On The Brink with Castle Island - Bruce Fenton on running for Senate in New Hampshire (EP.313)

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Longtime Bitcoiner Bruce Fenton re-joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Bruce's career and the events that led him to discovering Bitcoin Bitcoin's social layer and how Bruce has managed to stay close to the project through so many chapters of the journey His view on the tokenization of securities and why he is so optimistic on this technology Why Bruce decided to run for Senate and what issues he is fighting for Views on big tech, the future of the U.S. dollar and more His outlook for Bitcoin friendly regulation See Bruce's prior episode here. To learn more about Bruce visit brucefenton.com and visit Bruce on Twitter @BruceFenton

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Bruce Fenton, a longtime Bitcoins and now a Republican Senate candidate in the state of New Hampshire. Bruce has been on the podcast before, but I wanted to have him back on, talk about the Senate run, and talk about some of the big issues facing the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin community. So we talked about the status of the dollar as a global reserve asset, talked about Bruce's stance on Twitter and big tech generally, and talked about some of the regulatory considerations facing security tokens and Bitcoin. And most importantly, talked about what Bruce would do. if he was voted in to Senate. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Bruce Fenton. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific

inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with

a new round of concentrated easing. And print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. All right. Well, Bruce, a very special guest here. you for joining us again on the break. Nick had the pleasure of doing the first episode a couple of years ago with you. But it's great to see you again. Thanks for joining. Yeah, great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Lots changed, I guess, since the last time you're on. You're running for Senate, which is obviously big news. We're going to get into that. I would love to just start with a little bit of background on your career and how you got into the crypto industry. And then we'll get into the politics of it. My career in finance started when I was a little kid, really. My mom was a stock broker and financial advisor at firms like Payne Weber and Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. And so as a little kid, I was kind of raised on the floor of the brokerage firm playing around with the pink sheets and the quotron machine and learning about takeovers or whatever. And then at 14, I got my first job, stuffing envelopes or whatever. Even back then I was allowed to cold call. You're allowed to call

clients. They changed the rules. But you were allowed to do quite a bit. Even as an underage kid, I went through high school and I was in the Navy. And then I got my series seven when I was 19, quite young. That was kind of like my real beginning of my professional career. And I've been registered ever since in some form or another. So almost 30 years, 29 years, I've been licensed as a financial advisor. And in that time, over that 30 years, finance is very broad. So I've kind of done everything. I've dealt with very poor people doing some like global finance stuff for places like Senegal where people are like truly, truly poor. I've dealt with very basic American people, participants in large 401K plans who might have $50 a month, all the way up to big picture

economic consulting, something that I did over the last several years before Bitcoin, I was dealing with ultra-largellular types, working with sovereign funds, living in the Middle East half the year. And I've kind of done everything in between angel investing and all kinds of stuff with equities and stuff. So it's been a really fun career. But most recently, nine years ago, I discovered Bitcoin and I've been sort of full time in Bitcoin ever since then, whether it was executive director of Bitcoin Foundation or hosting the Stoci Roundtables and kind of like many people, just kind of being a member of the community, investing and speaking and talking about it and sharing the gospel of Bitcoin, so to speak. And then more recently than that, full circle back to

securities, a couple of years ago, we acquired an SEC registered broker dealer called Watchdog Capital. And our goal has been to make that a very Bitcoin friendly firm, a securities firm for the Bitcoin era, basically is how we describe it. So that's kind of my finance career. It's been wonderful to have a front row seat in this amazing Bitcoin ecosystem and see what's happened and what's gone on in the world. I'm very thankful and blessed to have had a pretty interesting career, I think. Totally interesting career. I'm curious when you first saw Bitcoin to click right away for you. Back then, you didn't see a lot of financial services types taking interest in Bitcoin. You're quite early. I think probably Barry Silbert and I were probably the only two people

who came from finance who were in at that early. It was pretty early. It was funny because a lot of people get a laugh out of this. I was considered like a suit wearing establishment guy. People are like, we don't need you and your Wall Street types in here. The cypherpunk. I didn't really get it originally. I had been a, as I mentioned, I've been trading stocks since I was crazy as it sounds nine years old. It's when I did my first trade. So I viewed it very much like a trade. I said, uh, buy this and make a little money and sell it. And I didn't really even know or care what it was. I just thought it was interesting and was messing around. But fortunately, when it did well, and like many people, I made mistakes. I think I sold right early on. I think I had

