On The Brink with Castle Island - Blake Masters on Inflation, CBDCs, and Setting a Pro-Crypto Agenda (EP.292)

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

We sit down with Blake Masters, COO at Thiel Capital, coauthor of Zero to One, and 2022 candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona.  Why Blake is running for Senate in Arizona  Blake's experience running Thiel Capital and what led him to politics today  Does Congress need more business expertise?  Where Blake falls on the spectrum of being pro vs anti crypto  Where Blake gets his info regarding the crypto industry  USA vs Chinese policy on Bitcoin  Should the US pursue a strategic Bitcoin reserve?  Does cryptocurrency impair the US' sanctions-making ability?  Will the government maintain its sanctions-making ability in perpetuity?  How crypto and Bitcoin could shore up the U.S. dollar  Can the Fed solve climate or racial equity issues?  Are the MMTers in power?  Is the U.S. facing a genuine risk of default?  Leftist explanations for inflation and why they are unsatisfying Where the Covid-related stimulus payments warranted? Dealing with Big Tech deplatforming and whether Section 230 is sufficient  Can decentralized internet applications compete with Big Tech platforms?  Are legislative solutions sufficient to Big Tech oligarchies?  Blake's view on stablecoins and how they should be regulated  Should the government be following China's lead on CBDCs?  Learn about Blake's platform. 

Hello and welcome to On the Brink. I'm Nick Carter. Today we're sitting down with Blake Masters, who is the Republican candidate for the 2022 election for U.S. Senate in Arizona. Blake is well known for having co-authored 0 to 1 with Peter Thiel. He's also the chief operating officer at Teal Capital. Blake is definitely one of the most explicitly pro-crypto and pro-Bitcoin candidates running for the Senate right now, which is why I wanted to get him on the show and pick his brain on his crypto policy agenda. Today we talk about why he's running for Senate in Arizona, how he'd bring his venture experience to bear in Congress. And then his views on whether the U.S. should establish a Bitcoin reserve, how Bitcoin could shore up the U.S. dollar,

how to think about sanctions in a world where cryptocurrency exists? And then other topics like modern monetary theory, whether the U.S. is facing a risk of default, explanations for inflation and why they are lacking, and of course, big tech, deplatforming, and whether decentralized internet infrastructure and applications can possibly be a solution here. Blake is an incredibly thoughtful candidate, especially on the topic of cryptocurrency, and it was a real privilege to get him on the show. Let's dive right into it. So Blake Masters, you're running for Senate in Arizona. A lot of us are watching your campaign very closely. You've also made some pretty pro-crypto, pro-pro Bitcoin statements. Welcome to show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

It should be fun. So outside of any crypto topics, tell us about your your platform and why you're running for office. I'm running basically because things don't work. I look at what's happening and just seems like we're losing the country. You know, we don't have a real border right now with Mexico. It's completely open. 225,000 people are coming here illegally every month. Not year every month. Sentinel's coming through. China's shipping that's sentinel, right? Disasterous inflation.

The left says it's 7%. It's transitory. Nope. I think the real Costco basket of goods is 11%, 12%, double-digit inflation, and it's going to get worse. And so on just like basically every front, I think, get people in charge. Right now it's Democrats, but too many Republicans, too. We don't care anymore about like whether stuff actually works.

I just want a normal, healthy country where people can, raise a family and work and worship and peace and prosperity. Clicious as that sounds, but like, my gosh, we used to have it. We don't really have it anymore. And I'm just sick and tired of politics as usual. So try to get in and see how much one person can do to change things. Totally. You first came on my radar thanks to zero to one, which I think it's every venture capitalist favorite book. Aside from that, you've worked at teal capital. You didn't realize, but you're a law clerk back in the day. So, you know, what of those experiences are you drawing on the most as you now dive into politics? Well, you know, so I've been running Thiel Capital with Peter for the last few years.

And I've gotten to do many things. Like I've seen so much of what works and what doesn't work in business and startups and investing. You know, writing zero to one was a good experience. Just the level of rhetoric and, you know, obviously it's a business book, but it's also about politics. And I've been paying attention to politics for a long time. You know, Peter and I got involved in the Trump 2016 campaign. And then I served transition team once President Trump won in 2016. And so I feel like I've gotten to, you know, in kind of just a few short years,

I've gotten legal experience, investing experience, general business experience, right? And politics, too. Like, I've gotten to do a lot of different things. And it's the interdisciplinary nature of it all that I think is making me. a pretty unique and compelling candidate, and it's also going to make me super effective as a U.S. Senator. Maybe not expert in any one thing, but I have, I think I have the general decline of our society well-diagnosed and some innovative ideas on how we can shake things up and improve things.

