
Christopher Giancarlo—former CFTC chair and known as “CryptoDad”—joins to explain why the U.S. should build a crypto reserve, just like oil or gold. He recalls a White House summit that treated digital assets with the pomp of a state...
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T Mobile the GIST is looking for a Social Media Manager do you want to get into the fast paced world of deciding if I look good on horizontal or vertical video? Well then this is the job for you. It's actually an excellent opportunity. It's a good staff to work with if you listen to the show. If you know someone who's good at social media, if you understand how YouTube can be leveraged to reach the youths, please get in touch with us. We are at the gist@mike pesca.com if you have any interest or or know of someone with interest in this part time job Social Media Manager the gist@mike pesca.com It's Wednesday, August 20, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Washington, D.C. is an unsafe city that Donald Trump and federal troops should stay out of because he's only going to make things worse. I mean, I know Trump's there. I mean his federales, the guys with guns, don't need more of them or don't need them. As directed by Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. He doesn't make things better. And I covered this on the show yesterday and I'm going to cover it again tomorrow when I have an edition of Not Even Mad Out. My guest will be Isaac Saul and Ricky Schlott. But please don't tell me that D.C. is a safe city as city leaders have done, as they've done with great defensiveness in a how dare you way. Journalists have aided in cementing this impression. Journalists who might otherwise dodge danger as they leave the office have to cross to the other side of the street. So just one example was npr. It's a fine story. They had a nice good chart and the chart told me everything I need to know. But the headline over the chart was DC's crime numbers are all the buzz, but how do we interpret them accurately? I'd Say, look at the chart. The headline on the chart is Homicide rates in D.C. have generally declined since the 1990s. Yes, true. Is that that helpful to start in the 1990s? The median age of people who live in Washington D.C. is 34.9. So I guess they started in the 1990s. But most people in Washington D.C. do not remember when crime was as bad as it was. They do remember when crime was much better than it is. And by crime, I look at homicide rates, there are in fact legitimate investigations, as well as the recent one by the DOJ into what Washington D.C. is doing with its crime numbers. But not homicide. Generally not homicide. The criminologists will say that is an excellent crime to pay attention to because it is the worst crime, but also because almost all the victims are at least recorded. So some statistics, and I guess I'm a fool because people don't like statistics. They're not motivated or statistics don't teach anyone anything. I'm told they're not a story. I find this very hard to relate to. I really like statistics. So D.C. residents might remember 2012 when the homicide rate was 14 per 100000. They certainly remember a couple of years ago when the homicide rate tripled, almost tripled from 14 in 2012 to just 11 years later, 39.4. Now the good news is that last year's homicide rate didn't triple. It doubled from 2012. So that's great. And if you want some extra solace, it had gone down from triple the rate of the year before. If that somehow makes you feel safer than you did in 2012 when you are twice as safe as if you were in Washington D.C. these are not low rates. Even the 2012 rate should not be seen as the goal. Cities, big cities have much lower homicide rates than this. My city, New York City, has a homicide rate of a third of that of the best rate that Washington D.C. seems to have ever recorded. But I bring this all up because, as I said, it's not just politicians do what they do. It's people in the media who try to advance the line that the politicians make and sometimes do it in what I regard to be embarrassing ways. Pooh, poohing murder statistics that no one should have to live with. Here's Michael Tomaski, who is a longtime progressive writer. He is the editor of the New Republic magazine. He was on Molly John Fast show and he was talking about. He now lives in the suburbs. He moved his magazine out of the city, which is dangerous. But that's not Why? I said they moved it. And he offers this testimony as to his cities, well, his neighboring cities, since he's a suburbanite. Safety. The numbers are real. The crime numbers are real. They're down. It's down. I live a few miles from the District up in Maryland since the pandemic and we don't have an office down there anymore. Even I don't go down there that much. But sometimes I do go take like long bike rides on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. And I go through all parts of the city, I mean all parts of. I go through southeast Anacostia, you know, where some people would not to go. I've never felt anything. I've just never felt anything. Are you like me? Do you hear that? And say, okay, Mr. Progressive Editor puts on his spandex and rides a bicycle that I'm