WBD683 Audio Transcription

Pro-Bitcoin Legislation with Dennis Porter

Release date: Friday 14th July

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dennis Porter. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Dennis Porter is the CEO & co-founder of the Satoshi Action Fund. In this interview, we discuss the intersection of Bitcoin and politics, and how the Satoshi Action Fund is orange-pilling states. Dennis outlines the success the fund is having in changing policy towards Bitcoin mining across multiple jurisdictions by focusing on its clear and direct economic and energy benefits.

“What we focus on is Bitcoin mining because I can say that Bitcoin mining can provide jobs, local investment, grid stability, environmental cleanup, and the ability to enhance green and renewable energy projects; and there’s not a policymaker on the planet who doesn’t hear those things and go, ‘I want those things’.”

— Dennis Porter

Interview Transcription

Dennis Porter: Hey man, I was a podcaster once too, so I hear these things.

Peter McCormack: I didn't even notice.  You did that for a while?

Dennis Porter: I did, I did it for a little while.

Peter McCormack: And then you stopped.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I'm a failed podcaster. 

Peter McCormack: You're a failed podcaster.  So, am I.

Dennis Porter: You failed forward. 

Peter McCormack: I failed forward!

Dennis Porter: I did not, I'm a quitter. 

Peter McCormack: Now you're running for presidency or something?

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  Dennis Porter, Porter 2028, Is that right? 

Peter McCormack: Would you run -- 

Dennis Porter: I could run, actually, no, I can't run technically until -- well, okay, so the way the president works is actually funny because, even though I'm not old enough technically, because you have to be 35 to run, to be elected president, sorry, to take the office of the presidency, you have to be 35.  And I'm 34, but I turn 35 before I take the office.  So, by the time I take the office, I can go in.  But the funny thing is, I have to talk to some constitutional experts, but my understanding of the Constitution is that even if you are too young, you can run.  Like you can be 30 and you can run, but you could never take the office.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so you could win and then go --

Dennis Porter: Yeah, basically the Vice President automatically takes the office the moment that your team gets elected.  And then you wait for you to become old enough.  So, if I was 33 and we won, two years into my presidency, the Vice President would take office immediately and then two years into my presidency, I would take over.  That's my understanding.  I might be wrong, but you can run, I know that part.

Peter McCormack: You can have a babysitter.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, basically, that would be fun.

Peter McCormack: So, you've thought about this?!

Dennis Porter: Yes, I thought about running when I was 30, that's right.  Yeah, but I was like, "How do I do this?"  No, I did not think about how to do it.  It was just one of those things when I discovered it, I was like, "Oh, that's really odd".  You can run, but you can't take the office once you win. 

Peter McCormack: Why 35? 

Dennis Porter: I don't know.  It seems arbitrary to me.  I haven't done enough research on that. 

Peter McCormack: I think if they're going to have that bottom end 35, they need to have that top end and not allow --

Dennis Porter: Oh, you're an ageist. 

Peter McCormack: I'm definitely an ageist when I look at someone like Biden, who clearly cannot string a sentence together and says some really odd things.  It just comes across as that he isn't mentally fully there for someone holding one of the most important offices in the world. 

Dennis Porter: I mean, it's a touchy subject, right?  I say, let the voters decide, that's important.

Peter McCormack: Well, then the GOP, no, the DNC, sorry, should let the voters decide.  And they don't.

Dennis Porter: Well, they will.  They actually changed.  So, I had a lot of focus on the Bernie race at one point in my life, and they did Bernie wrong, but they have since actually changed that model a little bit.  It used to be -- the reason why Bernie was screwed no matter what was because they have these things called superdelegates in the Democrat Party.  They don't have them, they don't exist in the Republican Party. 

So, backtracking a little bit, the way our elections work is that you don't win by popular vote.  We've seen that both with Trump and with Bush.  Neither of them got elected by popular vote, they both lost the popular vote, but yet they became President because we have an electoral college where each state gets a certain amount of delegates or votes, and then they get together and whoever wins the appropriate number becomes President.  So, in the case of the Democrat Party with Bernie, when he was running, he was getting a lot of momentum and he was put in a position where he was going to beat Hillary, or potentially be Hillary. 

Peter McCormack: He was going to be Hillary. 

Dennis Porter: He might have. 

Peter McCormack: He would have. 

Dennis Porter: But I don't think he could have.  The problem is he could have never or would have never won, because the DNC has so many superdelegates and these superdelegates are people within the party.  So, let's say you 've worked really hard in your life for the DNC, you've done a lot of work for them, you're a party elite, so to speak, is what they would call it, you would be assigned as a superdelegate.  And they have over 100, I think it's over 150 superdelegates.  So, it's a pretty good amount.  So, let's say you get to the end and Bernie's like 30, 40, 50, 100 delegates ahead at the state vote, the DNC has these superdelegates that can come in and vote and swing it back to Hillary. 

So, basically, once people realised that, I think they were never going to let him win, that's when he lost.  It wasn't because he kept going and it was like, "Oh, he's going to pull it off by a delegate or two".  It was like, "But even if he does, he's kind of screwed". 

Peter McCormack: And how do the superdelegates work?  Do they vote in packs; is there a committee; is there a whip?

Dennis Porter: There's a party convention every four years.  You have a party convention and the Republicans and Democrats both have them, and it's after all of the primary votes occur for the president.  You have the primary and then you have the general.  So, the primary is to pick who's for the party.  So, Democrats pick their candidate, and then on the Republican side, they pick their candidate.  And what happens is after you go through the primary, you vote on the state level, all the different states are voting, and then each state has a number of delegates that whatever the state voted, those delegates go to the party convention and they vote for the candidate that that state chose. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dennis Porter: So, the party convention is where they decide who is going to be their candidate.  It's generally speaking kind of more just for fun and for show, it's not really that important.  But in the case of, for instance, the Bernie race, where he might have actually upset Hillary Clinton and won, they have these superdelegates where they were able to vote and say, "Never mind, we're going to go with the person that's chosen by the party", because she was very much chosen by the party to run.  It was kind of like a coronation to some extent. 

Peter McCormack: Why; why did they want her? 

Dennis Porter: I mean, there's a few reasons why you would want Hillary to be your nominee.  She was seen as an extension of the Obama campaign.  They viewed the Obama era as a huge success.  And her name, her last name, is a very powerful name with a lot of name ID, and we can get into it a little bit, but name ID is very, very important for elections in the US particularly. 

Peter McCormack: Working well for Kennedy right now? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, Kennedy's -- yeah, let's get into the name ID in a second.  So, they go and they vote, you know, Hillary's basically the chosen one, they want to pick her no matter what.  And the change that happened though, because there was so much backlash, they were like, "Oh, well Bernie could never have won.  There's no way he could have won.  You guys are just -- it's all set.  Why even participate?"  So, there was this huge backlash from the voters and they ended up changing that system. 

