The Pomp Podcast - #489 Dave Rodman on Law in the Decentralized World

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Dave Rodman is the Managing Partner of The Rodman Law Group. He specializes in business, cannabis, crypto, IP, hemp, and securities law. In this conversation, we discuss the decentralized world, state recognized DAO entities, pseudonymity with legal repercussions, accreditation laws, schedule 1 drugs, Satoshi Nakamoto, and regulatory environment.  ======================= The Stacks 2.0 mainnet launched on January 14, 2021. Stacks, which you may recognize as Blockstack, is a layer-1 blockchain that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a secure base-layer and enables developers to harness its power in new ways. Stacks makes Bitcoin more than digital gold, enabling apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin--unlocking innovation, new value, and a new way to earn BTC. Visit http://www.stacks.co for more information. ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  ======================= As one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world, Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online, thanks to our excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options and rigorous security standards -- but this is only part of the story. We’ve been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011: http://www.kraken.com

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there let's kick this thing off dave rodman is the managing partner of the rodman law group he specializes in business cannabis crypto intellectual property hemp and securities law in this conversation we discuss the decentralized world, state-recognized DAO entities, pseudonymity with legal repercussions, accreditation laws, Schedule 1 drugs, Satoshi Nakamoto, and regulatory environment. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Blockstack. Apps and smart contracts are

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with Dave. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a special treat. I've got Dave here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

For sure. Let's just jump right into your background. You're a lawyer and you work on some very, very innovative industries. So we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different stuff there, but just where'd you grow up and how did you get into law? Yeah. So, uh, I grew up in Aspen, Colorado. Um, and, uh, basically always wanted to be a lawyer right up until I was about to graduate from college and then quick succession. And I was like, Oh wait, no, I'm going to be a doctor. Oh wait, no, I'm going to be in finance. And so went to work for Merrill Lynch, um, it right during the crisis so we were in collateral management uh for credit default swaps in 2008 i knew that leaving was going under like two weeks before nobody else did obviously couldn't

trade on it um and i got to watch the entire thing dissolve from like backstage it was incredible um and uh myself and a couple co-workers um found a bunch of errors in merrill's codes uh as they they were calculating exposure. And basically over the course of a couple of months, we saved Merrill about three and a half billion dollars in collateral exposure. I was the highest reviewed employee in the office. I got a thousand dollar bonus, no raise. So I took my three weeks vacation, went back home to Aspen and started studying for the bar exam. I went to law school in 2010 and focused with my finance background, focused on securities law and intellectual property.

Graduated, securities law and intellectual property is not the biggest practice area in Denver, Colorado. And so one of my really good friends from law school, Nadav Ashner, who's actually now my partner, was working for a cannabis firm in Denver. And there was a firm that shared office space with his firm that needed an attorney. uh i applied for the job and never looked back i've been in cannabis law ever since um

and that has led to you know hemp law cbd law uh and then eventually into crypto and i can we'll go into how it all happened but the important thing is that when i first started doing cannabis law uh there the people who were calling themselves you know corporate marijuana lawyers were basically just defense attorneys who had marijuana clients who are now saying that they were businesses to me so with my background i was actually able to carve out a pretty good niche pretty quickly uh so much so that fast forward 2019 i was able to bring uh nadav ashner the guy who put me in the cannabis law upon as my partner which was kind of a cool full circle uh experience so what's so funny to me is you start out in cannabis law and a lot of people don't know

how connected these two industries are right they know that they're innovative they know that they They are definitely kind of, you know, people who like to kind of push the edge of innovation are attracted to both of them. But most people don't understand that the cannabis industry is really cut off from the financial system, and therefore they've had to adopt Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Talk a little bit about, as you're doing cannabis law, how you come across Bitcoin and crypto. Yeah, so interestingly, totally unrelated is how I got into it. A good friend of mine who was in finance and was working in Thailand called me up and started to talk about this thing he wanted to do called an ICO.

