poorly and you could have a market in the stock price that's conditional on whether the CEO leaves you're not that is an ordinary

stock price you just trade cash for the stock and you willing to pay more cash when you think the stock is worth more in a conditional market you make conditional trades that has trades that are called off if the condition is not met so you could trade cash for stock for the company conditional on the CEO staying this quarter or conditional on the CEO leaving this quarter so the idea is to create both of those markets and that would have two different prices one price represents what people think the company is gonna be worth on average if the CEO stays and the other represents what they think the company's worth an average if the CEO leaves and so now the difference in those prices is the consensus a speculator estimate of whether or not the come the CEO is good for the company now to settle these mark

markets later we only need to know if the CEO came or left and whether the stock price later is high or low we don't actually need to know if the was directly really causally helpful to the company or not we don't ever have to judge that all we have to judge is did the CEO leave and what was the later stock price but just knowing those two things later lets us settle these bets but X ami when we're making the bets we are incentivized to reveal what we believe about the effect of the CEO on the company we should set these conditional probabilities these conditional estimates to our best estimate of them so this is a decision market and whether to dump the CEO so you can the basic structure here there's two parts one is there's a discrete decision to make you can say we're gonna do this or this

or that and you can lay them out ahead of time we're gonna do one of these things and the other part is the outcome we care about in this case it's the stock price of the company later so if we've got discrete decisions clear outcomes we can set up a decision market so whew turkey is an application of decision markets so we can of course create decision markets on many decisions like whether to fire the CEO and we could create them with many different outcomes and many different decisions and they could be typically advisory so my my proposal if I had a million dollars which I've posted on is I would go offshore and I'd create these markets on firing the CEO for the entire fortune 500 so a thousand markets - for each company I still that would be a great guerilla marketing because all the

CEOs would pay attention in the market do you get lots of press attention and after a couple of years you'd have enough statistics to decide whether the in fact the companies that are following the advice are doing better after which point you could pray we pressure boards of directors and the following the advice for a fear of being sued for not taking well you know do it being good trustees or their company yeah that's equally let me ask one question about the mechanism because I don't not sure I fully understand that because so there's a market now for what's the share price if we keep the CEO and there's a market for what's the share price if you don't keep the CEO and then the higher share price is going to determine our decision right it's the term of the

recommendation for your decision yes right but so let's assume that's binding or something so let's assume that oh if the share price people say oh if the CEO stays the share price is gonna be higher so they pay more for that but then a why can't just be manipulated right because you never know you never know what didn't happen right so the people trading in in the lower market that you know of those that event that it's never gonna gonna occur how how would how did the economics of this work so you know the the typical scenario here the simplest scenario let's say is where the

market is just advisory and so all you need is that people think there's some chance that either condition will happen if you're really sure that a condition won't happen then you have very little interest in betting on the conditions so you know we could have betting markets on if Santa Claus shows up tomorrow what will we do none of us believe Santa Claus will show up we just have very little interest no interest really at all bothering to bet on those markets so so the markets price it will be pretty meaningless there probably wouldn't be much of a price so we need a condition that people think has a chance of happening it doesn't need a 90% chance of my tea I'm gonna only have a tenner 1% chance of happening but the smaller the chance of something of a condition

happening the less interested people are in bothering to bet on a conditional market because their profits are proportional to the probability that the condition will happen other losses are as well so in order to get people to bother to bed in a market you need some chance that it might happen now of course in most companies there is a substantial chance every quarter that the CEO will leave you know the average tenure is maybe 10 years or something so that's one in 40 for every quarter so you know there's a 2% chance every quarter that CEO will leave so that could give you enough of a chance to bother to bet on what would happen to the CEO left this quarter that's of course if you think there's that chance

now the more sure you get that one or did the other decision you're going to happen the harder it is to get people to tell you about what they think will happen in other conditions so decision markets to our work better when there is actual uncertainty about the decision certainly among the people who are advising the market who are betting on the market can be sure now obviously one mechanically one way to just ensure this is just to have some small random chance of actually doing the decision randomly so you know if if one in a thousand if every time you know very quarter the board just you know rolled some dice and then had a at a you know one a thousand chance of dumping the CEO just based on the dice roll well now that could give

you enough of a chance to be sure that he'll go out but of course we know in the real world there's just people die randomly at various times right CEOs just sometimes die and there's enough of a chance of that randomly happening that that'll give you a small chance that the CEO will leave this quarter and so and there's there's an other random things that can go wrong you know in the world so I don't think you have to worry that the chances gonna fall below one in a thousand but of course the smaller the chance the less effort will put people will put into it and so the more noisy or the prices would be it's time for word from our friends at shape shift shape shift is the fast and easy way to trade cryptocurrencies to trade all constant they now support about 50 old