So now, the party conventions, when they go to vote, the superdelegates are not allowed to participate in the first round of voting for who's going to be the candidate.  So, let's say there's like a tie because I don't remember what the number is, you have to get over a certain number of delegates to be actually nominated as the candidate for the Republican or Democrat party.  And if you don't get there, like if they don't hit that threshold, they'll go to a second round of voting.  And then that's when the superdelegates can come in.  So, now in some instances, people keep saying, because I looked it up, I was like, "Oh, Kennedy's screwed.  He's going to have the same experience as Bernie had.  There's no way he can win.  The superdelegates will just come in and swing the vote and he'll be screwed, he'll be done".

Peter McCormack: Well, that's another interesting point, because I didn't even realise until recently, was I talking to you about this?  I'd made the assumption that Biden just carries on. 

Dennis Porter: No, no.  They want that to happen.  I mean, if I was a democrat, in a sense that I was in the party, highly active, like if I was someone who was a party elite and cared a lot about making sure that Biden wins again, I would basically be like, "No, he's it, he's our guy, we don't care".  That's like a strategy.  You're like, "This guy doesn't have a chance".  You're trying to make sure -- so, the President is not only the President of the country, he's also the leader of the party.  So, you don't want your leader to get struck down.  I mean that's not usually good for the group.

Peter McCormack: Has it ever happened that the President has changed but the same party has won the next election; they haven't got the second term? 

Dennis Porter: Oh…

Peter McCormack: That's a good question. 

Dennis Porter: That's a really good question. 

Peter McCormack: It's one for Danny.

Dennis Porter: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Because again, my history of US politics is every time a President serves a second term, it's the same guy.

Dennis Porter: Unless they've died. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Dennis Porter: In a sense, a new administration gets voted back into power.  I don't know.  You'll have to look that up, Danny, and let us know if they've ever switched. 

Peter McCormack: What happened with Nixon?  Was he President at the time when he was impeached? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: So, he just lost the job? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, so he ended up in the case of Nixon, you're going to make me really go through my political pop quiz here with me; so, in the case of Nixon, he ended up, what do you call it, not retiring. 

Peter McCormack: Resigning? 

Dennis Porter: Resigning from office.  Didn't go through all the way through the entire impeachment.

Peter McCormack: So, you can resign to avoid impeachment?

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  So, he was impeached, they just didn't finalise.  So, impeachment is the House gets together and they vote on whether they want to impeach you, which means that you then you go to trial, and that's a very complicated process.  And I think they might have been partway through the trial.  Again, you're going to make me check my absolute pop quiz presidential facts here, but I believe that he resigned before the trial itself was actually finished. 

Peter McCormack: So, do you think Kennedy has a chance?  Because I can't tell if because we're in this Bitcoin world and he said, "Well, I like Bitcoin", that we're seeing his kind of growth differently from say the general public. 

Dennis Porter: I would say that after the Trump Presidency that I don't really question someone's ability, especially when they start to gain any sort of popularity, and Kennedy definitely has gained a significant amount of popularity.  By many, and even myself in the beginning was like, "This guy has no chance".  But as more time goes on, there are signs that he does have a chance.  Now, he may lose brutally and get totally wiped out.  These things happen where you can gain a lot of momentum and then just kind of fumble it at the one-yard line, so to speak.  So, I'm not saying that he's going to like -- we're definitely going to go into a very highly contentious primary for the Democrats, but he does definitely have a chance. 

I mean, you can't ignore some of the things that are going on with him, and he's already over 20% in some polls, which is very high for someone that's challenging a sitting President in a primary.  Can we get the polls up; which is a trusted poll service?  Is there one you would say? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, nobody -- again, I would say again since the Trump Presidency that polls are kind of more like... 

Peter McCormack: Well listen, the polls on Brexit told us we were staying in Europe, and the polls on Trump said Hillary was going to win. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, 99 to 1 they said Hillary was going to win. 

Peter McCormack: He didn't even have a speech ready. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you read the book?

Dennis Porter: No.

Peter McCormack: So, there this whole bit where apparently, he was shocked he won. 

Dennis Porter: I'm not surprised. 

Peter McCormack: He wasn't prepared.  Apparently he didn't have a speech or something. 

Danny Knowles:  I don't know where to go to get a decent poll. 

Dennis Porter: I've heard that before. 

Peter McCormack: Trump, that's Biden and Trump. 

Dennis Porter: There's only been one major poll that was done to show that he was at 20%, or close to 20%.

Peter McCormack: This is interesting.  So, the people listening, not watching, so Danny's got up the Biden versus Trump, and it's 43.1% to Biden, 43.2% to Trump.

Dennis Porter: Is this current, or is this 2020?

Danny Knowles: I don't know ,I don't know where to go to get a decent poll.

Dennis Porter: That's 2024, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Can you see Kennedy in there?

Dennis Porter: Yeah, you're going to have to google, "Kennedy vs Biden".

Peter McCormack: But it is interesting the speed at which he has grown in popularity.  And also, the interesting thing I find about him, like there's things I disagree with him on, but he seems to be attracting both Democrats and Republicans.

Dennis Porter: So, there's that one.  That one's not close to the 2020, but I mean, like just again --

Peter McCormack: Okay, so this one's giving 70% to Biden, about, what would you say, 17% to Kennedy, and Marianne Williamson, about 8%.  Who's she; I don't even know she is? 

Dennis Porter: I believe she actually ran in the Republican primary last time.  I'm not sure why she switched, but I believe she's kind of like a woo-woo practitioner, she's very into -- she's an author.  I don't know a lot about her.  But the point here though is that he's gaining some momentum, and that's interesting.  It's not normal for someone to gain a lot of momentum against a sitting President.

Peter McCormack: You didn't want to say, "Unprecedented"!

Dennis Porter: Unprecedented, yes!  The other thing is the fundraising, the fundraising is starting to pick up.  Because the thing about fundraising is, running for President is all a confidence game.  And if you don't have confidence that someone can win, you're definitely not going to give them any money.  And they were able to raise $1 million almost three days in a row almost exactly, and that means that he's gaining momentum and people believe that he has a chance. 

Peter McCormack: Why would you not want to give money to somebody you don't think is going to win, because does that money come with favours? 

Dennis Porter: I mean, just because you don't want to light your money on fire, right?

Peter McCormack: You light it on fire anyway. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean... 

Peter McCormack: It's at some cost. 

Dennis Porter: Just in general, I just know that with presidential campaigns, it's really, really important, you have to raise a certain amount of money.  There's a bare minimum threshold that you have to meet in any sort of race. 

Peter McCormack: But they don't even raise over like $1 billion, on something ridiculous? 

Dennis Porter: They'll spend over $1 billion, yeah.  I think Hillary raised $1.3 billion, or something like that in her recent.  When she lost in 2020, she raised $1.something billion, spent $1.something billion.

Peter McCormack: Is it all pretty much on advertising?

Dennis Porter: Events, advertising.