So aside from, you know, day trading on inside info, which is what the Nancy Pelosi's of the world are doing, would you say that there is sort of insufficient investing expertise in in the Senate or the House in Congress generally? I mean, is there a dearth of sort of actual business expertise in Congress right now? I think so. I think so. But, you know, it's also, it's not just the case that you need more business people to run for Congress. I think in general, that's sort of healthier.

It's like I better have business people outsiders than, you know, career politicians or something like that. But I'm also not a candidate that runs around just saying, like, I'm going to run the government like a business, you know, because, okay, it's not a business, you know? And I think a lot of those people are, aren't that effective. Let me just pick on the Republicans a little bit, pick on my own side. I think Republicans in Congress, you know, some exceptions, but almost for that exception, they're just reactive. And so the left prosecutes its agenda.

I think it doesn't make sense for the country. I think it's a bad agenda. But the right is always just defensive. And so it's like, what is the left trying to pass this? week. What are they trying to pass this month? Nobody's thinking about like five and 10 year time horizons. Do we invest enough? Does Congress have enough investing expertise? I think one interesting lens about venture capital is like, you know, you're making bets that, you know, won't really literally pay off until seven, eight, nine years later. And so you're thinking, you're not just

thinking about the life cycle of a company, but you're also thinking about, you know, at the level of decades, what does this mean? Like, what's Web3 going to mean? What is Crypto mean? How is it fundamentally going to change things? And you get a much more macro perspective. And yeah, I do think that'll be helpful. I do think we need on all sides of dial, but especially I care about my side and cleaning my side up. We need Republicans to be thinking about like, how do we have a country in 20 years? Because at the current clip, by default, we're not going to. So speaking of crypto, I mean, you know, one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show was, know, A, I respect the platform that you have and the views that you maintain.

But also, B, you have been explicitly pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin. So where would you put yourself on, you know, on that spectrum of sort of Brad Sherman to Cynthia Lemus, who's probably our most pro-Bitcoin member of Congress? I think Loomis is great. I think she's shown a lot of leadership on this crypto issue. And I was just laughing a little bit at Brad Sherman. because I just don't understand that mentality. You know, like, he doesn't even know this stuff well enough

to have an intelligent opinion on, like, why we should think Nip It in the Bud was his quote, right? Loomis is really good on this stuff. Yeah, she's a beacon for sure. So, you know, what are your sources when it comes to the crypto industry? I mean, there's just so much information. It moves so fast. It's, you know, pretty diverse heterogeneous. industry. There's a lot of things going on. Where do you learn from? Well, Twitter, a lot of it.

You know, and I had probably now is a good time to disclaim. I'm not an expert in crypto or anything like that. Like, you know, I got into it fairly early and it's fascinating to me, but it also moves so fast, you know, so I don't pretend to keep up with every latest development. But, you know, I'll follow Twitter. You know, I follow Vitalik's blog. I'll see Selkis on Twitter. I'll listen to you know, Paul Piano's podcast. And I feel like just following a couple of key people in Bitcoin Twitter and crypto Twitter, I'm just sort of able to keep my, keep my fingers weekly on the pulse here. So one of your probably most notable tweets was after China banned really all Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin mining, that we should do the opposite. And as a country,

obtain a strategic reserve of Bitcoin. So, you know, as it pertains to that reserve, would you imagine that as just being part of sort of the Federal Reserve portfolio or, you know, inching us towards sort of a newer gold standard built on the back of Bitcoin, something like that? Well, I think the latter would be the healthiest. You know, I've been going around saying for a while on the campaign, but Bitcoin is the hardest money that we have, you know, and I was a pro-gold guy. I still like gold, but it's not Bitcoin, is it?