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maximum but now you can specify higher amounts so for example if you want to buy like 500 light coins you can now do that on shape-shift so good are six chip thought I oh and give it a try and we'd like to thank shape-shift for their support of Epson or Bitcoin the interesting thing about this pure target discussion you know we talked about it and when we talk about it like this it's seems this abstract futuristic concept that's like far away but actually when we come back to sort of you know the usual topic of this show which is like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies then I think some a concept like future key is extremely relevant and extremely pressing and the reason is that one you

do want decentralization right so you want to have some process that can't be captured by some entity or government that determines you know first of all with Bitcoin transactions and stuff and guess Bitcoin has that part semi handled I mean this of course problems there too but then how are how is it updated right so we've had with the block size debate is we've talked about this many times and we've also been started talking about governance we try to talk about governments become doesn't have a proper governance model and the result of that is that decision is just no decisions

are made or noise it's like a stalemate and people disagree there is no way of resolving disagreements and so I think with Bitcoin you know future key may be one of the few candidates that's actually could solve this right so is it is this an area you're watching and do you think that could actually be where now prediction markets will break through because people will see what happens with Picon and they will say maybe pick on itself will do that or maybe people will do that other parts just to say well the next time we're building something we need to build the prediction market in there from the ground up so we never get into this situation where like no decision can be reached right so I mean from the point

of view of being a cautious careful reasonable researcher or thinker you know the obvious thing to recommend is that new ideas should be tried on small scales first and slowly worked away to larger trials until you do something you have enough evidence to try something big of course often what you have is that the small-scale trials never happen and so we've got all these interesting ideas for changes that people don't even try on this scales so sometimes what often happens in actually is that you create these ideas for for changes and then they just sit there until somebody's desperate until a crisis somebody out there just needs something and it's on the shelf and you've been waiting for a decade or

two with your proposal and suddenly boom they grab it off the shelf and they give it a try you know when you're desperate you're willing to try more things than you otherwise would but you have pretty you know tight criteria too so I would rather we started with small-scale trials and worked way up but hey somebody who's desperate is also something I'm willing to go with and help so you know it's a bit of a Hail Mary pass if you will of taking something that hasn't been tried on small scales you and I have a lot of data but I do think the blockchain world has this fundamental problem I mean that the whole the whole initial conception was that you had an idea of something of how a system would work and then you

wrote it in code and then you sent it out there and now that it's out there nobody can stop it ha right so the whole appeal was once we get everybody using it nobody can stop it but of course the flipside is that nobody can change it right and nobody can stop it or nobody can change it is great if you thought it was great if you need to have it evolve and change in response to conditions because it wasn't quite right in the first place well now you're in big trouble because you don't nobody can stop it nobody can change it and nobody can anything so you know that's that's the key question this community is stuck at right is is somebody made something and they may and they looked pretty good and they threw it out there and it's such a way and we you know everybody

jump and said hey if we're enough of us get on this then nobody can stop it and here we are now let's go in and nobody can stop it right and nobody can change it and now you realize it's not quite what you wanted and what do you do so and maybe now he realized okay well we wouldn't we need to do all this back from the beginning but oops we needed to have some governance as part of this we needed like a process that somebody could not stop that included governance so that it could make itself better when there were problems and that was something that wasn't included in the initial concept here uh it was a it was a system that it did not include governance because it was under the basic engineering presumption that you design and you work it out and you

released the design and if you know you ran your software tests and they pride I'm sure it these things past their initial software test and they have passed a bunch of initial practical tests to but eventually you know real systems to get that get big and move into new context almost all real systems they do need adaptation to context and so how are you gonna do adaptation to context that that's the real question so you you're searching for a governance mechanism and now you realize you know most of the governor mechanisms people have or also things that let people like stop things right a city does something one way and then national government doesn't like it and you know if you have a governance mechanism to oversee the thing you're doing in the city then the government national government come and

say stop it we don't like it and the city is gonna have to stop it because there are ways to pressure the governments mechanism so you want to set up something people can't stop but you want to govern it so you need a governance mechanism people can't pressure so easily right and so you now you need to decentralize governance mechanism that's hard to pressure and that there aren't so many of those out there in the lecture right well what else you got yeah I mean so like like the current alternative that the community has is just discussing on reddit and those like those those are they have a big big problem because anyone can post they the discussions they they result in something that is barely readable and you have these

