path: root/transcripts/bitcoin-takeover-austin/american-dream.mdwn

Bitcoin and the American dream

Jimmy Song, CJ Wilson, Annaliese Wiederspahn, Brady Swenson

We have 3 coauthors, we have 3 of the 6 coauthors. Annaliese is 5th generation Wyomingite. Also cofounder of Cowboy State Daily in Wyoming. We also have Jimmy Song who is a prolific author writing a book once every 2 weeks. One is Bitcoin and the American Dream and also Thank god for bitcoin. CJ is an ex ballplayer. I was in Dallas when he was former Allstar pitcher for the Texas Rangers. Brady will be leading the talk.

BS: Alright. Bitcoin and the American dream is a book. It's a short but dense and powerful, at 60 pages. Bitcoin is definitely entering the political sphere. The network itself is apolitical, but in the real world there are political consequences of bitcoin. We're seeing more and more groups such as CJ's and Jimmy's and Annaliese's to come together to work on bitcoin in the political realm. I saw Senator Lummis here earlier today. Guys, why did you get together to write the book?

JS: Yeah, so, I wanted to write this book. We realized I think after the infrastructure bill and all that around it, we were just shocked at what happened. We realized we needed to have more political influence in DC. We wanted to have a voice. The thing is that, if you're going to go into DC, one of the things we found out is that you can't just go to Senators and members of congress and tell them what you want. You have to give them something in return, that's how it works over there. We wanted to write a book for them, something that would resonate with them and help them even if they don't agree with us, they need to know who we are and what we stand for. So we were talking about it as some thing we could leave behind in a meeting if we had a meeting with a member of congress or a staffer, but we needed to write the book. So I've been doing book sprints and I invited these guys and 5 guys to Austin to write a book in a week. We rented an airbnb on South Congress for a week, we did the whole book sprint thing, and it was intense. I got to tell you, like CJ, he can stay up... he does not sleep. This man literally does not sleep. I would be up at like 3am and he'd be like wide awake like it's noon time. We worked on it, and it was a lot of fun. Very intense but really fun, and we got the week out in a week.

BS: Why was it important for you to work on it?

AW: I think Jack mentioned something important which is that a lot of politics is marketing. Politicians don't understand bitcoin. There are also talking points when they speak with their own constituents; they don't even know what the right questions to ask are because they don't have the baseline to ask the question. Let's create a primer that facilitates the base layer of understanding so that as their constituents call and ask what are you guys doing, they can say how do you view this? How do you look to engage with this? It makes this bridge from really scary where the FUD can be compelling because it's the natural reaction to something new that you don't understand and can hopefully bridge them to being at least neutral if not pro and starting that conversation with their own constituents and maybe even becoming advocates.

BS: Let's give a summary of the contents of the book. It's 8 chapters. It starts with bitcoin and the American values. What are those American values?

CJ: Memes are a log scale of communication because a picture is worth 1000 words and memes are worth 10,000 words. We wanted to lay it out real slow and simple to make it digestable. The audience needs to be told, okay this is what we feel is wrong, this is what we feel are the use cases of bitcoin, and we took that all the way to a national security conversation. This 1950s era American dream visual of marry the person you want to marry, have as many kids as you want to have, eat whatever you want, white picket fence, nice car. That's harder and harder to achieve because of cost of housing and inflation. We all know that. Thta's hwy we are using bitcoin. We want to have purchasing power in the future. We feel like that's the best way to do it. Inflation is holding people back from upwards mobility. So that thing we used to all talk about, the American dream, that's not even close to happening now. So how do we fix that? We wanted to layer in the foundations and to wake people up and shake them. Jack was saying earlier, we as Americans have a financial privilege and we have phones and we have access to cars and technology but there's always something else we want. For a lot of us that are family people and have kids, we think about the future, and that's the ethos of the book. The very diverse cast getting them together and get them to agree, is it the new American dream? There's a whole like literally like a 3 day battle over that just the new versus....

BS: Jimmy, we're also seeing political discourse happening around bitcoin and seeing it all over the world including here. We're also talking about the rise of the single issue bitcoin voter and how that voting block could be extremely powerful for the legal adoption of bitcoin. Want to talk about the bitcoin vote?

JS: That chapter is really important. The audience for this book are policymakers or people in Congress or State legislatures or regulators... they have to know who we are as bitcoiners. The fact of the matter is that the perception of who we are and who we actually are are very different. They think of as anarcho-capitalists, men that are into computers or something like that. That may have been true like 10 years ago, but it's not true now. We wanted to point out that on a per capita basis black people are more likely to own bitcoin than white people and that's surprising for a lot of politicians to learn. We want to get them curious and want them to understand who we are and what we're about. One of the voting blocks that I didn't even know about is military veterans. They love bitcoin because they have seen the effect of war and how much money is wasted in doing a lot of that stuff. For us it was important to point that out to the politicians because honestly that's their bread and butter. They neted to know about their voters. If they don't know who they are addressing on this issue, then they won't have an easy time really understanding its significance or knowing why they should do what they are supposed to do. That's the idea behind that chapter. I'm pretty sure lik ethere's no drooling monkey single issue voter, so that's a good thing, versus the bitcoin voter which there actually is. I think there are single issue voters and we will see much more of it. I think the latest statistics is like 23 million Americans have some exposure to bitcoin at some level. Those are pretty big numbers. That's not something we had 10 years ago... it was just this niche industry and we needed representation in Washington, now it's a significant part of your electorate and you need to care about us.

