Transcript: Yaël Ossowski on the Bank Secrecy Act and the Quiet War on Bitcoin

Marty Bent [0:01] Yael, everything is fake.

Yaël Ossowski [0:04] It didn't really it's everything is made of plastic. It's covered over paper over in some function. It's all fake. So is it paper Bitcoin summer plastic summer? It's all of them rolled into one.

Marty Bent [0:15] really is. The only thing we can trust is the ledger itself and the private keys that give you access to the UTXOs you hold. Is that the only truth we have left in this world?

Yaël Ossowski [0:28] one of the only ones, I think now everyone's roaming around with AI devices. I mean, you've heard this from other programs and shows, know, the intimate relationships people have with their chatbots is insane. And I don't think we've put out a good number of, you know, resources, data, polling on this stuff. But I think people are, the movie Her, it's like happening in real time, especially with this new Grok model.

Marty Bent [0:52] waifu waifu is out

Yaël Ossowski [0:55] I don't pay enough for this yet on the the X, so I couldn't tell you too much about it for the moment, but probably where I am, there's gonna be a lot of people roaming around the halls looking at their phones and communicating with their new companion. Great movie, by the way, companion, if you haven't seen that one about AI robots and sort of the future of companionship. There's too many of these movies about AI are very dystopian. There's very few that are like tech positive. This one actually had a gleam of positivity. So. One thing to recommend.

Marty Bent [1:26] Yeah, think as with all things in life, everything in moderation except for nicotine. the like I've been using it. I'm not going to lie. I've used all the models chat, chibi, T, grok, Claude, and they're helpful, but I use them in moderation for research purposes only. And they're very valuable to help me do research for this episode on earth. A lot of things that you've talked about in the past that I wasn't aware of, and that we'll probably talk about. during this discussion, but I agree. saw your tweet earlier. I think we are as a society, highly disregarding the need for end to end locally hosted, encrypted sort of chats with AI because I think that's very important.

Marty Bent ⋮ Like I use Maple AI, which isn't locally hosted, but they use secure enclaves in the cloud to make sure that your prompts, your inputs are end to end encrypted and Maple AI has no way to see what you're actually chatting with the model about. And I think that's going to be very important that there's a section of the market that caters to that need, which is going to be increasing moving forward.

Yaël Ossowski [2:38] I mean, it's an open space for entrepreneurs because I know you've seen it and there's so many anecdotes of people who go to the doctor and they just chat with them and like in the corner on the browser, there's a tab there, chat GPT. If you were to go over there and look, are there patient scans? Are there questions? Because doctors are supposed to be very caught up on the literature, know, journal articles and everything else. I don't know if many normal, you know, family doctor, general practitioners are. probably AI tools would be very good for them. I just don't know how much information they're inputting into things like chat GPT that relate to your own patient information or scans.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And there's a lot of people doing that now. I think people just have to think about it and it's much like your own money, right? Where are you gonna bank? Where are you gonna host your keys? Where are you gonna put all of that cash, all of your savings? And we have to start thinking about our data a lot too. I think this has been obfuscated by cloud computing and... people not even understanding what data centers are or data, the cloud generally. And we're seeing it more and more. There's a lot of debates across the US about data centers and building up and we need things for AI and people are like, what, do we need all this stuff?

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ It's all in the cloud. It's like, well, what do think the cloud is? But it's someone else's computer. We got to build this stuff. So there'll be a lot more debates on that. I'm hoping we have a interesting point in the, least the country on the federal level, cause Trump is there and he...

Marty Bent [3:51] You

Yaël Ossowski [4:03] does suck up lot of the oxygen and does lead a lot of the conversations and he's been very pro innovation and AI. He's a bit muddy on Bitcoin and crypto stuff. As you can see this week, it's crypto week. Marty, if you didn't see that, it's the big thing in DC.

Marty Bent [4:18] Gotta love crypto week. It's a big week.

Yaël Ossowski [4:22] Yeah, crypto week. that he's definitely he's taking a lot of that. And it would be such a shame if the entire Bitcoin agenda of Trump, which maybe it's different from the average Bitcoiner, if all of that is sunk because Democrats did not like Trump coin. And that's what it seems like is happening, unfortunately.

Marty Bent [4:41] Yeah. Yeah. So to add context for the buildup to this conversation for anybody listening, Yael is a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute we met last month in DC, actually sat next to each other at dinner at the BPI dinner after the event and had a great conversation. I think I wanted to bring you on here because I think you have a well-rounded understanding of many things going on, not just in Bitcoin, but energy, AI. And it's funny. As we're starting this conversation, I'm being reminded of the last conversation I had with Matt Pines, who's also at BPI. And we're going to have some F-16s flying over here. please, please don't be startled by the engine noise that comes in. Pretty cool. They've got a fuel plane in front of them too. But I think it's interesting.

Yaël Ossowski [5:29] They're about to figure out why healthcare ain't free.

Marty Bent [5:38] Because all these topics, Matt and I talked about it the last time he was on the show. They're beginning to intertwine, like AI, energy, Bitcoin. Like they're all meeting at this singularity almost. And I think it's important that we get policy right for all three of these industries as they begin to converge into some sort of homogenous, I don't want to say homogenous sector, but they're all going to interplay with each other to a certain extent.

Yaël Ossowski [6:08] Yeah, I think so. And ideally what we want to forward are good principles, because the last thing that you really want when you're actually creating laws is just paper upon paper upon paper of complex rules that are very complicated, that are very long. And I think doing policy as I have done for the last decade, you just realize that everything that people are upset about, know, stuff is already illegal. It's already on the books and they just want to adapt the old rule to something new. when realistically you just need an interpretation. You don't need an entirely new law, something else on the books. Like if we look at the entire federal code, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages, you no human being could read through this right now.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ I mean, you can only do it realistically with an AI at this moment, but we have to try to figure out what are the main principles that we want to advocate for? What are the things that we would like to see? And what are the things that our public behavior are public rules and things that are private behavior and private rules. And I think for many different industries, people get very caught up in that public, like public obligations, because whenever you write new rules in the government, your point is you're restricting the freedoms of individuals, of businesses, of people. Whereas when you have private regulation, you have people competing, you know, there are essentially just the rules of the market and they have to provide the best product, do the right thing, figure out how they can offer the lowest prices for consumers, all the rest.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And we focus so much on that public thing that it just constrains more individuals, more individuals, more companies, more entrepreneurs. So they really have to figure out, if they wanna start a business, if they wanna do something that's AR Bitcoin related, they essentially need to have a lawyer on staff to tell them, is this compliant? Can I do this? Bucal Bitcoin guys would love that, is this compliant? And I think... We want to figure out what are the good principles that we want to advocate for, particularly for Bitcoin. You know, there's a lot of crypto lobbying in DC. I've seen a lot of it. There's a lot of money.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Every single PR firm on K Street has gotten some whiff of crypto money, which normally is opposed to Bitcoin. So you can read through the tea leaves there, but it's all about these like super complex rules that come out about defining X and Y and most Bitcoiners just want to be left alone.

Yaël Ossowski [8:27] And want to know we're not going to go to jail and we can use this stuff for ordinary things that we can use it to get a loan for a house that we could buy a car that we can get paid that we can just live life. And I think this is the key difference that does open up in the crypto versus Bitcoin policy realms is that Bitcoiners want actual real stuff and want to use it in the real world. And then the crypto world is more in a kind of cloud-esque things of they're creating new industries and bureaucracies and new layers. And it's super complex, but there's a lot of money that's funneling it. And unfortunately, I think that'll kind of carry the day in DC for a long while, long after Trump.

Marty Bent [9:07] new group goldberg machines that in my mind really don't make any sense from being frank here now that is the frustrating thing about being a big winner who wants all the things that you describe as actually have a mention this on rabbit hole recap last week but one of my favorite talks at the bp i've been dc last month was alex gladstein particularly the three minutes section reset on capital hill like you need to be specifically when you say crypto, doesn't mean Bitcoin and everything else. It doesn't even mean everything else either. Be specific. Are you talking about Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, Ripple, God forbid, whatever it may be.

Marty Bent ⋮ I think it's important that DC really does create those demarcations between the different assets because I think they're ultimately trying to achieve different things and Bitcoin overwhelmingly trying to achieve something grand in what I think is incredibly beneficial for the world and I'm sure you know this already but I think the rest is just pure noise, pure scams, pure easy money scams that...

