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

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

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 0:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Chris Berry is co-founder and partner at The Green Block Group. In this conversation, we talk about how technology is viewed in Washington DC, 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.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang bang. I'm here with Chris. Dude, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, you had a life prior to your work at the Ohio government. What were you doing?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you a University of Georgia fan?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  I am, go Dogs!

• 1:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, go Gators, but go ahead.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Okay, alright, we'll see you in late October.

• 1:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The Gators won't be there, go ahead.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  We, so I, born in Atlanta, grew up though in northeast Ohio, went to school in southwest Ohio, Miami of Ohio, Miami University.

• 1:54Anthony Pompliano?

  The fake Miami, go ahead.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  The fake Miami, although Miami University was a university when Florida still belonged to Spain. So you can buy that on the t-shirt rack at the school shop there in Oxford, Ohio. But, so, went to Miami University. 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. So while I was at Miami, that was kind of like what I went deep into. Big fan of that stuff. So I actually, my first job out of college, moved to Washington DC, worked on Capitol Hill for a couple of years.

• 2:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  So I worked for a member of Congress. 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. You know, lived on Capitol Hill. So I'd walk to work every day, passing the Supreme Court, you know, the US Capitol, all the office buildings. So it's just absolutely a phenomenal first job.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you do? So like, I'm fascinated by this idea that, you know, humans run the government. Yeah, I think people forget that. Sometimes there, you know, people want to rage against the government and all the decisions that are made and the implications of them. But there are humans that are actually, you know, evaluating different opportunities or different options and then they vote and the whole kind of democratic process to some degree. 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, etc. Like, walk us through, like, how does the, the staff of a congressman help, right? Or what's that day to day look like?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it'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 twenties. So they're probably anywhere from 22, kind of first job out of college, like I was, to mid, maybe late twenties. 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 25, $35,000 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

• 4:12Anthony Pompliano?

  It's super interesting.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  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 the, 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, it's a little wild.

• 4:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I can imagine there's some 22 year olds with some wild ass ideas on Capitol Hill.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you go to a, you know, kind of a after work happy hour bar and it's a, it's kind of a wild place. That's for sure.

• 4:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I, 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. Yeah. Pretty crazy.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  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 a freshman, you know, maybe they were like a doctor. They were a business person before. They don't really know how Washington works. So they're relying on 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.

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And we had 25 year olds running the place.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's nuts.

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, what is it? Like the prisoners are running the asylum?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, uh, anyone that's in DC, just go walk around Capitol Hill and you're going to see like a bunch of kids. And it's like, is there a field trip? It's like, no, they work here.

• 5:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. All right. So, uh, and then what do they do at kind of daily basis? Like, you know, you hear the horror stories of like, oh, somebody like presented this, uh, piece of legislation. It'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, but probably not as often as people think. But is it just a lot of like reading legislation and, and kind of like talking or what's that day to day?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So most of it's really meeting with your constituents.

• 6:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Interesting.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  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 100 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, a lot of people do good

• 7:09Speaker 02

  work, but it is much more like Veep than it is House of Cards or the West Wing.

• 7:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see that the new Ukrainian president is like the best known comedian?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? My theory is that comedians are just people who tell the truth.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And people really appreciate that?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  You're seeing it not just in Ukraine. It's all over. So it's, it's definitely a wild time.

• 7:30Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Well, it's also this element of like, 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 and to control the quote unquote meme, they really do control the message when it comes to the kind of the political conversation.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  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. It's really about who has the best messaging strategy for the most part. 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.

• 8:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. No, it makes a lot of sense. All right. So let's talk about technology in Washington and kind of especially the halls of Congress and the House of Representatives. What the hell is going on? Do they understand kind of all of these new technologies, not just blockchain, but autonomous cars, you know, CRISPR, right? All these things that are kind of the very innovative or bleeding edge of innovation? Do they get it?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I don't know. I think that-

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they talking about it?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  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 that, no one wants to do that. That wastes time, so fly across the country, he's got to prepare for it, and he could look, he could get totally embarrassed. So, the tech companies are spending a ton of money on lobbying, and they're figuring out a way to share their message and make sure they're shaping the narrative and getting their information out there. So, it's definitely being talked about.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  It's just a matter of who's controlling it and who's doing something about it. And a lot of times, again, it's money, and who has money these days? And it's the big tech players out in Silicon Valley.

