#849 Legitimizing The Crypto Industry w/ Bradley Tusk

Bradley Tusk is the Founder & CEO of Tusk Venture Partners In this conversation, we discuss regulation in the crypto space and efforts to legitimize the Industry. We also discuss Crypto companies going public, Tusk Venture's investments, and the future effects from the Russia/Ukraine invasion. ======================= Mode, UK Fintech app, allows you to buy, earn and grow Bitcoin, all in one app. Not only is it a secure app to buy & hold Bitcoin, Mode allows you to pay & receive up to 10% Bitcoin Cashback from its growing list of online partner brands. Available on the App Store and Google Play. Download Mode at modeapp.com and set up your account to be in with the chance of winning ONE WHOLE Bitcoin. Offer ends Jan 31, 2022. Only available in the UK. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish Hybrid Order Book pairs the high-performance of a traditional Central Limit Order Book with automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish Liquidity Pools, backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish Treasury. So, you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. Learn more at Bullish.com or follow @Bullish on Twitter. Because the future belongs to the bullish. *Not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish’s services are available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit https://bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings- ======================= Fundrise is largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Now let's kick this thing off. Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. In this conversation, we talk about everything from Russia and Ukraine, to regulation in the metaverse, and also self custody and mobile voting. Really enjoyed this conversation with Bradley, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mode. Mode is a trusted UK app that allows you to buy, earn, and grow Bitcoin all in one app. You can pay with Mode and receive up to 10% Bitcoin cash back from its growing list of online partner brands, straight into your Mode wallet. I have to say personally, I think the company

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  behind this app is pretty damn impressive. They're FCA registered, they're listed on the LSE in the UK, and they're also listed on the OTCQB in the United States. They choose to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a publicly traded company, and they are piloting a Bitcoin payroll product to pay their UK employees in Bitcoin. To all my fellow UK friends, I recommend you go check out Mode right now. The app is available in the App Store and Google Play. You can download the app now to get started, and make sure to check out the Rewards tab on the app for the 30+ brands you can earn Bitcoin cash back from. Go check them out at modeapp.com, or go into the Google Play Store or the App Store and download the Mode app today. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange,

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish hybrid order book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish liquidity pools, backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish treasury. So you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. You can learn more at bullish.com or follow Bullish on Twitter, because the future belongs to the Bullish. Now, this is not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high-risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish's services are available in select locations only and not to US persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  End risk warnings. Go check them out at bullish.com or follow at bullish on Twitter. Today's episode is brought to you by Fundrise. You all know I believe that the best investors both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. Fundrise is here to help you do just that. It's the largest direct to investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right. Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy to use automated platform. Its 1 million users already know that the investment with Fundrise is capable of producing strong appreciation returns and income generation while helping to stabilize a diversified portfolio. That's more important now than ever in our inflationary environment. See

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  for yourself how over 190,000 other investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to fundrise.com/pomp today and for a limited time, you'll get $10 when you place your first investment. Again, that's fundrise.com/pomp. Go check it out and when you make your first investment, they'll give you $10 on top of it. Fundrise.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 6:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I'm super excited. We have a special treat for everybody. Obviously, Darius every Thursday, but the second guest today, Bradley Tusk. Mr. Tusk, are you there?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Hey, how are you? Yeah, I'm here. How you doing, man?

• 6:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm doing fantastic. How are you?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Good, good. I had COVID. I'm finally done with it, so I'm pretty happy about that.

• 6:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Nice. You're on the other side of it. I had it too. My brothers all had it. We're all, you know, you gotta experience it to appreciate it. So we're all on the other side. I'm glad everyone is healthy and hopefully happy.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I was feeling left out after two years. So yeah, I'm in the club with six other billion people.

• 6:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, same. All right. Uh, let's talk. We had a couple of things I want to talk about. First, let's talk about Coinbase earnings. That's happening today. I know that you've got some thoughts there. What's your general take on? We can look at it as just like the large infrastructure companies in crypto, especially their reception by the public markets. How are you thinking about this?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, ultimately, I'm bullish on Coinbase, and I should say we were an investor on the venture side. We're not currently in it, but so I'm not completely objective here. But yeah, look, long term to me, if you fundamentally believe that crypto will continue to be something that people will want to invest in and take advantage of, which I strongly do, and exchange is making money on both sides of the trade that has real credibility and real market presence, is going to do well. Is it going to necessarily hit earnings and every expectation every quarter? No, it's like any company. But if you like Coinbase and you're already in it, I don't think you need to sell just because the earnings today may not be what they want.

