The Dispatch Podcast - A Libertarian's Journey to Trump | Interview: J.W. Verret

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

J.W. Verret, an associate professor at George Mason University, joins Jamie to discuss his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed—entitled "From ‘Never Trump’ to ‘Encore’"—which details how he went from endorsing Joe Biden in 2020, supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in this year’s GOP primary, and ultimately backing Donald Trump’s reelection. The Agenda: —DEI in the military —Anti-cryptocurrency on the left —Inflation and a ballooning national debt —The crisis at the border —Trump's threat to our institutions Show Notes: —Verret's profile at George Mason —Verret's profile at The Federalist Society Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is J.W. Verrett, a law professor at George Mason School, the Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he focuses on financial regulation and cryptocurrency. But the reason he is on today is an op-ed he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, from Never Trump to Encore, where he says as a Never-Trumper, he has decided he's coming around to voting for Donald Trump in 2024 if he is the nominee. So we focus on that op-ed and I press him on many of the points he makes there. And I think we have a pretty lively and interesting discussion. He also gets into his background a little bit right at the top so you understand a little bit more of his bio. But without further ado, let's get right to it. Here is Professor J.W. Verrett. J.W. Verrette, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for having me. I want to start by just getting a little bit of your background.

We're going to go into the op-ed that prompted me to reach out to you, to have you on the show, which is basically why you as a former Never-Trumper are prepared to vote for him if he's a nominee in November. But can you start just for the listeners who may not know you giving a brief summary of your background, your professional background, and then also a little bit of your journey. In the op-ed, it mentions that you supported the Ukraine impeachment, but just kind of your never-Trump journey, were you never-Trumped or was it after that? So just to give them a little background. Sure, glad to. So my primary job is I teach corporate securities banking law and forensic accounting here at the George Mason, Clinton and Scalia Law School. So corporate securities banking law scholars, my primary day job and getting involved in financial regulatory policy is what I sort of do on the side. I've done a couple of years in the House Financial Services Committee as an advisor to the then chairman, Jeb Henseling, who was very much a Tea Party kind of chairman. And we worked on the Republican fight in that

space is just dealing with the post-Dodd-Frank environment and fighting things like bailouts and over-regulation. I've done some of that a couple years, a term of service doing that. I've worked on a couple of campaigns. I describe myself as a libertarian as an increasingly curmudgeon libertarian over the years, and I've come to understand the libertarian view that neither party is really my party. I tend to align more with the Republican Party on most issues, but I wouldn't call it my party, certainly. And yeah, so I'm also practicing lawyer. I help defend clients against SEC regulation, and I served an expert witness in some financial regulatory cases as well. I worked on the campaigns of every nominee for the last couple of cycles. I worked on the Romney

pre-transition team. There's a transition team funded even though you, you know, even though you don't win that these days the both candidates major party candidates transitions are funded so they can be ready to go so I worked in the Romney pre-transition team and I worked on the Trump pre-transition team briefly but left pretty quickly before he was elected because I just didn't uh it wasn't for me when the Mueller report happened I wrote up that I took uh mola's report seriously and I think he found some things that were very concerning so I wrote up my concerns about that and about the Ukraine issues about the issues that that later came into the subsequent impeachment there and endorsed Biden because I thought that he would be the kind of guy we had seen his whole

career. Biden, the moderate. Biden, the friend to Mitch McConnell who reached across the aisle on so many things. Biden, the Delaware guy who protected what for me is very important in financial regulatory and corporate law issues, he took a pro-Delaware perspective, which is generally a pro-business perspective. And man, he is not that guy anymore. Yeah. And we're going to get into that. But just to clarify, so were you, did you become a never-trumper after the Mueller report, or did you not vote for Trump in 2016, or did you vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016? No, I was not a never-trumper. I think I voted for the conservative candidate, but I live in D.C., so it doesn't matter. My vote, if you're not a Democrat, your vote doesn't matter in D.C., obviously.

So, no, I did not vote for Hillary Clinton, and I would never, in a million years, vote for Hillary Clinton. Did you not vote for Trump either in 2016, though? No, I think I voted for the conservative party candidate. Okay. Then you were briefly on the transition team left, and you voted for Biden in 2020. I didn't vote. I couldn't bring myself to pull the lever for Biden, but I did write an outfit endorsing him as the better choice because I thought he'd be a moderate. And he let me down. And did you have a candidate you liked in this Republican primary? I was a supporter and a bundler for Ron DeSantis up until the point when he dropped out. And is that when, when he dropped out, was that kind of what prompted you to write the op-ed?

