Crypto Critics' Corner

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Episode 163 – What the Elon Musk coup means for Finance

What the Elon Musk coup means for Finance – Crypto Critics' Corner

Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey discuss the deteriorating situation in the United States, including the press conference by David Sacks, the destruction of the SEC, the future of crypto legislation, and the ongoing takeover of the federal government by freaks. Additional resources: Wired reporting on the names Reuters reporting on the SEC: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/secs-republican-led-commission-tightens-oversight-probes-sources-say-2025-02-02/ Additional episodes mentioned in this episode: Episode 161 – Is there one good regulator between the SEC and the CFTC? (feat. Sean Tuffy) Episode 162 – Humiliate your local billionaire (feat. Ed Zitron)

Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin discuss the deteriorating situation in the United States, including the press release of David Sacks, the destruction of the SEC, the future of crypto legislation, and the ongoing takeover of the federal government by freaks.

This podcast was recorded on February 4th, 2025.

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English Transcript:

00:00:05:03 - 00:00:11:09
Cas Piancey
Welcome back everyone. I am Cas Piancey. I'm joined, as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you today?

00:00:11:09 - 00:00:11:19
Bennett Tomlin
You know.

00:00:11:19 - 00:00:12:02
Cas Piancey
Yeah,

00:00:12:02 - 00:00:12:23
Bennett Tomlin
How are you?

00:00:12:23 - 00:00:14:07
Cas Piancey
slogging along,

00:00:14:07 - 00:00:20:06
Cas Piancey
doing we're trying out a new thing. We're going to try to post one of these shorter videos every week. We basically we literally have ourselves on a timer right now.

00:00:20:06 - 00:00:27:02
Cas Piancey
So we're gonna try to keep this as short and succinct as possible so that we can keep everybody updated. With that out of the way,

00:00:27:02 - 00:00:33:14
Cas Piancey
I think it's worth starting this discussion today. Actually, let's start with the least important one. First,

00:00:33:14 - 00:00:37:13
Cas Piancey
Bennett and I both watched a press conference by David Sacks.

00:00:37:13 - 00:00:38:21
Cas Piancey
who is the crypto czar,

00:00:38:21 - 00:00:48:07
Cas Piancey
Of the Trump administration, a South African who is basically like a mini Elon Musk, less successful, less interesting. Elon Musk,

00:00:48:07 - 00:00:52:09
Bennett Tomlin
He's the one who wrote the rape apologia book with Peter Thiel.

00:00:52:09 - 00:00:55:21
Cas Piancey
as evil as Elon Musk, but like, just less successful,

00:00:55:21 - 00:00:57:08
Cas Piancey
and less interesting. Anyway,

00:00:57:08 - 00:01:02:07
Cas Piancey
he did a press conference, and it was terribly stupid.

00:01:02:07 - 00:01:04:01
Cas Piancey
But yeah, go ahead, Bennett, get into that.

00:01:04:01 - 00:01:04:15
Bennett Tomlin
Sure.

00:01:04:15 - 00:01:12:04
Bennett Tomlin
So David Sacks held a press conference, along with GT Thompson and French Hill, Tim Scott, and,

00:01:12:04 - 00:01:28:01
Bennett Tomlin
Bozeman to talk about all the important cryptocurrency things they're about to do, which is two bills, a stablecoin bill and a market structure bill. The stablecoin bill is coming from Senator Hagerty, and the House intends to introduce one similar.

00:01:28:03 - 00:01:58:20
Bennett Tomlin
This puts some limits on what reserves stablecoins would be able to hold. Tries to set the fed and the OCC up as the two primary stablecoin regulators. But because this is important to Wyoming, included a carve out for state regulators to get like waived out of federal oversight if there's like a state regulator overseeing you. And so that's what, like any problematic stablecoin, will probably end up doing, is trying to get waived out of the federal regulation into a state regulator,

00:01:58:20 - 00:02:00:00
Bennett Tomlin
probably in Wyoming.

00:02:00:02 - 00:02:04:08
Bennett Tomlin
And so that's the stablecoin bill that they intend to advance.

00:02:04:08 - 00:02:34:15
Cas Piancey
want to just quickly also mention that they, during this press conference, the way that they were just talking about dollar hegemony and the idea of, like, a oh, we need we need more people to have access to dollars because that will strengthen the dollar is like, completely missing a really important part of the strength of the dollar, which is that the government is able to easily stop many nations and individuals from being able to easily access the US dollar.

00:02:34:15 - 00:02:42:22
Cas Piancey
And if you make it easier and easier to access the US dollar, I see why that helps with the velocity of money, but it doesn't necessarily help strengthen the money.

