Ep. 2 Pt. 3 - Crypto with Rohan Grey

Funny Money is a show about the economy, how it works, and how it can work better. In Part 3 of this 3-part episode, Ka and Andrés are joined by Prof. Rohan Grey to discuss the Crypto craze including its origins, the crash of 2022, and why he is known as the "villain" of the Crypto industry for drafting the most comprehensive Stablecoin regulation bill (the STABLE Act) proposed in the House by Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Finally, we discuss the future of digital money, including the #digitaldollar and data privacy.

Guest Bio: Rohan Grey is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law, where his research focuses on the legal design and regulation of money and finance, including digital fiat currency, as well as broader issues of law and political economy. He is the president of the Modern Money Network, a director of Public Money Action. Rohan has advised multiple members of The Squad in Congress on bills including Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s ABC and STABLE Acts, as well as Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Public Banking Act of 2020.  You may have seen Rohan on Jon Stewart’s show The Problem with Funny Money’s first guest Stephanie Kelton.

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Hosts: Jessica "Ka" Burbank (@JessicaLBurbank) & Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory)
Producer: Mike Lewis
Sound Mixed By: Curtis Clogston

#PodFunnyMoney #MMT #Money #Economics #Politics #News #Law #Crypto

Transcript

0:01

Alright, let’s talk about Crypto! Alright! So I think we've just done this perfect framing to get to the madness here around crypto. Let's get things started. Now that we've discussed this debt ceiling, all the politics behind it, the politics and the ideology behind money itself. Let's kick things off with a little video here about the crypto phenomenon. Let me explain something to you right now. Okay. Here's a $10 bill. This is garbage. This is garbage. You people in South Africa, you have your Rand, right? That's going to zero. That's going to zero. This is going to zero, too. Euros are going to zero. The Yen is going to zero. The Chinese currency is going to zero. It's all going to zero against Bitcoin. If you don't understand that yet, you're going to be impoverished, you're going to be on the street. You're going to be begging. You're going to be out of business. You're going to be toast. Man, fuck that guy. The worst. So we started our conversation talking about metals, gold, silver, etc. We discussed fiat currency and public money, and now we're going to do this full circle to Crypto. The other kind of coin, right? The other other white meat. Right the other white meat. So, Rohan, you were famously described as the villain of crypto currency. That's right. So as we begin to unpack that, can you tell us: what is cryptocurrency and what is a Stablecoin? Yeah, I mean, first, I hope Max Keiser is okay. I mean, cocaine is a helluva drug, but that’s a worrying moment to see on international television Yeah, I mean cryptocurrency, I think, there's a couple of different trajectories. One is that there's always been a kind of cutting edge of the financial technology, whether that was certain kinds of coins, paper, tally sticks whether that was the earliest forms of charge cards or created the telegraph and the wire, whether that was mobile money, Internet money, whether that was the ATMs, whether that was apps on your phone, whether it's Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, M-Pesa in Kenya, there has always been this intersection between information technology systems, even the written word itself. You have tens of thousands of years of oral-based societies. The development of physical tokens that then become the written language is a pretty big development. So there's always been this relationship between information technologies and monetary systems, and monetary systems are usually built around central actors, whether it's a government, or in the modern system, a government and a series of banks and banking like financial institutions that have government endorsement. But the way that the challengers, the way that the people from the margins, come in is often through having a technological edge. The incumbents get sclerotic, they get comfortable, and then people who have greater technical sophistication come and eat their lunch. And so where was the mobile money revolution started? Where did people start really using mobile based money systems? More than anywhere in the world? It was in Kenya. Why? Because they did not have a very developed banking system, but they did have a very developed telecom system. There are countries that have very low rates of banking, but very high rates of cellphone usage. In those places, it's the telecom companies that are positioned to be the monetary payments operators. So you've always had that. And that wasn't a crypto thing. As I said, that's everything from ATMs and credit cards through to Western Union who first created a lot of the telegraph wires and then created money transfers and things like that. You also had this other strain, which were people who were kind of technologists, cypherpunks, people who were concerned about this topic, tech futures, which I think a lot of their concerns were