You thought the writing was on the wall? And then you would have a choice again this November between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That's right. Let's go in the op-ed. And I think I'm going to quote about 90% of it. So to the extent I leave anything out, I think it's not very significant. Your op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal from Never Trump to Encore. I'm sure you're not the one who titled it, but that was the title of it.

What I had suggested was, never Trump or Never More, which I thought would have been a Bored title. Wouldn't do it. You write at the top, I think starting at the second sentence or so, like many voters in 2020, I hope Joe Biden would govern reasonably from the center. Instead, his administration has sought the furthest reaches of leftist ideology. What were once fringe progressive talking points have become national policy. Even the military has been infected with the divisive and unyielding woke.

doctrine. As someone who took his son out of a school in D.C., because I thought it was ideological, you might call it woke, one of the elite preschools in D.C. I have no issue with you that there is an issue of woke indoctrination in certain parts of the school system. I am intrigued, though, in terms of the farthest fringe of leftist ideology, you think that the Biden administration, to the extent they have, are on this leftist prism, which you know, he is obviously left of center. They're on the very fringe, the Bernie Sanders fringe, the AOC fringe. That's where you see the Biden administration.

And if so, how so? So I can just say from, you mentioned the reference to defense, these woke issues hitting the defense department. I'll just relay a story. Oftentimes anecdote is how we understand things. And so this is how I understand this. I have a friend who I spend some time with regularly, is in the National Guard, and he said, you know, they go up for their, their regular weekend

trainings. And he said in the most recent one, he said, so two days. And I said, you know, in my head I have in mind the stuff from the commercial that you guys were out there doing calisthenics and you're climbing and you're shooting and you're doing the things you do to stay sharp as a soldier. And he said, oh my God, man, that is not what we do. He said, he said, about half of it about about one of the full two days was all day long DEI training so you imagine just a giant room of officers and enlisted men watching trainings about DEI about diversity equity and inclusion and I thought what what what Eisenhower do if he saw what George Patton do if he saw that that is what the modern military has become I can't that that's that's I don't know what

to say about something like that. I mean, that is troubling if that's what they're spending most of their time doing. And I remember General Millie went before one of the committees and someone brought up something not quite like that, but something similar, what you would consider woke on a military base. And he said, that shouldn't have been there. I don't know why it was there. That does not sound like an army policy or military policy. That anecdote, you think that, I mean, do you believe or have reason to believe that that is

extrapolated across the entire military and that most of the time our military is, you know, in DEI training? I mean, I think so. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a defense policy expert. But if you want to ask the reason why I put that in the op-ed, that anecdote is the reason. Well, I would say if that is actually true, I would be very concerned about that as well. I do wonder whether that is an anecdote or something that is taking more time than training

flying planes or whatever. Beyond that, the left is fringe. I mean, I think, and I'll bring up at the end, a couple things I'm surprised you didn't mention that I would have brought up if I was writing an op-ed like this about the Biden administration. I think of the Chips Act. I think of the infrastructure bill. Those seem pretty center politics, even if I probably think they're corporate giveaways in some extent. And as a libertarian, you might think that as well. But these are very common, moderate positions that got bipartisan support. Well, yeah, the infrastructure, bill included a number of riders that were completely unrelated to the bill that were gifts to the far left. I can really only speak to my specific policy area of financial regulation, but in that area, one of the greatest threats to what I view is the future of private money, cryptocurrency, was included in the infrastructure bill, a broker reporting bill that effectively means that any, think of the typical developer in crypto as one individual, or a small team of a couple of individuals who can, and this is what's really interesting

about this technology, who can create new software code that can create something users can grasp onto that can suddenly be a program that will custody billions of dollars worth of assets. This happens all the time in crypto. All you do is you write code, you create a new piece of software, you put it in the Apple store, and Apple lets it, you know, does a, does a a brief review of it to make sure it's not some hacker thing and then it's downloadable and if it happens to take fire suddenly it can be a means by which individuals are transferring a lot of doubt but all that you've done as a developer is you've written code you put some math down on paper on your computer that can allow an app to work and you send it to the Apple store

and then that's it you're done and then okay maybe you do some uh tech support of the app later on, but in a small team of a couple of people. Anyone like that under the new broker reporting rules is a stock broker, and they have to have the full compliance requirements to the IRS of a stock broker, which is going to kill projects like that. And I think a former, the Trump's IRS commissioner came out with some pretty harsh comments about that reporting rule, and the fact that it went beyond even what was contemplated in the statute.

