Bankless - Vivek Ramaswamy’s Presidential Platform for Crypto

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

In today’s episode, we welcome a U.S. presidential candidate who just rolled out a pro-crypto policy. This is the first one we’ve seen. His name is Vivek Ramaswamy and he plans to protect these three core crypto freedoms: Plank 1 - Freedom to Code, Plank 2 - Freedom of Financial Self Reliance, and Plank 3 - Freedom from Regulatory Overreach. Vivek Ramaswamy is a 38-year-old Republican presidential candidate. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s worked in finance, he talks a lot about freedom - most importantly, he’s brought us a new policy platform on crypto, that if elected - he will implement. That’s why we’re doing the show today. ------ 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE  https://app.gmx.io/   ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:17 Crypto’s Importance to Vivek 8:42 Operation Chokepoint 2.0  13:17 Freedom to Code 22:35 Freedom from Regulatory Overreach 33:05 Vision of the Founding Fathers 35:11 Freedom of Financial Self-Reliance 42:17 WSJ’s Attack on Crypto 48:27 Holding Vivek Accountable  53:19 Closing & Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Vivek Ramaswamy https://www.vivek2024.com/    https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy   ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

The vision of the Constitution was one of decentralization. The idea that different states could compete. It allowed people the different choice of which rails they wanted to ride. Bound by a common set of ideals, it's up to the people to choose in a decentralized manner. That's how you actually hold each one to be the best, accountable, to be the best version of itself. I mean, you have different cryptocurrencies. You could say the same thing. That was the vision of the Founding Fathers.

Federalism, decentralizations, baked into the Constitution, the 10th and final of the amendments in that original Bill of Rights, enshrined that principle of decentralization into the federalism. the very DNA of this country. And I think that's part of the DNA that we need to revive in this country as well. Bankless Nation, we have a simple agenda today. We've got a U.S. presidential candidate who's just rolled out a pro-crypto policy. And this is the first one we've seen out in the wild. His name is Vivek Ramoswamy, and he plans to protect three core crypto freedoms. Number one, the freedom to code. Number two, the freedom of financial self-reliance. And number three, the freedom from regulatory overreach. We talk

about his pro-crypto candidacy today. Guys, since this is an episode with a politician, we feel compelled to add a note at the front of this. Bankless is not a political podcast. We don't divide on red or blue party lines. We have no party affinity. What we do care about is the values of decentralization, autonomy, and power to the people that underlie crypto technology.

This is why David and I go bankless. And when these values get political, so do we. We almost have to. We've had Democrats represented on banks. Bankless, like Representative Richie Torres. He's been on the podcast. We've also had Republicans on the podcast, like the one you're about to hear from. We'd host Ted Cruz. We'd host AOC. David, we'd even host Elizabeth Warren. I mean, come on. Let's just have a conversation. That is the goal for the bankless podcast. This is also a signal for politicians. If you are a politician, know that one in five

Americans now own crypto. 60% of those are Generation Z and millennial. If your political platform doesn't have a sensible policy on crypto, you better get one. And when you do, you can come on bankless and we'll talk about it. Vivek will be on in just a minute. But before we do, we want to tell you about Cracken, our number one recommended exchange for 2023. Go create an account. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us, hard-wide. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive.

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Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit Arbitrum.io and get your job. journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Bankless Nation, we're excited to introduce you to Vivek Ramoswami. He's a 38-year-old Republican presidential candidate. And 38 years old, I think that makes him a millennial, which makes him, might I remind you, a bit more likely to own crypto. Vovac is an entrepreneur. He's worked in finance. He talks a lot about freedom. And most importantly, he's brought us a new policy platform on crypto that if elected,

he will implement. And that is why we are doing the show today. Vavek, welcome to Bankless. It's good to be on, man. How are you? We are doing fantastic, actually. It's starting to start to turn around for crypto, I feel like. And this is part of the reason we brought you on is actually 2022, the end of 2022 and 23, has been kind of a bad year with respect to the U.S. government and crypto. A lot of the policies coming out of the U.S. government have been what we would say as overtly crypto hostile. Now, you've just come out with a pro-crypto policy. Most presidential candidates do not have a crypto policy at all, neither pro nor against or anything. So I want to start with this

question, Vivek. Why is crypto important to you? Why have you decided to come out with a crypto policy at all? Look, I'm actually not born and raised in the world of crypto. I come out of a different world, the world of biotech, but I see some of the same parallels of how a government that is fundamentally hostile to innovation uses its own power to trample on people who, who actually innovate in a way, especially now in crypto, even more so than in biotech, that calls out the hypocrisies of government itself. And so I was first drawn to Bitcoin, I would say intellectually, when the first version of Code is Law came out as an alternative worldview, that there should be a total opt-out from the current

financial system and regime as a way of holding the current system accountable. I think the competition is the best source of innovation, but competition is also the best source of accountability. The Federal Reserve, I think, has failed over the course of the last 25 years. I mean, our generation, we grew up into it. Real wage growth has been effectively flat for the bottom 99% over the course of the last 25 years because the Federal Reserve has been trying to play God. My view, and it has been for a long time, that the dollar should be pegged to a basket of commodities, but it hasn't been. But the best alternative to that is actual competition and opt out from that system. So I think that's actually the true promise of crypto,

broadly. It's a true promise of decentralized finances. It is an opt-out from the existing architecture that itself is broken, which in turn holds the feet of the current architecture to the fire to do the right thing. So that's why it's inherently important. Now, I get to the question of what are the threats to crypto. They're the same as the threats to a lot of our other freedoms. It's that the people who we've elected to run the government, they're not the ones who are actually running the government. It's instead this cancerous managerial bureaucracy, the three-letter agencies that are doing through the back door what Congress would have never passed through the front door. And so somebody who is pro-crypto myself, I still would accept

a result as a citizen of this country, where if the people of this country, through the front door of our electoral process, voted for or voted for congressmen who decided to pass laws that banned the trading of cryptocurrencies in the United States, that'd be an awful decision. That'd be a decision that I would disagree with personally. But at least it would be a democratically backstop decision in this country. Of course, that would never happen. We could go through the facts of why.

