In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. If you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you will know that as far as I can tell, one of the key features at the heart of the transition that we are in the process of making, is a change to how we exchange and store and account for value. Or to put it another way, what do we truly value and how do we express this value in ways that nourish life, in ways that help us flourish. As Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us, all genuine flourishing must be mutual. So how do we get to that? How can we imagine into being a society where every act of care, of contribution and kindness, is not only appreciated by the people, but is recognised where schools, councils, local businesses, become part of an ecosystem where value flows back and forth amongst the people who create it. It doesn’t replace wages or public services, but it enhances them. And so it becomes a good step of the way towards a culture that is predicated on the solid core values of compassion, integrity and generosity of spirit, and where we value what we care about, rather than what we can grab fastest and first.

Manda: So how do we build this in ways that work? And how do we do it inside the current system while that current system remains afloat? This week’s guest, Peter Kemp, calls himself a professional joiner, which I love. Peter is based in the U.K. He’s a digital innovator and social entrepreneur whose career has spanned web technology, media production, civic engagement and alternative economics. He was a co-founder of HullCoin and currently serves as CEO of Value Squared, which is V2 Limited and the Social Value Academy, both organisations dedicated to reimagining how we understand, measure and reward social value. So this is exactly what we need. I first heard about Peter back in 2017, when I was doing the Master’s in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College in Devon. And then we got to know about HullCoin. Since then, as you’ll hear, Peter has helped to establish Citizen Coin, which, like HullCoin, is a digital values led complementary currency designed explicitly to recognise and reward social, environmental and civic contributions that so often go unpaid and undervalued in the predatory capital economy. So we’re going to talk about this and how it works.

Manda: A couple of things to say before we start. First is that the sound was not brilliant, but thank you Alan of Airtight Studios has done his best. Second is we talk about fiat currencies quite a lot, and I just want to make clear that fiat currencies are basically the standard currencies of the whole of the world. Fiat means trusted. And essentially we trust that the dollar or the pound or the euro or whatever will be worth more or less the same as it was yesterday, by tomorrow. And clearly there are fluctuations and clearly they happen most when people are doing crazy things with their economies. But in balance, we assume that the checks, balances and laws of the world will hold these things within a reasonably stable boundary. It has to be said also that these are maintained by implicit or explicit violence, and I have unpicked that quite a lot on previous podcasts. If anybody wants me to unpick it again, I am considering doing a solo podcast about the tariffs because various people have asked me how they work, and I have yet to hear anybody give what I think is a clear and sane evaluation of quite how incredibly, utterly (expletive deleted) insane these things are. But we’re not going to do that today.

Manda: Today we’re talking about Citizen Coin. And last thing before we go, if you’re listening to this the week it comes out, we’re holding a gathering, Dreaming Your Soul’s True Purpose. It’s online on Sunday the 11th May, 4pm till 8pm, British summer time. And the aim really is to help you get to grips with what it is that you really want to do. That amazing overlap on the Venn diagram where your heart’s greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need. So if you want to come along, there is a link in the show notes. If you can’t get to that, then accidentalgods.life and go to the Gatherings page. And now, into the podcast; where you will learn, as I just learned, that the whole concept of Venn diagrams was developed in Hull. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Peter Kemp who developed HullCoin and now has also developed Citizen Coin and can talk to us at length and in depth about the evolution of parallel currencies that are going to help us to change the world to what we need it to be.

Manda: Peter, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing sunny spring day?

Peter: Hi Manda. I’m in sunny Hull in Yorkshire.

Speaker3: Oh, you’re still in Hull?

Peter: Yes. Of course. Yeah.

Manda: Right. For reasons unknown, I thought you’d gone to Bradford. Okay, but it is sunny up there.

Peter: Oh, no. We operate in Bradford and we operate in Wakefield as well, but it was all originated in Hull.

Manda: Okay, so that’s a useful way in, because I first got to know of you when I was at Schumacher doing regenerative economics, and somebody brought the concept of Hull Coin into the room. And I think four of us got really excited. Because I was beginning to do work on blockchain and understanding the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the others were interested in local currencies. And now you’ve moved from Hull Coin to Citizen Coin. But tell us a little bit about what Hull Coin was as a as a springboard into everything else, because it still remains, I think, a really exciting idea. And you’ve moved on with it since then. So let’s do a little bit of the background of how you came to be this person and the idea behind it.

Peter: Okay. I was working in Hull, with Hull City Council, with the anti-poverty unit, and the two characters there were really quite adventurous in their ways of thinking, and they were looking at alternative ways of connecting and communicating with communities, especially communities that were impoverished. And they were interested in augmented reality; the idea that people could stand at the bus stop or at any particular location, have their phone with an app, shine their app over the phone and the poster talk to them and explain and signpost them, this sort of thing. So we’re working on this kind of collaborative project. One of the reasons is that a lot of people from certain backgrounds can’t read. Their literacy levels are really low or non-existent. So it doesn’t matter what you’re writing out there, what you’re trying to say, if it’s in the written format you’re not connecting those people. And I’ve been involved since 2018 in Connection Technologies. So we were working on this project and the guys at the council said have you heard of blockchain? I said, well, vaguely, you know. Bitcoin? Yeah, sure. Whatever. And they were saying, well, what about if we develop some kind of banking system that everyone could use, that would kind of remove the need for banks. But it’s based on what people have actually produced. They get some kind of digital reward system through it. And I’m saying, yeah, that’s fine.

Peter: And then from there we developed the idea of what we’re going to do with these coins. How about if a retailer says, right, for one of your HullCoins, we will give you 10% off school uniforms or £30 off a hair treatment or some fresh food at heavily discounted prices. This sort of stuff. And it really intrigued me. So we put on a little conference in Hull which involved academia, the local authority, business, the VCS, the voluntary charity organisations. And we set out a series of premises about how we could use or could we use technologies to communicate much more effectively with people. As budgets were being reduced with local authorities and with community groups because of ‘austerity’, I suppose. We’re going back to 2014. It was how can we maximise our budgets to make the most impact? And one of the projects we were looking at was HullCoin. We happened to have a guy in the room who was a crypto journalist.

Manda: Oh, wow.

Peter: Yeah, he was actually based in Hull and wrote for CoinDesk. And anyway, lots of interesting conversations about live video streaming for training and education purposes. But it came around to this idea of this exchange, this social value exchange. And there was lots of interesting debate and it got quite heated occasionally. Anyway, that finished and we were kind of reviewing everything and then the crypto journalist posted something on CoinDesk about Hull City Council looking at this kind of project. And that blew the comms out for Hull City Council. They had the mayor of Barcelona ringing up. They had the Dow, they had the Financial Times. It was quoted on Newsnight, it was all of a sudden. In fact, at the time, we were just about to launch the City of Culture, we’d just won it and it got more column inches than the City of Culture at that point.

Manda: Wow.

Peter: Which blew the comms out for Hull City Council. I didn’t work for the council.

Manda: What do you mean by blew the comms out? you mean they just got overloaded?

Peter: Yeah, they got overloaded. And they’re saying, what on earth is this?

Manda: What is blockchain? Right.

