Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin are joined by Rohan Grey to discuss his proposal to create a new digital fiscal regime.

This podcast was recorded on March 17th, 2025.

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00:00:05:02 - 00:00:20:20
Cas Piancey
Welcome back everyone. I am Cas Piancey. I'm joined, as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. And the world is crumbling around us, so let's just stop there. We're joined by a special guest today, Mr. Rohan Gray, who is a law professor at

00:00:20:20 - 00:00:21:22
Cas Piancey
Willamette University.

00:00:21:22 - 00:00:35:01
Cas Piancey
and he's joining us now. I think this is the third time we've had him on. So this is, one of our favorite guests. We did, particularly, poignant,

00:00:35:01 - 00:00:36:09
Bennett Tomlin
It's actually the fourth.

00:00:36:09 - 00:00:38:11
Cas Piancey
fourth time, fourth time that we've had him on.

00:00:38:11 - 00:00:42:09
Cas Piancey
But he did a particularly poignant paper, digitizing the fisc,

00:00:42:09 - 00:00:47:03
Cas Piancey
and we wanted to have him on to talk about it as as everything goes to hell.

00:00:47:03 - 00:00:54:23
Cas Piancey
Rohan, thank you for joining us on that. On that depressing note, Bennett, what do you where do you want to start? This. This is a dense paper.

00:00:54:23 - 00:01:02:16
Bennett Tomlin
Rohan, could you tell us what the Treasury Bureau of Fiscal Services is and why it is important?

00:01:02:16 - 00:01:21:19
Rohan Grey
Yeah. It's the most boring bureaucrat you've never heard of. With the most important job in the whole of government. Right? This is. There's a couple of people in the office of course, but it's essentially the people in Treasury that move the money around. Now, the best way to think about it is there's three levels, but the bureau, the fiscal services in the middle, and it's the most politically sensitive.

00:01:21:23 - 00:01:37:03
Rohan Grey
But the three levels from the bottom are the fed. The feds like the bare metal rails. Right. This is like the zeros and ones. It moves the accounting around. The Treasury's in the middle. The Bureau, the fiscal service. Their job is to send the instructions to the fed. So the fed pretends that it's dumb. It's just sitting there.

00:01:37:04 - 00:01:55:17
Rohan Grey
Somebody sends the right payments instruction. It moves the money around. If not, it doesn't. Very convenient place to be in the middle of a war to stay out of it. All right. Central banks are very good at this. They're moving around money in World War One on both sides. They're moving around Nazi money in World War Two, you know, pretty much until you get to the late 1970s.

00:01:55:17 - 00:02:01:12
Rohan Grey
And then brown people in the Middle East, you know, doing politics up until then, the central banks usually don't,

00:02:01:12 - 00:02:19:12
Rohan Grey
politicize their own layer. All right. So you've got the accounting layer at the fed. Then the Treasury's doing the payments instructions to the fed. And then above that, you've got this other agency called the Office of Management and Budget, which is basically the president's lack, you know, lapdog, you know, and that one is really the legal authority.

00:02:19:18 - 00:02:35:10
Rohan Grey
So you need the official signature, then you need the instruction, and then you need it to be processed. Bureau of Fiscal Service is the one that does the instructions on behalf of the whole government. And part of the idea is it's easier than the fed getting a million people. The fed doesn't even like, you know, any any human beings.

00:02:35:10 - 00:02:55:00
Rohan Grey
It would rather only deal with financial institutions if it could. It's perfect. School has no children like the Trunchbull in Matilda. So even dealing with other human beings in the government is annoying. They would rather just deal with one and have that person deal with everybody else. So you go to the Bureau Fiscal Service, you've got your legal authority from the Office of Management and Budget, and then you get the payment instruction.

00:02:55:00 - 00:03:05:05
Rohan Grey
The fed goes, I'll listen to the Treasury. So that's what the office is. It's the office that processes about 88% of all federal payments through the Treasury's bank account. The fed.

00:03:05:05 - 00:03:16:17
Bennett Tomlin
And so can you talk about kind of the risks. If a bad faith actor were to insert themselves into that bureau and the broader process, it is a part of.

00:03:16:17 - 00:03:36:21
Rohan Grey
So hypothetically. Right? Completely hypothetically. Imagine you are, I don't know, say the president and you, I don't know, gave up on the idea that there's a separation of powers such that not only do you get to control the entire executive branch, right. There's no such thing as independent agencies. Is there such thing as, you know, commissions and heads of agencies that everyone is just your loyal subject?

00:03:36:23 - 00:03:54:23
Rohan Grey
You know, you're in a gold, gold plated castle, and, you decide that that's not enough for you. You also want the power of the purse. So you're not only relitigating the new deal with the administrative agencies, you not only really even admitted litigating Lincoln, you're actually going all the way back and litigating like the 1600s glorious revolution in Parliament.

00:03:54:23 - 00:04:15:23
Rohan Grey
Like, actually, the king doesn't have to listen to Parliament. I get to run the money taxation without representation, like I'm represented, if you're welcome. Right. It's a Democratic king. So now I can tax from the king side. So the risk with the Bureau of Fiscal Service is that, it's the lost chokehold for 88% of the government before you go and actually get the money.

00:04:15:23 - 00:04:40:08
Rohan Grey
So Congress can tell you to spend it can allow you to spend, but you can't actually access the money. My Congress has the power of the purse, but but the actual physical purse is still in the executive branch. Historically, this was an incredibly apolitical office. These were the most boring beige bureaucrats. This is the department of of lighting fixtures of the financial system.

00:04:40:08 - 00:04:58:09
Rohan Grey
Right. And somebody went and said, what if I start, you know, what if I start buttering up the IT guys and maybe the IT guys can help me launch a coup, right. And so they've found the one level of the payment system that is about as centralized as possible and as politicized as possible. As I said, you could go to the bare metal, go to the fed.

00:04:58:09 - 00:05:14:23
Rohan Grey
You know the problem. The fed is a board. It's independent. They're terrified of pissing off the bond markets. Even when Trump says the entire government's under my control. You know, the one exception he put in his executive order for the Monetary Policy Committee of the fed. It's the one last bureaucrat that he's terrified. It's like the final boss.

00:05:14:23 - 00:05:32:02
Rohan Grey
He's working his way up. He needs like a plus six sword before he can get through that armor or something. Right. Everyone else has fallen flat. But the good news is he doesn't actually have to take over the fed to take over the payments. He just goes one level beforehand and shuts off all the information going to the fed.

00:05:32:02 - 00:05:48:00
Cas Piancey
how is what is happening right now with Donald Trump? How is that different than impoundment, which I like? And maybe you can, explain. I assume that, most people aren't familiar with impoundment because we haven't dealt with it since Richard Nixon.

00:05:48:00 - 00:06:06:04
Rohan Grey
Yeah. Impoundment. It goes back to the very founding, but it kind of got distorted or grew over time until it became a problem. So the idea of empowerment is Congress tells the president or the executive disband and then passes a law, and the executive gets that law. It's a, you know, it's a valid law. And then the executive goes, no, I don't think I will.

00:06:06:04 - 00:06:22:22
Rohan Grey
And that should immediately get your kind of constitutional separation of powers hackles up. That's not supposed to be how it's supposed to go, right? We didn't say please spend unless you don't feel like it, in which case, do whatever the hell you want. That's a different kind of law. We do write those laws, but when we say no, no, no, I really mean it.

00:06:23:00 - 00:06:40:21
Rohan Grey
Seriously. Seriously, though, this time, guys spend the money. You're not supposed to say no. So going back to Thomas Jefferson, right? And all through the 1800s, there were moments when presidents did this, but it was usually quite limited. It was usually in the context of things like war powers, presidential powers, like very explicitly presidential powers,

00:06:41:09 - 00:06:45:05
Rohan Grey
where it would be something like, we gave you money to build some war boats.

00:06:45:07 - 00:07:03:21
Rohan Grey
The war is now over. So you've decided not to spend the rest of the money. Cool. Okay, we we page. We we gave you $1 million for roach eradication on day two of the roach eradication program. You found a really cool, you know, bioengineering weapon. You've killed all the cockroaches. I guess we don't need to spend the rest. $1 million seems reasonable.

00:07:03:23 - 00:07:24:18
Rohan Grey
Other examples like that have come up where they were usually in regards to how is considered to be inherent to the president. Right. This is not Congress tells you to do a thing under Congress's power. You're the kind of embodiment of that. You're the conduit for that. It's not that. It's the stuff that is, is, is sort of inherent to the president's power.

00:07:24:20 - 00:07:35:19
Rohan Grey
By the time we get to the 20th century, it's starting to expand. The imperial presidency is expanding pretty much ever since Lincoln, certainly Woodrow Wilson with World War One, right. Big World war. We need a president to manage this stuff,

00:07:36:05 - 00:07:42:23
Rohan Grey
just like we have the debt ceiling starting to make it easier to do debt management. We at the same time have the president taking over the budget

00:07:43:11 - 00:07:44:13
Rohan Grey
eventually gets to Nixon.

00:07:44:13 - 00:07:58:18
Rohan Grey
And of course, Nixon just gloves off. Fuck it. Who cares? And so Nixon says, I'm going to use this power of impoundment to to cut off funding to black communities. Community development grants, things like that, highway development going to certain neighborhoods.

00:07:58:18 - 00:08:01:16
Rohan Grey
And I'm going to justify this on the grounds that we don't really have too much money.