• 7:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about politicians and regulators, and he's been a lot of time on regulation, what's your general sense there? Do companies like Coinbase going public make it much clearer for them? And they start to pay more attention? Or have you seen a change at all over the last few months?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have. So look, to me, Coinbase's IPO was kind of a watershed moment in our industry, because what I think it said to the market, to Washington DC, to the media is, this thing is real. This thing is here to stay. This is not just some fad, you know, of a bunch of people in their twenties who are having fun. So I think the Coinbase IPO, when you look back in 50 years, the history of crypto, will be one of the seminal moments in the entire thing. But Just IPOing without them doing all the work necessary to influence the regulations the right way is really insufficient. So I think we're at sort of a very dangerous point right now where Washington is hyper

• 8:38Speaker 02

  aware of crypto, they know they need to do something about it, but crypto as a kind of political entity is nowhere, right? No politician thinks that like, oh, if I mess with Coinbase, I could lose my next primary or losing the next general. No one fears crypto politically the way they fear pharma or oil or faculties or whatever it is. And until you can play the political game and make politicians feel that you can influence their next election, they're not going to care about you. So as long as they don't care about you, trust me, you're not going to like the regulations that come from them.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to think about New York specifically, there's a new mayor, Eric Adams, who I always look at these situations, Miami is similar, there's a couple other politicians around the United States where in the beginning, they all say the right things, right? They get coached, they kind of learn about stuff, they say, okay, hey, we want to be kind of crypto forward, Bitcoin forward, whatever. And then ultimately, over time, you get more data points and you start to understand. And it seems like one of the big things in New York specifically around regulation is the bit license. And the longer that that's there in place, there's a lot of friction. I think that many people in the community want to see it removed or kind of changed in some way. What's your general take, given that you understand so much about the regulatory environment and politics of like?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  We have a lot of experience with the bit license specifically. So I would say this, if you look back at when the bit license was created by Ben Losky in the Department of Financial Services in New York, I think Ben had the right intentions in mind, which is he saw crypto as a legitimate industry that really made a lot of sense for New York, but that would need some level of structure and regulation. So he put something in place. Ultimately, what he put in place isn't really smart or right for the industry itself. It's too bureaucratic, it's too slow, it doesn't really kind of understand what the needs of the companies are. And so the existence of a bit license isn't inherently a problem in my view. And keep in mind, in other states, you have something called a money transmission license.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  You need a license everywhere. New York just has a different name. The problem is the way that that license is constructed and done is really bureaucratic. It's got to be overhauled. I would say, based on our discussions with the Department of Financial Services, I think that they realize this. We have a new governor. We have a new superintendent. I think that they get that the process needs to be overhauled. My guess is we will see that in a couple of months.

• 11:01Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to think about some of the other kind of longer tail components or subsectors of the crypto industry, you've started to think about the intersection of regulation, rules, politics, et cetera, with things like NFTs or the metaverse. And you wrote this kind of metaverse memo, which I got to say, I was very impressed with, one, your imagination of like, here's all the complexity that's going to go into this and like, here's all the problems that we're going to face. Because it got me thinking a lot about like, wow, I hadn't thought about, you know, many of those kind of, you know, situations. What's your general take? Maybe just like metaverse in general? And then like, what are the things that people should be paying attention to here?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  So, number one, it's coming, right? Companies like Apple and Facebook and Microsoft don't spend tens of billions of dollars on stuff that they don't think that they're going to be able to execute. So, it's going to happen. Now, look, it could be as amazing as a completely immersive world that in many ways is better than our current physical reality and a huge number of our functions in socializing and education and workers that in the metaverse. Or it could just be like the internet with sort of better VR, right? It's unclear still where it's all going to land, but it's coming for sure. Because it's coming, you can start to predict what about it may be problematic and what may not. So, I don't fault the government for not anticipating, say, 2007 or 2008 or 2009,