Peter: You know, we’re a local authority, what is the Hull thing? Anyway, so it was explained to them what this thing was about and they said, look, we love the concept, but we can’t really, as a council, support it. So we made it independent. We formed a separate independent company to deliver this thing, and we attracted funding from initially the lottery and also Comic Relief, which makes me smile getting funding from Comic Relief. It’s great, but it’s about communities and innovative technology. And we developed HullCoin. So we built a basic website, we attracted the attention of a quite unique blockchain developer at the time, who gave his work at massively reduced prices because he really liked the idea of this kind of social innovation, and rewarding social value. And we had people from the press. The press coverage. We had people flying in from Germany, part of the team who helped develop the euro. We had the New Economics Foundation come down to see us. They explained things like Vogel in Austria, which was a print based model, and said you’re really on to something here. And it’s the technology that makes the difference as in being able to execute it, because you can execute it at scale. So we ran through those exercises and for the basic principle we used a three circle Venn diagram. The Venn diagram by the way was developed in Hull. Just to let everyone know that.

Manda: Really? Seriously?

Peter: Yeah, seriously. So the stakeholders in the model that we developed, the initial model, was best explained in a Venn diagram.

Manda: I am still in awe of the fact that the Venn diagram was developed in Hull. Just as a break, was this at University of Hull? Was it something to do with the mathematics department?

Peter: I think it was. Yeah. One of the university buildings now is called Venn Building for obvious reasons.

Manda: Yes, I spend my life trying to find the intercepts of various Venn diagrams. That’s just made my day. Okay. Carry on. Sorry I interrupted. Totally.

Peter: Great. So in the three circle Venn diagram, the first circle is about the citizens, the people, the population. And the idea was within there you would have a recognition of the activities which are conducted by people, which are not paid for. Outside of paid work. So their community contribution, their well-being contribution, their personal development contribution, their contributions to local communities, their volunteering activity, their sustainability, environmental activity, their civic participation. So it was about being able to reward those individuals. Then the next circle, the next overlap was about governance and the agencies which deliver and want to deliver and recognise social value. So your local authorities, your charities, your VCS.

Manda: Hang on, what’s a VPS?

Peter: VCS – voluntary charity sector. Okay?

Manda: Thank you.

Peter: Yep. Your VCS, your environmental organisations, skills based organisations for training, public health NHS, where people are going on a journey to improve their own health and wellbeing. That’s that part. So then the final part, the final circle, but equally important was retail and local retail. So the retailer could say for the HullCoins that they are earning, we are happy to give you discount on 10% off school uniform, or £30 off a hair treatment, or fill a bag of fruit and veg for a pound. Because we’re about to get rid of this for tomorrow, it’s perfectly great. So it was an advertising app and platform that could do the three things, but all the way through it measures data. The data is the real magic behind it. So it’s a recognition and a stimulus of positive social value activity. But that type of data is really hard to collect. It’s very, very difficult to collect because it’s so nuanced. It’s very hyperlocal in a lot of instances. Capturing it is irksome, it’s labour intensive, it’s disparate, all the recordings all over the place. So we wanted a system where that could be all captured under one place. So the local authority, and our model is we license to local authorities or soon hopefully health authorities, too. Is that the local authority has a snapshot across its whole district about positive social value activity and at the same time is stimulating local retail. We’ve gone for local retail in particular. We’ve not gone for any of the national or international retailers. As I say, we’re doing this during the period of austerity. Has that left yet? I don’t know.

Manda: I don’t think it’s going to leave while we have the current governance system, myself. I think every government that gets in is hijacked by the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, and it requires that everybody gets poorer so it can continue to feed. Let’s keep moving on with the coins. Can I ask a quick question? So this is an app that people have on their phone.

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: One, we’re assuming that anyone who is sentient has a phone. That’s quite an assumption. But let’s leave that aside. So your developer, and I’m really interested to know who your blockchain dev was, was creating something that could interface right across all your local authority different ways of entering data, and offer them relevant data. Is that what I’m understanding? So Joe Bloggs down the road decided he’s going to give up smoking and the local health authority says yes, he’s given up smoking. We keep tabs on him and he’s still not smoking three weeks in. We’ve given him a HullCoin as a result of that. And that data gets fed into the NHS and aspects of local authority. Is that what I’m hearing? Because that sounds astonishing, frankly.

Peter: Thank you. To a degree. Except then there’s another layer of administration. So like the public health smoking cessation team would then have to evidence that and subscribe that and database that in order to evidence it. The way we built the platform is that individuals, when they’re on whatever particular social value activity, let’s take the smoking cessation. When the smoking cessation place creates an activity on the platform and says, we would like 100 people to become involved in this, you get rewarded with one HullCoin (at the time; it’s now citizen coin) each time you attend. The citizen who signed up to the platform opts in if they want to, to give basic demographic information, which is anonymized through the platform. But  the local authority gets that. The anonymization is really important to us, really important. So they can understand trends within demographics, whether that be by postcode, by age, sex, religion, all sorts of orientations. Quite simple. So by the individual scanning that QR code, they get a reward of one citizen coin which goes into their digital wallet. And the organisation who are rewarding them, we call them rewarding agencies, that’s how they’re seen in the ecosystem. The rewarding agency automatically gets that data to know that person’s attended, done and completed. So over a period of time, they can build up a picture of what’s going on in that one instance and then you can repeat that within volunteering, within environmental activity and all the other social value activities that I’ve said. So it’s a way of collecting data.

Manda: And in terms of creating the coin, if we stay with our 35 year old white unmarried man living in the middle of Hull who’s giving up smoking, was that HullCoin created spontaneously out of nothing to give it to him? So his act of giving up smoking has generated a unit of value within his ecosystem. Is that true?

Peter: Well, when we very first started out, no. It is now. When we very first started out, and the model’s continually evolving, that was the case. So so many coins would be minted, if you wished, with blank statement. A coin is basically a piece of digital information, that’s what the coin is.

Manda: Yeah, but under blockchain they took a lot. I mean somebody had to mine that coin. So you had to buy it.

Peter: Oh no no no no we had our own spare. We had our own blockchain. So we weren’t a part of Bitcoin or anything else.

Manda: So it wasn’t Bitcoin, it was blockchain.

Peter: It was blockchain technology.

Manda: That’s an important difference.

Peter: Yes.

Manda: Right.

Peter: To do with the transaction process.

Manda: And was it on the same, this is now geeky and people can just stop listening for five minutes, but this is my world and I’m really interested. Are you running on Ethereum or were you running on the Bitcoin blockchain?

Peter: We were running on a blockchain, but it was on our own. We had our own nodes.

Manda: So it was likely Ethereum based then.

Peter: It was pre Ethereum when we started this.

Manda: Oh was it?

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: Oh so your dev made his own.

Peter: Yeah. Oh absolutely. I think a bitcoin at the time was worth about £90. So we’re looking early days.

Manda: It would have been good if you’d gathered them and saved them, eh?

Peter: Not that clever!

Manda: Yeah, but also the feeling at that point was that the Chinese would come in and they were going to be worth about ninepence, if you were lucky.

Peter: That’s right.

Manda: It’s gone the way it’s gone. All right. Let’s take it a bit more general. I don’t want to geek people out. And this so far we’ve got a reasonable narrative. You created this in Hull, you got some money from Comic Relief and from the lottery. And you had really adventurous, I am so impressed, I find it quite hard to put the word adventurous together with city council employees, but clearly you had people who really, really got it. They were not just jobsworths which is what we seem to have locally, basically going through the day trying to do the minimum. These were people actually trying to do something really interesting and useful. You’ve got them the funding and what happened next?