The number of people who are now users of cryptocurrency would probably make that never actually happen. But if that happened through the front door, at least that's following the constitutional process. What's happening today is really legislating through the backdoor what Congress never could have actually. actually accomplished through the front door under the Constitution. And so for me, that's actually the core of my entire presidential campaign, not as it applies to crypto, but as it applies to every

sphere of our life. Regulations crippling the energy sector that weren't ever passed by Congress, but which have made the U.S. less competitive. The same thing with respect to health care, the regulation of drugs. You can go straight down the list. It's the defining threat of our time is that government actors are doing through the back door what they could not get done through the front door under the Constitution, and that's wrong. So the idea of Vivek of this anti-this managerial anti-crypto class, do you think that's the explanation for some of the issues that we've been seeing? So just let us describe this for a minute. So in crypto is very much felt like, in fact, we call it Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Do you know, the U.S. did sort of an

operation choke point where it squeezed off its banking sector from various sectors of ill repute during the Obama administration. This is what this has felt like, only with respect to crypto. So we've got major crypto startups and crypto exchanges, crypto companies that can't get bank accounts essentially. They're like blacklisted. We've got various politicians launching anti-crypto armies. And we're trying to figure out, we're sitting here in crypto and we're scratching our heads and we're like, who's asking for this? Because the people aren't asking for this. Vivek, we've got one in America, one in five Americans that own crypto. And by the way, 60% of those are millennial and Gen Z. And on behalf of our generations, we're certainly,

not asking for any of this. So where's this demand to choke off crypto? Where do you think it's coming from? So I think it's far deeper than just an assault on crypto. So what I would ask folks in the crypto community to do for a second is to take a step back outside of the lane of crypto to really understand that this is part of a much more comprehensive project. I think it's a comprehensive project of, it's a threat to liberty that takes the form of very different form than you saw in the 20th century. You know, look at what's happening in tech in the land of censorship. Okay, large tech companies are using large government is using big tech companies to do through the back door what government couldn't do through the front door under the Constitution.

So the government through the front door, let's take something else. We're not talking about crypto for a second. We're talking about speech, though you could use similar analogies. I mean, it's code a form of speech. I think. there's strong arguments that they are. So we'll come back to that. But let's just talk about actual old school political speech. The government cannot censor that directly through the front door because of this pesky thing we call the First Amendment, for pesky for the government, at least. Well, what are they doing? They're instead using regulations to get tech companies to censor through the back door what government couldn't censor through the front door. Regulations that give them

special forms of immunity if they actually do it. They threaten those tech companies with added regulations unless they do it. So it's not the government doing it directly. It's outsourced its dirty work to get done through the back door, would the government couldn't itself get done through the front door? Now, you look at other areas. Again, we're still outside of crypto here. Look at the ESG movement in capital markets. Why do firms like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard use their voting power in corporate America's boardrooms to vote for environmental and social agendas that don't advance the interests of the actual shareholder base of that company? That's a curiosity. Well, again, it's because government actors like CalPERS, the California State Pension Fund or the New York State Pension Fund, effectively tell the Black Rocks of the world that you don't get to manage our trillions of dollars unless you adopt agendas that we couldn't pass through the front door. Green New Deal couldn't get it done through the front door, do it through the back door, emissions caps imposed on companies, racial equity audits and so on that would have never passed in Congress or never passed in a state legislature.

but they use that state legislature's money nonetheless to be able to get it done through the back door. So now you look at the world of crypto. Again, the same thing is, if you ask through the front door, do you want the people of this country, well, 20% of crypto users, many of the young people are as well,

is that going to be something that we say, no, no, we banned this, we're against this? Of course not. The government couldn't get away with that. So they're using the backdoor actors at the SEC and elsewhere to create tortured interpretations of historical regulations that I'll get to on a second or themselves unconstitutional,

to be able to wean this out of existence. So where is it coming from? It's coming from the managerial class. It's coming from the people who are never elected to run the government. It's coming from a bureaucracy whose very existence is threatened by anything that resembles decentralization. And so what they realize is they're going to hold on to their power, they're going to hold on to their dominion and control more effectively if the threats

to their existence are sidelization. and they have the power to do it invisibly through the backdoor regulations that Congress never actually passed. And in my opinion, Congress never even gave those agencies the power to pass either. So let's talk about then your presidential platform with respect to crypto policy. So as of today, I believe you have just rolled out a platform for crypto and it has three planks. We'll get to what those those planks are in a minute. But, you know, I guess, from the crypto community's perspective, we are looking, really looking for some presidential leadership here

because the president has the power of the executive branch. We also have Congress, the legislative branch. They are tied up. They are like doing nothing. Hopefully at one point in time we'll have some sensible crypto regulation, the lawmaking. But that's at some point in the future. And then we've got the court system, which works,

but it moves very slowly. And there are even some things that the court system really can't cover because it hasn't really been defined into law. And so that leaves the executive branch, which is essentially in control of this managerial class. It seems like all of our regulators fall under this branch. And over the last couple of years, it seems like the existing White House has taken a negative posture on crypto for some reason that we can't figure out why. So let's talk about the positive vision. Let's talk about your vision, Vivek. You've got three planks to this crypto platform. I'm going to read them out. And what I'd like to do is go through them kind of one by one.