the drop from 100 down to 30 and I said, oh, boy, I better sell some and I bought some back. So I don't even know back then I didn't even track how many coins I had, but that was probably one of the worst trades I ever made in terms of net Bitcoin laws. I don't even remember the numbers, whether I had X number of coins or X times three, it didn't really matter much because I didn't value Bitcoins back then. But after the next round, when it went up, then I started saying, well, what is this? Why is it going up? Then I started seeing that people really believed it. And I want to say, well, how crazy are they and how foolish are they? So I made a big decision. And I remember agonizing about it. It was so funny. I missed the San Jose conference, but like the second major conference was in Vegas.

And I agonized. I'm like, is this just a total waste of time and 700 bucks or whatever for me to go and learn about this weird nerd money? Like, I'm not going to get any business out of it. I'm not going to get any clients for my investment business. And I really agonized about it. But I said, something tells me, I feel like this could be like the internet. I've got to go. And that was what really brought me on the path to try and understand it more and change. So I was a slow learner. It took me several months, probably six months. And I'm still learning now. I certainly didn't get it after six months. But after six months, I started viewing it more seriously. And over time, developed this narrative of this is how money works. And this is what money is. And this is why it's special. And this is why it's the future. I think back about my own journey in this industry, and I've just been wrong so many times. When I first started looking at Bitcoin, the first thing I thought about was post-trade settlement. And I was looking at colored coins and saying, oh, we're going to have stocks that trade on top of the Bitcoin network. And open assets protocol is going to be a big thing.

And I've found that a lot of people kind of get bucked off the Bronco, so to speak, along the way socially in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Obviously, Gavin is a perfect example of that. You had the block size wars that a lot of people kind of left the community or got ostracized. But you've managed to kind of hang on through a tremendous amount of volatility and cycles and just social up and downs. How have you managed to kind of hang in? I think Bitcoin will humble you. I wouldn't say that humility is my strength because I do have an ego like anybody.

But if you're not humble, it'll make you humble. I mean, there's been two or three times where I've been very humble. It was around Thanksgiving, was it 17, 18? I mean, I just got smacked and I ended up owing a bunch of taxes. Like a lot of people, I was trying to play the tax game. And if you have big gains and you don't pay them right up, you can end up owing a lot. And then the market goes against you. So there's been many times like that that have been humbling and also just kind of seeing it from a social angle.

I think you have to have some humility and just recognizing that there's always going to be new information out there. And you've got to be very cautious. So surviving is the key. If you just kind of keep your head down, big on risk management and being risk-overimilar. so I didn't take any crazy risks. I could have made a lot of money doing like an ICO or something like that. I don't know if I'd be talking to you right now if I had done that. I might have ruined my name, especially a bad ICU. I mean, what if most of them were? But suppose I made $50 million on some junky thing. And now I'd be dealing with lawyers and in trouble with the SEC, probably lose my investment license.

And I wouldn't be able to consider doing more of the fun things that I'm doing in life now. So you kind of got to watch your risk management, be careful, especially if you're not. it comes to accepting money from people or getting involved in questionable deals and just kind of keeping your head down and also being open-minded. I was a techie by normal human standards, but not by Bitcoin standards. I'm the guy who knows how to set up a WordPress blog and run a database. I'm not at them back. But that gave me a little humility too. I had so much to learn on the technical side that I was always kind of trying to learn and learn from other people. That was another thing that helped me kind of survive. But it's a tough road. A lot of ups and downs for sure.

It's a fascinating industry, and obviously there's so much more than Bitcoin now out there. We've seen this explosion and decentralized finance. You've seen this Web 3 thing really take hold over the past couple of years. What is exciting to you now in the industry apart from Bitcoin? And what's your sense of just where we are as an industry? For probably five years or so, I've been kind of a one-track mind on this, which is just my obsession with securities. Securities is, as I mentioned, since nine years old.

