Upstream - The War on Cash with Brett Scott

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Is the growing ascendance of digital money simply an organic evolution away from the purported inconveniences of physical cash? Or is this transition actually a nefarious, corporate-engineered, neo-enclosure of money by Big Finance and Big Tech? In his latest book, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets, author, journalist, and financial hacker Brett Scott lays out an extremely compelling case arguing that corporations are engineering an enclosure of money — transforming it into a completely digital form which they alone will control. In this Conversation, we take a deep dive beneath the surface of the global financial system to explore the technical and political differences between various forms of money, why corporations are attacking physical cash and plotting to completely replace it with digital money, who will really benefit from a cashless society, and why the fight for ownership of our digital footprints is one of the most pressing battles of our time.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify to leave us a review there too. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And also, upstream is a labor of love. It's really important for us to keep our bi-weekly conversation series and quarterly documentaries free of charge and accessible to anyone who's interested.

But it all takes a lot of time and resources. If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so, and if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable. Please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Capitalist systems go through phases essentially where they're expanding and at one point in time government cash would have been an agent of expansion of capitalist systems. At one point it would have been a tool of elites to expand markets you'd have the state issued money and

so on they would help to expand market systems but as of course systems develop and expand older forms can sometimes become blockers. So right now, cash actually is something that's becoming almost anti-capitalist, in the sense that it slows down the expansion of capitalist systems. And it actually also offers various forms of protection to people who don't believe in or trust the institutions that uphold large scale corporate capitalist systems. You are listening to upstream. Upstream, upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you've thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Deladuncan. Is the growing ascendance of digital money simply an organic evolution away from the purported inconveniences of physical cash? Or is this transition actually a nefarious corporate engineered neo-inclosure of money

by big finance and big tech? In his latest book, Cloud Money, Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets, author, journalist, and financial hacker, Brett Scott, lays out an extremely compelling case, arguing that corporations are enclosing money itself, engineering an enclosure of this meta-commodity into a completely digital form, which they alone will control. In this conversation, we're going to take a deep dive beneath the surface of the global financial system to explore the technical and political differences between various forms of money, why corporations are attacking physical cash and plotting to completely replace it with

digital money, who will really benefit from a cashless society, and why the fight for ownership of our digital footprints is one of the most pressing battles of our time. Here's Dela in conversation with Brett Scott. Well, welcome Brett, welcome to Upstream. So happy to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. You have such an interesting experience and background with the FinTech world. I'm wondering if you could tell us about your relationship with this world and particularly like what were the seeds that led to this book? Like what were the the moments or the feelings that you had or the realizations that led to cloud money? Sure,

I mean my backgrounds actually much broader than FinTech. I would say it was originally far more the financial sector more generally. FinTech is basically this field that specializes in automating finance. I became interested in that, but before I was interested in that world, I was actually involved in high finance. Actually, I worked as a broker in the financial sector, but I came from this quite politically radical background, so quite a left-wing background, and I originally had this whole sort of, I approached the financial sector from that perspective. I was sort of

explored it and I was very interested in how it worked and I actually wrote a book about that in 2013 called The Herodic Skides Global Finance, Hacking the Future of Money. And that was about the financial sector more generally. That was about hedge funds and investment banks and all sorts of stuff. And so, yeah, that book came out and then I started getting involved in lots of financial activism projects. So working on campaigns to reform the financial sector, working on different types of alternative finance systems as well. So looking at alternative currencies, alternative banking, all sorts of stuff like that, which you discuss a lot in upstream, this sort of alternative economy type world. So I was sort of straddling the sort of world of

alternative finance, but also the actual activism around financial sector as well. And I found myself getting drawn a lot into the FinTech world, partly because a lot of people in the early FinTech scene perceived themselves to be disrupting the normal financial sector. So they saw my first book, The Heretics Guides Global Finance, Hacking the Future of Money, and you have these sort of fintech entrepreneurs who say, hey, we're also doing that. We're also trying to disrupt finance, you know, and so I would get drawn into that world to some extent. But over time, it became very apparent to me that actually fintech was a big new area that actually the mainstream banking sector would slowly take over and would start to use to extend its power. And that's largely been happening.

But yeah, I mean, I guess I could go dull, deeper into all that. But I suppose one last thing I would mention is my work on alternative currency took me into the Bitcoin world eventually. I was involved in alternative currency prior to Bitcoin, but I got drawn a lot into that world. That became a whole new area of exploration for me. Nowadays I'm considered a Bitcoin critic, but in the beginning, the early days of Bitcoin, but I got drawn a lot into that world. That became a whole new area of exploration for me. Now, there's I'm considered a Bitcoin critic, but in the beginning, the early days of Bitcoin, I was actually involved in the early Bitcoin community. All right. So finance and cryptocurrency and alternative currencies, some of the themes

for our call today, I love it. And the book is called Cloud Money and you're offering a metaphor there. And your book has many different metaphors and a lot of invitation for us to unlearn how we look at money and how money is created and banking and finance. So can you just give us some metaphors that you're really enjoying right now in describing money and how it's made. What are you finding helpful for folks in rethinking money and understanding it differently? All right. Well, actually, I run a write a newsletter called Altid States of Monetary Consciousness, which actually are specialized in that newsletter in trying to build metaphors around monetary systems, partly because monetary systems are invisible to people.

They have visible components, but largely it's a type of a network structure or a mesh and you can't really see it. And actually metaphors are very good. Metaphors are actually visual metaphors. They create visual imagery in your head. So I find metaphors quite a good way to try and visualize the management system. So I find metaphors quite a good way to try and visualize

my own system. So I got a bunch of them, actually. In the book, I develop a metaphor around money being a nervous system as a baseline metaphor for money. And I do that very deliberately, because in a lot of mainstream economics or the traditional bodily metaphor for money is blood. People would imagine that money is blood. People would

imagine that money is the sort of circulatory system of the economy, sort of pumping around the economy. And I really can't stand that. I have a bunch of reasons why I can't stand that metaphor. But one of the main things is I think it it misrepresents where value and economy lies. So to me, the underlying value in any economy is human beings and ecosystems. And that's the baseline body, as it were, or if you want to call it blood. I don't want to be too like literal these metaphors,

but that's the real sort of source of value in an economy since the beginning of time, right? Way prior to monetary systems. But modern monetary systems do resemble nervous systems that can activate parts of that structure, or parts of that, if you want to call it the economic body. So I often think about monetary systems in these nervous system metaphors.