correct. Although again, they had a sprinkling of anti-tax libertarians and people that like to do weird shit on the Internet with children and stuff that you got to be careful of. But their general concern about a big brother, about building a digital monetary system that is completely controllable, censorable, surveillable, I think has been shown to be correct. And so they were trying to build forms of money that look the way that cash works, that you can transact it peer to peer, without a third party approval, without any tracking or surveillance, without anybody who could say no and stop your transaction in the middle. A lot of them ended up getting into Libertarian monetary theory, and they tried in the 90s to speak between banks and governments. But it was sort of like being right to forget who was or said, Forget this. As you said, it's wrong to be right. It's wrong to be right to government. And state governments said, hey, we should do this. And the government like, what are you talking about? What's the Internet? And so they went. So I guess we have to do it ourselves and that was when they started looking at private sector solutions, their own forms of money. Eventually this Bitcoin, things like that. Nowadays, a lot of it is just grift. A lot of it is slightly more sophisticated people selling versions of snake oil. At its best, it is that vision of anti-censorable money. and payment systems and it is the cutting edge of regular finance. These people do it at the margins and banks and governments buy it and take it over So there's a couple of different strains of the origin of crypto, right? One is, I would say the general development of financial technology. There's always been innovations in financial technology going back to the origins of writing, going back to paper money, going back to the origination of the Telegraph. But a lot of it is modern day graft. But in its best version it is that Cypherpunk vision of trying to avoid censorship, trying to avoid Big Brother and a surveillance regime. And then the other part I would say is that hardware component of the software, the Cypherpunk, a lot of it was around cryptography. The idea that you can obscure what you're doing on the Internet with the right maths. With hardware, It was really about this idea of taking big computers and putting them in your pocket. So the early computers, like origins of modern computing, were huge. They were the size of an entire room. You would have to actually reserve access to it like you're a musician trying to practice on a grand piano in a conservatory. And by the time you get to the 80s, you're talking about personal computers that can be in people's homes. But at that point, what are the kinds of devices that you're actually making payments within in a store? It's a point of sale device. And who owns a point of sale device? It's the business. So the infrastructure here of the payments network at this point is the government, banks, right? Financial technology companies, fintech companies, and then merchants. But the average person is still not a point of sale device. Nowadays, fast forward another 20 years, we are all carrying a phone in our pocket. We can make transactions on our phone. So the network, the nodes in the network, are now everyone. 7 billion people. 7 billion nodes, Not 500,000 nodes that we all connect to. Not 25 million nodes of all the businesses in the country, but every person is a node. So that I think is revolutionary. The cryptography is revolutionary. And when you put those together, you do have something that is unique. Now, as I said, most of them are grifters and a lot of that group, unfortunately, is inflected with this libertarian monetary ideology, this idea that money should be divorced from governments, it should be limited in supply. All of this stuff. So the interesting things about the payments technology are obscured behind dog shit monetary theory, frankly. And that's where the crypto movement gets stuck. I talked to some people there and the more in line, the more open minded ones, the less scammy ones recognize that the biggest goal that they could achieve would be to build cash-like anonymity and decentralized payments on the Internet. And they are just skeptical that governments and government money will be able to get us there because they think that governments won't ever endorse that, given the NSA and the CIA. Things I am also skeptical about! My view is: we have to do this as a public good. We have to form a democratically accountable coalition and make that technology integrated into public money. Why? Because most people don't want weird crypto money. Most people want regular dollars that they use for the rest of their life. That happens to work like cash. People love cash. It's still very, very popular form of money. If cash would work on the Internet, people would still be using it even more than they use it today. So crypto is a combination of right wing libertarian monetary theory, a combination of what I would call good anarchist state skepticism and kind of anarcho capitalist skepticism, and then just the cutting edge of financial technology innovation. Yeah, I mean, that seems to connect to the conversation we had earlier about the ideology behind apolitical or pre-political, social Darwinism, everyone for everyone versus, democracy and how