I mean, I've said this even a couple times today, just talking about Elon and stuff. It's sort of funny to me to think that I was that young, I've been doing this this long, but I really, really do care deeply about securities. I know it's a geeky weird thing. There's not a lot of like, I'm a Marvel Comics fan here. A lot of people do that, but there's not a lot of securities fans. I don't know anybody who kind of cares about securities as much as I do. They're just a beautiful invention. Equity is amazing. I mean, think about equity is such a great invention. It's like Wizard of Oz. You don't think of it as a great movie because it's just so iconic. Imagine inventing something as good as equity. It's just such a brilliant, brilliant thing. that's created so much good for the world. And now we see it with Twitter and everything else. It's a very, very exciting system that works well. It has good governance and it's created all, not some, but almost all of the great companies. And real estate, kind of anything, from your local little favorite hot dog stand to your favorite multinational, they're all equities. And if they're not, there's some kind of security. So securities are a big deal. And if we can make them work better, we make the world work better. And I'm convinced that the Bitcoin revolution is going to force,

securities to work better because I don't see a world where Gen Z is trading around Bitcoin on their phones and doing smart contracts and all this stuff. And then they're still doing, as we talked just a minute ago about ACATs and some of the old antiquated systems in our legacy financial world, it just has to modernize. It has to change. So securities are going to change. And I'm really excited about that. I think that they're going to work for, you mean, clearly they have to work for Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is to realize its goal of being money, it has to trade the biggest asset category. I mean, securities are way, way, way bigger than retail or coffee or anything else. So if we make securities work better, we make the world work better.

And that's really exciting to me because there's so many benefits for people and capital formation and businesses and jobs and everything else. I mean, I remember talking to you back in 2017 about ACATs and how this should work, how blockchain-based assets ought to function. It's been interesting since then. I mean, you talk about securities. We've seen a proliferation of unregistered securities offerings in this industry. Some have gotten cracked down on.

some haven't. And then you have the other side where you have a lot of entrepreneurs who want to do actual registered securities, but there hasn't been maybe the regulatory clarity that they were hoping for from the SEC around things like trading and custody and possession and control. What's your sense of just where we are from a regulatory perspective in terms of making some of the stuff possible? It's slow and unfortunate. I think I have a pretty nuanced view. I deal with these regulators all the time. On the one hand, it's easy to hate on them. There's a lot of people on Twitter and stuff, we just hate on the regulators with broad stroke. Some of the regulators aren't that bad.

I mean, securities regulators particularly, and some of these, even me as a very anti-regulation person, we do need some kind of regulations about private property. And I mean, if you invest $100,000 in a startup for 10% of the equity and then a month later they sell it to Microsoft for a billion, well, they owe you some money. They can't just say, sorry, Matt, you're out of love. You deserve right. on the one hand, there is a place for some of this. On the other hand, as most people know, it's gotten way out of hand. A lot of these regulations are very antiquated. Accredited investor rules

were invented in a days, not just before computers, but really before we're libraries. You could have somebody coming to you, and they did back then. They'd say, I'm a Rockefeller, and I'm selling you the London Bridge, and people had no way of verifying it was true or not. And they'd just send them money. And so they made these rules to try and protect people, but you don't really need them now. It's much, much easier for people to do due diligence. And so there's so many regulations that are outdated. And the thing that you see behind the scenes in the industry, you and I talk to a lot of people kind of off the record, there's a lot of regulated CEOs that are publicly, they don't want

to get in more trouble with the regulators by criticizing. But privately, there's quite a bit of frustration because there's companies that have tried to do the right thing. They have the licenses. They've spent, in some cases, millions on lawyers. And they just can't even get it done. And they're willing to say, kind of like, hey, we'll do whatever it takes. We just want to do these.

There's a product demand for these. products, there's a consumer demand for this and it's being done in other countries, how do we do it? And they can't get an answer. They get stonewilled by regulators. So that's unfortunate and that's got to change. I think it's going to change. I think that we're seeing part of a kind of sea change in the way the whole world works. The optimist in me says that we're going to move more towards decentralization and more freedom. It's the only way it kind of works. You're going to more authoritarianism, I just don't think it'll work. I think that competitive jurisdictions are going to lead the way and it's going to be easier and easier to do these kind of things.

And hopefully that'll be the case in the U.S. and everywhere else. And I guess that's a good dovetail into what you're doing next with your career here, which is you're putting your money where your mouth is and you're running for Senate in New Hampshire. So let's talk a little bit about that. And what spurred this decision? Yeah, I felt like I would regret it if I didn't try and make a change because our world is in trouble, our country's in trouble. I don't even recognize the America that I grew up in that I knew.