presuming costs more than a D.C. murder victim's monthly wages. To me it seems a little clueless, not terribly compelling. But then again, I'm the guy who is compelled by statistics and apparently no one else's. Maybe the bicycling anecdotes, the seem safe to me on a Sunday morning when not a lot of crime occurs. Maybe that goes further in the minds of the citizenry on the show today. You know, I don't talk about crypto that much on the show. I find it kind of cryptic. Then I came across the writings of one Christopher Giancarlo, who's the former head of the Commodities Future Trading Commission. And he had this amazing idea of how to use a clause in the Constitution that was once used to combat pirates to get back some cryptocurrency that has been stolen. And also Mr. Giancarlo recently went to a White House summit on crypto. He is a big fan of crypto. I will ask him all about this, plus the piracy angle. Christopher Giancarlo up next. As summer winds down and fall is right around that corner, just peeking out the tendrils of your hair, feeling its lovely breeze throughout. Quince is there for you, refreshing your wardrobe with staple pieces for the season ahead. I in summer used linen shorts. Linen shorts, timeless, classic, artisan and oh so luxurious. They stack up against similar luxury options quite well in terms of design, craftsmanship and especially value. You know, quince also has a line of bedding, towels and cookware. Your closet will thank you. How about on your next trip? Want some quince luggage? Quince bags to check in, to carry on carry on. Quints within a quince quince is there for you. Elevate your fall wardrobe essentials with quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quincom the Gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. 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Visit Cash App legal podcast for full disclosures. It's been sort of the best of times and the worst of times for crypto best of times, I mean it's still worth over a hundred thousand dollars a bitcoin. I mean by the time you hear this may have gone down a couple percent in the last few days. And of course we have a man in the White House, who's very open to crypto. Maybe even we'll have a crypto reserve, like the gold reserve worst of times. Well, there's a lot of hacking. There's a lot of theft. A North Korean criminal gang called the Lazarus Group pulled off a $1.5 billion heist. Over $2 billion has been stolen in crypto so far this year. And there's also this phenomenon called wash trading, which is just giving the impression that there is more activity in a coin than there really is. It's currency manipulation is what it is. You know what? Need for all of this, we need an adult in the room, perhaps in fact, a dad. I say that because Christopher Giancarlo is called crypto dad. He is a seasoned regulator who was recently at a White House meeting that he can talk about, and he has an idea that goes back to the United States Constitution to combat some of this theft. Chris, welcome to the gist.
C
Hey, really great to be with you. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
B
Now, I know that you're at this White House meeting where they had a lot of crypto leaders, and that was conducted under Chatham House rules, which says that you can speak on the record about what you spoke of there, right?
C
That's right.
B
Okay, so what were your major points in this meeting?
C
So what's interesting about Chatham House Rules is you can speak on what you said. You can also talk about what was said. You just can't attribute it to who said it. Okay. And so what I'll tell you is.
B
Sort of cryptic, if you will.
C
Kind of cryptic? Yeah, Cryptic as in. As in the Greek word for hidden. Yeah. The White House Digital Asset Summit that took place on March 7 was a really interesting look. I had the honor of serving under two different presidents, both President Obama and the first Trump administration. This was the first time that innovators were welcomed through the East Wing. Now, for your listeners who. And there's no reason why they should spend a lot of time thinking about White House geography. The West Wing is the business section. It's where you go to hold meetings to discuss whatever your given issue is. It's where the Oval Office is. It's where the White House briefing office is. The East Wing is the diplomatic reception area. It's where heads of state are welcomed to the White House for formal gatherings. Every time I had been to the White House over the last dozen years, it had been to the West Wing. This meeting, this crypto summit, was welcomed through the East Wing. It was an absolute statement that the world has changed 180 degrees. And no longer is this industry being prosecuted. This industry is being celebrated and celebrated with a full marine band and waiters and in uniform serving wine and cocktails and then a meeting in the White House dining room with the president and several members of his cabinet. So if, you know, you say that the best times, the worst times, certainly that was a symbol that, that the good times are here for an industry that perhaps over the last four years, certainly the last two years had felt fairly prosecuted.