Yaël Ossowski [10:16] I do have a new term for you. This came out of the Clarity Act, which is one of the bills that will be debated on here in Congress this week. Bitcoin is technically, according now to the proposed law, a so-called mature blockchain system.

Marty Bent [10:31] Hmm. Is it the only mature? Is there another mature blockchain system?

Yaël Ossowski [10:35] So the, I have the document here. So basically like the definition of a mature blockchain, essentially it means that there's no control. And then essentially you cannot have any one person who has more than, it says 20 % stake in the network. So it's talking about the tokens. So principally, I guess, Bitcoin, I they're talking about commodities versus securities and kind of making this whole difference. But this mature block, I don't know who pushed for this. I've never heard of this before. Certainly, you know, this is not in any, any meetings I've ever had with legislators talking about mature blockchains. I think it's interesting. Maybe it is something that you need. If they just mean the ones that are decentralized and the ones that are essentially open source and can't become endeared by a committee of 12 people or like a board of directors, I guess that's what they mean. But interesting that we're going to be stacking our mature blockchain network and system. the rest of the summer.

Marty Bent [11:35] Yeah, it's very frustrating because what would you say to the extent that or the confidence that you have that these politicians and the lobbyists behind them and the lawyers behind them writing these bills actually understand these things from first principles?

Yaël Ossowski [11:51] Yeah, I think there's not much understanding. They know it's a technological thing and they're basically the existing rules make things difficult. I think that's the extent of it. Some people might know because they this is the example that everyone brings up is, oh, I have an exchange on my phone. I've got Coinbase or something and I tried to do this and I couldn't send this amount until I verified it at a different tier and I had to take a selfie. And it's like, well, that's because of the Bank Secrecy Act and that's because of the things that you've done. I think there you haven't had too much information.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ What I think is a good thing, which many people might call the weird corrupt system, is that a lot of people who were in government, who are staffers, are all now working in the industry a bit. So they're working for various wallets or various crypto exchanges, some Bitcoin firms. So at least there, they're coming to learn a lot more and then they're going back to their former colleagues and just like teaching them a bit, showing them. So I'm not super... blackpilled on that, think definitely there's a lot more knowledge, more information. And the easier that developers make tools and apps and everything else, we can actually show people and it's a lot easier to do.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ space so they can understand a bit more about the blockchain and how it works and, you know, all the different transactions that are being confirmed, that is really helpful. And realistically, if we can get a bit more of that, it just means that they're not gonna push forward bad rules. Because that's realistically what we want. I've done this a lot at the state level and talking to state legislators or talking in media is that the goal of people who are in Bitcoin policy is not that we want the rule that it's only Bitcoin and we win. It's just let us be free and restrict the government from doing more to make our lives harder to use this stuff.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ That's principally it. It's a negative freedom argument rather than a positive freedom. We're not looking to have the license to do something, we just want to have our enshrined right that we already have be protected so that developers don't go to jail for creating decentralized tools that we really like. And I think that attitude goes back to the principle that I mentioned, the more that we can do that with things like AI, the less that we're going to have a super regulatory regime like in the European Union, where they have the precautionary principle. And you always have to essentially get permission.

Yaël Ossowski [14:13] before you launch something or you have to be sure that everything is in order, no one's going to be harmed. And I think the reason why the United States is different and we have a different attitude for it we have a republic is because we've turned that on a dime and we say, well, no, the most important thing is you have rights that are natural to you as an individual. And we, as a government, the only time we can step in and restrict you from doing something is if you're harming other people. And that because it's ingrained in the Constitution, because it's ingrained in the Declaration of Independence.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ , you just have like the healthiest of democratic systems. We're actually able to do this stuff, have a voice, and I think have good principles behind a lot of it. So however bad it might feel that people don't know, you know, how to send a Bitcoin transaction and change addresses and everything else, we still have the opportunity in the system and the infrastructure to actually. make that case and say, hey, just leave us alone. Let the people build, let the innovators create products that users and consumers want. So I'm much more hopeful on that than I probably have been.

Marty Bent [15:20] Well, let's dive into that because I'm very happy you brought it up because that's the next thing I wanted to talk about. The one phrase that stuck out to me from our conversation at dinner in DC last month was negative freedom versus positive freedoms. And you were describing it in the context of your efforts at the state level and some of the bills that have been passed there. think from the first principles, just really dive into this concept of negative versus positive freedoms, just describing that from first principles and then applying it to things Bitcoiners want, whether it's the ability to participate in collaborative, self-custodial transactions and coin joins or the ability to run a node or a miner, whatever it may be.

Yaël Ossowski [16:10] I think the most important one, we go right back to the origin, we go to the OG, we go back to the Constitution, First Amendment, Congress shall make no law. That's it. That's the ultimate negative freedom. just says like, we cannot legislate in this domain when it comes to your speech, when it comes to your religion, when it comes to your freedom of assembly. So that started the trend of limiting the actions, not of people, but of the government of this common institution that yes, we are building, we are building the government at this moment, but we've set up these safeguards to defend your individual rights from the over encroachment of this authority that we're building.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And I found that realistically throughout the years, you had most laws that really would comply with this and they say, well, the government can regulate that or can't get involved in this scenario. courts began to interpret things, know, interstate commerce. Okay, well, if you have your riverboat and you're selling commodities, you know, from Missouri and you go over to this other state, maybe there we can have some regulatory rules. And at the state level, you know, people don't really know that many of their localities, their cities, their municipalities, I know we're all very Jeffersonian about our system and we say local is better. But to be frank, a lot of localities are just absolute tyrannies and they're not very well run.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Many people are corrupt. If you just look at any construction company or orange cones that you have in your street, you wonder why they've been there for so long. Just look at the contract of the construction company and the city commissioner, you who signed off on it. There's probably a family connection or something. So one thing that we started looking at is at the states, you do have a good amount of ability to constrain various levels of government. And this is something that I've learned more from. Realistically, I would say in the 1990s, you had a lot of these preemptions. So in the state of Michigan, the Republicans, when they got their small majority, I don't even know what it was, like probably late 90s, they had a majority for the first time in a long time.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And they found it their duty to constrain the localities and municipalities from doing bad stuff and dumb stuff, such as banning plastic straws. So they came up with preemptions and say, hey, the government, local governments, local jurisdictions,

Yaël Ossowski [18:29] cannot make rules on the use of plastic straws. It sounds petty, but realistically what it means is that you're actually protecting the rights of people to use plastic straws from a different level of government from the locality that would otherwise do that rule. This is the same thing in Texas. Austin City Council does some really weird stuff with their laws. Texas finds ways to constrain them. Either they tie it to funding or anything else. And I think that's the better way that we can do Bitcoin policy as well. We do not need to have a full scope Bitcoin law that's figured out and drawn out.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ I realistically, figure out where the government and the state is intervening when it comes to Bitcoin usage and Bitcoin users and just restrict the government from doing that. It's much better than a positive law approach, which would be people must do X or Y rather than the government is refrained from doing X or Y. And this mentality shift with how we do policy is also very advantageous because it's protected for a longer time. This is the problem with many of the things that Trump is doing is if it's not actually enshrined in law, you know, they can turn around and just like do an executive order day one.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ You know, don't know, Hunter Biden is president or whomever, the next Democrat, he'd come in and 86 everything. And we have to think always from a negative rights approach because it's how the constitution is built, how the American system is built. And when you're living in a free society. You want to have all your laws like that. It's about constraining the powerful institution that is the government of which we're all forced to play a part, right? We're not forced to work for a company, but we're forced to pay taxes and be in the government and everything else. So more we can have that approach, I think would just be a lot better.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ There are a lot of activists who go around different states and want to have positive Bitcoin rules and have this for Bitcoin and like a special tax exemption for this Bitcoin mining thing. It's just not principally where I think we should go. I think it's a waste of our resources and realistically will just be repealed and done away with and probably creates more opposition than support. And I think that's why people like Alex who are doing great work elevating the stories of human rights activists is super important. People who are entrepreneurs and developers who are launching stuff on GitHub or in app stores every day are important.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And then also the people using that stuff for everyday use, whether they own a hair salon or...

Yaël Ossowski [20:52] You know, some kind of doggy daycare, they're accepting Bitcoin or are now apparently where I am every steak and shake. So it's good to see.

Marty Bent [21:00] You're in stake in shake country, sir. How would you?

Yaël Ossowski [21:02] I was very surprised. It's kind of everywhere and Bitcoin Lightning is the native token of the Steak and Shake. Who would have known?