00:02:42:22 - 00:03:06:00
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and if we're talking about access to money, like you probably don't cut off all federal grants, federal payments to a variety of different places, and try to crash the entire global economy at the same time, because a lot of people get their primary access to money from their jobs before we have to worry about whether or not they can put those dollars on whatever blockchains they want, they need the initial dollars.

00:03:06:02 - 00:03:16:16
Bennett Tomlin
And that's the real problem for most people, right? Democratization of finance is a lie meant to sell you scams, because most people who don't have access to financial services, it's because they lack money.

00:03:16:16 - 00:03:17:04
Cas Piancey
Yeah.

00:03:17:04 - 00:03:22:07
Bennett Tomlin
Exempting there are people who get an unfair stick, but like that's the big part of it.

00:03:22:07 - 00:03:24:11
Bennett Tomlin
The other bill is a market structure bill.

00:03:24:12 - 00:03:42:02
Bennett Tomlin
It sounds like it's going to be fit 21 2.0, which primarily punts a lot of cryptocurrency regulation to the CFTC, which as we recently talked about with Sean Tuffy, the CFTC doesn't have the budget, the manpower or like the wherewithal to do that kind of regulating.

00:03:42:02 - 00:04:01:08
Bennett Tomlin
And like the really problematic part of it, 21 is it uses like a hilariously broad definition of decentralized, which as long as like there's not one issue per one person with 20% of the token supply, it like counts as decentralized and goes into like the Cftc's little exemption playlist playbook.

00:04:01:10 - 00:04:12:11
Bennett Tomlin
I'm broad strokes for these bills, those little subtle details you can get into if you hate yourself. But like broadly, the idea is to punt crypto to the CFTC, gut the regulatory agencies,

00:04:12:11 - 00:04:20:09
Bennett Tomlin
make sure nothing gets regulated. And oh, Tim Scott says he can get these bills passed out of the Senate in 100 days. And,

00:04:20:09 - 00:04:26:18
Bennett Tomlin
Kirsten Gillibrand is a feckless coward who has agreed to collaborate with fascist to advance crypto regulation for some reason.

00:04:26:18 - 00:04:28:17
Cas Piancey
Yep. Cool. Okay, so that goes over that.

00:04:28:17 - 00:04:40:01
Cas Piancey
Also, I think, yeah, we'll link to the Sean Tuffy episode because there's a lot of reasons that the CFTC, it's not like it's an incompetent agency. It just doesn't have the ability to do this.

00:04:40:01 - 00:04:48:14
Bennett Tomlin
Oh, unless we're expanding the cftc's budget, are we giving the CFTC ten times more budget in the next reconciliation? I don't fucking think so.

00:04:48:14 - 00:04:52:06
Cas Piancey
maybe we should merge it with the SEC, but I guess that's a different discussion.

00:04:52:06 - 00:04:55:20
Cas Piancey
But that does bring up the SEC, which is another topic that we want to talk about.

00:04:55:20 - 00:05:00:06
Cas Piancey
Because it seems like the SEC will no longer be doing any investigating anymore. Right?

00:05:00:06 - 00:05:12:01
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. So the change was specifically reported by Reuters, and it says that like SEC, lower level staff can no longer start investigations without first getting approval of the politically appointed commissioners.

00:05:12:01 - 00:05:14:19
Bennett Tomlin
So nothing's going to be investigated.

00:05:14:19 - 00:05:27:23
Bennett Tomlin
It's being described generously in the press as a barrier to investigations, but it fundamentally means that basically nothing is going to get investigated unless you can get these highly politicized actors to agree to investigate it.

00:05:28:02 - 00:05:59:20
Bennett Tomlin
We're past the point of like, things not being enforced or them not bringing actions. There's not even anyone checking. There's not even going to be anyone looking. They're not going to be able to get approval. And the bigger fallout from this is it's going to drive so many of the lower level staff, the competent people who could eventually build like some kind of regulator out of the SEC in a way that even when you build the political will around wanting to regulate, it will take a huge infusion of funding and a long amount of time to rebuild the regulatory state.

00:05:59:20 - 00:06:00:06
Bennett Tomlin
They're getting.

00:06:00:06 - 00:06:00:11
Cas Piancey
yep.

00:06:00:11 - 00:06:03:08
Cas Piancey
It's so hard to rebuild these agencies once you gut them,

00:06:03:08 - 00:06:06:09
Cas Piancey
to bear, but it's like a metaphor where it's like,

00:06:06:09 - 00:06:22:03
Cas Piancey
I think generally what you do is if a if you're if you're, if you buy a home that's in a state of complete disrepair, you're often better off, just like knocking it down and rebuilding a new one because it's cheaper the way they're gutting these agencies.

