Speaker 1: So the big question is this, how do investors like
Speaker 1: us get access to the ideas, information, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: the right people that give us the tools and information
Speaker 1: we need to make conformed and educated decisions to have success.
Speaker 1: That is the question, and this podcast will give us
Speaker 1: the answers. This is Mark Moss, your host. Let's get
Speaker 1: this started here. Everyone, Welcome to another episode of the
Speaker 1: Market Disruptors podcast. Today I am joined by Nathaniel Whitmore.
Speaker 1: He's the author of Long Read Sunday and The Crypto
Speaker 1: Daily three on three, both on Twitter. I've been following
Speaker 1: for a long time and you should check it out anyway.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to have you, Nathaniel. Welcome, Thank you, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm happy to talk to you as well. We've
Speaker 1: you know, I've been following your stuff for for a year.
Speaker 1: You put out really good curated information um on Twitter.
Speaker 1: But why don't you tell everybody who you are, kind
Speaker 1: of what your background is and and how you got
Speaker 1: here what you're doing? Yes, sure, so that I was
Speaker 1: kind of joked. There's like two parts to the how
Speaker 1: I got into crypto story. The first is kind of
Speaker 1: the obvious one at first glancewers that I spent about
Speaker 1: a decade in Silicon Valley. Uh, kind of bouncing back
Speaker 1: and forth between venture capital roles and operator roles. UM
Speaker 1: one of those as I was helping a company, I
Speaker 1: advised a company that went through UM why I combinated
Speaker 1: at the same classes coin Base. That company was sort
Speaker 1: of a helps fortune five hundreds understand new technologies through
Speaker 1: educational videos, consulting partnerships, etcetera. And like they were making
Speaker 1: videos about bitcoin for Coca Cola, kind of private videos
Speaker 1: ordered by Coca Cola and like. So so that's kind
Speaker 1: of the the easy or clear part in some ways.
Speaker 1: But then before that, actually my whole kind of background
Speaker 1: of where I came from was much more focused on
Speaker 1: social impact and kind of global social change. So, uh,
Speaker 1: right after a university, I basically stuck around my university
Speaker 1: for a few years to design programs to send kids
Speaker 1: all over the world who wanted to make an impact
Speaker 1: and kind of partner with local organizations and figure out
Speaker 1: how to do that and uh, and a lot of
Speaker 1: what that the goal of that program was is to
Speaker 1: show just how hard it is. Right, there's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of energy that comes especially from young people who
Speaker 1: want to go out and make a difference, but then
Speaker 1: get to wherever it is that they want to go
Speaker 1: or they want to have an impact, and find that
Speaker 1: there's just huge structural problems. Uh that um that you know,
Speaker 1: at best, they're going to kind of nibble around the
Speaker 1: edges of the problems and it's not bad, but it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily what they're going for. And so it's interesting,
Speaker 1: Like it actually took me leaving Silicon Valley so my
Speaker 1: wife and I live in the Hudson Valley now, um
Speaker 1: and breaking kind of away from from Silicon Valley to
Speaker 1: almost like re contextualized bitcoin and crypto in general, but
Speaker 1: particularly Bitcoin outside of the Hayman's narrative which had dominated
Speaker 1: it from you know, when we were in it with
Speaker 1: coin Base and when we're making those videos for Coca Cola.
Speaker 1: Like if you look at uh in Silicon Valley in particular,
Speaker 1: bitcoin is just one of a lot of different kind
Speaker 1: of like fast mobile money type things, right, Like it
Speaker 1: was this cool thing that you could use to order
Speaker 1: coffee at Cooper Cafe and Palo Alto when you were
Speaker 1: pitching a VC, Like literally that's that's what it was.
Speaker 1: For for for me kind of being in it and
Speaker 1: now admittedly it wasn't my main focus, and I was
Speaker 1: pretty um tunnel visioned on the company that I was
Speaker 1: working on that time. But when I left and got
Speaker 1: out of it and I started to actually have space
Speaker 1: to to dig back into it, it turns out that
Speaker 1: for me, at least, it's it related much more to
Speaker 1: that first set of things that I had done before
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley that were about large scale global structural change,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of what pulled me all the way
Speaker 1: back in. So for the last few years, I've been
Speaker 1: kind of all in on on bitcoin and crypto, UM
Speaker 1: and UH, and that manifests in a couple of different ways.
Speaker 1: As you said, I do the Long Read Sunday, which
Speaker 1: is kind of a curation of the week's top tweets UM.
Speaker 1: I recently started a thing called Crypto Daily three at three,
Speaker 1: which is a kind of livestream video that also turns
Speaker 1: into a podcast. It was three minutes on three topics
Speaker 1: each that I'm seeing a lot of conversation about UM,
Speaker 1: and then kind of behind the scenes, I'm also consulting
Speaker 1: and helping companies figure out what their narratives are in
Speaker 1: the context of the market and producing content around that.
Speaker 1: So it's a lot of sucking in a huge amount
Speaker 1: of information, trying to make sense of it all, and
Speaker 1: then spinning it back out in a lot of different ways. Yeah. Cool,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's been been really helpful for sure
Speaker 1: for a lot of people, including myself. So it's interesting
Speaker 1: how you you had kind of the social impact piece
Speaker 1: before going to Silicon Valley and and Silicon Valley I
Speaker 1: guess brought you into bitcoin, but it was it was
Speaker 1: a job, and like you said, you went from the
Speaker 1: payment the payment space to then seeing the actual change
Speaker 1: that bitcoin um can can do. I think that's part
Speaker 1: of going down the rabbit hole. I think, right, we
Speaker 1: all kind of find that a different way, but you
Speaker 1: had that background. That's really cool. Um, do you think
Speaker 1: that's normal for most people like to kind of come
Speaker 1: in for the money aspect, which is kind of more
Speaker 1: like the surface, shallow surface area that then they kind
Speaker 1: of get sucked into seeing the overall change. I think
Speaker 1: you have. I think a lot of it was based
Speaker 1: on how you find out, who you find out from,
Speaker 1: you know, what your own context is. But I do
Speaker 1: think and I think there's actually a relevant point that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, for for as much as we can kind
Speaker 1: of like rip on the crypto industry for you know,
Speaker 1: just the massive almost like casino style games of some
Speaker 1: of these you know, uh coin offerings in seventeen early
Speaker 1: and all these things. There are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who found their way in exactly to your point, through
Speaker 1: like being excited about the market opportunity, being excited about
Speaker 1: kind of a generational uh, you know, financial opportunity, and
Speaker 1: who found that there was much more to it than that,
Speaker 1: and in fact, maybe what made it such a generational
Speaker 1: financial opportunity was actually broader than just you know, what
Speaker 1: the asset was going to be valued on day to day.
