[00:00:00] Luke: From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Maltz, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

[00:00:28] You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Sam Lyman, who is a DC policy wonk working at the intersection of technology and global affairs. Currently, he’s director of public policy at Riot Platforms. He’s also a contributor at Forbes reporting on crypto and policy.

[00:00:43] In this episode, we discussed ways that AI is reshaping the global political landscape, how the U S and its political leaders compare to other nations in AI policy and innovation, Bitcoin miners, misconceptions of their environmental impact and their role in the economically viable energy production, [00:01:00] why gold and Bitcoin need to be accumulated together and why he doesn’t think it makes sense to be against crypto.

[00:01:05] Now for this week’s episode of the brave technologist, Sam, welcome to the brave technologist. How are you doing? I’m great. How are you doing, Luke? Doing well. Doing well. I’ve been looking forward to this. We just kind of getting in more, a bit more on the policy side of things. I know we’ve, we’ve talked a little bit here and there on Twitter, so it’s always great to kind of put a face to a handle for sure.

[00:01:30] Give the audience kind of a sense of the work you’re currently doing and, and kind of what led you to doing it and, and why you see it as important, especially right now.

[00:01:38] Sam: Yeah, that sounds great. So Luke, again, great to be with you. I think we started following each other on Twitter about a year and a half ago.

[00:01:45] And yeah, from the get go, I can see, okay, Luke is active in the crypto and policy space, and it’s really cool to meet you kind of in person is in person as you can get in 2024. So, yeah, it’s great to be here where I’m at and [00:02:00] what I’m doing and how I got here. So I work for riot platforms, which is a leading Bitcoin mining company.

[00:02:05] So how I got here. I started my career as a. Speechwriter to Senator Hatch, Senator Hatch was the chair of the Senate finance committee and it exposed me to a lot of economic issues. So after I worked for him, I worked for a time at the U S chamber of commerce where all the while I was working on a lot of issues related to financial policy.

[00:02:25] So inevitably cryptocurrency came up as a topic. And so I started to dip my toes in that world. When I worked at a think tank called the Hatch Foundation thereafter, it was really during the bull run of 2020 and 2021 that I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole though, started to learn more about monetary policy, Austrian economics versus Keynesian economics.

[00:02:45] The technology behind blockchain and digital ledger technology. And that’s when I really realized that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency more broadly is a really powerful tool to disintermediate government from the [00:03:00] private sector. And that’s really kind of been a theme of my career. How can we restore more power to the individual?

[00:03:05] I think one of the biggest problems we’re facing as a country and really as a world today is that power has become. So centralized in the hands of a few people, whether that’s in government or even in tech itself. And the promise of cryptocurrency is that it returns power to the user. And I know that brave is a really good example of that.

[00:03:24] Gives users of the internet back the reins of their own data. So it’s not just sold off willy nilly to advertising companies. And you know, the bat token is always been a really interesting experiment to me that I’ve also watched in addition to Bitcoin. But, that’s all to say that’s always been the theme of my career.

[00:03:42] How can you restore more power to the individual and Bitcoin is an excellent avenue for doing that. So after I worked at a think tank, I. Began graduate research at Princeton university. I earned a master’s degree there in international relations and public policy, and one of the main focuses of my research was [00:04:00] how blockchain technology has an impact on international affairs.

[00:04:04] And so when I was at Princeton, I wrote a lot of research papers on that subject and then repurposed those research papers as op eds in the cryptocurrency industry, starting with an op ed about stable coins. In fortune magazine. And that led to an invitation from Forbes to begin writing about digital assets.

[00:04:21] And then my work at Forbes caught the attention of right platforms where I work today. And so I’m a public policy director at right platforms. My job essentially is to orange pill lawmakers. It’s meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill, legislators back in Austin, Texas, where we do a lot of our work as well to help them understand what Bitcoin is, what digital assets are.

[00:04:43] And the promise that they hold for our economy. And so that’s kind of the theme of my career is restoring power to the individual and Bitcoin for the current moment is a great way to do that.

[00:04:53] Luke: No, that’s great. And that’s one of the reasons why I was really looking forward to having you on Tuesday, because you know how it is in this space.