• 9:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And when you talk about the constituents, 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 affluent behavior or means, just in that you can literally get on a plane to go talk to somebody.

• 10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm guessing that a lot of that is the higher tech type stuff, the big pharma, all the things that people hear about Washington. That makes a lot of sense. When you do the reverse, because I know that a lot of representatives do go back to their actual geographies, what is that? Is that more like town hall type stuff, or the staffers involved in that? What's that kind of look like?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Great question. 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 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, 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.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  But it's definitely a reality.

• 12:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. All right, so why'd you leave?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Uh, so.

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Got tired of partying after work.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  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. You kind of, I lived with three great buddies of mine, the house next, or the townhouse next door, and other four guys that were great friends. But I grew up in Ohio, I'm close with my family and it, 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.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  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 gonna like? Be of value to a company outside of DC like your values in DC.

• 13:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're never experienced.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, your values are your, your skill sets 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 of sisters, you know, I live in Columbus now. I had a couple of sisters at the time at Ohio State. It kind of just made sense. I had a job offer and I just went with it.

• 13:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And, and when you moved to Columbus, what do you do?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So I moved to Columbus, still kind of working government politics. I worked at the Ohio Treasurer's Office under the former Treasurer Josh Mandel. He's a young guy at the time. He was like in his young 30s, I would say, when I first started working for him. I did communications for him and working for him was absolutely fascinating because it was great. So it was still kind of policy, which I enjoyed, but it was also finance, public finance, albeit, but still finance. So we were doing a lot of interesting things and he's a incredibly smart, passionate and just hard driving guy. He's a former Marine, couple of tours of duty in Iraq. So that's like kind of his go get them mentality.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  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, and it's such an 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.

• 14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so, so this is important. Let's, before we get into exactly what you guys were doing at Ohio, let's talk about just the state Treasurer's Office in any state. You just said that you collect, protect and invest the taxes of a state, big numbers. We're talking about collecting 60 plus billion, protecting 200 plus billion. And then you said, I think you.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Invest like 22 and a half.

• 14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, 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 of that?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so with the collecting, that's, you know, just income taxes, business taxes, those types of things. They, they flow in. Our office would then kind of in a simplified version, 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. Outside of that is where we were 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.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  So that was a very rewarding thing to work on. And then Ohio Crypto.com was kind of the big last thing.

• 15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't get ahead of me. Hold on. So collecting policy stuff, protecting, what exactly does that entail?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  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 treasurer, he's the directly accountable to the people. And it was up to him to make sure that he was the custodian of them. We kind of oversaw, make sure that, you know, choosing some of the banks we worked with and making sure that, you know, the retirees have their money.

• 16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. And then investing?

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Yep. So there's a couple of 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, you know, we were able to put money, get a little bit of interest on it. You know, 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 know, 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.

• 16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, kind of. So I'm guessing that that's the first time I ever coughed on the podcast. Shout out to myself. I'm assuming that most of the returns are looking at kind of like mid-single digit type stuff. So fairly low risk, but obviously, as you said, kind of the safety and liquidity prioritizing.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 17:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. 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. You guys went above and beyond kind of the call of duty, if you will, and you guys did all kinds of wild stuff. Wild in the framework of government, but pretty common sense, I think, from most people's perspective that come from the technology world. Let's talk first about the transparency stuff. Maybe talk about the website and how this kind of came together.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the Ohio checkbook.com and my, again, my former boss, Josh Mandel, he was the one, you know, it's, these are his ideas and we helped him execute on them. But Ohio checkbook.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 rogue 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 a Google style search bar, interactive charts and graphs would go back 10 plus years. And you could, you know, type in Walt Disney World, see if there was some type of government official that went to Walt Disney World for a conference.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  It would show up how much the date it was, who spent it, you know, 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 it was, 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.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So, all right. So I've talked to Josh about this. This is the wildest part of the whole story is what you just said. The state treasurer, as far as I understand, has the power to unilaterally do this.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:08Anthony Pompliano?

  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 I'll call it lobbying, right? The other governmental officials and offices saying that they need to do it. My understanding is that they were not exactly excited about doing this, which is why he kind of in parallel was building it anyways. And then it sounds like it was launched without the approve, you know, without the blessing of these other organizations and they all freaked out.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this took us about 18 months to build.