00:08:01:19 - 00:08:15:07
Rohan Grey
We're running out, which was a lie. But also just I'm the president. I can do what I want right when the president does. It's not a law. It's not violating the law. Congress threw the book at him. The Supreme Court threw the book at him. Right. The famous case called train in 1975.

00:08:15:07 - 00:08:21:01
Rohan Grey
And then Congress in 1974 passed the Anti Impoundment Act and Impoundment Monetary Control Act.

00:08:21:01 - 00:08:25:14
Rohan Grey
And that essentially said, no, sorry, president. When we tell you to do it, you got to do it

00:08:25:14 - 00:08:43:21
Rohan Grey
And the Supreme Court reaffirmed case law going back to the 1830s. They've been saying this for a while. They reaffirmed a sort of version of it again, in the late 90s under Bill Clinton, this time because they, actually, Congress passes a law this isn't Clinton unilaterally doing it, but Congress passes a law saying the president can do a line item veto.

00:08:43:23 - 00:08:47:21
Rohan Grey
So if you don't like something in the budget, you can cut out the pieces you don't like and sign the rest.

00:08:48:13 - 00:09:07:03
Rohan Grey
And and basically the Supreme Court says, no, that completely changes the character of the bill. And I think they're right about that. You know, if you've ever read catch 22, there's a bit where the main characters in hospital and he's censoring letters because he's so bored, they give him a job while he's recovering as a former Army pilot and eventually gets so bored just sends his every word.

00:09:07:03 - 00:09:25:21
Rohan Grey
You know, dear, dear Janet, I yearn for you. Tragically, that's the entire letter. You know, at a certain point, you can you can cut out so many parts of a thing that it completely changes what you're saying. So Supreme Court said no. When Congress gives you a bill, you can thumbs up or thumbs down, but you don't get to pick and choose because you're fundamentally changing the character of it.

00:09:25:22 - 00:09:48:18
Rohan Grey
Well, Trump has asserted that right all over again, right? He's asserted the right to ignore the line item veto even without a congressional bill. He's instead of the right to ignore the 1974 bill. He's asserted the right to ignore about 180 years of Supreme Court precedent. But to your question, what's different? I would say this is almost like the Stokely Carmichael line if you're racist and you got no power, I don't get he says, right, this is a black man.

00:09:48:18 - 00:10:05:15
Rohan Grey
And he said, but if you're racist and you got power now, I'm worried. Well, believing in empowerment and having no power to do it all right, believing in empowerment and finding the one magic button that lets you shut off all the money went from one seat in the government. Like you don't even need to leave your basement. You know,

00:10:06:04 - 00:10:08:22
Rohan Grey
that's a very, very different kind of power.

00:10:08:23 - 00:10:49:08
Rohan Grey
Up until now, if you wanted to impound funds at, say, the Department of Education, what would you do? You would go and talk to the education secretary, you and say, hey, I'd like you to commit an unconstitutional act for me. And the secretary is I don't know about that. You know, maybe you're right. But today, President Trump can just bypass that with his with his with his lackey, you know, Elon Musk running the department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge, aka rebranded US Digital Service, which was actually created by Obama to, like, digitize the government because, you know, where the internet president and we're, you know, doing our exit interview with wired magazine and kitesurfing with Richard

00:10:49:08 - 00:11:08:19
Rohan Grey
Branson and, you know, blah, blah, blah and MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito is out is my, you know, exit. Interviewer. So, so Obama sets up the internet government through the usds, and then Trump moves it from the Office of Management and Budget into the white House office, appoints Trump appoints Elon Musk as this sort of informal director.

00:11:08:19 - 00:11:24:09
Rohan Grey
There's this hilarious legal debate right now, whether it's actually the administrative written on paper, and she's just like Mia. Everybody in Congress, everyone in the news is saying, Elon Musk runs this and they go to court. They're like, well, no, no, no. He's just completely unrelated, you know? Sure. Okay. And Rupert Murdoch doesn't own all of the companies he owns.

00:11:24:09 - 00:11:45:09
Rohan Grey
He just hangs out in the board meetings. So, but anyway, to your question, empowerment, I would say today is, is I have the right to not spend what I don't want to spend. Regardless of what Congress says. But I also have a big magic button to do it all. And that big magic button is my prerogative as the commander in chief.

00:11:45:09 - 00:11:58:11
Rohan Grey
So it's this unholy alliance of unitary executive theory of the president as the sole face. I am the Senate. I am the law. You know I am the sword. Unitary executive theory plus impoundment.

00:11:59:03 - 00:12:03:04
Rohan Grey
Plus, like the nuclear football of money.

00:12:03:04 - 00:12:34:07
Bennett Tomlin
One of the things you kind of touch on in the paper. That feels a little bit related to this. Like the reason they wanted control of the Treasury Bureau of Fiscal Services is because it let them basically choke out every other part of government they wanted to. And one of the things that's interesting in your paper is you talk a little bit about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was set up to be independent and has a different funding structure, relying more and like a amount it can pull from the fed and its awards that, keeps it outside of those different processes.

00:12:34:09 - 00:12:44:09
Bennett Tomlin
And like part of the reason I'm highlighting this is because despite that fact that it was somewhat independently funded, I believe it was fed into a woodchipper.

00:12:45:20 - 00:13:00:19
Rohan Grey
It's still there. It's just all turned into stone. Like the characters in the outside of, like, the White Witch in Narnia. You know, you kind of walk in the front door and everybody's there in the middle of doing their office, but they're all petrified. Yeah. No, this is a good example. I mean, this is why you.

00:13:00:21 - 00:13:09:22
Rohan Grey
As I try to write the paper, you need to think of this as sort of three legs of the stool at every point in time. It's the law. It's the political economy, right? It's the money and it's the technology.

00:13:10:07 - 00:13:18:23
Rohan Grey
And so so the Cfpb was structured in a very interesting way, which is in and credit to Elizabeth Warren, I didn't appreciate this when I first read this about the CFPB.

00:13:18:23 - 00:13:22:18
Rohan Grey
Based on credit to her, I've been harsh when she deserves it. She deserves some praise on this one.

00:13:22:18 - 00:13:38:11
Rohan Grey
They designed it so that it was off budget, which means it doesn't have to be annually reappropriated. And it was, not going through the the Office of Management and Budget. So it has its own budgetary independence. It doesn't have to go to the president and ask to kind of get its monthly allocation.

00:13:38:11 - 00:13:43:06
Rohan Grey
It's almost like grandma leaves you an inheritance, but your parents were going to give you a hundred bucks a week. That's it. You know, we don't spend all,

00:13:43:19 - 00:13:48:13
Rohan Grey
you know, like, well, wait a second, which one of us got grandma's inheritance? Because it sounds like you're in charge of it, not me.

00:13:49:02 - 00:13:50:22
Rohan Grey
This is the Office of Management and Budget.

00:13:50:22 - 00:14:06:06
Rohan Grey
Congress passes a big spending bill. Office of management budget. Works out how much you get on a monthly allowance or whatever else. And it's supposed to be all very logistical. We just don't want you to run out of money too soon and then come to us. So we just trying to help you budget, but it's very, of course, micromanaging and subjective about how they do that.

00:14:06:06 - 00:14:29:08
Rohan Grey
So you've got kind of that layer and then you've got this coordinating all of the Treasury stuff. And, and, and if you kind of put those things together, you end up with this system where there's a lot of centralized bottlenecks. The Cfpb tries to avoid all of those. It gives you complete independence. And not only that, the other thing, the Treasury is often required to do is essentially do debt laundering.

00:14:29:13 - 00:14:47:03
Rohan Grey
So it's this other obscure part of the Treasury we don't talk about, along with the Bureau of Fiscal Service called the Federal Financing Bank. But the idea is, I think of it almost like, you know, Jesus or the E pluribus unum and the American, you know, sort of motto out of many into one all the different agencies that have to issue their own debt.

00:14:47:05 - 00:14:57:03
Rohan Grey
It would be a goddamn nightmare for them all to be out there in the economy. All right. Department of education, debt Department, defense that, you know, whatever else. Let's just all launder it through the Treasury, right?

00:14:57:18 - 00:15:04:17
Rohan Grey
I'm the way, the truth and the lives. Nothing comes out to the bond markets except through me. And now we have one clean, beautiful Treasury bond.

00:15:04:19 - 00:15:25:20
Rohan Grey
Right. And so the Federal Financing Bank is laundering all of that. That puts the Treasury in a position to screw with other agencies. Right. It's another choke point that the Treasury can not let you get your money out. And Mnunchin did this back in 2019 with the post office. So Mnunchin said, I'm not going to let you issue debt that Congress told you you can issue unless you pre fund your pension out until the year 2600.

00:15:25:20 - 00:15:32:07
Rohan Grey
You know, basically until we're in season four of Star Trek The Next Generation, I need to know that you can cover your Postal service employees. Right.

00:15:32:07 - 00:15:33:11
Cas Piancey
that didn't work, though.

00:15:33:11 - 00:15:45:11
Rohan Grey
he eventually gave up with pressure. But what he learned is this is this is a good strategy. I just chose the wrong part of the Treasury. Right. I just needed Elon Musk to come in and hack the accounts with the with a ridiculous PR campaign.

00:15:45:11 - 00:15:49:23
Bennett Tomlin
Well. And Russ Vought we shouldn't let him get off without. He had been planning this to.

00:15:50:02 - 00:16:08:19
Rohan Grey
Russ Vought is the architect of the the anti Empowerment campaign. He's the head of the OMB. And like with what's his name in the first, first administration, they appointed him head of the Cfpb at the same time as head of OMB. I'm forgetting his name, but he was a former legislator. Anyway, I'll it'll come to me.