Speaker 1: So I do think that there's a closer, there's a
Speaker 1: more there's more value to people coming in because they
Speaker 1: want the money than in a lot of spaces, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I think that there's a lot of a there's
Speaker 1: a conversion process that to a lot of people where
Speaker 1: whatever they thought it was coming in, even if they
Speaker 1: were just excited about the money, they found a lot
Speaker 1: more even if they stay excited about the money, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, I uh, you know, I say that the
Speaker 1: reason why bitcoin is hard for most people to understand
Speaker 1: is because you know, there's so much maybe six seven
Speaker 1: different disciplines that you have to get and which is
Speaker 1: why there's kind of that rabbit hole you kind of
Speaker 1: learned about each one. But I love the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, I think five six, seven years ago, people
Speaker 1: weren't really interested in money, people weren't interested in economics.
Speaker 1: Nobody used the word feat, nobody would throw around the
Speaker 1: words Austrian economics, right, and so now today it's creating
Speaker 1: all this awareness and like you said, it sucks people
Speaker 1: in on the money. Um, it's kind of the old
Speaker 1: bait and switch put in a good way. Uh. So
Speaker 1: I like that now. I mean you mentioned how you
Speaker 1: mentioned how you saw you know, in Silicon Valley and
Speaker 1: and it was kind of all about the payments. Um.
Speaker 1: I think even recently we still here, we we were
Speaker 1: hearing more about the payments. But that's kind of shifting.
Speaker 1: And I know you talk a lot about like narrative
Speaker 1: and narrative marking, So UM, tell me kind of where
Speaker 1: you think that narrative started to switch, uh, and kind
Speaker 1: of where it's at right now. So you have a
Speaker 1: you have a couple of things. There's there's almost like
Speaker 1: the silicon value question, which I actually think is interesting
Speaker 1: because of its kind of role and prominence in the
Speaker 1: tech world and the amount of money flowing through it.
Speaker 1: But then there's also just the more general question of
Speaker 1: when that payment's narrative shifted. Um, so maybe let's actually
Speaker 1: talk about the payments narrative first. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: it's been a for for I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people out there who would argue that they were
Speaker 1: always kind of telling the digital goal of the store
Speaker 1: value story, the you know, even now the something that
Speaker 1: we can get into, which is I think I think
Speaker 1: we're shifting again from those things to something that's much
Speaker 1: more of a kind of generational hedge against the fundamental
Speaker 1: paradigm shift in the economic system, which is like a
Speaker 1: superstore value, you know. But so I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of folks who that narrative has always been there
Speaker 1: for some people. I think that, um, there was a
Speaker 1: ton of money spent on on kind of marketing the
Speaker 1: idea of it as a payment channel, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and and honestly like well intentioned right like Square was
Speaker 1: accepting you know, Square merchants were making it. You're able
Speaker 1: to uh to accept bitcoin that wasn't a wasn't because
Speaker 1: they you know, didn't care about the other narrative or whatever.
Speaker 1: Just it made sense of their business. They were excited
Speaker 1: about the cooin. I think obviously now everyone kind of
Speaker 1: knows how long Jack Dorsey has been thinking about it,
Speaker 1: watching it, understanding it. But when you have a major
Speaker 1: company like that who is enabling that to be the
Speaker 1: way that most people interact with it, that's what they're
Speaker 1: going to hear about it. That's what we're gonna think
Speaker 1: about it. And also coincides at the time of kind
Speaker 1: of the rise of Venmo, the rise of other type
Speaker 1: of mobile money solutions UM and the idea of just
Speaker 1: being easier, like everything was being convenient, you know, or
Speaker 1: becoming more convenient in in a totally different way. And
Speaker 1: so it did kind of fit inside that, at least
Speaker 1: very quickly. UM. I think over the last few years
Speaker 1: that's obviously shifted. UM. I think it was really reinforced.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things that was interesting about
Speaker 1: the I c O boom was that it allowed bitcoin
Speaker 1: to define itself oppositionally, or maybe a better way to
Speaker 1: put it is for bitcoiners to define itself as different
Speaker 1: in some way and I think that wasn't just about
Speaker 1: kind of a fair launch model or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It was more about what the goals of the system were.
Speaker 1: And you saw, like if you look at the beginning
Speaker 1: of eighteen maybe even bridging back into the Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: side of this question, you saw kind of the emergence
Speaker 1: of a recognition that we were kind of having two
Speaker 1: different conversations at once. There was the money crypto and
Speaker 1: the tech crypto side, and um, you know, there there's
Speaker 1: something to make the argument that they're incompatible or and
Speaker 1: there's something who only care about one or the other. Um,
Speaker 1: I think there's also a lot of people who can
Speaker 1: see that they kind of they just have different ambitions
Speaker 1: and different aims. And so if you kind of take
Speaker 1: the Silicon Valley side, what the way that they're looking
Speaker 1: or I don't want to say, I don't want to
Speaker 1: pay it with such a broad breast strokes, because obviously
Speaker 1: there's a ton of people in Silicon Valley who are
Speaker 1: passionate and kind of deep money decliners as well. But um,
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley is really interested in the paradigm shift from uh,
Speaker 1: these companies which are supposed to disintermate the disinder mediate
Speaker 1: the Internet and instead became the most powerful gatekeepers that
Speaker 1: we've ever seen, right, Like Amazon is basically the most
Speaker 1: powerful gatekeeper we've ever seen from a retail perspective around
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, it makes the Walmart that encouraged antitrust,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of rumblings in the nineties and earlier
Speaker 1: two thousands look ridiculous by comparison, um and uh, and
Speaker 1: you kind of see that across other domains and disciplines
Speaker 1: as well. I Mean, a lot of the conversation about
Speaker 1: Facebook that's really unresolved as it relates to how big
Speaker 1: and how powerful it is that we've never seen anything
Speaker 1: that's that has this many users, this much data that
Speaker 1: it has access to. We don't have any precedent for
Speaker 1: how it's supposed to behave or what it's supposed to do.