So we can go into that if you want. But in terms of the cloud money metaphor, that's a second metaphor. That's a slightly different one, which is I'm just drawing on imagery of the cloud money metaphor, that's a second metaphor. That's a slightly different one, which is I'm just drawing on imagery of the cloud, which is a problematic metaphor used to describe corporate data centers essentially, so cloud computing. But I'm playing with that concept.

So cloud money basically refers to digital money. But of course, there's a bunch of problems with the cloud metaphor in general in tech, because clouds do a vogue, this idea of this like floaty entities that sort of float above us. But really what digital clouds are fortified compounds, surrounded by electric fences that have huge power. So I'm aware of the limitations of the cloud metaphor in the book. And another one that you offered that I really appreciated

was the metaphor of banking as entering a casino instead of using a cloakroom. And I remember when I watched the big short, I loved that movie in the way that it kind of helped, it helped me at least understand how money is created and finance, and I do remember it was one of the times when it offered an unlearning around how money is created and that money isn't, we put money in and then that allows money to be loaned to someone else, but instead banks kind of put the ones and zeros and there's only a fraction

that's there in the actual bank that had been deposited. And so that cloak room metaphor, I didn't know that I thought that, but I definitely did. And you've taken that even further into this unlearning of how money is created and that. So what does this mean that banks are not cloakrooms, but instead their casinos? Okay, yeah. I mean, just just bear, I mean, I'm also going to flag up that metaphors are dangerous because different people receive different metaphors are dangerous because different people receive different metaphors in different ways and actually not everybody lacks metaphors. Some people get irritated when I use metaphors for stuff. They trigger people in different ways

and I personally love metaphors, but it's not for everyone. But another one of the metaphors, as you've touched on in the book where I'm trying to describe the sort of nitty-gritty of the existing mainstream money systems is I basically criticized this idea of banks being custodians, custodians of money. So it's a very, very typical idea, especially in, you know, old-school economics. If the bank is a custodian or an intermediary, they sort of take your money, they store it, they pass it around, perhaps they lend it out to somebody else. So think about all that language being used there. Suggest somebody who's taken custody of something and who's then has control of it. And this is why I say that there's a very often a very flawed idea of banks being something but like a cloakroom.

So if you arrive at a club, for example, and you've got your coat and you go to the, they'll have a cloakroom, your hand over your coat, they take custody of it. They're basically the cities custodians who also help store it for you. They might give you a little receipt and you come back later to get it. Now many people still have this idea that banks are something like that. That you go, you take your money to them, they store your money, and then they will give it back to you. And actually that metaphor of banks as a cloakroom, it's wrong, but it also actually forms the basis for a flawed understanding of what's called fractional reserve banking. So one of the

scare mongering techniques you'll find among certain people who concerned about banking is they'll have that cloakroom metaphor, but then they'll imagine that what the bank is doing in the background is it actually doesn't have your money. It's taken it away and given it to somebody else. So this is a very common thing people think.

They say, you know, you think your money is in the bank, but it's actually not there. Now, this is a very misleading way of thinking about the system, and I develop a different metaphor, which is out of casinos. So I basically say, look, when you enter into a casino, you hand over cash to the cashier, and they give you casino chips, all right, and those chips can be used internal to the casino. And those chips are basically a secondary form of money, privately issued money that can be used within the casino. And actually, this is a much more useful metaphor

for thinking about the banking system. When you go and hand over cash to a bank, they're not storing your cash for you. They're gonna take your cash and issue you digital chips instead. So they issue a private form of money, all right. And so if you bank with, for example, Bank of America or something like that, they're going to issue you Bank of America chips.

And so actually there's two different forms of money. There is the cash system, which is not what you handed in to get that. And then there's this digital chip system. And what banks are actually able to do is they're able to issue far more of those digital chips than they have in actual state money reserves or government money reserves. And I think this metaphor is very important because it helps people to actually understand what's really happening with what's sometimes called fractional reserve banking, but it's more accurately known as credit creation of money, which is basically like, it's not that banks are taking your money and then giving it to somebody else.

They might take your money, but they just create new chips on the basis of that, rather than on the back of that. And the whole digital money system is basically made of these privately-issued bank chips, and a lot of the politics of cash to society has to do with the fact that you become reliant upon those privately issued full of money. Yes, and just a note about metaphors. The whole show is upstream, so it's based on a metaphor. So I guess we're pro-medipor here.

Yeah. Okay, so this was actually for me the most, I guess I didn't know this part in the book. This was the most new for me the most, I guess I didn't know this part in the book. This was the most new for me. This idea of a war on cash. And you know, like a few things that you that you share is that like, what if we saw cash as a public utility? And what if we saw the digitalization of money as an enclosure of the commons? And so yeah, this distinction that you just made and that you make in the book between

cash and digital currency was really fascinating. So can you tell us more about what is this war on cash? What are you noticing? What do you mean by this? And why should we be concerned? The concept of the war on cash is basically a way of saying that the decline of the cash system is often engineered from the top down rather than the bottom up. Now the reason why this narrative is important is that the very typical story you'll hear

in the media or among politicians or whoever is speaking about this stuff is the idea that the decline in cash, the cash system, so physical money systems, is something that just organically happens from the bottom up, from people just making choices. And actually, this is a very common way that economists think about the world. You know, economists are always imagining, you know, sophisticated economists maybe don't imagine this, but a lot of your sort of bog standard economics imagines that the key player in an economy is the ordinary person walking around the streets, quote-unquote the consumer who drives everything through their individual choices, all right? And this is a very bottom-up vision,