• 19:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And we built it in complete secrecy where, you know, maybe less than 20 people in the state knew about it. 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 Mandels, the 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. People across the state really love the idea, but typical kind of some politicians, bureaucrats, they didn't really love it.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  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, flipped the switch, ohiocheckbook.com/live. And it kind of just blows 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?

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  This was like a gangster move.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's like an official government term.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Is, is the idea that you build this thing, because really what it did was, it didn't necessarily expose, you know, wasn't the treasurer's office saying, hey, XYZ person or organization is abusing public funds or doing something nefarious or being a good actor, right? Do you kind of the whole spectrum? It simply gave the tools for anyone else who wanted to look. And it's almost like there's confidence and security in transparency.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:20Anthony Pompliano?

  If I, if I know that I can go look, then I am much more likely to feel comfortable than if I can't.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 21:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, any like really visceral reactions from folks?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Privately, yeah. People were not happy. There were 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 was 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 18 months. Why does it take you another year to 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.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it, so I checked out it, obviously, when I first met Josh. And one, super impressive, right? Two, just the way that it kind of came together and the launch and everything. There's an element of irony in like, Building a transparency tool in secret.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but, uh, but, but obviously for good reason. And I think that the part when you go to the website that is, uh, just kind of blows people's minds is like, hey, this is a government website that is actually intuitive, that actually has a great user experience. And again, to your point, the information was public to a degree, but there was a sense of secrecy or difficulty that was baked into the bureaucracy of getting the information. Well, now anybody who knows how to type can just go type in information and maybe start seeing stuff.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Which I think is pretty cool. So, all right, so you guys do 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. So tell us about that.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so ohiocrypto.com, that was kind of our, uh, you know, Josh, he was a treasurer 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 by law, invest in certain things. We still want to know what's going on.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  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 don't, 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.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was business taxes.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Business taxes, correct.

• 25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Walk us through kind of as you guys built it, how does the product actually work? Right? So I go to ohiocrypto.com. I basically put like, I'm assuming my EIN number in or something for my business. 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?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  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 you 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.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And so again, it's 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, 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.

• 27:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Now it makes a lot of sense. And then what was the response after it launches? Cause it will, before we get to that, this was built in secret as well?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  It was. Yep.

• 27:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So built in secret, you guys launch it, no real warning to anybody.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 27:18Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Now you can.

• 27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. But what was the reaction among, you know, kind of governmental officials and organizations in the state of Ohio?

• 27:39Speaker 02

  A lot of interest.

• 27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interest. Okay, interesting. So not negative reaction.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  And that's what's, and that is 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.

• 27:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  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 they deemed it too risky. Maybe folks in the space didn't think we went far enough with it. But people were just resoundingly positive about it. And that was so cool to see.

• 29:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, I think that it's something where Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies get some positive attention, some negative attention, right? The volatility, you know, all this retail investing, all this stuff. 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 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?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, I would say the only downside for personally working on this is by the time we had 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'd 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

• 30:35Speaker 02

  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 showed, 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

• 31:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:28Anthony Pompliano?

  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, in the short term, just given how regulations currently work, taxes work. But I think that both of those, you know, groups are forward thinking and it's more of the statement of, hey, you can now do this, right? More so than like, I'm trying to optimize for every last, you know, basis point of, of my finances. With that said, though,

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Hopefully this leads to other states and eventually the federal government following suit.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  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 nother conversation. But, you know, if you think about states are 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

• 32:45Speaker 02

  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 civic yourself, you know, 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?

• 33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes a makes a bit of sense. All right. So you guys left in mid-July, I think, right?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Mid-January.

• 33:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sorry, mid-January.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you did that, obviously tax season kind of follows that, right?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Remains to be seen kind of how many businesses, et cetera, have utilized the product. But I think everyone, especially in the crypto community, was was highly impressed and frankly appreciative, right? That, hey, look, somebody got this across the thing. 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 happen to be one of them?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know Josh is, I've heard him say it 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 the 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 ohiocrypto.com

• 34:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, no, I think it makes a lot of sense. And so now, talk a little bit about what you're doing, right? In terms of you guys aren't just focused on crypto. I think you're working with kind of all kinds of different technologies. But explain a little bit about what you're visioning.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so after I, after I left office in January, we were term limited out. So I was figuring out what to do next. And I decided to launch a consulting company. It's called the Green Block Group, greenblockgroup.com with my business partner, Ari Lewis. Ari's been 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.

