The Pomp Podcast - Chris Berry, Co-Founder of The Green Block Group: How Washington Understands New Technology

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Chris Berry is Co-Founder and Partner of The Green Block Group. In this conversation, Chris and Anthony Pompliano discuss how technology is viewed in Washington DC, how politicians interact with constituents, what state treasurers do on a daily basis, and the work that Chris and Josh Mandel did at the Ohio State Treasurer's office in building OhioCrypto.com. We discuss how it works, and what was the response from those involved. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Chris Berry is co-founder and partner at the GreenBlock Group. In this conversation, we talk about how technology is viewed in Washington, D.C., how politicians interact with constituents, what state treasurer's offices do on a daily basis, and the work that Chris and Josh Mandel did at the Ohio State Treasurer's Office in building OhioCrypto.com. We discuss how it works and what was the response from those involved. I really enjoyed this conversation and found it incredibly informative. I hope you enjoy it. 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'm here with Chris. Dude, thank you so much for coming. It's gonna be fun. Thanks for having me. All right, you had a life prior to your work at the Ohio government. What were you doing? Sure. So I kind of, I guess, real quick backstory on me is I grew up, born in Atlanta, Georgia. So

a big college football fan. Are you a University of Georgia fan? I am. Go Dawgs. Yeah, well, go Gators, but go. Okay. All right. We'll see you in late October. So the Gators won't be there. Go ahead. We, so I was born in Atlanta, grew up though in Northeast Ohio. All right. Um, went to school in Southwest Ohio, Miami of Ohio, Miami university, the fake Miami, the fake Miami, although Miami university was a, uh, was a university when Florida still belonged to Spain. So you can buy that on the, uh, t-shirt rack at the, at the, at the school shop there in

Oxford. But, uh, so went to Miami university. I've always kind of, you know, I guess I'm a pretty big nerd and geek. So I'm always been into like history and government. Um, so while I was that Miami. Um, that was kind of like what I went deep into, um, big fan of that stuff. So I actually, my first job out of college, um, moved to Washington DC, worked on Capitol Hill for a couple of years. What does that mean? So I worked for a member of Congress. Um, that was, you know, first job out of college. So like 22 years old, nothing important, but you work in a museum and it's awesome. Um, you know, lived on Capitol Hill. So I'd walk to work every day passing the Supreme court, uh, you know, the U S Capitol, all the office buildings. So it was just absolutely

a phenomenal first job um what do you do so like i'm fascinated by this idea that uh you know humans run the government yeah i think people forget that sometimes they're you know people want to rage against the government and all the decisions that are made and the implications of them uh but there are humans that are actually you know evaluating different opportunities or different options and they vote and the whole kind of democratic process to some degree uh but there's a bunch of support staff right and so like it would be literally impossible let's say for a congressman to read every single piece of paper, to kind of take every meeting, et cetera. Like, walk us through, like, how does the staff of a congressman help, right? Or what's that day-to-day

look like? Yeah. And so that's a great question. What's wild about that is most staffers from members of Congress, especially in the House of Representatives, they're in their 20s. So they're probably anywhere from 22, kind of first job out of college, like I was, to mid, maybe late 20s. And the thing is, is that that's a town where there's so much turnover. It's expensive. It's like a New York City. It's like a San Francisco. So a lot of these, you know, staffers, they'll work there a couple of years and then they'll

go get a job for twenty five, thirty five thousand dollars more. Go work downtown as a lobbyist or work down at like a PR shop. So to work on Capitol Hill, especially on that house side, it's really young. If you walk through the halls, I mean, you think like it's college intern season and that's and that's what's wild because it's super interesting to your point of like, they're the ones that are helping these members of Congress. And, you know, yeah, some members of Congress have been there for years, know what's going on. But for the most part, especially if they're a freshman or kind of in that, you know, second or third or fourth year,

they're not experts on it. So they rely on staff. And when they're relying on staff and those guys are 20 years old, it's kind of scary when you think about it. I mean, it really is. Thank God for checks and balances, but it's a little wild. I can imagine there's some 22 year olds with some wild ass ideas on Capitol Hill. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you go to a, you know, kind of a after work happy hour bar and it's, uh, it's kind of a wild place. That's for sure. Well, I think that, uh, what is it? The male brain isn't fully developed until you're like 28 or something. So like you have literally 22 to 25, let's call it congressional staffers without fully developed brains. Like that's pretty crazy.