Marty Bent [21:08] It's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. I went to college in Chicago and played club lacrosse and we would caravan through the Midwest and Steak and Shake was our staple road trip stop. So very proud to see that they adopted Bitcoin.

Yaël Ossowski [21:24] They wanted a bit maja with it. got the tallow now. I've seen the ads that they did an eat more chicken ad that's supposed to be making fun of Chick-fil-A. It's just like have more tallow. Have more kale, have more tallow.

Marty Bent [21:36] They're selling it too. They're selling the Tato by the jar now. It's really a stake in shake, really making a comeback, riding the Bitcoin marketing boost to the best of their abilities. It's beautiful to see. But as it pertains to negative rights and positive rights and our efforts to get good legislation in from the negative rights perspective for Bitcoin, how would you rate the success of that journey up to this point?

Yaël Ossowski [22:07] I think it would depend. mean, if you just look at a simple one is anti-CBDC rules. So many states have passed these and they've essentially just restricted any state agency from requiring or accepting a central bank digital currency, which again does not do away with the issue, but it just, it ties their hands. And the more that you can tie the hands of government from doing something, that means that people's liberties are somewhat preserved and good. And that's what they're voting on in DC as well. It's just sort of an anti-CBDC thing that'll be enshrined. I think there's a lot more to do. Again, there's a lot of, I would call them the positive rights activists who are in the crypto industry, want to have certain implementations.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And this is stuff that we don't really see in the headlines. Want to force blockchain usage in various government agencies and their company will be the blockchain. And there's a lot of lobbying for that stuff that's pretty gross if you think about it. It's not really highlighted because it's in small appropriations bills. It's in, you know, weird committees nobody's ever heard of. And that is essentially jockeying to make XY token like the token of the HHS or the token of the Defense Department. And it's not something that you need to have and that you need to have neutral money and we need to have our law be neutral as well.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ too much of the positive stuff says we should have this company follow this procedure with this law and there must be one example is they use you have to use a qualified custodian, which I think everyone has accepted and financial regulation is normal and that'll be the same with crypto brokerages and all the rest. But you know, a lot of the stuff they're setting up too many guardrails and putting up too many that make it so that it is somewhat crony capitalism. And I think if you have negative rights regulation, You avoid all crony capitalism. You increase competition by not, you know, enshrining certain rules that people need to have in order to provide services to the government or anything else.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And you just constrain government from doing stuff. So we can always be better. S. is always going to be the better place for this. I'm not sure how much state legislation will matter because realistically for for Bitcoiners, all that matters is our ability to get Bitcoin.

Yaël Ossowski [24:28] earn Bitcoin and then spend Bitcoin. And a lot of that is tax policy, unfortunately. Some of it is in money transmission license rules and things that are happening with Bank Secrecy Act at the federal level, which according to the rules this week, this is what I read, if every crypto exchange so-called or commodity broker of the mature blockchain system, they would be considered a financial institution. which sucks for other regulations they'll have to follow. But it does mean that the Bank Secrecy Act threshold that is applied to crypto exchanges, Bitcoin exchanges right now is like $2,500. So anything you send that is Bitcoin that you withdraw over $2,500, there's a suspicious activity report filed that would now be raised to $10,000, which again, small advantage.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Ideally, we would do away with Bank Secrecy Act. It's a whole other conversation, but it's small improvement. So we're never going to have a huge wind of change through policy, anything else. I think it really just comes down to instituting rules that prohibit and restrict government agents from doing too much. Obviously the laws against fraud are already on the books. We can apply them easily. Extortion already on the books. All this stuff is already illegal, right? Just let us use our money and do it in a way so that we're not penalized. So it's getting better.

Marty Bent [25:55] All right, it's good to hear it's getting better, but you brought up the Bank Secrecy Act and said it's a whole other conversation. Let's have the conversation because this is a topic I've been beating the drum about in the newsletter and on this show for well over six or seven years now. At this point, it is the boogeyman in the corner of the industry that really forces the hands of industry participants to bend over backwards to comply with something that I would argue didn't even achieve the goals that set out to achieve when it was originally enacted into law in the 70s and is being applied to an asset in Bitcoin that really doesn't fit into the framework that was set forth decades ago.

Yaël Ossowski [26:42] Yeah, and realistically, set up in the 70s, 1975, it's the same dollar amount. It's like, how much is the dollar devalued and how much has inflation gone up since 1975? And we're still on that $10,000 limit. So what it makes the bank secrecy act so bad, it has nothing to do with secrecy. And realistically, it's just a bank regulation. And you'd be surprised to learn that most banks actually hate this. They actually don't like it. They don't like complying with it. It's very burdensome. They need to hire entire departments that only do compliance related to it. And it's enforced in a way that they can track so-called illicit finance, bad behavior, criminal activity.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ But again, it's they're sending reports preemptively to the government. So every transaction that's over $10,000 essentially has to have the suspicious activity report issued. that goes into this central database at FinCEN, a financial crimes enforcement network, where they're supposed to sift through it. And if you ever have one of these filed on you, it's like a notch on your kind of internal credit score. So it deems that you are as a consumer, someone who's kind of a, you know, hard to deal with. And it means that you are not gonna be able to open up as many bank accounts or take out a loan or do anything else.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And it may have nothing to do with what you're transacting, it's just the amount. And where you send the money doesn't even matter. And this was actually ramped up a lot by Trump in the last couple of months, that basically anybody in a border state, if you are sending any transaction that's over like $200, they want to have it. So you have suspicious activity reports that are filed. So anybody who happens to live in Arizona or Texas or Nevada or California, and all of the Northern States as well. And what the Bank Secrecy Act really does is forces this compliance. and is realistically weaponized. And we learned this through Jim Jordan, who's the congressman from Ohio, had this entire government weaponization subcommittee.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ It was covered a bit in the headlines, but they produced this report that basically said that so much of the Bank Secrecy Act was actually weaponized against ordinary people. People who bought guns, people who went to Trump rallies, just people were buying things online, people were sending money to like their grandmother.

Yaël Ossowski [29:04] They were all thrown into this database and then at some point were denied financial services. And that is not because the government forced these banks to do so, but it's because the banks didn't want to deal with the additional compliance. And what the weaponization committee said is like, look, we got to figure out a way to get rid of the Bank Secrecy Act or ratchet up that amount. They were looking at it through a more MAGA, you know, going after President Trump lens, but you know, you call a spade a spade. And I think that was a good momentum for the movement. Senator Mike Lee has a really good bill called the Saving Privacy Act, which I think alleviates all of this.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And thanks to some of our efforts, also includes a protection for self custody of Bitcoin. But what it would do is just essentially get away with the ability to send the reports to FinCEN and the government. Banks would still have to keep records, but we would not force the suspicious activity reports to be sent to the government because that just creates all this additional compliance and is financial surveillance. So this is being talked about also on the left, the Democrats actually not far from where you are, there's the New Jersey Senator Andy Kim. So he is super anti-bank secrecy act. I don't know where he's coming from for that.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ You know, he was a guy who was big into the drone stuff that happened over the Christmas break. But he's come out in hearings and said, look, this is hurting ordinary people. He's not necessarily a Bitcoin guy, but he talks to his constituents and ordinary people to try to open up accounts. And he said, this stuff is actually hurting people. There's a lot of reporting requirements and it puts people in danger because their information somehow can also get leaked. You you don't have the best databases at these banks, particularly local credit unions have to file this stuff. So again, that's a positive rights thing, right?

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ made this law that forces banks to do X or Y, keep tabs on their customers and they have to keep all that data. There's no requirement that it be encrypted. There's no requirement that it be held in some secure location. It's just there. And I don't know how many you've seen, but you you've seen it either on Nost or on X. There's exchange hacks that happen all the time, bank hacks, you know, the photo of people holding the ID, that stuff gets out into the ether.

Yaël Ossowski [31:20] And if people hold significant amounts of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, they become a target. And we don't talk enough about that too, because a lot of younger people who are millennials, oftentimes minorities, have been stacking sats for a long time. And they've done it because they haven't trusted the system. And if they've been using a lot of these centralized exchanges, which again, points to the kind of reason you should be always very cautious, that could be very dangerous to them. And who knows what could happen. Overall, think Bank Secrecy Act reform is being discussed more and more on both left and right, which is a very good thing.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ I think if somebody got in the room with Trump and just explained it a bit more, he'd probably come out against it tomorrow. But we'll see what happens. But for right now, removing that as well from the Bitcoin conversation also helps because it is harming people in the normal non-Bitcoin economy. which will be a statistic we'll see at some point by the Federal Reserve, like what is the Bitcoin economy and what's the non-Bitcoin economy? But it is harming ordinary people a lot and I think there is some good impetus to change that.