B
Right. So when you work for Obama, that wasn't the case. They were open to it. There was a different sense around possibilities, tech. And then things soured under Biden, just as best you can, and I know that you have both a vested interest, but are an expert, lay out if you can, the merits and demerits of how the Biden administration treated crypto. Do you think it was just overreacting to the downside, or do you think something else was going on?
C
So. So up until and through the first two years of Biden, so from Obama through the first Trump administration, first two years of Biden, crypto was not an R or a D thing. It was not a Republican or a Democrat thing. What it was was a generational thing for more senior people that had come up through the traditional financial system. Crypto was something that threatened all of that and was dangerous. You know, Doug Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, says anything that was invented before you turn 35 is super cool and perhaps the source of a lifetime activity. But anything that's invented after you're 35 is dangerous, suspect, and should be suppressed. And that was the general attitude. What changed everything was Sam Bankman Fried. Sam Bankman Fried and his public contributions to Democrats he privately gave through intermediaries to Republicans, but his very public contribution to Democrats and then his sudden fall in a heap of fraud, I think, became an embarrassment factor. There were people like Elizabeth Warren, still are, on the Democrat side that were opposed to crypto because it undermined their control over the financial system. But that wasn't the leading voice of the Democrats up until Sam Bankman Fried, when unfortunately for them, it became almost a party position to be hostile to crypto. And Trump took advantage of that.
B
I don't know if this asks you to play psychiatrist too much, but as an overreaction, since Fried has been explicit about using donations, especially to Democrats, to burnish his credentials.
C
Absolutely. An overreaction. Absolutely. It was the best defense is a good offense. Let's move on. From Sam Bankman Fried by attacking crypto is something used only by money launderers and child pornographers. And we'll try to attack the whole thing and then, you know, politics abhors a vacuum. The further the Democrats went all in on that. Trump saw that as an opportunity and jumped on it. And it became a factor in the election. And I said I'm actually writing my second book now which will be out next March, the Further Adventures of Crypto dad, which I'll talk about. I was in a number of those Biden meetings where people like Mark Cuban and others tried to get the Biden administration to turn it around, but unfortunately it was already too late.
B
What were the arguments that Cuban was using? Why were they falling on deaf ears? Do you think that Biden was foisting this responsibility off to younger staffers? Is it just a default to Democrats are more regulatory of markets than Republicans are? Many questions there, but you tell me.
C
Yeah, you know, in my view, it goes back to a choice that was made during the 2020 campaign when it when Elizabeth Warren dropped out in return for having basically control over the picks of a series of financial regulatory agencies. And then once the Sam Bankman Fried show went down, she took over with an anti crypto position that became the Biden administration's position. And in the last few months, people like Mark Cuban and others were talking to the non Warrenites in the Biden administration saying you've got to turn this around. But by then it was almost too late. Biden himself was getting ready to drop out the debate. Kamala Harris and by then it was too late. And Trump had had really, you know, he took over the issue in a speech he gave in Nashville in July of 2025. And you know, once he said I'm going to keep Elizabeth Warren and the goons out of your crypto wallets, you know, he really owned it. It was by then it was almost too late for the Democrats to say, oh no, no, no, we, we, we're not so harsh, you know.
B
Right. And so that it's so funny because things, even neutral things get partizanized. Look at masks. And Donald Trump was one of those guys, as per the Adams quote, who was very suspicious of crypto because he was certainly older than 35 when it came on. I don't know how old Zafra Bribel box was, but he just says it's like money created out of air. So he turned around this polarized the Democrats who might have had definitely had some legitimate worries and concerns about it. And so they were.
C
There were people on the Democrats side that were really. That are very pro crypto guys like Ro Khanna and Richie Torres and others. And their time will come. The problem is they were being told to settle down, son, by the elders of the party. Those elders will move on. You know, life's a conveyor belt. They're getting close to the end of the conveyor belt, and they'll drop off.