Literally an entire office could have everyone under 30 years old. And if that member of Congress is again, in their first term, they're freshmen, you know, maybe they were like a doctor or they were a business person before. They don't really know how Washington works. So they're relying on an entire set of staff to help guide the way. And that's why lobbying has such a huge influence on what goes on in Washington, because really those are the folks that have been around for decades, kind of know what the different fights are like, and they're the ones that can help walk people through it. So that's, you know, if you kind of think of why is Washington broken, a big part of it is staff don't get paid enough. So they all leave. And we had 25 year olds running

the place exactly it's nuts literally what is it like the prisoners are running the asylum yeah it's it's i mean uh anyone that's in dc just go walk around capitol hill and you're gonna see like a bunch of kids and it's like is there a field trip it's like no they work here wow all right so uh and then what do they do it on a daily basis like you know you hear the horror stories of like oh somebody like presented this uh piece of legislation that's going to get voted on in four hours it's 500 pages like the staffers all try to like redo it as quickly as possible and give feedback to the congressional representative, I'm assuming that it's few and far between it happens, but probably not as often as people think. But is it just a lot of like reading

legislation and kind of like talking or what's that day to day? Yeah. So most of it's really meeting with your constituents. Okay. So, you know, in Congress, the leadership, they're the ones that really run the show. So probably 95% of members of Congress, but again, in the house, the Senate's different. There's only a hundred of them. So they all can go get a microphone and that's where a ton of the influences is just from like your PR strategy. But if you're in the house, most of them don't have much impact. So a lot of it's just meeting with your constituents. You know, people are flying in, they're meeting with like different groups that have, you know, some type of bill they're interested in. You know, if you're from Ohio, like I am,

they fly in from Columbus, they fly in from Cleveland, but to your point of kind of like, what's it like? It's really funny. So, you know, most people in Washington, DC, they either think that they're living in the West wing or house of cards, but in reality, it's more like Veep because it's just such a joke. So many people take themselves so seriously now get a lot of people do good work. Um, but it is much more like Veep than it is house of cards or the West wing. Did you see that the new Ukrainian president is the best known comedian? Yeah. Right. Uh, my theory is that, uh, comedians are just people who tell the truth. Right. Right. I mean, people really appreciate that. You're seeing it, not just in Ukraine, it's all over. So it's,

uh, it's definitely a wild time for sure. Well, it's also this element of like, uh, you know, the person who controls the meme controls the message. And I think we're seeing that, you know, if you look at everything from Donald Trump to AOC, like the people who have figured out how to use these channels for communication, uh, and to control the, you know, quote unquote meme, uh, they really do control the message when it comes to the political conversation. Absolutely. It's all about the microphone and who has it and who's able to utilize it. And again, you know, whether you're Republican, Democrat, you know, libertarian, vegetarian, anything in between. Um, it's really about who has the best messaging strategy for the most part. Um, you

know, Donald Trump's great at it. AOC is great at it. A lot of, you know, most people aren't great at it. And that's why you see, you know, AOC, a freshman Democrat from New York city who doesn't have a huge, you know, she's not the chairman of a committee. She's not in charge of really anything, but she has millions of followers because she's figured out a way to kind of hack the system and stand out from everyone else and you know kudos to her for that absolutely no it makes a lot of sense um all right so uh let's talk about technology in washington and kind of especially the halls of uh congress and the house representatives uh what the hell is going on do they understand kind of all of these new technologies not just blockchain but um autonomous

cars you know crisper right all these things that are kind of the very innovative or bleeding edge of innovation do they get it that's a great question i don't know okay um i think that Are they talking about it? They're talking about it, definitely. And again, that's where you kind of look who's, again, most of it's who has the messaging, the biggest microphone, and then the money. And really the money is these tech firms. And you see tech firms more and more realizing the importance of what they need to do to stand out in Washington. Because what happens is if you're Facebook, your CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, he gets called in front of Congress to go testify.

And no one wants to do that. That wastes time to fly across the country. he's got to prepare for it. And he can look, you know, he could get totally embarrassed. So, um, the, the tech companies are spending a ton of money on lobbying and they're figuring out a way to, you know, share their message and make sure they're kind of shaping the narrative and getting their information out there. So the, the, the info it's definitely being talked about. It's just a matter of kind of who's controlling it and who's doing something about it. And a lot of times, you know, it's again, it's money and who has money these days and it's the big tech players

out in Silicon Valley. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And, and, uh, when you talk about the constituents uh i'm assuming that most of it is the constituents coming to washington and so if you're traveling to tell your representative about your issues or things you care about you have to have some level of uh affluent behavior or means right just in that you can literally get on a plane to go talk to somebody um and i'm guessing that a lot of that is the higher tech type stuff the big pharma you know all the things that people kind of hear about washington uh that makes a lot of sense when you do the reverse right because i know that a lot of of representatives do go back to their actual, um, kind of geographies. What is that? Is that