I was a Ron Paul for 2007-2008 Republican, and I've had criticisms of the Fed for a long time. But, you know, practically speaking, yeah, it's probably just more of a stepping stone towards a sound or monetary policy. But, hey, if that's what we've got to do, I think every inch in the right direction towards financial freedom and a sound monetary policy

is an inch we should be taking advantage of. So this is one of the tensions, I guess, is that, you know, the dollar is so central to our, are actually strategic interests, right? It's one of the main ways that we project power abroad. Obviously, sanctions is sort of our primary weapon of war. We don't really fight many conventional wars these days, but we use sanctions all the time.

And, you know, that's where I run into issues with even Republican, of Congress, members of Congress, they take umbrage at the idea that anyone ought to be embracing anything out of the dollar because it might impair, you know, our sanctions making ability. How do you sort of, you know, square that circle in terms of the apparent conflict between an independent monetary system and the virtues of that and then, you know, the potential costs to us as a nation where we have so much dependence on the dollar system? Yeah, well, you know, I think any change is not going to happen overnight here. But I also think change is coming.

Like the U.S. dollar and the government's ability to sort of use or abused, depending on your perspective, the reserve currency status just to achieve certain geopolitical aims, that's got a long history, but I'm not sure it's going to work forever the same way it's been working. And, you know, we can talk a little bit more about that. But I think that, you know, there's a good argument to make, at least, that Bitcoin is good for the U.S. dollar because it's the one check on the Fed that we have. You know, when I'm in the Senate, I'll try to, you know, have meaningful oversight and sort of put checks on the Fed, get checks on the Fed on the legislative side. But, you know, Bitcoin is apolitical. It's technological. And now it's getting adoption.

And I think cats out of the bag. And so it may just be this depoliticized, you know, piece of technology that's a drainage check on the Fed. And if that's going to make the Fed, you know, on a relative basis behave a lot better over the next 10, 20, 30 years, maybe it's got this incredibly non-inflationary effect. They can't print all the money if people are just going to flock to Bitcoin. So I think there's an argument that's going to shore up the dollar and make it relevant for a lot longer. Yeah, I mean, the Fed is increasingly trending in this direction of being activist institution.

And, you know, there's a certain strain of progressivism that looks to the Fed to finance some of these ideas of the Green New Deal or, you know, generic concepts like racial justice or racial equity. We seem to be hearing about these more and more. and there's actually opposition to, there was opposition to Jay Powell's renomination on the basis that he wasn't prepared to undertake these activist measures from his seat at the Federal Reserve, which is kind of insane to think that the Fed itself could solve problems like climate or racial equity. It's insane. I mean, it's insane. It's, you know, it's like, analogous to the military, right? The military's job is to put warheads on foreheads, right? To, to just prosecute and win military campaigns to project lethal power anywhere instantly

so that America wins, right? That's the job. Well, it's being taken over by woke politics, and you get these, you know, teaching soldiers critical race theory. I mean, this stuff really does infect these woke progressive ideas really do infect these systems. And when you think about that happening to the Fed, right, which I guess, charged with the twin goals of low inflation and low unemployment.

Like, the Fed already wasn't maybe doing so well before it started to get infected by woke politics. And so if you imagine that the Federal Reserve system just gets, like, weaponized to fight racial justice or whatever the cause du jour is at the left at the time, like, it's going to be a disaster. It is going to be a giant disaster, maybe even worse than woke politics in the military. I don't know how anyone could disagree with that. Yeah, some would say that it's just pretextual.

I don't know if anyone's thinking this far ahead of time, but there's an argument to be made that it's pretextual for inflating the Fed's balance sheet to, let's say, $30 trillion, that you do that in the name of progressivism or the Green New Deal, which might become necessary or perceived as necessary to reset the fiscal position and to perform full debt monetization. So maybe it's just the case that, you know, we'll need an excuse to have the Fed, you know, effectively do full-scale monetization of the debt and inflate its balance sheet.

And surely, Nick, you're not against racial justice. So, you know, you have to go along with it. Otherwise, you're a bigot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is the lock to the left for sure. So, yeah, I mean, we might be on the brink of an truly inflationary reset. I mean, the likes of which I think the analogy would be the 1940s. After World War II, we had debt to GDP north of 130 percent. That's sort of where we are today. And we had high inflation and low rates for a long time. Speaking of which, a lot of people would allege that sort of modern monetary theory is driving policy discussions in Washington, is the de facto, you know, economic theory that drives, you know, congressional policymaking effectively. although the MMTers kind of ever deny that they're in power.