And, you know, being in the cannabis space, funding is all of my clients are banks and have been banks since 2017. It's a common myth. But the problem with the industry is funding because you cannot get good funding. so he starts to describe this whole ico thing and my immediate thought was oh my god we can use this to fund cannabis companies um that didn't actually happen but it was enough to get me super super motivated to learn the space um and so basically for a period in late 2016 or 2017 i'd wake up at like eight in the morning i'd work as a cannabis attorney till about midnight and then from midnight to maybe two or three every night i would be cramming on on what this whole ico boom was how crypto worked i mean i bought my first bitcoin in like 2013 and kind of forgot about it for a bit

uh and as i started doing this i started to kind of like sort of digitally follow my buddy around uh the internet trying to pick up pieces and then one night i was like hey you you know what the Howey test did, right? Like he's in finance. I assumed he understood it. He had no idea. And so I explained to him like, hey, this is very likely to be the sale of securities. And then like literally two days later, there was a big article in Hacker Noon where someone kind of explained the Howey test to the masses and that sort of relationship flipped. And he started to chase me around uh asking me questions and uh became general counsel for that company uh or outside general counsel um got involved with a firm in thailand that is very big in the crypto space

um they flew me out there uh and we started doing work for them uh and then slowly started to bring it back to our practice here where uh now kit is still our practice area uh followed by hemp But then blockchain and crypto is our third biggest area and our fastest growing. And quite frankly, it's one of the most interesting spaces I've ever been in. And I'm in some pretty interesting spaces. Yeah. And so when you think through kind of the crypto business that you've got, it's fast growing. There's lots of companies that seem to be popping up every day. What exactly are these clients looking for when it comes to legal representation or legal advice?

That's a great question. They don't know what they're looking for on a whole, and they don't know what they need. And it's a very interesting... Cannabis and crypto are so similar in one sense, but in the other sense, they're very different in that everyone in cannabis knows they have to have an attorney. They know that they can't start out without having good legal counsel because it's federally illegal, and there are really nuanced components to this. And there's a lot of overlap there. But in the crypto space, these guys are all devs and engineers and they're coding the future. And they kind of have this blind spot for how slow regulation works and how long it takes for these things to catch up to them.

You know, that initial client that I was talking about, they were convinced that they didn't need to have an entity. And I had to walk them through how when you don't have an entity, you have unlimited liability personally. and they're like no it exists uh in the ether it's it's it's all decentralized like yeah until someone sues you or sues your group and then you're all general partners um and and we've seen that a lot recently as these dow first uh um organizations have come about and they have these high-minded ideas and believe me i'm super passionate about it but you know it's my job to kind of be chicken little and follow them around and say you know this is what could happen this is how you're exposing yourself i know you don't want to listen to this i know you want to move

fast but like if you don't want to go to jail uh or you know experience massive civil liability you have to listen to me and it's not just an idle thing like we actually have a client who is in the uh in the blockchain space we weren't only very clear we weren't advising him on this project uh he went to jail for uh related to on the sale of unregistered securities um so it's real and the enforcement action uh you know the investigation started like five years ago and it only came to a head in 2019. so um that's that's the single most typical aspect of this industry is getting the founders and the innovators to realize that while we might get we will get there someday we will get to the point where you know a dow is a is recognized as an entity just

on its own for example but we're not there yet and the the the uh amount of time that it takes to get there there's a lot of enforcement that can happen so that's that's really that's what we we we do in the space is is uh um help people apply existing case law existing experience in corporate securities law work in ip work and we help them uh protect what they've built even though they're pushing the limit so much so i want to talk a little bit kind of further down this rabbit hole right of decentralization i think people who are listening to the podcast know uh it's one of my main focuses moving forward um is i just think that centralization is now a business risk and decentralization will be the default right and so when we go down that path uh

that feels like there's not a lot of precedent when it comes to the legal system um walk me through kind of what do we know and kind of what is precedent in the decentralized world um and how much of what we're seeing kind of play out right now uh will eventually end up having to be the case law like there's just uncharted territory we haven't gone to court yet over some of this stuff and so like there's gonna be kind of those seminal cases that end up being the precedent it's just that they haven't happened yet like just how do you view the intersection of decentralized technologies and organizations with the law so specifically on decentralization um i think that uh one we have not seen any uh cases bought yet i think we will and i think