[00:04:59] A lot of people look [00:05:00] at the government as kind of like, or, or, representatives or senators as kind of like. This monolithic thing where very kind of us versus them almost, but you’ve worked on the other side of it where, you know, you’ve worked with the policymakers directly.

[00:05:11] And then you’ve also fallen into this rabbit hole of crypto and kind of from what you see, like, how well do these lawmakers respond to what cryptocurrency or Bitcoin is, or are you seeing it as like adversarial or does it, do they get it when you explain it to them? Yeah, I would say there’s a huge

[00:05:28] Sam: learning

[00:05:29] Luke: curve.

[00:05:30] People,

[00:05:31] Sam: even a lot of people who are pro digital assets don’t really understand what they are. They just recognize the electoral benefits to being pro crypto, right? For a lot of lawmakers, though, that learning curve is much easier to overcome depending on their age. So a lot of people like to say that crypto is partisan.

[00:05:49] And that’s, they can make a case that that, that might be the way crypto is, but I would argue that crypto is not partisan so much as it is generational. You notice that with a lot of [00:06:00] older generations, they don’t understand crypto initial assets and what you don’t understand, you often fear. And so reflexively, They take a negative approach, a hostile approach to digital asset regulation.

[00:06:11] By contrast, younger legislators, we’re talking millennials, a lot of Gen Xers as well, they are more or less technology native. A lot of them grew up with the internet, or at least became very accustomed to using it day in and day out. Throughout their careers. And so when they come across new technologies like cryptocurrency, it’s much easier for them to understand.

[00:06:31] You know, there’s a lot of senators in particular who don’t even use email. They just depend entirely on their staff. So that kind of gives you a sense of the generational divide that exists. With technology in Congress, but a lot of these younger senators and members of Congress, they get the Internet and by extension, they get cryptocurrency.

[00:06:50] So that’s one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s a generational thing more than anything else. And once they’ve done the work, it’s hard for them to oppose things like Bitcoin. I think [00:07:00] a really good example of this is representative Ro Khanna. He’s a Democratic congressman from California. He represents the Bay Area.

[00:07:07] And he is spearheaded the effort on the democratic side to embrace pro crypto strategies. And he’s pointed out that being against crypto, it’s like being against the iPhone or like being against the internet. It’s just a technology. It’s not something that you can really be against unless you have ulterior motives and you want to keep centralized power in the hands of government like Senator Elizabeth Warren does.

[00:07:31] So there’s really quite the spectrum, especially in the Democratic Party when it comes to being on the Warren wing or on the Representative Ro Khanna wing. It’s all a matter of, I would say, generation. And how you feel about centralized power versus decentralized power.

[00:07:45] Luke: Yeah. And even, folks like, Richie Torres too, like, right.

[00:07:48] who’s on the democratic side too, has been impactful on educating folks or Kerry Gensler in particular on, on, latest round of questioning. There’s a lot of things that float out there around, like operation choke point, these efforts that are getting [00:08:00] floated out there to kind of circumvent crypto adoption and things like that.

[00:08:03] Like from your point of view, what’s motivating a lot of this, like antagonistic I know it’s generational, like you say, right? But there’s also folks like that are in that older generation that are pretty pro crypto too. is it bigger special interests or, other things, or just an unknown, like not knowing it or understanding it, or what do you think is driving a lot of the hostility?

[00:08:22] Sam: I think a lot of the hostility is driven by big banks, or at least has been historically so politics makes odd bedfellows, there’s no better example than Senator Elizabeth Warren, making friends with the big banks we saw this in a hearing last December where she brought in Jamie Dimon. To testify about the dangers of cryptocurrency and money laundering.

[00:08:42] And she essentially set Jamie diamond up to go on a crypto rant. And that’s because a lot of big banks don’t like crypto because it’s a threat to their business model. Right. And so what is Senator Elizabeth Warren’s motivation though? I don’t think that she’s necessarily in the tank for big banks, [00:09:00] but she does recognize that the very existence of Bitcoin is a threat to what she wants.

[00:09:05] What she wants. Is a central bank digital currency or CBDC a CBDC is. A dystopian nightmare, a CBDC with centralized power in the hands of the federal government. And we’ve already seen what a CBDC looks like in China. So China, a couple of years ago, they unveiled their version of, of a CBDC. It’s called the ECNY.