Do you have a view of this and sort of the sustainability of these ideas and how they've been expressing themselves in kind of recent legislation? Yeah, I think that MMTers denying that they're in power is the classic left-wing thing. Like when you're in power, you still pretend to be the victim and we need to go ever further left, right? They're clearly in power. Like functionally, that's how it works right now. and it's unsustainable, you know.

And so whether we literally default or whether we have a good financial future, it depends. It depends on what we do. You know, I think one of the things that's actually saved the dollar so far has been the fact that like every other central bank is sort of always abusing its own currency too. And so there's no other safe asset, you know, we're the reserve currency. And if crypto gains steam, as it has been, right, and Bitcoin, I think people begin to see, like, if we just keep it this current clip, no, there's life after dollar. And it looks a lot like Bitcoin. And so that's one, I'm always sort of against like trillions and trillions and crazy social spending.

And so I'd be against build back better and the Biden administration's spending plans anyways. But it's especially dangerous because if we keep doing this, now that we have a viable alternative, this is just the flip side of the coin of what I said five minutes ago, Bitcoin might be the real check on the Fed. Now that there is an alternative, maybe all the spending just turns the dollar junk really fast. And so it seems like it's suicide to continue down on the same path that we've been going down for decades. Like even my kids understand you can't keep spending the money that you don't have. Well, if there's an alternative that the capital is going to flee to, maybe that's it for the dollar if we put another 10 trillion of them in the next year or two. Yeah, and I think that's

really the constraint on MMT is they build these, you know, idealizing. models of the economy. And, you know, they rightly point out that, you know, you can't, quote, unquote, default on a debt that's nominated in your own currency, but they fail to mention the fact that there's competitors to that currency and people can rapidly desert it if they lose faith in it. And the constraint that the MMT years always, you know, admitted to prior to this inflationary episode, was inflation. That if you undertake the MMT agenda and, you know, and you know, you know, And the one way to note, you know, the failure mode there is material inflation. Interestingly, now we have enormously high inflation, highest it's been in 40 years, I want to say.

But there's no acknowledgement that it's monetary led, fiscal led. Instead, the finger is pointed at supply chains or antitrust. There's other purported explanations. I mean, what do you make of these sort of these explanations for inflation we have? I think it's softestry. Like I went back, I remembered, I think in July or August, AOC went on the news. And I was actually surprised. Like she did a competent job of articulating the exact wrong stance on this.

So she was wrong, but I was actually surprised. But she got up and said, like, you know, this inflation is transit. It's sector specific. It has to do with supply chains and the pandemic and all this stuff. And I just went back and looked at that last week. And, man, I knew it was wrong then, but it was just, in retrospect, it was just obviously wrong. Like, you print $5 trillion and distribute it. And like, yeah, you're going to get inflation.

Like, at a certain point, it's possible to be too smart about this stuff. And the common sense of thing is when you print shit loads of money in an economy where there's no slack. to really pick that up. Like you're going to get inflation. And so obviously there's a monetary cause here. And it's not transitory and it hasn't just been sector specific. And I mean, it's what they have to say because they're in power and it's their fault.

But but it's and normal people are connecting this. I'm telling you. I'm campaigning every day here in Arizona. Normal. Yeah, we're probably talking to Republican voters right now. But like they know, they see the gas prices and they, you know, and super, market shelves and whether or not bear, you know, everything's more expensive. They know that this is somehow highly correlated, if not just caused by the reckless Biden administration spending agenda.

Yeah. And, you know, I recently interviewed Representative Tom Emmer on this show. And, you know, he expressed regret that he voted for the CARES Act. But he also said that he had to because all of these businesses were being forcibly shut down. And he felt that there was no alternative. at that point that because the government was shutting down these businesses, they had, you know, they had a duty effectively to support them. But I guess the thing is, is that this expenditure went on way beyond just temporary payments to businesses. Look, probably the first stimulus, first coronavirus stimulus, like, you know, maybe you had to do because, and this is back, you know, when Trump was president, of course,

maybe you had to do that because, yeah, if you're going to shut down businesses, then you can't just shut businesses down and then totally deprive people of your livelihood, right? Like maybe you need some emergency injection. It went on far too long, far too many rounds of this. You know, the Biden administration

only just wants to increase it. And maybe the best solution, surprise, surprise is like not to lock everything down in the first place. So I'm sympathetic to Emmer's feeling on that, but it went on far too long and you can't let the progress. have left just hijack things like this.