strange people coming anonymous people commenting it anything on on the block size debate so Bitcoin does need a governance mechanism and few taqi seems like a crazy idea to most people but like it's one of the only ideas out there so maybe you could take the time out and just hash out what it rough what it would roughly look like like in your in your few tacky proposal you have these values and these beliefs and we'd like just like to understand what values for Bitcoin would be what beliefs would be and how they would interact so we were talking about decision markets and we didn't quite get to how it would work as a governance mechanism as opposed to a advising governance so we were just talking about advisory decision markers

so far and then the step is to make them formally in charge so to make a decision market kind of mechanism formally be in charge as the governance mechanism you need to have a little bit more than what I described before you need to pick an outcome that's the official outcome well and or a way in which that official outcome can be changed so in my paper on the subject in the Journal of political philosophy the slogan is vote on values but bet on beliefs so in that scenario I imagine that there's about a voting process by which analogous to something we're doing today people there are legislators and they pass bills and they vote on what the outcome measure could be and so in that scenario you could revise and

change the outcome measure in a Bitcoin world it's less clear how you're going to revise the outcome measure and so you might need to pick some outcome measure and stick with it which which is also a lack of flexibility that could come with a bite you later but nevertheless what we need is a official outcome measure either fixed forever or the results of some process that can modify it that would have to be specified and then in addition to that you need a way to make policy proposals an official channel by which a idea becomes an official proposal such that it must officially be considered and then once there is an official outcome measure and an official way to make a proposals then the spec

then you invoke a betting market basically and you say there has to be some official betting markets ie a place you go to look for the price and the rule of Governments is that you look at the official betting markets for the price on whether the proposal would improve the outcome and you have to look at that at some time or some average over time and it has to be of course using some whatever the asset is in this market that you're trading that's measure that's connected to this outcome and then at some at the right point in time you'll look at the price and you see if the price is above the threshold then the rule of government says we adopt a proposal and boom there it is it's now the default and and it could be overcome again by a new proposal so

those are the extra things you need to turn this decision market into a governance mechanism here you need an outcome measure that's official and a way to change it if you allow that you need a way to make policy proposals that are official and we can talk about how you limit that so there's not too many of them and then you need the markets that are official ie where we're going to go to look at the price and we have to decide when we look at the price and then the rule is some of the automatic mechanism looks at the price and makes the decision if the price is high enough relative to the status quo you just do it so that's a that's like a lot of concepts maybe we could just map these concepts to what they would be in Bitcoin for for a for

sure for Freud to make medicines for example when you say outcome measure I tend to think of the price of a Bitcoin in dollar because that is a measure right so obvious on the system right so I mean more robustly you might think that if you're going to allow quantity changes in bitcoins or something then it would be the price times the quantity that you want to track but of course and scenarios with a number of bitcoins don't change the prices is it reasonable proxy but then you might also want to tie it to some stable measure of value besides the dollar it's always possible the dollar will undergo some terrible inflation and so you might want to pick some more stable value like some average of world currencies or an average of

world stock prices or something though those even though they would be more trouble to monitor they would be more robust to possible fluctuations in the dollar you know those that would be details that you might want to pay attention to but yes it does seem like you know just a total quantity value of the coins might be a reasonable robust value of measure here you know you could also of course do transaction volume but you might worry a bit more about that honestly I think you know having any decent governance mission mechanism tied to any geef decent outcome measure is just such a big gain over what you're likely to actually end up with I wouldn't like haggle too much about the exact outcome measures I just worry

about get whether you can get anything going so I mean like another outcome measure could be perhaps some some measure of of decentralization like how much does it take for me to for people around the world to run full nodes for example so I mean if it is cheap for people to run full nodes then Bitcoin as as can be a more decentralized system so like perhaps you could have outcome measures like which are price right then volume the problem with volume of course is that the some determined attacker can could just spam the network and create volume artificially so you want to be sensitive to whether these measures you

choose can be manipulated but you also want to be sensitive to whether they're like constraints and conditions as opposed to the thing you really care about because you know it will really try to maximize whatever you you give to it so you know if you just made it this cost of doing these full full nodes and that was your only outcome measure then it might be able to just achieve that and then it wouldn't care about anything else and then it might not do things that would increase like the total size and use of the community once it had achieved this this this thing I'm just making the cost low so you would I would think you'd want to pick an outcome measure that continues to be hard however far you go along that line so that you continue to keep moving so I would think you might want to like you

know you could put you could do a product of the Bitcoin price times some measure of this cost that you expect you know as long as the cost ism is below some threshold you're okay with it or something so that it saturates it seems like this so clearly also illustrates how hard of a problem is and how that probably to be quite honest isn't gonna be the solution right because even if you look at something like where one maybe could agree on like the Bitcoin you know the Bitcoin the total volume as a total value of you know quantity times price like of course if you looked at a Bitcoin community today you know that there will be multiple ways of of