B
I don't know. Have you seen. Have you seen party politics in America? They tend to hold on a little longer than they do in the financial.
C
The money's so good. Of course they hold on. The money's too good.
B
So this is all interesting, and it's. It's half sociology, it's half economics. But why do we need not just an embrace of crypto, as per your opinion, or at least not an unhealthy fear of it, why do we need a crypto reserve? Would you say so?
C
Since the dawn of history, governments stockpile commodities. And they've been doing it for the dawn of time, and they do it today. Ancient Egypt stockpiled wheat, as far as the architectural archaeological record shows. And today China stockpiles everything from pork to soybeans to copper to rebar to gold and crypto. So countries stockpile, they hold reserves of different commodities. Why do they do that? Well, they do that for internal politics because people will riot if they can't bake bread in China, if they can't have access to soy or pork products. And in the United States, we stockpile oil because, as we saw in the 1970s, when people can't put gas in their car, they get pretty upset. So for internal domestic politics. But we do it for another reason that people don't think about as much. We do that defensively or maybe offensively, to control global prices. The dollar is tied to the price of oil in global markets. And one of the reasons the United States stockpiles and reserves petroleum is not just so that we have it in a crisis to drive, put in our cars, but so we can affect the global price. If the global price is going up, the United States will sell to put more product into the market to lower the price. So we use it to adjust global prices. And we've been doing this for a long time. Petroleum was actually Congress authorized a reserve, which is why we call that a reserve, as opposed to just stockpiling, which means the United States just holds on to things it has. Now, the United States has large holdings of crypto because as part of regular law enforcement activity, at the federal and the state level, law enforcement agents seize crypto all the time. It drove Trump crazy that during the Biden administration, Biden would basically routinely sell the crypto that was seized every few months.
B
Right. Like one would a drug dealer's Lamborghini.
C
Exactly.
B
Lamborghinis lose value when you drive off the lot. And so the Biden administration probably lost out on. I don't know if anyone made a calculation, but. A lot of money.
C
Yeah, exactly. So. So just not selling what we have is step number one. The question is, without congressional authorization, for Trump to actually go out and buy crypto, how might we otherwise come into possession of it to add to that stockpile? And so you asked about this meeting at the White House in March. During that meeting, at one point, cryptozoar David Sacks asked us, the assembled guests, to go around the room and bring to the attention of the administration something they hadn't yet embarked upon. And when it was my turn to speak, I referred them to an article I'd written in cointelegraph a few weeks before, along with Coin Fund President Chris Perkins, a former Marine, in which we called for the dusting off of a constitutional provision, Article 1, Section 8, which allows Congress, gives Congress the specific authorization to issue something called letters of mark and reprisal. Yeah, now that's a term we don't hear anymore. But it was very common in the 17th and 18th centuries when countries would actually authorize merchantmen to arm their ships and attacked foreign shipping as part of warcraft, especially by countries that didn't have much of a navy.
B
You were the chairman of the United States Commodities Future Trading Commission. You understand about commodities and honest markets. So when you listed the wheat reserves and the oil reserves and even the gold reserves, all of these commodities have fundamental intrinsic value beyond their perceived value. You could eat wheat. We need oil to make our cars, and even gold, which is mostly based on scarcity. So there was a good analogy to crypto there. And the inability to just get more of it, it still has a fundamental value, is a very useful metal. Not so, crypto. Doesn't that raise a problem?