You know, you see what the government shutdown debates all the time. Oh, you couldn't possibly shut down the government. It's like, well, you don't negotiate with terrorists. And I feel like when the Dems are in charge, they try to use these shutdowns or use the similar kind of leverage. It's exactly that, as leverage to extract what they know they can't get through open debate. So I want to change tech a little bit and talk about big tech. You know, obviously there's intersections with well.

which people are excited about, but you know, you've been pretty ardent about talking about we need to end the power and the discretion, the fact that these big tech firms are almost governments in their own right. In some cases, in some cases superseding the power of actual sovereign governments. You could argue that if an entity can de-platform the sitting president of the United States, they have some power that is superior to that of the government. Certainly, they do that to other heads of state too. So, you know, it seems to me that we have an anomaly private sector that, you know, kind of does the bidding of the left, whether they're in power or not.

And, you know, it's kind of a clever constitutional end around whereby they're not bound by the First Amendment, given that they're anomaly private companies. What do you sort of propose in terms of solutions to this apparent quandary? Nobody really seems to have particularly good ideas beyond Section 230 reform. What do you make of this situation we're in and how we get out of it? Yeah, I think, you know, people probably do talk too much about 230. Clearly, if you're actually a platform, maybe it makes sense, right? Why should you be liable for random stuff your users post if you're really just a platform?

But obviously, if you are a publisher, like obviously, if you are editing content, suppressing left way or suppressing, you know, right of, center content, embracing left-wing content, you're a publisher. You've got your thumb on the scale, and so you shouldn't enjoy the protection. So I think we should, you know, radically reform it or wipe it away for these companies that are acting like publishers. But I just, the censorship problem is really bad. Like they de-platformed President Trump while he was president.

It's nuts, right? Twitter ban Marjorie Taylor Green. Say whatever you want about her politics. I like her politics. Some people don't. But everybody should be able to agree that you can't. D platform a sitting member of Congress. I think she just posted a link to the, you know,

vaccine injury database too. So this is wild. And I think we've got to regulate these big communications companies, these social networks, as common carriers, you know. And we know how to do this. It's just a phone company. The phone company can't listen to you and I having a telephone call and decide they don't like the political content of what we're talking about and ban us.

Like, they're literally not allowed to disconnect our service for that political reason. And so why on earth would we not treat Twitter or Facebook the same way? Like, just hold them to the same standard as its own company. It requires zero innovation, just requires lots of political will. And there's other problems with big tech, too, of course, you know, and maybe some of those are better addressed through an antitrust lens. You know, the danger there is you just go and bust them up. And, you know, there's a slippery slope argument to that.

But then also, do you just create, you know, it's a whack-a-mole. You just create a lot more medium-sized problems. And some companies like Google, it's just a monopoly search engine, right? It doesn't even let itself to antitrust. What would that even mean? All their other businesses account for like zero of their revenue and they're fake. It's just a search engine. But I think the biggest problem with big tech, honestly, is their ability to swing elections.

I think Facebook materially just changed and probably, yeah, swung the 2020 election, censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. Yeah. And not just U.S. elections either. It seems like they feel they have a duty now to get involved in any kind of foreign election of any nature. Absolutely. And then what does Google do?

At least we know when Facebook censor something because the content's there, poof, it's gone. Like it's transparent in some sense. So here I am a year later complaining about it. But what about Google? Like anybody who knows anything about Google and how it works? and Silicon Valley knows Google's got the motive and the opportunity to, if they're subtle enough, and these are clever people, they can change the search engine algorithms weeks before the election in almost imperceptible ways, but in ways that move hundreds of thousands of votes.

And that's all you needed in 2020. And, you know, I think they got caught sleeping in 2016, didn't want to let it happen again. Can I prove that? No. But do I know a lot of ranking file engineers at Google who would, and do I suspect Google management wanted Trump again? Like, no, of course they didn't. So no one's got oversight over that.