the way we will see it is this um this imputation of a general partnership and and what that means And to kind of, and then to explain why that's so important. If you and I started, like, we started a new podcast company. So you, Dave and Pom, we're just doing stuff. We don't put any corporate form around it. It's not an LLC. It's not a C-Corp. It's not a formalized partnership. The government imputes what's called a general partnership. And so you and I are 50 50 equally liable for all of the actions of our project, of our of our of our partnership. And that means all of our assets are completely at risk if someone sues us and they win for whatever the suit doesn't doesn't matter what the suit is about. If there's a damages claim, we have full liability. So over the years, over the course of the East India Trading Company with the first actual corporations to the 1980s in Wyoming, the LLC creation, we as lawyers have figured out ways to limit our liability so that just the company houses the liability. And I think that the disregarding of these corporate forms by some of these decentralized organizations, when you then have a claim against them for, again, for whatever reason, a lawyer is going to look at this and they're going to say, OK, there's no corporate form. who is participating what's their percentages you know even if there's they're all there's a

hundred of them and they all have one percent that's who's going to get sued that's who's going to be dragged into court and i'm ignoring the whole aspect of like the anonymous component and um multi-state wallets and you know with enough resources those things will come to light you will find the humans and those will be the people who are liable so that is the case that will see we will see that will be the controlling case law um unless you can get a statutory create a uh entity created at the state level any state let's call call it the united states right now but like just the way you can form an llc in colorado you can form a c corp in colorado if we can create a uh a state recognized entity as a dow uh that then affords that entity the liability protections

that the company would that would mitigate that sort of uh that sort of precedent-setting case um and would you know nip all this in the bud i don't think that's going to happen um we're my firm's kicking around uh lobbying with uh the with the colorado legislature to see if we could try to create something like that but what i think will cause that is uh some some big disaster will happen to some decentralized uh organization and everybody else will go oh i need to talk sorry i don't know if i can swear on this apologize um i need to talk to a lawyer um so that doesn't happen to me and so when you think through this this is fascinating to most people because i think that they look at these dows and they say oh it's decentralized uh one sometimes

they're actually not decentralized but but i think the hope is that you can actually build decentralized technology and so how do you look at the balance between uh the promise of the decentralized kind of autonomous organization within a legal structure does the legal structure kind of uh mitigate or um you know uh almost like um silence the decentralization because now there is a legal structure there's lawyers involved uh there's something to go after or how does that kind of work if we fast forward and we say okay uh there's going to be legal challenges eventually we're going to get to this like state recognized dow entity um how do you think that kind of plays out full well knowing that like this could change in the future so yes on on one hand uh there is

the sort of thought that create the corporate wrapping and now there is something to go after um but i would argue that when that doesn't exist we're going back to that general that gp kind of connotation um and the example where it was you and me 50 50. it's actually a little bit bit worse than that uh in that it's we're jointly and severally liable so um if they can get a hold of both of us then you and i are each you know 50 50 whatever our quote-unquote ownership is responsible but if they can only get a hold of me then they can hold me 100 responsible for both of our actions so while i can see on one hand while you know someone in someone working in the decentralized space might say well i don't want to i don't want to wrap up my dow in something

that's targetable or that's you know located in wyoming colorado um but at the same time you know if they're a citizen of the united states and and uh they get that their company gets targeted whether that's by the government or by a civil lawsuit um they themselves are already the target and they are completely responsible if they're the only ones who can be found um so that i think that is uh the sort of um recognition that people don't quite have yet and so you did how does pseudonymity uh pseudonymity or uh anonymity play into this right in terms of uh if i'm out there with my real name and i can be found i'm liable what happens if i am using a twitter handle but you don't actually know who i am or literally in a you know kind of and that would be like a satoshi

nakamoto situation or like a pseudonymous name or actually just literally anonymous like nobody knows who did this but now it's out there is this something where just like hey people spend enough money and like they'll eventually figure it out is this you could convict like a pseudonymous person and then if they ever get uncovered then the conviction sticks to them like how does that work So, yeah, that is a really good question. And I'm actually a Gitcoin kernel mentor for their block two program. And we had a big conversation yesterday with all of the fellows. And the answer to that is, one, you certainly could delay the inevitable being synonymous or fully uh anonymous that is that is true um and i want to be clear that this is a separate analysis