[00:09:28] What they can do with this currency is essentially turn off and on people’s money and their access to money with the flip of a switch. They can also. Put restrictions around where they spend their money, and if their social credit score goes down, they can also tie that to their ability to spend money.

[00:09:45] So for a central planner, it’s a dream come true for a freedom minded individual. It’s an absolute nightmare, and I think that is what’s driving the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party is they want a CBDC and. A decentralized [00:10:00] cryptocurrency stands in complete opposition to that. So I think that is what’s driving a lot of the animus against crypto on the left.

[00:10:08] On the right, we’ve seen that the right is much more favorable towards the cryptocurrency industry, and I think. That’s because the very ethos of Bitcoin is this idea that private property matters, that people should be able to make their own decisions in regards to their finances and everything else.

[00:10:25] And Bitcoin is the very embodiment of that idea. So I think that’s why you see contrasts from the left and the right, but again, pro business, pro innovation lawmakers on the left, they understand that Bitcoin is here to stay. Other cryptocurrencies are here to stay. That’s why they take a favorable stance towards it.

[00:10:42] Luke: And that, that’s an interesting point too that you bring up towards the end, because I remember, you know, like back in 2018, right, like going to, I think it was Ethereum Denver hackathon, and it was, it was the early days, folding tables, and it wasn’t like how everything’s so glitzy now, but back then you had people handing out bumper stickers that said cryptocurrency is not a [00:11:00] crime.

[00:11:00] It was at a different stage then to where it is now. And you mentioned that, that it’s here to stay. I mean, I feel like the forces that have been against this are so huge that, and despite that, you know, it’s maintained resilience through, a lot of clear headedness and a lot of people just stating the obvious, right.

[00:11:15] Where do you see this going? The elections will matter, right? It’s not going to stop the blockchain. Looking at a longer view, do you think that this is something where we end up having to KYC people, or do you think it’s still kind of up in the air as far as like how humans will transact with this stuff at the bigger scale?

[00:11:32] Sam: I think it’s up in the air still, but overall I’m very bullish and optimistic about the future of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. That’s in large part because it’s become so accepted on Wall Street. So on Wall Street, we saw with the, the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, Wall Street has more or less capitulated to Bitcoin.

[00:11:51] Now we have Larry Fink who was beforehand against the industry is very much for Bitcoin. He has gone down the rabbit hole himself. He has been [00:12:00] orange pilled one media appearance at a time. And the fact that the private sector has accepted Bitcoin has real implications for where we’re headed next from a policy perspective, because these same banks that finance a lot of the campaigns for politicians, the fact that they’ve accepted Bitcoin means that policymakers themselves have to be partial to it as well.

[00:12:22] I think we saw this earlier this year, you saw that blue wall. That was keeping a lot of democratic lawmakers from being pro Bitcoin that started to crumble. And one of the major players behind that was Nancy Pelosi, who is arguably the best investor of all time. You don’t know how, but she has excellent stock advice.

[00:12:44] Who knows how that works. But anyways, it became very clear that once Nancy Pelosi, who is the purest distillation of the U S establishment came around to Bitcoin and crypto policy, that there would be very little blue opposition towards this industry going [00:13:00] forward. So for that reason alone, I’m very optimistic about the prospects of the industry.

[00:13:05] That being said, I think there, as you mentioned, Luke, there’s always that threat. That privacy will become a crime, which is an absurd proposition, given what we read in the Bill of Rights, given what, given the ideas that America was founded on, but there is a real push from some political actors to make privacy a crime and to make free speech a crime.

[00:13:25] I feel like those two things often run hand in hand with one another, but as long as we can defend against those bad actors, I’m very, very bullish on the future of the industry.

[00:13:35] Luke: I agree. I agree. And it does feel like it’s a lot of this is just kind of boiling down to kind of first and fourth amendment territory, which is now you’ve got all these legal, illegally goals interested in it, which is fantastic.

[00:13:46] I think, you know, it’s a good forcing function because it does seem like the cryptocurrency issue has become kind of a political football. And this is one of those weird things where it doesn’t really seem like it’s Necessarily because the industry wanted it more that it became a [00:14:00] political first thing and then and then it was sprung on people just to kind of circle back a little bit.