No one in the capacity in the U.S. government does to its search algorithms in the weeks before an election. I think that's a huge problem. Yeah, a friend of mine once said on this show, simply Google determines what exists. And it's terrifying that they have the ability to determine, you know, what we can see and what's real and what's not. So, I mean, so your preferred view is the common carrier approach, at least for the big tech platforms. I mean, what's your level of optimism around quote unquote Web 3 as just a private sector competitive impulse, which reduces maybe some of the market power of these big tech firms?

I'm optimistic. I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket. You know, I do think we need legislative solutions. So that's what I'm going to go in and do, right? But it's also like let a thousand different versions bloom. I'm sick of the libertarian argument, like just go build your own Facebook. You know, well, people tried with parlor, right? I mean, you can't build your own in this current Web 2 model.

And so unless you want to build your own like, you know, just own every nut and bolt. Like we invested in Rumble, which I think is a really good company. and, you know, they really have this foresight in 2013 to really own as much of the stack as possible. So I think it's pretty good. But, like, it also took seven or eight years to build, and that's really hard and expensive. And, no, if you're parlor right now, like, you're just totally beholden to not only AWS, but of course, Apple and Google, you know, to just get people to download your app. And I think that's intolerable.

So to the extent we get decentralization with Web, three and meaningful alternatives, like, great, can't come soon enough. And my job is to sort of tag team it by getting into the U.S. Senate. And, you know, I mean, however optimistic you are about Web3, Facebook and Google are here to stay for quite a while. And so I'm going to work on legislative solutions, you know, to restrain them in a meaningful way as long as they exist. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, the libertarian argument is so hollow. I mean, just based on the empirical reality we saw with, you name it. You name your conservative platform, you gab, your parlor, you rumble.

You know, Gab, I think, ended up building the entire full stack of all internet services underneath them in order to just operate, whether it's hosting, registrar, DDoS protection, payment processing, they all had to find dedicated, sympathetic service providers or build their own. I mean, it's just unreal. It's unreal. It's the idea that you have to build every single rung on the ladder, every single piece of the stack, all the Legos, you've to home brew it. It completely eliminates all the efficiencies that we've made startups and entrepreneurship possible on the internet. It like regresses us.

So, yeah, I don't see that as, you know, a fair thing to say, you know, build your own. So speaking of which, you know, one of the, you know, one of the. maybe overlooked historically rungs or parts of that stack, but most fundamental is just simply payment processing. And, you know, in this country, we see a very explicit attempt to politicize finance, both, you know, high finance, like who has access to credit with the ESG movement in terms of, you know, eliminating spending on oil and gas, for instance. And then also, you know, in more quotidian ways, like which influence? have access to, you know, PayPal, Venmo, and payment processing generally.

And we actually saw, I don't know if you're familiar, probably are, we saw this institutionalized with this program under Obama called Choke Point, which effectively targeted conservative businesses and deplatform them from banks through the FDIC and the DOJ. And so that's sort of one of the arguments that people make in favor of stable coins, which is, you know, you're getting dollar denominated transactional units, but then they're sort of outside of the regulated bank sector. What do you make of stable coins generally? How do you see them fedding into the picture here? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I mean, I'm pro, right? And look, you're the expert here. I'm not. My read is stable coins, like we still don't know they're in such infancy, right? So thinking that we can identify some problem with them that's tractable and that would basically require legislation to regulate them right now, I think that's insane. I think that would stifle innovation. Obviously, you've got to protect consumers from outright scams, right? Just tether, seem like, like a great idea. I don't know, probably not. But does that mean that most other projects are scams? Like, no. And so I think this is the kind of regulatory approach we need. It's a healthy

respect for new technology. And you've got to pay attention. But Congress needs to understand if we just start shutting down, you know, experimentation and innovation, all we do is like we just force it outside of our borders, right? I want to pay attention to stable coins. I want to see if people's criticisms are valid. Does it actually weaken our ability to, you know, to impose sanctions and achieve geopolitical aims or something like that? I don't know. Maybe in theory, let's see how it works before we just rush to ban things. Yeah. You know, there's, you say they're in their infancy. There's over 150 billion of them. So they're at least toddlers. It's like, it's like, yeah, it's, it's not something that you need to nip in the butt. You couldn't even do that, right? I do think cats out of