like more like town hall type stuff or the staffers involved in that? What's that kind of look like? Great question. Um, it completely varies from member of Congress to member of Congress. And honestly, probably a lot of it is what type of district they represent. So if you're a Democrat and you're in a swing district, they're probably going to be pretty careful about what they do and how they're doing it back home because yeah, it may be great in theory to go have a town hall. But if all of a sudden it becomes like a news hijacking where, you know, a bunch of angry constituents come out and take the microphone, don't let you talk. That's what the local news is going to run with. So that's kind of like, you know, these members of Congress

and their staff, they have to evaluate what they're going to do and how they're going to do it. And in politics, controlling that message is so important. And that's the same, you know, whether you're building a big tech company, whether you're running a political campaign or whether, you know, you're an official member of Congress, because if someone is hijacking your story, you've just lost all control. And right now, as we've seen, you know, Democrats just took over the house, Republicans kept the Senate, but there isn't a lot of, um, there isn't a lot of reason for most members of Congress. If they're kind of in a swing district, they have to be very careful what they do and how they do it. So there's a ton of thought and energy put into how

they're going to, uh, best communicate it, but then also protect themselves because, you know, if you're a member of Congress, you're running for reelection, you never stop running. It's every two years, you know, they say you have to raise like 10,000 bucks every week just to kind of stay in the game. And so you're not falling behind. If you're, if you're in the Senate, you have six years. So, you know, they can kind of take some time off and not really focus on that. But if you're in the house, it's a constant campaign, which, you know, is that good for democracy? I don't know, but it's definitely a reality. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. All right. So why'd you leave? So I got tired of partying after work. Honestly, it's probably like New

York, it's probably like, you know, the Bay area where no, not many people are from DC. And so that was awesome where everyone's there kind of for the same reason, you know, it's like Hollywood for ugly people where you go to Hollywood for like show business, you go to Washington because you like government and politics. And so it was awesome. You meet friends from literally all over the country. Um, you kind of, I lived with three great buddies of mine, the house next or the townhouse next doors and other four guys that were great friends. Um, but I grew up in Ohio. I'm close with my family and it was just kind of the right timing where some jobs opened up and I was able to kind of just leap at it. And, um, it was just kind of the timing I think chose me. I

think in an ideal world, I would have stayed a few more years. The other kind of fascinating thing with DC is it's very easy to almost get stuck there in a way because, you know, if you have all this federal government experience, well, how are you going to like be of value to a company outside of DC? Like your values in DC and it's a good value experience. Yeah. So it's, you know, your, your values are your, uh, your skillsets don't exactly match. So I didn't want to necessarily get some way stuck there. So I was like, you know what, it's kind of the right time. I had a couple sisters, you know, I live in Columbus now. I had a couple sisters at the time at Ohio state. It kind of just made sense. I had a job offer. Um, I just went with it. Got it. And, uh, and when you

moved to Columbus, uh, what do you do? So I moved to Columbus, um, still kind of working government politics. I worked at the Ohio treasurer's office, um, under the former treasurer, Josh Mandel. Uh, he's a young guy at the time he was like in his young thirties, I would say when I first started working for him, um, I did communications for him. Um, and working for him was absolutely fascinating because it was great. Cause it was still kind of policy, which I enjoyed, but it was also finance, um, public finance, albeit, but still finance. So we were doing a lot of interesting things. Um, and he's a incredibly smart, passionate, and just hard driving guy. Um, he's a former Marine, a couple of tours of duty in Iraq. So that's like kind of

is go get them mentality. And so we did a number of really cool first of their kind initiatives that I don't think any treasurers before had done anything like that. None after. And it's such a important office. I mean, we collect, protect and invest the state's tax dollars. So I think we collected last fiscal year, 62 and a half billion protected, 224 billion. And then invested, I think it was 22 and a half billion. All right. So this is important. Let's, before we get into exactly what you guys were doing in Ohio, let's talk about just the state treasurer's office in any state um you just said that you collect protect and invest the taxes of a state big numbers right you're about collecting 60 plus billion protecting 200

plus billion um and then you said i think you invest like 22 and a half okay uh collecting right that's probably most of the policy work is that correct in terms of like how we're going to collect it how we're going to count it all that yeah so with uh the collecting that's you know just income taxes, business taxes, those types of things, they, they flow in our office would then, um, kind of a simplified version, um, you know, send that out to the different state agencies and whatnot, or put those in a different investment accounts. So then, you know, we could pay the bills, we could build the roads, we could do whatever needed to be done just to operate the state. If you think of it like a company. And so that's, you know, the collect, protect and invest,