[00:14:04] I recently had Hester purse on from the SEC. She mentioned something that kind of really stuck with me after the interview. You know, I was asking her, Hey, like, how often are you all actually using the technology like at the agency aside from some small. You know, research group or whatever. And she brought up a great point.

[00:14:19] Like, Hey, we can’t even touch it. We can’t transact on it. We can’t do anything like really I’m looking at podcasts to learn more about this stuff. Do you see the same kinds of restrictions on policymakers that we see on the agencies that are supposed to be, you know, helping to enforce the regulations on this side, or is it a different kind of a situation from there and how much does that concern you that, you know, the regulators can’t really even transact on this network, right?

[00:14:46] Sam: Yeah, it’s really concerning. You see this oftentimes in Congress when you have men who are 80 years old who are expected to legislate on the future of internet privacy, and they themselves hardly use the internet at all. Not because anyone’s stopping them, they [00:15:00] just don’t, out of habit, right? And because of that, they come into the argument or into the debate uninformed about how this technology works.

[00:15:08] The issue is that oftentimes, regulators themselves, people who work in the executive branch especially, have real limits in place to what they can do with cryptocurrency. From my understanding, there’s a threshold they can’t own over a certain amount of cryptocurrency so that Really limits their exposure to the technology itself.

[00:15:26] And you can’t regulate something you don’t understand. And the only way to understand cryptocurrency is using it. So I think it would be hugely beneficial for policymakers if some of those thresholds were lifted. So people could actually use the technology they’re expected to regulate. It doesn’t make any sense.

[00:15:42] Otherwise.

[00:15:43] Luke: Yeah, totally kind of add to this a little bit. We’ve seen cryptocurrency kind of be this big innovative sector, right? And it’s kind of new to Washington. The other end the spectrum, we’ve seen this huge boom in AI innovation, right? Like over the past couple of years in parallel, like, do you see these things kind of [00:16:00] converging at all?

[00:16:00] Are you hearing policymakers think about them at all? Like, or what’s your take on the path of seeing AI and cryptocurrency kind of converging?

[00:16:09] Sam: Yeah, I think they run together and that’s because the base layer of both AI and Bitcoin, for example, is energy. So we know that if we want to lead an AI and Bitcoin, we’re going to have to scale exponentially our energy use over the next decade.

[00:16:27] And one of the best ways to guarantee energy generation is actually Bitcoin mining. So there’s this narrative out there, Bill Maher recently. Try to push this narrative that Bitcoin mining is terrible for the grid, that it sucks up all the energy and that it will doom us to energy poverty. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[00:16:46] In reality, Bitcoin miners use stranded energy. They use energy that nobody else wants. They also are a guaranteed customer for energy producers. Right. So a lot of times [00:17:00] energy companies will produce energy during hours of the day that nobody needs it. And that’s where Bitcoin miners come in. Bitcoin miners fix the problem of stranded energy.

[00:17:09] By always being there to soak up any excess energy that’s on the grid. So that’s critically important as we seek to boost our energy production over the next decade, because we know that to lead an AI, we’re going to have to essentially triple our energy production as a country and Bitcoin miners will be key to making that.

[00:17:29] Energy production economically viable because we’re a guaranteed customer for energy providers. So you’re seeing a lot of energy projects scaling up in Texas right now. And how do they have the economic model to do that? They do because Bitcoin miners are there coming in and saying, Hey, we guarantee that we will be your customer for the next X number of years.

[00:17:50] And so that allows. Energy projects to bootstrap themselves in a way that wasn’t possible before. And that will be critically important as we scale up energy [00:18:00] projects to also power the AI boom, because AI is going to take honestly, a lot more energy than Bitcoin will. And so those two things will run together, I believe, especially because they both require large amounts of energy.

[00:18:12] Luke: On a similar note, energy on the domestic side and energy is always kind of a foreign policy item too. With the U. S. national security establishment, what’s your take on their position around Bitcoin and crypto? Like, is it something that you think that they’re paying attention to or, not giving enough attention to?

[00:18:30] Sam: I would say they’re definitely not giving enough attention to it. They’re more or less asleep to the promise of Bitcoin. And stable coins in particular. So this is an analogy I like to use. Let’s talk about the wheel. The wheels, one of the most basic technologies that’s existed for millennia. Right.