00:16:08:21 - 00:16:12:08
Rohan Grey
So anyway, the Cfpb, it's one big problem

00:16:12:08 - 00:16:27:22
Rohan Grey
is that it's technically on the money side is that it's still attached to the fed, so it gets its money directly from the fed. That's about as good as you can hope for. There's no government debt involved. There's no borrowing for my grandchildren. It doesn't need to get it from taxes or revenue or even fines if it says it needs a certain amount.

00:16:27:22 - 00:16:31:14
Rohan Grey
The fed just basically has to give it to them. And the fed doesn't have discretion over that.

00:16:31:14 - 00:16:57:16
Rohan Grey
But to your point, originally it was designed so that the head of the Cfpb was a single director who could not be removed, except for course. And the Supreme Court a couple of years ago said, no, that's unconstitutional. The president needs to be able to fire at will everybody in the executive branch, otherwise, he can't do his job as the chief executive.

00:16:57:18 - 00:17:16:20
Rohan Grey
And they didn't go all the way to saying everybody at that point. They they only invalidated the Cfpb on its own terms. And the version of an agency that's still potentially legal is one that has multiple members rather than one single head. So if you're in a commission where it's sort of three two, you know, it's the case, it's the FTC,

00:17:17:05 - 00:17:18:22
Rohan Grey
it's the SEC.

00:17:19:00 - 00:17:40:06
Rohan Grey
They said that that might still be allowed. And to be clear, the current Supreme Court doesn't like that either. They're probably about to get rid of it. That that was all goes all the way back to a case in the 30s about the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission called Humphrey's executor. So so I think Humphrey’s executor’s probably fucked, frankly, but before that, the Cfpb was fucked along the way.

00:17:40:08 - 00:17:49:03
Rohan Grey
So the fact that its funding structure is good doesn't mean that it's actually independent, because you can just put your own lackey in the top and tell them to turn off all the budget.

00:17:49:22 - 00:18:07:01
Rohan Grey
But the fact that you can design the budget to be that independent is a model for other agencies. And in fact, Trump tried to fire the head of the National Relations, National Relations, Labor Board and the Supreme Court in at least a preliminary ruling said no, reinstate them while this case goes all the way through.

00:18:07:03 - 00:18:11:13
Rohan Grey
So they haven't been been willing to let him completely fire everybody yet.

00:18:11:13 - 00:18:22:19
Bennett Tomlin
talked a little bit there about the problems with the current set up of the Treasury Bureau of Fiscal Services. Can you outline at a high level the new digital fiscal regime that you laid out in your paper?

00:18:22:19 - 00:18:26:12
Rohan Grey
As I said, if you think about it as three level says, the legal authority to spend,

00:18:26:22 - 00:18:35:23
Rohan Grey
there's the actual directive to spend and then there's the processing of the account layer, right. That that corresponds to OMB Treasury and said today,

00:18:36:09 - 00:18:37:20
Rohan Grey
my big argument is

00:18:38:04 - 00:18:44:12
Rohan Grey
we need to basically internalize as much of that as possible inside the legislative branch.

00:18:44:14 - 00:19:06:00
Rohan Grey
So part of this can be through Congress, through its own legislation, partially it can be through congressional committees and staffer offices and things that kind of negotiate with the executive branch on an ongoing basis. And partially it could be independent agencies within the legislative branch. So the classic ones there are the Government Accountability Office that used to be called the government Accounting Office

00:19:06:11 - 00:19:11:23
Rohan Grey
and the Congressional Budget Office, which I usually hate, but we could repurpose it to be doing something useful with its life.

00:19:12:00 - 00:19:14:08
Rohan Grey
Certainly wouldn't be hard to be more useful than a complex.

00:19:15:00 - 00:19:34:22
Rohan Grey
So anyway, my pitch for a digital fiscal regime is, three pieces of technology sort of accompanying those three things that I just mentioned. One is what I'm calling the, digital fiscal record. The and the idea of the fiscal record is basically it's it's the congressional record of all the laws passed, but it's digital.

00:19:35:00 - 00:19:59:02
Rohan Grey
So they are software, which means you can bake in automatically executing laws, laws that expire after a certain point, laws that are, conditional on an external fact and that fact can point to a third party trusted source that says, hey, if inflation gets above a certain point, do X, or if unemployment gets above a certain amount, do Y or whatever it is, and that statistics could be essentially baked into the law.

00:19:59:02 - 00:20:05:05
Rohan Grey
Then the second layer I'm calling Congress's Treasury ATM. And the idea here is

00:20:05:18 - 00:20:23:09
Rohan Grey
what you do is you take internally the authority from the law, the Congress passes a law, you take that authority and you basically get it in the form of credit, a line of credit. And I'm using the metaphor of a credit card, although it probably wouldn't be a physical credit card, it'd be basically a set of permissions.

00:20:23:11 - 00:20:28:22
Rohan Grey
And you access this ATM and if you have the right permissions, you can get digital dollars in your local account.

00:20:29:16 - 00:20:43:10
Rohan Grey
So the thing that you go to the ATM with from the statute is not money. It's like internally within the government, it's basically almost like an IOU or a credit. So I'm calling it a public credit card. It's the full faith and credit to the United States that Congress gets to issue.

00:20:44:04 - 00:20:50:08
Rohan Grey
I'm an executive agency. I say, hey, here's a bill that says I am allowed to spend $100 billion over ten years.

00:20:50:20 - 00:20:59:15
Rohan Grey
I go to Congress. Congress says, when we wrote that, what we meant was 10 billion a year. Cool. Here's your credit card. It will work up to $10 billion a year.

00:20:59:15 - 00:21:01:20
Rohan Grey
You could do it. And this is a really key point.

00:21:01:20 - 00:21:21:16
Rohan Grey
You could do this qualitatively, not just quantitatively. You don't have to give them a number. We're so used to thinking of numbers like there's a certain kind of personal lives in the world of black. I'm excited all the time. Congress lives in the world of black Amex. So you could you could fund agencies on an as needed basis and just tell them as much money as they need they can get.

00:21:21:18 - 00:21:39:06
Rohan Grey
The Cfpb is told that it can get as much money as it needs. And last I checked, they don't have, you know, they don't have luxury resorts in the Caribbean. They actually saved, I think, $600 million that they there. And they've put it in a savings account for a rainy day. The Congress that the Trump is about to drain,

00:21:40:02 - 00:21:42:06
Rohan Grey
for their own independence basically.

00:21:42:08 - 00:21:51:14
Rohan Grey
But essentially he there's a lot of agencies that operate on an as needed basis. The fed doesn't run out of money. You know, if the Fed's not spending, it's because it's exercising its own discipline.

00:21:51:14 - 00:22:04:03
Rohan Grey
So you get you have this ledger, you pass the laws on the ledger. The ledger says these agencies are allowed to spend, the agency goes to Congress or it's or it's representatives and says, can you turn this into practical spending power?

00:22:04:09 - 00:22:06:08
Rohan Grey
They say, yes, he's your credit card.

00:22:06:23 - 00:22:19:01
Rohan Grey
You take the credit card to the ATM and you get digital cash. Why do I why do I split it up like that? A couple of reasons. One is I want to split up the act of determining how much you can spend from the act of approving the withdrawal.

00:22:20:01 - 00:22:21:16
Rohan Grey
The first one is an adjudication.

00:22:21:16 - 00:22:47:05
Rohan Grey
The first one is an interpretation of the existing law. The second one is is basically rubber stamping. You're doing something. It's a different, different authority. And and importantly with that digital, atm, every individual agency has their own wallet server locally. So you can think about this like we talked about with ECASH where you need to have a device in your pocket to store your cash.

00:22:47:05 - 00:23:10:21
Rohan Grey
As a consumer, this is the institutional version of that. But it's not banks and and investment funds. It's internally within government. Why is it important for every government agency to have their own money locally in the equivalent of a safe, not at the fed, because it means that if Trump takes over the fed, which is looking increasingly likely at some point, then these agencies could still theoretically have a direct link to Congress's money power.

00:23:10:21 - 00:23:14:23
Cas Piancey
Wasn't there an example recently of, in New York?

00:23:14:23 - 00:23:31:01
Rohan Grey
Yes. So I'll talk about that in a second. That's about the tax side. I've been talking about the spending side, but this is just as important for protecting your money on the tax side, because if you could delete dollars out of existence, you can you can take anybody's money at any point in time. So the last the last piece of the technology.

00:23:31:01 - 00:23:42:13
Rohan Grey
So step one is the digital record. Step two is the ATM. Step three is what I'm calling the Federated Central Ledger. And the idea is that Congress has a master spreadsheet of all the government spending that's been done in its name.

00:23:43:06 - 00:23:50:04
Rohan Grey
And every agency has its own accounting spreadsheet, right? Separate from its wallet. It's what holds its money, but it has its own separate accounts.

00:23:50:04 - 00:24:07:00
Rohan Grey
And those accounts essentially sync up to the government's main accounting spreadsheet. So this is almost like a sort of semi blockchain, semi distributed ledger. I'm not going to say we're not putting Congress on the blockchain, but but but Congress is sort of the one who keeps the master record of everything. And everybody else just gets a little picks.

00:24:07:00 - 00:24:17:13
Rohan Grey
Right. Someone's like, oh, it's it's got a tail. And someone else is like, oh, it's got hooves. And someone else is like, oh, it's got tusks. It's an elephant. It's just the Congress is the only one that can see the whole Alison.