maximizing that quantity but of course one would just be by increasing the volume which of course would dilute existing orders into huge resistance there you know so so people wouldn't definitely not agree on that and and then the problem is I think as you said but with that in fact increase the total value of all the bitcoins if they increase the volume it's not obvious it would it's not it's not obvious right but let's say you know let's say increasing the volume by a factor of 10 would have to price you know I mean who would those new bitcoins go to I mean if they went to existing what can all this be miscible in my factor 10 and the price went down by

more than a factor of 10 then the optimization would be failing right so the way let's say let's say they're the price would go down by a factor of 2 well in that case you would have increased the total value by 5 and then this criteria would approve of it and maybe it would be a good thing maybe it would be a good thing but if you ask their their current Bitcoin holders they would probably say this is not a good thing I liked my Bitcoin moment you know and I still owe more well I mean let's get back to the desperate point right I mean the whole reason why you're even considering this is like you're stuck in a corner where you don't have that many great options otherwise you know we you would wait and see like let this

technology develop on a small scale and work its way up but the only reason you're even considering it now when it hasn't been worked out and tested as you're kind of desperate you need something here and you need it sometime you know soon and you need it to be you need it to work so that puts a high priority and just picking something simple that's clear that seems workable and just doing it even if it's not optimally what anybody wants cuz you need something yeah that's quite right I mean of course opinions differ on that I was content with Peter Todd just recently and he was like no it's actually good that there's no governance process because it should be hard to update it and you know if we if it can be updated you know that's that is as desired and of course the

opinion is completely different so in the case of Bitcoin it's complicated right I I'm sure there must also be the issue of whether pressure could be applied to a governance mechanism so once you have a governance mechanism that says it allows a change then you know the government could say okay everybody we need this change because we need you guys to be under our thumb and now if you don't adopt the following change there's going to be this hell to pay now you know it's pressuring the governance mechanism to adopt the proposal so what once you can change something you are now open to pressuring to being pressured to make changes that somebody else wants if they have a way to pressure you to make a threat

basically they can make a threat a credible threat of somehow hurting the entire system if you don't do what they want then they can pressure a government of its mechanism to do what they want so you have to wonder are you able to stand up to whatever pressure they will try to impose in order to make the decisions they want and then when it comes to you know let's say mining pools being in charge of that that voting power or charge of that mechanism then the answer would probably be no you're not able to stand up because actually people can be located and they can send people there with these data centers arrest people and all so the ability to resist pressure is actually not that high well you got to expect a governance mechanism

will allow you to adapt but will also adapt to threats and you will adapt to threats and therefore you will succumb to threats it's walking down the game tree as we call it and has the economists figure out what the consequence of these actions would be I think in any case people will try things like that and you know I know batalik or the theorem is written a long block person they didn't even if this is a is this it's a very daring and out-there idea and I think I am sure many people will end up setting up some sort of future key systems in the cryptocurrency space and they will make mistakes like that you know they'll choose the wrong parameter and it's gone and I'm sure there would be lots of mistakes but I

certainly look forward to seeing that some of that experimentation so I mean the right I mean a compromise would be to identify the parameters that you don't want outside threats on and don't allow governance on those so I mean that's analogous to the Constitution of a country or something you just have some parameters that you make very hard to change what would you know just why a constitutional conventions and amendments are very hard and you make other parameters that are easy to change so if there are parameters that you don't not very worried about threats changing they just need they're just parameters of administration and and management's that's that you know if you don't get the right things go badly but nobody's really gonna want to threaten you on you could make those parameters easier to change and then hold off on some other parameters as

just out of out of the range of change unless there's this really really strong consensus so you could set a consensus parameter like what percentage of all the miners have to agree on something before that thing can be changed you probably would want to just set some of these things way off to the side so that you need 99.9 percent of agreement before those parameters can change so for example like you could have something you could have few taki could you have few turkey as a settlement mechanism for disputes that are beyond a certain size what I'm trying to say is let's say there's there's one proposal which is just to add a particular new up code to the scripting language there's

some disagreement but you could think of the disagreement as like 8020 like most miners you would ask are in favor of this new op code and this has happened in the past those things don't go to the filter key so that settle but when you have a split where the miners are split 50-50 or the code developers are split 6040 it's it's those situations that are really hard and you could fall back on few taki as an option because both the options obviously are a pretty good otherwise a lot of the community won't be supporting each one each one of them and then you could use filter key in those in only those circumstances once you have a set of governance mechanisms