Marty Bent [32:28] Yeah, it's completely insane. think somebody in the industry ran the numbers too. mean, the whole reason that it exists in the first place is to prevent money laundering. And it's not effective at doing that. think the last ad I saw was probably three or four years ago. Who knows how fresh this is or how. more advanced the government has gotten at being able to leverage the advantages the Bank Secrecy Act affords them from an information perspective to get better at this, but I highly doubt it. some like 0.1 % of money laundering is actually stopped by Bank Secrecy Act suspicious activity reports.

Yaël Ossowski [33:07] Yeah, and this could be done by the banks themselves. mean, look, they don't want to be held liable for any of stuff. I think that's what a lot of people don't think about in the conversation is that the banks hate this part because it's just additional compliance. Like they're just looking out for their own backs and their own skin when they give people credit cards and accounts and everything else. Like they have to protect their own assets. So of course, they're going to implement their own systems of kind of control and making sure nobody's being scammed or something. But Bank Secrecy Act just... introduces this additional layer through this very weird system where they have to file all of these transactions through this old school system.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And it's just additional work and doesn't really do anything. Nick Anthony at Cato is really good on this because he's gone through the number of reports filed each year. It's like millions upon millions of these suspicious activity reports that no human being could ever review, but that are filed that are there that are in a database that could be activated if you know, somebody is part of an investigation or something happens. And I think we have to also think of the industry perspective of these guys have to comply with this stuff. And man, I've gone to European like Bitcoin and blockchain events and stuff. It's like there's a reason that 75 % of the sponsors are, you know, compliance organizations, you know, it's like identity providers and stuff.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ It's like that's where they're forced to buy this stuff. They're forced to get it. They're forced to use it. and implement chain surveillance as much as possible. This is the way that the rules are set up right now. And if we actually wanna effectively help people and allow people to have their freedom again, you gotta figure out a way to curtail that and remove it really from the remit of the federal government at all. So, hopeful, getting there.

Marty Bent [34:55] Be optimistic that Mike Lee's bill or something else. I would love to just repeal it outright if possible.

Yaël Ossowski [35:02] Yeah, and that's kind what this does. It goes through, I mean, it does a lot more. There's all this stuff related to the SEC and this like audited financial trail and just all the different things that if you happen to be a public company, you have to deal with, which is pretty onerous. I don't know. I'm not rich enough to be in that position, but, you know, this stuff is very onerous as well. The problem is that most of these pieces of legislation are very good, but they're tied to politicians whose wins are always the sales are going in a different direction. So Mike Lee is kind of a MAGA guy right now.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ People like him, but they didn't like him because he had a bill to sell off some federal lands, which I think you talked about. So it's hard because you have that stuff happening all at once. sometimes it always just takes a crisis or an outrage, some kind of raging moment to change things. So that's why I said it's going to take like Trump coming out one day and say, man, that bank secrecy thing, you know, that really sucks. And that's why the Trump sons, when they've gone to the Bitcoin conference and stuff, apart from saying, you're welcome for pumping the price, which whatever, they always say too, it's like we were as a family targeted by the system and we had our accounts closed.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And that's why we looked at things like Bitcoin. And I think the more that that message is kind of heard, that will also have an impact. I'm not sure. There's at least, there's one Republican, I believe one Democrat who are on board now. They're talking more to other people to get the kind of bill going. It's just, you never really know. And, you know, I, I thankfully never worked in Congress, you know, as a staffer or something. I probably would have lost all my hair, but, uh, overall, the more that people can discuss these issues, maybe it gets cut up into various pieces and we'd go for just an outright appeal or a limiting, uh, it'd take a bit of time, but I think Trump can open the Overton window on

Marty Bent [36:58] Yeah. Let's do it, Donnie. I know you listen to this show. It's time. It's time to do it.

Yaël Ossowski [37:03] I heard he's on Fountain. He's actually earning sats while listening to you.

Marty Bent [37:07] Yeah, I mean, he's boosted us too. It's incredible. Thank you, Donnie. No, like the other thing, I'm not sure if you call it Thomas Massey's conversation with Theo Vaughn the other week. That's one thing I wonder with all these individual bills, like is the nature of what's happening on Capitol Hill these days and how anything gets passed such that it gets harder for specific.

Yaël Ossowski [37:09] I didn't see that one.

Marty Bent [37:35] bills like this to actually get passed. Do they have to get swept into an omnibus bill with some concessions being made in the process?

Yaël Ossowski [37:44] Yeah, nobody wants to defend their vote on anything, right? So if it's just one bill instead of 12 bills or 13 bills, they don't have to explain it. It's not in some attack ad. So I get that perspective of why they don't want to have all these individual bills. Realistically, they're just lazy. They don't have enough time. And, you know, sometimes I'm actually thankful we don't have a super hyperactive Congress, because then they would be passing bills left and right. And, you know, the Supreme Court would be very slow to strike them all down. But at the same time, it would be a lot more accountable if we did have that because like we, I think I heard Odell talk about this on rabbit hole recap is the amount of money that's going into Department of Homeland Security and agents and stuff.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Like these are not just people who are going to Home Depot parking lots. know, they're getting, they're getting laptops, they're getting tools, they're getting chain surveillance stuff. Like they're, this is a weaponized police force that is yes, used for migration. forgive me for sounding like a progressive, we're sort of militarizing a part of our government that hasn't really been uber-militarized before and giving them really awesome tools that are emerging from the private sector, whatever companies might be offering stuff, and that is something that really would harm our own individual liberties as Americans, which I'm very concerned about. yeah, overall it's a... It's a complicated space.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ think congressional reform is just like super boring. Nobody wants to cover it. The reporters who cover it are super bored. It's a lot of like in fighting. People are trying to represent their constituents and then also the people who give them money. And it's, it's just hard. think we don't necessarily need to look to Congress always for our solutions. Definitely don't need to look just to the president for our solutions. It's again, just figuring out the stuff. that would be in place and protect Bitcoiners that we don't have to worry about going to jail or being hauled before a committee, that would be better. So obviously I'm a huge admirer of Thomas Massey, love a lot of his work and principles.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ You we don't have too many of these people. It's pretty much you only have one or two of these sort of congressmen or senators every generation. And right now it's Thomas Massey, Rand Paul as well. They're fairly good. But again, I don't get...

Yaël Ossowski [40:05] All my hopes up on just what's happening in the halls of Congress. That's why the what's happening with Bitcoin builders and users in the community and people on Nostr. And like these projects are really what I think give people a lot of fire and show the potential of this technology, which I'm excited about.

Marty Bent [40:21] Yeah. No, it's funny. had a discussion with Balaji last week. It's like we're reaching like a singularity in the private sector and nothing ever happens in the public sector. I think over last few months, I've re-

Yaël Ossowski [40:37] Can I ask you quick though about Balaji? I love the network state of Reddit. It was really interesting just hearing him talk because I think you get about four questions in. for your response to that, what is your overall takeaway from what he's trying to build? Because I think he gets always very tied up in taxonomy. You have the red American, the blue American, this and that, and the grays, and the CCP.

Marty Bent [40:42] Mm-hmm.

Yaël Ossowski [41:06] It's just like he's caught up a lot. He's created an awesome framework I just don't know what it means specifically for me who might be sitting in whatever You know Dover, Delaware. What am I gonna do about X or Y?

Marty Bent [41:19] Yeah, no, appreciate it. I Blasio and I have a good relationship. We talk off air probably pretty frequently. And I don't agree. Like I love his perspective and the way he distills everything and the sort of how he places everything on the chessboard from his perspective. I do think the sort of a doomerism about America's future is a bit overstated and The whole concept of the network state is really interesting and I can see it, but I the application, I would argue that the application is not something that I would want to participate in because I come from a big Irish Catholic family in the Philadelphia area.