Speaker 1: And so Silicon Valley, I think is is really interested
Speaker 1: in kind of the decentralized technology alternatives to those types
Speaker 1: of things, because that's what Silicon Valley does is it
Speaker 1: creates technolo aologies that respond to the problems of today's
Speaker 1: systems and tries to do them in a different way
Speaker 1: that's faster, better, cheaper, more efficient, whatever, so, but only
Speaker 1: if they can pull a profit from it. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a whole different conversation about what extense of looking value
Speaker 1: has been interested in pulling a profit or or been
Speaker 1: interested in a tenure game to let retail care about
Speaker 1: whether it pulls a profit once it goes public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that the maybe we can get into that. But
Speaker 1: that's a whole different conversation. But I think that as
Speaker 1: it relates to bitcoin during during this boom, as everything
Speaker 1: was about tokenizing everything, tokenizing the world, decentralizing everything, Bitcoin
Speaker 1: and bitcoiner has got to say really strongly and really firmly, like,
Speaker 1: that's not what we're here for. We're here to change
Speaker 1: the money system, and decentralization is actually for us about
Speaker 1: censorship resistance. Uh, you know, the permissionless nature of this
Speaker 1: asset um, the fact that it's not going to change
Speaker 1: you know, it's money supply, and it's it's monetary policies,
Speaker 1: and then it's a it's a bulwark against kind of
Speaker 1: the rampant money printing that we're seeing. And so I
Speaker 1: feel like actually, in some ways, the breakout success, at
Speaker 1: least in the short term, of this other category of
Speaker 1: assets gave bitcoin a chance to really define itself as
Speaker 1: something different. And I think that if you look at
Speaker 1: what the story that was being told behind the scenes
Speaker 1: as people were recruiting institutions and new people to come
Speaker 1: in during the bear market. During they were talking about
Speaker 1: about bitcoin and its role as a as a hedge,
Speaker 1: not about tokenized assets. Yeah, so you know that. It's
Speaker 1: it's interesting because you know, we're talking about narrative marketing
Speaker 1: and so you had, like you said, uh, Square for example,
Speaker 1: coming out and talking about bitcoin as a payment mechanisms.
Speaker 1: We had companies that were promoting it hoping that people
Speaker 1: would use it and then they would be able to
Speaker 1: gain market share and make a profit or whatever they're doing.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about making profit, but um bitcoin is a
Speaker 1: decentralized company that nobody runs, and there's nobody there, and
Speaker 1: there's nobody there to push a narrative, right, There's nobody
Speaker 1: there to um say what it's supposed to be or
Speaker 1: tell people about it. So really it seems like maybe
Speaker 1: it comes down to the community, people like you or me,
Speaker 1: who are putting out content to try and help push
Speaker 1: that narrative. So do you think that's why there's kind
Speaker 1: of that difference. Yeah, I mean bitcoin is a very
Speaker 1: unique phenomenon in I mean in history from a lot
Speaker 1: of different vectors. But I think that the one dimension
Speaker 1: of that is that it's a company less force, right,
Speaker 1: and that that we've never seen anything like that. Um,
Speaker 1: there is no bitcoin marketing department, there is no bitcoin
Speaker 1: pr department. What it has kind of it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a it's kind of like a decentralized narrative, a
Speaker 1: decentralized force right where I'm talking about bitcoin and what
Speaker 1: it means to me, but you're talking about bitcoin of
Speaker 1: what it means to you, yep. And And that's I
Speaker 1: think why the narrative battles around bitcoin can be so
Speaker 1: fever pitch is that there's no one who uh, there's
Speaker 1: no one that comes back to that. There's there's individual
Speaker 1: voices authority based on who happens to follow them, right,
Speaker 1: But it really is the kind of like a large group,
Speaker 1: and so it's a very messy kind of social consensus process.
Speaker 1: But I mean, you know, this is kind of represented
Speaker 1: in forks, but I think it's the My instinct is
Speaker 1: that the longer that uh, you know, bitcoin itself continues
Speaker 1: to get to to differentiate and kind of the further
Speaker 1: the forks fall by the wayside in terms of where
Speaker 1: they fit in the market, the more you'll see within
Speaker 1: the big tent of bitcoin, even different interpretations of what
Speaker 1: bitcoin are, what why it matters, what it means, You
Speaker 1: will see, you know, you'll probably see battles over things
Speaker 1: like rehypothecation and what are and aren't you know, financial
Speaker 1: products that we're okay with on top of bitcoin, even
Speaker 1: though again no one gets it aside, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of the beauty of it. So you know, it's definitely
Speaker 1: it's a particular type of narrative battleground around bitcoin. Um
Speaker 1: and I think that that's you know, only going to
Speaker 1: increase over time. So it seems like maybe in the
Speaker 1: beginning we had the squares and whatnot talking about it
Speaker 1: as a payment source and may and and the companies
Speaker 1: that can build products around it to to make money are
Speaker 1: going to going to invest money to push whatever narrative
Speaker 1: they want. Um And now it looks like almost it's
Speaker 1: the Wall Street taking over that narrative. Right We have
Speaker 1: E Trade, TD, merrit Trade, Fidelity, on and on and
Speaker 1: on New York Stock Exchange. Now they're all picking up
Speaker 1: and so now uh, they're gonna probably try to push
Speaker 1: that bitcoin is a financial instrument narrative. Yeah, well it's interesting.
Speaker 1: So so they definitely are right. They want bitcoin to
Speaker 1: be a financial instrument. They wanted to be, um you know,
Speaker 1: set up in ways that they can uh sell, right,
Speaker 1: and and they're the particular narratives around it, I think
Speaker 1: will be a little bit based on what it is
Speaker 1: they're trying to sell. Are they selling a custody solution
Speaker 1: or they selling futures product, um, you know, all of
Speaker 1: those things will shape the particular uh you know way
Speaker 1: that they frame it. However, I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that's really interesting is that there is a convergence
Speaker 1: of a narrative from the bitcoin community alongside the kind
Speaker 1: of Wall Street big financial institution narrative, which is this
Speaker 1: idea of bitcoin as a non correlated asset, right as
Speaker 1: a hedge against um, what's expected to be kind of
Speaker 1: a rise of money printing, right uh and modern monetary
Speaker 1: theory and all these sort of things. Um. There they
Speaker 1: are now the kind of again painting with a broad brush.