difficult it is. But that’s ultimately our task, right? Figure out how to create the public good together. Can you then talk about the STABLE Act? What is that? And why has that gotten you labeled as a villain for crypto? Yeah. So the kind of first big form of cryptocurrency that really broke through, it wasn't the first kind of cryptocurrency. It was just the first one that broke through. And it was a combination of technological innovation, a few things that were solved, particularly what was called the Byzantine Generals problem, which was a way of being able to have people you don't trust to validate your messages, basically. But it was also being in the right place at the right time. When did Bitcoin take off? 2008. Does that sound like a familiar time, monetarily speaking? There was record low trust in both governments and traditional finance, and that was when everybody is on social media for the first time and they're looking for alternatives and Bitcoin goes: we’re here! Ron Paul going “we’re here!” and suddenly you have this take off of Bitcoin. Bitcoin wasn't complete. It hadn't solved all of the technical bugs, but it was good enough that people could start to talk about it and to talk about its potential. But I would say of all the forms of crypto, Bitcoin is one of the most explicitly anarcho capitalist in its ideology. Then you have this sort of 2.0 version, what they call Ethereum, and Ethereum is sort of saying, we are not going to try to make digital gold. What we are going to try to do is make the equivalent of like a web platform like Amazon or Facebook. We’re going to do crypto 2.0, looking to create a general purpose payment system that you can put a bunch of stuff on top of. You can put trading on top of, you can put speculation on top of, you can put your own tokens on the same rails as everything else. It’s the post office, it’s Amazon Marketplace, whatever else. Right. And for a lot of those actors, the Ethereum, the Ether, the currency underneath that is really just a kind of pay to play way to use that system. It's sort of like they call it gas because you are using it to actually use the system. Whereas with Bitcoin you are holding it to hold onto it like gold. And so a lot of them think of themselves as communitarian, people building a new ecosystem, building a new society, building a new community. They think about constitutional governance. They think about ethics, about having a foundation. They think about having a living founder who has a name. Vitalik Buterin is sort of the living Jesus in that movement in the way that Bitcoin's prophet is dead and therefore, they don't have a face, you don't talk about them. But both Ethereum and Bitcoin are their own unit of account. They're their own private currency. Just like if I make Rohan Bucks or if UMKC University Missouri, Kansas City, where the MMTers are located, make Buckaroos. Or our colleague Ben Wilson makes Benjamins at SUNY Cortland or if Fadhel Kaboub makes Denison Dollars at Denison University. They're just their own unit of account and they float just like the yen floats against the dollar or the euro floats against the dollar. I have no problem with anyone making their own currency. Good luck. If people like it, go for it. Chuckie Cheese makes its own currency. I don’t care. Doesn't bother me. Where we have a problem is that for those systems to work and again, remember, I think a large part of it ends up becoming about grift and speculation and it doesn't actually have a good use case yet because they're not as privacy respecting and anonymous and decentralized as they claim. But where the use case comes in is, well, if I hold it now, it'll go up in value. So it's like holding a collectible. or it’s like getting in early on some stock that's going through the roof. So it's a speculator’s dream, or at least it was for a long time. But for that to work, what you are doing is gambling. You are not using it as a payment system, you are not using it for business for some other purpose. You are gambling. You are investing in this one, not that one, hoping it'll go up just like you play the stock market, right? It's hitting that same endorphin high that“Oh yeah” of speculating on stocks, right? The same thing that happens on GameStop or on Robinhood with GameStop, sorry. But for that to work, what do you need like when you get to a casino and there's the craps table, the blackjack table and poker table: you need chips. You need money to put down, You need stuff to hold in your pocket. So Stablecoins come in as basically US dollars that you hold your money in, in between speculating on other forms of crypto. It's the white bread in a very spicy sandwich. Right? Bread. Meat. Bread. Lettuce. Bread. Cheese. Bread. Every step you go in and out of the Stablecoins. So even tough Stablecoins aren’t very interesting as a unique currency, they are the intermediary through which you go in and out of any other crypto currency. The reason they are so important is because the traditional banking system does not let you trade from your bank account. Banks are actually quite conservative about what they let you do with your bank account, right? Try to run an illegal gambling operation out of your bank account. See how long before your bank shuts you down. So they needed a way to essentially hold the money in what looked like a bank