BS: That surprising statistic about black people owning more bitcoin per capita than white people... I was on someone's clubhouse room, and it's interesting to get educated in that clubhouse room. Annaliese, let's talk about the promise of bitcoin saving which Pierre and Michael covered earlier this morning.

AW: Your money today is worth less than it was today. People outside of finance, it's disheartening to live your life. You're a carpenter, hairdresser, and you want the fruit of your labor sweat of your brow to buy you whatever in the future. You do all the right tihngs. You save in a savings account, and now that money is worth less to you. So the draw of some of these groups to bitcoin is obvious to us. It's almost, it's surprising when you talk to policy makers that it's not obvious to them. Of course, if I have been a hair dresser for 15 years and all my savings are in a pick your bank account savings account getting 1.5% interest, and I go to buy a house, and I find that I can't because I missed it. I shouldn't have to be a financial genius in order to be able to afford a house if I've been saving and doing all the right things. What policymakers saw in a shocking way with the infrastructure bill is that the public already realized this, constituents were already seeking harder money. They wouldn't call it that, but they were seeking a place where their value would be preserved over time. When the infrastructure bill hit, there was this flood of calls, emails, tweets, text messages hitting these offices and they thought this was a bunch of nerds in basements. They didn't know that it was the farmer, the rancher, the baker who held bitcoin and have some exposure to it. Then all the politicians went well shit I have to figure out what this is. It was an intense moment. It was all created because of inflation and the store of value principle that was realized in the political class. That's an important piece and how we get there to the point where okay now this is going to need a regulatory interface addressed at both the municipal, state and federal level.

BS: The next chapter was about bitcoin as a tool for social justice. What are you thinking?

CJ: One of the things Jimmy did so fantastically, we were talking about putting together a team to write the book, and he said we need to have a diverse cast and have all these checkboxes to say we have perspectives from all these angles. We can't have just two or three people write it; we need all these people. We had a bunch of perspectives. We had progressives, boomers, bitcoiners, and it was educational for every single person. For me, one of the most important things is there is a restaurant in Austin that only serves beef cheeks. Jimmy left out that we ate brisket every single day. We were carnivore authors. Having Charlene and Lamar express their experience with bitcoin and social justice and the sort of illegitimate banking, the corrupt banking, I guess them having a chip on their shoulder that allowed... it was interesting to see with Gary because he's like 65 and he lives in Dallas and he said well I never really thought about that, it's interesting. Wait a second, they don't give Mexican the same kind of interest rates they give white people at banks? yeah this is a thing, google it. He never really considered this, he went holy shit. Building that story into it was interesting. That chapter was the one where I closed my laptop and said, I'm going to buckle up and listen to this one because I don't necessarily belong here as a soap box person. I took a lot of information out of that. People of color have a higher percentage of crypto exposure because they are the ones that are marginalized more and they are the ones using remittances sending money to El Salvador, Guatemala, the Phillipines, they are the ones that need bitcoin more. That chapter was really good. The thing is, this is not a one party issue. It's an American issue. While it might be easy for certain types of people to grasp on certain methods or narratives for bitcoin, it's important to have the progressive voice understand that well okay democrats here you go something for your talking points to so that we get off this Lenin-Marxist thing and we can say, hey you really want to have social justice well here's some god damn social justice figure it out.

JS: One of the big points in the chapter that impacted me personally is the history of black people in the country. We all know about slavery and what happened there. The real legacy of slavery is that the government took away their stuff all the time, like with Jim Crow laws. One of the things we point out in the book is that white people when they leave an inheritance they leave on average $185,000. Black families are living on average $20,000. There's no transfer of generational wealth available. Of course they look at bitcoin. The government takes away their stuff. They are looking for something that can't be confiscated by the government. It was powerful for me to recognize that.

BS: Bitcoin for main street. This chapter was about small businesses. The cantilon effect works on so many levels, the individual level, businesses, global level, the United States enjoys incredible benefits and power and leverage by being on top of the cantilon pyramid. In the business world it also happens.

AW: Sure, so this chapter, there is an interplay. There's an energy piece too. Bitcoin is great for jobs. It's great for the future of American jobs. It's also great for treasuries. We were at an event about a month ago and a woman from Austin told me a fantastic story. She was a single mother. She rans a company locally that provides labor for events. Lots of events. She was freaking out when COVID hit because all of her contracts got canceled and she had all this working capital and she said, how am I going to get through this? She put a good portion of the money into bitcoin and she was able to reopen her doors money ahead when live events came back this year. It's amazing. Having harder money in your treasury as just a local business owner can have huge impacts. Another piece of the mainstreet is that, what it can do in terms of job creation? And certainly when you talk about energy... I'm from Wyoming, so when you talk about the energy piece it's just huge and it's hard to undersell. It democratizes job creation. This is not an urban only job growth industry. This creates jobs in Wyoming, in the rust belt, and also creates jobs in Austin, New York, Miami and big cities that have benefited from the tech economy. The people in rural America who have my heart also have a future and that's freaking huge. It's community changing. It's culture canging. It's like Jordan Peterson standup straight changing. It provides that to them. We can't undersell our energy partners provide in terms of democratizing the job creation coming out of this bitcoin industry going forward.