Speaker 1: Financial institutions are are kind of framing it in that
Speaker 1: way to their clients, to their customers, and even if
Speaker 1: it's just internally so far as how they think about it,
Speaker 1: and um, that's really interesting to see and I think
Speaker 1: very powerful. Uh that that's the way the narrative is
Speaker 1: kind of shifting in terms of what bitcoin represents to
Speaker 1: that larger financial world. Interesting. So you think the when
Speaker 1: you talk about the bitcoin community, I mean we're really
Speaker 1: just talking about the the developers and the people in
Speaker 1: the space, you know, Twitter, the Bitcoin Maximus and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So you're thinking that the maximalists are are continued to
Speaker 1: push their narrative of really the store of value and
Speaker 1: that it is again hedge against the money printing, and
Speaker 1: you think Wall Street may pick that up and help
Speaker 1: kind of run that run that marketing torch a little bit.
Speaker 1: I think that they are picking that up. I think
Speaker 1: there's there's two pieces of it that they're picking up.
Speaker 1: So if you look so um Ral Paul, who started
Speaker 1: Real Vision, uh he used to be kind of a
Speaker 1: macro equities trader. Um has been on to two podcasts
Speaker 1: this week discussing this. So one was Stefan Lavere is
Speaker 1: obviously a bitcoin focused podcast, and they were talking about
Speaker 1: kind of this, uh, this idea of a generational turning
Speaker 1: in terms of um, in terms of where where we
Speaker 1: are in the financial cycle and kind of the you know,
Speaker 1: equities being at their their kind of highest price ever,
Speaker 1: and what's likely to happen in the bond markets and
Speaker 1: how you know, as things shift, as there's kind of
Speaker 1: uh no more debt to be had, you know, things
Speaker 1: are going to change, and all of a sudden, boomers
Speaker 1: are going to find uh, their their you know, equities
Speaker 1: worth so much less than than they were planning on. Right,
Speaker 1: And then you have all these millennials who are looking
Speaker 1: at you know, the most expensive equities ever, the most
Speaker 1: expensive real estate ever. And why wouldn't you take a
Speaker 1: kind of asymmetric bet on something like bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Um?
Speaker 1: So you have, on the one hand, just that it
Speaker 1: as a pure, uh pure market play type, which is
Speaker 1: is kind of the not necessarily the narrative that bitcoiners
Speaker 1: are pushing. But it's something that gets to this other
Speaker 1: point was why is this a generational hedge? Um? Why
Speaker 1: is it such a non correlated asset? It's it comes
Speaker 1: back to this idea of something that is digitally scarce, right,
Speaker 1: and that is kind of uh, you know, knowably provably scarce,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden when you start having that conversation,
Speaker 1: it really paints itself in opposition to uh, two policies
Speaker 1: that we see, you know, both both happening, but also
Speaker 1: that are seemed to becoming more in vogue. And so
Speaker 1: you kind of have this convergence of on the one hand, uh,
Speaker 1: just a generation who's like, well, I can't buy these
Speaker 1: things to to create and preserve wealth in the long
Speaker 1: run because there's got they've got nowhere to go but
Speaker 1: down Now. The other their hand, they're like, well, there's
Speaker 1: this other thing that seems like it might be a
Speaker 1: good bet or a good hedge, but why And it
Speaker 1: comes back to again a lot of the core ideas
Speaker 1: of um scarcity that that have people so excited. So
Speaker 1: I think it's this really interesting thing that's happening where
Speaker 1: it's not that just all of a sudden people are
Speaker 1: all Austrians who really care about scarcity and sound money.
Speaker 1: It's that in the context of what else is in
Speaker 1: the market and these larger market forces, it's it's painting
Speaker 1: itself in a much more appealing light, right Yeah, I think, yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: not everybody wants to paint themselves as Austrian or even
Speaker 1: cares to know what that means. But I think, like
Speaker 1: I think sound money might have skipped a generation or
Speaker 1: two right where. I think if you went back in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds, I mean, people were still really
Speaker 1: tuned into gold. Um, as the US got off of
Speaker 1: gold and kind of went into the paper, maybe that
Speaker 1: was lost a little bit and and uh, and there's
Speaker 1: a couple of generations don't really care about it. And
Speaker 1: now kind of like maybe you see an African continent
Speaker 1: where they skipped landline phones and went straight to mobile phones.
Speaker 1: Maybe this generation skipping the gold sound money going straight
Speaker 1: to a bitcoin sound money, um and not really knowing why.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's interesting. Now, Um, what about other narratives in
Speaker 1: the marketplace? So obviously that's bitcoin, but now we have
Speaker 1: crypto currency, right, so, um, what do you see about crypto?
Speaker 1: About the crypto narrative? I mean, do you think it
Speaker 1: seems to be kind of spinning off of the bitcoin
Speaker 1: narrative and now it's all these other things big blockchain,
Speaker 1: not bitcoin sort of. So I think that it's pretty
Speaker 1: undeniable to me that even if you're really excited about
Speaker 1: all of the different assets, um, the conversation that has
Speaker 1: jumped mainstream is specifically about bitcoin. Uh, it really much
Speaker 1: more than general crypto assets, with the exception of liber
Speaker 1: and stable coins, which maybe we'll come back to in
Speaker 1: a minute. Um, but that's there. You know, they've been
Speaker 1: three hearings, two in the Senate, one in Congress over
Speaker 1: the last two weeks, basically two and a half weeks,
Speaker 1: and the word ethereum hasn't come up. No one's mentioned eos,
Speaker 1: you know, no one's gotten into the industry and um.
Speaker 1: And I think that that doesn't That just reflects uh,
Speaker 1: partially what they're hearing about it, and partially kind of
Speaker 1: where again that this is. It's it's in the context
Speaker 1: of this larger financial system questions and this growing concern
Speaker 1: about what the future of the financial system looks like
Speaker 1: and where money fits in and all these things, right,
Speaker 1: And so basically they want to have the money, uh,
Speaker 1: the money crypto conversation, not the technology crypto conversation. So
Speaker 1: I don't think that that's actually a knock on anything else.