account or it looks like bank money. That is to say its value is pretty close to 1 to 1 with the US dollar. And if you if you know anything about banking history, what makes bank money unique is that there are all sorts of government guarantees to ensure that 1 to 1. We just saw this with Silicon Valley Bank. We just saw this with the whole debate around unlimited deposit insurance. People assume that your bank money is worth 1 to 1 with US dollars. To do that you need to have a theory of how you keep it stable. So the first thing you probably do is you call it a stablecoin. You're really trying to sell it to everybody that it's really stable. And then you have a theory about how it's backed by the right assets. Well, it's backed by this, its backed by that. It's backed by cash in a vault. Well, maybe it's not cash, but it's Treasury bonds. Well, maybe it's not Treasury bonds, but it's a thing like a Treasury bond. Well, maybe it's not like a Treasury bond, but it still pretty good, right? These are the kinds of debates you hear around Stablecoins. So when I looked at this, what I saw was shadow money, shadow banking. Things are trying to be a bank account or that are trying to work like bank money that do not have the legal and regulatory protections of bank money. Prior to the 1930s, if anyone has seen Mary Poppins. What would happen? There would be regular bank runs. You try to get your tuppence out Uh oh, a bank run. Suddenly your bank account isn't worth as much as you thought it was. This would happen regularly and the creation of deposit insurance was a way of saying the government will step in and backstop your money to ensure that it's still going to be worth what it says it's worth. That is what allows us to treat bank money as interchangeable with cash. Before that, in the 1800s, you go into a store with a $5 banknote, you have to essentially haggle not only for the price of the money, but haggle for the price of the banknote. As you ever see that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, he's running away from the police. He's trying to buy a mask, and the guy wants to sell it for $10. He’s like, “Here, I’ll give you $10”. He’s like, “No, no, no, that's not worth $10.” You should tell me that you only go pay five. He’s like, Fine, I'll pay you five. He’s like “Five! It's worth at least eight!” And he's like, “Fine, I'll give you eight.” But no, no, no, you don't understand. You're supposed to say six. He's trying to run away and the guy's forcing him to haggle. You would have to haggle not only for the price of the good that you're buying, but for the price of the note that you paying. So you do all this haggling. You finally agree on $7. You handover a $7 bill. And the guy goes, This bank, terrible bank. I'll give you $4 for this $7 bill. You're like, Oh my God, Fine. Here's another $7 bill No, no, no, no, no. You're supposed to say it's worth five. It's the same kind of thing. So the idea that a banknote is worth the face value is not natural. It's the result of a lot of legal and historical and political processes to get to our modern day. That's why it's actually quite expensive to be a bank. It's quite hard to get a bank charter. It's hard to get that deposit insurance from the FDIC. So if you can create something that looks like a bank that walks and talks like a bank that gives the impression it's as safe as a bank, but you don't have to pay for all those fees. Well, that's the sweet spot. Right up until everything blows up in your face. That's what Stablecoins are, in my opinion. They are shadow banking entities, entities trying to engage in the business of bank money creation without the protections of actual commercial banks. So we proposed a bill to create a functional definition of a bank deposit If it walks and talks like a bank deposit, if it if it tries to create that impression that it looks like a bank money, we should regulate that entity like a bank and make them get a bank charter. And the crypto industry hated it because it was more regulation, it was more cost and most importantly, banks wouldn't let people speculate in crypto. So if we forced every Stablecoin to get a banking license, it would make it very hard to continue to use them as a workaround to the restrictions imposed on the banking system. So they hated me for that and they said, Well, you know what you're talking about. You won't be able to stop us. These are very safe. They could never collapse, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. Fast forward two years. A number of them have collapsed. A number of them did need bailouts. The Treasury secretary and the President released a report basically agreeing with us that that's how Stablecoins should be regulated. And, you know, Congress is is much more open to capture by the industry than the White House office was. So unfortunately, that recommendation hasn't been passed into law yet. But I think a lot of the warnings that we put out around the STABLE Act about how dangerous shadow banking is, about the risks of unregulated bank products, giving the impression they're safe, and then in moments of crisis, not being safe have come true. And we're waiting to see what's going to happen on the next round of legislative efforts. Yeah, you were a bit of a Cassandra with the Stable Act at the end of the 2022 crash. But first I want to pull