C
No. The reason why money has always been tied to a commodity is not because the commodity might have fundamental value. When you tie your money to a type of shell or a bead or a clay tablet, it's not because there's necessarily value there. And by the way, throughout history, humanity's been tying money to commodities. It's because things that come out of the ground can only be taken out of the ground. So Much at any given time. You tie money to commodities because one, they're uniform, but two, they're all taken out of the ground. You can only actually extract so much gold per year. You can only extract so much oil. And the dollar honestly is tied to oil out of the ground. And so humanity does that. Why? As a hedge against governments debasing their currency. If it just was on paper, governments just print all they want. In fact, every major world currency eventually gets debased to zero. The British did it to their money before them, the Dutch before them, the Spanish. And sadly we're doing some of the same thing ourselves right now. Which is what leads why bitcoin makes sense as the world's first digital commodity. And like those other physical commodities, a limited ability to produce more of becomes actually a very logical things to, to, to tie money to so that money retains its value. And so there's actually a very real cleverness to the idea of a bitcoin reserve. Because whether we, the United States eventually have to retire money back to a commodity, remember it used to be tied to gold. Or whether our adversaries economic or let's just say our economic competitors do it themselves. Now the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, B R I C S have been talking about creating a new global currency and tying it to bitcoin. Well, if they do that and we have a reserve, guess what? We can do the same thing we do with petroleum. If the value goes up, we can distribute it and lower the price. So holding a crypto reserve in the face of a lot of people being concerned about currency debasement, including of our own dollar, and maybe doing something about it by trying to create a rival reserve currency based on crypto bitcoin, that reserve would give us the ability to play both offense and defense in combating it. So it's not about the utility of the underlying commodity. It's always been about the, the limited nature of it as opposed to the printing press that governments have.
B
And I will note the c in the BRICS is 90 something percent of the BRICS. And it might be the case today that China has more bitcoin than the United States does. We don't know, but that's a plausible assertion. The other thing I wanted to ask before we got to the letters of mark, which is a great idea I do think is not necessarily about the reserve, but if we were to legitimize crypto in many ways and to endorse it, you know, as someone who regulates markets, you can't have an administration that picks winners and losers. And given this administration's being tied to meme coins, but also in the non crypto realm talking about getting a share of intel, do you trust this administration to be the exemplar of not picking winners and losers?
C
I trust no administration to be the exemplar of not picking winners losers. I watched the last administration tried to pick pick traditional finance over decentralized finance. It's not one administration or other power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the United States Chief Executive is a very, very powerful position. I think that we the people need to be the biggest check on governments and we've stood by over the last five years as one out of every four dollars has been printed. We have a major debasement problem going on right now and I think that's something that needs to be of concern to all people. And it's one of the reasons why, I think one of the reasons why bitcoin price continues to rise and if the government continues to print, I think it will continue to rise even more.
B
And we'll be back in a minute with more of Christopher Giancarlo and I promise we'll get to the piracy Foreign let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
C
Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
B
That's not the itinerary we're following.
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Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones.
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House Bon voyage.
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B
We're back with Christopher Giancarlo, former head of the CFTC and let us now get to the privateering. Tell me how your idea would work. Who would be the new John Paul Jones? Would there be a skull and a crossbone involved?
C
I hope this is skull and crossbones involved. The new John Paul Jones would be the one, whatever tech firm is most successful at hacking back from the Lazarus Group and other state sponsors of hacking activities are stolen crypto. And that's the idea here, is that Congress would authorize the executive branch to issue these letters. I've been privately advocating that we create a competition that firms that would qualify for these letters have to demonstrate first of all existing capacity, computing capacity, hacking capacity to do it. And that we would authorize multiple firms with this capacity. We would set a set of specifications they would meet and then there'd be competition to hack back. We would specifically designate who they were going after so that it doesn't become something that people can use to harm their enemies. They would only be able to harm our national enemies, which we would define. And then who would emerge would be the most swashbuckling buccaneers of the 21st century cyberspace.
B
And they probably get a small cut of it, just like whistleblowers. Yeah. Get a cut of the economic activity when they do blow the whistle. That's not unprecedented.
C
And some portion of it should go back to the people who lost it. So it shouldn't. The proceeds shouldn't all go to the government. Should be some. Oh I would say three way split.
B
Yeah, yeah. But wouldn't we need. Don't we need to improve the security on the front end just as much as we need this interesting idea for how to get it back after the horse has left the barn?