Peter McCormack: So, it's campaigning, yeah.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, hiring staff, running polls, there's all sorts of stuff you can spend money on. 

Danny Knowles: She spent $4.9 billion in 2020. 

Dennis Porter: Is that total?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, Trump and Biden spent $2.74 billion, "The total amount spent by Trump and Biden campaigns", hold on, it's contradicting itself.  But we're in the realm of billions. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dennis Porter: This is one of the things that I originally was attracted to fixing in politics, although I don't know if we ever will.  Bitcoin might give us a chance.

Peter McCormack: We'll come back to that.  So, in the primaries, I don't remember a scenario, maybe I missed it, I don't remember in the last election, Trump going into primaries.  I don't remember,  I have no memory of that. 

Dennis Porter: Oh yeah, he didn't really have a challenger, no.  That's right.

Peter McCormack: But being a challenger, does that mean there will be primary debates between Biden and…? 

Dennis Porter: That's very interesting, that's a very good question.  We'll see. 

Peter McCormack: Can they stop it happening if they fear it? 

Dennis Porter: So, the DNC controls the debates, generally speaking, the parties control the debate schedule, and they have said that there will be no debates. 

Peter McCormack: That's not good, because you want to see a debate between Kennedy and Biden.

Dennis Porter: But if you're the DNC, you do not want your current sitting party leader, who is the President of the United States, to be debated. 

Peter McCormack: But if you think it through, it feels to me like there may, I'm not sure, I can't read it, but just there may be some momentum with the Republicans and there may be some momentum with Trump.  It means it's a genuine chance he may win again, right? 

Dennis Porter: Trump? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Dennis Porter: I mean, he's in a good position. 

Peter McCormack: So, it's whether they think, who's more likely to win out of Trump and Biden and Trump and Kennedy?  If you felt like Kennedy had more chance of winning, then maybe you would want the debate.

Dennis Porter: And just remember that the President is the leader of the Democrat Party. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know. 

Dennis Porter: He controls it, essentially.  So, why would you want to be openly debated as if there isn't real opportunity for you to be unseated?  That's like a confidence game again.  It's like, you're showing weakness.

Peter McCormack: But I think you're showing weakness by not having the debate.

Dennis Porter: It could get to a point where he might be forced to have a debate.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because he will have to debate Trump anyway.

Dennis Porter: Yes, or whoever wins the Republican primary.

Peter McCormack: Which will be Trump.  DeSantis, seems like he's losing. 

Dennis Porter: That's the current trend, but it can change rapidly.  These things change very quickly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Do you think Gavin's waiting four years, Gavin Newsom?

Dennis Porter: I've heard a lot of people talk about him running.  I've heard varying opinions.  I've heard people tell me that they are best friends with certain people that are running for office right now and that they said they're never going to run, and then they're running.  So it's like, no one knows but that individual, really.  It's a big decision to make.  Sometimes you're sitting there going, "If this happens or if this happens, if this series of events happens, that's what's going to pull me into the election".  So, he may be looking to run now, but he might be waiting to see if, for instance, Biden is weak, or who ends up winning on the Republican side, who ends up taking a big lead.  If there's someone that he feels like he's a better matchup against, he might decide to jump into the race.  So, there's all sorts of things that can impact why you would run.

Peter McCormack: I don't know much about him, but I have seen lots of criticism pointed towards Gavin Newsom, especially a couple of key issues, once during COVID, especially as I think when people were on lockdown, wasn't he seen in a restaurant or something?

Dennis Porter: That's right.

Peter McCormack: And then secondly, the energy policy they have in California, because they've been having certain blackouts.  But I did also see an interview with him recently, I think it might have been on Fox.  It was, was it Hannity interviewed him?  He did a good job. 

Dennis Porter: He's a good policymaker in the sense of politician. 

Peter McCormack: He's a good politician.  He's good at politics. 

Dennis Porter: He's very sophisticated. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dennis Porter: Ever since Trump ran, I literally don't count anyone out, unless they're just kind of an obvious kooky person.  That's like, no.  But current Governor of California?  I mean, it's a good position.  Generally, the country doesn't like the idea of a Californian governing the whole country, because they feel like they already have too much power and control.  I think people have actually run polls on that, that there's a backlash, like lack of interest of a Californian leading the country as a whole.

Peter McCormack: People probably want to know why we're talking so much about politics, the Bitcoin podcast.

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  We should talk about football instead!

Peter McCormack: Like what you did there; you can come back on the show!  We can talk about football.  I think we can talk about politics and football.  So, Dennis, people who don't know you, tell them why we're talking about politics.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, well, I started this political organisation called Satoshi Action Fund, and I spend a lot of my time focused on politics.  The last, I would say, two-and-a-half years, I've been really focused on the intersection of Bitcoin and politics.  I've been somewhat of a student, I guess you could say, someone who cares about the political space since a very young age.  I grew up with my dad listening to Talk Radio, I grew up in a very conservative family as well.  So, a lot of Sean Hannity and various other, what's the other one, the other really big one I'm trying to remember right now?  He passed away recently, but there was a couple of really, really strong show hosts that did Talk Radio on the conservative side.  My dad would always listen to them, just like back and forth all the time. 

Every time my dad would be like, "Oh, come on you guys", like that, I'd be like, "Oh, what's your opinion on that dad?" and he would share back and forth with me.  And my dad is really smart, really understood the political system very well from the bottom to the top, understood how the levers are pulled and moved around.  So, just learned a lot from him growing up and I've always been fascinated by the space, always been interested if I could have a career in the political space.  And I had tried a few different times to make an entry, but there just never really was anything that worked well for me. 

2017, I discovered Bitcoin, got really into Bitcoin.  I started trying to mine, started trying to teach myself how to code.  None of that really worked out and was just kind of, 2017 discovered it, bull run; 2018 crashed.  So, then I was like, "Well, I'll just stay on the sidelines and continue to monitor the situation, continue to learn, continue to read books, never had a public-facing account at all in the space, was an anon for a long time.  That break was really important though, because between 2017 and where we are in the current phase, I ended up going to get trained to be a campaign manager and was trained to do full-stack campaign management, grassroots organisation, went on to help several different campaigns.  I've done everything from like opposition research, which is where you like tactically investigate your opponent on the other side of the aisle to find information on them that might be detrimental to their ability to win that race. 

Peter McCormack: You went looking for dirt? 

Dennis Porter: Mostly looking for voting records, trying to find contradictions, trying to see if they've said something that isn't true.  That's generally the position that someone in opposition research is put in.  But if you find something worse than that, you know, always helpful for the campaign.  So, that's yeah, in some senses you would you look for dirt on your opponent. 

Peter McCormack: What do you think about that, as part of campaigning?  Because I know it goes on, I know it happens, but it feels like you can campaign positively or negatively.  So, campaigning positively to me is understanding the electorate, understand their needs, what they want, and telling them what you would do for them.  The negative side of that is telling you what the opposition won't do based on X, Y, Z.  And I find that negative.  I have a preference for the positive side of campaigning. 