the bag. When I mean infancy, I mean like, let's see how, just let's see what happens. I think we're early on. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't rush to try to put these things under the same financial regulatory structure that, like, you know, the dollar operates in. I just think that would be insane. Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny because like Elizabeth Warren was known as sort of the anti-big banks campaigner, but she's campaigning to put stable coins under the bank, even charter model, even though they're not engaging in banking. And it seems like an attempt to cause stablecoins to be much more tightly regulated by the government itself, which is, you know, it's paradoxical because the reason stable coins exist is because the U.S. bank sector is sclerotic

and highly regulated and highly surveilled. And so it's just an attempt to fold it back into the state apparatus. I mean, the state apparatus will love, they love the centralization, right? They love the state managed apparatus. Surprise, surprise. But I think what will work better for people over the long run is, yeah, open source decentralized projects. That's true in software. I don't understand why that wouldn't be true in finance. So, yes, lastly, and speaking of which, central bank digital currencies, obviously we're going to see China's, you know, digital yuan rolled out in full force at the Olympics here. That seems to be an explicit part of their desire to sort of de-dollarize the world, project power, and get an even tighter grip on surveillance and control.

Worryingly, a lot of Western central bankers seem to really find this idea appealing, including members of the Federal Reserve, although there's more discussion there still. What do you What are your views generally on central bank digital currencies? I think they're the government's dream, right? Like if you were making a pitch to the government, who's about to invent money for the first time, it's like, okay, well, what if you could control every single dollar, right? You know, who's got it at any given time, you know, how they spend it,

where they spend it, you can turn it off at the flip of a switch. Don't have to deal with cash or untraceable transactions or anything like that? I mean, it is a central banker's dream. and it's an authoritarian stream. And I think that's why you're seeing so much development coming from China on this stuff. You get the AI-powered surveillance society. You got your automated social credit score or whatever, backed by a currency that they can digitally control to extract total compliance.

So that's not a pipe dream. I do think that's coming. Hopefully that's not coming to the United States. And that's why I think we in the United States need to be working on legislation now to ensure that literally a totalitarian digital. financial system can't be built here. And so, yeah, maybe even if you banned a Fed, CBDC, like, the government at some point is going to try to build a digital dollar.

This is the question is, like, what kind are we going to have here? Is it going to be that, you know, sort of cryptocurrency and name only, but actually it's just a mirror image of China's centralized system? Or no, do we actually learn from actual innovation in crypto and say, like, zero knowledge proof systems that allow Americans to maintain their privacy and have a more cash-like financial system, frankly, where citizens are protected from government snooping. That is obviously more American, obviously more healthy, obviously more democratic, lowercase D. And that's how we have a good future. Like the Chinese future is not good. And we can learn from it. So I think you've cultivated

a bit of an audience in the crypto and Bitcoin community here. A lot of us are paying attention to your campaign. What would you say to that constituency? What's your message to them? Get you a U.S. senator who actually understands this stuff, who's committed to the same principles, who's interested in these same projects for the reasons you are. I think it's clear I'm not like an expert on this stuff,

and I intend to become expert and get a lot better. but I've got, I think, a unique combination of knowledge and interest in the space, but also a humility. You know, I don't have some desire to go in and regulate it out of existence. Quite the opposite. There will be regulation in crypto and around crypto. And the question is, what does it look like? You know, do you have an advocate who understands, like actual liberty is at stake here? And it's going to go and try to, you know, block the bad stuff.

and to the extent you got to do something, do the right stuff, well, that's me. And I think a lot of candidates are learning to say they're pro-crypto, but I think it's pretty easy for most of them just to memorize a few bullet points to say like, oh, I'm pro-Bitcoin. I think people could actually tell I am. And I hope that's interesting to people. Yeah, well, I don't know if that would stand up to scrutiny if they just gave lip service to it on this podcast.

Blake, I know you're busy. You're literally on the campaign trail, right? Literally. In transit, driving, I hope, safely concentrating two things at once. This has been really great. Thank you for some of your time and supporting you from here. So, good luck. Thank you for having me on.

I'd invite anybody who's interested to go to my website, blakemasters.com. If you've got some extra crypto sitting around, you can donate it to my campaign. US dollar coin is actually a great way that we could take donations, makes the FEC compliance a lot easier than converting in and out of Ethereum or whatever. So if you can spare a few, send them my way. Make some cool stuff happen. Awesome. Thanks, Blake.