from satoshi that's that's different uh and i can go into that why but um if the u.s government for example decides that they want to come after you they're going to come after you they're going to use chain analysis they're going to use the nsa they're going to use whatever they can at their at their fingertips they will eventually figure you out unless you are just hacker extraordinaire and you've covered all your tracks um you know eventually with enough resources and i would argue the us government has enough resources they will pierce that anonymity where the sort of delay comes in is when you then back down from that and you're looking at civil rights and you've got uh attorneys who are, you know, maybe suing, I don't know, something like SushiSwap or Uniswap, like

the anonymity that might be there will certainly pose difficulties. There'll be evidentiary questions. But ultimately, I think the answer is with enough resources, pseudonymity will be set aside. It's just a question of whether or not you need law enforcement to do that or, you know a well-funded individual to do that and i think that's sort of um up for debate i don't i don't know if we've got we're anywhere near that yet um but that's a lot of people will argue that well i'm i'm anonymous nobody knows this or i'm located in the czech republic and i've got a company in mauritius like you know what what's the risk and it's like you know that's it's just delaying if something's going to happen it's going to happen you mentioned satoshi nakamoto

kind of being a separate case, explain that a little bit. So, I mean, I don't think that we're going to see the US government figuring out, or at least publicly, who Satoshi is. I think that it's so far back and it's so foundational that, and, you know, Bitcoin has been basically deemed a commodity by the CFTC, um they're more focused on more recent things so if uh someone tried to do a pseudonymous launch of uh a new token uh sec is gonna catch that um they're they're looking now i don't think there's any incentive to them to try to piece together uh what happened at the founding of bitcoin um and even if they did i'm not sure how much uh you know what would they accomplish at

that point i honestly don't believe that there would be anything worth that spend uh of resource um it's it's definitely you know the the the d5 stuff that is clearly uh implicating some of the the banks received acts um things that would impute uh the patriot act um you know we're talking about billions of dollars uh that is where they're going to focus that is where the pseudo anonymous founders are going to are going to be experiencing government heat. Got it. And so if we kind of look at, let's say, a really kind of what I would consider a cut and dry example of where some of this complexity plays out. So let's say that I build a decentralized exchange and that decentralized exchange is actually decentralized. I can't take it down,

even if the government comes and puts a gun to my head and no one else can. So it's kind of a fully decentralized, censorship-resistant exchange. And then people go on and they start to trade what ends up being deemed illegal securities, whether they are non-accredited investors or there was some issue with the actual securities being offered originally, whatever it is. What is the precedent or how do you think through, is the founder of that decentralized exchange responsible for what happens on the exchange? If let's say the founder was 18 when they started it and they put it out in the world. And then at 25, they're like, you know what? Maybe I don't want to be as, you know, take on the state and screw the system. And like, I want to take it

down, but I actually can't take it down. Like, how does all that play out? Sure. So there's no clear answer to that exactly i will say that we have a fairly uh good piece of uh data with ether delta um you know as an as a decentralized as a decentralized exchange but they were still able to like figure out who was responsible uh and that person still had control and i think control is a key concern here so if you have a truly decentralized exchange and put it up there and You literally can't control it anymore. That is going to limit the ability of law enforcement to come after you. It doesn't necessarily eliminate it, and it certainly doesn't eliminate civil liability.

Everybody forgets that we're not just talking about criminal sanctions here. We're talking about what could a plaintiff's attorney extract from you. um and then most of these people if they're gonna you know maybe there's some some truly egalitarian um and uh high-minded devs who literally do a fair launch and have no pre-mind have no tokens it's just up there but in reality most of these have some kind of hold back for themselves and that that hold back the idea that you're going to get an increase in value based on what you held back as far as, say, a governance token, that absolutely brings the securities laws right back into play, the 34 Act, 33 Act, and, of course, the private securities litigation cause of action.