that's the core, you know, what you have to do every day. If you screw up, you can't do anything else because you know you have to do those things correctly um outside of that is where we're able to kind of do these other kind of interesting things with some transparency investment accounts we launched the nation's first investments accounts for individuals with disabilities so that was a very rewarding thing to work on and then ohiocrypto.com was kind of the last thing don't get ahead of me hold on so uh collecting policy stuff protecting what exactly does that that's the pension funds for the state of ohio there's five pension funds you know police and fire, state employees, teachers, school employee, retirement, highway patrol. And so that's,

there's five independent investment funds. We, as the elected, you know, the, the treasurer, he's the directly accountable to the people. And it was up to him to make sure that, um, he was the custodian of them. We kind of oversaw, make sure that, you know, choosing some of the banks we worked with and, and making sure that, uh, you know, the retirees have their money. Makes sense. And then investing. Yep. So there's a couple different state investment portfolios. We had an investment team in-house. Now it's state tax dollars. You can't do anything crazy. So it's really conservative type stuff, bonds, those types of things. But we had a full-time dedicated team and every day they're just going and invest

and make sure that we were able to put money, get a little bit of interest on it. What we always said for investing was safety, liquidity, yield, and that order. Because it's tax dollars, you can't be screwing around with it. You need to be able to get it. But if we can get a little something to kind of you know increase what we're able to provide for ohioans we try to do it yeah kind of so i'm i'm guessing that uh that's the first time i ever coughed on the podcast shout out to myself um i'm assuming that most of the returns are looking at kind of like mid single digit type stuff um so fairly low risk but obviously as you said kind of the safety and liquidity prioritizing absolutely got it okay uh all right so that's all the what i'll call

like table stake stuff every state treasurer's office has to collect protect and invest the funds in which they are entrusted with uh you guys went above and beyond kind of the call of duty if you will and uh you guys did all kinds of wild stuff uh wild in the framework of government but pretty common sense i think from most people's perspective that come from the technology world uh let's talk first about the transparency stuff um maybe talk about the website and how this kind of came together yeah so the ohiocheckbook.com um and my again my former boss josh mandel he was the one, you know, these are his ideas and we helped them execute on them. But ohiocheckbook.com was the first time in state history that we put every single dollar that the state spends online. So

it was two bucks for a pack of pencil to millions of dollars in road contracts, everything in between. But not only did we do that, but we designed this website in a way that you didn't have to be a PhD. You didn't have to be a computer scientist. You didn't have to have a CPA in order to look and search. You could go on at a Google style search bar, interactive charts and graphs would go back 10 plus years. And you could type in Walt Disney World, see if there was some type of government official that went to Walt Disney World for a conference. It would show up how much the date it was, who spent it, all the information you need. So as a citizen or an investigative journalist or anyone that just cared about tax dollars, you could go in and see how this money

was being spent. And so what's really funny about this story is Josh made a policy decision in-house that he was going to build this thing but build it in secret while at the same time asking for permission to do it so all right so i've talked to josh about this this is the wildest part of the whole story is uh what you just said the state treasurer as far as i understand has the power to unilaterally do this yep he did it in terms of him and the rest of you as a team together built this privately right or yep behind closed doors at the same time he was not shy about saying we need to do this we need to do this and um i'll call it lobbying right the other governmental officials and offices saying that they need to do it uh my understanding is that

they were not exactly excited about doing this uh which is why he kind of in parallel was building it anyways. And then, uh, it sounds like it was launched without the approval, you know, without the blessing of these other organizations and they all freaked out. Yeah. So this took us about 18 months to build and we built it in complete secrecy where, you know, maybe less than 20 people in the state knew about it. Um, and so as we were building it, Josh was also going around the state, talking to journalists, talking to members of the legislature. And he said, Hey, I want this to, I want the state legislature to acquire me, Josh Mandel's a state treasurer of Ohio to pass a law. So I have to do this. And so he's just talking about it in theory in public

and you know, people, Oh, sure. We're happy about it. This is a great idea, but nothing was really happening. Um, people across the state really love the idea, but typical kind of some politicians, bureaucrats, they didn't really love it. And so as he was going around trying to build support we were just building this thing and so one day we just launched it flip the switch ohiocheckbook.com live and it kind of just blew people's minds because it had never been done and the journalists investigative reporters good government citizen watchdogs people were just like whoa like what just happened this was like a gangster move yeah and that's like an official government term right is is the idea that you build this thing because