So that's just a little piece of the giant. infrastructure bill, that's a little piece in my area and my window into the microcosm of this. And I just see that little rider in the infrastructure bill potentially destroying a multi-trillion dollar asset class. Well, let me skip right to that part in the op-ed where you mentioned the financial regulations. You write, my work in the financial regulation and cryptocurrency has shown me the havoc wrought my policy seemingly chosen not to foster economic growth, but to appease the likes of Elizabeth Warren, who has enjoyed outsized influence over Mr. Biden's nominations. One nominee to run the leading banking regulator, the Office of Controller of the Currency,

was an open member of a Marxist group and called for the Federal Reserve to provide retail bank accounts. It took a few brave Democrats to stop her nomination. Is this motivated more about your specific field that you've seen that efforts by the Biden administration to squash, I guess, cryptocurrency technology. And as a corollary to that, is that really a leftist position or is there bipartisan elements trying to shut this down? I think of Charlie Munger, the late Charlie Munger, who was obviously very vociferous in his hatred of this space and Warren Buffett, Jamie Diamond and others. It does seem that there is a kind of a bipartisan consensus, or at least one wing of each party that really dislikes crypto. I wouldn't agree with, I, I, I, I,

I would be more precise than that. I would say the visceral anger, anti-crypto anger, comes from the hard left. There are a couple of Republicans that might join some moderate bills on crypto regulation, but for the most part, most Republicans, most mainline Republicans and most liberty-minded Republicans are very pro-crypto. There's a few Democrats that are pro-crypto as well, but the visceral hatred, you know, use every tool at the government's disposal to destroy this nascent technology because it is pro-freedom technology generally comes from the hard left and it focuses around elizabeth warren basically can i push

you on that a little bit though i mean charlie munger used the the term rat poison and i wouldn't call charlie munger a conservative he's probably a moderate of some sort warren buffett i mean they seem to viscerally hate this uh they believe that the only use for it uh is you know uh illegal nefarious means to to transfer money, as not to be able to, to do it discreetly for money laundering and whatnot. So I mean, I'm not taking a side or the other. I am maybe a little bit of a skeptic of crypto, but it does seem it's not just kind of Marxist revolutionaries investing regulators. It does seem there's a constituency on both sides who just think that cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and all this is no good. I think the idea that we should,

that the federal government should abuse its regulatory power to cut off access to bank accounts, to treat individuals who are using software as if they are broker dealers. I think that idea comes from Elizabeth Warren channeled through the likes of Gary Gensler and Michael Zhu at the OCC. I think that is an accurate statement. Now, you might also say we can talk separately about there's crypto skepticism out there, generally about the technology. I don't know why you would ask Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger

about tech issues. This is fundamentally a tech issue. I don't know why you would ask them what the future of open source software development is and is it going to be funded by crypto. That's not a question that they know anything about. So I don't know why people keep asking them that. I don't know why people keep asking Jamie Diamond what he thinks about crypto because

at least for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the idea of getting rid of the middleman in finance. It's not something Jamie Diamond is ever going to support. You don't ask the horse and buggy operator. What do you think about this newfangled car? He's going to say, it's very dangerous. You should use traditional horses only. And we can also get into a third discussion about how I'm often a skeptic of lots of crypto projects. And I tend to focus only on a couple of them like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Atlanta that have at least a couple thousand

developers actively working on those projects. But those are different conversations than what concerns me, which is the abuse of the regulatory process. process to try to stamp out this technology. And that comes from, it comes from Liz Warren, channeled through the White House, channeled through former Liz Warren advisors who went into the White House National Economic Council. Pretty much, it's an open secret in Washington that the deal was when Liz Warren dropped out of the Democratic primary race, she sat down with the campaign, the Biden campaign, and she said, I want to pick the Fennreg nominees. And they said, deal, you got it, Liz. And they stuck to the deal. I mean, it's pretty apparent that they stuck to the deal.