00:06:22:03 - 00:06:30:18
Cas Piancey
It's like what whatever is going to remain by the time someone else comes into power is going to be hard to imagine that they can even it'll take generations to rebuild

00:06:30:18 - 00:06:40:17
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. There's a finite number of people, lawyers and experts, who are capable and willing of working for this type of group. And you've just made that group even smaller, you know?

00:06:40:17 - 00:06:40:23
Cas Piancey
Yeah.

00:06:40:23 - 00:06:54:01
Bennett Tomlin
We should also then, since we're on this general thing, we should talk about how our favorite free speech advocates have now made it a crime to report on Elon Musk's Doge collaborators.

00:06:54:01 - 00:06:58:16
Cas Piancey
So two things here. First of all, we're going to link to the wired reporting. You can find that in the,

00:06:58:16 - 00:07:03:14
Cas Piancey
details of the episode below. Or if you're listening on a podcast, you can find it in the episode notes.

00:07:03:14 - 00:07:07:19
Cas Piancey
The reporting is fantastic. I urge you to become a member of wired.

00:07:07:21 - 00:07:10:09
Cas Piancey
Pay them. They're doing amazing work.

00:07:10:09 - 00:07:10:17
Cas Piancey
Covering

00:07:10:17 - 00:07:11:14
Cas Piancey
the coup.

00:07:11:14 - 00:07:18:22
Cas Piancey
And what they did was they went ahead and they named these individuals Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor,

00:07:18:22 - 00:07:23:19
Cas Piancey
Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

00:07:23:19 - 00:07:31:12
Cas Piancey
reason we're naming them is specifically because of our last episode with Ed Zitron, where he said, a really important part of this is naming names.

00:07:31:14 - 00:07:34:18
Cas Piancey
So these individuals are interns. They're no one's,

00:07:34:18 - 00:07:39:18
Cas Piancey
they're interns at the DOGE. The department of Governmental Efficiency, which

00:07:39:18 - 00:07:40:23
Bennett Tomlin
Which is not a department.

00:07:40:23 - 00:07:43:10
Cas Piancey
is not a real governmental department.

00:07:43:10 - 00:07:48:18
Cas Piancey
They're interns there, and they basically went in office space style and started asking people what their duties were,

00:07:48:18 - 00:07:52:22
Cas Piancey
changing code, doing all kinds of things that the office of,

00:07:52:22 - 00:07:55:08
Cas Piancey
what is it, Office of Personal Management or

00:07:55:08 - 00:08:05:05
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, yeah. So they took a they, like, went into Office of Personnel Management. They went into Office of Budget Management. They have connected unauthorized devices into, like, the Treasury's,

00:08:05:05 - 00:08:18:17
Bennett Tomlin
secure payment systems. And, it was initially reported that was Reed access. They apparently had both read and write access to these payments. Despite the there being court injunctions against, like the federal funding freezes and things like that.

00:08:18:22 - 00:08:24:10
Bennett Tomlin
There are still people reporting that, like certain agencies have yet to receive their grants,

00:08:24:10 - 00:08:35:03
Bennett Tomlin
and things like that. There's still gaps which seem to suggest that the Trump administration is not perhaps completely adhering to the court injunction so far,

00:08:35:03 - 00:08:36:08
Bennett Tomlin
which is illegal.

00:08:36:08 - 00:08:36:17
Bennett Tomlin
That's a

00:08:36:17 - 00:08:39:05
Cas Piancey
We're going to keep saying it. We're going to

00:08:39:05 - 00:08:51:05
Cas Piancey
keep saying it. Thanks. You know, and Chuck Schumer really nailing at home for these guys, A bill to a bill to make sure that that what was already illegal is acknowledged as

00:08:51:05 - 00:08:58:07
Bennett Tomlin
Chuck Schumer is worried the coup may make your chicken wings expensive. And he's right. It will. But like,

00:08:58:07 - 00:09:01:08
Cas Piancey
there's a coup, Chuck. There's a there's a coup.

00:09:01:08 - 00:09:02:07
Cas Piancey
Anyway, yeah.

00:09:02:07 - 00:09:03:12
Cas Piancey
Yeah. Great points, great

00:09:03:12 - 00:09:23:10
Bennett Tomlin
So, yeah. Ed Martin, the attorney general for DC, has threatened an X to prosecute people, revealing these names in these details and things, which, you know, seems like an illegal use of state power to silence journalists, critics in the press in a complete and utter violation of the first Amendment.

00:09:23:10 - 00:09:34:23
Cas Piancey
I want to keep saying that Elon Musk is like, quote, tweeting all these people and saying, like, that's illegal, but there's no law. He's like, this is not illegal. It is not illegal to name names of people destroying the government.