And you tell us why you think it's important, why it's included here. The first is, plank one, freedom to code. The second, freedom of financial self-reliance. The third, freedom from regulatory overreach. Okay, so those are the three planks of the platform. The first, this freedom to code Vivek, let's talk about that for a minute. You've got this line in your platform that says direct to government prosecutors will prosecute bad actors, not the code they use, and not the developers who write that code.

So focusing the prosecutors on bad actors and not the code. Let me talk about the counter that we have so far in crypto. We've got some developers of privacy technology. It's a technology called tornado cash. Some of them have been arrested. Some of them are now in jail. This is open source encryption tech, right? And they're in jail.

We've got code that's been put on the OFAC sanction list. We've got this creeping surveillance state that seems like because it's a transaction on the blockchain, they have the right and the ability to sanction whatever they want. Tell us about this first tenant, this freedom to code. Why is that a core part of your platform? Because I believe in the First Amendment, actually. I think that the expression of any opinion is a form of protected speech. And I think that if you get into the part of what different protocols are actually expressing. It's a form of expression. You could call it a form of artistic expression. You could call it a form of self-expression. That's protected speech in the

United States of America. So are there risks to freedom of speech? Are there risks to actual protection of all expression? Yes, there are. But the thing that makes America great, the thing that makes America itself is that you still get to do it in this country. So, you know, the Turner Cash is a good example, this is not a defense of any particular one, you know, particular instance or company or actor. And I think that are there bad actors who engage in bad kind of speech all the time in the realm of the marketplace of ideas? Yes, they are. Yes, there are. But this is about first principles in the first place that any developer, any writer of code, has the ability to directly express themselves. And the thing that the government is supposed to target is the use of a

bad actor, is the use of that by a bad actor to break the law, not the expression itself. So one of the things to think about is there's a Supreme Court case that came out last year called West Virginia versus EPA. And this is what's relevant for the SEC here as it relates to crypto. That was a case that held in the case of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Several of the regulations passed by the EPA, the Supreme Court held, had never been actually given that authority by Congress in the first place. Well, if those regulations by the EPA were unconstitutional, then you know what? That means most of those SEC regulations that are being tortured to be able to put people out of business in the crypto arena are also unconstitutional as well. So that's, I think, one of the basic points is when we talk about the freedom to code, it means you're free to express yourself. That doesn't mean you're free to steal other people's assets. Then you're breaking other laws that already exist relating to theft. But you're free to express yourself in the government's over. in going after a particular form of expression is not only arguably a First Amendment violation, but it's also a violation of a Supreme Court standard that was set in the last

year. And it's worth understanding how new this is. And the fact that this is new means this hasn't been worked out, but it's also not, it hasn't been fully understood, but it's also an opportunity that the Supreme Court, just a little bit over a year ago, held that for any of those regulations, and this applies to even those coming from the SEC, that Congress never expressly gave the SEC to authorize. That is unconstitutional today under current law. And so that's where as the next president, I have the ability to run the executive branch of the government. We're not talking about passing new legislation. We're talking about actually rescinding unconstitutional regulations as they exist today. So one of the first things I would do as U.S. president is to rescind

any of the regulations that fail that Supreme Court's test in West Virginia versus EPA that would apply to most of the regulations covering the crypto sector. And then I would go further to stop immediately enforcing, instruct agencies to stop enforcing any regulation that's already on the books. Because what's happening today is many of those authors of code, they have to guess, I can guess themselves to say that, okay, if we don't know what the rules are and it's regulation by enforcement, which is the paradigm that they use today, to say that you know what the regulations are based on who they enforce. That's an unconstitutional violation for regulations that, A, were never passed by Congress in the first place, and B, which leaves somebody holding the bag as the hot potato that

they happen to be the one left holding, when in fact, nobody knew what regulation they were breaking in the first place. So if you're stealing something for somebody else, you're breaking another preexisting law, great. That's what you need to be going after as the government. But you can't be arbitrarily willy-milly after the fact, deeming that a particular type of code or protocol violates a particular rule or is or isn't ensnared by the securities regulations. No, that has to end. It will end on my watch and that we're able to end that without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness because it comes from the regulatory state itself. I mean, know if that makes sense. 100%. And as you probably can guess, Vivek, we have a pretty good perspective to what

goes on in the crypto industry just from what we do here at Bankless. And over the last 18 months or so, the fear that open source software developers have felt about their presence in the United States has shifted the focus point of the entire industry offshore. The Asian conferences have just grown up and just boomed in attendance and the United States conferences, people don't want to go to the United States. Some people don't even want to set in front of the United States if they're foreigners out of fear of being arrested. Open source software developers, startups, they domicile their startup outside of the United States based off of this fear that has set precedent from this tornado cash and a few others. And the way that we summarize the way that the government has really

approached tornado cash is it deemed tornado cash to be an illegal smart contract. That smart contract on Ethereum is an illegal one per OFAC. And I think what What you're saying here with freedom to code is that you're setting a policy for the crypto industry that says there is no such thing as an illegal smart contract that's just code. There are illegal activities that you can do through that smart contract, but the smart contract itself is not an illegal thing. This is what you are putting forth, correct? That's exactly right. And that forces the government to be accountable for actually enforcing clear laws that are on the books rather than, regulations that they decide what they actually meant through enforcement in a given case,