Peter: Well, they left the council.

Manda: Oh darn.

Peter: Well, it had to be done. It’s a foot in two camps, it wouldn’t work. And we needed the core team. We formed the company in my flat, actually.

Manda: You mean they left the council to join you?

Peter: Well, it was all our idea. It was all our concept. Even from early stages we built it together. But the principle. And that was when we got our first tranche of funding, which I think was about 50 K, from the comic relief. And it was like, well, let’s build on that. Let’s see what we can do. It’s quite a risk, I suppose, but there was just something fundamentally about it that really felt right. That just really, really felt right. And then, as you say, we had some lottery money which was great. And then the lottery took us on a bit of a programme where they worked with us for a year to develop the proposal and look at moving it out at scale. And we had another about £400,000 we were going for. And that was tripping along quite nicely, we were starting to make contact with other local authorities and remodelling what we were doing. We were testing and learning locally in a couple of postcode areas, which were very different economically. And right at the final, final, I was going to say hour, but minute, they pulled it. They said, no, we’re not supporting it. It actually went through to panel as well, which is really unusual.

Manda: Why? On what basis?

Peter: Because of the blockchain. Because we’re using blockchain. And someone on the panel.

Manda: Had got bitcoin and blockchain confused, basically, hadn’t they?

Peter: Yeah. Their tech advisor wasn’t sure about whether the lottery’s brand should be associated. I think so. I think so. So that was devastating.

Manda: Idiots.

Peter: At the time, there were five of us, three full time, two part time, and within a couple of months all the money ran out and we had nothing to support it, which meant people had to go and get other work, other jobs. I cashed in a bit of pension fund money because I wanted to carry this thing on. And my parents helped bail me out as well, which was really lovely. And we kept it going. And then from there, we got press coverage, we had lots of interest from all over the place, which was lovely. We kind of tested the model, but it was obvious that the blockchain may become a massive blocker for us, pardon the pun, when trying to work with local authorities.

Manda: Right. Again, because people could not differentiate between blockchain and bitcoin.

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: The quality of journalism in this country just makes me want to scream.

Peter: We had we had some members from a council who actually thought that when people were mining for Bitcoin, they were actually digging with spades.

Manda: I suppose you’re in the north of England. It is mining country.

Peter: Yes. This is a fishing town, we don’t mine here!

Manda: Oh, okay. Hull, yeah, all right. It’s England and I come from Scotland. Oh, God.

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: And it’s also one of the most deprived areas in the country. And you were developing a way of sharing social value. And actually, I think I really want to emphasise this; money in our contemporary predatory capital death cult is created by debt. And you were creating a form of social value exchange and accounting and storage, which is what money is, that was created by doing something generative and useful.

Peter: The value is in the positive value activity. That’s the value trapped in the coin. It’s not fiat based.

Manda: It’s not debt related.

Peter: No, it’s not at all. It’s a positive contribution.

Manda: And it’s not linked to implicit or explicit violence, which all of our fear based fiat currencies are. And they didn’t get it. It’s just so, so frustrating. Okay. Anyway, you know this and you’ve been through the frustration. And I interrupted you several times, and we were at the point where in the beginning you created a certain number of coins, and they’re held in a wallet. And then presumably you shifted on to, if I give up smoking and someone gives me a HullCoin (we’ll move on to citizen coin), that coin was generated at the moment of my creating its value. Is that right?

Peter: Yes it does. So if you’re the rewarding agency, whichever social value activity you’re doing, when you create an activity, you can nominate the number of coins that particular activity is worth and the number of people, if it’s restricted to maybe 100 people or 1000 people or 10,000 people, how many? So in that case it is created. But we’re using more standard databases and some really nice tech MySQL stuff. We partner with a really good tech company based in Hull as well. And so we’ve replicated that model so it’s trackable and traceable, so we can see the coin journey. So we moved from the model of creating coins in a blockchain style and giving them to rewarding agencies for them to then put the activity detail in, to when the rewarding agency says we want to do this activity and we want 25 people involved in this activity, and we’re going to give two coins for the morning that you’ve spent at this activity. It automatically publishes those tokens, those coins, that’s how it works. So the whole system is more admin lite as well, which is really, really nice. It’s a smoother process. Yeah.

Manda: Okay. I have two questions branching on from this. And then we’ll look at how HullCoin became Citizen Coin. But before we go into that, one question is around privacy. We’re looking at a space where AI is growing exponentially by the real value of exponents. And Daniel Schmachtenberger said quite memorably a while ago that the thing that’s going to destroy the human race is our failure to understand the nature of exponential growth, because we’re used to linear growth. And so six months from now, it won’t just be twice as powerful, it will be ten times as powerful. And six months after that, it’ll be a thousand times as powerful. And Peter Thiel and Palantir seem to be quite fast on track to completely taking over the NHS in this country, which is something that personally, I do not want any of my data going anywhere near Peter Thiel in any circumstance. Nothing is unhackable if we get quantum computing, that’s a given. But until we’ve got quantum computing, what kind of cryptography are you doing to maintain absolute privacy?

Peter: There are all kinds of anonymization technologies behind what we’re actually doing. The first part is we only request basic information from people. I suppose the most accurate information would be an email address. There are no addresses. You don’t have to give your real name. So to be actually tracked and traced is really difficult.

Manda: You can trace most people by their email address, can you not? You could trace me by mine, it’s my name.

Peter: But no one gets the email address. So the people who license this, we don’t even see the email address within the platform. So I can see the whole ecosystem and I don’t see those email addresses. We see the email addresses of the retailers because that’s a business on there. We see a contact email address of the rewarding agencies. But the citizens, the individual, we don’t see any of that whatsoever, that’s obfuscate and never presented. And we host on Microsoft Cloud, we pay quite a lot for the security. We have the whole system, the app and the web portal independently penetrated or penetration tests at least once a year or after key developments. So Crest approved is a government approved standard. Independent companies. So they come, they try and hack the crap out of what we’re doing.

Manda: Okay, so you got some teenager who’s being paid to do this?

Peter: No. Oh, believe me, no. If you look at what they’re charging, they’re not teenagers.

Manda: But teenagers are probably best. You know, when Musk wanted to take down the US Treasury to hack everything, he took in the teenagers. Because actually, they’re extremely good at what they do. So unless we’ve got Musk level teenagers hacking in, it’s all safe. All right, we’ll take that one as read.

Peter: I think it’s also important with the data as well. So our model is that as a company we don’t share data, apart from with the organisations who are directly invested in delivering the programs and delivering the social value. We don’t data scrape, we don’t link to anything outside of the ecosystem. I think that that was always a really important part of our model. We’re not Facebook or one of the other social media platforms where you’re on your laptop and you’re on your phone looking for a pair of shoes, and all of a sudden, within your Facebook profile.

Manda: You start getting ads.

Peter: We’ve got a model that works this way because if it becomes ubiquitous, which is what we want, we’re really quite aggressive in this and we want it to be ubiquitous; UK first and then and then outward

Manda: Oh ho!

Peter: Yeah. Seriously.

Manda: Today England, tomorrow the world. Okay.

Peter: We’ve not had a proper app developed and built in the UK that’s really ripped across the world yet, okay. The Yanks always nick it or China gets involved.

Manda: Well, you can assume America’s going nowhere so you’ve only got China now. So yay.