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Let me go back to one of the lines that I skipped over to get to the crypto. You write, the economic landscape has been equally distressing inflation coupled with ballooning national debt and deficit. it. Four more years of this means a bleak future for my children. I guess I would just pose to you, it does seem to me that despite the inflation during the early years, which probably had something to do, maybe not entirely do with the early stimulus that Biden administration pushed through. I mean, inflation has remarkably come down. The economy has not gone into a recession and that the economic outlook at this point looks pretty good. Disagree or agree?

uh this is one of the primary points of feedback i got from the op-ed well the other is just the visceral hatred hate mail i got a lot of that after this op-ed it's kind of funny now because i used to get that from the trumpers i now i get it from the democrats and from the trumps so i get from both sides now i'm going to come in a faculty office to see my inbox i'm like all right what's going on you know so so there's the sum that i make fun of lSU and make fun of how i look and all that but on the economic side yes that's a that's a point of feedback i've gotten quite a bit everything's fine so what are you talking about um so here's here's my i wouldn't say everything's fine i mean i think inflation you know prices are not go haven't gone back to where they were uh prices

are still high but in terms of what people thought might it take to beat inflation it seems like where the quote unquote proverbial soft landing is is within sight when a lot of people thought that was an impossibility so yeah the rate of inflation has gone down but it's still troubling uh you north of 2% target that should be our target but the rate of inflation has going down in the in the immediate in the last few months right uh and we're not in a recession that's also true but how long can that last when you the scariest thing to me in the world is the chart of the graph of the national debt and graphs of interest on the national debt interest on the national debt is now a larger appropriation item than the Defense Department.

But when I worked on this issue in Congress, 2013 and 2015, we were worried about the national debt at $20 trillion and interest on the national debt at half of what it is now. And we said this is unsustainable, the path of growth of both of these things is unsustainable. And now the slope of that graph is much higher than it used to be then. Sometimes in some, last year, I think it was time for a minute of a couple of months where we added a trillion dollars to the national debt so that pressure of interest on the national debt is is not only do i worry about it but in his you know in his uh in his nights of of dark nights of the soul j powell worries about that more than anything else as well because it limits his ability to have freedom

flexibility and interest rates if bringing interest rates back down to avoid a recession results in inflation again his ability to increase rates up uh to keep pace with inflation is constrained by the extent of interest on the debt and by the ballooning interest on the debt. That's the issue. J.W., you anticipated my next question, which is, you know, I'm Paul Ryan guy from back in 2011. I believe that he took great political risk to come up with a plan to at least try to get this debt under control. The person who explicitly went against Ryanism, explicitly went against trying to control big debt, who campaigned on the exact opposite of that because he thought

it was naive and stupid politically was Donald Trump, who himself added enormous amounts to the debt during his presidency. And there's no idea that he's going to do anything less. In fact, he doesn't believe in touching entitlements. He makes it a purpose of campaigning on not doing anything that Ryan ever wanted to do with the entitlement reform. How can that be a plank in saying I'm switching from NeverTrumper, the debt when Donald Trump doesn't seem to be any better. And I'll add one more to that. You know, before he left in 2021, in 2020, he wanted himself to do another stimulus package. He wanted even before the elect, you wanted Mitch McConnell to send up more checks to help help him curry favor in Georgia with the voters there before that special election and maybe make it more amenable for him to remain in power.

power. How is the debt an issue where you would say, you know, I'm no longer a never Trumper. We need someone who's going to get a hold of the debt. And that person is Donald Trump. I can see every single point that you just made as a legitimate point. And yet I will say that Biden is worse than Trump on all of those issues. And I predict the Republican Senate. And so, you know, Republicans are not great on deficits in debt. I mean, Paul Ryan tried and the Tea Party revolution gave us a short window of some people who actually cared about this. People like Mick Mulvaney when he was in Congress, we worked together in these issues, and he was good.

I mean, we had a lot of good ideas. We just couldn't get him past Democrat Senate. Concede every single point, but I think that Trump working with a Republican Senate, he is going to grow the debt less quickly than Biden will. And so it's lesser of two difficult choices. You go on to write about the border, and conclude with Mr. Trump doesn't care about the niceties of political discourse, and that is an

asset related to the border, and I do think there's obviously many issues with the border, but Trump campaigned on putting a wall, and he alone can fix it. There is no wall, and I'm not sure it was his harsh rhetoric that stopped anything at the border. Why are you confident that what he will do will, you know, meaningfully make a difference on the border? If he wasn't able to do what he claimed that was his number one objective when he came into office, which was build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? I don't think you'll stand in the way of state solutions at the very least. He's not going to sue Texas to stop him from putting up razor wire. That makes him, again, lesser of two difficult