really what it did was uh it didn't necessarily expose you know it wasn't the treasurer's office saying hey xyz personal organization is uh abusing public funds or doing something nefarious or being a good actor right kind of the whole spectrum uh it simply gave the tools for anyone else who wanted to look uh and it's almost like there's confidence and security in transparency right if i if i know that i can go look then i am much more likely to uh feel comfortable than if i can't absolutely and so uh any like really visceral reactions from folks uh privately yeah people were not happy um there's some members of the legislature some members of kind of the executive branch that did not like it and really held it against us and it's funny after we did it

there were some people that said well we were going to do it ourselves so we didn't need you you know you guys it's like well we've been talking about this for 18 months why does it take you another year or two to launch it but when you think about it one the big thing is this is already public information. We didn't take any information that wasn't already a matter of public record that already belonged to taxpayers. And we just put it online. So anyone could request it, but you just didn't have to go through all these crazy steps to do it. And second is, if you think about like the democratization of finance and money, I mean, this belongs to the people. This doesn't belong to bureaucrats. They're entrusted with it, but people should know how to do it. And

people should also have confidence in being able to search it. And again, not have to be some type of computer expert to go online. And there's this interesting report that we kind of, that was kind of resulted in it. And originally Ohio was 46th in the country for government transparency. And so we kind of use this report to model it. We became number one. So we went from 46 to one, but the number two, three, and four and five best sites, I mean, were light years behind what we did. And so we really kind of flipped this thing on its head and built this thing out in a way that not only did it improve in ohio but other states were able to kind of follow and they did and there was a number of other states that started to kind of up the ante and what we you know what we saw was this

race for transparency yeah i mean look it so i've checked out it obviously uh when i first met josh and uh one super impressive right to the just the way that it kind of came together in the launch and everything uh there's an element of uh irony in like building a transparency tool in secret yeah right right um but but uh but but obviously for good reason um and i think that the part when you go to the website that is uh just kind of blows people's minds it's like hey this is a great website that is actually intuitive that actually has a great user experience uh and again to your point the information was public to a degree but there was a sense of uh secrecy or uh difficulty that was um baked into the bureaucracy of getting the information well now

anybody who knows how to type can just go type in information and start seeing stuff right which i think is pretty cool so all right so you guys do uh ohiocheckbook.com uh and then it's like you guys are emboldened right now you guys are like all right well that one went pretty well uh and then you move on to ohiocrypto.com uh so tell us about that yeah so ohiocrypto.com that was kind of our uh you know josh who's a treasure for eight years and we had probably four or five different first of their kind initiatives. OhioCrypto.com was definitely the last, and I would say in a lot of ways, perhaps the most successful. So we had probably, we started building OhioCrypto.com in 2018, you know, so less than a year ago at this point. But what's

interesting, you know, being kind of on the finance side, I remember having meetings years ago in the office, Hey, what is this Bitcoin where we get people together, kind of read the white paper and see like, what does this mean? Cause we want to stay on top of things. Even if we can't buy law, invest in certain things, we still want to know what's going on. So it was always kind of in our mind, what cryptocurrency, what Bitcoin was. But Josh, one day comes in and says, I've been thinking a lot about this. I want to make Ohio a leader. No one is doing this. It will have tremendous impact in the space. It'll have tremendous impact for Ohio. One, we can give taxpayers another option to which they can pay their taxes. But two, and in some ways,

more importantly, long-term, we're able to plant a flag and show that Ohio is open for innovation. Ohio is open and friendly to innovators and entrepreneurs that are doing interesting things like cryptocurrency, that are in the Bitcoin space. They're just doing things that, you know, we're Ohio. We're not Silicon Valley. We're not Austin, Texas. We're not New York City. so we have to think and do things a little bit differently and it's doing things like ohiocrypto.com where we made ohio the first state in the country to accept cryptocurrency bitcoin for tax payments and uh it was business taxes as far as taxes correct um walk us through kind of as you guys built it how does the product actually work right so i go to uh ohiocrypto.com i basically

put like i'm assuming my ein number in or something for my business uh you tell me how much i owe and then I just like, you know, send Bitcoin to a wallet address or how does it work? Yeah. So it's real simple and easy. And what's really fascinating as we're building this, you know, the first thing you do when you attempt something was kind of look around like, well, who's done this before? And we found there was a couple towns in Switzerland. We called them up. They didn't really speak English. So it was kind of starting from scratch. And so we just kind of had to chip away every single day and figure out what we're going to do. And, you know, as we were starting it, you know, there may have been like 12 steps to begin. And Josh was always