right? And so you can't make the entire blanket category of a particular form of expression, smart contract or otherwise, illegal. What's illegal is if you take something that belongs to somebody else's property without their consent, that's a form of theft, go after that. That's something that's different from just categorically making an entire class of contract or an entire class of code or expression illegal. That's what's happening today. It's actually the government not following its own laws, the government's own rules, according to the Supreme Court, say that that has to be legislated by Congress to be specifically banned. It can't go through the administrative state. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening today. And the good

news is that can end on the watch of a new president who actually knows what he's doing, both with the respect to the Constitution and understanding what's actually being regulated. Now, I'm very up to speed specifically in the crypto world, where if that precedent was set in stone, if your policy was set in stone, all of a sudden there would be a ton of activity flooding back to America inside of the crypto industry. And I'm guessing what you're saying, this extends to outside of the crypto industry as well. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's really important people understand that what I'm sharing with you as applied to our sort of revised policy vision for the future of crypto, there's a parallel as it applies to the energy sector. There's a parallel

as it applies to many segments of the health care sector, it's a broad point that government should never define its regulations through enforcement because that puts the onus inappropriately on unelected actors in three-letter government agencies. In this case, it's the SEC, but the same principle applies across the administrative state. If you want to ban something, clearly define what you're banning and have it go through the front door of Congress. If not, it's not the law. And the U.S. president, who's swears an oath to the Constitution has an obligation to rescind and stop enforcing those regulations. And that's how I'll govern. Okay. So that's the first plank really is freedom to code.

And this says basically code of speech. And in the United States, we have First Amendment protection to speech. I want to jump to the third plank of your platform. Then we'll jump back to number two, but you've been alluding to it several times. This is the freedom from regulatory overreach. Okay. And so different industries probably have different and different communities have different relationships with their regulators. We have a special relationship, I would say, with the SEC. And there are a few individual actors in the SEC, but I'll just name one of them. You must be familiar with Mr. Gary Gensler. The Supreme Court case, it's funny that, or the court case, you mentioned the West Virginia versus EPA. Mr. Gary Gensler and the SEC

recently got smacked down for blocking a... a Bitcoin ETF, which has been in the works for many years. And the court, I believe, called the SEC arbitrary and capricious with respect to its decision to block Bitcoin ETS, not having a substantive reason. It sounds like under your watch, you would stop that kind of activity. Can you tell us more about that, though? What kind of powers does the president have to go to the office? of Mr. Gary Gensler and say, hey, stop what you're doing. This is arbitrary and capricious. You're not

going to do that under my watch. Can the president just fire an SEC administrator? How does this even work? So yes, is the answer to that question. And I think this current Supreme Court has made that fact a lot easier. As the U.S. president, I swear an oath to the U.S. Constitution, the ultimate arbiter and determiner of what the U.S. Constitution says is the Supreme Court itself. So they use those words arbitrary and capricious, that actually dates back to old standing doctrines. There's a doctrine called the Chevron doctrine and otherwise that say that the regulations are null and void coming from an agency if they fail certain standards. If they're arbitrary and capricious, they absolutely fail. Well, you have a leader of the SEC right now who refuses, even in testimony before Congress,

to say whether Ethereum qualifies as a security or not. Think about that. It's unbelievable. So, I mean, you could say it is a security and we disagree with that decision. But the refusal to say so reflects that they actually want to behave arbitrarily and capriciously. But fake, he can't even tell us if a Pokemon trading car is if tokenizer securities are not, okay? Yeah, exactly. So this entire securities regime and apparatus, I believe itself, is unconstitutional. A lot of it does not track any statute that Congress has ever passed. It's an interesting thing even at the SEC. This is. going back 20, 30 years, there was a push when there were prosecutions in an earlier era for insider trading to at least define it in the law in Congress to say that, okay, this is what insider trading is or isn't because they kept going after more and more vague cases.

And insider trading has never actually been defined in the law. And the number one party lobbying Congress against offering a clear definition of it was none other than the SEC. So this isn't new for the crypto world. This is what the SEC is doing with respect to the crypto world is now not new. It's part of the culture of not just this agency, but of the administrative state, which prefers ambiguity. It's not like it was a failure of technical prowess. It was intentional because that thing is the point?

Discretion. Ambiguity is the point. Absolutely. Ambiguity is the friend of the tyrant, really, because then you can decide after the fact what the laws were instead of having to pre-specify what the rules of the road are. because if you pre-specify what the rules of the road are, then you're bound by them. So that fails what the Supreme Court has called, both in the West Virginia versus EPA and all the way getting back to the Chevron doctrine, an arbitrary and capricious standard. The good thing is, thank God, we have a Supreme Court in a judicial system that says that if they're using ambiguity as their friend in the way that they want to, and it fails the arbitrary and capricious test that they're just making up and whimsically deciding this is or isn't security without pre-specifying what those standards are, then those regulations are null and void already. So yes, what power does the U.S. president have? The U.S. president runs the executive branch of government. The SEC, like the FDA and otherwise, sit under. the executive branch of government. Read the Constitution. Article 2, there's not multiple

executive branches of government. There's one executive branch of government, and that reports into the U.S. president. I've been a CEO before. We haven't talked a ton of my background on this call, but I commit this not as a politician. I've been a CEO. I've built a biotech company and an asset management company. Well, if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you. It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to change. And I refuse to be that hollowed out husk of a puppet, which is what I do think we have in the White House today. And so my view is that every one of those members of the executive branch absolutely can be fired by the U.S. President.