Speaker 1: It's more just shows the comparative maturity of the bitcoin
Speaker 1: narrative and the demand and the interest from kind of
Speaker 1: the larger mainstream financial and political world to understand how
Speaker 1: it might fit now. I guess they don't care if
Speaker 1: if supply chain management figures out a better way to
Speaker 1: run their computer system on blockchain, right, that doesn't affect.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the things that happened at the
Speaker 1: hearing this week with the the Senate Banking Committee, So
Speaker 1: two weeks ago we had two hearings that were about
Speaker 1: Libra specifically UM. This week we had a hearing that
Speaker 1: was theoretically about cryptocurrency regulation writ large. Turns out it
Speaker 1: was still about Libra UM and Libra is really the
Speaker 1: thing that's got them uh concerned and paying attention, but
Speaker 1: it was theoretically about kind of cryptocurrency regulation in general.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that was actually interesting is
Speaker 1: that there were some who, like some of the folks
Speaker 1: who are more I guess you would say, maybe positively
Speaker 1: inclined towards this. We're kind of trying to lead the
Speaker 1: witnesses who are speaking to to the Senate Banking Committee
Speaker 1: to to show what what other use cases for blockchain
Speaker 1: their were outside of money, because they didn't want the
Speaker 1: entire technology to be just assumed to be going after
Speaker 1: to trying to recreate money in some ways, which is
Speaker 1: more politically contentious than to your point, changing the way
Speaker 1: that supply chains run. Um. So yeah, so again it's
Speaker 1: there's there's this this kind of larger thing. And I
Speaker 1: point out that because I think it has such a
Speaker 1: it's going to shape a lot of our discourse within
Speaker 1: the crypto industry about what matters and what we're paying
Speaker 1: attention on. But I don't think it diminishes all the
Speaker 1: other kind of narratives that are flowing through. Um. They're
Speaker 1: just a little bit more still a battle for how
Speaker 1: we who are in the industry are interested and uh
Speaker 1: and what sort of bridges into the larger mainstream world
Speaker 1: we're looking at. Right, So yeah, what's interesting about this
Speaker 1: is again, right, there's so many different areas to focus on,
Speaker 1: and one is kind of philosophy maybe if you will,
Speaker 1: or or economics and money. They all kind of converge,
Speaker 1: and it's like what is money, right if you really
Speaker 1: want to dig into it, And so you talk about
Speaker 1: all these other like cryptocurrencies and maybe they're like utility token,
Speaker 1: so it's a token that I'm able to use on
Speaker 1: that system, But that's all money, right, Like it's all
Speaker 1: about value and how I store value, how I use value,
Speaker 1: how I trade transfer value? And if I just you know,
Speaker 1: airline reward points or talking reward points, that's all that's
Speaker 1: all money, it's value um. And so they want to
Speaker 1: separate that from money and like blanket like cryptocurrencies, But
Speaker 1: how can they stop somebody from creating value, creating a
Speaker 1: coupon and allowing you to use that coupon on a
Speaker 1: system that's a cryptocurrency. And so I kind of envisioned
Speaker 1: this this world where money as we know it just
Speaker 1: changes and they can contry to try to control the dollar,
Speaker 1: but money becomes uh you know, decentralizing. Everyone creates it, transfers,
Speaker 1: it uses it. So they can try to separate that narrative,
Speaker 1: but at some point it seems like they it keeps
Speaker 1: coming back together. Do you think, Yeah, sure, I think
Speaker 1: I think that the point that you're making, which is
Speaker 1: right on, is that you're seeing a little bit of
Speaker 1: a separation at least kind of linguistically or conceptually of
Speaker 1: value and money, right And a lot of what I
Speaker 1: think the folks, uh you know, who are like maybe
Speaker 1: in the ethereum community or thinking about things like non
Speaker 1: fungible tokens and all these things is they're they're trying
Speaker 1: to make value programmable. They're trying to make a value
Speaker 1: primitive for applications where it's really easy to move this
Speaker 1: little bucket of value over this this place and back again.
Speaker 1: Um and to have that be kind of programmatically determined
Speaker 1: or happen automatically if some set of conditions are met.
Speaker 1: And you know, we're used to thinking about the only
Speaker 1: way that we kind of denominate that is through money, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, well, value is uh is represented uh in
Speaker 1: you know, dollars or cents or whatever it is. Um
Speaker 1: And and really cryptocurrencies for a lot of these ecosystems
Speaker 1: represent just a different kind of unit of account for
Speaker 1: the value that's being distributed through these communities. UM. I
Speaker 1: think the thing is that's That's one thing I think
Speaker 1: that's good is that we're starting that I think is
Speaker 1: a good separation is the aspiration of different programmable values
Speaker 1: and what they are, what their implications are. UM. I
Speaker 1: think you're starting to see a lot of experiments. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the kind of air in some ways of
Speaker 1: some of the like tokenized the world type things is
Speaker 1: more specific micro communities that are having a go at
Speaker 1: how value might move between users of their their products,
Speaker 1: uh in in different ways. So you have you know
Speaker 1: a lot of activity around games with non fungible tokens
Speaker 1: where there's kind of true digital ownership, but theoretically true
Speaker 1: digital ownership of assets. UM. You have uh, you know,
Speaker 1: some communities like Scent that are trying to see if
Speaker 1: they can create different value primitives that incentivized content creation,
Speaker 1: content sharing, information sharing in different ways. UM. I think
Speaker 1: those things have such a huge way to go to
Speaker 1: uh to prove that there's um, well, one that the
Speaker 1: architecture of the systems is right. The two that it's
Speaker 1: like they have two challenges in some ways. One is
Speaker 1: you know, is is the it is kind of the
Speaker 1: way that we allow users to exchange value enough of
Speaker 1: a hook to get them here to actually spend time
Speaker 1: in this community versus all their other options. And then
Speaker 1: to what's the right unit account? Should it be ethereum,
Speaker 1: should it be you know, our native token? Should it
Speaker 1: just be bitcoin? Should it be USD Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: but I think we I think we already kind of
Speaker 1: have a working framework. So for example, I took my
Speaker 1: kids to Dave and Busters, and I have to pay
Speaker 1: money to play the games and I have to put
Speaker 1: money in the machine and I get credits on a card,
Speaker 1: but then we don't use all credits, and I leave
Speaker 1: and like, I'm not going back to David Busters maybe ever.
Speaker 1: And now I have all these credits on this card.
Speaker 1: Those are to those could be tokens, and like why
Speaker 1: couldn't I trade those tokens for your airline reward points?