harping like, no, we got to make this as simple and easy and intuitive as possible. So yeah, you're absolutely right. You go to ohiocrypto.com, you enter in your tax identification number, up will pop up what you have. You take your wallet that you already have, you can scan it, pay it, and a tax payment can be done in like 90 seconds. And so again, it was the first time it had ever been done. But we wanted to make it again, just like ohiocheckbook.com, so user friendly that there wasn't there we were not giving people reasons to say no the difficulty of the physical payment that was not going to be a reason for someone to say no to this now it makes a lot of sense um and then uh what was the response after it launches because

before we get to that this was built in secret as well it was yep okay so built in secret you guys launch it no real warning to anybody nope uh which one i think was awesome because it caught even the crypto community kind of off balance right in the sense that i remember the day it launched everyone was like whoa this is real right because the knock against bitcoin for the longest time was like you can't pay your taxes well now you can't now you can't right um but what was the reaction among um you know kind of governmental officials and organizations in the state of ohio a lot of interest oh interest okay interesting so not negative reaction no and that's what's and that that's what's what's wild i would say the week and two weeks after we launched that

I don't think we had a better week or two weeks in the office for eight years. Wow. It was fascinating to see the people from literally across the world that had interest of just what it was. We were kind of, because, you know, being in a governmental office, you kind of see a ton of different things where people, they're always throwing arrows at you, and you're just always kind of taking shots left and right. And so we're building this thing, but then also expecting for that to come. And so we do it. And then we just start talking to people. We talk to journalists, we talk to people in the space, we talk to business leaders, we talk

to everyone about it and we build out communications methods so we can tell people, you know, for folks in the space, you know, we're telling them the same genesis and the same information, but information that they specifically would like. As we're explaining it to business leaders, hey, you can pay your taxes and this is how. So we're developing these communication strategies to make sure we're hitting, you know, the right messaging points for everyone involved. And so as we're walking, you know, kind of going through it in that first week or two, it was really astonishing to see it. And no one really knocked us back on it, which was fascinating because we had expected, you know, some political opponents of Josh's, perhaps the newspapers didn't like it because it deemed it

too risky. Maybe folks in the space didn't think we went far enough with it. Um, but people were just resoundingly positive about it. And that was so cool to see. Yeah, it, um, I think that it's something where uh bitcoin and cryptocurrencies get uh some positive attention some negative attention right the volatility you know all this retail investing all this stuff uh when you tie it to hey you're a government official organization and this is going to help us collect more taxes and then we can use those funds to maybe fund things you want to do right all of a sudden like there's like a personal interest or or a professional interest in seeing it be successful I think it changes the kind of conversation a little bit.

How many people were actually interested though, right? In terms of not, not like how many businesses in Ohio actually said, you know, that's something I want to do. Yeah. So the, the, I would say the only downside for personally working on this is by the time we'd built this, it was ready to go and we launched it. We only had a few weeks left in Josh's administration, you know, which coincided around Thanksgiving around Christmas, new year.

So we didn't really kind of get to like really run with it as much as we would have liked. But we had 10 businesses, I believe, register for it. We had two while we were in those couple of weeks pay for it. So the first person was a man named Bernie Moreno. He's a big business leader in Cleveland. He's actually in charge of the Blockland Initiative. He was the first person in America to pay his taxes. The second one, and this was also fascinating and I think shows the potential, is Overstock.com became the first Fortune 1000 company to pay their taxes.

They do a ton of stuff with cryptocurrency and they saw it, heard about it, and they wanted to be the first big business to do it. And so to work with, you know, a local business leader and then a national kind of business, Fortune 1000, to pay their taxes shows, I think, the possibility and the potential. But also just it helped really tie for us how many people this affects. It's from the small entrepreneur of two or three people in Cincinnati, Ohio, that are maybe building the next cryptocurrency or blockchain product to literally a Fortune 1000 company, kind of everyone in between. And so to kind of get that, you know, again, it was only two small sample size for the short amount of time we had. But that was really rewarding and really cool to kind of help move the conversation and help show it. I remember my parents when they saw the Overstock.com announcement, they called up and they're like, what's this crypto? You know, and I kind of explained to them, they're like, oh, that's really interesting. That's a cool thing you guys worked on.