[00:18:46] And so in the old world, the wheel was invented that gave, you know, Europe. A huge boost in advancing itself technologically so much so that when the conquistadors arrived in the new world, they had the benefits of the wheel. [00:19:00] Whereas. The new world, the Aztecs, for example, didn’t have the wheel. However, they found the wheel amongst Mesoamerican civilizations, but it was used in their toys, right?

[00:19:09] And they had little carts and little toys that had the wheel on them. What the ancient Mesoamericans didn’t realize is that the wheel was so much more than a toy, so much more than a play thing. It was a technology that could revolutionize trade. It could revolutionize transport. It could revolutionize the very way they live and go about the world.

[00:19:28] So there’s a real parallel there with blockchain technology. I believe, I think a lot of times people think that crypto is a play thing, right? President Trump gave a fantastic speech at Bitcoin Nashville, but at the end of his speech, I kind of chuckled because he said, have fun with your Bitcoin and crypto or whatever else you’re playing.

[00:19:47] Right. There’s this idea out there that crypto is something that, you know, whether it’s monkey JPEGs or other NFTs, it’s, it’s something, it’s a hobby. It’s a, a beanie baby as some people will argue, but no, no crypto [00:20:00] is so much more than a play thing. Crypto is a new financial rail that can revolutionize the way we project economic power.

[00:20:07] So let’s talk about two things in particular that the national security establishment is completely asleep to right now. Number one, the promise of Bitcoin. So. I am a strong advocate of creating a national Bitcoin stockpile or a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And this is an idea that President Trump himself has embraced and Senator Cynthia Lummis has championed for quite some time.

[00:20:28] And so there’s huge benefits to having a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Just ask Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor shows us the promise of a Bitcoin reserve on a corporate level, right? He took his company that was Middling in the early 2010s had kind of lost its way and now it’s one of the largest companies in the U.

[00:20:47] S. and the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. He’s completely changed the balance sheet. He’s returned massive investments to stockholders and he’s just completely transformed his [00:21:00] company by simply having a Bitcoin reserve. By the same token, countries can do the exact same thing by nearly accumulating Bitcoin.

[00:21:09] The long term trend of Bitcoin has always been up and to the right. And there’s really good reason to believe that that trend will continue up and to the right. Now the companies, or I should say the countries that are ahead of the curve on this trend will just advantage themselves in the future. And so that’s why I’m a strong advocate of the U.

[00:21:28] S. Not only holding on to the Bitcoin that we currently own, but even adding to those reserves because let’s say that Bitcoin were to achieve parity with gold, and we know Bitcoin is digital gold. Let’s say that it were one day to catch up to gold or even exceed gold. That’s a solid 10 or 12 X from its current value today.

[00:21:45] And so there’s huge benefits to be reaped there. You also have to think about Bitcoin as a competitor to gold. So gold itself is more or less the defacto BRICS currency right now. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, right? These are [00:22:00] these other countries. That aren’t necessarily the West, but they are competitors to the West competitors to the United States.

[00:22:06] And a lot of them are fleeing from the U S dollar right now, because the U S dollar has been weaponized on an international level with the invasion of Ukraine. So they’re fleeing the U S dollar. They’re flocking to gold. What’s one way that the United States could weaken that exodus to gold?

[00:22:24] It’s by introducing a new competitor, which is Bitcoin or digital gold, right? like to say that Blockbuster is to Netflix what gold is to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has the potential to take the gold business model, if you will, and completely digitize it and make it much more valuable than its analog counterpart.

[00:22:44] And I think the United States is dropping the ball. If we don’t start really getting serious about a Bitcoin strategic reserve to undercut attempts to weaken the U S dollar by flocking to gold. I think that gold and Bitcoin need to run together. We can’t. Just accumulate gold [00:23:00] at the expense of Bitcoin.

[00:23:01] Those two things should be accumulated together. So that’s just one aspect. Where I think the national security state is really sleeping on Bitcoin and digital assets.

[00:23:09] Luke: Yeah. Yeah. You said a second point too around stable coins. Maybe we could go into that a little bit more because I think I’ve heard Austin Campbell talking about this too.

[00:23:16] It’s really fascinating. Yeah.