Speaker 1: Right totally? So we have like we're used to the
Speaker 1: system where we gain reward points, we we we gain credits,
Speaker 1: what token whatever? They could be tokens, but like why
Speaker 1: does that value have to stay locked in that silo
Speaker 1: and why couldn't it be transferred? And so all the sudden,
Speaker 1: Dave and Busters decide, well, hey we're gonna make them
Speaker 1: a token. Um, but now that's illegal. Uh sorry, it's
Speaker 1: a cryptocurrency, it's money. It's illegal. But it's like it's
Speaker 1: the same thing. Yeah, well that's I actually think it
Speaker 1: was a mistake to run away from the like souped
Speaker 1: up airline miles narrative in some ways for these tokens
Speaker 1: like it so that the reason that people rejected that
Speaker 1: narrative that they tried to in some ways is that
Speaker 1: it it may be diminished the total upside that people
Speaker 1: were imagining as they were buying tokens and kind of
Speaker 1: like pre launch of anything. However, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: a bad thing to have, I mean exactly, to your point,
Speaker 1: creating liquidity and secondary markets around an ecosystems currency is
Speaker 1: a really nice economic value add type activity. And to
Speaker 1: your point too, we're we are used to having to
Speaker 1: convert whatever the dominant currency is into this little ecosystems
Speaker 1: currency for the sake of our experience there, whether it's
Speaker 1: David Busters or I mean, how Starbucks. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's still true, but a couple of years ago
Speaker 1: there was more like Starbucks is basically the biggest mobile
Speaker 1: money provider by a lot, over Apple, over PayPal, over Venmo.
Speaker 1: You know, from from an actual like how much was
Speaker 1: on American accounts um than than anyone else Starbucks card
Speaker 1: Starbucks exactly, Like and it's that's just Starbucks has shown
Speaker 1: that there's a market there. I it blows me away
Speaker 1: that Amazon hasn't done this yet. The average Americans spent
Speaker 1: something like seven a month on Amazon literally, Like it's
Speaker 1: crazy how high it is. Maybe that's the average prime member.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, I don't, don't call me on that,
Speaker 1: but it's an it's an enormous amount of money, right,
Speaker 1: Like why not just leave if you're if you had
Speaker 1: a ten percent discount on Amazon Bucks and you knew
Speaker 1: on average, Amazon just showed you what the average you
Speaker 1: spent was, you know, in any given month, and they
Speaker 1: made it desperately easy to just convert it at any time,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like people would leave it there. So
Speaker 1: all of these things, I think, to your point, are
Speaker 1: there there. They feel almost like totally inevitable, you know,
Speaker 1: with the exception of if there's if there's a regulatory
Speaker 1: barrier put up that that that eliminates them. But they're
Speaker 1: not the same. They're not what bitcoin is trying to do.
Speaker 1: And that's fine, you know they're they're not what bitcoin
Speaker 1: is trying to do, but they kind of they I
Speaker 1: think they all work together. So I believe in a
Speaker 1: in bitcoin becoming a store of value, becoming an exchange,
Speaker 1: moving on to becoming a unit of account um. And
Speaker 1: I think you asked kind of earlier like what are
Speaker 1: they all pegg too? And I think we have to.
Speaker 1: I think I think I think in a hundred years,
Speaker 1: history books will be written about this period that we're
Speaker 1: living in right now and it will be this transitional period,
Speaker 1: and people go, what the heck were they thinking? Like
Speaker 1: they had this free floating value. There was no peg, right,
Speaker 1: there was no unit of measurement, standard unit of measurement.
Speaker 1: So uh, like, you know, we have an inch, we
Speaker 1: have a degree of fahrenheit, right, we have a meter
Speaker 1: a weight, but we don't have a standard unit of
Speaker 1: measure for value. And I think we'll have to get
Speaker 1: back to that, and I think bitcoin sits there eventually. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's that that is the central the
Speaker 1: set of folks who are in Congress in the Senate
Speaker 1: who have played out the endgame scenario of these things.
Speaker 1: That's their fears that that's becomes bitcoin instead of the
Speaker 1: US dollar, although actually they're much more scared that it's
Speaker 1: libra um, that that it becomes libra not the U.
Speaker 1: S dollar. Um. It's been interesting to watch just how
Speaker 1: much the size and scope of the power, the size
Speaker 1: and scope of the audience that Facebook has is the difference.
Speaker 1: Like it was really fascinating to watch a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago when uh so even before when I'm uh
Speaker 1: fed shared er on Powell was testifying, not about Libra
Speaker 1: or anything specifically, but he was asked about it. He
Speaker 1: was asked about bitcoin, and he said, you know, did
Speaker 1: someone asked him? I think it was Brad Sherman, who's
Speaker 1: the Farnia congressman who has been kind of the most
Speaker 1: antagonistic Um. Yeah, he uh, I think he was the
Speaker 1: one who asked Chairman Powell, you know, could you see
Speaker 1: a world in which bitcoin replaced the US dollar? What
Speaker 1: would that mean? And he basically said, you can conceive
Speaker 1: of theoretically scenarios in which uh, there are multi you know,
Speaker 1: multiple currencies, and we've seen that before. However, you know,
Speaker 1: in his estimation, that's not really how people were thinking
Speaker 1: about it. They were thinking about it more as a
Speaker 1: digital store values of digital gold, um and uh. And
Speaker 1: and interestingly, it seems to have been the case that
Speaker 1: those folks really picked up on that and they kind
Speaker 1: of went within They're like, okay, at least from now,
Speaker 1: and this could change in a minute. Like the thing
Speaker 1: that we have to be worried about with bitcoin isn't
Speaker 1: that it replaces our financial system. It's it's easy as
Speaker 1: it relates to terrorism and and uh, you know, money
Speaker 1: laundering and things like that. But with this Libra thing, Uh,
Speaker 1: Libra is a different story because you know, there's no
Speaker 1: founder even of of bitcoin, there's no there's no committee
Speaker 1: that looks like a central reserve. Libra is a different story.