Yeah, look, I've met Bernie and then obviously everyone knows Overstock. And I think that it's this element of it probably is not the most prudent financial thing to do right in the short term, just given how regulations currently work, taxes work. But I think that both of those groups are forward thinking and it's more the statement of, hey, you can now do this. Right. More so than like I'm trying to optimize for every last basis point of of my finances. With that said, though, hopefully this leads to other states and eventually the federal government following suit. Right. Absolutely. And that's the other thing. It's, you know, especially in Washington, there's so much negativity and just problems there. And that's a whole another conversation. But, you know, if you think about states or the laboratories for democracy, Hopefully states like Ohio as a leader can help move that ball forward. And also because, you know, we, sure, what we did was fine and great, but if no one's second, if no one's third, if no one's fourth and others don't adopt it, what we did doesn't really matter.

So that's the big thing is getting those people next and who's next to kind of move that ball because the regulatory environment isn't great. And in this space in particular, you know, it's truly global marketplace where, yeah, maybe people are in Tel Aviv building a company or maybe they're in Europe or Southeast Asia. Well, or Toronto is a huge one. And for me flying from Ohio, it's quicker to fly to Toronto than it is New York city. And so what can we do, you know, as policymakers or government officials or even business and civically yourself, you know, you're, you're moving that conversation, but what can we do? So people are willing to build their business here in America, as opposed to taking it outside the borders and giving them a reason to do so. yeah makes uh makes simply sense uh all right so you guys left in uh mid-july i think right mid-january i'm sorry mid-january yeah um and when you did that obviously tax season kind of follows that right so uh remains to be seen kind of how many businesses etc have uh have utilized the product but i think everyone especially in the crypto community uh was uh was highly impressed and frankly appreciative right that hey look somebody got this across the uh the thing um Would it be fair to say that Josh, yourself, others on the team are like Bitcoiners, right?

And like super crypto enthusiasts, or would you think it's more of, no, we're just more, we're trying to figure out, you know, interesting, innovative technologies to use and blockchain and Bitcoin happened to be one of them. Yeah. I know Josh is, I've heard him say a million times, he's a crypto enthusiast. I find the technology fascinating and just, you know, what is it going to lead to and just what does it mean? And also just being at the forefront of trying to understand it.

And so, you know, not to jump ahead, but kind of what I do now is help some of these companies move the conversation, move the ball, whether it's communications or, you know, building out some messaging or branding strategies, because that's such an important thing for anyone in this space is, you know, it's great to kind of talk to the same people and do the same things. But for the technology to move forward, it's how do you find others outside of the, you know, the small, you know, bubble so you can sell to those people so you can get them to adopt it, whether that's, you know, doing small things like Ohio Crypto dot com or announcing partnerships with, you know, you know, the coffee shop down the street to accept Bitcoin for your morning latte or something. Kind of moving the conversation and moving that ball down the field is so important for this to continue growing. And that's something that I find fascinating. Yeah. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. And so now, um, talk a little bit about what you're doing, right. In terms of, you guys aren't just focused on crypto, right. I think you're working with kind of all kinds of different technology companies, but explain a little bit about what you're doing. Yeah. So after I, uh, after I left office in January, we were term limited out. So

I was figuring out what to do next. And, um, I decided to launch a consulting company. It's called the green block group, uh, green block group.com with my business partner, Ari Lewis. Ari's been in this in the crypto space for years and he's actually someone who I met because he was a consultant that we brought on for ohiocrypto.com so I met him build it he helped build it because in the office we had a ton of financial professionals tons of you know IT engineers that could actually build this back end but we didn't really have anyone that was a true crypto insider and knew and could talk it and could help us walk through some of the you know the opportunities and challenges within it. So we brought him on and he was doing consulting. After he was winding off

that project, I was leaving the office. He was doing consulting. I was doing consulting. We kept working more and more together and realized, why don't we just join forces? Because as we were working on this, he was teaching me so much from his perspective of working in startups, working in venture, working in this space. I was teaching him from the communications, the marketing, the branding, the media, the government. And so what we figured is, well, what if we kind of offer a more holistic set of experiences where instead of someone just hiring a PR firm or someone just hiring like an implementation kind of expert, you can take our collective experience and hopefully provide a much better service to our partners. Makes sense. Um, before, uh, I wrap up,

yep. It was ask a rapid fire questions. Uh, I'm going to skip some of the crypto questions and let you off the hook. Uh, what's the most important book you've ever read though? book I've ever read? Um, that's a great question. I would, so this is kind of a, I'll go with an author. Okay. So I really like, I like reading like the big, you know, history nerd and all that stuff. But what really helps me like get into a good groove with reading is like mystery type novels. So I read a lot of John Grisham. Oh yeah. He's probably my favorite author. Who's not, you know, in the history or government, that type of space. And another reason i like it is every every christmas every holiday season um i get a new book from john

grisham that my mom gives me and writes a little note in it so it's like a tradition so it's it's i love reading i'm in the middle of one right now um so i'll go with that uh i had never read a john grisham book but i obviously know who it is uh and there's a lot of them there's a ton yeah so you've got a couple yeah i've been getting a lot of years yeah for sure absolutely um all right And then, uh, aliens, believer, non-believer. I'll go. No, no. I'll go.