We've had freedoms eroded every year for 20 years, the Patriot Act. And I was telling just a college student. I'm not that old compared to a college student. But I live in a completely different lifetime. When I was 19, when I was in the Navy, I could jump on a plane and go to boot camp without an ID. I didn't even need an ID. Just a ticket. There was no metal detector.

There was certainly no TSA. The TSA didn't come along for years later. The same thing when I started my career as a broker. I could open a brokerage account over the phone. And I could say, hey, Matt, buy 100 shares of Microsoft. and you didn't even have to pay for a week. You had five-day settlement, and I could just open it over the phone. I didn't need your social security number.

I didn't need your date of birth. I didn't need your ID. I could just open the account. And then it was right around when I started in the early 90s that they said, oh, now you need their ID. And then you needed their social. And then a few years later, they said you needed a driver's license. And the older brokers went nuts.

These people have been doing this for 30 years. They said, what are you talking about driver's license? Driver's license to buy stocks? What do you mean, driver's license? What next? You're going to tell us to file their taxes and report what they've earned to the IRS? I mean, this is absurd. It would be just like somebody going into a gas station today and saying, oh, you need a driver's license by gas or you need a driver's license. Say, what are you talking about? But now we accept it. Now there's a whole new generation. People, even as old as their 30s, but certainly people in their 20s, they don't even know. They think it's always been like that. Like it's some sort of birthright of government to know everything about it. everybody and where they are and where their money is. So we've seen creeping tyranny, but over the last two years, it's ratcheted up to a level that we couldn't have even imagined before. So we've got to set this right. We've got to take our country back and we've got to embrace freedom and our

constitutional principles. It's fascinating. And you're starting to see more and more, I would say, crypto advocates moving into the space. Was the crypto side of this any part of your decision? And I'm curious, if you win, what are you looking to do in the crypto space? It's funny because part of the decision process was like, what can I do to serve good in the world? What can I do to make the world a better place? What can I do to further the things that I care about peace and human rights and freedom? And the biggest answer to me is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really important. And if we can fix the money, we can fix the world. We can stop the violence and the tyranny that's caused by fiat and all of the other problems. But additional lens on that, I say, well, how can I help

Bitcoin the most? I think holding high federal office, I could help Bitcoin quite a bit. as a pure through and through Bitcoin or not somebody who just says it for the fundraising, whatever. I'm a true believer. And I think I could even influence people on the other side of the aisle. I'm certainly an expert on it. Even my biggest enemy would agree that I do no Bitcoin. I am a bitcoiner.

So even people on the other side of the aisle, I would hope maybe it's naive, but I would hope that I could try and educate, even somebody like Elizabeth Warren that I have nothing in common politically with to be a voice of a bitcoiner might further Bitcoin. And also I'm a fighter. So I would fight for Bitcoin. I'm also somebody who doesn't really compromise. I don't really need this or really honestly even want it. But I want to help America. I want to help Bitcoin. And I want to further these cyphor punk ideals and freedom ideals, liberty ideals.

So I think if I were to win, then I would certainly hope that I'm going to do a lot for Bitcoin, both publicity-wise and talking about it and trying to hold back any kind of tyranny. There's quite a few tyrannical kind of things. And we may see more once we have this executive order to explore Bitcoin goes further. We might have even more bad ideas or probably certainly going to have more bad ideas. So to be there to kind of stop that, I think is something is a very high calling, in my opinion. It's something that hopefully I could do a good amount to help the world. It's certainly been great to see Representative Emmer and also Senator Lummis come out very actively basically in the same camp as you and start to fight for some of these things. You brought up Elizabeth

Warren and I'm down here in Massachusetts, so we're dealing with Warren as well as Stephen Lynch that just continually are proposing things that really are frankly just pretty hostile to the industry. What's your sense of the counter argument here? Why are they proposing to restrict the growth of this burgeoning industry? Status is going to state. People who believe in the state as a solution, like Elizabeth Warren, it's just a fundamental ideological difference that I have. I think her values are against the American ideals of freedom and liberty and giving

people human choice. I don't think our founders envisioned. You could have gone to the founders and said, hey, there's going to be this new neat technology that does XYZ. and they could have understood that within minutes. They don't even need to know what the technology is, but I don't think they would have been in favor of big, heavy-handed, thousand-page federal regulations governing these things.