Marty Bent ⋮ I'm very tied to my roots, my nuclear extended family, friends network, community that I grew up with, part of the reason why I moved back to the area despite. The fact that many people warned me I'm moving back to a shitlib capital of the country. It's like, yeah, I love my family more than I hate the shitlibs. I'm willing to go back and fight for it. But I do think the idea of network states in the sense of you have like-minded individuals who meet in the digital realm and talk about ideas and build things. I don't think they need to all just like uproot and meet in a physical location and then go restart individual city states, whatever it may be.

Marty Bent ⋮ in those places. think you just share ideas, build things in the digital realm, and then get to hand-to-hand combat and meet space in your locality and try to make where you live a better place. And I brought this up at the end of our most recent discussion that was released earlier this week. I think part of the degradation and the social fray that we're seeing in society these days really stems from

Yaël Ossowski [42:53] Mm-hmm.

Marty Bent [43:13] degradation of the nuclear family. I saw this up close and personal when I was living in Chicago, I volunteered at an inner city lacrosse program that started in 2011. And I worked there for three years. And that was the one stark thing that really stood out to me throughout the three years volunteering there is like the south side, west side, southwest side of Chicago is really a terrible place these days because the nuclear family. just doesn't exist. Kids are being raised by their aunts and their grandmothers and the family isn't there and you have this sort of a negative feedback loop that leads to these negative consequences.

Marty Bent ⋮ And I think the idea of like uprooting and just meeting with like-minded people to build community doesn't really jive with what I've experienced personally. I think culture and community are important and you can't really... They're emergent things. You can't just centrally plan them. It's like similar to El Salvador's Bitcoin city. That was always a bad idea to me. You can't centrally plan a decentralized city. Like it doesn't make any sense.

Yaël Ossowski [44:25] That's an interesting point. like Balaji, I've been an expat, you know, living outside the US for the last couple of years. And I always think about that as being very purposeful with your migration, where you go, the community that you build. And oftentimes you're just sort of a victim of victim of circumstance, like where you happen to be, you know, whatever relationship you're in, whatever job you have. You know, most people don't have the will or the money to create like a whole facility with, you know, digital nomad types and Often this is the ideas of the 1930s and the 40s in Spain. We had all these like left-wing communes. People thought they were reinventing socialism. These things always turned out chaotic and nobody cleaned the dishes or took out the trash and didn't tend to work very well. But I like the small cities like Prospera, the idea of Liberland as well, if you've ever heard of Liberland.

Marty Bent [45:17] Praxis is another.

Yaël Ossowski [45:20] Yeah, I think these are great, good experiments. Most people are not going to choose to move to these because of familial ties and everything else, which I totally get and I understand. And if Balaji's network state makes sense, then we're also way more digital anyway. So in a sense, it doesn't matter about our actual locality and where we live. And it is more of these online communities somewhat. But yeah, I think we have a lot of choice of that. mean, Americans are super super privileged that we can move to like 50 states and there's all types of flavor of what you want. Hawaii, Alaska, you can go to Puerto Rico, you can go to Texas, can go to Washington, Oregon, North Carolina. There's a lot of choice there and it's pretty good. Most people who live in small European countries with like two million people don't have that choice, so pretty lucky.

Marty Bent [46:06] Yeah, so I've got Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas, and South Carolina on my belt in states I've lived in, and all very different in their own regard.

Yaël Ossowski [46:16] South Carolina is just always one of my favorite choices, man. This is a place most people do not travel to, but it is a place that has just so much potential, just like great culture laid back. Yeah, I'm a big bull.

Marty Bent [46:30] Low country living, baby. It's very laid back. No, I do want to make it clear. Network State, this whole model of uprooting and moving and trying to create these communities doesn't make sense for me. It may make sense for other people. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have massive success and are sort of prototypes for how to do this in the future. But for me, the family tie is way too strong.

Yaël Ossowski [46:58] Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was an immigrant twice in my life. So I guess I'm, I'm always searching for that familial connection and getting back to the, to the origin. But it's, it's tough, man. It's finding out where to live, where to be. And I think having purpose and ideology and technology and the promises of everything biology talks about. Yeah, it's, it's awesome. It depends on which one you want to have, right? It actually is the total free market in action. Very different from today's discussion on immigration policy, but again, that's another topic.

Marty Bent [47:33] Yeah, no, and I don't want to sound too idealist, but and maybe it's Stockholm syndrome, but I do earnestly believe that the fire of the American spirit does still exist in many Americans, maybe not a majority, maybe a very small minority. And I do believe in the intolerant minorities ability to sort of prevail and having lived in all these different states, particularly Texas, South Carolina, even Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, West of Philly is very

Yaël Ossowski [47:36] Yeah.

Marty Bent [48:02] freedom oriented until you get to Pittsburgh. I do think that the ideals of liberty, the fire of liberty still exists in the bellies of many Americans. It's just figuring out how to get the government out of the way and do it tactfully. And that's why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin because I think it's an incredible vehicle to do that in a nonviolent sort of roundabout way.

Yaël Ossowski [48:26] Absolutely. Yeah. And all the lessons that we also learn through Bitcoin are just being applied to every other industry and every other technology too. It's always like that constant meme of was it James Franco who's there. He's got the noose around his neck. You first time. I think there's so many other industries that are facing like the talk about the environmental stuff with AI data centers talking about the illicit finance things. I Bitcoiners have been talking about this stuff for years and years. And these other industries just have to learn now. It's like, well, thankfully we thought about it for a long time. We've come up with like proposed solutions and we figured out workarounds were necessary. So you don't need to do this.

Marty Bent [49:08] Yeah, no, the energy side of things is something I've been passionate about for seven years now, having been in the mining industry. And I think that's one thing in the research that ChachiPT helped me with is something that you've written about and

Yaël Ossowski [49:24] Do I exist in chat GPT like it actually worked? Okay, good.

Marty Bent [49:27] I gave them your website and said, let's crawl this and look at everything. But I'm sure if I asked them, you would come up as well. But this idea of Section 230 for energy policy really struck a chord with me. It's like, oh, I've never thought about it this way, but this makes a lot of sense.

Yaël Ossowski [49:35] yeah. Yeah, I guess to explain it. So Section 230 is what we colloquially call the 26 words that created the internet. So as part of the Communications Decency Act, it was a bill in Congress in 1996. The point was to essentially figure out how to deal with all that smut online, all that dirty stuff. And basically, if people could be liable for what types of information is put on their website. So if you have a forum, or if you have comments, you have a blog, are you as the website provider liable for whatever comments? So if somebody disparages someone or liable someone, are you liable as the website provider as, you know, at that time it was like GeoCities or BlogSpot or something like that.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Are you the one that's going to be liable in a civil trial if, you know, somebody sued? And what Ron Wyden did And it was realistically Ron Wyden, who's this Oregon representative, congressman. He put in those 26 words and basically said that, you know, no publisher will essentially be the person who owns the words. So anybody using an open communication platform, if you're just like the publisher and people are writing on it, you're not liable for what people are writing it. Now that has allowed the internet to bloom and to blossom and not having to deal with lawyers. for everything that's published on a website, opens up all this creative freedom.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Now, if you look at the energy sector right now, we have this immense need for more grids, more technology, more gigawatts, absolutely everywhere. And most of our energy providers, from the dirtiest ones that deal with oil to the natural gas, even the nuclear industry, and even some solar guys, they're being caught up in all these weird lawsuits themselves where... people are using their products, energy products, people are using their energy power, and then they're being held liable for something. So the example that I used are these climate change lawsuits. a lot of groups like Greenpeace or Pro Solar Activist will sue people like Exxon or BP, Chevron, BP and Shell merger, by the way, is a huge deal.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ But they will sue these companies and say, well, A, you cause climate change, B, you lied about it.