right? This is the idea that it's you and me, our choices is what's dictating things in an economy, rather than, for example, looking at the big oligopoly players and what they do in an economy, how that affects everything. So the war on cash is basically where it's speaking about the fact that many of these large top-down players have been engaging in various forms of attacks on the cash system, demonization of the cash system, slowly making it harder to use the cash system and so on. To make it more and more likely that people wondering on the streets will quote and quote

to choose digital payments. And we have a problem in economic language in the sense that there's a very little way to describe that process. In typical economics, there's no real distinction between different agents in the market. It's assumed that everyone has the same level of power. And I don't know if you've ever seen these kind of news stories with I'll say things like consumers choose digital payments. I always think about the economics fixation upon choice. It's often a way of disguising power

because if you think about it like, for example, a menu, I always think about it, I come from an anthropology background. So if an economic student and an anthropology student walk into a restaurant and they're watching people choosing things from a menu, the economic student often has a tendency towards fixating on what the people are choosing. Say, oh, that's what this is what demand is. A person wants this, a person wants that. Whereas an anthropology student is probably a political, economy student, is far more interested in who set the menu,

why are certain things not on the menu? What's considered acceptable to be on the menu? That whole power structure that lies around the choices. And often this is just screened out of public debate. So when it comes to the cash system, for example, that gets screened out in the form of newspaper headlines to just say, oh, well, people are just choosing digital payments.

Without thinking about, for example, the power of corporations like Apple, which can completely have hegemonic cultural power and can basically make choices on behalf of people. So the book is looking a lot at how the move towards, quote, unquote, a cash to society is not really a bottom-up move, it's as much a top-down process as a bottom-up process.

I'll go into a bunch of examples from that, from the banking sector, which is a big interest in removing the cash system because they control the underlying accounts that are required for the digital money system through to Visa and MasterCard, which have massive interest in getting rid of cash, through to actually government players as well, who have at least some agenda in getting rid of the cash system. Yes, and I love that you bring in the lens of class and cash, both in global north, but also global south, very fascinating. And I know, so my partner is the steward of a local and independent restaurant, and he's always using cash. And I know that when we go other places like a bar or restaurant,

they love that we use cash. And I hadn't thought about the difference and like kind of like how radical that is that he's using cash. And also his access to ATM's and things like that. So can you talk a little bit more about class and cash and how that's connected? Yeah, sure. I think it's important maybe to just note that I'm not romantic about cash. But capitalist systems go through phases, essentially, with their expanding. And at one point in time, government cash would have been an agent of expansion of capitalist systems. At one point it would have been

a tool of elites to expand markets. You'd have the state issued money and so on. They would help to expand market systems. But as of course systems develop and expand older forms can sometimes become blockers. So right now, cash actually is something that's becoming almost anti-capitalist, in the sense that it slows down the expansion of capitalist systems. And it actually also offers various forms of protection to people who don't believe in or trust

the institutions that uphold large scale corporate capitalist systems, for example, the banking sector. So there's actually a massive class element. Historically, it was always the first people that banks would target to get accounts where rich people. And this has always been the case. So you would have this bifurcation between your sort of merchant class and aristocrat

class who would have access to the banking sector, and then your kind of working class would be using these sort of physical forms of money rather than having banks, right? As time has gone on, this process has, the banks have been reaching ever a further out trying to get people locked into their account systems. But you'll tend to find that cash is always used

on the margins of society. It's always used among informal, you know, a lot of immigrant communities, for example, like nomadic groups. Basically, anybody who's kind of on the arts go to society, anybody who's often people who work on wage labor and so on. And to this day, it's very obvious when you walk into a city like New York or anywhere else, which places, quote, unquote, very obvious when you walk into a city like New York or anywhere else, which places, quote, and go, go cash, those first. It's very obviously these kind of bougie, yucky places where people have a certain aspirational, I guess like a trust in large-scale corporate institutions where they basically believe

they are unproblematic. And as soon as you leave that context, that whole belief breaks down. And actually, in many places, cash has a lot more cultural resonance with people. For example, in the UK, where I was based quite a long time, there's this digital finance startup called Monzo, which is, became very, very big among the upper middle class kind of bougie elite of London. Everyone had this sort of bright peach colored card. And actually, many people in this sort of progressive left in London, everyone had this bright peach colored card. And actually, many people in this sort of progressive left

in London, who part of the cosmopolitan urban intelligentsia have monzo cards, because it's considered, they got the slick aesthetics and so on. But if you rock up with your monzo card in a sort of northern English city, a working class city, you're very quickly going to find yourself perceived as being a Londoner. It's like, if you go to an old bar and people be like, you know, go back to London.

So there's very clear distinctions between who gets access to these aspirational technologies and stuff. But maybe there's the last point I'll make about this, this this class thing is, the best way to sort of see the move towards a cashier society is as an enclosure. It's the institutionalization of society because you basically have to have an account with a set institution and you have to have permissions from them to interact. So if you all digital payments using cards, or essentially you're asking banks permission to do stuff, the type of person who finds it unproblematic tends to be a person who just trusts institutions, and that tends to be a certain class of people.

But what's happening is increasingly people from lower social classes are being made to feel ashamed that they would want to use the cash system and told you have to start using the system because it's going to take over. And the book I'm analyzing a lot of this sort of class war dynamics to this. And actually arguing that there really needs to be a pushback saying we need to actively promote and protect a public alternative in the form of cash. Because what often happens is that, for example, in places like the UK at least, the government doesn't protect the public money system. It rather tries to subsidize the private

money system. So they'll say, okay, well, these people here who are slow to adopt digital payments, we will help them get accounts at Barclays Bank, we'll help them get accounts at these banks. So they're basically acting as almost like sales agents for the banking sector rather than actively promoting and protecting the public money system, right, which is the cash system. And that's partially where you can see it as a privatization

or a full privatization of the monetary system. And nowadays you can't perceive cash as being almost like a public utility. Yes, and even as I was reading, I was like, oh, is cash even like an alternative currency or like a local currency in a way? And just to clarify what I mean by that, there's a lot of beautiful examples around the world of local currencies, which are often directly exchangeable and then can only be utilized in a very specific place and also only local and independent places. So Totteness in England had the Totteness pound, I know Bristol had the Bristol pound, the Brixton pound in London as well as Berkshire in Massachusetts. So those are some examples where it keeps the money circulating locally.