00:24:17:15 - 00:24:17:21
Speaker 2
Right.

00:24:17:21 - 00:24:51:10
Rohan Grey
It's keeping the copy of all of the individual agency's ledgers as a master ledger. And each individual agency just keeps its own pace locally. So it's not a distributed ledger, because that's one common thing. It's a federated ledger. It's just that the central hub has access to every everything else. So to go to your other question, why this is in part important is so that is, if the president is now a hostile agent within the government, that Congress can still have a direct fiscal conduit, a direct fiscal channel to each sub agency within the government, right?

00:24:51:10 - 00:25:12:18
Rohan Grey
It's the this unitary executive, and what they did in, in, in New York is they decided to punish New York state government that they said that they'd accidentally gave them some money they didn't deserve, and they just debited $80 million out of their bank account. They took it out of the bank, the Citibank, I think it was Citibank that the state of New York banks with.

00:25:12:20 - 00:25:32:08
Rohan Grey
They took it out of Citibank's reserve account of the fed and told Citibank to take it out of the cities of the states account. So we are at the point now where you can basically be unilaterally taxed as a penalty and your money is not safe. So putting this stuff in a in a wallet that's safe in the agency means that the president can't can't delete it all.

00:25:32:13 - 00:25:50:13
Rohan Grey
And if we are really at a level where I think we're getting pretty close to in terms of 11 minutes to midnight for the breakdown of the constitutional fabric of this country, we might really need to be talking about what it means to like, keep up a financing regime. So like the part of the government that isn't going with the Trump side of things when it goes that way.

00:25:50:13 - 00:26:08:03
Cas Piancey
We can get more into the weeds of this stuff, here in a second, but I feel like it's worth talking to you about this. And this is maybe more philosophical than, like, detailed law. But one of the things when Bennett and I were talking yesterday about this, I, I was like,

00:26:08:03 - 00:26:11:04
Cas Piancey
I'm pretty worried about the future.

00:26:11:06 - 00:26:30:12
Cas Piancey
For instance, Federal Reserve independence. I'm pretty worried about the Treasury secretary doing whatever the fuck Donald Trump wants. Like, these are things that are I'm already like, well, like you just said, 11 minutes to midnight, like two minutes to midnight, right? Like, I feel like we're there. And I guess

00:26:30:12 - 00:26:34:16
Cas Piancey
part of what I said to Ben, it was, I kind of don't get it.

00:26:34:22 - 00:26:52:13
Cas Piancey
Like, he's doing this quite detailed paper where he's discussing fixing a lot of these problems that we now know absolutely exist. But you know as well as I do that this stuff takes a really long time to get,

00:26:52:16 - 00:27:07:16
Rohan Grey
Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get the super majority in Congress to pass a bill doing a task force and research all this stuff, and then the president will slowly implement it all, and then we'll go, oh, no, I've got no power anymore. I accidentally built the machinery of my own constraint. Yes.

00:27:07:16 - 00:27:23:06
Cas Piancey
And my I guess my worry here is that what Bennett responded to me and I want. Maybe this is exactly what your answer is. But what Bennett said to me was, I think this is Rohan preparing for cleaning up after the ashes have settled, and I is.

00:27:23:06 - 00:27:23:20
Cas Piancey
Do you think that's

00:27:23:20 - 00:27:45:18
Rohan Grey
Partially. Partially. It's that partially. There's a number of countries around the world that actually do have parliamentary systems and saying, hey, guys, watch out, right. Watch out. It's coming to you, too. If you want a parliamentary system and think about it right, think about it in the context of a place like Europe where they have proportional representation, where every parliamentary majority is a weird amalgam of three different parties.

00:27:45:23 - 00:27:49:06
Rohan Grey
Imagine being able to say to them, we're going to divide the fisc

00:27:49:16 - 00:28:04:23
Rohan Grey
so that you have a direct line to one third of the fisc or whatever it is. I mean, this is a very important way of, of of structural izing, you know, of, of, of materializing the legal divisions of power that we actually need to keep legitimacy of government working.

00:28:05:15 - 00:28:21:03
Rohan Grey
So, yes, partially. It's like, hey, you know how America went, imperial presidency, you're all kind of on the edge of that. If you want to have a thing called a parliamentary system with ministerial independence, because theoretically the Treasury Secretary supposed to be independent, right. Treasury Secretary is supposed to be able to say, I have my own independent, you know, the Constitution.

00:28:21:03 - 00:28:35:19
Rohan Grey
Yeah. Bennett's laughing. Right. Of course, he's looking at the idea of Treasury independence in this day and age. A fucking joke. The fed is supposed to be independent, right? The Fed's still doing that to a degree until it isn't right, until Humphrey's executive gets overturned. And I don't think the Supreme Courts kind of want to go after the fed.

00:28:35:19 - 00:28:38:16
Rohan Grey
So I'll be curious to see the jujitsu they do about that line,

00:28:39:04 - 00:28:59:16
Rohan Grey
at least initially. But but it also it also is, is to me actually a bit of a kind of wartime vision, which is to say, if if we're at the point of like, Confederacy money, you know, if we're at the point of like, which one of these agencies is going to go with which person, you know, whole world Congress says one thing.

00:28:59:16 - 00:29:09:00
Rohan Grey
And the problem, of course, is we don't have any other branches. Congress is on their side. The Supreme Court is on their side. Like who? Who is the legitimate branch calling out the other branch. At this point, nobody.

00:29:09:13 - 00:29:18:19
Rohan Grey
But if we do get to that point, if we do get to that point where it's just gloves off and somebody wants to say, hey, we're not gonna let this happen, then a vision of how digital money could work,

00:29:19:15 - 00:29:26:14
Rohan Grey
where you could essentially run a, a distributed wartime government, without needing I mean, think about it.

00:29:26:14 - 00:29:32:12
Rohan Grey
Also, from a resiliency point of view, you're in the middle of a civil war, and you've got one place where all the money goes through.

00:29:32:21 - 00:29:39:09
Rohan Grey
I mean, Congress in this situation has to be the place where the where the authority gets made. But that could be a football. You could be carrying that around with you. Right.

00:29:39:09 - 00:29:49:20
Rohan Grey
It could be on the run if you want, like actual locations, making money and sending it out to do economic organization during, during a serious root.

00:29:49:22 - 00:30:10:17
Rohan Grey
Then then you don't want that all going through one place because then you just bomb or occupy that place. So partially, this is a vision for a sort of democratically resilient institutional structure for the fisc. And that's just as relevant during the troubles as after the troubles. But we won't even know what it could look like until we start talking about it.

00:30:10:17 - 00:30:17:15
Rohan Grey
So this is a vision of like, hey, if we had this working today, we wouldn't have these problems. The best time to do this was yesterday. The next best time to do it is today.

00:30:17:15 - 00:30:28:21
Bennett Tomlin
Well, I can also imagine, depending on how things play out, if there are multiple governments claiming legitimacy, it is likely there will be multiple currencies trying

00:30:28:21 - 00:30:29:04
Speaker 2
Right.

00:30:29:04 - 00:30:37:20
Rohan Grey
Suddenly we might find ourselves needing to rebuild this stuff from scratch. Either way, because the pieces that are already in place are not actually under our control on the chessboard.

00:30:37:20 - 00:30:43:17
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Or just who took the. Just for the general. Someone flipped the chessboard upside down.

00:30:43:17 - 00:31:00:01
Rohan Grey
sitting there with a gun outside of cameras saying, I've decided to continue, you know, like these sweating on the camera, you know, and this movie sounds so extreme, except it's kind of not right. All of this sounded really crazy a month ago, and. And now everybody's gone. Pepe. So we're not just me.

00:31:00:01 - 00:31:04:02
Bennett Tomlin
Cas9 or across the Rubicon or whatever. There. We're.

00:31:04:02 - 00:31:04:19
Speaker 2
Crossing the Rubicon.

00:31:04:19 - 00:31:06:02
Rohan Grey
In the paper. Right. We crossed.

00:31:06:03 - 00:31:07:03
Speaker 2
The fiscal Rubicon.

00:31:07:03 - 00:31:11:22
Rohan Grey
A while ago. And, you know, even since I wrote the paper, he's been defying judicial orders.

00:31:11:22 - 00:31:25:01
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Which at the time when you initially wrote it, one of the lines is thus far, Trump has yet to openly refuse to obey a federal court order. And I was reading it yesterday as he was watching the, plane land in El Salvador.

00:31:25:01 - 00:31:25:19
Speaker 2
Yeah, I look.

00:31:25:21 - 00:31:46:13
Rohan Grey
I, I I I'm part of what I talk about in the paper is that if you're smart, you can use the technology of law and the technology of keeping accounting as the execution. So you're not the legislature is not taking over the executive responsibility. It's not actually making the money. It's not actually printing the paper. It's not actually making the payments, but it is keeping score.

00:31:46:15 - 00:32:04:15
Rohan Grey
And it's got the right to keep score constitutionally. Right. If you control the laws, if you can say, hey, I told you to spend $36, by that I meant this. You're not doing that. It's sort of like somebody keeping track of the, you know, the soccer World Cup in their basement and something the referee gives the other team is going like, I don't agree with that.