The idea that central planners, no matter how smart they are, whether they're Fousy or Elizabeth Warren or Cheeshing-Ping, no matter how smart somebody is or how smart they think they are, they're not as smart as the crowd. They don't know more than every American. They don't know more than every single person in New Hampshire. And so it's arrogant and narcissistic and sometimes driven by bad intentions that they think that they can control these kind of things

that they just really can't. They don't know better. Bitcoin can regulate itself through the market and market forces, and it's done a really great job at that. So it's a fundamental difference of thinking that government should be in control. There's people who want to be in control. Remember, Elizabeth Warren gave $800 billion of tax money in the tarp bailout to crony bankers for bad ideas. She didn't even reward the good ones. She rewarded the ones who were foolish, who made poor decisions. They want that kind of control because it gives them power. And I want the opposite. I want to have less control and less power. I want to have these people be less powerful. And that's the way that I think our country should work. And I think that works better.

So take me behind the curtain a little bit. So my understanding of political races is limited to like the West Wing and House of Cards at this point. So you decide to run. What do you do now? What's the organization look like? What does the next couple months look like? I mean, I'm kind of breaking every rule that they say to do because I don't want to do things the way that everybody does it. And it's fascinating. There's a lot of people that come in. There's a lot of consultants and others that kind of tell you what to say and how to shape your image and shape your message and what to dress and how to wear. And they spend a lot of time and money on your photo ops and they want to bring your kids into it and stuff like that. And it's just not me. When I was a little

kid in fifth grade, they said that elections are about a couple people putting out their ideas forth and the people pick who the ideas they like better. And that's simple. But it's, not what we do anymore. And my ideas are my ideas. They're not for everybody. I'm not for everybody. But I am who I am. And I just want to say what I say and believe what I believe. And I have faith in the voters. I know there's a lot of people that agree with me. And I know there's a lot of people hungry for this. And from a personal standpoint, I just don't have the energy. It's a big ask for me to run. And one of the biggest decisions was, I have a good chance of winning this. I had to do I really want this job? I love Bitcoin. I have the best gig in the world.

I have the best job I could ever imagine. I've spent 20 years designing a lot. I have to do I'm life and a day-to-day work-life balance. I have a beautiful farm. I go for long walks with my dog. I time when my calls are. I have it perfect. And so to make a sacrifice to go down there, do that to a place that I don't like to be around a lot of people I don't like doing things that I don't want to do, it's a big ass. But I'll do it. I'll do it for America, especially if the voters want me to. But in addition to that, I'm not going to also sell my soul and also not be myself because I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't be happy doing that. I'd be absolutely miserable. I don't really like meetings, for example. I would not be happy if my campaign

consisted of three, four meetings a day with people shaping, oh, you're going to be talking to Matt Walsh. You've got to hit this issue. No, it's not me. I think people can see that. They see the scripted way things are. So I'm going to try and do things very modern, very scientific, very much like a startup. There's a lot of wasted money in campaigns. There's two kind of campaigns. People that cold call for the consultants to raise money and people who sell fund. And both of them get soaked. They waste a lot of money. I'm lucky in coming from kind of a startup background, especially in crypto where we're very efficient and very effective. I've picked up a lot of tricks and tips over the years of everything from how to hire freelancers to what's more efficient for this or what I know my own work style is

or when I know I have the most energy or these kind of things. So I hope to kind of mix up the system. I had a diehard Democrat tell me that they didn't agree with a lot of my positions, but they certainly hope that I can shake up the election process because the incentives are broken and kind of mixing that up a little bit. So I'm going to try and reinvent the rulebook, which, by the way, 2020 is the perfect time for anybody to do that in any industry. Now's the time when we can write what the future is going to be. Absolutely. And you're someone that's obviously very skilled at social media. You've been using that a lot throughout your career. I'd imagine that's going to continue to be a big part of your campaign. So let's talk a little bit about Twitter

and how you're using it. And then I'm going to start to ask you about Elon because today's been a big day for Twitter. I like Twitter. I was very, very disappointed with the censorship. I was very upset about the de-platforming of Trump. When he was deplatformed, I almost deleted my account. I changed my name to like a big long number. It was like 2837-65-21. And I made my picture black. And I tweeted a bunch of controversial stuff criticizing Twitter. I ended up losing like 5,000 followers. I was very upset about it. I was kind of almost going to burn up my account. But it is such a great tool, particularly in our space. It's such a great way to contact people. There's so many good folks on there. I do get good information. I do find that it helps me sharpen my opinions. People will challenge you. If you say something incorrect on Twitter, you're going to get called out on it. The character limit is a way to sort of make your thoughts a little bit concise. You don't ramble on Twitter. So there's a lot of benefits of it. And for that reason, I've stayed. Sometimes I feel like a fool and I feel like a little bit of a sucker because it is a censored platform. And I'm very against that. But overall, it's a pretty good tool. And I like using it. I'm going to keep using it the same way I have.