And they're also quite beautiful. They've got like local illustrations, local artists, et cetera. And then, so I looked into them and to see where they are now. And it's actually so similar to the trends that you're seeing in the book. We have, I think, the Totteness P pound closed, although it's seen as like a great example in a great story, but it isn't used anymore. In Bristol, even the mayor was paid 100% in Bristol pounds for a moment. But then now my understanding is due to COVID and like the worry of cash and COVID, now they're looking

at Bristol pay and actually moving towards digital currency. And then in Brixton, they're incorporating blockchain technology. So super interesting. So can you talk about, I know this is something that you have connection with as well. Can you talk about local currencies and how these are shifting and changing in view of what you're noticing for your in your book. Sure. First, I'll just say that this whole imagined connection between cash and COVID is just totally dubious. So one of the big things that was happening prior to the pandemic is a lot of these big institutions are pushing against cash, but when the pandemic happened, they very, very quickly

weaponized it to trying to create a kind of scare mongering around cash using this health angle. But there's many public health institutions have just rejected that. So Robert Koch Institute, which is Germany's preeminent health research institute, just says this line is total rubbish, right? There's no connection between cash and COVID. Bank of Flint National Seventh Months said for that as well. Actually, there's been many studies that have pointed this out. But this has not stopped a whole bunch of players pushing that idea, and many business owners have internalized this idea.

And I sometimes think they have sort of cynically done it, because certainly there's many places that kind of wanted to push people away from cash, and have just conveniently used this as an excuse COVID. But when it comes to alternative currencies, like the Bristol pound and so on, Brickson pound, yeah, it's quite possible they've also been following that trend. I mean, I used to be involved in the Brickson pound. And it's quite interesting when you look at those small local currencies like that, is that

they have to have a physical version of the money for marketing purposes, right? So they, it's actually people, human beings are tactile creatures, right? And it makes a big difference if you can feel and touch and note and see the artwork and so on. So that was a big element of how you would promote these small scale alternative currency systems, but actually bear in mind that many other systems would also be digital. So the bricks and pound system had a digital payment system, and then there was a sort of a small cash part to it. So actually, much like the normal monetary system is comprised of a physical component that's issued by the state and a digital component that's issued by the banking sector, these small local currencies would also have these dual structure.

But the main way to think about those local currencies, like the Brickston pound, is they're essentially actually vouchers systems. Something like the Brickson Pound would basically be trying to think, if you go back to my casino metaphor about banks issuing these digital chips that we can move around, well, Brickson Pound would take your digital chips and then issue its own digital chips in response to that. They would get chips into their bank account from you and then they would give you a voucher to say it was only redeemable in local area. So these are local voucher systems and you can implement that in either digital or physical form. One point I wanted to maybe touch

on about this, can you consider cash sort of an alternative currency? I mean, not really, in the sense that it is forms a foundation of a normal mainstream monetary system. And actually, the cash part of a normal monetary system is the main psychological component. If you go into Google and you type, money into Google, you will see pictures of cash. You don't see pictures of bank data centers. All right, so it's the main psychological construct people have when they're thinking about mainstream money, and yet it's actually a very small

part of the money-tree system. For example, in the UK, about something around 97, 95% of the money actually takes a form of these bank-issued money. The only thing I'll just say about what's kind of interesting, a very overlooked aspect of this debate around cash to society is actually cash is far better at maintaining decentralization and localization, right? So a lot of the alternatives of economy movements are interested in localization. And if you think about how cash moves around, it moves around from hand to hand, it comes from a centraluer, but once it's out in the world, the kind of can just sort of percolates around in this very sort of slow and quite a decentralized fashion.

It has to go up in person to person and it appears to appear way. And if you think about the vision, imagine like a 1950s style economy, this was often the sort of default, right? You'd have a person who walks into a locally owned store and hands over cash to the shop owner. Now, the shop owner might have sourced goods from some distant corporation, but there's going to be this localized element to the system. Now, contrast that to what's happening now, where you basically send a smartphone message to your bank data center, telling them to contact Amazon's data centers and

to confirm some payment. And that is a recipe for massive corporate centralization. So in this sense, you need digital money for mass centralization, mass corporate centralization. Corporations cannot work. Large scale digital corporations cannot grow unless they have digital money. So in a sense, cash has this, it slows things down, it localizes things in an economy precisely because it's physical, which is why it's standing in the way between diffusion of big finance and big tech, and which is why the ideology in a capitalist market right now basically says it's impossible for cash to

remain, and it has to go. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money, Cash, Cards, crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. We'll be right back. I want you to know, Sizing up all the thoughts I want you to know You're the self-privileged, I want you to know Don't know about you, but I am rude I know I'm a fool, I want to know You're the same movie I want to know Don't know about you, but I am rude Shed, I am a loser I am rude Shed, I am a loser

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Debrisa! Debrisa! Debrisa! Debrisa! Debrisa! Debrisa! I'm gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one That was Debacer by The Pixies. Now back to our conversation with Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money, Cash, Cards, crypto, and the War for Our Wallets.

And what about credit unions? So I know when I give talks on alternative economics and invitations for folks, I often say, move your money from Wells Fargo and Bank of America into your local credit union. How do credit unions fit into this conversation? Yeah, sure. You know, in the world of alternative banking, there is different strategies people use. And bear in mind, this question around whether you protect the cash system or not is slightly separate to what do you want the structure of the banking system to be.