00:32:04:15 - 00:32:25:09
Rohan Grey
Here's the true score, but you're good. So now your score in the basement matters more than the FIFA, right? Like that's that's Congress. Congress isn't the one running the stadium, but it is the only one whose opinion constitutionally is, is legitimate about what spending has and hasn't been authorized by Congress and all. Which is to say, my magic sauce, my technological insight here is

00:32:26:03 - 00:32:35:17
Rohan Grey
if you do that with the technology of law itself, if you do that with the technology of accounting, just the act of passing the law is itself a form of programable software.

00:32:35:19 - 00:32:51:22
Rohan Grey
I don't have programable software in my paper, otherwise I would have made that an exploding sentence. I would have made it a self expiring sentence requiring renewal. Like you need to renew the appropriations authority every week. I would have had that sentence self delete unless I went back in and reauthorized it with a bit more juice every week.

00:32:51:22 - 00:32:55:17
Rohan Grey
But yes, I underestimated how quickly it would die.

00:32:55:17 - 00:32:58:14
Bennett Tomlin
I thought it was also interesting reading this paper.

00:32:58:14 - 00:33:00:11
Bennett Tomlin
And you allude to this in the paper?

00:33:00:11 - 00:33:08:04
Bennett Tomlin
Elon Musk and Mario nifL have announced their plan to put the Treasury on the blockchain. Is that different than this plan?

00:33:08:04 - 00:33:23:20
Rohan Grey
Well, I would say, I would say, I mean, first of all, it is different. I don't think you need a blockchain in general. And I think if you are trying to do the distributed stuff that I'm trying to do for resiliency, blockchain's the wrong solution for the same reason as I talked about with ECASH Right? It's the wrong solution for a digital dollar for consumers.

00:33:23:20 - 00:33:26:19
Rohan Grey
It's also the wrong solution for a digital dollar. Intergovernmental

00:33:27:06 - 00:33:40:20
Rohan Grey
or a digital dollar credit. But of course, what he means is that the executive gets to control it. So even if it is a blockchain, like, fuck it, fine, put on a blockchain. But let Congress control the blockchain, not you. And I don't think he's going to be as excited about that.

00:33:40:20 - 00:33:46:05
Rohan Grey
What he means is what he means is, you know, I want all of these payments to be visible.

00:33:46:13 - 00:33:49:17
Bennett Tomlin
He doesn't mean anything. Let's be honest. He means.

00:33:49:19 - 00:33:50:12
Bennett Tomlin
It.

00:33:50:14 - 00:33:57:06
Bennett Tomlin
He likes blockchain. He likes the people who like blockchains. Liking him. He doesn't even particularly like blockchains.

00:33:57:06 - 00:34:13:23
Rohan Grey
I think I think the best way to understand it metaphorically is what he's saying is attack government corruption through the tech layer. And that's what they've done. Trump sound his Trump found his his tech wizard. Right. He found his Ja'far. He found his magician and his magicians going doing magic shit with alchemy.

00:34:13:23 - 00:34:25:08
Bennett Tomlin
Could you talk a little bit about how the digital dollars that are part of kind of this new digital fiscal regime are similar to and different from CBDCs?

00:34:25:08 - 00:34:37:13
Rohan Grey
Yeah. So the first thing is they're not issued by the the central bank, right. When you try to understand what a central bank digital currency is, you leave feeling pretty confused and gaslit. And the only truth of it all is we don't know what it is. We don't know what it's going to do. We don't know how it's gonna be designed.

00:34:37:19 - 00:34:53:19
Rohan Grey
We do know it's going to be issued by the central bank. It's in the name. We spent four hours with the word central bank on the board. And what we discovered is that a central bank digital currency is in fact a digital currency issued by central banks. After furious debate. We have all come to consensus that that's what it is, and that's the only thing we can all agree on.

00:34:54:15 - 00:35:17:05
Rohan Grey
What that means is that from an accounting point of view, it is at once a legal obligation of the federal government and of the fed. You know, if you're one of these fed, it's private guys. The case to read is US v. Wells Fargo from 2019 to the Second circuit where they said that the emergency funds at the Federal Reserve went out to bail out banks, even though it never came from a, quote unquote taxpayer or from the Treasury.

00:35:17:07 - 00:35:30:00
Rohan Grey
It counts as public money, counts as money from the constitutional treasury, the theoretical treasury up in the sky, the Treasury in our hearts. Right. Anyway, there's two people. That's Jesus's church anyway. There's someone moving public money around. That's the treasury.

00:35:30:00 - 00:35:42:00
Rohan Grey
so that's the kind of that's the kind of general, idea is that this digital dollar would be a generic liability of the government, a monetary obligation, full faith and credit, backed by the full faith and credit.

00:35:42:00 - 00:35:46:16
Rohan Grey
It's legal tender. So you can use it to pay any public or private debt at its face value.

00:35:47:08 - 00:35:52:17
Rohan Grey
I could could pay interest or not, depending on how they want to design it. Maybe different parts of it will pay interest. Different parts weren't,

00:35:52:17 - 00:36:07:22
Rohan Grey
and every agency, if it gets its authority from Congress, from a spending statute, from an appropriation bill, can get its credit card, which is to say it's a set of permissions, and it goes to the ATM and it can withdraw that money on its local, wallet or its local device.

00:36:07:22 - 00:36:10:12
Rohan Grey
I'm calling a purse just to keep with the coinage metaphor.

00:36:10:21 - 00:36:25:11
Rohan Grey
Once it's stored locally, it's offline. It's peer to peer. It's the same as ECASH. You can send it to another device like that, or you could even deposit at the fed, or you could put it in a check, or you could send it to someone cash local device, wallet or whatever else.

00:36:26:09 - 00:36:33:17
Rohan Grey
And it would be monetary, right? It would not be debt as we understand it in a public sense. So there's no borrowing for my grandkids and all that bullshit.

00:36:34:14 - 00:36:42:23
Rohan Grey
And the authority comes directly from Congress, right? It's that signature, you know, from Congress. It's that appropriation bill that matters first and foremost.

00:36:42:23 - 00:36:48:03
Rohan Grey
And then every individual agency would essentially have their their, like, piece of it, a fragmented fisc, right?

00:36:48:04 - 00:36:49:05
Rohan Grey
A distributed system.

00:36:49:17 - 00:37:04:09
Rohan Grey
The other part of it, which I will expand out in the later paper, is not really the point right now, although it was part of the point of my original paper when I wrote this three years ago and kind of predicted to a degree what just happened. And again, I don't know whether it's better to be able to see the future and never be able to change it or not.

00:37:04:09 - 00:37:07:23
Rohan Grey
You know, going insane like Cassandra from, from, from the Greek mythology. But,

00:37:07:23 - 00:37:17:18
Rohan Grey
the other part that I talk about here is how do you make sure you don't suck with monetary policy, right? How do you not miss a central bank? Independence? Like I got my thoughts about central bank independence. This is not the day. This is not the moment.

00:37:17:18 - 00:37:20:16
Rohan Grey
I'm not trying to litigate every single fight in my life at the moment.

00:37:21:13 - 00:37:33:22
Rohan Grey
But the way that I did that, or the metaphor that I've used for this, is, and again, I'm trying to use constitutional terms and let's make them literal. So, as I said, withdrawing money from the ATM, we're coining digital coins, right? We are doing these things.

00:37:33:22 - 00:37:53:10
Rohan Grey
is that the fed would be authorized to essentially take over responsibility for issuing all forms of government debt, which is basically how it does monetary policy today. It buys and sells government securities, treasury securities and mortgage backed securities. But it has to wait for someone else to issue them. It's sort of like gambling with someone else's chips that they manufacture.

00:37:53:10 - 00:38:10:19
Rohan Grey
It's like, why don't you make them yourself? Oh, well, I couldn't do that. You can. Other central banks have talked about issuing central bank debt. About 40% of central banks a little do issue central bank debt in various forms, usually in places where the Treasury doesn't issue enough of its own to help the bond markets like they want the investment asset.

00:38:10:19 - 00:38:29:09
Rohan Grey
So the idea is, if you're regular money that you and I are spending is digital gold, make that digital silver. So they have their own separate parallel form of set of digital instruments. And that allows the fed to do its own monetary policy if it wants interest rates to be positive, if it wants a savings instrument, if it wants to have financial markets have an asset,

00:38:30:04 - 00:38:37:13
Rohan Grey
everything the Treasury markets do today, just put it under the fed and keep it out of the, out of, the government spending process.

00:38:38:07 - 00:38:56:02
Rohan Grey
So that's the idea is that you would have all of this go into coins, and they would be the kind of retail coins that you and I use. And then there would be this sort of highbrow whole, like wholesale institutional coins that would be more like government debt that the people would use for savings and investment and whatever else.

00:38:56:02 - 00:38:56:19
Cas Piancey
Don't you think,

00:38:56:19 - 00:39:21:10
Cas Piancey
a lot of people I know, a lot of our listeners, whether we agree with them or not. I know that a lot of our listeners would be surprised by the idea that you're having, like, your concept of future good monetary governance is federating it more decenter like essentially trying to make

00:39:21:10 - 00:39:28:21
Rohan Grey
it's centralizing it around Congress. It's centralizing the decision making, and it's decentralizing the execution.

00:39:28:21 - 00:39:36:03
Cas Piancey
Right. But then we're also talking about giving the fed the ability to like like you said, the abilities they already have,

00:39:36:03 - 00:39:45:08
Rohan Grey
already has that power. It just has it poorly. It just has it badly. It's like someone's already asking you to drive your kids to school. It's just that the car stuck in first gear. Weird.