up this tweet. It's by Cameron Winklevoss who said Bitcoin isn't just an asset. And it's not just a technology. It's a movement that offers the blueprint to dismantle traditional power structures. It promises greater independence, choice, opportunity. It was a tough week, but the underlying fundamentals haven't changed. WAGMI. Okay, so this is what you've described, I think pretty accurately and broken down pretty well. This perspective that a lot of people who like using crypto or are grifting with crypto have. And what they tell others. The crash in 2022 that he's referencing there which is the time period that we saw in May, a lot of this was because the Stablecoin did promise losses 1 to 1 backing with the dollar, which to me I think signals what is giving cryptocurrency its value is your ability to exchange it for fiat currency and people's ability to invest fiat currency into it. Can you talk a little bit about the crypto crash of 2022? Yeah, and it's always ironic when people, like the Winklevai, try to pretend that they're somehow like renegades. I mean, these assholes went to Harvard. Their dad was like an Ivy League finance professor. They walked into a million dollars of play money. And then they went on the Olympic rowing team and then they went into like tech venture capital. I mean, these are people outside the power structure? They are the power structure. They are literally the face of the ubermensch. And they're pretending like they’re somehow leading people out of power structures. The world is built for assholes like them. It's just amazing that anybody falls for their grift. Anyway. Yeah, that crash in 2022. I mean, it started with Terra It started with a number of other entities that went down, and when they went down, they brought with them 3 Arrows Capital, Voyager. They brought with them, I think most importantly, the energy around crypto. There was already a kind of impending regulatory crackdown that was sort of long in the tooth coming, but going to come eventually. And there'd been a game of kind of cat and mouse. So early on everyone was making their own coin. Like 2012, 2015 the era was the ICO craze. You don’t issue stocks for your new speculative venture, you issue a coin! Everyone gets to make a coin. It’s the age of coins. And then people started to say wait a second, these looks suspiciously like securities. In fact, an IPO is the definition of issuing a security and we're calling it an ICO. It's a little close, a little on the nose. Right? So then they all switched over to Stablecoins and then that started being a little bit spicy and they switched over to NFTs That got a little bit spicy, and they ran out of new ways of putting mustaches on forms of money. To quote your Ben Franklin Funny Money logo. There’s only so many toy mustaches you can put on the same underlying kind of idea. And it was ... The nature of a Ponzi scheme is that when things are going well, you're paying people out extraordinary rates. That's how you make people believe that it's worth putting even more money in. Eventually it’s not sustainable. You can’t pay out of the previous people with money coming in from the new people. But as long as it's growing exponentially, you can. And so what ended up happening was that a number -- First of all, one of the stablecoins that was what’s called an algorithmic stablecoin; it had the coin, and it had another governance token. They were supposed to sort of balance, offsetting each other, and it didn't really work out. And it was so obvious to a lot of people. beforehand that it was a bad model, but a lot of people weren’t looking too hard Or they didn't want to. When that started going down Sam Bankman Fried who at that time was running FTX, which is one of the largest exchanges, certainly the largest exchange in the United States, was quick to bail out or buy out a number of these distressed companies. And the reason for that, in my opinion, is try to keep the impression that the crypto ecosystem is still growing, to keep those positive vibes because he was running an exchange. And an exchange, like a casino, is not betting against you in any individual bet. It’s betting on the odds, in general. It wins when there's more people in the casino The exchange wins when more people are trading. As long as the party is going the bar is making money. So what they lose is when that energy starts to go down. So what Bankman Fried wanted to do was to continue to give people the impression that it was an up and up and up trajectory. And to do that, every time one of these crashes started to shake the confidence of the community, of the industry, he would step in and paper over it, and that only worked for so long. When his whole little fraudulent empire crashed, it really did a huge dent in the ecosystem and it had a secondary effect of giving ammunition and political credibility to skeptics and to the regulators who were already starting to close in. So that bear market, that long winter, is a combination of chickens coming home to roost, some individual failures that were papered over that eventually became too big to ignore, and regulators finally started to step up. People like the Winklevoss run one of the other big exchanges. So of course, they are also trying to convince people that the party is still worth going. I don't know if anyone had ever watched a movie called The Beach. It’s been around for like 20 years. Hopefully it’s not much of a spoiler, but it's sort of this amazing utopia in an island in Thailand where everybody is there and there are these weed dealers there this violent gangs of weed growers and they're living on the other side of the beach. So they get a little bit of free weed, but they can't tell anyone about the place. And eventually they get in trouble they accidentally tell people, and the weed dealers come over and they hand Tilda Swinton’s character. She's the kind of like leader of the group and says, you guys screwed up here So as punishment, you have to shoot one of them. That's the price to stay on this island if you want to continue to live this utopia because you came over to our side