Speaker 1: Libra has uh an antagonist, It has an arch villain
Speaker 1: that we already know that we already don't like that
Speaker 1: we already do on trust and and it also has
Speaker 1: two billion people. It has a built in biggest country
Speaker 1: in the world, you know, by a lot of people. Um,
Speaker 1: that's much more scary. So you know, Libra is basically
Speaker 1: trying to say that it's it's also not aspiring to
Speaker 1: to be kind of a you know, a global reserve currency,
Speaker 1: and people are like bs, like, you can't not when
Speaker 1: you're so big. They've put themselves into a very difficult
Speaker 1: situation because uh, he says uh. They say, well, how
Speaker 1: do we know you're not gonna still use information? Oh well,
Speaker 1: we're decentralized, but how are you going to comply with
Speaker 1: us laws? Oh well, we're gonna control all that, Like,
Speaker 1: so we're controlled enough to you know, we we're we're
Speaker 1: centralized enough to give you all the control you one,
Speaker 1: but we're decentralized enough to you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about us, and like they're caught in between this two
Speaker 1: the two uh, these two places that are difficult. But
Speaker 1: I want to jump back into the narrative for a minute,
Speaker 1: and let's talk about the government narrative. Right, So, as
Speaker 1: you just mentioned, you said that really the narrative they're
Speaker 1: pushing is this terrorism, drug dealing, illicit activities, um, and
Speaker 1: so maybe it's a narrative warfare maybe almost right. So
Speaker 1: bitcoin is like, hey, and Brad Sherman actually a year
Speaker 1: ago kind of got this right where he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: people see this as a way to undermine the US
Speaker 1: dollar and take away the power. And so I guess
Speaker 1: the two narratives are, yes, bitcoin is a way to
Speaker 1: hedge against the US dollar. But the government is saying
Speaker 1: we understand that Trump says that the US dollar stronger
Speaker 1: has ever been talking out of the side of his mouth.
Speaker 1: But the narrative they're pushing the warfare is terrorism drugs right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean mean warfare is the substance of politics, right,
Speaker 1: that is what uh politicians do. It's can you have
Speaker 1: the catchiest way to to to tear something to reduce
Speaker 1: something into a thing that you either want or you
Speaker 1: don't want, right. I mean, Reagan's welfare queens was like
Speaker 1: one of the most powerful destructive political memes of all time.
Speaker 1: And you can go through every like it's totally regardless
Speaker 1: of administration and political party. Um, memes are I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what That's what the whole thing is because digging
Speaker 1: into substances so hard, nuances so hard, and memes are
Speaker 1: kind of best when they reduce nuance. And uh, and
Speaker 1: right now there's definitely a political battle. I mean in
Speaker 1: some ways, Facebook is kind of almost providing this body
Speaker 1: shield for the rest of the crypto industry in some ways,
Speaker 1: you know, it could quickly turn and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: all the fire that's Levit did it gets Levit did everything, uh,
Speaker 1: level that everything else. Um, So it's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: good thing, but yeah, it's it's total meme warfare. And
Speaker 1: you've got you've got the the there's kind of a
Speaker 1: the antagonistic memes right now are um, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's criminal money. Uh. The antagonistic memes are it's trying
Speaker 1: to dethrone the U. S. Dollar that they haven't figured
Speaker 1: out a way to say that that sounds credible and
Speaker 1: that well, they also can't they can't even tell each
Speaker 1: other that. Like you can see, like Brad Sherman's there,
Speaker 1: a couple others are there. It's almost inconceivable too. I
Speaker 1: think most of these elected officials that there could be
Speaker 1: a world in which a thing created by an anonymous founder,
Speaker 1: run by a network of volunteers, you know, that doesn't
Speaker 1: have any formal company structure could actually provide a global threat.
Speaker 1: You know, they just don't buy it. That's why that's
Speaker 1: why they kind of threat to the US dollar meme
Speaker 1: has shifted over to Facebook and too, liber so aggressively
Speaker 1: because they can maybe imagine that more. They can imagine that,
Speaker 1: you know, if if if there's a run on currency,
Speaker 1: you know, in this basket of currencies, that it sucks
Speaker 1: dollars you know, out of the US dollar system. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's fascinating. So like how we fight back. The
Speaker 1: community fights back against those two memes. So for example,
Speaker 1: the narrative they're pushing, the meme they're pushing is that
Speaker 1: it's it's finances terrorism or it's for drugs drug dealers, right,
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, I think as you start to
Speaker 1: find out about free money, maybe you start leaning more
Speaker 1: towards uh libertarian type views and maybe you go, well,
Speaker 1: why does anybody tell me what I can and can't
Speaker 1: put it in my body? Why are drugs even illegal?
Speaker 1: Why don't we just end the violence overnight, make them legal,
Speaker 1: spend a fraction of the money in in education and
Speaker 1: training and rehab, and call it a day, right, Like
Speaker 1: this war on drugs doesn't work a trillion dollars down
Speaker 1: the tubes, and so maybe that narrative just bees destroyed overnight,
Speaker 1: like who care? Why are why are drugs? Wire drug
Speaker 1: dealers even a problem? And then the next narrative terrorism
Speaker 1: will terrorism? I mean, who's the US supplies terrorism? US
Speaker 1: supplies the weapons, the US shift pallets of money in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night to I ran, US bombs
Speaker 1: every day. That causes people to want to come bomb US,
Speaker 1: and they could just in terrorism if they wanted. So
Speaker 1: the two narratives are pushing are really caused by the US,
Speaker 1: not the people, and those should just those shouldn't even
Speaker 1: be conversations. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think those that's
Speaker 1: kind of a non a nuanced, non nuanced type of
Speaker 1: meme that like I would love, man, if we could
Speaker 1: go to those conversations and have those I would I
Speaker 1: would happily put like my little bitcoin hat on the
Speaker 1: shelf just for a second so we could have those conversations.
Speaker 1: But that's the that's the battle line almost right, that's
Speaker 1: the that's the US fighting back. The bitcoiners are saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we need to sound money, but the US is saying,
Speaker 1: will it's drugs and terrorism. So like that's kind of
Speaker 1: the battle line. I think that there's there's a I mean,
Speaker 1: it can be if you choose to fight that. I
Speaker 1: think that when it comes to those two particular issues,
Speaker 1: they're good answers. Uh, they're good answers within the existing
Speaker 1: UM political framework, right, Like even if those are you know,
Speaker 1: we would aspire to have those things changed, which I'm
Speaker 1: I'm all for UM. You still have you know, one,
Speaker 1: people don't really understand that bitcoin is anonymous but not private, right,
Speaker 1: so you have that at least until you know, coin
Speaker 1: joints and things become totally normalized, we have a window
Speaker 1: at least where people, once they learned, they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: actually that this is you know, law enforcement who sophisticated
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily act to view this as a as a
Speaker 1: total negative. There's you know, it's more trackable in some
Speaker 1: ways than cashed um too. You have uh, you know,
Speaker 1: crypto companies are and bitcoin companies are already regulated, right
Speaker 1: you have k y C and a m L and
Speaker 1: all the exchanges who choose to participate in in the US. Like,
Speaker 1: so it's interesting right there. I think that they're one
Speaker 1: of the narratives right now. Are One of the things
Speaker 1: that I'm watching is kind of the d Americanization of crypto.