00:39:45:08 - 00:39:49:10
Cas Piancey
right. And now it's being threatened. Right. Like I, I guess

00:39:49:10 - 00:39:56:10
Cas Piancey
A lot of our listeners say stuff like, oh, the, the fed controls the fed controls the world, whatever. Like whatever.

00:39:56:15 - 00:40:03:13
Bennett Tomlin
Not a lot of our listeners like three loud listeners and YouTube comments. Most of our listeners are not saying.

00:40:03:14 - 00:40:19:00
Rohan Grey
They could barely control inflation. I wish it had more control over the shit that it claims to control. It knows how to throw workers out of work eventually. You know, in the sense that if I like if I turn the temperature up in my house, eventually I'll kill all the plants. But like, that doesn't mean I know how to garden.

00:40:19:01 - 00:40:25:17
Rohan Grey
Like, I just know how to nuke things. You know, it can nuke the labor market. I haven't seen it actually deal with inflation directly. Very well.

00:40:25:17 - 00:40:29:19
Bennett Tomlin
The fed regional banks are mediocre at even agreeing with their other regional banks.

00:40:29:19 - 00:40:44:14
Rohan Grey
Yeah, and the thing is, the fed regional banks don't exist anymore in a legal sense. You know, they exist in a very boring practical sense. But like it's it's the it's the board of governors in DC that runs the show and they're a bunch of bureaucrats like, I wish it was this conspiracy theory about bankers running the world.

00:40:44:16 - 00:40:55:10
Rohan Grey
It's it's somewhat boring. It's Eichmann in Jerusalem. It's a bean counter with a statistics degree earning 200 grand and going home at 3 p.m. on a Friday. That's the that's the face of evil at the fed.

00:40:55:10 - 00:41:05:12
Cas Piancey
stepping away from the evil. The evil Federal Reserve here for, for a second. But my my my point here being that I think a lot of listeners, regardless of their thoughts on Federal Reserve conspiracies,

00:41:05:12 - 00:41:08:20
Rohan Grey
Yeah. The banality of the evil of the Federal Reserve. Yes.

00:41:08:20 - 00:41:22:15
Cas Piancey
Outside outside of that, I think a lot of our listeners probably think that there is a centralization problem or that, you know, they that they disagree with the way money is controlled.

00:41:22:17 - 00:41:44:09
Cas Piancey
The dollar is controlled. And, and I think it's just really interesting and stunning to see it. It's so fragile, actually, I guess is is what I'm what I'm coming to understand in these last few months, things that Benet and I were saying in November are coming true already. And, you know, that is not something you expect.

00:41:44:11 - 00:42:15:09
Cas Piancey
That has been the reserve currency of the entire world for this long. To fall apart that quickly. And yeah, I'm, I it's like, I assume that this is like you being influenced by current events. But, you know, you also said that, you know, you feel like Cassandra, and that you, you predicted this. So I, I guess I, I'm kind of wondering how your, how you're feeling and why you think it's important to take the monetary, the monetary governance system in this direction.

00:42:15:09 - 00:42:30:01
Rohan Grey
Yeah. I mean, I think, first of all, the, like, rumors of America's decline as a global imperial hegemon are always grossly overexaggerated, you know what I mean? Like, I think it's one thing to say the country's fucking itself up. It's another thing to say, like the minute that Rome starts fucking itself up, something else is going to take its place.

00:42:30:01 - 00:42:34:05
Rohan Grey
Like it takes a few hundred years. Sometimes it's, you know, not going to say it'll take that long in this day and age.

00:42:34:19 - 00:42:53:23
Rohan Grey
But like, there is going to be a while in which this is just a really shitty hegemonic dynamic because there's still nuclear bases all around the world. There's still the entire Western United Nations regime that's wrapped around American power, as if it was a tumor that you can't get rid of without killing the patient.

00:42:54:10 - 00:43:15:06
Rohan Grey
So I'm not convinced that there's going to be a reserve currency tomorrow, because the entire thing is built with America at the center. That doesn't mean they're not going to try, doesn't see it sapping in power. But, you know, I think probably my favorite TV show, sci fi show for sure at the moment is Foundation, because it's sort of the end of an empire, you know, based on the, based on the sci fi.

00:43:15:06 - 00:43:30:03
Rohan Grey
But I highly recommend if you haven't watched it. But, you know, the idea is a sort of Galactic Empire's collapsing and it's going to collapse in 500,000 years, and it's going to cause 30,000 years of darkness. And maybe we can slow it down a little bit. You know, maybe we can make it 8000 years of darkness. We're not gonna stop it collapsing the very bleak starting point.

00:43:30:03 - 00:43:32:21
Rohan Grey
But you end up having a sense of the scale of what you need to do to try to

00:43:33:14 - 00:43:36:19
Rohan Grey
arrest or lean into imperial decline.

00:43:37:07 - 00:43:44:22
Rohan Grey
So all that is to say, I'm not sure that America is going to die tomorrow. But when we think about it, you know, there is a centralization problem in a lot of different ways.

00:43:44:22 - 00:43:48:07
Rohan Grey
But I part of why those problems persist, in my opinion, is a

00:43:48:18 - 00:43:59:09
Rohan Grey
is that they obscure themselves, they hide themselves. And a lot of the time we end up thinking it's the central bank because we think of it as a place that makes money. Oh my gosh, of course that's the place to go. Why'd you rob the bank?

00:43:59:09 - 00:44:01:07
Rohan Grey
That's where the money is, you know, that's the joke.

00:44:01:17 - 00:44:19:07
Rohan Grey
But if you actually understand where that where the government works, its the budget. It's fiscal policy. First, monetary policy is like a laundering device. It's like taking. It's like, I don't know about you, but when I set up my, you know, my bank account or the credit union, they gave me a savings account first, and then I got a checking account.

00:44:19:07 - 00:44:23:00
Rohan Grey
Right. And you get multiple checking accounts if you want to be a one savings account per person.

00:44:23:00 - 00:44:39:14
Rohan Grey
The treasury debt is like the savings account. The checking account is a it's a more practically useful version of it. But all your money goes into that savings account first. And so if you're wanting to know how much money the government's created, how much of an impact it's having on the world, it's the budget, it's Congress,

00:44:40:02 - 00:44:42:05
Rohan Grey
and the fed comes later in the story.

00:44:42:05 - 00:45:04:10
Rohan Grey
And so what I'm trying to do is, is sort of be really clear where the power is, being really clear who's responsible. Part of the big problem, as you probably know, is this what they call the exorbitant privilege of the United States, where it's simultaneous, a domestic actor doing its own domestic shit like the rest of us, and simultaneously supposed to be this benevolent God sitting above us all, managing the global, you know, world.

00:45:04:10 - 00:45:30:16
Rohan Grey
On behalf of everybody, I just had a little scholar come to my school and give a talk about that kind of stuff about how they, you know, benevolent Kantians. And I'm like, last I checked, your Americans, not Kantians. And there's a pretty big difference in where you universalize your rules. Right. But this is the problem is, as long as this is all in some neutral, technocratic Federal Reserve, that ideal, you know, thinks of itself as part of some global class.

00:45:30:16 - 00:45:37:00
Rohan Grey
We have these problems. If it's Congress, and nobody's going to pretend that Congress gives a shit about the rest of the world. Have you met Congress? I met them

00:45:37:14 - 00:45:43:17
Rohan Grey
so so I think I think the the risk at this moment is that we focus on the wrong places.

00:45:44:08 - 00:45:45:19
Rohan Grey
We ignore the important stuff,

00:45:46:05 - 00:45:53:03
Rohan Grey
and we we miss these sort of huge, big red buttons that are able to be co-opted.

00:45:53:05 - 00:46:00:17
Rohan Grey
We spent how many years talking about CBDCs. Who the hell talked about the bureau, the Fiscal Service? Maybe

00:46:00:17 - 00:46:24:21
Bennett Tomlin
what you're highlighting there is kind of interesting to me. And you parallel this, I think, with debt ceilings in the paper where this boring thing, whether it's the Treasury Bureau, fiscal services or the debt ceiling that is meant to exist primarily for just logistical and managing the functions of government thing. Eventually one person like looks at the actual rules governing that thing and goes, oh, that's a gear.

00:46:24:22 - 00:46:27:15
Bennett Tomlin
If I pull that out, the whole thing stops working.

00:46:27:15 - 00:46:47:22
Rohan Grey
wait. Are you saying we can pass backwards in NFL? What if we just try passing backwards for an entire game and someone does that and, like, wins three games until we work out how to, like, block that whole. Right? Yeah, it's a totally. It's a hack, right? It's a hack in the most fundamental definitional sense. It's a creative repurposing of something to achieve a different ended increase your kind of control.

00:46:48:00 - 00:46:52:09
Rohan Grey
And I think one of the things that it's done is it's totally redrawn. The map of the administrative state,

00:46:53:00 - 00:47:13:17
Rohan Grey
the administrative state had had these thousand different individual islands and archipelagos and things. Now it's got three, three buttons. Now that's the administrative state. You just turn it off. You just as power goes, you know, if you've ever seen that Gary Lawson cartoon of like, electric chair operators night school, there's a person with a hand up in the teaches like no, stand down.

00:47:13:17 - 00:47:22:22
Rohan Grey
Then up again real fast isn't the right answer. You know. Does anyone else have the right answer? You know, something like that. How do I run a government? I just go in and press buttons. Oh, no. I broken the whole budget. You know.