C
Totally. And there's so much more that can be done in that area. I mean one of the things that we're learning is that our existing AML KYC Anti Money Laundering Bank Secrecy act procedures of all of us having to give reams of information over to financial service providers in case we do something wrong. By the way, there's no proof we've done anything wrong. We just need to do it in order to have access. And then it sits there as it was with Coinbase so that hackers can get in and this time not steal the crypto, actually steal all the IDs. And so we've definitely got to do a better way. And government, I can tell you from having been there, is one of the least cyber secure environments. Sadly there is.
B
So I'm going to ask you the question, I think anticipating what my audience wants to know, is this technology, is this commodity safe enough? And I'll also say you have to ask compared to what? Right. Which is always the question I asked about self driving cars. Are they safe compared to what? You have to compare them to the other manually Controlled cars. So is it a safe enough store of wealth compared to dollars, compared to banks, compared to everything else that's a competitor?
C
Well, here's what I would say. I don't want to say it depends, because it does depend. But what I would say is, at the highest level, how many banks have failed in the last three years? Well, two of America's top 30 banks, Silvergate Signature bank and Silicon Valley bank, failed. And yet the Internet, on which all of decentralized finance is based, has never gone down. And Bitcoin has never failed in its 15 years of existence. And so the existing banking system is not as durable as we like to think it is. It's just that we've built so much redundancy in it. Those three banks are gone. And but for government insurance, but for government bailouts, there would have been a lot of tears about that. So we don't think about it because of the redundancies and the insurances built into the system. But the existing system is not that durable. In fact, if you leave the developed world and you go to the underdeveloped world, banks go in and out of existence every eight years on average. And people lose a lot of money with that because the government insurance programs aren't like what they're here, which is why those societies often work on cash and are increasingly reliant on digital forms of money like stablecoins. So the existing system's not so great. Now, this new system that's likely to replace it is going to be. There's going to be as many. The bad guys will find new flaws. You know, I hate to say it, but finance is a game of cops and robbers. And the robbers get one step ahead of the cops, and the cops have to stay one step behind and not two steps behind. But there's always some new scheme going on, and there will be in this new world. The one thing I would tell your listeners, though, is there's no optionality here. It's not like we can say, you know what, it's scary and dangerous, so let's just keep what we got, because time doesn't wait, okay? The Internet marches on. Technology marches on. This new technology is going to replace the branch bank, the checkbook and everything we grew up with. It's just going to happen. We don't have the option of saying, oh, I'm a little scared, so let's stop it. It's not going to be stopped. So what we got to do is be all over it. We've got to understand it. We've got to maximize it, we've got to improve it, we've got to work with it. We've got to make it as good as it can be and as good as it can be. It's going to be much more empowering, you know, for your listeners. We don't write letters anymore because texting and emailing is just too easy. We don't buy photo albums anymore because we keep those photos on our phone. We can show them at dinner parties. We can send them anywhere in a second. Nobody wants to go back to developing film. The same is going to be true about finance. Nobody's going to go back to branch banking. Nobody's going to go back to checkbooks. We're going to get used to sending money in a split second to anybody in the world without having to go through 30 intermediaries. It's going to change everything, but it's going to happen.
B
A pay on to the future from a man with a sword hanging over his shoulder. Christopher Giancarlo is senior counsel to Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher. He previously served as the 13th chairman of the U.S. commodities Future Trading Commission. Thank you so much.
C
Really. My pleasure.
B
That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist and Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Astra Green does the socials. Leo Bounds, the intern. We've got Philip Swiss. Good. And Kathleen Sykes on the mandolin. Michelle Pesca lays out the red carpet for everyone. Peru. G Peru. De Peru and thanks for listening. Or maybe do Peru. G Peru and thanks for listening. Yeah, that's the order.