So just as an initial point, the move away from cash and towards digital payment is a generalized shift in power to the banking sector over the state. But you can then have a debate about what you want the structure of the banking sector to be. Okay, so a lot of the world of alternative banking is about, how do you want to change the banking system? And credit unions are one alternative to your mainstream corporate banks.

And historically, there's a few different ways people try to alter the banking system. There's one of them's around geography. You can try and sort of limit the geographic proximity of banks. So local banking movements, we say, OK, we don't want banks that are distant from us. We want to have local banks that will be more responsive

to our local needs, be more embedded in our community. That's a sort of almost like a proximity-based concept. You want to say there's something good about having smaller scale, more localized institutions, rather than distant giant institutions. There's also the cooperative banking movement, which says change the ownership structure of these. So rather than having them own by corporate shareholders have them owned by members and so by that,

so it will change the ownership, and that will improve what the bank does. You can hybridize that. You can say, I want to localize cooperative bank. And then there's the ethical banking movement, which says change the mission statement of a bank, which just says, get it to pledge that it's not going to invest or extend credit to fossil fuel companies

and stuff like that. So Trilose Bank and things like that will do that. And hypothetically, you can also, you can hybridize all of those. You can have localized, cooperatively owned ethical banks and credit unions and this kind of thing. So yeah, it's definitely part of the strategy for reforming the financial sector. But bear in mind that's this question around, as I said, around cash isn't strictly in the same category as this. A lot of the even your cooperative banks and so on will still be pushing for digital money

systems, right? Because there would be parts of the digital money clearing systems and they're working with me as a master card too. So it's a slightly different angle. Yeah. And thank you for distinguishing that. And I've heard you say, you know, the book is partially in defense of cash. We have this cash piece as a public utility,

and then we have the banking sector and how we might change that. I appreciate that you brought in localized, cooperativeized, mission-driven, and all-add nonprofit. My understanding is credit unions are nonprofit banking, which is a whole other area of that. So, well let's let's move to cryptocurrency. You mentioned that your own journey with crypto has totally changed and evolved and I really it was so fascinating to hear yeah about the response to your last book and cryptocurrency in that whole world.

Maybe could you tell us your own personal story first with crypto? How did you feel about it at first? How did you get involved? And then what started to change and where are you now? Sure. I think I got involved in Bitcoin probably around 2011, somewhere around there, a friend of mine, chatted to me about it. At that time I was just coming out of a financial sector and I was exploring us with alternatives

and I was getting involved in alternative currencies because there's a whole world prior to crypto alternative currencies. So I was pretty interesting and I started hanging out at the scene, I started using it. I guess in the early London Bitcoin scene, I was one of the early, I actually, I was pretty interesting and I started hanging out with the scene, I started using it. I guess in the early London Bitcoin scene, I was one of the early, I actually used to get Bitcoin and exchange from my first book. So at some point I had a bunch of Bitcoin which I got from selling my book. So yeah, I was kind of interested, and I was sort of intellectually interested in like, how would you make this thing work?

I was quite naive about it. Well, maybe I wasn't, I guess I was trying to understand the technology rather than thinking too deeply about the tokens. But after a while, I started to become increasingly aware that there was something empty about the Bitcoin system. And this was also going hand in hand with me, thinking a lot more about money,

getting much more interested in deeper theories of money. And Bitcoin has this problem, which is it has this very, very fascinating technology. And in the book, I describe the technological aspect of Bitcoin as being almost like a Rubik's cube. You know, when somebody tries to explain it to you, it sounds very perplexing, and you kind of like it's all this jargon words and stuff.

And even when you first start to look at it, it's like looking at an unfinished Rubik's cube. And you've got to twist all these concepts around many, many times until suddenly they lock into place. And you can kind of glimpse it. You can suddenly see how this decentralized structure works. So there's these different elements of the Bitcoin recipe that come together to form this very fascinating

technological architecture which basically enables a network of strangers, people who don't know each other, scattered across the world, to issue and coordinate the movement of tokens between themselves. And that was the fascinating technological component, but the actual token in Bitcoin is extremely crude. So it's basically a very sophisticated way of moving a very crude token around. And the main ideological job of the early community, and what actually the sort of community since then,

has been trying to spin an ideological layer around these actually quite empty tokens, quite crude tokens, trying to create mythology around them essentially, which includes speaking about them as money, pasting monetary branding around them, creating all this kind of mythology about why they're worth something and so on. So there's a huge marketing effort that goes into making these tokens actually feel like something. But when you strip them back and you look at the tokens, they're totally empty. And this is a fundamental weakness in currency.

Now what happened when I say that people often will say to me, oh yeah, but normal money is also empty. All right, it's also just numbers, which I totally disagree with. Normal money is a vast coercive network structure that's underpinned by the liabilities of very large institutions, including the state and the commercial banking sector. And I could go into that, but that is a very, very big difference

between what you see, the numbers you'll see in a normal monetary system, and the numbers you see in Bitcoin. But what Bitcoin is basically very good at is parasiting upon monetary imagery. It's very, very good at sort of mimicking a monetary system. So it sort of looks the same. But really what it is is actually a digital collectible that's priced in money, but it is a digital collectible that has got monetary branding pastel over it.

And it's a little bit like, you know, if I walked into an antique shop and I saw, I was like a medallion, you know, this medallion, you mentioned it had some kind of like inscriptions carved into it or something. And it has a price and it says, you know, this is $20 to buy this medallion. Now, if I took that medallion and I handed it to somebody, an exchange for something, I could say, hey, I look, this is my money I'm paying you with this is my money. It looks a little bit like money, but really what it is is actually a collectible price in money that you're swapping for something. So the whole Bitcoin system is basically like that.

And say digital collectible, it has a very, very volatile price set in the speculative market. And once it has that price, you can swap it for other things with prices, which is a process that superficially makes it look like it's money. And this is actually very interesting, but the Bitcoin community gets very, very angry with me when I point out this obvious reality, because their entire ideological effort at Bitcoin is relies, and it's whole the whole marketing effort relies upon people imagining that actually it's competing with the dollar. and it's whole the whole marketing effort relies upon people imagining that actually it's competing with the dollar.