Dennis Porter: I agree.  I prefer, I also have a tendency for the positive side.  There's a couple things though.  One is that there are all sorts of different tools that you can use in the election cycle and election process to help advantage your campaign.  Generally, I would say it's almost always better to stay on the positive side and there's a couple of reasons why.  One is a lot of voters tend to prefer that; but also because, let's say you lose and you got really negative that whole race, or maybe even when you get into office and you were really negative the whole time, there's sort of negative outcomes that you produce because of that. 

For instance, people have run for office and got really negative and they go back into the community after they lose and they're just like, they're embarrassed.  Like they ruined their entire life and all their credibility and their image because they got so negative in that campaign.

Peter McCormack: I think this is one of Trump's issues.  I think he campaigned very negatively.

Dennis Porter: A lot of people, that's how they felt.  And when he got into office, you could say that that caused him some trouble.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think so.  I mean, the stunts he pulled, you know, the bringing out the, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it wasn't something to do with people who'd made accusations against Bill Clinton, he had them on the front row of the debate against Hillary or something along those lines.  It's not the decorum I would expect of a leader.  And I think what happened was, the opposition therefore followed the same negative campaigning, and so all you heard about is all these negative things about both people, what they weren't good at.  And so, I think the way that harmed Trump is, whatever Democrat voters think of Trump, there are a large amount of people here in the US who support him.  But when you get over into Europe, you get into the UK, everyone pretty much thinks he's a moron. 

I mean, I even remember at Christmas having a huge row with my brother about Trump.  I was like, "Yeah, but have you considered this?  Have you looked at his policies on reforming the prison system?"  You know, you can't even get to that point where you're trying to have these sensible discussions about the good things he stands for, the things he's wise about or smart about, because they've just got such a negative view.  So, I just don't like that negative campaigning. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean, I agree.

Peter McCormack: I think it's bad for everyone.

Dennis Porter: I also don't like it either. 

Peter McCormack: But you did it! 

Dennis Porter: It was a very short period in my life.  I would say it was my first job in the political space. 

Peter McCormack: What was that stuff we dug up on Dennis?

Dennis Porter: Got to go find it, got to look it up.  You can hire me to do it, I'm really good at it!  So, one of the things I think is important when you're running for office is knowing what the tools are that are available to you.  You don't necessarily use all of them, but you should be ready if necessary to use them.  It's almost like you're in a battle and you don't want to be the guy that runs negatively, but to some extent there are points when if you are getting attacked, you might want to utilise that tool in order to kind of match the other person.  Typically, once they start getting into the mud, if you don't find a way to hit back and do it tactically, we're not talking about making this...  

There's a clear difference I think that's important.  One is making stuff up, lying about your opponent.  I definitely think that that sort of behaviour is like abhorrent and that's not the type of work that I would do in the past.  But if someone says, "Hey, I voted in favour of this and this and this and this and that's why you should vote for me", it's like, well, if you're pinning your whole election on that in a debate, you might want to know that information that they didn't vote for those things, and they're just straight up lying to the American people.  That's not really like getting in the dirt, that's not slandering your opponent, that's just plainly pointing out facts that they are not being honest with the American public.  And it's good in a debate.  You could be like, you know, you get that information, you have it.  And then when they say again, "I did this, I voted for this and this and this", and you're like, "Actually, we have your vote tally right here and you did not vote for those issues". 

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's fair.

Dennis Porter: That's kind of more the approach of opposition research, not necessarily trying to find out whether they there was some like extramarital activity and exposing them for it.  I think that you should definitely keep family behaviour and that sort of thing out of elections.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Okay.  So, one of those tools, feels like one of those tools now is Bitcoin.  We talked about that, it's the cheat code.  And we noticed it about a year and a half ago.  We started to get regularly contacted by politicians, people who are running for Congress, who wanted to come on the podcast because they're Bitcoiners, and every interview would be the same, so we stopped doing them.  It's different if we got the opportunity to interview DeSantis or Kennedy, because these are real contenders.  But it just feels like, I mean currently every nominee that we're aware of DeSantis, Kennedy, Vivek Ramaswamy, if I get that correct, they're all pro-Bitcoin.

Dennis Porter: Or they say they are.

Peter McCormack: Or they say they are. 

Dennis Porter: Well, that's a really important point.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I feel like the real letdown was Eric Adams, who came out as massively pro-Bitcoin and then immediately took office in New York and kind of did a 180, maybe a 170, 160.

Dennis Porter: You can usually tell when people are just using what you call lip service in politics.  I mean actually, from a very early stage, this is about two-and-a-half years ago, two years ago, when I started trying to help move or grease the tracks for the political space with Bitcoin, and get more politicians in and help them understand Bitcoin and help them to support it, I knew that that we would start to travel on a very interesting trajectory.  And along that trajectory, I wanted to make sure that bitcoiners knew how important it was to demand more out of their elected officials. 

As an example, there are many politicians who target varying groups in the world, in the space, varying voting blocs, whether they be the black community, whether it be the LGBT community, it could be the conservatives, it could be the evangelicals, whatever; there's all sorts of different voting blocs out there.  And what will happen oftentimes is you'll have elected officials who will play lip service.  They will say, "Oh, this, I support you", they'll use the right language, there's usually a language that every voting bloc has.  You know, in the Bitcoin community, we have all sorts of different languages, proof of work, HODL, NGU, right?  Like these are words that probably a bunch of people listening right now are like, what the hell is he talking about?  But if you are in Bitcoin, you understand those words like this.  So, if you get good at saying those words and speaking the right way, it's very easy to convince a community to support you. 

In the Bitcoin space, it started off with just a politician putting #Bitcoin in their bio.  A thousand tweets.  You know, someone would take a photo of it, screenshot, put it on Twitter.  "Oh my gosh, this candidate running for office", not even an elected official, "this candidate running for office, they're pro-Bitcoin, how amazing".  Well, that's great, but that's kind of a form of lip service, and that's why I wanted to make sure that bitcoiners know to constantly demand more out of people that do use the Bitcoin cheat code.  So, we have transitioned from #Bitcoin to tweeting about Bitcoin, where politicians will tweet about it, boom, that blows up.  And that would be candidates.  Now we have learned, when someone's running, "Oh, it's just a candidate, we shouldn't even pay attention to them.  That's not enough for us now". 

Then it was introducing policy, we saw all sorts of policy introductions occur, "Oh my gosh, pro-Bitcoin bill", boom, taking off.  And then people realised, "Oh, it's just an introduction, it doesn't mean anything, it's not a law, nothing's happened".  And the bitcoiners are constantly demanding more.  And now we're starting to see that it's not good enough just to have #Bitcoin, it's not good enough to tweet about Bitcoin, it's not good enough to be talking about Bitcoin publicly; you need to introduce policy and pass policy in order to get the support of the Bitcoin community, which I think that's really important, because what's the ultimate goal of any sort of political effort?  It's to pass policy, because if you haven't actually had a real world impact, then what's the point?  It's just all lip service. 