00:47:22:22 - 00:47:36:05
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. And, like, part of the reason I found the paper so compelling is that I don't think there's an easy path back to September 2024 right

00:47:36:05 - 00:47:57:02
Rohan Grey
On, on. Politicize it. You can't, politicize it. Just like we politicize the filibuster. Just like we politicize judicial nominations. This is a escalation that keeps going until it breaks. And, you know, it is all very boring and very technical. Unless you know where to look, then you don't know, you know, I it's that Leonard Cohen song I love a lot.

00:47:57:02 - 00:48:14:15
Rohan Grey
They sentence us to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. Now we're coming. Coming to reward them, you know? And like, Elon Musk is the hacker guy, right? This is, as I said, this is Trump's magician. I don't know how all that stuff works. Everything is computer. Well, you've got a computer guy and that guy knows how to hack shit.

00:48:14:15 - 00:48:40:11
Rohan Grey
And what he did quite fairly is look at the government and say, I don't care what you tell me, the vulnerabilities are. I'm going to look at like an engineer and they're the vulnerabilities. And I'm like, those are exactly the engineering vulnerabilities. You know, you're a terrible person doing it for terrible reasons. But you you did identify a piece of this that everybody missed because they were just, you know, I try to get my colleagues to use element, a secure messaging service that is federate.

00:48:40:11 - 00:48:52:08
Rohan Grey
It's like signal but you can self host now wanted to talk about it for years. Well now everything's getting shut down. It's time to be now. Now a distributed federated system starting to sound a little bit more important, isn't it?

00:48:52:08 - 00:49:17:14
Bennett Tomlin
And I think what's also interesting is in re-engineering these technical things that can work more fundamentally, like longer and better than legislative solutions, because there's already an anti impounding act. We did that after Nixon. It's it's on the books. It exists. It hasn't been overturned by the Supreme Court yet. But with a sufficient, bad actor who's willing to grab the lever and say, no, this is my lever.

00:49:17:14 - 00:49:31:01
Bennett Tomlin
Now, the laws can be overturned. The technical infrastructure requires more of like you need physical people to go physically do things, and that's a different tenor of thing. And so that was another thing I appreciated when, reading through this paper.

00:49:31:01 - 00:49:50:05
Rohan Grey
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, somewhere in between the 939,000 words or something. I try to put a few memes in there to keep an attack palatable. And there was an onion headline, which I love, which was sort of, Trump asserts, little known. No one's going to stop me. Loophole to break the Constitution, you know. And the other one was the line from, from The Big Lebowski, you know.

00:49:50:05 - 00:50:04:04
Rohan Grey
Well, that's just your opinion, man. Like the courts can say, hey, you can't do that. And I don't know if you ever remember that bit from the now disgraced comedian Louis C.K., but he's talking about how he goes to the airport and he has to drop off his car and he's running late and he calls the car people. It's like it's in the car park outside the the terminal.

00:50:04:04 - 00:50:16:11
Rohan Grey
They're like, no, you got to deliver it to us. He's like, well, I'm on the plane, so what are you going to do about that? They're like, oh man. All right, we'll pick it up. And he's like, that's when I realized I could do anything I wanted because they needed to come on than I did. And I.

00:50:16:11 - 00:50:17:00
Speaker 2
Was like.

00:50:17:02 - 00:50:31:19
Rohan Grey
That's a terrible realization for you. Knowing who I know now, who you're going to become or who you are in the process of being. But that's what Trump set out, right? I can just do what I want and people have to stop me. And it's actually a lot of work to stop people doing things, especially with a system that's built to not make that very easy.

00:50:31:19 - 00:50:54:15
Rohan Grey
And so to your point, it's not I don't think technology is a substitute for law. Right? I don't think it's a substitute for collective political action. I'm not a techno socialist, but the technological architecture, the topology of the landscape matters, right? It matters whether you're on the top of a mountain and you're the Swiss defending everyone, attacking you, because for a reason the Swiss get to be neutral.

00:50:54:15 - 00:51:14:23
Rohan Grey
And it's not because they're amazingly great politicians. They're fucking goat herders. They just happen to live in the mountains, you know? It's a useful place to live if you're trying to avoid being attacked. So I think the, the, the technological regime shapes the power politics. It shapes the debate. While you're fighting at the courts, it matters who has control over the escrow account, right?

00:51:15:02 - 00:51:22:20
Rohan Grey
While you're fighting these things, it matters who gets first mover advantage, who gets to control the data in the meantime, etc., etc..

00:51:23:00 - 00:51:35:17
Bennett Tomlin
Reminds me of the likely apocryphal Andrew Jackson Jackson story. The court has made its ruling. Now, let's see it. Enforce it. Or the, Stalin. One castle. It. Yeah. The. How many divisions does the Pope have?

00:51:36:00 - 00:51:57:09
Rohan Grey
Yeah. How many divisions and type haves. That's his ruling. Let him enforce it. Yeah. And we saw this with the stitch in time. That saves nine in the 30s. If you have enough material support. The problem is now sitting in one seat with one button. It's an incredibly powerful move that by the time you challenge it you can do too much damage.

00:51:57:09 - 00:51:59:02
Rohan Grey
You know, you can stop.

00:51:59:04 - 00:52:01:01
Speaker 2
Basically, oxygen.

00:52:01:03 - 00:52:10:02
Rohan Grey
You know, I think I remember reading somewhere recently had terrify me again after I first read that we're sort of 96 hours away from a revolution in any country. If you start feeding

00:52:10:04 - 00:52:15:21
Cas Piancey
Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And if you shot. If you shot energy off or something like that for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:52:15:21 - 00:52:18:20
Rohan Grey
days of food production away from a crisis in. Exactly. Yeah. Energy as well.

00:52:19:08 - 00:52:23:19
Rohan Grey
But like the government, how many days can survive with its payment system shutdown?

00:52:23:22 - 00:52:24:13
Cas Piancey
Right.

00:52:24:13 - 00:52:33:06
Rohan Grey
How many? How many days can any agency launch any effective resistance to this imperial takeover? Once payment system shut down, you just you just you just zero out. Every agency.

00:52:33:06 - 00:52:55:18
Cas Piancey
That was the reason I, I particularly wanted to have you on to discuss this was because I think a lot of people, maybe not people who listen to the show, but but, but I think a lot of people who don't maybe even take in that much media at all don't understand that when you start messing with the monetary system, you I mean, that that's everything.

00:52:55:20 - 00:52:58:23
Cas Piancey
That is every thing else. And so when you start

00:52:58:23 - 00:52:59:08
Speaker 2
You can't.

00:52:59:08 - 00:53:02:12
Rohan Grey
Coordinate. You can't coordinate economy this complicated without it.

00:53:02:12 - 00:53:03:12
Cas Piancey
Right.

00:53:03:15 - 00:53:13:14
Rohan Grey
Even in World War two, even when all of the planners inside the Department of Defense. It's all. How much steel, how many planes? Like, even when they're thinking at that level, they're still paying people in money,

00:53:13:14 - 00:53:35:14
Cas Piancey
have to. Yeah, you have to. And so I like, I yeah, I, I thought it was really important to discuss this just because I think. Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of this that is intricate and a lot of it that is maybe tough to grapple with and understand, but like, it's unfortunately now our duty as citizens of America to have to familiarize ourselves

00:53:35:14 - 00:53:38:09
Rohan Grey
We're all sentenced to 20 years of boredom trying to change the

00:53:38:09 - 00:53:41:10
Cas Piancey
yeah, complex monetary policy,

00:53:41:10 - 00:53:45:09
Bennett Tomlin
probably 2 to 4 years, if not very much for the first.

00:53:45:09 - 00:54:00:15
Rohan Grey
did 20. So you only take six months. That's my test. But yeah, I mean, the other the other line I had in there, well there's two, two other funny means one is from this. One is from family Guy with the Blue Harvest episode about bad Star Wars where they're like, where to? He's Darth Vader, and he's like, we finally build the Death Star.

00:54:00:15 - 00:54:18:15
Rohan Grey
It's the most amazing yes or no problems. The guy's like, oh yeah, no, no, I'm he's like, I couldn't help but notice you. You hesitated him and he's like, oh, it's not a big deal. He's like, wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask about what that 1%, 0.1%. Oh well, it's just an esthetic choice really. But there's this one chute where if you put a missile down it, it controls up the whole thing.

00:54:18:15 - 00:54:18:20
Rohan Grey
He's like.

00:54:18:20 - 00:54:21:22
Speaker 2
Whoa, whoa, you know, really we can we get rid of that?

00:54:21:22 - 00:54:40:02
Rohan Grey
Oh, it looks so ugly, you know. Well, let's just do. He's like, well, we can do it tomorrow. If money's no object, we'll get estimates. Yes. Get estimates. Yes. Get estimates. Yeah. It's just like a perfect ending to the bit. But the other one is the bit from Rick and Morty where they like, where he, he takes over the galactic government and he's like, I'm going to blow up the game.

00:54:40:02 - 00:54:52:21
Rohan Grey
He's like, I've hacked into the mainframe. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to destroy all the bombs. You're gonna, you know, he's like, no, something better. I'm going to make the dollar. You know, the currency is one of its self-worth, zero of itself. And then everyone in the room is like, you can't do that. The empire is great.

00:54:52:21 - 00:55:10:14
Rohan Grey
Wait, who's paying me to say this? But I can tell you that for money, you know? And then they'll just start shooting each other and turn on themselves. But, like, it's amazing when you take that engine out and realizing how many pieces here, you know, this is Milton Friedman's great idea that everybody making a pencil doesn't give a shit about each other.