I'm still talking Bitcoin. I'm still making jokes and just kind of being myself. I'm not going to change it over to some kind of scripted thing. I'm certainly not going to give control over to some high paid media person. I am who I am. In this campaign, I'm working hard to be as direct and accessible. So not just Twitter, but Twitter spaces, clubhouse, Zoom meetings, anything like that, where there's a lot more ways for voters.

A voter can call me up on the phone or a voter can go and do a Zoom call or a FaceTime call. I'd be willing to do a FaceTime call for as few as five people. You can just have some friends at your house say, hey, let's do a FaceTime with this candidate. We didn't have that technology 10 years ago. So that's very exciting. And as far as Elon, I love shareholder activism. It's a great way of governance. I'm really excited that he's done this because I think it can shake things up and get the incentives aligned.

Hopefully every company that's being driven by kind of woke ideology, hopefully they're all sort of on notice that you've got to put your owners first. The shareholders are the owners and they're the ultimate boss. What's your outlook for platforms that are community-owned competing in social? Thus far, I'd say that's been pretty difficult, these blockchain-based community-owned social networks. I guess it's really been the user interfaces that haven't been up to snuff compared to Web 2. Are you bullish long-term on that category? Something has to change.

So either the incumbents have to change. There's got to be something. There's such a pent-up demand. I'm really surprised and disappointed that there hasn't been something. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard. But the deck is stacked against it. There's huge market share and other issues that you have to overcome. And also just kind of the system going against. Parlor was shut down and they have difficulty getting on Amazon and there's lawsuits and all kinds of other things.

But it's surprisingly hard. I feel like if we just had a critical mass, maybe Elon is somebody who's famous enough that he could set up his own network. If his Twitter bid fails, it sounds like he might sell the shares and $9 billion is a lot of money. And Elon's a big name. If he could go to a new network and if he got Trump or somebody else like that. I was surprised. I thought the minute that Trump got de-platformed, I thought he'd be on a new network within a week or two, and I figured everybody would just go over there. But it is harder. It's harder than it seems to make a competitor. I wouldn't invest in a competitor. I'm sure you get pitches all the time. I mean, everybody in the world is trying to build a Twitter killer. And I'm just not versed in it enough to know why, but it sure does seem to be a harder thing than you would think.

It seems like something that I could do with a couple upwork engineers in a couple hundred grand. I mean, I'm not naive enough to think that's the case because very knowledgeable people with a lot of resources have tried and for whatever reason it hasn't taken off yet. But that has got to change. A censored platform that has people working from home watching Zoom with their latte deciding what Bruce can see and what is true isn't a workable platform. It's just not free information has got to be out there and that's got to rise to the top. So it's inevitable that it will change. I'm sure that within the next year or two, it just has to. One of the core issues you'd be facing here, if elected, would be around just the power of the tech industry writ large and around some of the monopolistic tendencies in that market, some of the censorship that's gone on. There's a lot of issues there.

So what do you imagine kind of facing there? And I'd be curious just your views on just big tech more broadly and your policies towards that category. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because ideally, as a libertarian, I want to stay out of big tech and out of every other corporation. I don't want to be telling corporations what to do and say, you can't, they should have the right to delete all the Republicans if they want. They should have the right to de-platform the president or anybody else if they want. However, it is a bit nuanced in that you could make an argument that these are kind of like a public square. But I think the even more solid argument now that's really easy to fix that I would try and work on is the government direct involvement when you have the CDC saying these accounts are responsible for misinformation or this thing is true and this isn't. And they're pressuring the tech companies. That could be stopped.