I want to reduce the size of the federal employee headcount by at least 50% by the end of my first year, 75% by the end of the first term. I can get into the details of how I would do that. I think that a lot of people wonder about the so-called civil service protections. That's the number one obstacle that they said stop Trump. They told Trump you couldn't fire these people because of civil service protections. There are all of these special rules that would say that, well, the president can't engage in political retribution. So anytime you fire somebody, it would arguably be a violation of the civil service rules if there's a professional technical civil servant who could allege that you fired them for political reasons. or other anti-discrimination laws that say it violated this rule or that rule with respect to,

you know, racial or gender or quota outcomes or otherwise. So I've put up, I think, a provocative, if some would call it radical. I think it's actually sensible once you think through it, way of firing large numbers of federal bureaucrats without tripping up the civil service rules. You know, it's a thought experiment for doing it exactly this way, but it'll get the point across. every one of those civil servants, like every other citizen in this country, has a social security number. Well, one way to do this is if you say it ends in an odd number, we fire you. If in an even number, we keep you.

Boom. Large scale, instant 50% reduction in the number of federal employees in the civil service. First of all, I can guarantee not a thing will change, right? You'll automatically have half the size of the government. Everything functions. The next day, the sun will rise in the east and set in the west just the same way it did the day before. But you have completely avoided that morass of lawsuits saying that it was political retribution or a civil rights violation or a racial agenda discriminatory result.

No, actually, you use the law of large numbers in your favor. That's what gets this job done. How does that stop us from suffering the unconstitutional overreaches? Well, part of the problem from the SEC to the FDA to the U.S. Federal Reserve is when you have a bunch of people showing up to work who should have never had that job, in the first place. That's when they start finding things to do that they should have never been doing in the first place. So that's actually the biggest cost

of having too many people show up in the federal government. It's not the headcount costs. It's good to save that. That's a small fraction of the total real cost that were suffering, which is a bunch of people who shouldn't have had that job that then find things to do, making up rules as they go or making up regulations as they go.

That's the real failure at the SEC, which is instead created a culture. damage. That's exactly. It's anti-innovative. It is the wet blanket on the culture of innovation that has made the United States great. And yes, is crypto suffering absolutely. But it's one of many sectors that are suffering. And my crypto policy plan is consistent with that for the energy sector or many other sectors as well. Gutt the administrative state. Unlock the freedom to innovate. That's who we are as Americans. You know, funny thing is, as you can probably see, your guys' cameras down there. So if I'm looking now that it looks like I'm looking at you, but you can. You You can see this. I'm in a swivel chair now, right? Well, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while he was literally inventing the swivel chair, believe it or not. He was 33 years old. How old are you guys, if you don't mind me asking? I'm 30. Yeah, I'm 38. All right. So I'm 38, too. So Thomas Jefferson's the midpoint of our age on this call, on the younger side. He invented the swivel chair while he was at it. I bet he would be a, I bet he'd be a fan of cryptocurrencies if he were alive

today. Benjamin Franklin, who also signed that Declaration of Independence, he invented the Franklin Stove. He invented the bifocal spectacle. He invented a remedy to the common cold. These are the these are the spirits of our founding fathers, right? The people who are the pioneers, the explorers, the unafraid, the people who wouldn't be stopped by some government standing in the way. Those are the guys who signed the Declaration of Independence. That's the spirit we need to revive and that's not what we see in that administrative state and that bureaucracy today. I agree. And we said many things on, by the way, you were talking about your plans for the regulatory state. I couldn't help but wonder for maybe the first time what Gary Gensler's social security number ends with. So very first time. But as you were

talking about it, yeah, I think we've said many times on bank lists that we believe that the founders would have been totally all over this crypto thing. Why? Because it's embedding values, lowercase L, liberal values, into protocols. And after all, what else is the Constitution? But in an embodiment, of liberal values like freedom of speech inside of a protocol, right? Code. What is code? Well, that was code in the form of paper. This is code in the form of actual digital software code that kind of run somewhere. I'll tell you another way in which the founding fathers would have seen it that way. I mean, it's the 10th Amendment. It's the principal enshrined in the 10th Amendment. You guys familiar with the 10th Amendment or I can? I need a. I can, yeah. I mean,

this is my world right now, not yours. And you can educate you. And you can educate you. me a ton more about crypto as well. So that being said, the 10th Amendment is the one that says the powers not reserved to the federal government shall be reserved respectively to the states and to the people. The vision of the Constitution was one of decentralization, actually. The idea that different states could compete, that the states weren't supposed to be particularly similar to one another. It allowed people the different choice of where they want, which rails they wanted to ride. Do you want to ride the rails of Connecticut or the rails of North Carolina? There's two different sets of rails.

They're bound by a common set of ideals. But it's up to the people to choose in a decentralized manner. That's how you actually hold each one to be the best accountable, to be the best version of itself. I mean, you have different cryptocurrencies. You could say the same thing. That was the vision of the founding fathers. Federalism, decentralization.