Peter: Hahaha! I don’t know about that. So data is really important. We don’t scrape it. We don’t sell it. And our model would be that further down the line, if we’ve got the demographics of people who are interested and a private company wants to advertise to them. Let’s say a car company has got a new model coming out which they want to know 18 to 45 year olds, men of this type persuasion and women of that type persuasion, they would like to know their opinion. They contact us, we pop out through the app a notification, if you signed up for this sort of thing. Then individuals give their feedback and say yay, nay, da da da, which is live. Every account’s unique. It’s genuine. It’s quite immutable. They’ve got that data, but the individual gets paid. Not just in citizen coins but actually gets money from the company that they would normally spend on marketing. And I think that makes it a lot more equitable.

Manda: Yeah, yeah. Yes. The world could run like that if we tried.

Peter: Well, I think it would also reduce the need for algorithms, which are really negative and really clickbaity and contentious. That’s not going to work because where the revenue is, is by direct communication with people with honest opinion. Do you see?

Manda: Right. Yes. Yes, I totally do. Yes. And we talked to Audrey Tang once in a while, particularly about Polis and about finding the uncommon ground. So let’s suppose, I don’t know, you’ve got the demographic of people who’ve given up smoking, and a vape company wants to come along and advertise vapes to them because they’ve given up smoking and they want them to take up vaping. Leaving aside the ethics and the morals of that and that we would say no; if 55% of the people who had been given coin for giving up smoking said yes to vape advertising, would the 45% who said no see it? Or would they not even see it?

Peter: And we wouldn’t engage with companies who do vaping?

Manda: No, I realise that. All right. It was a bad example. Let’s go back to the cars then. Someone’s got the ultimate eco car and you want to identify people who have done an awful lot of work with the local river and acted as river stewards, really into things. Company with eco car wants to advertise to them, 55% say yes, 45% say no. Does everybody see the adverts or do the 45% who said no see no adverts, and the 55% who said yes see the adverts and get paid for them.

Peter: Only the ones who opt in see the adverts.

Manda: Right. Excellent.

Peter: No, absolutely. There’s also an opportunity for that eco driven company  to say, right, we’ll sponsor the platform or we’ll sponsor some activity. We’d like to be associated with the environmental activity. So what do they get out of it? We capture the social value stories, that from a corporate point of view are corporate social responsibility stories. So when they put 100 grand in and we evidence which is near enough immutable, 100,000 stories for them or a million stories for them, they can say within their own CSR, their corporate social responsibility statements, especially larger companies, this is what we sponsored. And it’s real and it’s live and it’s direct and it’s environmental and it’s about sustainability. So there’s a bigger opportunity there. Again, they’re feeding into something really positive. This is all about positive. It’s the retailer wins. The citizen wins. Organisations that do great stuff win. That’s the bigger circle.

Manda: Okay. So one last avenue I want to go down and then we’ll look at the evolution of HullCoin into Citizen Coin. As I understood it when you talked to us at schumacher, the fact that the citizen coin or the coin was worth random things, depending on who offered it. I remember at the time you suggested a number of things, one of which was tickets to the football match are worth nothing five minutes after the whistle is blown for the game to start. So here you are, you’ve got a coin here, have a ticket, or have it at half price or something. Or you come and have a scone at the end of the day because we’re going to have to throw them out, you may as well come and have one. Or I’ve got an old car and I don’t want it anymore and frankly, you can have it for a citizen coin. It’s not tied to the local fiat currency, which in this case would be UK pound sterling and therefore it’s not taxable. And as I remember at the time, you said that the Tory government, who is a long way to the left of the existing Labour government, but at the time we thought they were quite right wing, was really supportive of this because they were worried about currency crash and the crash of the system, and they wanted to have a different method of value creation, exchange and storage up and running. First of all, is that still the case? Is the government still supportive now that we’ve got a different flavour of government? And second, am I right in understanding that not tied to fiat currency means not taxable?

Peter: Yeah. In reverse order, not tied to fiat currency means it is not taxable. It wasn’t the government per se, it was the Department of Work and Pensions. So they came up to have a good old chat with us and we expected some bloke in a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit with a brolly under his arm. Very efficious. And we didn’t get that, we got somebody who was really quite open minded. And his department’s responsibility was about the future nature of work and the future nature of value and looking at machine learning, AI automation. And he was a former tax man as well, apparently, and said there is no tax implication and there’s no benefit implication on this as well. Because nothing’s set. If we’d modelled it that one citizen coin was worth a pounds worth of discount and for an hour you earned one, that is money. Okay. It’s not, it’s too variable. So the lowest fiat value discount offer we have was about £0.50 off a cup of tea for one citizen coin and at a place called cycle technique, I think in Wakefield, you can get 10% off anything in the store. Their most expensive bike is £16,500. So for one citizen coin it saves you £1,650. And we’ve had everything in between. So that is an extreme end, right?

Manda: Yeah. But that’s the point. It’s a distribution curve which was probably also invented in Hull. Not. Okay. So talk us through, because you just talked about Citizen Coin. You started off with HullCoin, you were going to get money and then the idiots couldn’t differentiate between blockchain and bitcoin and pulled the funding at the last microsecond.

Peter: I don’t want to call them idiots because I’m going to be knocking on their door again soon.

Manda: No, no, but I’m allowed to because it’s my podcast, I can do that. And you carried on and when we were talking before, you said your parents helped you out, which is really sweet. And then somewhere we leapt from Hull Coin to Citizen Coin. Tell us a little bit about that jump.

Peter: Well, there was a stage before that. So towards the end of the HullCoin funding we met a group from Eindhoven, some really switched on people, Marianne and Diana, who were looking at developing a community coin in Eindhoven, working with Fontys University. And we picked that up, and not for a lot of money, I might admit, we developed a platform for them using at the time, the last remnants of the blockchain. And that was all about volunteering. They wanted to see how stimulating volunteering, recognising volunteering and linking it with retail, how it would work in a very hyperlocal environment. So that kind of gave us a little bit of cash to keep going, which is great. And also another model and also expanding our ideas. And they had some really cool ideas as well about local currencies into Europe, into the Netherlands as a first little foray. And then I was at a digital inclusion meeting in Leeds, which had lots of local authorities involved in, and I presented the concept at the time, which was the HullCoin concept. And Wakefield Council and Leeds Council and Bradford Council were really keen. It was just about where they could position it, which department it would work with, this sort of thing because it’s really early. But we decided that we needed to move away from blockchain, because we were going to hit the same sticking point with local authorities. That was a major fear. We talked to a couple of IT departments and they’re like, we’re not sure about the blockchain, even though the IT department itself knew it wasn’t a part of the same thing. It’s a reputational thing.

Manda: Was Ethereum not up and running at that point? I remember reading about Ethereum in 2017, was this just too early?

Peter: No, Ethereum was up and running, but it was at quite a cost as well.

Manda: Okay. Because it wasn’t mined it was paid for.

Peter: That’s right. Exactly. And we weren’t at scale. And the idea of smart contracts and everything else, but we really couldn’t afford it. And we also had an issue with, on the mining side, with the blockchain side about power usage.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I remember writing to you about that. Yes.

Peter: Not great. So we’re thinking if we had to do that, of having lots of stuff based around Iceland who use geothermal to produce electricity. But anyway, I’ve sidestepped again.