choices in my mind. Hopefully the Republican Senate can push something, jam something down the house's throat on border solutions. But for me, if you want to pick my top issue, it's not border, it's judges. And let me, let's get to that in the end when we talk kind of the broader question after we get through the op-ed. You go on to write, I find myself parting ways with the never-Trump faction. I respect that stance, which was born of conviction, yet our situation demands a reevaluation. We can continue down a path that led to division and economic stagnation. Our pivot to a future that, while imperfect, promises governance rooted in traditional American values, economic liberty, in a judiciary cut from the same clock as the gifted nominees confirmed to the Supreme Court

under Mr. Trump. Can you speak to the unity that this vision of Donald Trump's America ushered forth when he was president? So I, yeah, I mean, I won't say it was all happy. And it's again the same answer. I think the division is worse under Biden than it was under Trump because I think the Biden divisions are built on and make even worse the problem that was already there in the Democratic Party's effort to use demographics, effort to use, you know, to objectify people based on where they were born or who they were born to, I just think this DEI mentality that is overtaking the left is just maybe more divisive than the divisions that, that Trump focuses on. I take your sarcasm and accept it, but again, I parry back with Biden's worst. You go on and say, count me as a former never-trumper, given the coming election, the never-Trump position is naive. Before going on to conclude, I hope the best parts of Mr. Trump's administration, including the reasonable leaders tapped ahead government agencies, get a second round.

I hope the mistakes of the past won't be repeated. Many of those reasonable officials, or at least some of the people that considered reasonable officials have publicly stated that they hate Donald Trump. One John Kelly said he's the worst human being that he's ever had to work with. Why do you think that he's going to get a lot of these reasonable officials back when so many of the reasonable officials have come out on record saying they disdain him and Donald Trump seems to now have a more narrow group of supporters around him than he did that were willing to work for him than he did, you know, maybe in 2016. Well, I was focused on independent agencies.

So in my area of financial regulation and then the others, EPA, I thought some of the cabinet appointees were great. I mean, a lot of those appointees were the kinds of people you would have expected from a traditional Republican. Christian Carlin at the CFTC, Jake Clayton at the SEC, though I disagree with some of his decisions. It was a normal kind of disagreement within the basic parameters of, of traditional security law. It wasn't like twist securities law to regulate climate change,

which is what the current chairman is doing. I think they would all come back. I think they would all come right back. Now, I don't know what to do with the White House or the different stuff. I don't have an answer for that. I'm only responsible for the financial regulation part of the world. But I think those guys would all come back. I haven't seen any of them speak, fire that General Kelly has. Yeah. Let me just make it a little bit broader after going kind of through the specifics. You mentioned the last piece. You hope that he avoids the mistakes of the past. I assume that's referring to mistakes like you went on TV and criticized, you know, asking a foreign power to investigate the son of a political opponent and trying to maintain power

by saying election was stolen and getting his vice president to overturn an election and then cheering on a crowd who called for hanging his vice president. I mean, I guess it comes to the question of where you do not feel that he threatens institutions in the way that it did seem like you seeing some media appearances during the Ukraine felt like he was threatening institutions is that not a top concern or is it has he allayed those fears that he he would not try to break norms that we we thought were inviolable institutions have proven resilient um so i take heart to that this is a very i'm not going to make a lot of the fact that this is a difficult decision that the country

faces not just for me but the country faces but we have not had a muller report kind of version of the of the biden family not really and i just it doesn't sit well with me that hunter took payments from the chinese government and claimed to the chinese government that he had influence over his dad now we don't have proof that he did have influence over his dad there was a direct quid pro quo for those payments in the same way that the Mueller report wasn't able to finally get any evidence of a direct quid pro quo there was just smoke everywhere these similar fact patterns i mean not as not as not as direct an investigation and and i wish we had more of one we get some of that indirectly from from a from a from a attorney's investigation in which he was not actually charged uh directly for

foreign influence we can't forget that uh it's it doesn't forgive the mistakes of the past and and And I didn't want to dwell on that in this particular op-ed. But it doesn't forgive any of that. But it just makes this choice even harder. Well, you know, look, I actually am surprised you didn't mention the Afghan withdrawal as a piece. Yeah, I mean, that's another thing that surprised me about Trump was as a libertarian. I, I, it was hard in the Bush years to stand up against the Patriot Act and to stand up against the Afghan invasion at, you know, federal society meetings. but Trump withdrew us and he didn't start any new wars during his presidency so that's great