Peter McCormack: And to those bitcoiners who have previously said, "Ignore the politicians, they don't matter, just keep building, forget about it", what do you say to that?  Because, me and Danny have talked about this, we talked about it months ago and we were like, "Fair play to Dennis.  Dennis is having real-world impact".  I remember seeing Pierre Rochard retweet something that you'd done.  Pierre is a hard nut to crack and when you've earned Pierre's respect, you've obviously done something highly credible, and we were there.  We knew you previously as somebody who was doing a podcast, we were like, "Oh here we go, another upstart!" 

Dennis Porter: "Another challenger, let's squash this one!" 

Peter McCormack: "Another rascal coming at us!"  But no, you and I have always taken the piss out of each other.  But we've always liked you, but you've started to have some material impact.  We're like, "Fair play.  This is actually impressive".  So, that's me, that's my perception.  I do think you should engage with politicians, I do think we should try and help them understand so they don't write bad policy.  But other people think, "Just ignore them".

Dennis Porter: Yeah, that's not the right approach at all, in my opinion.  I think it's really important to engage politically.  Just look at some examples, like for instance in El Salvador.  None of that would be happening if there wasn't sort of some sort of political effort.  I think people are just maybe turned off to the word "politics" and "political" and "politician".  It's oftentimes why you hear me say things like "policymaker", "lawmaker", "elected official" instead of those words, because they seem to be kind of --

Peter McCormack: Cursed. 

Dennis Porter: They are cursed words.  If you want your country, if you want your state and you want your city and you want your community and you want your family to benefit from Bitcoin, then you should want the whole world to move the right direction on Bitcoin, and that would include the place that you live.  So, if you are thinking, " I wish where I lived was better for Bitcoin", you have to engage politically, you have to be participating in the political system.  And I would challenge people who say that we should ignore politics, who also are supportive of the Constitution, to think about how politically engaged those founding fathers were. 

The founding fathers were extremely politically engaged.  I don't think you could possibly be more politically engaged than they were at that point in history.  And they went on and they fought for independence and ten years later, the United States was free.  It only took a decade to go from being under the thumb of the king to being a wholly free and independent nation. 

Peter McCormack: I mean, I thought you were disrespectful to our king.  You know, we raised you, we fed you, we gave you tea. 

Dennis Porter: That's right!

Peter McCormack: And, what did you do to us? 

Dennis Porter: We poured that tea right in the harbour. 

Peter McCormack: You threw it right into the Boston Harbour. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: And do you know what?  Fuck you guys!

Dennis Porter: Hey, at least we're good allies now.

Peter McCormack: We are good allies.  And do you know what, in fairness, you got rid of us for a 2% tea tax and you've kept your tax rates low, especially in California.

Dennis Porter: They're super low, yeah.  I'm from Portland, Oregon.  We have really, really low taxes.  It's the best taxes in the whole country. 

Peter McCormack: Is that true? 

Dennis Porter: No. 

Peter McCormack: Is it the worst? 

Dennis Porter: It's not as bad as California.  It's pretty high though.  I would say also on the thing of tax, I'm not anti-tax.  Just, there's a pretty significant misallocation of capital in government when it comes to --

Peter McCormack: Everything.

Dennis Porter: -- programmes, which is to be expected kind of.  The price for making sure stuff gets done no matter what is that it's expensive. 

Peter McCormack: I mean, again, I agree with you, I think we should engage with politicians.  I wish we had a Satoshi Action Fund in the UK because we don't...  Well, let's be fair to Freddie.  Do you know Freddie New? 

Dennis Porter: He's working on it.  I had a call with Freddie.  Seems like they've got some great...  He's got a background, he understands the system, so it seems like they're in a good position. 

Peter McCormack: I think we're lucky to have people like him and yourself doing this, but I agree we should be engaging.  We should be encouraging this, because we do not want bad policy, we do not want bad law, and you are making significant progress.  But can I just backtrack a second because you talk about voting blocs.  So, the bitcoiners are a significant voting bloc now.  And quite an interesting one is that I can imagine voting blocs are…  No, actually I think what I'm going to say is wrong, because you talked about like the Hispanic voting bloc, and they can swing I guess between Democrat and Republican. 

Dennis Porter: Oh yeah, absolutely.  Yeah, I mean President Abraham Lincoln was the president who freed the slaves, and he was Republican in the sense that he fought the Civil War and part of why the Civil War was fought, a pretty big reason was over slavery.  And now, the Democrats are the ones that have all of the black community supporting them.  So, people switch very aggressively, pretty regularly all the time. 

Peter McCormack: And so, the Bitcoin voting bloc is obviously an important voting bloc, but it seems to be, I know Kennedy, but he's certainly an oddball in certain ways, and I don't mean him, his personality, I mean in that he seems to be attractive to both Democrats and Republicans.  He seems towards the centre on certain issues.  But it seems to me that it's been much more on the side of the Republicans who've taken an interest in Bitcoin.  And I know we've seen a change on the Democrat side.  You've made some progress, you've been getting Jason's book out there to be read by people.  But historically, why do you think it's -- 

Dennis Porter: I heard it has a great forward! 

Peter McCormack: I think it's brilliant, the forward, personally!

Danny Knowles: Have you read it, because I thought ChatGPT did it?

Peter McCormack: Well, it was a mixture of ChatGPT.  So, I don't actually write anything anymore.  Everything I write, I get ChatGPT to structure it.

Dennis Porter: Of course.  What I do is actually, this is a really good trick, is you write it out, you take your first draft and you just do it.  Don't be super judgmental, don't care how it sounds.  Normally, you have to be really crafted and really go through and make sure it's balanced and everything is cohesive.  What I'll do is I'll write something and then I'll put it through the thing and give it a prompt and say, "Hey, spruce this up for me", because then it actually starts to understand your voice a little better.  Because if you just say, "Write this thing for me", it has none of your voice in it. 

Peter McCormack: That's interesting.  So I don't.  What I do is I say, "All right, I need to write a forward for a book, I want it to be 1,200 words long, I want the intro to be structured around this", so it might be a generic introduction to why Bitcoin is important to Democrat voters, "I don't want to go through the arguments, these are my arguments, and I want my conclusion to be structured like this".  And so, it's probably like a three- or four-paragraph prompt.  I get it and I take that, and then I rewrite that, because usually it's more than 50% to 60% wrong, but I like the structure.  It always seems to give me a very, very good structure.  And I'm like, "Okay, that's great, that is structurally correct". 

So, then I just rewrite it and then I put it through Grammarly to make sure my grammar and spelling is correct. 

Dennis Porter: Well, it'll do that too. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Grammarly, I think, does a better job. 

Dennis Porter: Okay.  