When rarely it actually entirely is dependent upon getting a dollar price in order to induce the money-like vibe it has. It's quite a tricky topic to kind of like get your head around. But one of the big topics I talk about with Bitcoin is counter trade, which is, should I describe counter trade? Go for it since you brought it up. Yeah, it's a very useful concept if you want to try and see what's happening in the Bitcoin system.

And it also has actual potential interesting consequences for the monetary system. Counter trade is a bit similar to what I've already been describing there, which is basically when you're using a non-monetary object for exchange, but doing so by looking at its monetary price. So for example, if I have a watch that costs $50, and then you have something that costs $50, and I say, hey, can I give you this watch for that other thing that you have? So that's some headphones.

That's an act of counter trade. Basically, what we've done is we've looked at the prices. We said the prices are equivalent, so we can just swap them. The alternative would be that I could sell the watch for $50 and then give you the $50 to pay for the headphones. So basically what you've done is you have these two monetary transactions that are superimposed over each other

that makes it look like there's no money passing hands. And this is how all Bitcoin transactions work. So you basically calculate the dollar price before you work out what how much that you give for something else. And this is actually quite interesting, right? So in places like El Salvador right now where they've tried to force people to use Bitcoin,

this is how it will work. All transactions are actually priced in US dollars, but you can then calculate the US dollar price of Bitcoin to work out a counter trade ratio. So you can have this like, oh, it's like almost like a parasitic system. So Bitcoin can use counter trade to sort of parasite and sort of look like money.

But this is actually quite interesting because it does actually form a new way of doing exchange. Even if it's not actually competing with a dollar, it's definitely using its dollar price to do stuff. And this can actually cause quite a lot of, it's quite a lot of a dollar, it's definitely using its dollar price to do stuff. This can actually cause quite a lot of interesting strategies you can do with that. Bitcoin is interesting in that politically, because it has certain political potentials in the sense of, if you are a dissident and you've been shut out of a normal banking

sector, you can counter trade this digital object to get stuff. But ideologicallyologically it's extremely conservative because it relies upon this very austerity-based mindset where you basically the sort of hard money thinking, where you're imagining money as a commodity and that you got to restrain it and so on, which is basically conservative thought, right? It's like what Margaret Thatcher would have told people. So one of the most concerning aspects right now of the Bitcoin system is not really its reality, it's more its ideology than it's spreading all right.

So you'll have 16 year olds suddenly, quoting Murray Rothbard and conservative thinkers at you because that's what they're reading on the cryptocurrency forums. So as an ideological tool, it's extremely effective at spreading conservative monetary thought and doing so without actually challenging the normal monetary system, which is a deep irony because what it's actually doing is empowering the conservatives of the normal monetary system

in the process. Oh, yeah. And one frame that you bring up is anarcho-capitalism. And yeah, I think can you go a little bit deeper into the ideology that it's spreading? Like what is the paradigm shift or what is the invitation that it's offering to, let's say that 16 year old? Because I can also hear like that exchange of things without going through the banks that some people yeah would say that's a good thing. We're not utilizing the corporate bank. We're just going person to person. So it's much more decentralized as it's noted. So what is the deeper ideological frame

that you're concerned about? Well, bear in mind, there's a difference between the reality and the ideology. The reality of Bitcoin is less damaging than the ideology or the marketing pitch. The reality is that it's a digital collectible that you can move around and swap for things, right? Via its monetary price. The marketing pitch is that it's an attack on the inflationary, terrible dollar, you know, and so on. Now, that's marketing pitch is often what's the austerity-based mindset. So, if you're looking, for example, at progressive monetary thought in the US, it'd be exemplified by modern monetary theory, MMT, which is a progressive monetary movement that's just tries to say we should take control of the monetary system to actually use it

for more progressive purposes. Whereas the conservative position will be, you should restrain the monetary system, hold it back and do austerity, which is just an old school conservative position of money, right? And that is what Bitcoin tries to exemplify in its monetary design, albeit its technological design, appeals to radicalism, right? So if you're just focusing on its decentralized structure,

it looks very radical, which is why it captures people's imaginations and subsequently trodgen horses, conservative ideas about money into them via that. But the anarcho-capitalist element is part of the libertarian mythology, which is the idea, I mean, Bitcoin's attracted many different types of political groups, but one of the sort of core communities

is being libertarians. And anarcho-capitalism is like a very hard-line wing of a libertarianism. And libertarianism in general is based upon the fantasy of the separation between states and markets. Right? Libertarians, at least in their conservative form, believe that markets are a natural phenomenon that don't require states to exist, at least large-scale modern markets.

So I often think about libertarian philosophy as a little bit like teenagers. You know, like imagine there's a teenager who's like fuming against their parents, they've been grounded or something locked in their room. And they're like, I'm going to run away from home and like screw my parents and so on. And this is the kind of vibe. Libertarian thoughts are a little bit like this. It's actually brought into life by the presence of large scale states that will create large scale markets, right, that underpin the infrastructure of large scale markets,

which in turn brings to life private entrepreneurs who will then get irritated with the state underpinning of their market, and will sort of rail against it and say it's a giant injustice that there is a state player which underpins their market. And will then generate fantasies of escape, which is what a knockout capitalism is, where you basically imagine a market untethered from a state foundation without police, without armies, without law courts, without anything, basically, you're out. And so you imagine this market operating entirely by itself. And one of the elements of this from the monetary side is that, well, the state's underpin

the monetary system, underpin modern corporate capitalism. But if you want to create that fantasy of escape, you have to imagine a non-state form of money. And right now Bitcoin forms the core fetish of that monetary element of the anarcho-capitalist fantasy. So you can imagine large scale markets operating with Bitcoin with no-like states involved. This is the big like fantasy and Bitcoin.

Of course, it's completely flawed because Bitcoin only works because it has a US dollar price. Now, if you're involved in actual alternative money design, you can start to see the flaws in it and you can start thinking about like, okay, well, how would you actually create a non-state currency?