00:55:10:16 - 00:55:11:02
Rohan Grey
Well,

00:55:11:17 - 00:55:15:16
Rohan Grey
once the money stops working, everybody stops giving a shit about each other again in a.

00:55:15:16 - 00:55:33:00
Bennett Tomlin
I really appreciated the, line in there. The, If political independence requires budgetary independence and budgetary independence requires being able to actually spend money, then political independence is in turn, at least partly a function of payment system design. Like if we believe

00:55:33:03 - 00:55:36:17
Rohan Grey
That's my syllogism. Right? Tatted out on my ass on my gravestone, you know.

00:55:36:17 - 00:55:49:12
Bennett Tomlin
If we believe what's allegedly written in the Constitution, that it makes sense to hand these powers to Congress very explicitly, to function the way these things are supposed to function.

00:55:49:12 - 00:56:09:06
Rohan Grey
Yeah. And, you know, the thing is crazy is also, if you look at the Constitution, it mentions a bunch of stuff that you actually can't understand without reference to physical stuff. You know what is coining money? Well, you ask a kid in 20, 200, you know, unless we have a digital coin to metaphoricize, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

00:56:09:08 - 00:56:28:13
Rohan Grey
What is drawing money from the Treasury? This is a physical process, right? Even if it's metaphorical, you know, it's. If you've ever seen Monty Python's Life of Brian, they're all standing at the back of the sermon on the Mount. What's he saying? Well, I think he's blessing all the cheesemakers. Cheesemakers? Well, it's a metaphor. Obviously. He means manufacturers of any dairy product.

00:56:28:14 - 00:56:48:19
Rohan Grey
You guys told me about 14. I realize he was talking about peacemakers and they just couldn't hear him properly. But like the Constitution specifically mentions physical acts borrowing on credit, you know, paying money, drawing down stuff. So there's always been this material infrastructure, that the Constitution relies on, that material destruction involves, it can change, but it's still there.

00:56:48:19 - 00:56:50:21
Rohan Grey
So I had a colleague who read the first thing and was like, you know,

00:56:51:12 - 00:57:07:20
Rohan Grey
he's showing the the kind of the material infrastructure necessary for constitutional imaginary myths. And I think that's the truth. To tell a myth, you still need to set it in a period. Right? There's a difference between Star Wars and Lord of the rings. So we've been telling the Lord of the rings story of the Constitution.

00:57:07:20 - 00:57:15:01
Rohan Grey
We need to tell Star Wars story in the Constitution. Or maybe, maybe, maybe I've made a gold play. Platinum, Star Trek or something. Yeah,

00:57:15:01 - 00:57:18:10
Bennett Tomlin
Rohan, are you excited for Trump to mint the trillion dollar coin?

00:57:18:22 - 00:57:36:08
Rohan Grey
Oh, man. You know God. Yeah, I think I've talked. Maybe I mentioned this last time I was on that. It's been a terrifyingly, accurate way of living, which is I've come to. I want to work out how to kind of, you know, get a good, get a good line of it. But like, the most maximally literarily hilarious and absurd timeline

00:57:36:21 - 00:57:45:00
Rohan Grey
is is usually the time when we end the like not all the time, but like it's it's the it's the electron kind of ring the the the most resonant.

00:57:45:00 - 00:57:59:16
Rohan Grey
You know, it's the, the lowest. If we can go fucking absurd if we can be like a series where you're like, that's a bit out there and someone's like, just wait the lapping up the public will love this. We'll go, we'll we'll go. Weeds season six. Like it's going to get weird like that. Usually is the right answer.

00:57:59:17 - 00:58:04:08
Rohan Grey
So if somebody said to me, yeah, Trump's going to mint the coin as a way to avoid the shutdown,

00:58:04:11 - 00:58:06:03
Bennett Tomlin
It's going to have his face on it, too.

00:58:06:03 - 00:58:07:02
Cas Piancey
Oh, of course it will.

00:58:07:02 - 00:58:14:07
Rohan Grey
is going to have his face. All right. You know what we're going to be talking about? We're gonna be talking about the legality of putting a living person on the coin. And I'm going to talk about the 1 trillion on the other side.

00:58:14:07 - 00:58:24:13
Rohan Grey
We were talk about his face. We had a great bit. It'd be a great bit. Put his face and musk face on two coins and then have everyone debate which one they like more. And before you notice, we mean $2 trillion coins.

00:58:24:13 - 00:58:27:17
Cas Piancey
and then you can bet on Poly Market which one they're going to pick.

00:58:27:19 - 00:58:39:23
Rohan Grey
Exactly right. And then you know what? Then? Then he can try to deposit it at the fed. And the fed can say no, and he will actually have a legitimate legal basis for getting mad at the fed. He'll say, hey, you don't have the right to say no. You're a

00:58:39:23 - 00:58:44:23
Cas Piancey
I'm glad I'm glad you're going crazy with this because I had to cope with this with the penny decision. When

00:58:44:23 - 00:58:52:01
Rohan Grey
Yeah, he can't see. And I had hear this one, this everybody he knows me. My photo online, it's all gone. It's completely pulled out now. Yeah.

00:58:52:01 - 00:59:05:23
Cas Piancey
the penny, I. But I love that I was my whole thing was like, we got to get rid of the penny and the nickel, and then he got rid of the penny and everyone's like, haha, I feel like you happy about this case. And I'm like, well, at least he at least he fucked the nickel part up, so he still looks like an asshole.

00:59:05:23 - 00:59:07:00
Cas Piancey
You know, I like.

00:59:07:00 - 00:59:24:18
Rohan Grey
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and frankly, at this point, like, watching him with all this stuff about going off to Canada and Greenland and stuff, you know, he said the other day it would look so nice on the map. And I'm like, I loves that for him, I love it. This is a man who's playing risk with the world and coloring in like a eight year old.

00:59:24:18 - 00:59:41:03
Rohan Grey
And it's like, I don't like have to draw this line. It should all be one color up here. And that's his thinking. So yeah. Could the coin work like when I, when I wrote my claim paper, I said part of the reason it's valuable is because you can tell the story to seven year olds. I just didn't think that it would be the president.

00:59:41:05 - 00:59:50:03
Rohan Grey
As as the seven year old in mind. But yeah, you find the most absurd story that's going to keep people eating popcorn and not turning back to HBO prestige drama.

00:59:50:15 - 00:59:55:22
Rohan Grey
That's probably the one. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not I'm not putting the meaning of the coin at 0%.

00:59:55:22 - 01:00:00:10
Rohan Grey
Of course, that would require the Democrats to have a backbone and actually resist on the on the shutdown.

01:00:00:10 - 01:00:04:14
Rohan Grey
So that's the actual major reason the Trump would mint the coin is because they wouldn't get an opportunity.

01:00:04:14 - 01:00:12:23
Bennett Tomlin
At least our listeners can go out and purchase the brand new platinum cascoin available at all. Your favorite coin dealers.

01:00:12:23 - 01:00:26:23
Rohan Grey
and when when Congress is is in hiding and running away like Estonia's digital government, you know, you know it. It's the anti pope living out in the, in the, in the, in up in Canada. You can you can tell them you've already pre funded the wall for them. They are.

01:00:27:02 - 01:00:33:02
Bennett Tomlin
Listen, at some point in the next year, some currency pretending to be a dollar, it's going to be 1 trillion to 1 cascoin.

01:00:33:02 - 01:00:51:05
Rohan Grey
This is this is partially why all this crypto technology is interesting because it is a lot harder to say hey we should build our own you know anti anti Trumpian government currency in live time if you don't even know how to build one. But we have the capacity to, to actually sort of bootstrap one relatively quickly now in a way

01:00:51:05 - 01:00:54:23
Cas Piancey
Not as fast as Trump can make another trump coin, though.

01:00:55:05 - 01:01:10:00
Rohan Grey
Not as not not as fast as you can just shut down every government agency. Yeah. I mean, this is always interesting to go back to where we started with this, the bureau, the fiscal service. The guy was a guy named David Le Brock. He was the most senior civil servant in the Treasury. He'd been there for 20 years plus.

01:01:10:00 - 01:01:24:00
Rohan Grey
Right. He was the guy with the keys to all this stuff. And when Trump came in with his Doge boys. Right. Peter Pan is lost, boys came in and said, give us the keys to the castle. He said, no. And I said, well, why not? He said, well, I've got, you know, legal obligations. I'm like, I can't do this.

01:01:24:00 - 01:01:41:07
Rohan Grey
And he said there'd be liability. And they and the response from the Doge team was, there'll be liability for you if you don't. And he resigned. And then he kind of did his little PR tour telling everyone how terrible they are. But the fact that there's one seat, there's one seat in that Treasury office, one guy with one set of passcodes, what does it say?

01:01:41:07 - 01:01:54:03
Rohan Grey
I mean, this is the desktop. This is the desktop with one chute going down the middle. Why the hell do we build a system where there was one signature that could stop 88% of all federal payments, and that guy is a bureaucrat. Terrifying.

01:01:54:03 - 01:02:00:06
Rohan Grey
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to chat, actually. Hopefully in a few more months we'll have to do a round two without having to let.

Crypto Critics' Corner

Episode 170 – Put Congress on the Blockchain (feat. Rohan Grey)

Put Congress on the Blockchain (Feat. Rohan Grey) – Crypto Critics' Corner

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Episode 170 – Put Congress on the Blockchain (feat. Rohan Grey)

Put Congress on the Blockchain (Feat. Rohan Grey) – Crypto Critics' Corner

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