Manda: But coming back into geekiness; now, there’s layers upon layers upon layers of Ethereum, that the regenerative finance people are using all the time, that are in terms of the electrical cost, almost zero. And they’re not a buy into, they’re created and regulated by the people who create the branch, as I understand it. Is it still untouchable? Because it just seems such a good idea?

Peter: No, I don’t think it is untouchable. We went this route, which more than suffices what we need at this stage.

Manda: Okay, so what is the route you’ve gone then?

Peter: We’ve gone to our own MySQL databases, with interactive APIs running all in the background to understand the transaction process, to produce a coin journey report which evidences the full existence and the journey of the coin from its inception through to its redemption. What it was earned by, the demographic it was earned by. So we have all that. I think the next part, which is about the Social Value Academy, which is about using the Citizen Coin platform for organisations to evidence their outputs, which would trigger payments, further payments for the next phase of the project, I think that may then tie into smart contracts. We could either build it ourselves or we could use something like Ethereum. But we’re not there yet.

Manda: Building it yourself, you’ve got some very smart devs. Okay.

Peter: Yeah we have. Thank you.

Manda: Yeah. All right, so let’s not get too geeky. I would be interested, but we’ll probably do this offline, because the value of a blockchain is that it takes an awful lot to hack it.

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: Whereas a database is orders of magnitude easier to hack.

Peter: It is.

Manda: But then I suppose the question is, why would anybody bother? It’s not as if you’re dealing with large amounts of money, and you’re not even dealing with large amounts of dollars at all. You’re dealing with a local currency and you know, if somebody who wants to hack themselves a thousand citizen coin, then, you know, good luck, mate. You’re increasing the value in the system, I guess.

Peter: Yeah. What you’re doing is just if you want to spend them, you’re just going to stimulate loads of local retail. So great.

Manda: Exactly, yes. I am essentially a modern monetary theorist and I look at a government that is applying austerity, and I think you make the money. You the government, you make the money. Please stop pretending you don’t have money when all you have to do is type it out on a screen and it’s there. And and yet vigilante bond markets or whatever, make them pretend that there is a lack of money. With what you’re doing, you could have as much as you want, but I’m guessing one of the reasons that governments get a bit scared about creating infinite amounts of money is, is that at some point you will trigger inflation and money will cease to be of value because there’s so much of it. Have you seen inflation within your local currencies? Is that an issue? Does it function the same way as ordinary money I guess is what I’m asking?

Peter: No, there’s no inflation with citizen coin because it doesn’t behave like a fiat currency.

Manda: Okay.

Peter: You can’t flood anything. The citizen coins come into existence in a public sphere when somebody’s earnt them by doing a piece of positive social value work. So there’s no other way that they can be created. That’s when they actually come into existence. And at the retail end, that’s not paying fiat currency, it’s obtaining a discount from a retailer when they feel a bit philanthropic, a bit socially minded, or they have products or services that are in their quiet times, and they go, hey, come along and have some of this at a heavily discounted rate. So it stimulates the local retail, but it’s not an inflationary mechanism at all.

Manda: Okay. Which is good and brilliant and lovely and beautiful. You and I, I think, certainly I, I think you, are aiming in the long run to run in parallel with fiat currency to the point where fiat currencies just vanish, because then the power dynamic changes completely. This is my plan. You don’t have to say if it’s your plan. At some point we have to move beyond simply having subsidised come and have a scone at the end of the day, because the scones are going stale and we want to get rid of them, you may as well have one, and actually begin to function more like a fiat currency. And we talked quite a while ago to Diana Finch from Bristol about why the Bristol pound eventually stopped. And it seems that there’s a sticking point allied to the shift from a parallel, complementary currency to something that functions more like a fiat currency. And you obviously haven’t hit that yet. But can you see a point where you might? And do you have a plan to overcome that road bump?

Peter: I’m not sure about your first statement about completely dissolving fiat currency.

Manda: Okay. Talk more about that. How are we going to get rid of predatory capitalism if we don’t do that?

Peter: Well, I think it needs to be ethical. And I think part of the problem with capitalism is it’s really good at banging on about its own story, because it’s obvious. We’re talking through computer technology now. We drive cars, we we’ve got AI, it’s obvious. We’ve got growth in lots of areas. I’m sure we both agree that growth isn’t the target, believe me, that’s not what I’m saying. But it has enabled a lot, you know, a lot. I have a problem with world wide solutions. I think they’re great in theory. I used to think that we’d all unite as a globe if there was a an existential threat. The aliens are coming. Something’s happening.

Manda: Yeah. ‘Don’t Look Up’, it’s not happening is it.

Peter: All join together. No. And of course we had Covid. And that is a classic example of when we could have all really pulled together and learnt from that and done something in a different way and felt joined up. And what that appears to have done is put people into silos who are, through technology, going further and further into their silos, and are not getting another story. I think the beauty of a social value and a recognition of a social value is that the evidence is there, genuine. It’s not made up. People are marking their own homework, it’s real world stuff. You can engage capitalist companies with this because they want their image to be good, so they can sponsor and support and grow this. I think that there’s a handholding thing to be done, but the social value part needs to be recognised and needs to be evidenced. Without the technology we have, we couldn’t evidence it as easily, as readily, without being massively resource intensive. And that’s what we’re trying to create.

Manda: Tell me a bit more about being resource intensive.

Peter: Well, if you have a community organisation and it wants to evidence all the great stuff, all the great 100 activities, whatever they may be, which have gone on, and how many people turned up and what they did and the demographics of those people. You’re on about somebody having to create a database, you’re on about it being accurate, you’re on about managing it.

Manda: Okay. And you’re offering all of that in your app.

Peter: It happens. All you do is you scan and it’s there, all that is genuinely there. So it could be done at scale. And the other part is it’s all in one place. So it’s not a database over there and over there and over there and over there.

Manda: Okay. The data is all in one place.

Peter: It’s all in one place. Do you see? So you’ve got some really rich data all in one place. So that could be health data, as in your personal health journey to improve your wellbeing. To quit smoking. Your environmental journey, your civic participation journey, your contribution in general to to develop your own well-being, your family’s well-being or your community’s well-being. It captures all of that, and that’s a massive story. You can put exchequer values to that, and there are various Toms schemes out there, or Toms frameworks that that actually put a financial value to those outputs. That doesn’t quite measure it fully enough, but it’s what a capitalist or a market driven economy does understand. So if you can say we’ve generated £200 billion worth of social value, and it’s accurate, it’s not made up, then you’ve got something that has got a bit of weight there.

Peter: And that’s just in the UK. So if you can step repeat this and evidence the social value on a global scale, and have exchequer values towards that, you’re then not looking at hundreds of millions or billions, you’re looking at trillions. Now markets which are really concerned about financial value in some way, shape or form, it will definitely draw attention. And I think there’s an opportunity for capitalism to develop a more ethical, a parallel, and work with this parallel economy and see the benefit and evidence the benefit.

Manda: Hang on. Stop. How? How? This is a really interesting theory of change, and it speaks quite clearly to something that Indy Johar put out in Substack this week. So I am a big multinational corporation, and I function by finding the cheapest people possible to abuse the most that I can, in order to produce goods that I can then rack up and make huge amounts of profit everywhere else in the world. I am by definition psychopathic. I am the dark triad in action. And now we have a way of assessing social value. How does that change my dark triad ness?