[00:23:17] Sam: Yeah. Stable coins have a massive potential to Supercharged dollarization. So a lot of times people see crypto and think that’s a threat to the U. S. Dollar. Well, no, if used correctly, both bitcoin and stable coins can shore up the U. S. Dollar. So let’s talk about what that looks like.

[00:23:34] We know right now that there is flagging demand for U. S. Debt. One way to really boost that is by embracing stable coins wholeheartedly. So for context, the 18th largest Holder of us treasuries today are stable coin companies, and that number is only growing with every passing month. And so this presents a really good opportunity for us to increase us demand.

[00:23:59] Or increased [00:24:00] demand for us debt. At the same time, it gives us an opportunity to essentially allow other countries to opt into the U S dollar. If you live in a country that experiences hyperinflation, for example, Venezuela or Zimbabwe, or at times Turkey. Then you have a real incentive to get your paycheck and your native currency and immediately convert that into us dollar stable coins.

[00:24:24] So it creates this really interesting opportunity where if we want to expand the influence of us dollar stable coins. Is a really good way to do that. Now let’s talk about one other possibility. Vivek Ramaswamy has talked about eventually pegging the dollar to a basket of commodities that could include Bitcoin.

[00:24:41] And there’s growing support for that idea amongst certain policy circles here in DC. Now imagine what that could do for both the dollar and Bitcoin. If the dollar eventually is backed by something hard, Like you said, a basket of commodities that could include Bitcoin, then the US dollar itself becomes a proxy for Bitcoin and arguably [00:25:00] solves the scaling problems that Bitcoin faces as a network because people want exposure to the US dollar and the US dollar is backed by Bitcoin.

[00:25:08] They are by proxy getting exposure to Bitcoin itself, but it’s a lot easier to transmit stable coins as opposed to Bitcoin. While the scaling issues exist. So you could simultaneously save the U S dollar and solve the Bitcoin scaling problems at the same time.

[00:25:23] Luke: Yeah. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. No, it’s really awesome to hear too.

[00:25:27] Among tech circles, too, we’re kind of seeing this, trend around, you know, techno optimist, effective, accelerationist movement. How do you see that impacting politics? Because it does seem like, especially with AI, but also with crypto, you’ve got this weird narrative where it’s like, oh, AGI becomes a thing and then it’s like Terminator.

[00:25:47] So, you either are going to stop this thing, which really Can’t stop, or you know, we’re going to go on a race to a red light with what we’re trying to do here. Like, what’s your take on how that those movements are impacting [00:26:00] policymakers and politics over the next, you know, five, 10 years?

[00:26:03] Sam: Yeah, so we know that politics is downstream of culture and technology and the very existence of the techno optimist movement makes me very bullish on the future of politics itself because let’s look at the current state of American politics.

[00:26:17] It’s a sad state of affairs on both the left and the right. They’re weirdly mirror images of one another, especially in their pessimism. So on the left, you have this hugely pessimistic narrative that, you know, America is systemically racist, that the whole system just needs to be burned to the ground and that America is guilty of sins X, Y, Z, and it’s not worthy of its current status as a global superpower.

[00:26:43] And then on the right, you have another pessimistic narrative, which is the United States is going to hell in a hand basket. You know, our country is lost. The deep state has ruined everything. And there’s this. Tendency to black pill on both the right and the left. So insert in [00:27:00] the middle of this whole debate about the future of America, the techno optimist movement, the techno optimist movement says, Humans have infinite potential and power and no country harnesses that potential better than the United States of America.

[00:27:15] And if we can just get the policies and regulation right, we can do incredible things with the technology that we’re building right now. Whether that be, you know, building an AGI, whether it be scaling up cryptocurrencies, whether it be launching travel to the moon and to Mars and really exploring the stars.

[00:27:32] There’s just so much optimism in this movement. That is inherently American. America is an optimistic country that believes in the promise of technology. But it seems like both political parties have sort of forgotten that or they’ve abandoned the optimism that drives people to American politics in the first place.

[00:27:53] So my take is that the first party. That really embraces the techno optimist movement [00:28:00] can resurrect themselves in a way that will appeal to voters across the political spectrum right now. People just want to be optimistic again. They just want to believe in America. They want something to hope for. And I think Donald Trump intuits this.

