Voting for Web3 | Aarika Rhodes

hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation nighttime edition david and i are super excited to host erica rhodes the episode that we're gonna talk about today it's how we beat brad sherman okay david who's brad sherman for folks that don't know brett sherman is the sitting member of congress from california 32nd district who uh recently made a farce about crypto using things like mongoose coin and like rabbit coin uh and to make

overall just doesn't take crypto seriously and has openly advocated for an open ban on just generally all things crypto um i'm not a fan of such a policy uh so i think that we can do we should do whatever we need to do to make sure that that kind of policy does not work its way into congress and so it just so happens that a new person on the scene one named erica rose is not also not a fan of such a policy and we are going to talk about that here on today's state of the nation i think this is uh this is a conversation with erica rhodes and we're

going to talk about uh her battle against brad sherman for this congressional seat we're also i think there's a bigger picture here because we're going to talk about pro crypto versus anti-crypto in the 2022 midterms really in 2021 one of the main stories was uh crypto finding its political voice for the first time and so i'm very curious as to whether we'll see krypto flex its muscles a little bit whether this is something that gains some mainstream attention whether it helps some um some some folks that are

running actually win some seats against those who our opponents are against crypto so i think that's going to be the conversation we're about to have today uh before we get into it we gotta tell you a little bit about our friends at on juno this is really exciting this is kind of a you've heard david and i talk about the d5 mullet thesis okay which is like fintech in the front uh and uh d5 in the back a lot of fun that's that's what on juno really is uh so this is a

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you can find out more at onjuno.com make sure you use that code bankless david and i ask you the question we start every state of the nation episode with which is this what's the state of the nation today sir i had to show you how to look this word up to make sure that it was actually a word and yes it is indeed a word we are ryan on today's state of the nation we are discoursing we are having political discourse we are talking about politics we are talking about governance we're talking about policy and asking about what should crypto policy be what is good crypto

policy from someone who believes in crypto rather than thinking that it should be banned uh so today ryan on the state of the nation we are discoursing i think we need some more discourse on crypto and politics we we need to take crypto to the politicians so that's uh it's a good topic for today so we will be right back with erica rhodes but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy

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in los angeles in 2022 erica was an active volunteer during the democratic primary for former presidential candidate andrew yang of which i was also an active volunteer for andrew yang so we share some commonalities there erica is running for congress in 2022 against brad sherman who's a staunch anti-crypto representative and he's the one that tried to make a farce out of crypto using things like mongoose coin and has made statements about uh supporting a total shutdown of crypto uh and it's also no surprise that some of congress congressman sherman's biggest

donators in the 2020 campaign were banks and bank lobbying organizations uh and so some of the statements out of brad sherman in the last couple years or so is that cryptocurrencies are a crock all bitcoin does is allow for a few dozen men in my district to sit in their pajamas and on their couch all day and tell their wives that they're going to be millionaires and that bitcoin also provides no real value to the economy so erica we have interest in your campaign and what you have to say about crypto policy and we are going to unpack that on today's show but before we do that we want to learn a little bit about

you who is erica rhodes well thank you for having me i'm really excited to be here um so i am an elementary school teacher i teach k through sixth grade science and i ended up um deciding to run for congress in 2020 um in 2020 so we have been at this for a really long time and it's just crazy like the primaries are so close away but um i really want to serve on the education and labor committee on congress and i want to sub kitty a subcommittee the financial services

so i think that this is a real opportunity for us to bring change and really start addressing poverty our banking system how why people are staying impoverished and more importantly present new ideas and a different way of governance i think that there is this this deep mistrust between people and their elected officials and for me it's really important that we come together like we i want to be like a unifying figure and model what a good representative is and so i'm really

excited to be in this race and more excited that we can actually win i definitely also think that we can definitely take the seat right out from under brad sherman but i also want to keep on going down the erika roads rabbit hole what were some how uh tell us a little bit about your formative years that has shaped the policy or what you believe in today um like the what policy specifically no just like uh your ideals your ideology or growing up what do you believe in so you know funny people don't really

know this about me but um my family is very eclectic um so half of my family is republican half of them of my family's democrats so i think i approach my politics with good ideas and what's gonna actually solve problems and what's going to leverage people and so that's why i think i run a clean campaign i'm not really focused on like titles as much as i am about just getting things done and i think for me at this point at 36