And there are ways of doing that. But the way that Bitcoin works is not gonna achieve it. And yesterday, I met someone who uses seeds, seeds cryptocurrency. And I know there's, you know, we talked about high-fi and then FinTech and then there's ReFi, the regenerative finance. So, you know, this gets into that, you know, developing on Bitcoin, trying to make it more regenerative for ethical. So what, what's your view on the refy space and crypto currencies like Holochain or seeds?

I mean, I'm pretty critical of seeds. I mean, they know that. I wrote a critique of seeds. I mean, seeds is interesting in the sense that it actually embodies many of the same monetary principles as Bitcoin, but sort of puts a regenerative spin around it. This is not the first time this has happened with crypto tokens. Bear in mind that crypto tokens are basically like digital collectible, a machine issues.

You essentially create a machine that spits out tokens of a certain number. That's what all these crypto systems are. Many of these tokens are essentially blank. They're just like a digital object with no particular characteristic other than its number and its branding. And you can tinker with how you want that branding to look. In the case of Bitcoin, they've tried to evoke imagery of digital gold and so on.

But there's been, for example, attempts to creating anti-capitalist cryptocurrencies, like FairCoin was an example where they were like they created an ideological story which is that this object represents anti-capitalism, okay, even though structurally it didn't really represent that. Now, seeds has been quite similar, at least in its early iterations, it's just a digital object spat out by a machine which then has regenerative branding put around it, right, and you can sell it. So the team has been selling it for US dollars, which are then used to fund the project in which they then can also pass partly some of it to regenerative projects. Now that's fine. It's essentially selling a

digital collectible with regenerative branding in order to maybe fund the development of the ecosystem plus passing some of it to regeneration. But it's not fundamentally a, there's a lot of sort of conceptual flaws in how that was supposed to become a self-sustaining system or at. And actually, the founders of seeds have often said they're trying to ride on crypto hype

in order to raise money for regeneration. And when they say raise money, they basically mean raise your US dollars by selling digital collectables into a market, which is what a lot of crypto projects do. And they should have funneling the money in a different direction. But it's not necessarily in itself a, I mean, they have been trying to change it. So who knows? Maybe it's getting, it's getting, it depends on what you take on whether you think that's a good system or not. Some people love it. Things like Holochain are quite, I think, much deeper.

Arthur Brock, who runs Holochain, always started Holochain at least. It was one of the people who started it. He has actually a history in being in mutual credit systems and sort of these types of, and mutual credit is actually quite an interesting and progressive form of alternative currency, where you're essentially issuing promises.

This is quite different to something like seeds where you're issuing digital collectibles, with a price. Mutual credit systems, you're trying to get people to form networks or form meshes between themselves and then issue promises to each other and you have systems to track those promises. And that's quite interesting.

That's actually more interesting from the perspective of if you're trying to do say, community building. It's like, can you form these sort of IOU systems or promissory systems that bind people together? Because bear in mind, the normal monetary system is actually, we didn't really go much into this time, but it's based also actually on systems of promises, but like very legal formal promises and IOUs, right?

But it issue by states and banks and then which I then we use between ourselves. So we already have a credit-based money system, but it's just very hierarchical in the way it works. Whereas mutual credit systems try to do something quite similar, but they try to make it formal horizontal or non-hierarchical in the way it works. So, and the great thing about one of the intuitions is the reason why credit money systems that are powerful is that they can expand and contract in an organic way, all right, they can breathe as it were,

which is quite different to this commodity mentality of money, which imagines these sort of static systems, all right, now if you can build a peer-to-peer credit money system, you can imagine a people-powered, expanding, contracting, organic type of system, which is actually far more interesting than a lot of the crypto tokens, which have this very static vision of money.

So that's what I would be interested in looking at. It's like rippling credit systems, groups like trust lines, groups like circles, hollow chain is in that space too, but there's this various other experiments going on. And what's the name of that community? Like if you can, because we're like we're going deep into ReFi and now I don't even know if we're still there. What is that space called? Oh yeah, I'm not talking about ReFi right now. I'm actually talking about, I'm talking about the Rippling credit. Oh mutual credit and Rippling credit. These are like,

you're probably like fascinating places to be if you want to go and look at interesting alternative currency But reify itself is still an aspirational space and actually you know many of the concepts in so-called reify right now are actually being I guess rehashed from older ideas of natural capital and older ideas of natural capital and carbon markets and stuff which have existed for the last 20 years, but now they're trying to be implemented in sort of decentralized technology. So, in a way that the crypto community or the blockchain web3, whatever you're in called it, community right now, is often going through the same learning curve as communities 20 years ago have already been through. In the sense that they will sort of discover these things. So people got very excited about reinventing carbon markets on blockchain.

Then they'll get excited about natural capital systems, which is all about placing monetary prices on previously uncommortatized things. I think maybe in a few as time it'll start to get more interesting and more kind of deep, but I think the early waves of ReFi will probably be fairly shallow, I'm imagining. Maybe I'm being cynical, I don't know. No, no, no. I have actually heard that. I've heard that from folks saying that the crypto space is really in like pre-AOL web. It's just very early on, and the potential is there, but it just needs to be continually

adapted. Yeah, there's lots of cool, there's lots of energy in the space. So hopefully they all read your book so that they know the the challenges and the metaphors. I love all the metaphors. So just to close then, just leaving our listeners with invitations, just to make sense of this in their own lives and going forth from from this conversation. So I heard the appeal or of course, to read your books and to understand how money is created and metaphors to use that are more helpful and more in alignment

with what's actually happening. We have coming in defense of cash and really that recing cash is a public utility, that piece of it and really looking at who creates the menu in the restaurant. So looking at FinTech and who is behind the automation and the going cashless and the power dynamics that are embedded in that and legacies of capitalism, et cetera.