And so if they don't hold back any of the tokens, if they literally just say, I'm going to make zero economic benefit from this, does that change that evaluation? I think it does. I think it does. I mean, if you really could point to that fact pattern and say you know someone just released this in the wild and it's automated and it has they have no way to affect change and like that's really key like no way to affect change you know some of these things are kind of out in the wild but you get enough of the founders together they in theory tweak stuff you know for and it's not not like they're doing anything shady there it's that they they want to be able to fix something or something that breaks but if they don't have

that ability. Yeah. I think that just releasing that, what does it affect? Basically a piece of code, an AMM that just runs. I think you'd have a very difficult time coming after something like that. Yeah. And so really what you end up doing is you're basically putting a balance between economic benefit and legal liability, right? And so if you want no legal liability, that means you should probably take no economic benefit. If you're okay with some legal liability, then you take economic benefit you got to figure out where you know kind of where your priorities lie or kind of where your risk tolerance is yeah and and like you know it might not just be a specific project analysis like if you've got a master plan and over here you've got uh something like an nft project

and over here you want to make this nfp project function you have this uh this amm that is totally you know you wanted to run by itself if if you could draw the connection where you need one for the other uh you certainly um could impute liability that way what about like decentralized lending um that feels to me like it is uh less obvious the ways that founders could make mistakes uh then like let's say an exchange that traded uh you know illegal securities like that seems pretty cut and dry to me uh but when it comes to lending or some of these other financial service type offerings that are supposed to be decentralized. And we'll just make the assumption that they are decentralized. Is there things where you don't have a money

transmitter license or a broker dealer license or KYC AML, and you can be held liable for that stuff? Or is it something else that they should be worried about? So honestly, I actually think this is where we're going to see the most uh uh flurry of enforcement and i think it's going to be much much more serious than a breach of the 33 act or the 34 act both you know securities law focus um the bank secrecy act is a big deal it is a big deal the patriot act gives the government a lot of power here um and so when you start and you've already heard janet yellen just you know uh in the last week or so two weeks ago saying that terrorist financing is is on their radar i mean whether it is or not that's what they'll say that is what will be stated as they go after these

platforms and there are really strict rules around aml and kyc for anything financial um thank god the the fincen stuff was averted that was a nightmare um and but but that's that's where we're headed. So bringing it back to the question about liability and control and this decentralized idea, if FinCEN decides that they want to go after one of these things because they aren't following proper disclosure for funds and people, they're going to do that in any way they can. And I think that we have yet to see what that will look like, but I think a lot of people are going to be caught Yeah. It's fascinating to me that the securities laws and kind of the ICOs and unregistered securities, like that caught everyone's attention from a legal perspective. That's what I wanted to

talk about. What you've kind of done is you're accelerating or fast forwarding. You're saying, no, no, no, no. Like when somebody applies the Patriot Act, they can pretty much do anything. And therefore, not only do they have more kind of legal purview, but also the penalties are much higher as well. So is this something where you think that the reach of the US government will be global and it doesn't matter where you are because they'll use that Patriot Act? Or do you think that US citizens have a different risk profile on the legal side than let's say people who are not US citizens not living in the United States? Well, sure. So primarily, on a first impression, US citizens are going to have a far larger risk profile. US companies are going to

a far larger risk but we actually have precedent here uh with the crs the common reporting standards which was kind of forced on the world by the us after the passing of the patient um or around the same time um and you have a very clear example of the u.s government using its full force and effectiveness to impute its way on sovereign nations um so I think that, you know, if you're if you're a team that's all not U.S. and you properly geofence U.S. residents, you have a good argument not subject to U.S. law. But no one is actually geofencing U.S.

residents, not really. And that is that is like the opening in the armor. That is how the U.S. government will attempt to assert itself. And they will use treaties and they will use relationships with other countries to get their way eventually if they want to. It's a question of want to.

Now, I will say there is an Overton window. And if the Overton window shifts enough, there is a chance that some of these doom and gloom things that I'm talking about kind of get papered over, get sort of the paradigm shifts. And the good example there is Uber. If you walked into a law firm in 2005 and said, I want to create an app that allows people

to use other people's cars, every lawyer is going to say, oh my God, you can't do that. Like there's, here are all the reasons why you can't do that. So it's what we're trained to do. And it would have been good advice at the time,

but that's an example of where things moved quickly enough and had enough of an impact where those concerns didn't materialize. Other things certainly have materialized out of it, but that is an example of the tech shifting over to the window more quickly then the regulations can catch up in a way that regulations will never catch up or could never

catch up um but that and there will be some of it and i i don't know how much of that there will be um but it is on the table there will be there'll be some sort of moment where certain certain projects think as big as uniswap might you know just skate through it absolutely could happen um but there will be a lot of collateral damage for some of the small projects and it's your thought process kind of we haven't really seen the enforcement in the defy world regardless of what blockchain is being built on or whatever but like that's coming yes yes so um it's definitely coming they definitely understand well they have an idea of what's happening i think there's very few people including myself who actually understands everything but um yeah it's it's a