Peter: I love that phrase. How does it change? Maybe I’m being too optimistic here. I think when you can put exchequer values, this isn’t the real value of social value by the way, this is talking to capitalism. Okay? So if you can say we just generated a trillion

Manda: Dollars, units.

Peter: Fiat currencies worth of social value. People who play with money all day are going oh that’s interesting. If they’ve brand which they want public and want to be seen to be ethically doing the right thing, they can go we could sponsor some of this and look fantastic. Okay, well that’s very cynical but yeah, all right, it’s very cynical but at the moment they’re not sponsoring this or not to the way that they could. And when they sponsor it they go, we actually supported 200 pieces of positive social value in this sector or that sector. And they’re not making it up, it’s evidenced. So you’re then putting money back into, or you’re putting some form of liquidity, (I’m not an economist, as you can tell) back into organisations which are developing social value activity and promoting it. And there’s an interesting conversation with AI along this track too. So we first started looking at AI eight years ago, the advent of, and it’s part of our discussions with the Department of Work and Pensions in Britain, because they were looking at the same. Or this particular department was. And so jobs get replaced, new training is needed. People lose jobs or their training. How do you pay them? How do you pay them when they’re not producing producing? How politically do you persuade people that these lot should have a universal basic income is where I’m going.

Manda: Right. In the paper that you sent me, you said this is the basis of universal basic income. Talk to me about that. Because that’s very alive at the moment, although not with the current Labour government, obviously. But UBI. How does Citizen Coin or whatever become part of UBI? I’m not sure we ever got to how Citizen Coin arose? Maybe we did.

Peter: I told you, I jump around.

Manda: Yeah. No, it’s my fault. I think we got off that. But let’s have a look at universal basic income, UBI, a citizen coin or a social value coin? How how does that work?

Peter: Well, it’s kind of from a political standpoint. So if you have people working very hard at full time, five, six days a week, and you politically try to say to those people, part of your tax money is going on giving a part of the population a universal basic income. The political reaction to that is, why should my hard earned money go to feed people who are doing bugger all? And that’ll be a press narrative. That’s a typical broadsheet.

Manda: The fact that it’s economically illiterate. Okay. It’s not worth me losing all my fuses over this, but yes, okay. Right.

Peter: So if Citizen Coin or something like becomes ubiquitous and you can say no, these people contribute their grandparents, do you want to pay for that? They do the car share. Do you want to pay for that? They’re improving their health journey, which is this reduction on the health service. Do you want to pay for that separately? We aren’t giving them anything. Their contribution is massive already, and most people do contribute. Most people do, okay, without receiving any reward for it whatsoever. It’s what we do as human beings. It’s an essential part of what we are. Okay? There is a massive cynicism that that’s not the case. The reason for that is one, the narrative has been messed around with for particular reasons. And the other one is we’ve never been able to evidence the social value accurately, because it’s too resource intensive. We now can say, so the politicians can say, okay, this section of the population that’s been replaced by AI or their working week has gone down from five days, six days to two days as a result of that, they also contribute by doing this, this within communities. That. This on their own health journey. It’s never been able to be evidenced before. So you’ve got an argument, a conversation piece to say the value of people isn’t just what they earn in fiat currency. The value of people is much, much deeper and it’s always there. Do you see?

Manda: I completely do. My fear watching what’s happening in the US at the moment is that at some point Reform gets in and Andrew Tate is there, and instead of these people are contributing by doing this, it becomes, okay, your job has gone from six days a week to two days a week. You’re going to spend the remaining four days a week doing things that we’re going to tell you what to do, and and now we can assess that. So now you’re going to go and look after your grandparents and, I don’t know, scrub out a few sewers, and if you don’t give up smoking you don’t get any money. I can imagine a world where this is weaponized, and I don’t want to live in that world. But I think the weaponization is going to happen anyway. It’s not a question of whether Citizen Coin is there. It’s a question of can we shift the narrative to something more generative such that the weaponization can’t happen?

Peter: I totally agree with you, which is why we don’t give individual data out. So we give broad demographics. So the argument from a political, if we’re looking in Hull politically, the argument would be that a big chunk of this population already do this, which saves Hull I dunno, half £1 billion a year. And here’s the evidence. Here’s actually the evidence. We’re not making this up. It’s not a couple of focus groups and then we’ve created a multiplier, we can actually evidence this. You don’t know who it is and it’s not relevant, it’s the the political sway of this thing. This is really happening. And you may be next, because AI may come for you next, too.

Manda: Absolutely. Yes.

Peter: So there’s that. But I think the important part is the evidence of the social value. And I think that politically it could work. I’d love to have a chat with Sam Altman, actually, because he also did some UBI stuff and still is funding it in the States.

Manda: Yes. Yes. The problem is they did UBI stuff along the Curtis Yarvin lines and we don’t want to play that game. There’s UBI and UBI.

Peter: Okay. Okay.

Manda: Yeah. It’s a very interesting rabbit hole to go down. And maybe I’m doing Sam Altman down. He might be a really wonderful human being. And his version of UBI may be closer to ours, but there is around certain corners of the Silicon Valley internet, a Curtis Yarvin UBI narrative that is not something that any sane person wants to go near.

Peter: No, no. And I think as well with UBI it genuinely needs to be universal. So it’s not a Western specific. It’s global.

Manda: This is the thing. I had this conversation with Natalie Bennett of the Green Party, because my thing about UBI is it needs to be universal, but you need to have universal rent controls with it, or you just found the fastest way of piling public money into private hands that the world has ever invented until Musk came along. And that’s not just rents, it’s everything. Including up to and particularly including fossil fuel prices. Because one of the repercussions of Covid was that the government suddenly discovered it could create £680 billion and not create inflation. Who knew? Because basically they were paying bankers bonuses. Flood that out into the economy and the oil price went like that. And the oil price was going like that long before Russia moved into Ukraine. And it went like that because the oil companies went, oh, everyone’s got this spare money, we’ll have that thank you. And I don’t know how we control that. I don’t know how you get that level of universal rent controls, unless you’re paying it in a different currency that the fossil fuels and other predatory capitalists don’t want. And that’s one of the things I think that is most interesting about the nature of parallel currencies is can we create sufficient value? Can you buy actual food with this? Can you house, clothe, shelter yourself, get clean water, clean air, clean soil with it in a way that the predators cannot access? And I don’t know the answer to that, but you might do, because this is a world that you swim in.

Peter: I don’t know the answer to that either. That’s too much. I think the idea behind our model, and I’m kind of back stepping from that question because I’m a bit lost in there.

Manda: Did I not frame it right? Or is it just too big of a question?

Peter: It’s too big of a question for me. Like I say, I think we’re of an opinion that we need to work with the fiat thing somehow, even if the fiat things changed. What I was trying to come back to was that we wouldn’t want a global citizen coin central repository where everything is controlled. I think there are lots and lots of massive dangers. So our model, if we look at local authority areas, is that each local authority controls its own. So each region or district or hyper controls its own. It has the data, it controls what’s going on. It decides what it wants to do with it as well. And we don’t want a situation, as if this is ever going to happen, but let’s just say; where it does really take off and then some unscrupulous bunch in whichever country take over. I can’t imagine that being true at all. Can you imagine?