young people and um i really i feel we're not advocating and doing what's in the best best interest of young people and that's partly why i filed um i also was inspired by andrew because he was one of the only candidates to talk about financial literacy he brought people from all across the political spectrum and he automation he's obviously pro crypto and i think those things are really really important we're gonna change you know the future and i think the lack of

things getting done has changed my like has kind of like shaped the way i view politics you know it's not about just being against someone as much as it is about being for something and i feel like today's politics is just character assassination and who does that impact the most everyday people because people just want to see their lives get better they will they're sick of inflation they're sick of you know the education system and their kids not getting what they need and so that's kind of where i

am politically so and i wanted to say one more thing i want to remind people like i am not like this career politician i'm not crazy polish i am literally myself i'm a teacher i was really frustrated with the injustices happening no one advocating and i just made the decision to do something about it and so if people people like kind of expect me to be a certain way i am just myself and i think that's refreshing for people that do support my campaign because i want someone regular that understands in that

seat in washington so it's cool to see erica it's really cool to see uh millennials get get involved in in politics because i know like you speak on behalf of you know some millennials dave and myself are part of that that generation so many people so many millennials are just apathetic right it's like they just like or so um many in crypto you know very much believe what you said earlier that institutions are failing us um like there's massive institutional distrust but then they really don't feel like

they can do anything on the political front and i confess like sometimes i'm guilty of this too and so are a lot of people in crypto in fact crypto is almost a protest movement for us where we're saying like hey the old system doesn't work so we're just gonna opt out but can you give the case for why people in crypto maybe millennials or some of the younger generations as well should stop being apathetic and actually get involved in politics why should they care about uh your campaign specifically or like

politics in their local district in general i love this question i think you're nailing it dead on the systems are failing people and that's why when trump got elected it wasn't like okay i just because i just didn't like him it was more like well why did he get elected what was the cause of that and then i had made the personal decision that i'm gonna get politically active i'm gonna pick a candidate i'm gonna support them like i've never supported anyone before and now i'm running for office and with

me running my students are seeing that an everyday person can stand up and make a difference and a lot of my platform was inspired by young people like lowering the voting age to 16 when i first decided to announce that you should be the pro bitcoin candidate you should have that on your campaign and take donations in bitcoin and i said well i'm familiar with bitcoin i don't know how that works with fec compliance but a lot of young people have already participated and i think for me i'm very intentional

about empowering them and lifting their voices up and i think when you have people like me showing a different way of running the campaign i think that's going to trickle down and inspire other people to run their campaign differently because the old way isn't working the whole way of governing isn't working and that's why we've created such a mass movement and if you and this is what's wild is i work full-time as a teacher in a pandemic and we've raised over a quarter of a million dollars

and we have two hundred thousand dollars cash on hand and it's not from big banks corporations pawn shops check cashing it's from everyday people that want an everyday representative and so that's why young people should get in because this is the campaign for hope this is the campaign for the future and this is the campaign that's going to bring the change and and that kind of leadership in congress because the reality is if i go to congress and i serve maybe one or two or three terms i can go back as a teacher because i love my job i'm not

trying to be like in the senate i'm not trying to run for president i'm really trying to advocate in the best way i know how i'm single i don't have children my dad was like erica you need to run for congress and we made it happen two teachers and a bunch of kids built this platform and here we are about to unseat brad sherman and one of the reasons why we're so interested in this in this campaign is i think that this could be a microcosm for so many more races and the future of politics in america and perhaps even the world

because if we can show that especially as the crypto industry if we can show that we can rally behind somebody that um not only reflects uh the interests of our our industry but also the generations of the people that make up this industry which tends to skew younger and we can show that we can unseat somebody who's backed by banks and just long-term incumbency then hopefully we can start a domino effect and really start to realign so much of what politics has uh left behind which is you know the younger

generation and it pushes the narrative that that seat you're not entitled to that you actually have to earn it that you can't just show up around election time that you need to be in your community all the time advocating for everyday people and that's the issue that i take with not just brad but several elected officials they think that c is theirs and we and myself and there's a lot of other um candidates running that run on a pro crypto pro bitcoin um platform

which we happened we we try to ask people to do it and take lightning network and you know just be more open-minded and now the news is picking up to our campaigns it's becoming a hot topic and i my prediction in 2024 you'll see presidents running a pro bitcoin crypto platform wow you think so presidents absolutely do absolutely do that would be incredible and if that's the case it's got to start this year it's got to start in uh you know 2022. but can you talk about this because this