Yaël Ossowski [52:08] And C, you are now on the hook for everything that's ever happened related to environmental disasters, climate change and everything else. And what we're kind of proposing is, well, we need to have a kind of section 230, like no individual company, institution, gas company, oil driller is itself responsible for climate change. We cannot have a system that then starts to dole out liability based on something that is very general, very broad, disputed in terms of measurement and causality. We cannot have that go into the court system and say, okay, yeah, they're the ones who are liable and therefore, know, everything that BP's done, they need to pay like a $1 billion to someone who died in the heat wave.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ So finding out a way that we can extract the energy production from the energy use and to protect the energy producers. Because that's essentially what energy producers want to do is they want to get this stuff out of the ground. They want to be able to produce it. If they're dealing with cooling stations or something else, they want to get that stuff out into the grid. We cannot saddle them with the great American tradition of suing them like crazy and expect that we're going to have affordable energy or expect that we're going to have great cutting edge innovations in AI. or expect that we're going to have anything propelled in Bitcoin or anything else, because they're constantly just going to be beefing up their legal departments.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And they're not going to be giving us better technologies. They're not going to be figuring out a way to better refine the stuff that comes out of Alberta and that is shipped through Keystone pipeline or something like that and thrown out to the markets. And unfortunately, it's like we're we oscillate between hating energy companies and loving them. Generally in the United States, we're at an OK moment right now. But if gas prices go a bit higher, you know, we'll have a Joe Biden figure who say we should probably criminalize these guys for raising prices. And maybe Trump would do the same, to be honest, I don't know.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ So the idea of a Section 230 is just figuring out a way to get rid of the lawfare and the liability concerns when it comes to energy producers. And I think we need it right now. If you look up any state in the union, there's some kind of lawsuit against any kind of oil company energy industry right now. Even in my home state of North Carolina, you've got

Yaël Ossowski [54:30] the nuclear provider, Duke Energy, they're being sued. And they're the ones who've turned North and South Carolina into these nuclear behemoths, super renewable, sustainable energy. And they're being sued for causing climate change, much the same. Like we're not gonna find the ultimate climate change culprit in court. And I think it's a folly to do so. And it's just very expensive. And it means that all of our energy prices are probably gonna go up because they got to deal with it. So I hope we can reason with that, but. I'm figuring out more and more that most people don't know anything about energy, which you've learned a lot about.

Marty Bent [55:04] It's astonishing. No, I didn't know a lot about energy until I was forced to by way of getting into the Bitcoin mining industry and I was astonished. I was 26 when I started and I had even started my career at a commodities fund. We traded energy but like I was more looking at the macro but once you get down to the micro of how you actually extract oil and gas from the earth and then get it to midstream then get it downstream get it to a power facility and a substation and the rest of the grid the transmission lines all that it's highly complex it is a feat of human ingenuity that should be marveled at and celebrated vigorously by anybody who appreciates the fact that you have air conditioning and you can walk into your house and turn on the light switch and there will be light It is, mean, just the energy infrastructure is probably one of the best things that humanity has ever, ever brought to the world.

Marty Bent ⋮ And to your point, like it goes through this ebbs and flows with the energy companies of hate and love. And particularly right now, where we sit in 2025, looking at the future, looking what China has done in terms of energy production over the last two decades and how we've lagged. Like, I think something like this is incredibly important, especially if we have the the goal and the intent to go out and expand generation by as much, by like orders of magnitude over the next two decades, like something like this probably needs to exist.

Yaël Ossowski [56:40] yeah, and you'd be surprised to learn just how much many of the big tech companies are just not even looking at city grids or different ways of generating electricity. They're just like going all in on their own projects, putting $10 billion in nuclear, owning their own infrastructure. mean, one thing that's fascinating to me that I've learned a lot about, of course, with the energy is the submarine cables. So how we have the internet around the world is not because we have satellites, but actually because we have these huge networks of cables that are just laid in the ocean and they connect everything. And we've had sort of special purpose companies that are developed to put these submarine cables together.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And it's essentially all of the internet of the European continent and Latin America. And we've had sort of the same companies doing it for years and years. Not much innovation hasn't changed. Now, a lot of the tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, they're just like, bro, we're going to lay our own cables because we cannot rely on this. We don't know if there are Russian or Chinese submarines that are going in and trying to tap these lines. Like there's just so much that's vulnerable that's right there that we don't understand. going back to Energy Canada, my home nation, you know, we are a energy exporting nation.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Literally that is our major product. And we've had governments now for over a decade who've denied that reality and made Canada much poorer. have essentially made it so that it's not the top G7 country it used to be and have really harmed a lot of the workers there because there aren't as many opportunities. Whether it be nationalizing energy projects, stopping transmission of energy, transportation of energies, making exports illegal, there's just so much of energy that's tied to absolutely everything in our lives and I think people forget that. They just assume we can all just log into the computer with our laptop job. And as you said, the air conditioning will run, everything will just function.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ But if we don't have electricity for, two hours, there's a lot of stuff that would fail. Like a lot of people would be harmed. Hospitals on edge, we'd run out of diesel. The toilets don't work because you can't get the water up. There's just so much stuff tied to energy. And I think we have been in the Josef Schumpeter model. We've been sort of, we've enjoyed the benefits of this great capitalistic market for so long that we kind of forget about it.

Yaël Ossowski [59:05] And we can kind of leave that to decay and rot and that could harm people if we don't continue to build and continue to allow producers to get that to the marketplace that we can use it. I don't want to be again in a scenario like in the European Union after the invasion of Ukraine, where all of a sudden the Russian gas is gone. And where I live in Austria, you know, we saw our energy prices double and sometimes triple depending on the month. And we didn't have reserves. We don't have our own natural supplies of natural gas for heating homes and everything else. What are you supposed to do? It's the lifeblood of our entire civilization and we have to figure out ways to incent more energy producers and ensure they're not caught up with these like crazy lawsuits that will ultimately drag them down and make all of our prices too high.

Marty Bent [59:55] Yeah, it is baffling how idiotic both the US and European energy policy has been over last two decades. it makes you wonder, this just like a civilization cycle where we're, you didn't say this exactly, but I think along the same lines of we've reached a state of decadence where we forgot what got us to the ability to.

Yaël Ossowski [1:00:20] Mm.

Marty Bent [1:00:23] be decadent and are completely letting it rot below us.

Yaël Ossowski [1:00:28] Yeah, no, 100%. And it's the same in our political institutions. You know, we have this mayoral election in New York City, which, yeah, whatever, nobody cares about New York City, but everybody cares about New York City. It's where the media is. And there's a guy who's very open about socialist ideas and government run grocery stores, who's probably going to be the next mayor. And what I was mentioning with the Schumpeter model, was this great Austrian economist basically said that you have Capitalism, everything is great. People are rich. You know, they get very decadent as you mentioned, and then they kind of forget how they got there, why they got there, and they just start essentially turning the state more into socialism, giving people more benefits without actually providing the same incentives.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And then it just breaks. You have creative destruction. It all is gone. And then you have to rebuild again. And we're going to continuously have these cycles. I think Trump was a kind of force of that cycle. He stopped something that was happening. I don't know exactly how to define it, you know, but whatever the sort of Obama Biden era stuff was, there was Trump who was stopping it. But we have to admit he's oscillating in the other way pretty hard too. And while there's a lot of advantages, there's any number, as Matthew said on your program recently, there's a lot of disadvantages too. I think many people realize that.

Marty Bent [1:01:44] Yeah, what was the, we just did, into the Department of Defense just by large stake in a rare earth metal producer here in the United States.

Yaël Ossowski [1:01:54] Yeah, I'm just peeved. didn't have a share in it myself. But yeah. Yes, that's stuff is very critical.

Marty Bent [1:01:59] But no, mean, that's a step towards like, number one, it's like overt positioning, like we're getting back to industrial policy, but number two, like teetering on the edge of like quasi-nationalizing a critical sort of rare earth metal extractor.

Yaël Ossowski [1:02:16] Yeah, related to Bitcoin, the Fannie Mae Freddie Mac are these mortgage providers and stuff. That was set up, yes, as like a quasi-government thing, but now it's just like completely owned by the government. And Trump has even mentioned with a few of these deals that the United States would own, like the Ukraine deal was kind of mentioned. It's like, the US would just own this and that. It's like, bro, we're getting into the nationalization game here, are you? I did not sign up for this part where we're nationalizing certain industries and lands. You typically don't want that because government is not very efficient at allocating resources and understanding supply and demand pricing and prices a lot of other people out and makes it so that things are not looking too good.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ That was actually one of the problems of this CHIPS Act that people are very enthused about is that we're going to give a billion dollars to these companies to build in Arizona. You know, what, what are you really getting for that? Are they actually building the real stuff here? And what are you doing to deleverage Taiwan from China? It's like super complicated questions and there's not really a way that governments can centrally control it, which is why it's good to be skeptical and good to limit government wherever possible. But yeah, lot of scary stuff.

Marty Bent [1:03:32] Yeah, you're about like the sovereign wealth fund announcement of Howard Lutnick. Like we're going to get equity stakes in Moderna and Pfizer so they can inject you with mRNA vaccines. Like what? What are we doing here?