• 12:24Speaker 02

  what Facebook would become and getting ahead of it because it was a brand new thing, right? I fault them that it's 2022. They still haven't dealt with it. But we know the metaverse effectively is going to be the internet on steroids. So, every problem that we currently have with internet 2.0 is going to exist in web 3.0, but like, much bigger, right? So- Uh, data ownership. Like right now, you know, we already have a position in the US where individuals really have no control over their data. They're easily monetized by their platforms. Um, and I think that that's, you know, really good for the companies who are making money on it, but really bad for the consumers or data portability. You know, right now, it just, you know, bad data portability means like every streaming service that's a member

• 13:06Speaker 02

  of our password to sign in, it's a pain in the neck, but it's not a huge problem. But once you have an avatar where your entire existence and life is on, is in the metaverse, if you have to recreate that for every single metaverse you go into, that would be impossible, right? So you need laws that say that data has to be cool. Um, or think about things like consumer protection. So right now, the government, typically state and local government, says, you know, here's how products have to be made and services have to be sold to basically keep consumers safe. Um, but still much of that is around a physical object. So like the chair that I'm sitting in, there are rules around how it had to be made so that I don't fall, crash to the ground in the middle of the interview. Um, when transactions

• 13:50Speaker 02

  are completely digital in the metaverse, um, and they're so widespread, um, how do you protect consumers, right? And, and I don't know the answer to it, but I know you've got to think about it. Or taxation. Um, if you are state or local government and much of your revenue depends on sales taxes, you know, someone with a decent VPN, basically buying and selling what we need in the metaverse, could probably get around paying all sales taxes. That would devastate, you know, local state government. So there's so many different issues and the problems are foreseeable, the challenges are foreseeable, the opportunities are foreseeable. So the reason I wrote the memo was, you know, hopefully to spark a conversation, you know, like this, so the regulators will start thinking about it and for once in our life actually get ahead of us.

• 14:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of these rules and regulations do you think will be what I'll call, uh, historical in application in terms of like they're written on a piece of paper or in a digital format, uh, but they still are courts and laws and all that, uh, versus like the code is the law and this kind of, uh, maybe libertarian type view of, uh, we don't need the people or the governments, we just have code, like. Where's the truth in this?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Look, I loved it personally. I loved DAOs. I'm fascinated by this effort to buy the Broncos. And, you know, I'm building this mobile voting technology that could fit well with that. I'm really personally excited about that. But overall, and we see this in sort of every single sector, you do need some level of actual regulation with laws on paper and legal cases and precedent and regulations and all of that. Because like, take crypto again. As an investor in Coinbase, or we were, you know, maybe we'll be again sometime, I want the industry to be considered legitimate because I'm in the company that is legit, right? So, you know, I want the fraudulent ICOs to be cracked down upon because something has to separate the good apples and the bad apples, right?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  So it can't totally be purely self-enforcing. Now, some of it should be, like, I'll give you an example, esports, right? How do you regulate esports betting? I've got a company I'm incubating down in Miami right now called Gorilla. That's an esports betting platform. And how do you make sure that if you and I are playing Fortnite, we're not conspiring to throw the match in one way or another so that we could take advantage of the bet? That won't work from government regulation. That's going to require some sort of self-regulatory organization that everyone says, these are the standards we're going to live by, and we will ostracize everyone who doesn't live by these standards. So I think there are some forms of tech that can exist with sort of self-policing and rules and kind of its own subculture, but a lot of it does need actual guidance.

• 16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  John, what questions you got?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when you think about the different industries that are being regulated, it sounds like Tusk goes after the specific, like, highly regulated markets. What markets do you see moving forward will become a little more free, open? So obviously crypto is one that is extremely skeptical. Will it be regulated? How will it be regulated? What are some other markets that you are interested in at the moment?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one, so we're big digital health investors and while healthcare is unbelievably regulated, almost by definition, digital health will have to be a little more free because it just changes the entire concept, right? And I think what we saw, not that there's probably no upside of COVID, but one maybe silver lining is the value proposition for digital care became very clear to a lot of people very quickly. And now you realize if you can get the care you need from your phone in three minutes opposed to driving to a doctor's office, waiting around for a while with other sick people, and then seeing someone in person, like you're always going to want the digital option. And so as that continues to grow and manifest, it opens up simply because the nature of