possible you have a big common ax toriel space in which you quays you can combine them I mean that's just generally true of all design parameters and features I would think that the issue is just more do you have any plausible governance mechanism here that meets the minimal constraints that's it's not whether you find the optimal I would worry less about finally optimal or what one and more worried more about do you have anything that just works at a basic level so if you've got some voting mechanism and it works for lots of things well now you should be a lot less worried because hey you got something that works if you have a few tart key mechanism that works and then great you got something that works but I think at the moment that your problem is do you have anything that works

not can you combine it in some optimal way I mean in the case of Bitcoin right the sort of way it works is that there is code that's run right code that determines what's a valid block and it's sort of what the majority runs of that code that is you know the authoritative sort of truth and rules of the network now in a way there's a bunch of people in charge of that code and you know they can change it and then it sort of depends where the people upgrade or go somewhere else but so there is some sort of very weird type of dominance

mechanism it's not maybe you know is it certainly not perfect and I think one big problem is that these people certainly accomplished developers but they weren't elected they don't really represent necessarily Bitcoin users and there is so much inertia out there that to try to get people to change something else is extremely difficult so they ended up having a ton of power from being in that position and I think that happened a suit of a little bit by accident but now there's like no way out well I mean you you do want some cost of

change in governance that I mean that's why we often make it hard to change rules in government so it's not a terrible thing if there is a substantial cost to make changes because there are a lot of things that go wrong when change is easy so that this is just a general thing we know about governance in different contexts you try to adjust the cost of change to trade-off the need to adapt from the cost that can happen when the things that go wrong when cost is too easy so when change is too easy I'm sorry then there can be awful lobbying there can be a lot of what we call rent-seeking people pushing for things to get personal advantages a lot of and people have to pay to little things

that other people are trying to push for so they could protect their interests there's just a lot of costs in real systems when change is relatively easy so I mean a standard story we have like in organizational theory is that when you have like a travel office they usually have a bunch of rules about travel that are just hard to change that is you know what what kind of travel you can get reimbursed for or whether it's a plane ticket or a cab or whatever they've just got a bunch of standard rules and no they don't want to change it and if you've got some exception they don't wanna hear about it and you think well that's not very adaptive what if what if my circumstance is different what it's what if something changed here shouldn't they like pay attention to the details well if they start to pay

attention the details then they'll get lobbied a lot then although of all these people who come up all the time saying you should make this exception and that exception and the other exception and I'll have to react to that and people have to do all this lobbying and they just make a decision now we're just gonna have a simple world we're not gonna change it and that'll minimize all these costs so by analogy here there should be some cost of change it should be not easy to make change exactly because you'll end up with all these costs if you do but you don't wanna make it so hard that you can't ever change if you need to change so that's really the question is do you have a way to make substantial change even at a substantial cost when substantial changes is really needed yeah absolutely well Robin thanks

so much for coming on we at the end of our show but really enjoyed this discussion and I think and I hope that this sort of intersection of decentralized technology cryptocurrencies blockchain and prediction markets is going to become quite interesting I mean I know there are some projects in the space or very mentioned and there's some other ones too who are building prediction markets in this way and we'll see maybe will be like a lot of other attempts that they don't go too far but maybe actually there's something there all right so in any case I am very very excited to see how they turn out so we

we academics are usually like big fans of innovations somewhere else right in our own little world we don't innovate very much and we're not very interested but wait we like to take credit for innovation somewhere else so in the same way you know I'm sure people stuck in the middle of this they're really scared about any of these options because they could all go wrong but I'm on the outside so I just yeah it would be great if something you guys tried something because it would sure be fun to watch yes so thanks so much for coming on of course will will link to your blog also you Twitter and and your book is he out already uh not too much not too much but every six months to go perhaps there's some pre-order site in case which is actually it's on singularity more so no exactly

on topic but if you've liked what Robin sure talked about then you think he looks like someone who would write a good book then you know you can perhaps pre-order that book all right so thanks so much for coming on and you know thanks mayor for you know your second episode it's been a pleasure yeah it was great thanks for coming on Robin it was really great to talk to you take care yeah and her listeners thanks so much for joining us you know we put out episodes every Monday you can get the episodes in your favorite podcast player or see them on YouTube and it's on youtube.com slash and a BT C by the way apologies for the terrible lighting it's gonna be better soon and if you're a loyal listener then we still have this

primary competition going on which is that you leave a iTunes review for us and you can say wonderful things or horrible things that's irrelevant and we will send you a t-shirt at least as long as we have still have some and if the rate of use keep up the same way you and so a lot many of you have done that and thanks so much for all the wonderful things you've said and so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week