Yaël Ossowski [1:03:43] I haven't seen any other proposals of what would go in there though. I guess, because realistically we don't want the government owning a bunch of stuff when we're are what $38 trillion in debt. Like there's stuff to pay off. We don't need to, you know, put things on the Robin Hood brokerage right now. Like we need to actually be selling things.

Marty Bent [1:04:05] Yeah, it's very chaotic times. And that's why, again, that's why I anchored a Bitcoin. I do believe it's that sly roundabout way to take control of money out of the hands of government and central banks. And if you fix the money, you can begin to really limit the government and what they can do. And that brings up the topic of the week, which is the constant berating, not only the week, the last month of... Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and this sort of back and forth on DC. You many reps and senators tweeting, it's time for you to resign. There was a rumor that Trump was writing a letter that was going to fire Jerome Powell.

Marty Bent ⋮ And then he stepped back from that in a press conference right before we came on to record. I wrote a newsletter about this last night. And it seems pretty obvious. They've been as close to explicit. The Trump administration, Scott Bessent, others have been, obviously they don't like drone pal, but it seems like they want to go to full merger between the treasury and the federal reserve so that they can turn things on turbo and sort of make sure that there is no independent fed chair stepping in the way of their fiscal policy goals.

Yaël Ossowski [1:05:23] Yeah, and then we're one way stop to funny money. there's a look in a pure. The way that it should be is that there would be no central bank interest rates would be set, you know, just by the market. It'd be fine. Right. We la la land. But that's ideally how it should be when you have this kind of politicization. I don't just say like nobody wants to defend pal, right? You just need. No.

Marty Bent [1:05:50] felt weird. Somebody's criticized them for years. Like last time I'm writing the news there, like, this is like, listen, I don't, like the biggest fan of the guy either, but yeah.

Yaël Ossowski [1:05:58] But he's also the devil we know, right? Like if you did have a merger, you had a thing where like Trump would set the interest policy. I he'd be at zero rates forever. He's a real estate guy. Like this is what he wants is zero rates forever, which have their own unintended consequences. And I think one of the greatest distillations I ever had on this was actually Ron Paul's book in the Fed, which talked to a great length about, I mean, his end cases that we should just audit the Fed and try to curtail some of what it can do. But he goes through. a lot about the Great Depression and sort of the jiggering that they did with a lot of the rates actually caused a lot more harm that people may realize.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And I think because we haven't really had that good historical lesson brought up too often, yeah, would go ahead, we'll have the interest rate at this and that and whatever it might be. It's like this stuff is the central price signal, price of money signal for absolutely everything in the economy. There's no way you can actually make a good determination of what it should be. It's all just market reaction. this stuff is, it's always very concerning to see, again, I don't like more government institutions. I don't like more rules and laws and things like that. But the only other alternative is to introduce, yes, some kind of Bitcoin system that wouldn't even have to deal with this.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Because the Bitcoin interest rate is whatever I set it at rather than what the government sets it at.

Marty Bent [1:07:18] Yeah, it's completely insane. And whether it's how DC operates just plainly with the laws they're and putting out there or central bank policy or potentially soon to be treasury central bank policy, whatever it is. To me, I'm gonna keep it simple, stupid. I'm left curve. I'm the caveman. But it literally comes down to information systems. Like you cannot make good decisions. in a central location for people thousands of miles away from you, you are so far removed from the data inputs that it is quite literally impossible for you to make a good decision. And you need to decentralize and distribute that information or the decision making based off those informational inputs to as local level as you can get. We've gotten so far away from that in the United States.

Yaël Ossowski [1:08:10] good high acion that's good price discovery right there

Marty Bent [1:08:13] Yeah, it's a Yeah, and like, so how do you... Let's run with the assumption that they're successful in kicking Powell out. Like, I'm sure you've saw, but like July 3rd, Scott Bessent was on CNBC. It was bluntly asked, like, will you become the Fed chair? Is that a possibility? And he said, it has happened historically. And then she pressed him, like, is it going to be you? And he just gave a non-answer. And it was like the most blatant admission by omission I've ever seen. And who knows whether it would be Bessent. or Warsh or Hassett. It seems like those are the three front runners.

Marty Bent ⋮ But I think all three of those front runners will effectuate the plans of the Trump administration would seem to be. It's like teetering on the edge of explicit. I think it's still an implicit sort of signaling that we've been getting over the last, even before the election, that they're going to merge the Treasury and the Fed so that they can drop interest rates and the Federal Reserve under the purview of the Treasury will be there to buy the bonds to make sure yields are low.

Yaël Ossowski [1:09:26] Yeah. And what's interesting about Besant is, I mean, he is a Bitcoiner, right? He knows this stuff. And you, you know, a lifespan, at least my professional career, you know, just in bashing the Fed and centralized money creation and printing and everything else. here's someone who like understands and actually owns Bitcoin and understands the unique qualities. And it would be in a position where he's determining, you know, so much of the central

Marty Bent [1:09:27] is

Yaël Ossowski [1:09:56] price that's put on money. I don't know what to think because again, these are the institutions that we tried to slay for many years, know, Tales from the Crypt, trying to slay these monsters for so long. And then you have people who are at least Bitcoin adjacent who are in that. And I don't really know who's holding them to discipline. That'd be something very interesting, you know, was so much of it just a thing during the campaign and to get Bitcoiners and crypto people excited or do they still hold those principles and that's what also I'd really interested in because there's a lot of market confidence and Besant like super smart guy knows how to make money understands things but at the same time he does have that that eye on Bitcoin and Whatever stable coins could do as well.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ So I have to say that that would play a part somewhat So I don't know if he would go uber crazy if he were to do anything. I don't even know if it'd be him I don't know, kind of weird to talk about. I'm making the bet on whatever the Bitcoin version of Polymarket is that basically Pal stays until his term ends. What is that? Early next year? So I think this will be buried by some other story at some point because like the economy will still grow, people traveling a lot more, gas prices will be low. I think it'll be okay.

Marty Bent [1:11:05] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, part of me wonders is this all K-Fab, Kabuki theater.

Yaël Ossowski [1:11:25] Not half wrong.

Marty Bent [1:11:26] Another part is like, maybe they're serious, they do it. like the, the QA not in me is like, they're gonna, they're gonna speculative attack the dollar and then issue bit bonds or something like that, like aggressively acquire Bitcoin, try the rug, China and Russia. And then the third part is nothing ever happens. Like it'll go to term it's all K-Fob and we'll transition because

Yaël Ossowski [1:11:50] I mean, I've heard a lot of it is obviously related to housing, which is why Bill Pulte, who's the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, like he's been the number one fire too late pal guy on X and everything else is that looking at mortgages is super important because yeah, a lot of our economy is based on, you know, energy and the military industrial complex, but also on construction and building houses. And if you have like a basically a dearth of people who won't be working in construction anymore because they've all been deported. Yeah, there's going to be like all kinds of problems in the housing industry.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ We already have higher prices for building materials because of tariffs. And then if people are not able to get lower interest rates to build homes or buy homes in the first place, that's also very problematic. So I think it would depend on how the housing numbers go. And I think that will determine anything. Not 100 % sure how to lean out, but yeah, that's it. Big important thing, because people in the US love their homes.

Marty Bent [1:12:50] I do, but let's walk through this. Like, because I've been saying this for the last month or two, like, again, don't want to defend PAL, but if you look at the CPI data, you take out gas and electronics, have fallen like electricity, food, medical care, medical cost, and rent, shelter have all gone up well over three and a half percent between three and a half and six percent year on year based off the last print. So that's basically the basket of Essential goods needed to go about your day-to-day life have are well above Well, I don't even know if the targets two or three anymore.

Marty Bent ⋮ It's over both of them materially year on year Which is not good. So they can the free market like it's not even free market But like if you're thinking Interest rates sort of drive prices like it makes sense to me that you would keep them high For longer because there is still inflation that exists in other parts of of the economy outside of gasoline and tech deflation. And then when it comes to housing, I think you're have high mortgage rates. There's two parts of the equation of the housing markets, the mortgage rate and the price of the housing. And like, I think we just need to let housing correct from like a nominal cost perspective or a real cost perspective and just let the market figure out what a house is worth in each individual market.

Marty Bent ⋮ And what were mortgage rates in the eighties and nineties were like 13%. Like it's not.

Yaël Ossowski [1:14:03] Mm-hmm.

Marty Bent [1:14:19] out of the realm of normality that mortgage rates are this high.