It's baked into the Constitution, the 10th and final of the amendments in that original Bill of Rights, enshrined that principle of decentralization into the very DNA of this country. And I think that's part of the DNA that we need to revoke. in this country as well. Metamask portfolio is your one-stop shop to navigate the world of DeFi. And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore. With competitive rates and convenient routes, Metamask portfolio's bridge feature

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for defy liquidity providers. The future is on chain with your wallets, with your trades, and with your money in your own hands. Try it out now at app.gmx.io. All right, so we've talked about the first plank, freedom to code. We talked about the third is freedom from regulatory overreach. And now, as you were talking about, you know, this 10th Amendment,

it brings me to kind of the second plank here, which is the freedom of financial self-reliance, right? And, yeah, the 10th Amendment, I think you recited it, well, Vivek. The power is not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people. One of the chief liberties we preserve in this whole crypto movement, the point, if you will,

is that an individual gets self-control over their own assets. Right. Very technically, they have their own private keys. And that gives them a vault that no one can essentially take away from them. It's theirs. Now, when we exchange those private keys,

and we put it on a centralized exchange, well, a third party can start to do things with it. We saw that quite tragically with SBF and FTX, of course. Like, not your keys, not your crypto. That's what the industry says. And so one thing we are deeply worried about in the United States is that the nation state would take this right away from us or seek to take it away. And they could do it in various ways. They can even disincent it.

But you've got this freedom of financial self-reliance that says you would prohibit, prohibit any federal agency from creating rules that limit or impair self-hosted wallets. Okay, that is good, Vivek, because that is the one thing we need to preserve. We've got to avoid the nightmare scenario where the nation state says, yeah, you can own crypto, in air quotes. It's just going to take the form of IOUs in your brokerage accounts, right? It has to be through an exchange. That's not crypto.

That's not crypto. So tell us about this. What is the important? Because I agree with you. I think the Jeffers and Benjamin Franklin's of the world, they would have been all over holding custody of your own private keys and the self-reliance that brings. Why is it important to you? And how would you actually enforce this? How would you protect this and enshrine this right?

Look, I think that this is baked into the DNA of this country. I mean, it's Jeffersonian vision. It's Andrew Jackson's vision. Self-reliance. And it's not crypto in that particular case. And so are you taking some risk? Yeah, I mean, if you lose your passwords, you lose your passwords. That's up to you. But it's still self-reliance. And I think that that's part of the consequences that you face for the choices you make,

but that's what true freedom entails. So I think a lot of the regulations that have gotten in the way here take the guise of so-called anti-money laundering statutes. Well, I think that the supposed motivation here is that they don't want, you know, North Korean or Iranian or Russian actors or whatever to be able to secretively transact in a way the government can't actually monitor. That's what they tell us. Well, first of all, if you just double click on that, actually, right now the current system perfectly allows you to do that. It's happening as we exist. It's happening as it exists right now. So why are you uniquely creating some sort of phantom, you know, boogeyman alternative when that's actually the status quo is it exists today? So it's just a fake excuse. It's not real.

I think the real excuse is to pinch out of existence and alternative to the current financial system. And that's what cryptocurrency really is and should be. And my view is even to the crypto crowds, I would offer you my humble perspective is don't forget that, right? It's not that you want some kumbaya relationship with the government to say, hey, let's all be happy and coexist in a way that's like plugged into your system and in a little trackable points in your brokerage account.

Bitcoin ETFs aren't the end game, guys. That's right. I mean, it's just remember the OG revision of the whole thing. Code is law. It's an opt-out from the current system. It's the, we're the pioneers, the explorers, go into the Wild West because we want to stay there, right? That's exactly the point.

And so don't forget that. The threat to the existence of crypto or the original founding vision can come from both sides. That's a deeper discussion we can have. Once you become an industry and you become professionalized, the managerial class within that industry can itself start to look a lot more like a government. that's regulating you from the other side. A new set of bankers as it were.

Absolutely. Absolutely. A new set of crony capitalist bankers, I think will be the natural course unless the people had the original vision of what the promise of crypto was supposed to be, stay true to it. But anyway, if the government is one of those threats, there's the threat within which we can get to later within the industry. But I do think that the government is using this anti-money laundering statutes as a way of saying that, no, you don't get self-hosted wallets or otherwise.

I think we have to say, hell no, that was the original founding vision, the Jeffersonian Yeoman who says financial self-reliance is part of my right to be able to opt out. Now, it's really important, though, that people understand that we're willing to practice what we preach there. I'm not going to come crying back if I, you know, put all those keys on a stick and I lost the stick. Too bad. That's what it comes down to, right? You don't get some sort of safety blanket. The 2008 financial crisis happens. And then you say, oh, I want to go crying to daddy, the government to bail me out. I'm against that. Okay. And even that I was working in finance on Wall Street at the time. I was against it then. I'm against it now. You got to

play by the rules. You can't handle the heat. You stay out of the kitchen. But if you're arguing for the heat of the opportunity of true individual self-reliance, then yes, that comes with some risk. With risk comes responsibility. But we're going to walk the walk. And I think that that's the kind of original, I would say, kind of OG-type vision of the promise of crypto that I want to hold on to. And I don't want to hear people from the industrialized managerial class of the new industry, the new crony capitalist bankers from within the industry come crying as well. No, because that undermines the case that I'm making. But my job as the government isn't to provide some blanket of protection. It's to get the hell out of your way so that you're free to innovate, free to be