CJ: We talk a lot about arbitrage in terms of location. You will see businesses migrate to places where running a bitcoin based business makes more sense. So there are people that want to setup businesses in Texas and Wyoming, or Wyoming has SPDI bank charters or things like that. One big thing to hit on the math is that everyone who takes swipe fees are losing money to Visa or Amex. Running a lightning node as a payment point of sale, then you are going to keep 2.5% or 1% more or something like that, off of gross revenue. I run a car dealership. If you get $1200 for new tires, I have to pay Amex $40 bucks per transaction to run that transaction. If I was able to use lightning, then I would be able to keep $39 more per sale. This is huge-- your net revenues go up, and it makes your business more profitable and then you can buy more bitcoin. It's important to explain this, because when you explain it to a senator they say oh my constituents will retain more wealth because all that Visa money is getting extracted on every hop. We wanted to put the story in there, but it was in Canada, it's a book about the American dream. When you take money out of a business, that hurts the customers because you need to charge more to make up for that fee. Amex is not really providing real value, they provide a network effect because everyone has a credit card...

BS: What about bitcoin and national security? Maybe national security is one of the least politicized part of government still. People seem to agree about war. How can bitcoin effect national security or is a matter of national security?

JS: In that chapter, we talk about what not to do and what are some other examples we should probably learn from. What China did was in a totatalitarian direction. They are moving to a CBDC where they can surveil their entire population, and figure out who their minorities are so they can throw them into concentration camps. It's nasty. We don't want to go in that direction as an American people. But it's also a big deal in other places around the world like Nigeria and El Salvador. Nigeria is not exactly authoritarian like China, but they aren't trying everything like El Salvador either. They don't really know what to do. The Nigerian central bank, the people are actually going for bitcoin... so you have these examples of different governments doing different things. Our recommendation in that is, hey, be more like El Salvador. They are trying different things. Not everything is going to pan out, and we had Jack Mallers up here to talk about all that, and Chiva wallet there's a disconnect there because it's centralized but they are trying different things and the spirit of entrepreneurship and trying different things is good. As far as national security, there are indications from a currency perspective that China is trying to impose their money on everybody else. Their road initiative is doing a ton in parts of the world that the US doesn't have good trade relations with like Africa and Southeast Asia or some parts of the middle east. They are trying to displace the dollar. In that chapter, our argument is that if we want to keep the dollar's global role, then we need some bitcoin backing to make that happen. If we want the dollar to survive in that way, and we want to continue having influence through the US dollar, then we need to acknowledge the competition coming and they already have the lead in all these regions. We're going to need to use bitcoin as a backstop to the dollar as a way to appeal to these countries and say hey you don't have to be under the thumb of China and give everything away to them. Instead, use bitcoin as a third rail along with dollars and we can keep our global dominance.

AW: Thanks everyone for fighting the FUD yesterday on Senator Warren... it's super important that you reach out and say hey listen, even the testimony doesn't hold up what you're trying to do. Don't kill an industry over facts that don't check out even during your own hearing testimony. You can't even find people to lie to you about that, so come on. So reach out and be proactive. I don't think that bill is going anywhere. But you have to keep the pressure up, it's a marathon not a sprint when it comes to American politics.

CJ: Something we talked about with Jimmy, people are already out there and if you have your real name on twitter and you're already adding these people, then we're all working on the same thing and we want it to happen. They all feel that pressure. I've been getting tweets from random congresspeople reaching out to me. We need to amplify the good voices. Lummis is here and she has been a good advocate for bitcoin. That influence inside the halls of congress is growing. The contagion is spreading. People are wising up. We just have to have patience and stay on it, keep the gas pedal down just enough so that we're not all on caps lighting on fire every time they do something wrong, but also amplifying people that we like. We need to reward them. What's the reward for politicians getting it right? We need to vote for them, we need to amplify them. The scaffolding exists for us to make a change. We only need to convince 400 or 500 people in DC that bitcoin is the right thing then we can make a massive difference in the next decade. It's only 400 people. That's not hard.

BS: There's a lot of pessimism and apathy about our government and the process and whether you can make a difference or if people will listen. It's the case that you can make a difference; not lots of people reach out, due to the apathy. The single issue bitcoin voter will become an extremely powerful voting block. Get it out there, talk to your politicians, educate politicians, it's important to the way that bitcoin is adopted. Bitcoin is inevitable, but it matters how it is adopted. We all want it to be legal and supported in this country as soon and as widely as possible. I enjoyed reading the book this morning.

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