And she is sort of like shaking and everyone is saying: 26:00

Don't do it, don't do it. And she shoots and there was nothing in the gun. It was just a mind fuck. But it totally ruined the vibe. Nobody felt safe there anymore. Everybody left after that, right? Once you realize that's what people are willing to do to protect that utopia, it is no longer a utopia. And once it was clear that this ecosystem was built on massive amounts of fraud, it was built on these very dodgy products, it's very hard for people to continue to believe in the same way the true believers are there. There's a few people being like, Come on guys, the party is still cool hahaha. But it's and you can see the crying in their eyes. I thought you were going to say that this system is built on massive amounts of vibes. Yeah, well that too. I mean so is the stock market. But yeah, what we are seeing is people who are desperately trying to reclaim a sense of positivity for an industry that is really lost its sheen, lost its luster, lost that innocence of, hey, maybe this is all good. I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried was so central and of course a lot of the kind of die hard crypto people say, well, he wasn't one of us, but it was one of the largest exchanges out there. These are central actors in the ecosystem. And of course, the only other major exchange left standing really apart from Coinbase is Binance. And Binance is about to be in all sorts of trouble right now. And the Stablecoin that Binance is built around is Tether, and Tether is also in all sorts of trouble and committed all sorts of fraud. So at the point at which the ecosystem core nodes, its core systemic infrastructure is all rotten, what's left? It's that old joke that I used to say that like the problem with the legal profession is that 99% of us give the rest a bad name, you know? It’s like what’s left? Rohan, would you say crypto is dead or dying? I don't think all of crypto is dead or dying, but I think this idea that like they are invulnerable, that they know what's coming, you know, that stuff is dying. This idea that nobody can stop them, you know. We're in the Empire Strikes Back phase, right? When we introduced the STABLE Act, there were people that were saying, well, you can't stop decentralized systems. So I said, Have you met governments? They kill millions of revolutionaries at once. Right? You're in Indonesia and you're a communist in the seventies. You just get killed, it’s that easy. Well, we've got decentralized nodes around the world. How many? 50,000? Wow. Thank God no government has ever killed 50,000 dissidents before in one swoop, you know. Are you really so naive to think that you can stick your middle finger up to the entire United States government and get away with it because you're good at computer coding? Grow up. And so when it comes to things like cash and anonymity and privacy, my view is always the only way we're actually going to win this against the cops and the spooks, because they are a formidable enemy, is with a mass sustained political movement marching in the streets, not anti-social libertarians in their basement trying to get rich, but the kinds of mass organizing that New York City and Philadelphia did to get cash protected or, you know, to march for a job guarantee or to do whatever else. Right. We need huge protests in cities. And I don't think most people want to protest in favor of a gold standard that's digital. They might protest in favor of my grandparents died to not give the Nazis all of our details. And I would like to not give some other future fascist government all of our information. But I think most people would be quite comfortable with dead presidents on pieces of paper if it was digital. A lot of folks are terribly afraid of digital currency. Let's watch a video from some of these people. FedNow is a payment service by the government coming out in July that your bank will have to sign up for, which is the first step to make the dollar digital. How does this work? Well, if you buy something on Amazon, your money won't go directly to Amazon anymore. It will first go to the Fed's account and then go to Amazon. This means the government will know everything you use your money for and if they want to, they can reject any purchase you make. Take money out whenever and decide what you can and can't spend your money on. For me when I see this, why are we more afraid of this than we are a bank, a very powerful bank, having the same information. Like you just basically describe the functionality of a bank in present day. How