financially self-reliant, free to code without some government actor impeding on that liberty. And I think if both sides stay true to that set of the rules of the road as president, don't come crying back to me when, you know, there's a, you know, I think something that's a consequence of making a choice. Part of freedom means the freedom to make the wrong choice. We do make the wrong choices sometimes. But that's what it means to be free. Don't come for a government blanket of protection then and selectively, you know, getting after the fact protection. That's what big banks have done for much of our national history and it's shameful. But as long as we're willing to play by those same set of rules, then yes. Crypto should be proudly. I mean, this is a good way, the Wild West, where people are able to opt out of a system that could use some competition and is otherwise broken. I think you guys get the kind of thing that I'm saying on both sides of this. You're talking to the podcast called Bankless, the Vake. Oh, yeah, that's right. You get it. Yeah, the Wild West terminology is something that I think the bankless listeners are very, very familiar of. So if you didn't know that we use that terminology all the time on bankless, then I've never watched an episode of this. It's really funny. That's good. I'm glad to speak each other's language, though. It's good. I will. I'm kind of intrigued now. I want to bring up this focus on self-hosted wallets as kind of the true thing that a lot of the establishment, the banking sector, the regulators really want to go after here. And there's a recent story of a vague that happened where we had this clash as an industry with the Wall Street Journal and a few of its authors. They recently published this one article that said that crypto was used to send over $130 million straight to.

to Hamas to finance the October 7th attacks, evading sanctions and government controls. This article in the Wall Street Journal is later cited by Elizabeth Warren and signed by over 20% of Congress in a letter to the White House as to why the crypto industry needs to be reined in and why specifically self-hosted wallets are a threat. I don't know why my self-hosted wallet is being invoked here by Elizabeth Warren and this letter, but it was. It's kind of weird. Oh, your specific one? No, no, no. Everybody is. Everyone. universally.

Yeah, yeah, I have not Tesla loss, no. 9-11 did happen before the age of crypto, right? And so, so did World War I and World War II. I don't know what the heck they're actually talking about it. Well, but actually, it goes further, David. You should continue the story, because it turns out none of this shit was true, the bake. Yeah, so we, the crypto industry ourselves, led by Nick Carter, a friend of the pod,

went on this research campaign to actually go do the on-chain analytics to see how much money was actually sent to Hamas. And we discovered, as an industry we learned, because of the public traceability of blockchain, that it was not $130 million. It was something closer to the ballpark of $450,000. But not only was that there are insane discrepancy between these two numbers, but Hamas actually went out to its financiers and told them to say, hey, stop sending crypto because the transparency is too traceable.

It's too traceable. So what did the Wall Street Journal do in this particular example? Did they like go and retract their arguments and put out a new article? No, actually. They doubled down and publish an even more damning false article on crypto. And so like, and again, this is all fodder that is being taken by our elect, some of our elected representatives to go and strong arm specifically self-hosted wallets. So I guess I'm kind of just asking your take on this, your perspective and like what we need to do. because it's not just, you know, banking advocates wanting to keep.

It's also media, right? And so, like, what's going on? I mean, I'm laughing because this is my world, right? I'm coming as an outside of Republican presidential candidate, the kind of things I'm saying, the Republican establishment. Have you guys been, how closely have you guys been following this presidential race at all or not really? Not super close. As it relates to crypto.

Yeah. Just watch the debate last week, okay? The most recent Republican, the third Republican presidential debate. I called it a lot of hypocrisies within the Republican Party. They're not coming for me. I mean, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, I won't even bore you with the boring politics. If it says I'm not going to get another cent from the Republican National Committee

because I called out some of their own corruption on the debate stage last week. So just watch that and form your own judgment. But believe me, I understand the collective aggregated, which would say closing ranks between, the establishment of a given industry, in this case, the political industry of the Republican Party and the media, I understand how that ping pong works. And believe me, they will have be captured because they have longer-term repeat relationships that predate your arrival on the scene. And the same thing is happening with my own experience in this campaign.

Now, all that being said, we should stay tethered to the facts. What is the legal, basis for banning a self-hosted wallet. I declare there are none. It seems. It seems pretty un-American. So here's the winning point of this argument is, if you want to ban it, go through Congress. There have been times where the people of this country have supported un-American acts that have passed Congress.

And it's shameful, but that's the country we live in. But that's not what's happened right now. And I don't think it's going to happen. because this is made up after the fact regulating coming from the SEC and other three-letter agencies. So that's where we're on the high ground here. And then you tied back to our actual history. What would Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or John Jay? Would they have celebrated?

Yes. Financial self-reliance, the Jeffersonian yeoman, the anti-money laundering statutes are absolutely overbroad in their scope. And use the Hamas analogy. First of all, the facts themselves, as you noted, to my surprise, were wrong. But just because there's a particular class of weapons that actor A gave to actor B halfway around the world, we're still producing those weapons right here at home in the United States. So the very people want to use that logic to see if the financial mechanism of a payment transfer was used was the same as something that a bad actor used halfway around the world.

If you believe that logic, we'd stop all weapons production in the United States as well. So it's clear that they don't actually believe what they're saying. They're just using it as an excuse to accomplish an agenda that has nothing to do. do with actually the prevention of terrorism and more to do with choking out the existence of an alternative and opt out to the current financial system that they're insecure of its own value proposition. And that's what you do. When you're afraid of someone questioning your own value proposition, you stifle the competition. That's what's happening here. Federal Reserve has been a disaster for the last 25 years. As we talked about earlier, real wage growth has been flat for the last

25 years. The Fed is a big part of the reason why. Well, I think, I think that when they're insecure about their own value proposition, they're using any other irrelevant excuse, prevention of terrorism on down to choke out the use of what is really just an opt-out from a broken financial architecture and edifice that exists today. And the irony is, I think the existence of cryptocurrencies will force that existing edifice to be stronger and to level up compared to where it is today. But that's not going to happen in absence of the competition. So Vivek, I think we have time.