And then I heard, I did hear, let's look at credit unions like for one's own banking needs or at least interrogating and questioning the banking industry and how can we make that more regenerative, just and equitable. And then this end part about looking into ripple, and credit, and mutual credit systems, you also invite in the book to meditate on and with cash,

which I just love that frame. So any other like invitations for those listening, like if you would want them to do anything going forth from listening to this conversation, you know, besides what I offered, like what else might you invite them to do or to think about? Maybe I'll just point out to that last point, I mean about physical systems is, you know, as I pointed out earlier, it's not like cash is somehow, like some romantic kind of, it was, you know, in the 18th century, we wouldn't want to be calling cash progressive or something, but it's physicality is important, and actually many, you know, we're

talking about things like, you know, other aspirational projects like, you know, seeds, you know, trust lines, all these types of things, whole chain, they said you don't ever challenge the digital aspect of systems. What they're trying to do is create better digital systems or more progressive digital systems or more regenerative ones and so on. But there's not actually a challenging of the underlying concept that we're gonna accelerate,

expand and get ever more sort of digital systems in place. And just if you wanna zoom out and you look at the sort of ideology of, I think you know, this term, you know, hegemony or hegemony, I don't know if you'll say it, definitely, which is basically like, these unquestioned beliefs that are in support of an existing power structure.

The unquestioned belief that things will get ever more digital actually is, I believe, is something that comes out of the capitalist growth imperative. This idea that really, if you want capitalist systems to grow, they have to be able to reach across the world and operate at huge, huge speeds, which is why digital is so fetishized. And also, why people's imaginations, they find it easier to imagine, say, a world of regenerative crypto mixed with Bitcoin and whatever, then to imagine, for example,

the cash system remaining because that latter stuff doesn't actually go against the digital hegemony, as it were. And I'm interested in whether people think or that actually human beings are physical tactile beings, where essentially small-scale creatures that operate in physical environments. And there was something essentially inhuman about this idea that it is naturally better to be going to ever larger digital systems. There was something that pulls against elements of us. And I think one of the things I was asking people to think about in the book is, why is it

that we can't imagine that we could protect the cash system? Why is it that we find it so hard to believe that we could slow down the acceleration in the system and to just sort of stop? So one of my challenges is where I'm sort of meditating with cash. There is something meditative about trying to keep yourself using a slow physical form in a world that's pushing you to accelerate towards a fast digital form. I'm interested in whether 10 years' time is going to be back lash at digital fetishization. People realize that actually in the digital vortex a lot of existential emptiness is found there.

It doesn't really jive with our physicality and our actual reality of who we are. So grounding our money. Yeah, and it's weird because I'm trying to ground it in a system that's still based at past, you're on state violence and so on, but this is the contradiction of our systems. Right, can I ask one more question? Are you okay for time, this one more? Sure.

Sure. I'm just curious how to say it. It's like kind of like, what are you here for? Like, what is the source of your work like Do you have a deep nature connection or a deep leftist? You know community that you're like fighting for like where what is all of this for you? What is the heartbreak that all this work is trying to solve like if you were to ground it and your kind of purpose or passion or heartbreak like what is that sure? If you were to ground it and your kind of purpose or passion or heartbreak, like, what is that? Sure.

I mean, I think I'm most, I guess, passionate about it, but it's quite a complex thing to be passionate about is contradiction rarely. I find it hard to get on board with non-contradiction-based thinking, so which actually, many old terms of economy people or groups will have sort of quite utopian beliefs. And so this is what you need. This system is wrong and this one needs to be put into place. But I think what's really at the essence of so many of our problems is that we struggle to grapple our contradictory situation.

So, and I kind of one of the ways I sort of put it in the book is that feeling that you get when you're reaching towards the Amazon by button. And there's a part of you that kind of like knows that there's something perverse about the fact that Amazon is taking over the world, which you still sort of feel yourself pooled towards it, and you just push it anyway, right? And this, to me, is like one of the kind of core things that's at the heart of our systems is that we kind of created these systems that's at the heart of our systems, is that we've kind of created these systems that will exploit certain parts of ourselves,

reward certain parts of ourselves whilst suppressing other parts of ourselves. And we're stuck in the sort of contradictory bind. Traditional anti-capitalism, for example, doesn't often think very much about this. It's often, you know, there is a system you need to bring it down, and we're gonna go against it,

whereas I actually think, in many ways, I actually am, I have quite an anti-capitalist impulse, but it's sort of, it's much more kind of like, I sort of see humankind as being this kind of super organism that's struggling with itself and doesn't quite know how to exercise this sort of certain forces from itself. So I guess my mission as it were to try and either uncover that or to come to terms with that in some kind of way or help people to understand what's going on and just sort of like get real about it in a sense, you know. And I find that actually quite exciting,

but that's what my newsletter is about, you know, it's this, this altered states of monetary consciousness that's trying to sort of get towards this point where we could start to be able to perceive ourselves as stuck in these contradictory systems that have light and dark sides. Yeah, I'm reminded of the quote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, about the sign of intelligence is

being able to hold two opposing views at the same time, and also Dinella Meadows, the system's fingers, that's kind of the highest leverage point to intervene in a system is to transcend paradigms, to hold all paradigms lightly, to not be dogmatic or proselytizing about one's own paradigm, but to hold them lightly and be able to see the differences and choose between them.

So yeah. So yeah, thank you for uplifting contradictions and exploration. And yeah, your book and this whole conversation, what a deep invitation of unlearning. So thank you so much for your work and for your books and inviting folks to check out the newsletter, which we'll link to in the show now.

Great, thanks so much. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money, Cash, Cards, Crypto, and The War for Our Wallets. Thank you to the Pixies for the Intermission Music. Upstream The Music was composed by me, Robbie. Support for this episode was provided by the Gorilla Foundation and by listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans.

Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at upstreampodcast.org for its last support. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit independent arts and media, all donations to to upstream in the US are tax exempt. Also, if your company or organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming episodes, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org forward slash sponsorship. For more from us, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post capitalist memes at UpstreamPodcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review.

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