Manda: No, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

Peter: No, no, no. Because they’re all full of scruples. And then they’ve got access to something really, really hyper powerful and you can turn the positivism, if you like, into punitive stuff. And we don’t want that. That is not what this is about at all. We have been asked, if people are naughty, would you take their coins off them? And it’s like, no, no, they’ve done that piece of value. They’ve already earned.

Manda: Trauma culture thinking. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? It’s the need to to project out the trauma inside in some kind of external pain. It’s really quite unpleasant. Because that’s one of my questions; I would imagine that Ethereum is that much more secure than a database of any sort, where the Doge kids can probably get into it. If they can get into the American databases, they can probably get into ours. And you don’t want them to do that? You really do not want them to have access, to however anonymized the data, that’s not something you want them to have. I am remembering the day Trump got in, so the 6th of November, I got a YouGov poll thing and I used to do them all the time. I thought they should have somebody who’s slightly to the left of centre filling in their polls, and halfway through it asked me the nature of the contraception that I was using.

Peter: What?

Manda: And first of all, this is irrelevant on so many bases, like, I don’t do these kind of relationships and anyway I’m too old. But that was the last YouGov poll I ever did. The day he got in, it started asking me for that data. And so we do not want to be giving anybody the data of the number of fertile women in a particular area, given that their stated intent is to get back to the time of the Inquisition, because everything went south when women were given the vote. It’s just…

Peter: Terrifying.

Manda: Yeah, it’s insanely terrifying. And let’s not help them do anything. So given that that is insanely terrifying, nonetheless what we have here is a different narrative and a different way of spreading the narrative. So two things I want. First is I don’t think we joined the dots; we got from HullCoin to there, how did we get to Citizen Coin? I’m interested in actually the number of local authorities that are genuinely taking this. I’m wondering, is Preston? Preston is my little Marxist heart exploding in delight at what they’re doing? I’m not really a Marxist, I’m much more of a modern monetary theorist and a kind of eco spendist. But they seem to be doing really good stuff. Are they also incorporating this, and how far is it spreading within the UK? And is it only in quite switched on what we might call progressive left councils, or are other people taking it on as well?

Peter: So the first iteration of Citizen Coin was developed for Bradford Council. Not the whole council, it was under the Department of Place, the Stronger Communities team, which is about community cohesion and resilience and that side. So we’re now commercial. We don’t operate on grant funding, we are a fully functioning commercial local currency. So we’re not dependent on that anymore, which is great.

Manda: So they pay you an actual fiat currency in order for you to create them the not fiat currency. Lovely.

Peter: Yeah. For them to evidence all the great stuff that’s going on in their districts. And my conversations with them now is about how if they embed it within each of their departments, they will improve their delivery, capture what they’re actually delivering, see at a really early stage where they’ve got good examplars and bad exemplars, running similar schemes in two different regions, can see immediately. Connect with communities in a different way. So there’s all that. So it was Bradford came on and cunningly we launched it in March 2020, the same month that…

Manda: Just as Covid hit.

Peter: Perfect. So we’ve got a social integration app which

Manda: Had no social integration happening for two years.

Peter: For anybody. Who could have predicted that one? Right. But it didn’t stop us, there were still lots of people volunteering, doing deliveries and medical stuff. And there was a lot of community spirit then as well, which is great. So the voluntary like volunteer in Bradford and those kind of organisations did great stuff. The Stronger Communities team did great stuff and retail, there was some point of contact with retail to a degree every now and then. When Rishi did the eat out to cheat out and all that sort of scheme. Yeah, everybody can have it now.

Manda: Quite. Yes. Become a super spreader in your own right.

Peter: If you eat a local restaurant, you can’t catch it. Well, tell me.

Manda: Such an idiot, yeah.

Peter: We learned how to refine the technology so it was smoother to use. We learnt how to remodel what we’re doing, how to pitch and market, how to train the local authority to pitch and market to various things, which is what we do. So we don’t just give them the app or the tech, we also give them the support.

Manda: Teach them how to use it.

Peter: That’s right. Yeah. And teach trainers and teachers teach trainers and teachers. And we had our first exposure to colleges there, which was lovely. We’ve got some really interesting stuff from young people. Quite phenomenal. And then last year Wakefield Council, who we invited over to Bradford to see how it works, and the Bradford team really liked what we were doing. So Wakefield Council took it on last year. It launched June 2nd last year. They’ve got circa 140 rewarding agencies already on board. They themselves, from a retail perspective, have got their sports centres offering discount, free swims, all sorts of stuff, which is really popular. And we’ve got about 110 retailers so far. But the word is out and people are now joining without being contacted, which is great. In Bradford, they hit a big problem in that Bradford council itself was massively in debt, as a lot of local authorities are, and the team that was helping to deliver this were all made redundant. So that kind of put us on a tick over for a while. But that’s all been rejuvenated and picked up.

Manda: Right. Because you’re saving the money?

Peter: Yes. Yes. So part of our mission has been to work back up into the upper echelons of the hierarchies.

Manda: So that they understand.

Peter: And start having an economic argument.

Manda: Canning you is not a clever thing to do, right.

Peter: Yeah. And having an economic argument, because this is a complementary economy. It works that way and the value is really quite intense. Which are the conversations we’re now starting to have with both local authorities, the initial conversations. So we’ve probably only got about 3500 people signed up to the platform, which isn’t bad for local currency. And we’ve got a few hundred rewarding agencies and a few hundred retailers with very little budget, no marketing budget or anything else. We wanted to grow it organically. These are the pilot models. We’re now really happy to start going out there and looking at serious funding, we’ll probably go for some big lottery funding through the UK fund, to look at two regions and how community cohesion and Citizen Coin and retail stimulation and streamlining local government processes can be developed. And I think we might make a pitch to national government on the same level.

Manda: Or in Scotland or Wales? Because I can imagine the Scottish Government would really get this, or certainly under Nicola Sturgeon it would have.

Peter: I’d love to do it. If you can get me an introduction, we’d love to. There’s only so many hours in the day amd we’re only a tiny. Oh, absolutely yeah please. So that process we’re going through next and we’ve established the Social Value Communities Academy CIC, which is set up to be a think tank, which uses AI to understand more about social value. The Exchequer values alongside that, if we can measure it in different ways. We work with procurement teams. We’ve got procurement angle on this as well from West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s. Those conversations are coming on. Because there’s some really interesting thing about social value and tenderers, people who tender for contracts within all large groups. Within local authorities, within the NHS. And part of what they have to do is a percentage of their tender weighting is 10% in a lot of cases, up to 20%, is on their social values statement. Their social value statement is nearly impossible to make sure it’s been delivered. But not anymore! Not anymore. So we’ve got an opportunity here. So there’s another opportunity for the procurement system. And that’s what the Social Value Academy is about. It’ll be training local authorities, it’ll be training the voluntary charity sector, it’ll be training businesses, it’ll be training contractors, NHS, about social value, how to evidence it.

Peter: Guess what? They use citizen coin of course. But then the data that’s produced from that, the genuine data, we can start looking at policy. We can start looking at local democracy. We can start looking at things like participatory budgeting. So we could use the same app to run a vote. So do you want this little school or do you want this little road or do you want this little hospital? We can only afford two, so it’s like, well, which one do you want? Here’s the debate, get involved a little bit, watch the video, maybe come along to the meeting. So there’s an opportunity further down the line for that as well. And that I find really exciting, where you’ve got direct involvement. So you know what you think before you’re going to have a little chat with somebody about the bigger picture stuff, it was for us to develop an app in somebody’s pocket that was really, really useful. There’s new apps come out all the time. There are apps that do part of what we do,  you know, there’s recycle apps that covers a human being’s journey their whole journey, outside of paid work. And that’s what we do. So it’s valuable in lots and lots of ways. Do you see?