• 17:31Speaker 02

  digital healthcare is a lot freer and easier. And I have this vision that's probably crazy, but I could see a world one day where we don't have hospitals and we don't really have physical facilities. We have very specific physical facilities, like surgery centers to, you know, keeps to be born in or brain surgery performed. But I think everything else is either done digitally or we're investors in a company called Get Labs and it's an at-home phlebotomy company. So they go to your house to draw blood and simply because they believe the unit economics are better to go to people than to have to run labs. So I think that if that's correct, you will see so much of healthcare move from physical locations into digital in people's homes, that a lot of that opens up. We do a lot in the gambling space that I just mentioned.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  We just saw over the last couple of years and we're seeing right now, states legalizing sports betting, New York went online January 1st and it's been a massive explosion ever since. That's going to follow on iGaming and esports betting and so there will be a lot more opportunity in that space as well. And then, you know, maybe energy in a sense that if Congress ever does get around to passing a meaningful climate bill where there's hundreds of billions of dollars in new incentives out there, that should sort of spark some innovation and create some new ideas, but that requires specifically Congress to get their act together, which obviously barely happens.

• 18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Bradley, one of the things that's, I think, becoming more of a topic right now, we saw in Canada, obviously, they've gone after, maybe not gone after, maybe that's too aggressive of a word, but they've at least become more abrasive to the CEOs of Coinbase and Kraken for talking about self custody. And when you start talking about Metaverse, we start talking about Bitcoin cryptocurrencies, it feels like self custody is going to become a bigger and bigger kind of conversation. What's your take on the regulation there? How will that evolve over time? Any thoughts?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we're investors in a couple of Dibs. Dibs is a kind of fractionalized sports card trading NFT company. And I remember about eight months ago now, one of the most interesting calls I've ever been. It was here, my team and the leadership team at Dibs. And the question was, who do we want to regulate this? Because our view is eventually, all custody is going to be regulated. So we could wait around and see who takes the lead on it and then decide whether or not, how we handle it. Or our view was, right now, because no one's regulating it, what if we picked our regulator? What if we said, hey, you know, the entity X, we think you're best equipped to regulate us, please go ahead and do so. And then we can shape all of the initial regulations

• 20:02Speaker 02

  and really, you know, design a system that kind of works for us. And so that's what Dibs did. In fact, we kind of were debating between the state of Wyoming, the state of New York, and the SEC picked the state of New York for a bunch of different reasons. And they were a little surprised to hear from us saying, hey, we'd like to be regulated. But they understood and that's now in play. And so I do think custody is going to end up being regulated one way or another. And I think companies in this space, rather than just keeping your head in the sand and just trying to resist it completely or pretend that it's not going to happen, be more thoughtful and proactive about it. Think about, for what I do, who is the best regulator? What are the best regulations? How can I go about proactively making that happen? In my experience, and this is true whether it's

• 20:44Speaker 02

  in crypto or transportation or education tech or any sector, if you are proactive and smart about regulation and politics, you will win most of the time. If you try to just avoid it completely or just pretend it doesn't exist, you will lose most of the time.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think also about individuals, how many of the crypto, I don't know, employees or folks in the industry now, do you think are equipped to kind of navigate so much of this? Like, you're talking a lot about, oh, it seems like the intersection of this brand-new, innovative technologies with what are pretty kind of established industries, law, regulation, etc. Like, how do you think about the people? And do we need to upgrade the skills, or what?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  You do. So, look, the crypto exchanges and the big companies who will be impacted by regulation have to hire some people outside of their ecosystem for certain functions, right? And when it comes to legal, government relations, public relations, that kind of stuff, you know, you need people with that kind of expertise, which are people who work in Congress, state government, city government, whatever it is. But you need people with those specific skill sets. You know, you can't just say, oh, so-and-so on my team is really brilliant, so therefore they can figure anything out. To me, the worst founders to invest in the people who it reviews, just because they have really high IQ, they can do anything. That's clearly not true. So, two things have to happen. One is, the industry

• 22:06Speaker 02

  has to get more professional around who it brings in. And then, two, the ecosystem, like, we're right now the only venture fund that exists that could then go out and run regulatory campaigns for our portfolio companies. You know, while I like having a monopoly, ultimately, there needs to be more of us. It can't just be my fault. Because 90-ish percent of companies are regulated either directly or indirectly by government, at least here in the US. And if that's the case, you've got to be able to be proactive about the regulation, just like you are about marketing or engineering or anything else.