there are people who are paying attention at every level of government um you know finance related uh counterterrorism related espionage related just policy people are paying attention they know this has happened and i brought up that one client earlier you know the investigation started in 2014 arrest happened in 2019 um these things take time and it's hard to hold that timeline against these projects that are you know worth billions of dollars over the course of summer founding founding to billions of dollars that's that's probably never happened uh in fact i would feel confident in saying you know not going through the traditional financing route that's never happened um these are these are startups that are more valuable than you know

companies that have been around for decades um so i lost my train of thought sorry no no i i think that you're you're nailing it in the sense of um the enforcement one takes time you said a couple times i think that's dead on i think two is uh people are paying attention so the it's like they're going to start looking at things that are what they deem to be illegal wrong whatever and they will come after it but even on top of that one of the things that i think i'm hearing you kind of talk through is like uh this constant cat and mouse game right it's like innovation leaps forward, the law catches up. Innovation leaps forward, the law catches up. And so this isn't so much like this is an irregular development in the market. This happens over and over and over

again, whether it's cannabis, crypto, or name your other innovative industry. It's just like we're literally just feeling the pain of going through that kind of evolution. Yeah, I would say it's a little different when you realize that what we're talking about is money. uh this is it is uh is a fundamental new ingredient in this sort of innovation uh path you know facebook and google you know they weren't involved in at the beginning they weren't involved in money and money has some connotations around sovereignty and around power that i think is drawing more attention probably correctly i mean that this is pretty standard uh when you start to mess with money supply um so yes broadly very similar uh pattern here we've seen in many

industries the one little change is like the fact that this is a money focused well i don't want to say it's money because we've all known the technology is is applicable to a lot of things But like the fact that it's a currency, sovereign, these are sovereign currencies, that does change things a little bit. But I do believe that it'll follow a similar sort of catch up pattern that you described. Yeah. Before we get into the rapid fire questions to wrap up, I just want to kind of give you the floor of like, what's the key pieces of like almost like blanket advice? not legal advice to anybody, but just as people want to build in this industry, what are the things that they should be considering? What should they be doing to make sure that they're at least positioning themselves to not do it really dumb, low hanging fruit stuff that they

can easily avoid? So I don't want to sound like a shameless plug here. So I won't say talk to us, but talk to a lawyer. I cannot stress that enough. The amount of pain that I have seen happen where people get a certain point and then involve someone like me and then you know you point to a foundational part of their business model it's like that's illegal you can't do that i i and i say that with the caveat of everything i just said about the open window and and uber um there are some fundamental things that they just that are i guess there's some um some aspects that if they talk to a lawyer first they would be able to uh more efficiently and effectively address maybe the bigger issue uh which does take more of a leap of faith but i mean so uh one of our

clients uh you know they they didn't bother to check whether or not there was a trademark for the company they founded and they did an ico and uh i had to deal with an old school trademark attorney and explain to him that we couldn't change the token name at this point like it's it's immutable um and we ended up coming to an agreement but like you know they burned a ton of money uh just dealing with a silly little thing whereas if they had come to a lawyer you know the first thing would have done meant to run a check for the name um you know it's stuff like that uh that i think that people get get your attorney get someone legal involved at the product uh market fit uh stage and um you know with the caveat that you know maybe the whole overarching

project is a little bit outside the lines but if you can smooth some of the smaller obvious things you can devote more time to the changing of that over to window and a big part of it yeah that's a great way to look at it kind of the big picture in the small picture um i ask every person the same three questions that you'll get to ask me one to finish up uh the first is what is the most important book that you've ever read Yeah, so a little bit of a bummer, I guess, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Sojana Zuboff, you know, the way that she explains the data rendition economy and what it has actually done was mind-blowing to me, and it was, you know, I've been telling everybody

since I read it, you have to read this, it's super dry, it's very difficult to get through, It's one of the hardest ones I've ever read. But to me, it's almost like the equivalent of Das Kapital in Marx, like just coming up with an entirely different view on economics. I mean, that's how fundamentally different it is and how important it is. And I think everybody, everybody should do it. Yeah, that's a great suggestion. Second one's more personal.