much should we be I don't know Fighting back against the skepticism and the conspiracies and the fear of digital dollars and financial technology. I mean, I think you're right. I think you're right that it's similar to a bank. But I also find that pretty worrying. I think, you know, the reality is it's sort of like that old Scooby Doo thing where you think it's like a ghost and you pull the mask off and it's just like the guy running the carnival trying to do an insurance scam or something. The bank who holds all your data is just one subpoena away from the NSA if they even bother to subpoena it anyway. Right? So we are already creating a massive surveillance dragnet with Stripe, with Square, with Venmo, with PayPal, with Chase, with JP Morgan, with Wells Fargo, with all of it. If anything is likely to be more private, frankly, it's the post office which is still not at the stage of opening your mail, which is more than could be said for what Amazon does with Amazon Web Services. So I think the reality is that there is a genuine fear of a government panopticon and of the totalitarian state, because it's one thing for rich, greedy, billionaire bastards to try to rip you off. It's another thing for genocide. And usually it's the governments that do the latter. But historically speaking and contemporarily, definitely it's the private sector that serves as the tip of the spear for building that infrastructure. And it is not the FedNow system, which, by the way, a real time gross settlement payment system exists in a number of countries around the world. That is the major threat. It's the death of cash and the lack of any cash alternative to be able to make online transactions. But when we talk about the ECASH Act, we try to say we should have a public version of physical cash. Something that is a bearer instrument stored on a device, no ledger, no account, no third party intermediary. I can go to your phone and tap it. The money just goes from one or the other, but it's actual Government dollars. Most of these crypto people don't want that. Well, they don't support it. They don't put any energy towards it. It's not as easy to get rich off of. It's not as stoking of your libertarian fantasies, and it's just not very sexy to build very boring public infrastructure. It's like, who wants to talk about revitalizing the Post Office, right? Not many people outside our circle, perhaps. So I think it is important to be skeptical. I've had some fights with fellow leftists that say, Well, the Social Security fund is great. You know, I trust them. They protect my Social Security number. Do they? You know, Oh, so a bar code on your arm is fine as long as you trust the people managing the bar code. But come on, you joking? So I think that having a serious conversation about legal identity management is overdue on the left. And it’s hard. And the left is organizing on massive social media platforms and everybody has an Apple phone and blah blah, blah. It requires learning about Linux and open source and free software. It requires learning about small board hardware devices. It requires learning about mesh networking and requires all that kind of stuff. That is technically very intimidating, even for people that already are interested in law and money. I teach a class called Law, Money, Technology and I say to my students, You came here to learn about money. And that's hard enough when you're already in law school, which is already hard enough. And now I'm going to make it triple hard by saying we gotta learn the technology, too. But I think it is important to remember that we are living right now in a generation that is a last generation that will remember what it was like to be born and grow up, not permanently connected to the net. I don’t know about you all, but that Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, we at least remember what that sound means, right? The next generation will not. And if we build an Internet and a form of digital payments where the assumption from birth is every payment that you make going into a database that is trackable, is censorable, that will be a loss of economic and political freedom and autonomy and privacy. That will be extremely difficult to get back. So what we are building right now is that new layer of the infrastructure both in the private crypto stuff, and the fintech and Zelle. And with Public. And I have no problem with public accounts for everybody. I have no problem with FedNow, and they are all good initiatives, but in the absence of a cash like layer, then they become servants of a panopticon. With a cash-like layer they become a choice. There are reasons why you might want to put money into an account. But the reason why you would want to take money out and pay somebody with cash. And the War on Cash, as my colleague Brett Scott would say, is very real. And Raúl, who you should definitely have on this podcast, Raúl Carrillo his whole work now is about the ways in which money systems are also data systems. And every time we use money, we are making data. and we need to be thinking very carefully about what data we want to be making, who gets to see it, access, hold it, analyze it and use it against us. And I think that's a very fruitful direction to pivot the discussion of public money because it's one thing to say everyone should have a bank account, but