Manda: Yes. I’m just, my brain’s going off in so many directions. There’s so many possible options. And the idea of changing local democracy. It seems to me that the current system is not fit for purpose and we urgently need people to understand that democracy could feel different, that they could feel empowered, and that what you need if we’ve only got money for two things, is not to have the local equivalent of the Daily Mail giving people false data. How do you clean up the inputs for I don’t know, you want the school, you want the swimming pool, you want the playground, you can only have two out of the three. And how do we help people to make sense of the possible inputs on that? And I think my current answer to that is Audrey Tang’s Polis system, which is designed to take people across a broad political spectrum and help them find the uncommon ground between them, so that they can sense make themselves. If you’ve got let’s say, ten people in a zoom room who are all in different social media silos, they will bring their different social media viewpoints, 99% of which will be untrue. But then they’ll cancel each other out. You know, our lot think this, your lot think that. I’ve got to know you as a person. We can’t both be right. It is possible we are both wrong.

Peter: Yeah.

Manda: And then let’s just have a look at what’s on the ground. What do we actually get with the school? What do we actually get with the swimming pool? What do we get with the playground? What would our kids want? How are we going to make this work? And then finding that you can do that and people listen to you. If we don’t give people empowerment, agency, motivation, direction, we are sunk. And it just seems to me that this is our route to doing that. And it’s really exciting.

Peter: Yeah. And of course you get a citizen coin for participating. Naturally because that carries the evidence that you’ve actually participated. And how many people are involved in the local democracy and how can we spread it, because you’ve got the data.

Manda: Yeah.

Peter: The first time I came across that sort of ecconomy was Rutger Bregman wrote a book, Humankind A Hopeful History, which I loved. It just fits in so well with kind of a lot of our philosophy, really, about that. Human human beings are fabulous, but if you look at the narrative out there that’s put out by the press and the negative stuff on social media, you think we’re all rubbish, we’re all horrible and it’s just not the case.

Manda: It really isn’t. Everybody thinks everybody else is freeloading, but they themselves given the choice would be doing something wonderful. And everyone needs to realise that everybody else thinks the same.

Peter: Yeah. Absolutely right.  And you know that if you go on holiday, you could just transplant yourself 3000 miles away, get talking to a bunch of people from all over the place and you go, do you know what? There’s so much commonality here. We are the same. Which is gorgeous. There’s another thing about the Citizen Coin platform and it came back to something that Diana mentioned, Diana Finch. And she’s saying that rewarding people for positive social value activity, there could be a negative to this. And there are experiments that do prove this. And she was talking about a particular experiment. And I’ve read about that experiment too.

Manda: Where you start paying people, for instance, for giving blood, and suddenly it becomes my blood is worth this much.

Peter: Yeah. And is that enough? Yeah.

Manda: Is it enough or am I being done? Or we charge you this much for us looking after your kids late at school, and it becomes that’s how much it costs for extra childcare, not these people are doing us a real favour by staying on at school for an hour later. Yes. I had a friend at college who did her entire thesis in do you depress social innovation by giving it a financial value? But I’m thinking that if it’s a citizen coin and not £50 because it’s a fluctuating value, that will have less impact, is that likely?

Peter: Yeah. No, I think the fact that it’s discount related and the fiat value does fluctuate is one thing. But within the mechanism, you can donate your coins to other people.

Manda: Okay.

Peter: So we came across this really early on in Bradford. So we’re talking to the volunteer agents and saying look some people said I don’t want paying for this. And it’s like I get it, we’ve been doing this for years, that’s not my motivation, which is gorgeous, which is absolutely lovely. So our conversation with the Rewarding Agency is it goes like this: if you allow us to reward you with this thing, you’re not only doing a great piece of volunteer work, you’re helping us evidence our output, which helps us for our sustainability. You can donate that token to somebody else less fortunate who could really work with that. So please, will you let us reward you? It’s a different conversation, but that first part is there. So it doesn’t undermine because there are other options here. And it’s doing more than just rewarding an individual for a piece of activity. It’s doing a lot more. There’s a bigger picture. Do you see?

Manda: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Yes, yes. And for people listening, I think we leapt in several layers up. So there is quite a strong economic theory that exactly as Peter was saying, when people are doing something voluntarily because they choose to because it feels good, if you then start paying them for it, it stops feeling good and it feels like a job. And it becomes a job they don’t want to do. And there’s a lot of evidence that that’s the case. And so what you’re saying is we’re not paying you in grubby fiat money. We’re enhancing the value of what you’re doing. And this token is a token of that enhanced value. And if you want to pay it forward to somebody else, you don’t have to hang on to the token. But we we want to be able to show the world that what you’re doing is valuable. And that seems really useful. Yeah. God, this is exciting, Peter.

Peter: Thank you.

Manda: We’re way over time. As ever. We should give up the idea that this is a one hour podcast, it just isn’t anymore. Is there any last thing small that you think everyone should know? I will put links to everything that you’re doing into the show notes, so they will be able to find you. Anything else?

Peter: No, I’m good there thank you. Yeah. That’s great. Cheers.

Manda: In that case, Peter Kemp, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. This has been enlivening and exciting for me, and I hope for everybody listening. So thank you.

Peter: Thank you.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Peter for the breadth and the depth of his thinking. For his capacity to join so many dots and bring so many genuinely inspiring ideas together and make them work. The fact that he is offering actual databases that gather actual, safe data and keep it secure, and help the people who make decisions about our money to understand how it can be used more efficiently, with more social value, in ways that are more generative, is amazing. We want to end the death cult of predatory capitalism. That’s a given. We have to, and it’s urgent. But we want to do it in ways that allow people’s lives to emerge, to change, to evolve, to become something better and more fulfilling. And we don’t do that by pulling the rug out from under them. We do that by evolving the alternative system that makes the old system obsolete. That’s absolutely straightforward Bucky Fuller stuff. We all know this. What’s not always obvious is how to do it. And Peter is in the process of evolving the ways to make it happen. So go Peter! And go all of the councils that are bringing this into being. And if you live anywhere in the world and think that your council could do with something that’s going to really help people to engage more deeply, to volunteer, to work on their own health, to create better local and distributed democracies, participatory budgeting, all the things that we really need. And there is a single app that can bring all that together. Please let your council know. And if you need to get in touch with Peter, I’m sure he will be able to help them to understand the value that it can bring.

Manda: So there we go. That’s your homework for this week. Bring citizen coin to your local environment. And that apart, if you want to come to the gathering on Sunday, Dreaming Your Soul’s True Purpose, then please sign up on the website. If you’re listening to this after the 11th of May, 2025, there are always other gatherings. Just go to Accidental Gods, press on the gatherings tab and have a look at what’s there. And that apart, we will be back next week with another conversation.

Manda: In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for wrestling with this week’s production. To Lou Mayor for similarly wrestling with the video. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to get to grips with the ways that we could measure, share, and account for things that really matter, for ways that we could begin to wean ourselves off the horror of the fiat currencies that keep the death cult of predatory capitalism going, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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