government shouldn't be doing anything with these tech companies. They should get out of the way. And that goes for competitors as well. There shouldn't be any regulations preventing somebody from creating a competing network. Everybody should be able to kind of do these things. But if that doesn't work, I do legislation as a last resort, especially telling companies what to do. But the status quo is not acceptable. I mean, we can't just have a small group of elites telling everybody else what is true or what isn't true. So we have to do everything we can to ideally just tear down regulations, tear down government involvement. I don't want the CDC to even exist, let alone be telling news sources and social media what's true and what isn't. And having politicians say what's true. I mean, just think about that. People in crypto think about OPSEC and security and how things can break. It's just not a workable

system to say like, oh, we're going to let politicians decide what's true or not. Like, gee, what could ever go wrong with that? About a million things. I think it's just crucial that we get government out of it. I think one of the first things I would try and do is reduce or eliminate any government involvement. Government shouldn't be talking to social media, really at all. Just kind of stay out of it, let them do their own thing. And hopefully let the markets correct, tear down the regulations as much so that a scrappy competitor has a real fair chance. At least there's no regulations preventing them from building a better Twitter or building a more free platform. That makes sense. I mean, one of the other issues that you'd be faced with here is just around the role of the U.S. dollar, both in the United States and then internationally. And so the status of the dollar as a global reserve asset has certainly been something people

have talked about a lot in the context of sanctions over the past few weeks in months and the fact that apparently now we have the ability to just withdraw foreign currency reserves, for instance. What is your kind of take on where we are in a week where we've had a record inflation print and just the future of the dollar and how to think about that? It sounds a bit radical to many. I'm sure maybe not in a lot of your listeners, but to most people it would sound pretty radical in that I don't think focusing on the dollar is necessarily in our long-term interests. I'd rather focus on Bitcoin. As cliche as that sounds, Bitcoin is better money.

And we can hold the dollar up on a pedestal and say, oh, it's the dollar, as if it's some kind of patriotic thing that we're waving to the flag or whatever. But we're really not. It's a scam coin. It's a scam that cronies print and give to their friends. And we would never tolerate this and never take it seriously if this was in our industry. In crypto, something with the same policy that the Fed has and Janet Yellen has, it would be laughed out of the room. If somebody came out with an ICO white paper and said, oh, yeah, I'm going to issue a $50 trillion coin. And what's the issuance mechanism? It's a meeting.

Who's in the meeting? We are. I mean, nobody would do that. I mean, it's just, it would be lower than the worst standard. So really, well, what is it then? I mean, if it's this kind of scammy sort of weak asset, what is it? It's a lot of marketing and a lot of hype. and this idea that it's some sort of patriotic thing and it's tied. And I'm very much aware.

The reason I say it sounds extremely, I'm certainly not discounting the very, very significant issues of geopolitics and how the dollar works. And I lived in the Middle East. I'm very aware of the petrodollar and all of the ramifications of this. But again, long term, long term, the priority has got to be good money. You've got to have good money. And we have bad money right now. The fiat is broken. It's junk. Having good money is a much better foundation. So as extreme as it may say, I would much rather focus on Bitcoin. Being not a cheerleader for the dollar doesn't mean you're not a cheerleader for America. I believe our values. I'd rather export our values and go back to our own core values so that we're the freest country in the world. We're much more free than we

are now. People have freedom and reform securities laws so that everybody can start a business easier and you can fund businesses easier. These kind of things, we can be a shining example. We've been a shining example and we've exported our culture and our movies and our technology. We have Apple computer and we have Hollywood. We have a lot of amazing things that we can do outside of the government and outside of the dollar where a large country with a lot of natural resources, I'd like America to be the leader, but not necessarily because of the dollar, because of better ideas and more freedom. And I think very few people would remember or have studied that it hasn't always been the case, that the dollar is the global reserve asset, for instance, and that America did not even have a central bank when it was formed.

And so I think what you're saying resonates with me, at least, that certainly it's not an incompatible thought to have leadership. but not have the global reserve asset. Yeah, they play a lot of games with it. It's a big shell game of weird shady things, the whole tarp bailout, and then loaning money at low interest to the banks, and they get it all back and all of these kind of things, how BlackRock gets all of this money from COVID of all things. Well, okay, there's this flu thing that we thought was going to kill everybody, and it's not as dangerous as we thought.