[00:28:13] He said, in his RNC speech, be hopeful about America, be hopeful about the future. That’s also something that Elon Musk says pretty often. He encourages people to, to believe in humanity, which stands in stark contrast to what he calls the anti natalists, right? People who believe that, you know, the human beings are a cancer on this earth, that we are the sole cause of climate change.

[00:28:35] And it just, if you really imbibe that kind of messaging, it makes you feel really down about yourself and about humanity as well. But then you have the techno optimist movement, which says, Hey, we can populate the stars. You know, we can be a population of 1 trillion human beings one day if we just scale technology in the ways that we can.

[00:28:54] So I think the first political entrepreneurs to capture the magic and hope of the [00:29:00] techno optimist movement. Will really have a lot of success electorally. They’ll capture a new movement that I think holds a lot of promise for American business and culture. So I’m optimistic about techno optimism. I

[00:29:14] Luke: think you have a good point there too.

[00:29:15] Cause even, I mean, regardless of where somebody sits, the party that’s kind of taking that first step, it’s kind of a forcing function and you’re starting to see it now. Whereas like a year ago, it was like, there was no real, you’re starting to see like a democratic party people that aren’t necessarily in leadership there, but are young up and comers or.

[00:29:34] People that hadn’t really spoken out are now kind of taking a position because you’re going to be left behind. Right. Like it is very real in this election where it might come down to thousands of votes and yeah, like people are kind of turning into single issue voters in this, in this election. So it’s good either way in that, you know, it’s forcing both sides to the table in a way where I feel like the industry has kind of been forced to the table too.

[00:29:54] You’ve got a lot of developers that are like, I hate politics. You know, I don’t want to be in this discussion, but like, this [00:30:00] is my livelihood, I got it. Do it, you know, like, so it’s kind of an interesting time and also kind of bizarre too, like you mentioned that about both parties. I’m like, I don’t know.

[00:30:08] I’m old enough to remember how Bush v Gore and how weird that was. And now seeing Cheney, endorsing Kamala Harris. Where am I, where am I in a dream? This is just kind of bizarre right now, not to get too political or anything. It’s just very, it’s very strange how the parties have kind of evolved over time.

[00:30:24] But this undercurrent though, of the optimism. I mean, I think a lot of it. Is even stuff you would see in 2017, right? Like when, the ICO era of crypto, where you had all these people that were like, look, we can fix these broken web two models with crypto, right? Like, and, you know, you saw kind of a good energy there.

[00:30:41] I think we’re starting to see some of that coming back. We’ve covered a ton here and you’ve given us a lot of your time. We really appreciate it. I mean, is there anything that we didn’t cover today that you’d really like people or anybody listening to know about?

[00:30:53] Sam: Yeah. Well, you know, Luke, before, before we talk about that, what you said really makes me think [00:31:00] we have entered a political bizarre world, right?

[00:31:02] I too remember Dick Cheney being the architect of the Iraq war and shout out to Democrats back in the early 2000s. They were right about the Iraq war. They were right about Afghanistan. And they didn’t apologize about it. And now you have the Kamala Harris campaign championing and celebrating the endorsement of Dick Cheney, who is one of the most notorious neoconservative warmongers of all time.

[00:31:28] And the fact that the two parties have more or less switched places over the past 20 years, you know, going back to which party will embrace this techno optimist movement. By the looks of it, it seems to be the Republican party right now, which is unexpected, you know, traditionally. The Democratic Party has been the party of Silicon Valley, but you have this emergence of the new tech, right?

[00:31:50] I think it’s best embodied with J. D. Vance, who worked in Silicon Valley as a VC for a time, who has close ties with Peter Thiel. It seems like more and more the Republican Party is [00:32:00] positioning itself as the party of innovation, as the party that embraces new technologies and They’re dragging the Democratic Party along with them because, like you said, there’s interesting incentives here where once one candidate, for example, endorses Bitcoin, that actually increases.

[00:32:16] The pressure on the candidate, the opposing party to do the same thing. And we’re seeing this play out slowly with Kamala Harris right now. She recently endorsed AI and digital assets and said that her administration would support those technologies to what extent they will. There’s an open question, but I think you’re right.