This comes from the folks over at Eat Sleep. They've got this thermoregulation bed, which basically makes it super cold for you so that you can sleep better. I used to be like a five, six hour sleeper. Now I'm like eight, nine. Hopefully I can get 10 if if I have time. What's your sleep schedule? Are you a five hour sleeper, 10 hour sleeper and somewhere in between? So I am a chronic insomniac. I have an insomniac about third grade. um so sleep has been one of my uh primary uh antagonists my entire life there have been times like when i was describing getting into um the crypto space it's certainly been an advantage

um because i can just go but it's uh it's not sustainable i'm constantly uh trying to get better sleep get more sleep you know change my sleep cocktail that i need to take um it has been a very it's been a lifelong fight and it has not been a fun one do you uh sleep on like a in like a cold room or on a cold bed or anything yeah so uh i have a sleep number bed uh you can maneuver uh the the uh its angle and um its temperature and it it has some other features that that help um i've also experimented with uh binaural beats which are playing different tones and different sides of your of your head to try to uh change your wave function and that i've actually seen that work a little bit um you name it um i've tried it when it comes to sleeping i look i've

heard a lot of people obviously asking this question say a lot of crazy shit i've never heard it was a binaural beat so i know that you're an expert if that's uh if that's one of the things that you've tried uh third third question is a little bit more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer i think statistically mathematically uh you've got to be a believer i do not believe that we've been visited and i'm not convinced that we ever will make contact given the the size of space and time uh changes that are involved everything we see is billions of years old already but yes i do not believe we are alone in the universe they certainly haven't visited us though yeah i i think that's kind of uh where i end up is like i don't think little

green men have showed up but uh but they got to be out there somewhere uh or at least i'd like to think so it makes sense uh what's the one question you have for me to uh to finish up um so yeah uh so so the deeper that i i've gone into blockchain and crypto and more both personally and professionally and the the more adoption i see the stronger my belief in all this goes um and as those beliefs get more and more ingrained it sort of uh has skewed my my media and my news consumption um you know i've basically stopped listening to music i listened to like podcasts like yours like hidden forces you all asked that allocation podcast um and for the most part the hosts of the show and the guests all kind of just reinforce those beliefs uh so

much so that i get to these points where i'm i'm i go through like intense periods of uh like self doubt and wondering if i'm in an echo chamber i think at one point i was asking friends on my telegram chats if they had any uh uh like mmt uh pro mmt podcasts or anti-big bitcoin uh things i could read um because i was just worried that i'm just deepening in this echo chamber and kind of plays into the surveillance capitalism what you get fed and stuff and i got to imagine that for you that this this this has got to be a an order of magnitude larger issue being with all of your evangelicalism and uh you know bitcoin uh you know bringing it to the masses and who you talk to so that was a really long build up but my question is uh how do you check to see if you're in

an echo chamber and as a corollary is there anyone that you've had on the show that has has challenged or changed uh your worldview from that echo chamber yeah so i think that um there's two things I'm checking. One is I've got some very specific things that I think through. One, market adoption. Two, self-inflicted wound in terms of code being introduced to the blockchain of Bitcoin. Three is price. Four is certain milestones of future institutional adoption, corporate adoption, central bank adoption. There's a couple of things that I watch and if something was to happen, I would definitely like, Oh, wait a second. That's a red flag. Kind of like if you had like a dashboard and an alert went off, this is something's wrong.

Right. And then you kind of go investigate it. Um, so that's kind of just on a passive basis. Uh, then I actually enjoy, um, kind of going and talking to people. So I'm less of somebody who's like, let me go read the latest, you know, hit piece on Bitcoin or whatever. It's more so like if somebody disagrees, I want to go talk to them and I want to understand why they think. And then, uh, you know, my wife would tell you that my absolute favorite thing to do, uh, and I've got to be careful. I got to warn people more often than just inviting them for dinner. I like to bring them for dinner, uh, and then just go to like intellectual war with people. Right. And it's just like, what do you believe? Here's what I believe. And like, let's just have it out. Um,