00:09:35:08 - 00:10:01:02
Bennett Tomlin
Which makes it which makes it especially terrifying that the attorney general for DC is like, yes, President Musk, I agree with you that this is a crime we need to prosecute. Like even even I need I need everyone in the audience. Understand, even if you win your federal case and it gets thrown out by the time it gets thrown out or whatever, there is a good chance you are like, bankrupt, unemployed, and your life has been ruined because, like, the case has been brought against you.

00:10:01:06 - 00:10:15:09
Bennett Tomlin
And the effect that has and that is their goal is to chill and silence and cut people off, make people afraid to say Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine,, or any of these people because it means that they risk ruining their entire life.

00:10:15:09 - 00:10:26:06
Cas Piancey
Yeah. Which is silly. It's silly. This idea that they would go like I'm. It's not silly in that I don't think they'll do it. That's not what I'm saying. I it's very possible they do do this stuff.

00:10:26:06 - 00:10:34:22
Cas Piancey
Which again points to our, our last episode with Ed where it's like I specifically said they were going to sue people about this and they were going to like, I didn't say arrest because I thought that would go too far.

00:10:34:22 - 00:10:35:18
Cas Piancey
But if they do,

00:10:35:18 - 00:10:46:11
Cas Piancey
you know, am I surprised? No. But does that mean we all need to shut our mouths? Well, no. Then they win. So, you know, our job is as content creators and and members of the press,

00:10:46:11 - 00:10:51:13
Cas Piancey
we need to push back as hard as we possibly can against this stuff. So,

00:10:51:13 - 00:10:52:10
Cas Piancey
Yeah. Proud.

00:10:52:10 - 00:10:54:22
Cas Piancey
Proudly. Name names. If you had the opportunity to,

00:10:54:22 - 00:10:55:04
Bennett Tomlin
And,

00:10:55:04 - 00:11:14:20
Bennett Tomlin
should also mention, as part of his efforts to dismantle the federal government and illegally stop funds that Congress has already appropriated. Elon Musk has put in his sights the OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which receives a large portion of its budget from federal initiatives, often through agencies like,

00:11:14:20 - 00:11:19:18
Bennett Tomlin
US aid and things like that that are directing it CRP because they report on things.

00:11:19:23 - 00:11:27:06
Bennett Tomlin
One of the I think it was a groper, but it might have been some other kind of alt right crazy person on,

00:11:27:06 - 00:11:38:09
Bennett Tomlin
x that Musk was retweeting was like, why did the government fund the okapi when they went after Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk, like, quote, tweeted it and was like, we're going to cut this off.

00:11:38:09 - 00:11:45:17
Bennett Tomlin
And obviously, there's obvious reasons Elon Musk doesn't want the organized Crime and Corruption reporting project to exist like it's in the name.

00:11:45:17 - 00:11:47:15
Bennett Tomlin
Why he doesn't want it to exist.

00:11:47:15 - 00:11:48:19
Cas Piancey
Exactly. And, you know,

00:11:48:19 - 00:11:53:07
Cas Piancey
Ben and I, we're we're posting about this over on blue Sky, and I just want to point out that,

00:11:53:07 - 00:11:58:02
Cas Piancey
Oliver Rivers actually quote, tweeted Bennett, who had said something about how,

00:11:58:02 - 00:12:01:23
Cas Piancey
the OC crp was getting, you know, they're trying to defund it. And,

00:12:01:23 - 00:12:07:07
Cas Piancey
Oliver Rivers, who's the CEO of the OC, CRP, said, we're not going anywhere.

00:12:07:12 - 00:12:12:01
Cas Piancey
So that's that's what I love to see, is these journalists basically putting their putting their foot down and saying,

00:12:12:01 - 00:12:17:15
Cas Piancey
nope, this is bullshit. We're, we're it doesn't matter if they defund us like we are going to be a successful,

00:12:17:15 - 00:12:27:10
Cas Piancey
organization regardless. So I'm really proud of them. And if you if you can afford to support wired, rolling Stone, there's so many people doing really good work out there.

00:12:27:10 - 00:12:42:09
Cas Piancey
Please, if you have an opportunity, I'm begging you. It's it's now or never. It's there that you you might not have a wired or a rolling Stone in a year or two based on this administration. So pay for it now because the work they're doing is super duper duper important.

00:12:42:09 - 00:13:05:08
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. And I think that's basically where we're at. They have illegally seized the levers of power in the government. They are attempting to destroy the ability to regulate, prosecute, investigate. They are setting themselves up for complete and utter corruption, graft and just dismantling of the entire, like, infrastructure.

00:13:05:08 - 00:13:07:02
Bennett Tomlin
And I guess we all have to talk about it.

00:13:07:02 - 00:13:10:18
Cas Piancey
Yep. And this is why we had with, with Cas9 guys. This is why we hedge.

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