[00:32:33] The more the Republican party embraces these things that only increases the incentives for the Democrat party to do the same, which hopefully that mainstream is techno optimism in time. I’m, I’m hopeful that it will.

[00:32:45] Luke: It’s wild too. I mean, cause if you think about it too, like, looking back at like the Obama, like Obama’s first campaign, right.

[00:32:50] It was when like, was like the Facebook campaign, right. Like where you had the left was totally early to the tech game there where they were like, Oh, we’re just going to go directly to the [00:33:00] people and like broadcast on YouTube and Facebook and all these places and forget going through this media apparatus.

[00:33:05] Right. Like where we’re just going to directly sign up people and use a lot of these tools and now it’s just, yeah, it’s just really interesting how these things shift over time.

[00:33:13] Sam: Yeah, free speech being another interesting case study. Oh my gosh. The ACLU was born on the American left, and now it seems like the American left wants to abandon free speech in favor of safetyism, and I don’t think that’s a good long term strategy.

[00:33:30] I think that, you know, Will undermine the first amendment, but that seems to be the strategy right now. So I think Elon Musk, what he’s done with Twitter is an important bulwark against that effort.

[00:33:40] Luke: Yeah. Well, and even things like, you know, seeing how the courts have, have jumped, stepped in on a lot of things where you’ve had like, you know, really overzealous agency regulation and enforcement actions and judges have been kind of, which just wasn’t.

[00:33:53] What I would have thought would have seen happen necessarily. Cause that’s your point of like, you know, 80 year olds in the Senate [00:34:00] that never used the internet. It’s just kind of like, who thinks about these judges kind of ruling on these things. But, but really, I guess we’re there where they’re really part of the deeper principles, right?

[00:34:09] Like in issues that are more core to like the bill of rights, then, you know, the technical nuance of technology, right? I don’t know. I mean, yeah, yeah. It’s interesting time where we’re in. Is there anything you guys are doing at Riot elsewhere that you want folks to know about while we’ve got you here?

[00:34:25] Sam: Yeah. So at Riot, we’re currently building the largest Bitcoin mine in the world. So that’s pretty exciting. we are going to bring online about over the next year or so. One gigawatt facility in Corsicana, Texas. So that is one of the most exciting things we’re working on right now. I think there’s a real national security case that we want to center Bitcoin mining in the United States, because this is an emerging monetary network.

[00:34:48] And if we don’t do it, then Russia will, or China will, or adversaries will, you know, we know that China, they banned Bitcoin a couple of years ago, but there is still hash [00:35:00] rates, significant amounts of hash rate coming out of China. So. I think we would be deceiving ourselves if we thought that Bitcoin and China no longer are being used together because China, they still have their eyes on this technology.

[00:35:13] I think deep down, they still recognize its benefits. So, you know, we are a company that centers on making Bitcoin in America, as Donald Trump mentioned in his true social post. We want all Bitcoin to be made in America. Of course. You know, that that’s not really feasible. Right. But I do think that keeping America a pro Bitcoin country is essential to preserving freedom at home and abroad.

[00:35:36] And so that’s something that we’re working on at our company by just building these ginormous Bitcoin minds, something that we want to continue doing so we can preserve the freedom to transact The freedom to be our own bank.

[00:35:50] Luke: That’s awesome. Yeah. But again, Sam, I really appreciate you making the time today.

[00:35:53] Where can people follow you on online and, and, you know, you and Riot, et cetera.

[00:35:58] Sam: Yeah. So, you can [00:36:00] follow me on x. com formerly known as Twitter. My handle is at Sam Lyman 33. You can also follow my work on Forbes, just type in Sam Lyman, Forbes, and it’ll bring you to my account. It’s L Y M A N. Yeah, feel free, anyone who’s listening, if you’re interested in these topics, feel free to connect with me on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

[00:36:18] Yeah, it’d be great to talk more if anyone’s interested.

[00:36:20] Luke: Fantastic. Well, Sam, can’t thank you enough again. It’s been really great conversation. Love to have you back to, to check back in on some of these points and also hear more about how Riot’s doing in the future, man. Really thanks again for making the time.

[00:36:32] Sam: Yeah. Thank you, Luke. This has been a lot of fun. I look forward to the next one.

[00:36:37] Luke: Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.

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