and, uh, you know, they, they can get pretty spirited. Uh, but also I learned an incredible amount during these, uh, and hopefully the other person does as well. Um, but what's so fascinating to me is you very quickly understand not just what somebody believes, but how deep their conviction in what they believe. And I think that the level of conviction, especially when you're talking to very intelligent people, is almost just as important as what they're saying. So it's like believing something's great, believing something, and then having deep conviction is even better. And so I think that that's kind of how I really look through it. In terms of people coming on the podcast. In the beginning, I had lots and lots of people. I think a lot of the people who

kind of question Bitcoin now don't really come on. They all hide. What they'll say is something to the effect of like, oh, I don't know that much. Right. But they know that. Oh, I don't understand it. It's like it's a five page, eight page paper. How do you not understand it? I know you're smart. Yeah. Well, what they'll do is they'll call the podcast. I don't really want to talk about this. Like, I don't really understand that much. But I know that you're anti Bitcoin, which is, by the way, it's fine. It's a great position to have if that's what you believe you know i think you're wrong but that's fine uh but it's always funny like they don't want to actually have the debate uh especially not in a recorded situation um and the last thing i would

say is uh i i try to get out of the like bitcoin anti-bitcoin like that's too much of a macro thing and i think that that's like uh a little bit misleading because actually i i have yet to meet somebody who just like writes off the entire system right there somebody may say hey look i understand the technology and I think that the technology is real, but I don't think it's going to be successful because I think the government will crack down on it. And so like, that's what I want to debate is I want to debate the micro issue, right? It's like, okay, let's talk about government intervention and government regulation of this asset of the players in the industry, that type of stuff. And so to me, it's more so like the more you understand, the more nuanced

conversation you want to have. If you don't understand it that well, you just want to debate at a high level, like, should I buy Bitcoin or should I not, right? I'm much more interested in kind of the nuanced micro level. Um, but, uh, you know, as with all of these things and probably some level of confirmation bias, like the more micro you want to talk about, the harder it is to find, you know, somebody who disagrees because in order to understand the micro, you've got to have gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, which means that you probably believe. Um, so, uh, that's kind of how I think about it. Gotcha. Interesting. Um, cool. Uh, I actually, I have have to say i'm a little disappointed uh i was hoping you were going to ask at some point um

the you used to ask everybody on the show almost like what regulation would change i assumed i would get a regulation question let's hear it i would love to hear if you've got a regulation that you would change so i have three uh oh okay that's amazing first and foremost and schedule one uh designation of substances is the single most uh anti-science piece of legislation that has ever been put into effect. It has killed people, not the war on drugs. That's a separate analysis. All the good that can be done with hallucinogens and pathogens is completely unable to study, is a travesty. I actually wrote an article about it titled Schedule 1 is a crime against humanity. So that's first and foremost, and that has been both mine and my firm's primary thesis for a

while but then more into the spirit of the podcast uh i would completely revamp the accreditation standards for accredited investors it would no longer be a finance based a wealth-based uh criteria you have to take some sort of you know simple test and when people talk about democratizing finance i think that is where you have to start um because it's just not fair and just because you're rich doesn't mean you're smart uh and then lastly i mean near and near to all of our hearts would be to normalize the tax treatment of crypto. It's like we're brothers. I like all three of those.

I didn't hear a single thing in there that I thought was crazy. I actually thought that was pretty common sense. So the fact that none of that's happened yet seems like maybe we need some more people with common sense in the regulatory and legislative bodies. Well, you know, it's going to happen. And time is inevitable. And people who were crypto native are going to be in power and, you know, probably starting in real numbers in 10 years. Hopefully it doesn't take that long, but you'll see the change in the guard. I think you are. You're definitely right there, my friend.

Where can we send people to find you on the Internet or find more if they want to kind of reach out to you guys for some legal services? Sure. So therodmanlawgroup.com is our website. Phone number is on there. Info at therodmanlawgroup.com is the email. And then we're on Twitter at Rodman Law. And we're available. Awesome. You guys do fantastic work. I really appreciate you coming on here. I find it fascinating, a lot of the legal analysis and this legal battle, frankly, that's going to play out in the decentralized world. So hopefully people, one, this piqued their interest, but also two, they understand like, hey, look, if you're going to go play in this world, make sure you got a good lawyer. So thank you so much. And we'll have to do this again the future yeah absolutely i'd love to uh come back on and talk anytime this was a fantastic