• 35:28Anthony Pompliano?

  He helped build it.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  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 backend. 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, well, why don't we just join forces? Because as we were working on this, he was teaching me so much from his perspective of, you know, working in startups, working in venture, working in this space. I was teaching him from, you know, the communications, the marketing, the branding, the media, the government.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Before I wrap up.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's ask rapid fire questions. I'm going to skip some of the crypto questions and let you off the hook. What's the most important book you've ever read, though?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  So I really like, I like reading like the big, you know, my 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.

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  He's probably my favorite author who's not, you know, in the history or government, that type of space. And, 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. So I'll go with that.

• 37:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I had never read a John Grisham book, but I obviously know who it is. Uh, and there's a lot of them.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  There's a ton. Yeah.

• 37:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've got a couple of Christmas.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been getting a lot of yours. Yeah, for sure.

• 37:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Um, all right. And then, uh, aliens believer, non believer?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  I'll go no.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  I'll go no.

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. Okay. Hold on. I was big on your, uh, your innovation there. And now also you're the non believer. Why?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I'd like to think we're special.

• 37:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's just.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  That's real. Yeah, I think it is. Cause I think there's just.

• 38:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree that it's probably real.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  But I saw the conspiracy theories immediately. Like I have no idea what it means. So.

• 38:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Are we going there?

• 38:11Speaker 02

  That's, I don't know.

• 38:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And if we go to the black hole, what happens?

• 38:14Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 38:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you seen the photo of the two, uh, galaxies, uh, colliding?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's a little scary.

• 38:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I gotta send it to you.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Like this stuff is too big for me to wrap my head around. So I'll just go with no, no aliens.

• 38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Uh, and then what about, uh, the ocean? Like, uh, any desire to go to like the depths of the ocean?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone wants to always go to space, but no depths of the ocean.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  No, no. I, I think serving on like a submarine, like in the Navy, I think that would just be a, oh, cool.

• 38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  No, horrible.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Oh, horrible. Like it's just like, I think it's like really freaky or like trapped down there if something goes wrong.

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You're like, you have six months down here.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 38:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm out.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  I have no reason to go down to the depths of the ocean.

• 38:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. That's fair. Uh, all right. Psychopath test. Uh, how long do you dunk Oreos and milk?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's, I just had some Oreos this past weekend. Um, I would say maybe like. Three to five seconds.

• 39:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, just kind of like you kind of like.

• 39:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, like, I want to get a little wet, but I don't want it to be soggy.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Too soggy.

• 39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And you also like, you know, you gotta like dump them in, but then like have a spoon. So then you're not like.

• 39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  No way.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You put, wait, you dunk them in.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  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 of seconds and then like grab a spoon and like take it out.

• 39:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, you're 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. Eat it like cereal.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  See, but no, that's like, no, that's gross. 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 very much frowned upon.

• 39:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's fine. All right. Three to five seconds isn't that bad. I'm, I think like seven seconds is ideal, but three to five is like conservative. But you know, you get a little bit of the experience.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  I wonder if it varies with like the double stuff and.

• 40:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, no, you just gotta, just one size fits all. All right. What one question you got for me?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Um.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Let's see. Good. One question. What do, what do you, so you had a lot of great 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 technologist, like you've been in the space, like.

• 40:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I know nothing.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  What do you wish policymakers, government officials knew about this world that they don't? Or what could, you know, the space be better at telling them?

• 40:34Anthony Pompliano?

  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

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  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 gotta 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 actual artificial intelligence work? How does robotics work? How does computer vision work? Right? I mean, just like all these different technologies, including Bitcoin and crypto.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that having leaders at the government, at the national government level that have, I'll call it quote, quote, 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 who'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 way to look at it. 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

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  with the like ground truth with the innovative technologies. 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. Those technologies will actually impact what they decide today, five, 10 years from now. And so it just feels like if they're blind to the tech, then probably should fix that. I think that's spot on. I mean, that's I just made it up on the spot. No, that's Somebody on the internet is going to 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. I, for, for everyone in the crypto community, just thank you. I think that what you, Josh, and the rest of the team did was pretty cool.

• 42:55Anthony Pompliano?

  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. All right, man. I appreciate so much your time. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked 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.