• 22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And I guess part of this also is, for you all, do you think that, or my understanding, and what we talked about previously, is that there was this really unique kind of lane for you guys to play in, which was the combination of the regulatory advice and kind of work and experience with capital. Do you think that that's actually exasperated in this market, where you've got crypto and these new technologies and kind of more complex? It almost feels like the intersection that you guys play at has become even more magnified now?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And you know, we're in a race, I can't talk about our returns to the SEC rules, but I would say things have gone really well. The thesis that Jordan, my partner and I had back in 2016 has certainly proved out based on returns, based on the kind of deals we're getting into, based on what we're leading. So yeah, and it's simply because there's a saying by Pericles, which is just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. And that was back in the Greek empire thousands of years ago, but it's still true today. If you succeed and become relevant enough that all of a sudden there's a meaningful amount of money going through your industry, government's going to get involved. And either you can wait till they they pour something on you, or you could be proactive about it, figure out what works best for you.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  And so we try to invest in companies that want to be proactive about it. And as that awareness and realization of the need to take regulation and government and politics seriously increases within tech, it just gives us more and more deal flow and more and more opportunities to leave rounds.

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. My last question for you is around Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, kind of all the geopolitical chess that's going on. Obviously, there's this overlay of like financial sanctions and financial censorship. Just open any question like what's your general take on all this? What should people be paying attention to?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so and this may be an unpopular view, but I'm not quite sure why we're doing anything in the sense that Putin's a terrible person. He's probably the greatest thief in the history of the world. You know, human rights violations, all that other stuff. But virtually none of our economies depended on Russia or or the Ukraine, right? And yes, you know, they didn't stop Hitler in 1938, and that led to a lot of problems, but the world is radically different today. The way we fight wars is radically different today. And so this notion that, you know, we still have to apply kind of 20th century military thinking to 21st century situations, to me, doesn't really make sense. And I get the idea that if we let Russia take Ukraine, then maybe China goes ahead and takes Taiwan.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  But again, you know, Taiwan is useful to the US because there's semiconductor factories that we care about that are there. A lot of those factories inside the US itself. Well, once we have the capacity, you know, I like the Taiwan's a democracy, but should American troops or lives or or doc taxpayer dollars be put at risk um to defend another country? You know, I I kind of think not like, I'm not really sure why we feel like we can have unlimited influence, unlimited power, and then we have to contain that or Russia or China or anyone else. So I I just think we're we're fighting the as they always do. They fight the existing war with a strategy for the last.

• 25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's um, it's, I mean, just absolutely surreal, fascinating. I don't know what the right word is to watch all of this play out. But what I do think people are waking up to is it's much more serious. And I also think that there's been this shift of the United States's appetite, obviously, for violent conflict, but also the way that it's perceived around the world, and sometimes in a in a positive manner, sometimes in a negative manner. But it does call into question, I think, and you bring up a great point of like, where is the places where the United States should intervene? And when is that appropriate? To what degree? What severity? What investment is necessary? Should we put American lives at risk or not? And then when should we not? Right? And when should we kind of sit by and say, hey, we don't agree with that,

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  but you know, that's not our our fight to fight. And I don't think there's a right answer. And that's the part to me that that always gets people.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  You know what's what's interesting is the thing that you guys do for a living crypto, I would argue is the best argument for not having too much involved. Because crypto is, in the way I see it, a sovereignless currency and concept where people say, I don't trust the central institutions in my life. I don't trust the central government, the central banks, media, Wall Street, whatever it is. I'd rather throw my lot with other like minded people, even if I don't know who they are, even if there are countries all over the world. People are getting less and less nationalistic, especially younger people. And I think as a result, the notion of, oh, we've got to go to war because this these borders are violated by these borders. I just don't think that's how kind of Gen Z thinks about things. And so to me, the the very the

• 27:24Speaker 02

  fact that we're here having this conversation, because crypto is so important that there's a market to hear us talk about this, is the same reason why ultimately, a lot of the traditional foreign policy ideas don't really hold up today.