Episode Title: CryptoDad’s Pirate Clause: Reviving Letters of Marque
Host: Mike Pesca (Peach Fish Productions)
Guest: Christopher “CryptoDad” Giancarlo, former CFTC Chairman
Date: August 20, 2025
Duration: ~37 minutes
This episode explores the intersection of cryptocurrency, policy, and history, focusing on a novel proposal: using the U.S. Constitution’s “letters of marque” to fight crypto theft and cyber-piracy. Host Mike Pesca is joined by Christopher Giancarlo, known as “CryptoDad”—the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—who shares insights from a White House crypto summit, evaluates shifting political attitudes toward digital assets, and introduces his “pirate clause” idea to hack back stolen cryptocurrency from foreign actors. The conversation covers the politics of crypto, the feasibility and ethics of digital privateers, and the future of money itself.
Notable Moment:
"Are you like me? Do you hear that? And say, okay, Mr. Progressive Editor puts on his spandex and rides a bicycle that I'm presuming costs more than a D.C. murder victim's monthly wages. To me it seems a little clueless..."
— Mike Pesca [05:16]
Notable Quote:
“It’s been sort of the best of times and the worst of times for crypto... And of course we have a man in the White House, who's very open to crypto. Maybe even we'll have a crypto reserve, like the gold reserve.”
— Mike Pesca [10:39]
Notable Quote:
“This was the first time that innovators were welcomed through the East Wing... no longer is this industry being prosecuted. This industry is being celebrated and celebrated with a full marine band and waiters and in uniform serving wine and cocktails...”
— Christopher Giancarlo [12:39]
Notable Quotes:
“Crypto was not an R or a D thing. It was not a Republican or a Democrat thing. What it was was a generational thing... Crypto was something that threatened all of that and was dangerous.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [14:17]
“There were people like Elizabeth Warren... that were opposed to crypto because it undermined their control over the financial system... but that wasn’t the leading voice up until Sam Bankman Fried, when... it became almost a party position to be hostile to crypto.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [15:08]
“Trump saw that as an opportunity and jumped on it. And it became a factor in the election.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [15:58]
Notable Quotes:
“Since the dawn of history, governments stockpile commodities... Today China stockpiles everything... and crypto.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [19:41]
“So just not selling what we have is step number one. The question is... how might we otherwise come into possession of it to add to that stockpile?”
— Christopher Giancarlo [22:03]
Notable Quotes:
“I referred them to an article I'd written... in which we called for the dusting off of a constitutional provision... which allows Congress... to issue something called letters of mark and reprisal.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [22:56]
“The new John Paul Jones would be the one, whatever tech firm is most successful at hacking back from the Lazarus Group and other state sponsors of hacking activities or stolen crypto.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [30:12]
“A competition... authorize multiple firms... designate who they were going after... and then who would emerge would be the most swashbuckling buccaneers of the 21st century cyberspace.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [30:49]
Pesca’s Summary:
“They probably get a small cut of it, just like whistleblowers...”
— Mike Pesca [31:27]
Notable Quotes:
“How many banks have failed in the last three years?... And yet the Internet, on which all of decentralized finance is based, has never gone down. And Bitcoin has never failed in its 15 years of existence...”
— Christopher Giancarlo [33:31]
“This new technology is going to replace the branch bank, the checkbook and everything we grew up with. It's just going to happen. We don't have the option of saying, oh, I'm a little scared, so let's stop it. It's not going to be stopped. So what we got to do is be all over it.”
— Christopher Giancarlo [35:44]
“What changed everything was Sam Bankman-Fried... his sudden fall in a heap of fraud... became an embarrassment factor.”
— Giancarlo [14:33]
“The one thing I would tell your listeners, though, is there’s no optionality here... The Internet marches on. Technology marches on. This new technology is going to replace the branch bank, the checkbook and everything we grew up with. It's just going to happen.”
— Giancarlo [35:44]
Mike Pesca’s trademark is responsible provocation—challenging orthodoxy with data, dry humor, and sharp skepticism. Giancarlo’s style is lucid, measured, and deeply historical, blending anecdotes from government experience with philosophical arguments about money, technology, and governance.
This thought-provoking episode delivers a deep dive into digital assets and U.S. policy, weaving together history, economics, and national security. Giancarlo champions preparedness, innovative legal tools, and open-mindedness to the future of money—urging the U.S. not just to adapt, but to lead as disruptive change becomes inevitable.