that was a success but I was going to I was going to say you know I sometimes like to say my politics these days in the post-Trump era is are you know pro-democracy and not teaching my children crazy stuff which you know is in different parts of the spectrum I I would fall on depending on that issue obviously I'm speaking to the left don't teach my children crazy crazy stuff And at this point in time, the right, the Trump right for democracy. But I guess tell me where I'm wrong here. I'm left a little bit concluding from your op-ed and what we're saying here that maybe your personal crypto space might be trumping your view outside of the crypto world, including the threat, which you seem to think was a real threat on January 6th of institutions

and democracy, that the particular field that you're in, you don't like some, it's worse in that field under Biden than it would be under Trump. And that might be animating your move more than a broader picture. I don't think that's fair. I think it is fair to say I'm focused on my field generally of financial regulation, finance, economy, and budgetary issues. And those are my primary focus. I also, I'm worried about the other issues, the culture of more issues as well. Let me just conclude on maybe a couple crypto questions for you. You want investment advice? No, no. I'm a pretty big skeptic on crypto. I have invested a little bit around the sides of it, but only because I didn't want to miss out, perhaps, in the long

run, even if I think it is not something real. But my question is, and this was not a point, came up with. I've heard people say it and it resonated with me and I would like a kind of response from you. Bitcoin's been around for 10, 15 years and we're still trying to figure out a real great use case for it. AI has been around like five minutes and everyone has a use case for it. To me, that makes me more bullish on AI than crypto. What is your response to that? It seems like crypto has been around for a long time and the use cases are still very limited. If you were in Ukraine during the invasion when the banks went down. That's the best one. Yeah. You want to get to Poland and you didn't have access to your money.

Or if you had cash, you didn't want to carry it because somebody at the border was just going to take it from you. All you have to do is memorize 24 words of your seed phrase. And when you get to Poland, you buy a little device, repeat, and there it is, right? And then you sell it on Coinbase. And if you live in Argentina and you face an inflation rate of 90% and you think, man, I don't want to put it in the pay. So I want to put it in dollars and you go to the bank and the bank says, oh, there's a limit. You can only buy a little bit of U.S. dollars. And what do you do?

You buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin is incredibly popular in Argentina. So I wouldn't say there's no use case for it. It's slow development in the same way the Internet was slow to develop. It took 20 years before we got to the 1990s and AOL popularizing use cases the Internet. Then it took another decade before we got any real e-commerce on the Internet. So that took a long time. And I think that's a better – when you're trying to replace money, I think it's a longer kind of timeline to development

of the internet, which was, you know, most people like us, we just know, we just think it started in the 90s, but we started in the 60s. The use case you mentioned is the best case I've heard before, but it really applies to kind of really

third world countries in many cases, or countries that are desperate and at war, and the hope that it doesn't, you know, go to zero automatically and have a great volatile swing, Bitcoin, which it hasn't. I wouldn't call on. You know, third world country, I would say if it's that valuable in Argentina, there's no reason I think it couldn't replace currencies in the, say, the bottom 100 countries in the world economically.

And that itself is a pretty interesting use case. Remittances, global remittances, it's great for. If you've ever tried to send money overseas, it's terrible. Even if you don't want to hold Bitcoin, you just use the Bitcoin as the means of transmission, and then you convert to Fiat on both sides of that transmission. you can send it in about five minutes versus and for a relatively minor fee especially if you use a lightning transition channel for a negligible fee less than 0.1% if you're using a lightning channel for that and relative to if you can do a remittance through the banking swift system it might take you a week it might take you two weeks you're talking about sizable fees of like 10% and if you're undocumented in the u.s it's hard to go to a bank to do that at all. Final question. Any hopes if there is a second Trump administration that you work in it on these

type of issues? That is doubtful. But I don't need to do anything like that. I've done my time in government. I think I would go work in Congress again. I really enjoyed that. If I could find a kind of a libertarian Republican to work for, I would do that again. I don't think I'm interested in working in the executive branch.

We'd like to see more originalist judges. that's that's the key and and i'll send them some law clerks if they want some law clerks professor thank you for joining the dispatch podcast thank you it's fun You know,