• 27:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I lied. I actually have one more question, a little follow up on that, which is one of the, maybe not theories, one of the things that I've been talking about a lot and thinking about a lot is sanctions are very valuable when the person that you're targeting, the company, the nation state, uses the currency of which you control the production and distribution of. And so if they're all using dollars and we are the creators of dollars and we're able to put these financial sanctions and actually make them stick, that's great for us, right? And then we have this amazing kind of intended impact. Now, the downside is if they don't use the dollars. And so one of the things that I keep coming back to is like, the single greatest position for a country to be in is to be the producer and distributor of the global reserve

• 28:17Anthony Pompliano?

  currency. The next best option is to be the largest holder of, participant in, and most sophisticated user of a currency that no one controls, right? It's basically like, if I can't control it, then I actually want no one to control it. And so from like a kind of geopolitical game theory, like, should the United States start embracing Bitcoin and saying, look, on the 0.001% chance that the dollar is in the global reserve currency in 50 or 100 years, like, let's put ourselves in position to be successful and benefit from that situation as well?

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, for several reasons. So one, just like I think any reasonable financial advisor these days would tell you, part of a diversified portfolio should be in Bitcoin or crypto in some way. It's almost irresponsible now to not hold any of it. I think same thing is true on a national level. But beyond that, there's such an amazing opportunity here that this country is missing, which is even though crypto, as I just said, is a sovereignless concept, a lot of the underlying values of innovation, risk-taking, aversion to the status quo and central institutions are really the American ethos, American values. And we could try to make this country the home of crypto jobs, right? And we could basically create an entire new industry, crypto, blockchain, FTS,

• 29:34Speaker 02

  DAOs, DeFi, so much stuff, and create a lot of jobs for Americans, a lot of wealth here. And rather than looking at crypto by government as this sort of evil that has to be contained, they should be looking at it as this option. Opportunity that could really help transform the economy.

• 29:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. There's another thought process also of just like, uh, uh, energy ends up being, uh, one of, if not the most important assets to make sure that you've got, uh, independence on and, uh, control of. And ultimately Bitcoin is, uh, the most secure computing network in the world. It runs on energy. It's the most profitable, uh, use of energy, uh, at the current moment. And so, uh, it just, I don't know. I'm with you. It's very confusing to me that, uh, we're taking such an adversarial stance, uh, in some politicians' eyes, but I think it comes from a lack of education and, uh, and also just like innovator's dilemma, right? Like, hey, the system works for me. Why, why do we change it?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  If you guys have one more minute, we've talked before, which is mobile voting. So I've been funding and running the campaign nationally to make it possible people to vote on their phones over the blockchain. So, so far either deployed military, people with disabilities in seven different states have been able to vote real elections on their phone. We are now building our own mobile voting technology end to end encrypted that will make open source to anyone who needs it. But the real reason why it's necessary is not just because we believe in the blockchain or we want things to be easier, but every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician wants to stay in office and they prioritize that and everything else. Just as the listeners here and watchers know, I spent the first 15 years of my career in government.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  City government, state government, federal government, run campaigns. I've kind of seen this from every possible angle. And if you want politicians to behave differently, you gotta give them different incentives. So when every decision is gerrymandered, that means the only election that really ever matters is the primary. When turnout in primaries are 10 or 15%, the only people who matter to those politicians are that 10 to 15%, which tend to be the furthest right or the furthest left. So they're being prodded by the most ideological of voters, whereas if we can get turnout to 40, 50, 60%, because all it's doing is press a button on our phones, then all of a sudden everything moves to the middle. We have a lot less extremism, a lot less polarization, and then a lot more rational thinking and, and results.

• 31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Where can we send people to find out more about both the regulatory stuff that you guys do and also the investing?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so mobilevoting.org is all the stuff for mobile voting. Tusk VC is the venture website. And actually, if you just go to bradleytusk.com, that Metaverse memo you mentioned is on there, and it links to everything else we do.

• 32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Thank you so much, brother. You've been a pioneer. You continue to push the pace when it comes to regulation and the legal conversation. So keep it up. And if any founders or entrepreneurs are out there and want to raise some money, Bradley's a pretty good, damn good person to go talk to. All right, buddy. Sounds good. We'll talk soon.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Really appreciate it.

• 32:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks, brother. All right, bye.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 32:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.