Yaël Ossowski [1:14:24] to your point, like houses were not $800,000, right? And that correction would be a huge detriment to most of the boomers because that's the retirement plan. So in Canada, it's very explicit. They say that, you know, our goal as a government is to ensure that housing prices do not go down. Like they're very explicit about it now because most of the people who own homes are older and that's their retirement plan is like their house, whether they gift it to their children or sell it on the open market. So this is going to be a generational battle too, because there's a lot of housed older people who are doing very well and a lot of unhoused apartment dwelling youngins who just have Bitcoin, don't have too much fiat and like we're competing in the same space to try to live, right?

Marty Bent [1:15:12] Yeah, no, mean, maybe it's the might selfish intent coming out, but like, I want to buy a forever house for my family. I don't want to pay an obscene amount for it. I'm OK to lock in a higher mortgage if the price is right. Sell your goddamn houses, people.

Yaël Ossowski [1:15:32] Mm-hmm. Yeah, and the, you the US has always had a fairly active housing market, you know, had people flipping houses, people selling things, and you have like a good used market. And you do have a phenomenal amount of building and places like Texas and Tennessee, more the red states. There's a lot of work on zoning that's happened, that's kind of been done. It's getting there. And, you know, it's not always a finance equation. oftentimes, at least with kids, it's like, are the schools and are they good schools? How close are you to family and so many of these other issues? with housing, it's like a thing that we've never really solved.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And again, in New York City, they're talking about, you know, even more rent control and everything else, which has never worked anywhere. And Argentina is a very good example. Milay got rid of rent control and you've just seen like rents fall. It's become so much more affordable for normal Argentinians, not just digital nomads from the US who are going to to Buenos Aires, but normal people are actually able to afford stuff, which is why I think it's always helpful to have Milay and his story in Argentina, like always have that in the front of our mind of like, this could be our alternative of what's happening.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ And it's all good so far and actually pretty great apart from whatever crypto thing he was involved in.

Marty Bent [1:16:48] I find the whole Argentina story, particularly over the last year, so hard to discern the signal from the noise because you'll hear examples like this. It seems to make sense to me. Get rid of rent control with the free market side, price to go down. That seems real. But then others like he's a webcock, like completely.

Yaël Ossowski [1:17:04] Yeah, but that's all rhetoric, right? You just have to look at the data, the numbers and the debt and, you know, they no longer have deficit, which is like, I can't even imagine when the United States will no longer have deficit ever. Like he was actually able to implement things. think there has been because it's, you know, governance is dirty. It's gross. this following this stuff is hard, difficult and remaining true to principles is very difficult. But Milet has done a fantastic job. He's been very good. It's like questionable stuff relating to like his sister, who is a key advisor. But there's Zach over at Reason who did a very good documentary on Argentina and Milet fairly recently.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ We got him on Nostra as well. That was fairly cool. But he put together something good on the YouTube that goes into the actual story and talks to people. Most of it is actually framed through the left-wing unions who hate him because he's been doing a lot of union busting. And I think that has much like the normal mainstream media kind of been the narrative. So you haven't heard too much positive. You kind of have to look at the numbers yourselves or actually like send good people down there to get the real the real truth.

Marty Bent [1:18:15] Yeah. No, have free market. works. It's like... And so, what, in terms of priority lists for you on the policy side of what we need to get past as it pertains to Bitcoin energy, whatever it may be, what, how would you describe like your top two to five priorities of what you think we need to get done? Whether it's this year, throughout the rest of Trump's

Yaël Ossowski [1:18:21] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:18:44] administration between now midterms like what's the window looking like and what do we need to get done

Yaël Ossowski [1:18:52] Yeah, I think like it's crypto week in DC, as we mentioned, and it's the Clarity Act. It's the Genius Act and the Anti-CBDC Act. Yeah, sure. Anti-CBDC Act, very important. Get that enshrined. The others don't really matter for Bitcoiners. Realistically, it's a lot more about the crypto world. For stable coins, everyone has these arguments. I'm going to say steadfast, it really comes down to being able to use Bitcoin and not having to... give the IRS every single transaction we do. So need to have de minimis taxation rules, anything that's under $10,000 that you spend in Bitcoin, you never got to declare it, don't show anybody, nothing.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ That would be ideal. Especially if you're using brokerages, exchanges, wallets. I think that is really important. There is a more beefed up IRS that is coming in the Trump administration. There's a lot more people who've been hired. So I don't know who they're going to go after. All right, it could be Bitcoin people. I'm not sure. So having de minimis rules, I think is very important for average everyday normal use of Bitcoin as money. That is definitely important. And basically that apart from all of the developer issues and, you know, with with Samurai and with even tornado cash and these trials, which you've talked a lot about, you know, something like the blockchain certainty regulatory act, I believe it's called is It's at different stages of being implemented into various parts of legislation, so I have no doubt it'll make it in.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ If it has the teeth to do so and actually protect developers who are working on decentralized projects is another question. Not sure. I do think that for me the de minimis tax stuff really important. The blockchain regulatory certainty act for developers is really important. And I think for me that's about it. I don't need to have necessarily a reserve. I know my colleagues at Bitcoin Policy Institute are doing a gay woman's job of making that case and are very interested in it. And I think there are a lot of advantages to Bitcoin in the hands of a national policy. You hear my skepticism of government enough, but I think for me, those are the most important ones for now.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ Just letting people use Bitcoin as ordinary money every day in their lives. And then also making sure that we're not arresting people who are granting us the tools to do so.

Marty Bent [1:21:14] Yeah, I think I'm aligned there on priorities. Keep it simple, stupid. Just let me save in Bitcoin, let me spend it, let me receive it, and leave me the fuck alone, please. That's all I want. Just let me chill on my...

Yaël Ossowski [1:21:15] Focused. Yeah, if I had like a specific, you know, project, you if I was on the board of something, I'd be like, well, it'd be great if every whatever used a qualified custodian exchange that only passed art. And this is the problem with lobbying. It's the problem with government. It's the problem with most of these rules is that they're catered to creating monopolies for certain companies. And I think most people don't call that out enough. That's what regulations do. The more that you instill regulations and you put things there, you're not harming the big companies. The big companies have the resources. to fight it. Coinbase and all these others, they'll be able to do whatever, they'll comply, they'll hire more lawyers. It's the small developers and people come up with cool stuff who get harmed and then the users who can't use those products. So absolutely right, keep it as simple as possible.

Marty Bent [1:22:10] Yeah. What can anybody listening to this do? Do they have agency or is it all dependent on the lobbyist?

Yaël Ossowski [1:22:18] No, I think it's dependent on agency. know, the de minimis tax rules been talked a lot. I think that is something that Senator Lummis is pushing. But again, not right to your congressman, bro. I can't. The more arguments I think that people hear in non-traditional channels is actually very important. That's most of what I do is speaking to consumers and people who just go to the shop or the convenience store. And like the more that people can hear stories, can hear anecdotes, can get articles written.

Marty Bent [1:22:27] $600 insulting.

Yaël Ossowski [1:22:47] from their perspective, I think it's just helpful because unfortunately, if it's just the Bitcoin lobby that's talking about this, it's not good. It's got to be the person who has a hair salon in Minneapolis or the guy who owns a auto parts store in Detroit. It has to be ordinary people who are using Bitcoin and the technology and want to be able to use it without being penalized. So those stories are more needed than anything. And it's not write your congressman, it's just talk to more people about it. If you can, you know, find journalists to talk about it, do your own podcast about it, figure it out.

Yaël Ossowski ⋮ You know, I couldn't tell you any, any single solitary advice, but the more people who at least discuss it and make it known, people will listen and they'll, take that up and might take some time. But I think there's enough groundswell here that we could actually implement that change and make it so that we don't have ugly dates every year with the IRS.

Marty Bent [1:23:45] That's the least we can ask for. Keep talking about it, freaks. Yael, this was incredible. We're going to do this many more times in the future. Thank you for the work you're doing, not only at BPI, but also Consumer Choice Center. It's very important, Yeoman's work, to take a term you used earlier. It doesn't seem pretty.

Yaël Ossowski [1:23:53] Thank you very much, Marty. that one.

Marty Bent [1:24:08] I think I'd ever want to do it, I'm thankful there's individuals like yourself out there who like to get in the mud with the political side of things.

Yaël Ossowski [1:24:17] Absolutely, mate. Well, we do it. We do it for the cause. So thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

Marty Bent [1:24:21] Alright, see ya. Peace, freaks.