Wow. Okay. Hold on. I was big on your, uh, your innovation there. And now I'll say you're a non-believer. Why? I'd like to think we're special. Okay.

Um, I also know that I'm smart enough to not have any clue what's going on in the world. I mean, just that black hole photo that came out, like even wrapping your mind around, like what the heck that was, how they took that. I mean, it just, yeah, I think it is. because i think there's just i agree it's probably real but i saw the conspiracy theories like i have no idea what it means so are we going there that's i don't know and if we go to the black hole what happens i have no idea have you seen the photo of the two uh galaxies uh colliding no that's that's a little scary i i gotta set it like this stuff is too big for me to wrap my head around so i'll

just go with no no aliens all right uh and then what about uh the ocean like uh any desire to go like the depths of the ocean i mean everyone wants to always go to space but no depths of the ocean no no i i think serving on like a submarine like in the navy i think that would just be a cool no horrible a horrible like it's just like i think it's like really freaky you're like trapped down there if something goes wrong you're like you have six months down here i mean i'm out i have no reason to go down to the depths of the ocean all right that's fair uh all right psychopath test uh how long do you dunk oreos and milk oh that's i just had some oreos this past weekend um i would say maybe like three to five seconds okay that's just kind of like

you kind of like yeah like like i want to get it a little wet but i don't want it to be too soggy yeah and you also like i you know you gotta like dump them in but then like have a spoon so then you're not like no way no you put wait you dunk them in you kind of like throw them in you can instead of like dipping them with your hands where you like dunk just throw it in let it sit there for a couple seconds and then like grab a spoon and like take it out man you were the second person that is but the other person i think it was juan hernandez was like i put them in and i let them get super soggy i eat it like cereal see but no that's like that's no that's yeah and if you leave them in too long then you're like you know i get but that's also probably like

eating pizza with a fork and knife which is yeah very much frowned upon yeah that's fine all right three to five seconds isn't that yeah i'm i think like seven seconds is ideal okay three to five is like conservative but you know you get a little bit of the experience i wonder if it varies with like the double stuff and oh no you just gotta just one size fits all all right what one question you got for me um let's see good one question what do you what do you so you had a lot of questions about like policy like what do you think from you know you're you're at the other end of the spectrum of like you're the technology like you've been in the space like i know nothing what do you wish policymakers government officials knew about this world that they don't or what

could you know the space be better telling them i think that every government official would be better off if they took a one month sabbatical every year and they had to go spend it in like a externship type uh situation with a company building some sort of innovative technology they can pick and there has to be some rule where like congressional officials all can't go work in big pharma right but like again i'm making all this up off the top of my head so you got to think it out more but like maybe hey we'll send up to five representatives to a single industry or vertical um but like some of them should go figure out you know like how does autonomous driving work how does uh actual artificial intelligence work how does robotics

work how does uh computer vision work right i mean just like all these different technologies uh including bitcoin crypto uh i think that having leaders at the government at the national government level that have i'll call it quote unquote experience but it's less experience and more just like base level knowledge of how some of this stuff works and also having a network that allows them to reach back out to industry folks where oh we're talking about like i don't know how to like set up roads i don't know maybe i should call like somebody's working on you know autonomous driving at uber or google or tesla or whatever right like that seems to be like that should be a fairly non-controversial uh way to look at it um and so it's less about like what

do they know and it's more about just like it's very obvious that a lot of them are unfamiliar with the like ground truth with the innovative technologies uh and the decisions they make today unfortunately because of the bureaucracy because of the lead time needed for a lot of implementations of their decisions uh those technologies will actually impact what they decide today five ten years from now um and so it just feels like if they're blind to the tech and probably should fix that i think that's spot on i mean that's i've made it up on the spot that's great internet's gonna troll me and say that's a bad idea but whatever it's fine i like it all right man listen i really appreciate it uh i uh for for everyone in the crypto community

just thank you i think that what you josh and the rest of the team did uh was pretty cool um i think everything from the transparency stuff to the crypto stuff is just a new way of looking at kind of, you know, public finance. Right. And hopefully many, many more people will follow. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I appreciate so much your time. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a

long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.