So let's give BlackRock $500 billion. And then BlackRock goes and buys their own funds with it. And then their own funds go and buy their own assets that they have their own vested interested in. That's just a weird game that anybody should look at and say, oh, that doesn't sound quite right. Why do we need government involved? And it's not like they've done a great job. It's not like anybody's sitting there saying, well, their geniuses. Look how smart they are.

They're not that smart. They made very bad decisions and shown that they have poor decision-making ability. So what do we need them to do money for? If you put 100 Democrats, 100 Republicans, 100 libertarians in a room and asked them what you think the ideal role of government is, libertarians say nothing. The Republicans and Democrats would differ, whether it's border security, or free health care or whatever, but probably almost none of them would say, oh, we need the dollar. We need monetary policy. We just don't need government to do it. People can decide what money is without

somebody in some fancy office in Washington, D.C., telling them what's money. You and I have decided that Bitcoin is money and a million other people have as well. That's at the end of the day, just like thousands of years before us, people decided that gold was money. They didn't need Janet Yellen to tell them that gold was money. The properties of the money decided what money is. And that's what we're seeing with Bitcoin right now. So there's almost nothing government can do to stop the inevitable. People are going to move towards better money. So as they say, all politics is local. We've been talking about some big national issues, some big geopolitical issues. What do people in New Hampshire care about? And what are you running this race on? I care a lot. And I think a lot of the people in New Hampshire

care about the last couple years of tyranny, the last 20 years of creeping tyranny and the last two years of extreme tyranny. Lockdowns, mask mandates, movement passes. These things have no place in a free society. They're completely unworkable. They're exports from China and an exports from a failed system. Never in any of our emergency plans with the CDC, no matter how severe a virus was, never did we have plans to shut down the country and prevent people from going to their gym and telling restaurants that they have to close after being in business for 20 years. That was never a thing. It was driven by fear and hysteria and authoritarianism. And it can never happen again. And we've got to roll this back. So that's a big one. Peace overall, peace on a domestic level, whether that's being more

peaceful about things like drug laws where we're doing violent enforcement and throwing people in prisons over a forbidden plant. I'm against that. And I'm also against being policemen of the world and bombing people all over the world. So I'm for peace. And then the third big thing is economics. I think I understand economics and money. So having good sound policies. And I think the regular voters, I've talked to a lot of regular folks in New Hampshire. Number one question people ask me is about Bitcoin. Should I buy some, Bruce? That's the number one thing. And that's because they care. and they see what's happening with inflation. Inflation is the number two thing people ask about.

Why is my lumber and my gasoline? Are you going to do something about the gasoline prices or something like that? So those are the big issues. And I think people care a lot about that. There's a lot of people who care deeply. The people who have their businesses shut down, they're never going to forget this. And they're never going to forget.

They're going to go to the polls in November. And they're going to make a change nationwide. I think we're going to have a wave of change federal state across the board in the whole country. Certainly seems like that. Bruce, where can we send people to learn more about your campaign, get involved? Where do you recommend people go? Sure, thank you. I've gone with my website. It's hopefully the least censorable thing, Bruceventon.com. I've made that website myself for 20 years, and it's the same. So it looks a little

different than your typical campaign sites, a lot more personal. I've got 20 years worth of photos and blog posts. And I think anybody spending 10 minutes on that site can get a pretty good idea of who I am and what I stand for. And if I'm the kind of person that they want representing them, my social media handles are the same, Bruce Fenton.com. Anybody who likes these ideas or just thinks that they should be talked about or thinks they're interesting, I urge them to talk to New Hampshire voters. If you know people in New Hampshire, you share it. Go on your LinkedIn, go to your friends, your family, and say, hey, check this guy out.

Maybe they'll vote for me in the primary or the general election. But spreading the word and thinking about these principles of liberty and freedom, even aside from my run, supporting liberty and freedom and constitutional values is really key. So I urge everybody to vote. And I urge people to run. Here, I'm doing it. Why not? Give it a shot. We've got to take our country back. It's very, very crucial times that we're in right now. And we have a bright future ahead. If we do the right thing, we get the right people in there. We embrace our core values and we do it in the right way. I'm really optimistic about what the future looks like. Well, I love having you on the podcast.

Thanks for all you've done for Bitcoin and continue to do. Wish you success. And hopefully we can do this in person next. You too. Thanks so much. Hope to see you up here in New Hampshire this summer, maybe. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.V.C. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to on the brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.