Time is short because I think we have time for maybe two more questions. And I would say to the bankless listener, we've got a link in the show. show notes to Vivek's full crypto platform. But it sounds like Vivek, you're making the case that you are a pro-crypto presidential candidate, which I don't think a president has quite made that take and articulated in quite this way. There's other details here, of course. You're going to make sure that we know what the difference between a security and commodity is in crypto, bring that regulatory clarity. We haven't touched on stable coins, but you are pro-private innovation of stable coins. It sounds like I want to ask the-

And then competitive access to the Fed window. Great. Fantastic. That's what we would love. But I think the meta question here is you've laid out this pro crypto platform. How do we hold you to it? So a presidential candidate, okay? And I know all politicians, a lot of promises made, of course.

How can we hold you to these promises? Like what good is a platformed commitment in your campaign for Vague? Yes. So it's a good question. I would say first piece of advice is never trust any politician. I mean, that's been my experience in life. I'm not, I guess I'm technically a politician now, I've been one for nine months, but I'm not a politician by nature.

I've been an innovator. I've been on the other side of this. And that's a big part of what actually gives me my sense of motivation, the chip on my shoulder. I've operated in highly regulated industries by all god-awful regulators that make up the rules as they go along. And so that's what gives me my sense of drive and motivation. I think one of the metrics I would use if I were in your shoes to assess somebody is what have they given up to advance their convictions?

I wrote my first book against the politicization of corporate America. Well, I had to step down from my job as a multi-billion dollar CEO of a biotech company to be able to do it. It was a comfortable position to be in. But I made the sacrifices I needed to write that first book, Woke Inc. And capitalist punishment to travel this country and expose what I've been exposing regarding the weaponization of the financial system. So are you ever going to fully know before somebody gets in there and gets a job done? No, of course not. But a good metric is to say, what sacrifices has somebody made in their life?

If you read my first book, Woke Inc., you'll have a good sense of what that journey looked like. If somebody's actually made real sacrifices to advance their convictions, then that might give you a sense of who they really are and the likelihood, at least, that they're going to follow through on the other risks they're taking. Here's another thing, though. You read my, and I'm glad you guys are posting it, Read that crypto policy. Those are things that I can get done as president of the United States running the executive branch of the government.

Most broken promises from U.S. presidents don't come from somebody who's necessarily a bad person and change their mind. It came from somebody who thought they were going to get it done but required Congress to see it through. Right. So nothing I'm offering here as a legislator, very little, I should say, of what I'm offering here requires Congress to act as a legislative promise. This is what I get to get done as the executive branch of the government. and I'm not some legislator imagining what it means to be an executive. I've been the CEO of multiple companies, multiple multibillion dollar companies that I've built. So I think that that should give you a chance.

My first advice will always be, and we wouldn't be who we are as Americans, if we did start trusting the government, never trust the government, and never trust somebody who's telling you that they're running for a position of leadership in government. But look at somebody's track record, look at somebody who's actually made sacrifices to advance their convictions, a good bet to go with somebody who's close. to one of you than somebody who comes from within the DC establishment, and I've put it on paper, and then ask yourself the question, do you think this helps me within the Republican Party in the primary process? You know, I told you watched that debate from last Wednesday night. Everybody

should watch that debate and form a judgment for themselves. There's a reason why the Republican National Committee's chairwoman, the personal leads that say, I'm not getting another cent from the RNC, because I'm not advancing the party lines. I'm defecting from that. But the flip side is, I'm not going to be able to do that alone either, because I'm not going to get a the traditional establishment base of support. So yeah, I think I do need the support of folks like yourself. And the blunt truth is, I just think this is true. I mean, this is an important election. I don't think that, I think this is going to be probably the single candidate myself because of my passion for gutting the administrative state, the single most crypto-friendly candidate we're

going to have had in a generation and may have in a generation yet to come. These elections don't come out very often. I do have a clear path to success. And so, So, you know, I wasn't very good at this at the start of the campaign, but I'm getting better at it now because it's necessary, asking for people's help to actually get us there. Well, there you go. Go to Vivek-20204.com and check it out for yourself, learn about me. And if you agree with most of what I say, it doesn't have to be all of it. But if you agree with most of it, support this campaign and I'm going to do my part.

I appreciate it, Vivek. And certainly there's a lot for crypto listeners to agree with on the crypto platform that you've laid out today. So thanks for walking us through. And that second point that you raised, your ability to execute, the president's ability to execute that policy, that rings true to me. I think a president with this as their platform, given the will, could get it all done. It's not a complicated stuff, and it's certainly within presidential powers. Vivek, thank you so much for guiding us today on what your crypto

platform as president would be. It's been a blast. Thanks, guys. A country that put a man on the moon can do this. It's not a question of technical challenge. It's a question of political will. And I think you guys do your part. People across, we accept crypto, we accept Bitcoin, we accept dollars, but lifting this campaign in the next six months, next even 60 days, that's going to be the difference between seeing this through versus not. And I really mean it. If you want to be on the community, do your part, I'm going to do mine. Links in the show notes, everybody. I'm going to end with risk and disclaimers, and we'll have Vivek witness this because I think you'll like it, Vivek. None of this has been financial advice, as we say at the end of every bankless show. Crypto is risky. This is not even

political advice you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot that is how we end every show of a vague we are headed west under my watch we're gonna you're gonna have to end that charade it just how silly is this whole edifice right so yeah thanks so much let's get in there and get the job done thanks guys see yeah bye