Speaker 1: Is companies like Circle move their operations from you know,
Speaker 1: Boston to Bermuda um and Finance, you know, pulls out
Speaker 1: or kind of blocks people. Geo blocks users starting in
Speaker 1: September to give a much more kind of newtered version um.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is, yeah, the interesting thing is that,
Speaker 1: uh a lot of those exchanges, at least the ones
Speaker 1: that are based in the US, kind of made of lee.
Speaker 1: Their issue isn't compliance with m L and k y C.
Speaker 1: They just kind of know that that's the law of
Speaker 1: the land and you're not getting around that. Maybe there
Speaker 1: was a period where could do that, but if you
Speaker 1: want to do that, you're going somewhere else or you're
Speaker 1: doing a decentralized exchange or something you're looking at a
Speaker 1: fundamentally different model. The reason that circle pulled out of
Speaker 1: of you know, of the US, or at least mostly
Speaker 1: had more to do with the fact that they don't
Speaker 1: know if the I R S, the c f TC
Speaker 1: or you know, UH, the SEC is going to come
Speaker 1: after them on the basis of what a crypto acid
Speaker 1: is because it's not determined, right, you have different definitions
Speaker 1: by every different group. So I think that the terrorists
Speaker 1: and money financing narrative is it's almost lazy on the
Speaker 1: part of governments. It's the easiest to kind of get
Speaker 1: rid of UM. I will say that I think that
Speaker 1: that just being like but also maybe the most powerful
Speaker 1: because it's fear. It's fearmongering, right, so people are wanting
Speaker 1: to give up freedom for safety. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: just maybe this is being overly optimistic, But I just
Speaker 1: don't think that that's I don't think that's the really
Speaker 1: the thing that they can hang their hat on. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe like the thing that's the most scary about it.
Speaker 1: And UH is the the extent to which UM, the
Speaker 1: extent to which elected officials are willing to talk about
Speaker 1: UH talk about the possibility of things like major terrorist attacks,
Speaker 1: UM in in the context of giving them permission to
Speaker 1: do things like band bitcoin or do things like uh
Speaker 1: like force encryption. So it's a little bit different, but
Speaker 1: I think it's worth noting and something I'm paying attention to.
Speaker 1: So Attorney General William Barr has been talking a lot
Speaker 1: recently about backdoor encryption basically and forcing applications like what's
Speaker 1: app to have you know, law enforcement backdoors um instead
Speaker 1: of you know that basically destroys end to end encryption
Speaker 1: and uh. And he gave a whole speech about it.
Speaker 1: I think it was last week maybe at n y U.
Speaker 1: The whole thing is like thirty minutes on just this
Speaker 1: topic and he basically the way that he concluded was
Speaker 1: and by the way, you know, we can have this
Speaker 1: conversation now, but as soon as uh, as soon as
Speaker 1: there's a terrorist attack that was land on WhatsApp, like
Speaker 1: we're gonna just do this anyways, and that's going to
Speaker 1: be our justification. You didn't say it in quite that
Speaker 1: brazen terms, but basically, so you know it is uh
Speaker 1: that's the part that scares me. Could also be done
Speaker 1: word of mouth, and maybe we could ban that too, Yeah, Bannon, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been in communication channels hard. I mean, but this
Speaker 1: is gonna be this balance between security and privacy is
Speaker 1: is the I think the biggest, most important kind of
Speaker 1: like mega trend of the next I mean, it's gonna
Speaker 1: society is going to be shaped by the push and
Speaker 1: pull between these forces, you know, over the next five
Speaker 1: or ten years, for the next fifty years. But it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's been going on for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years, right, So I think the quote is maybe
Speaker 1: not known in the origin. Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 1: said that those willing to give up freedom for safety
Speaker 1: deserve neither. So like it's been a couple hundred years
Speaker 1: that people have been willing to trade off their freedom
Speaker 1: or their liberty for safety. Uh. Well, this is why,
Speaker 1: I mean, the the framers of the Constitution, the Bill
Speaker 1: of Rights, knew that this was a challenge. They knew
Speaker 1: that the first thing to go in situations of tyranny
Speaker 1: was basically, your rights go out the window for under
Speaker 1: the idea of protection. That's why they enenthrined so many
Speaker 1: of these rights, uh, you know, in in in the
Speaker 1: in the Bill and the Constitution, so I think, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not new. What's new is obviously it's you know,
Speaker 1: the the changes in technology are so different and create
Speaker 1: such a different type of surveillance opportunity that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a it's not just a shift in magnitude, it's
Speaker 1: a shifting kind of where the where the conversation is now. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in cryptocurrency or cryptography is our weapon to fight back
Speaker 1: against that tea, hopefully if it doesn't get taken out.
Speaker 1: Oh man, so much good, so much good stuff. We
Speaker 1: could keep going on and on and on, but I
Speaker 1: know we're already past our time, so uh, we'll have
Speaker 1: to wrap it up at that point and maybe somewhere
Speaker 1: down the down the road we'll get back on again.
Speaker 1: But thanks so much for taking the time. Um. I
Speaker 1: guess uh. I normally ask where people can follow you.
Speaker 1: They should definitely be following you on Twitter. Uh what
Speaker 1: should people be looking at if they want to keep
Speaker 1: up with you? Yeah, that's Twitter is the best place
Speaker 1: at n LW. It links out to everything that you
Speaker 1: could want to find. Um. To reiterate, I guess I
Speaker 1: do uh. A weekly newsletter that's kind of weekly newsletter
Speaker 1: and direct to Twitter kind of newsletter long read Sunday
Speaker 1: that's kind of a curation of all the best essays
Speaker 1: and threads I've seen. And then every day at three
Speaker 1: pm I'll do a live stream of three topics three minutes,
Speaker 1: just the conversation that I'm seeing that day. It turns
Speaker 1: into a podcast that gets distributed by email. But basically
Speaker 1: if you go to Twitter at n LW you can
Speaker 1: find all of this there. Yeah, good stuff. All right,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for the conversation. We'll talk soon. Thanks Mark. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you like this episode of the Market Disruptors Podcast,
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Speaker 1: M