Peter McCormack: But I'm mainly using ChatGPT to give me structure, not to give me arguments.  I already knew my arguments I wanted to write in that forward.  I mean, there was one key argument, really.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I like AI.  I think the interesting thing is, it's going to get more and more sophisticated over a very short period of time.  I think it's overhyped right now, but in the sense that people are like, "Oh, it's going to change the world", I don't think it's there yet, but the thing is that it changes so rapidly that it probably will get closer to that sort of vision than what people had spoken about the internet.  In the beginning of the internet days, people were, "Oh my gosh, it's going to do all these amazing things", and it took like 20, 30 years for it to take place.  I think the AI curve will happen much faster.

Peter McCormack: I use it nearly every day.

Dennis Porter: That's what I heard you say on one of your shows recently.  I never listen to your show, but I heard that one!

Peter McCormack: No, I use it for, like I say, press releases, a policy.  We needed a policy for my football club; it wrote the entire policy.  I said, "Write a", what was it?  It was like, "a non-discrimination policy for a football club that follows the Football Association guidelines.  It literally wrote it within seconds. 

Dennis Porter: That's great. 

Peter McCormack: I'm now using it for design concepts.

Dennis Porter: We use it for research.

Peter McCormack: There you go.  Are you using it?

Danny Knowles: I think I've kind of stopped using it a little bit.  I think it's kind of fallen out of my habits.

Peter McCormack: Connor is using it.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, for editing, it's pretty good. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Connor's using it for editing.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, we use it.  So, one of the things that we did at Satoshi Action was when we were going through the process of trying to pass policy and law, we found that there was basically no research on Bitcoin mining.  There's some, but in comparison to other industries, there's not very much at all.  And so about four months ago, we launched Satoshi Action Education, which is our research arm.  And just fortuitously, simultaneously, a gentleman named Dr Murray Rudd happened to reach out to me just out of nowhere on Twitter, and on less than 300 followers, said just enough.  I read pretty much all my DMs.  I don't respond to all of them, because that would be insane, but I read most of them, even the ones that are in the garbage box.  I'll just quick check it, see if it -- I can tell really fast, because I've done it so many times.  I can tell quickly if it's scam or not. 

Dr Rudd was like, "Hey, I've seen your work, and I want to talk to you about research".  And so we got on a call, we started talking, and he came on as our science lead, science director for Satoshi Action Education pretty quickly.  And at the same time, the AI hadn't even been out yet, but he had already been playing around with very rudimentary kind of AI stuff.  And then it really started to take off, and now he's been using it full time.  I think, I mean I don't want to announce anything, but we've been doing some data crunching on one of the key-question exercises that we're working on right now, which is essentially an exercise to bring together policymakers, industry, and academia to determine what are the actual questions that we need to answer in the research world.  Because oftentimes, there's plenty of smart people who could go, "Oh, we need to answer this question, we need to answer that question", in the Bitcoin space.  But there are an infinite amount of researchers outside the Bitcoin space that might want to do good Bitcoin research, but there's no sort of guidepost or research agenda for them to look at and go, "Oh, that's what needs to be answered.  That's the place where we're going to have the most high impact". 

When it comes to research, researchers always want to have the highest impact possible because citations are really important to them.  You need more citations to grow your career and you need multiple papers with a bunch of different citations.  There's this thing called the h-index, you can look it up on Google Scholar.  Every single academic has a score and that tracks their citations.  And you want your citations to go up, but you also want your h-index to go up as well, and it's very hard to get your h-index to go up.  And so when you look for what kind of research you want to do, you want research that is going to be cited a lot. 

That's why we're doing this key question exercise, to put out that agenda so that researchers across the globe really can see what are the most important questions to be answered, so that when they actually go to their research and answer them, they'll be rewarded with citations and with career growth; because academics are not incentivised by money, they're incentivised by the growth of their careers in the academic sphere.  And money helps that, money is good to help them do their work, but it's only a very small part of what they really want, which is more citations and a higher impact score so that they can get brought into higher positions and get tenure and stuff like that.

So, going back to Satoshi Action Fund, have you outlined your goals?  Do you have a constitution or do you have, I don't know, a mission statement?  What is it? 

Dennis Porter: I would say that the shortest way to describe what we're trying to do is to change the narrative on Bitcoin mining. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, just mining? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean we do care a lot about Bitcoin, but we're very, very focused on Bitcoin mining. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, interesting, I didn't know that. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, it's a huge focus for us.  There's a couple of reasons why.  The main one I would say really is that about two years ago, two-and-a-half years ago, I was putting on my political hat and thinking, "Okay, where can we have the biggest potential impact in America, positive impact, what industry will have that, what part of Bitcoin will have that?" and I believe that that's Bitcoin mining.  And then also, simultaneously, I believe that industry will be the most attacked.  And that was two-and-a-half years ago, you could already kind of see that picking up. 

Peter McCormack: And if you get that right, if you win on the mining, you kind of, by virtue of that, you're going to win for Bitcoin anyway.  I assume a lot of the conversations, if they're about Bitcoin mining, you still have to talk about Bitcoin.  So, you're doing the entire job in one.

Dennis Porter: Yes, but also the reason why we focus on Bitcoin mining is because it has something to offer that policymakers understand right now.  So, if you try to pitch someone Bitcoin, what are you going to say?  Why does the United States really need Bitcoin? 

Peter McCormack: That's a good question. 

Dennis Porter: What's the go-to answer?  Like, what is Bitcoin going to replace? 

Peter McCormack: The government!

Dennis Porter: Or the dollar.  You're always on this rabbit hole of, "Oh actually, it's going to get rid of the dollar".  I don't think personally, I don't think that Bitcoin is going to get rid of the dollar anytime soon, if ever, but that's usually they're like, "Well, because your currency sucks".  Well to be honest, the United States currency really doesn't suck that bad.  It's the best fiat currency we've ever had pretty much in human history.  And I know that it's going through a lot of trouble right now, but it's still way better than Argentina or Zimbabwe, where they are dealing with multi-triple digit inflation, right?  So, when you're pitching Bitcoin to a policymaker, like what are you actually selling them on?  "Maybe in 50 years, the dollar will go away".  That's not a really big winning pitch for people. 

So instead, what we focus on is Bitcoin mining, because I can say that Bitcoin mining can provide jobs, local investment, grid stability, environmental cleanup, and the ability to enhance green and renewable energy projects.  And there's not a policy maker on the planet who doesn't hear those things and go, "I want those things".

Peter McCormack: You've said that before a few times, haven't you?

Dennis Porter: Yeah, thousands of times. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's good though.  Can you talk me through any specific examples where you've gone into someone who really doesn't understand Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, anti-Bitcoin, have you fully flipped anyone?  They've gone, "Holy shit I didn't even know all this". 

Dennis Porter: We have not focused strategically on people that are enemies of Bitcoin mining. 

Peter McCormack: Okay. 