is um this is so hilarious that um brad sherman is running against such a pro crypto pro bitcoin candidate like it couldn't have happened i just love that it's happening to brad sherman but like i just so i mean i know you're not about you know slinging mud and campaigns and this sort of thing but like i i think that the crypto world is somewhat mystified a little bit about brad sherman and i'm i'm wondering if you could kind of help us get in his head for a minute because

it's really bizarre to us to see him talk about crypto in the way he talks about it right like with a com complete dismissal like you know there's gotta be thousands hundreds of thousands of people in his district that actually hold the crypto assets that he's disparaging that have actually benefited from the upside of these crypto assets that he's disparaging can you help us understand

why like why does brad sherman hate crypto so much because brad sherman gets his money from the big banks chat cashing pawn shops and so it's in his best interest to be anti-crypto and anti-bitcoin and i'm going to tell you something right now before work after work every weekend we are outdoor knocking phone banking canvassing and i have yet to meet one person that wants it regulated or wants it banned not one person and i'm talking people from all walks of

life all across the political spectrum age gender whatever i have not met one person and even people have this consensus that even if they don't hold bitcoin or ethereum or whatever that it shouldn't be banned or regulated and why are you working on that in congress when we have an increase in homelessness in our district when we have a housing crisis in our district when we have climate change problem when we have education problems why is that your priority and so believe me when i say this people

need to go to fec.com type his name in the search engine and look at where he gets the money and that tells you everything you need to know about what he's interested in and i promise you you will not see young people people of color everyday working people you won't see that reflected in where he gets his money so this is like your explanation for this because it's it's not just brad sherman there there are a few other politicians who've come out with this aggressive anti-crypto policy and i've always just like been flabbergasted by

it's like that can't be a winning position like back to your point who on earth is asking for it which of your constituents are actually asking for this and yet they're coming out very so strongly anti-crypto do you think this is but is this coming from the big banks like the big bang because if you're representing your constituents you're not taking this position and that's the truth if you had a town hall and said hey this is coming i'm doing a hearing on cryptocurrency stable coins how do you feel about it

and then you're hearing an overwhelming amount of people saying look we don't want that please regularly whatever but then i can see him taking that position in the hearings but if you have a town hall and no one is saying that this is their number one issue then it shouldn't be something that you're aggressively trying to ban and regulate and so obviously it goes back to where you get your money and that's why i am very pro and i know this can be controversial in the crypto space because there's there's this this feeling about printing money but public

finance elections imagine if we can get the big money out of election process give everybody a hundred dollars they donate to the candidate that they wanted then an elementary school teacher wouldn't have to hustle as like way hard to try to unseat an incumbent and it would make the incumbent actually go to their community and find out what they care about we have to fix the systems it's not like it's an it's not enough to just replace people we have to get to the root of it but you have to have bold leaders bold

representatives that will introduce that legislation go on the house floor and give those impassioned speeches and rally at their constituents to put pressure on other elected officials that's how you get change and that's how you create a movement okay i want to specifically call out who you plan to actually represent because i think there might be a lot of listeners here that uh you know my pre might be in your district that maybe they don't actually know it so where is california 32nd district uh and can you tell us a

little bit about that district who what type of people lives there what is the constituency base uh and it's like what's the region so that we just had the redistricting we lost the congressional seat so ca 30 which was initially when i started running with ca 30 now it's ca 32 so it's the 32nd district and we represent majority of the valley and they just added the palisades and malibu and um if you go to my website ericaforcongress.com and you show to the bottom we have a whole map of the new district and all the cities there's like

micro there's like smaller cities it took a long list and the demographic makes up for you know we have an an array of people from the from the um from the economic standpoint it's very diverse in terms of like you know race and age we have the largest deaf community in the in the country which i'm very proud about i learned sign language when i was in college and i'm a huge advocate for the d and deaf community and we have a lot of like working class people and we also have people a lot of

people that work in tech and and they're very pro innovation we oh thank you there it is and then we have so it's a very well diverse district um and so this is who i'm running to represent well that is fantastic because i from what i can gather this is a pretty well populated district um can you kind of just uh scale up how big california 32nd district is versus other districts is this a big district is this a medium district what's the size of this i