it's a very different thing to say everybody should be able to enjoy the kinds of ways that we use cash. It sounds like there's really no shortcuts and that's one of the big lessons, at least for me. You can't privatize or technology your way around questions of power and exclusion and injustice. You have to face things head on and that's what constructing and reconstruct the public is all about. And that's what engaging with law, at least to me, is all about. And I think that's such a vital lesson to take. Yeah, you could try to devise some kind of AI or perfect digital learning and then you can just put kids in pods, right. But that’s not actually going to make adjusted, good children. You actually have to do the messy work of like raising a kid every day and talking to them and building experiences and seeing how they feel and touching them and hugging them and all that kind of stuff. You can't just skip sociality. Right? Engaging with the interdependence and the glue that binds us all together and the quality of what that is going to be like. If you come in being fundamentally misanthropic you will be fundamentally misanthropic. You will build a misanthropic society. Being skeptical of concentrated state power, is not being skeptical of public goods. Cash is public. You have to have a public debate about how to spend the money, how to make the money, what to spend on it. It's just the ability to say, I get to say I don't have to roll my window down for that cop unless it’s a valid traffic stop. That's also part of being a democratic society, is if I want to go buy sex toy, it’s no ones bloody business but my own. And that's part of being a democratic society as well. Going back to the very beginning, which is face to face societies where everybody knows everybody's name can be terribly oppressive. Any LGBTQ person in a small town knows what it's like when everybody knows your shit and then ask them what it’s like when they go to New York. It is liberating to be in a crowd. Liberating to be anonymous until you choose not to be. It is anti-social. It is hyper-social because you get to redefine your identity on your terms and to meet people in entirely different ways than the ways that whatever societal upbringing you had defined for you. That's really powerful, Rohan. And I know you spent a lot of your recent career, and kind of how we met, building out organizations and institutions that are educating the public on exactly this kind of stuff. And then also, building that infrastructure through various initiatives. Is there anything you want to plug or to talk about? I mean, I know that there is kind of this Modern Money Multiverse that is being fostered. Anything you want to give a shout out to? Yeah, the Modern Money Network is an educational organization They have Learning Communities around the country. You want to set up any to join? Please reach out. Our Executive Director Hannah Judson is available to chat. Public Money Action is our policy advocacy group. When do legislation and other related policy actions, we do it through that. We also have various people writing and doing different kind of initiatives elsewhere. If you’re a technologist, or if you like building think about E-Cash, think about what it mean to build hardware, whether it's the box with software that goes on top or anything else, thinking about what it would mean to advocate for a job guarantee where people can earn money in ways that don't require them to give up to their information, that kind of thing. If you're interested in the law or becoming a practicing lawyer, feel free to reach out to myself or Raúl. If you’re in other disciplines, you're doing research and things, please feel free to reach out to us. A lot of what we do is often media outreach. Things like this kind of podcast. And working with existing journalist because journalism is the draft of history and it's one thing to have good ideas in your own community. It’s another to work out how to sort of pitch them out into the mass media so that millions of people can read and watch them. Big shout out to Stephanie Kelton for pretty much setting the trail of what it means to be a public communicator about these ideas, bringing them down to the level of accessibility. If you're an artist, if you're a graphic artist, if you're a storyteller, if you're a musician, whatever else. Having culture around these things is really important. It's very, very hard to talk about very dry ideas without some poetry attached. And we need as much roses with the bread as possible. Speaking of graphic artists, Rohan, we have a parting gift for you. Yes. From Ka. This is a minted NFT. Just for you, Rohan. As a token of our appreciation for chatting with us. I appreciate that. I can't wait to sell it at a huge markup. Someone is going to give a$1,000,000,000,000 coin for this. I will HODL forever as I'm supposed to with all good digital assets. I appreciate it and definitely don't screenshot it. Everybody, everybody knows its value is only worth as much as it is scarce. So thank you so much for giving me the only copy of that picture. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you for joining us and having a great conversation covering so many topics. You're an absolute unit, an absolute machine. We're lucky to have you. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.