Dennis Porter: We focus on people who are in the middle and who are open to it.  So, I don't spend a lot of time trying to -- it's like, have you heard that saints and sinners, you ever heard of that before?  Or, there's the attractors or detractors, you ever heard of that? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Dennis Porter: Where it's like, you don't ever want to spend time going after your detractors because they're your haters, it will take a lot of work to convince them to be on your team.  So, what you want to do is --

Peter McCormack: Forget Elizabeth Warren.

Dennis Porter: Just let Elizabeth Warren do her thing, she's not really going to probably pass anything right now.  She gets to do some body damage in the social sphere by convincing people that Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment.  She's wrong, but that's what she's doing right now.  What you want to do is you want to spend time with attractors or people that are open or people that are in the middle, and you want to turn those people in the middle into attractors as quickly as possible.  And oftentimes what you can do is, if you build enough of a momentum around attractors and neutrals that you've pulled to attractors, if you build enough of a firewall, you can prevent the detractors from doing anything negative. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, so where have you had success with that then? 

Dennis Porter: So, for us, we started at the state level, so this is a really important part.  Everyone gets really focused on DC, for obvious reasons.  It's the political capital, political powerhouse of pretty much the entire world, definitely the United States.  So, it draws a lot of energy into itself, and it does a very good job, and I mean energy in the sense of attention.  They do a very good job of kind of forcing you to do that, because they'll do stuff that'll just destroy you overnight.  So, sometimes you are forced to pay attention. 

Fortunately, right now in the digital asset Bitcoin space, we are in an era where they care a lot more about market structure, securities, stable coins.  Those are the things that are being focused on in DC, and they're not really hyper-focused on Bitcoin mining.  You might hear Elizabeth Warren say something about it, you might hear a committee take place where they talk about Bitcoin mining, but there's no sort of large movement to change policy around Bitcoin mining.  But there is a lot with stablecoins with the SEC, CFTC, is it a commodity?  Is it a security?  That's the big conversation right now.  So, we're kind of under the radar in DC. 

So, in some senses, it's good to be there and educate, which we do.  I was just there handing out 700 Bitcoin books to every member of Congress in every single congressional office.  And I've done a briefing in DC before where I -- 

Peter McCormack: How?  How are you giving everyone a book?  Walk me through how you literally give everybody a book.

Dennis Porter: So, you get volunteers and you raise money online and you go and you walk through the entire building and hand them out. 

Peter McCormack: But how?  Like how do you know where everyone is? 

Dennis Porter: Well, the great thing about the American political system is it's very permissionless, so you can just walk in and go to every office. 

Peter McCormack: So, for every member of Congress, do they all have an office in what building? 

Dennis Porter: There's multiple buildings.  So you have, I believe, two Senate buildings, is that right?  And then three House buildings.  So, they're right around the Capitol, and they all connect with tunnels to the main Capitol too.  And so what book did you give them?  We had the Bitcoin Standard, we had Layered Money, and we also had a Progressive's case for Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  You didn't have a Republican's case for Bitcoin?!

Dennis Porter: We don't need that one right now.

Peter McCormack: You don't need that one.  That's a Bitcoin Standard!

Dennis Porter: That's basically right!  That's right, a lot of Republicans, especially Republican leaders, are talking enough about Bitcoin right now that I don't think that we need to spend time.

Peter McCormack: So, you knock on the door and you say, "Hey, I've got a book for you".  And are you really talking to staffers, or do you actually meet the members of Congress? 

Dennis Porter: Both.

Peter McCormack: Both, okay.

Dennis Porter: And to be honest, staffers are probably the most important.  This is one thing that people, and I think someone has said this on your show before, that staffers actually run the world.  So, the world is actually run by a bunch of 20- to 35-year old staffers that work in these offices because as an elected official, especially let's say like a Senator, you don't have time to research and study every single little bit of what's out there.  I mean, you have to worry about the border, the war, you have to worry about healthcare, you have to worry about the shutdowns.  There's this Bitcoin thing, you're like, "All right, that's cool".  But unless you're a Lummis, your office is probably not going to spend, or you as an individual are probably not going to spend a whole lot of time studying and researching it. 

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I interviewed Cruz, it felt like he had.  He blew my mind about how much he knew about Bitcoin.

Dennis Porter: Cruz is interesting.  I think he's one of those people that he definitely has people on his team that -- so, this is again, this is the point I'm trying to make.  His staff, his team came to him and educated him on it.  So, he had really good staff that was able to do that.  And that's why it's really important to go in and educate the staff on the value of Bitcoin, the technology.  Because what they will do is they'll turn around and they'll tell the Senator, "Hey, you should take a look at this.  This is really good".

Peter McCormack: And when you're handing out the books, is it just one book each and you're deciding which one's best for each office?

Dennis Porter: Yeah, generally speaking, so some offices we gave two books to.  We had to be careful because there's a $50 gifting limit on the Senate side.  We just did that arbitrarily across the whole thing.  So, there's gifting limits for pretty much anything that you give to public officials.  On the House side, technically, there's no sort of price limit on books if they're considered educational, but we just considered, "Let's be strict instead of loose with this rule, and let's stick to the $50 limit".  So, we only gave two books to everyone, no matter what, to make sure that we were really, really far below that.  Most people just got the Bitcoin Standard, but if we went to Democrat offices, we would give them a Progressive's Case.  And in some instances, we had some people go and give out all the Bitcoin Standards, and then someone else came back later and gave a Progressive's Case to make sure that we were really saturating with that book.

Peter McCormack: And when you're knocking on the door, are you literally knocking on the door and someone's going, "Oh, hi, who the hell are you?"  And you're like, "I want to give you a book".

Dennis Porter: You can knock, you can just walk in. 

Peter McCormack: You just walk in. 

Dennis Porter: It's a big office, like you'll walk in, it's a big office.  There's someone right at the front that's like, "Hey, how can I help you?"

Peter McCormack: And you're like, "I want to give you a book and tell you about Bitcoin and why it's important, why you should care about it".

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean, so if you haven't set up a meeting, which we did set up a bunch of meetings where we actually went in and were like, "Hey, we're here to give a book and we want to sit down with so-and-so that we agreed to meet with", whether in some cases that was an elected official, in other cases, it was just the lead person.  This is a really interesting part.  Most offices have someone who's dedicated to their digital assets now.

Peter McCormack: Oh, wow!  Okay.  I did not know that.

Dennis Porter: They might be strictly dedicated or it might be part of their portfolio.  Staffers will be assigned a specific portfolio of work.  So, they might do banking, or they might do SEC stuff, or they might do financial stuff, they might do agriculture, they might do transportation, whatever; digital assets now is one.  There's nobody's like, people are like, "Well, why don't they have a Bitcoin person?"  It's like, they don't really differentiate too heavily in DC.  That's one thing that people need to kind of understand that it probably, will likely not ever happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they have the right policy for all of it.