we don't have the census report yet but it's going to be around 800 000 people ish okay if we take a rat in that in that right so it's fairly big like if you compare it it is a bigger district and la has become an epicenter of the creative side of crypto especially with this uh just absolute boom of nfts uh crypto has all of a sudden become cool in the last like you know 18 months or so and a large part of that story has to do with the creatives outside of la uh

and so when uh i think when we see you unc brad sherman maybe a lot of people are surprised about that but maybe they're they're surprised about that because they weren't paying attention to how far crypto has infiltrated people's lives and how uh the nft movement and the creator economy movement has really taken a a seat in la and so i kind of see la as a perfect ground for flipping a seat that doesn't understand what an nft is or why people are paying money for a jpeg

yeah i i agree with you and you know what i don't think people understand is like everyday people have crypto like i know lots of teachers we talk about it on our lunch break right so it's so it's like you're like everyday people have it um there's a there's a girl she doesn't live in my district but she's a huge volunteer for my campaign she was a veteran and when she came back she fell into poverty and she got into bitcoin when it was really really early on and pulled herself out of poverty and now she gives she's

devoted her life to community service and helping um you know get elected officials into office that care about poverty and so a lot of people in the crypto space actually give and do a lot of community service work with their earnings and i think that goes unnoticed and so we have to cheat as like a community we have to change the narrative around bitcoin and the crypto and what people really do because there's like this misconception that's criminals and all this stuff that's not true that's not true so you can tell me

like teachers i work with they're criminals come on they teach kindergarten they teach kids to read like let's be real so we we have a lot of work to do in terms of bringing other elected officials along and i think that we're the campaign to do it so erica there's there's also a story i think for uh for the rest of the us around innovation here and um you put out this tweet uh recently in early december you said this congressman brad sherman wants to ensure our country's last in line to benefit from all the innovation that is occurring in the

cryptocurrency industry it's time for new leadership and you position yourself as someone who will fight and defend the infrastructure of bitcoin and stable coins and uh brad sherman has has been a notable anti-crypto uh advocate in many of these conversations what would you do differently how do you think america can can lead in crypto leave it alone and not try to regulate it to death um i would be the antithesis of him on that

hearing right so i think that we need to embrace the innovation i think it is going to be the next big thing like as big as the internet we're already seeing signs of that and so if i were in that hearing you would be seeing me asking totally different questions that really highlight the benefit of embracing um bitcoin and blockchain and innovation and what it could do because that's the educational piece and you'll also see me trying to inform other members of congress why they should also

refrain from trying to regulate it and if they were going to do it then we need to make sure that it's done accurately and that the language is correct and that it's being presented to the public and like being intellectually honest i think is like the best way of framing it and then also i'm going to start um i want to i think there's already one i guess we found that you can't have a bitcoin caucus but definitely be a part of the bipartisan crypto caucus um

because i think it's important that when things come up for a vote that we can then as a caucus then go and educate people and say like no this is why you don't want to vote this one if you do it then maybe we'll hold our votes on x y and z and to leverage in that way and then definitely sign um onto the the bills that are pro innovation in the united states we definitely want to make sure that this stays here so i think a lot of us you know know the stats know how difficult it is to actually unseat a multi-decade you know incumbent somebody

like brad sherman um what makes you think you can unseat him what makes you think we have a shot this time oh a lot of reasons one he's canvassing i haven't i've lived out in my district since 2006. i have never once seen him even canvas or campaign or anything because he just thinks that that seats his and so now he's actively campaigning so that's the really good thing out of fear out of well out of fear you know this is a historic race too and so we've never had a woman represent this district we

never had a black woman or african-american represent this district so people are really paying attention to this race and we're starting to get national attention so he's really taking this seriously and we have the bankroll you know we still have you know about half a million more to go which i do believe is going to come q2 but he sees that this teacher has actual cash on hand and can physically take him out and we're running a really solid ground game we are in the community every single day as i'm doing

this interview people are phone banking and everything so we we're in this to win it and he knows it and so i think he does fear me well and he should uh and we will definitely be telling people where they can go donate at the end of this show but before we get there there's some other conversations that we want to talk about uh more details on your actual specific crypto policy uh stable coins are very hot subject right now as well as things like sec regulation and exactly what you talked about which we want uh to make

sure that american policy doesn't regulate away the value of crypto so we're going to get all into those subjects and more right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon avalanche

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