Dennis Porter: Yes, and also, I don't think that stablecoins are going anywhere.  That's considered to be a digital asset.  Are we going to have our -- I don't know what's going to survive.  Listen, I'm Bitcoin only, but I don't know what else is going to survive.  But if there's anything more than Bitcoin, it's now officially digital assets. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, and so when you're knocking on the door and you're having the conversations, you're way beyond the point of, "What is Bitcoin?  Explain it to me".  Everyone knows about it, it exists. 

Dennis Porter: Oh yeah, everybody knows about it in DC. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and are you pleasantly surprised about how much they know about it sometimes? 

Dennis Porter: There are some times we'll go into offices and we'll be really surprised.  We'll be like, "Oh wow, they really know a lot.  That's awesome", and we have a great conversation.  We spoke with a rep from Florida recently, a staffer from that office, and he was particularly very interested in Bitcoin mining and talked about how his boss was leaning into energy and how they were going to do an op-ed on nuclear and how he's super supportive of nuclear energy.  And so, you do have instances like that.  The worst case scenario is you'll go in, you'll be like, "Hey, I'm here to hand off this book.  Thank you so much.  Have you had an opportunity to learn about Bitcoin yet?"  And they're just like, "Yeah, thank you so much.  Bye".  Like, you will get that.  But it's all about like fishing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dennis Porter: So, whenever you go and do these kinds of mass meetings or mass drop-offs, you are fishing for the person that is an attractor, but you don't know who they are yet.  So, you look, you're out there looking.  And we've had this happen multiple times where we found this is a very good strategy.  Oftentimes, people won't pursue this strategy because it's a lot of work to set up 20 volunteers to do 700 books and raise $10,000 online through Geyser to do that, which was really cool.  We used the Geyser Lightning fundraising software for the first time ever, so that was cool.  Also, I got to give a shoutout to the Orange Pill app guys because they were the ones that instigated the whole thing with Saifedean.

Peter McCormack: Nice.  I love those guys.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, they wanted Saifedean on the app, so they bought his appearance on the app by saying, "Hey, we'll send a book to everyone in DC if you come on the app" and then about halfway through raising the money, I was like, "Hey, why don't we just do this in person?"  So, I've got to give them a shoutout, because it would not have happened without them.

Peter McCormack: Matteo, yeah.

Dennis Porter: And Brian, Brian De Mint. 

Peter McCormack: I've only spoke with Matteo.  They sponsor the football team now. 

Dennis Porter: They're cool guys.  I like it. 

Peter McCormack: It's a cool app.

Dennis Porter: It is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dennis Porter: They had our event on there for that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Okay, so, you go fishing, you catch a good fish, what now; what's your goal; what's your objective?  Are you just building allies?  What's a win?

Dennis Porter: So, in the case of DC, so we're not trying to lobby for policy right now.  Our focus is on trying to make sure that we get them involved in the key-question exercise that we're pursuing, the one I mentioned to you earlier.  So, the key-questions exercise is really to, like as I mentioned, to create a research agenda for Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.  And you want them to participate in that process because what will happen is, as you're doing the research, you can get potentially two things to happen: they might actually get involved in writing a paper and become a co-author; but the real impact that you want to have is that they will absorb the research that you're doing and use it to influence policy decisions, for instance, what they want to write and talk about in an OSTP report or an EPA report, or when they want to craft what is acceptably accepted for any sort of green energy tax credits.  You want to make sure that Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining is included in that. 

So, the end game is impact policy, but we need to have those relationships and then get them plugged into what we're doing, and for them to see the work that's going on, and then use that work and that research to influence public policy. 

Peter McCormack: So, at the moment, you're really just kind of, it's like you say, fishing and scattergun approach.  You're just trying to move the needle forward with as many people as possible.  But when the time comes, hopefully you will have built enough allies where if you do want to get into policy, you know the support will be there.

Dennis Porter: That's part of it.  Fortunately, like I said, we're really focused on CFTC, SEC market structure work right now in DC.  In the long run, though, there will definitely be conversations that we want to influence as it pertains to Bitcoin mining, particularly energy conversations.  You know, we really want to see FERC start to understand Bitcoin mining as a demand response resource.  Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, they're the ones that oversee all of the RTOs and ISOs in the country.  So, you've talked to-

Peter McCormack: RTOs, ISOs, come on, man.

Dennis Porter: You've talked to Sean Connell a lot about this.  So, there are seven RTOs and ISOs, Regional Transmission Organisation, Independent System Organisation, and they, or is it operator?  Either way, they oversee the grid.  So, ERCOT is an RTO, and they oversee the grid in Texas, but you have seven of them all over the whole country.  Not all of the country is inside of an RTO or an ISO, which is an important link back to the fact that we do state work, which we should probably talk about because it's the majority of our work.  But FERC oversees six out of those seven.  The only one they don't oversee is ERCOT.  And that's really important because ERCOT has kind of stood up as this place where it's like a testbed for Bitcoin mining.  But that would be less likely to take place if it was underneath FERC.  So, FERC governs the other ones. 

Peter McCormack: So, what are the primary incentives for these offices that you're talking to?  Where are you going to win them; where are you going to convert them?

Dennis Porter: The primary objective for us and where we think we're going to win them is that Bitcoin mining is an important piece of energy infrastructure that can aid in the energy transition. 

Peter McCormack: And that is working then? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean we're in the beginning phases of that conversation for a lot of offices. 

Peter McCormack: So, you must have -- because it is that kind of wow moment where you really start to understand what's happening with the grid, say with ERCOT.  We saw that amazing graph, I think it was Sean Connell as well, who showed us where was the demand response.  And the graph was, once the price hits a certain point, the miners are switching off automatically.  I think Lee Bratcher actually said to us, he said, "It worked so perfectly that the grid was actually panicking because the miners hadn't switched off in time, but they needed to in the future".  But actually, they switched off at the exact time they needed them.  But they wanted them to almost switch off ahead of time because they were so panicked.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, well, there's not really many resources that can respond like Bitcoin mining, so they get nervous.  They're like, "Aren't you going to respond yet?"  They're like, "Well, we don't need to yet".  And they're like, "Well, you're getting really close.  You should do it".

Peter McCormack: But it's a real wow moment when you start to see this, and you start to understand the role this plays.  And I think it's one of the coolest things that's come out of Bitcoin.  Yeah, here we go.  So, this is the chart. 

Dennis Porter: This chart is actually in our -- so we do a briefing.  We have a 40- to 50-minute presentation that we do for staffers and elected officials, and we use a lot of Lancium charts in there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and so are you kind of blowing their minds when you explain this issue; are they like, "We had no idea?" 

Dennis Porter: It's more like a cautious scepticism because they're just like, "Okay".  So, the thing is that they've been trying to figure out how to do this for a long time.  People in the energy world have been trying to figure out how to create more flexible load on the grid.  If you go to any utility right now in the entire country and you ask them what is one of the most important types of loads that you want to bring on to your grid, and they're going to tell you it's flexible load.  But the problem is, nobody wants to shut off their power, right?  So, how do you bring in more flexible load? 

Well, one of the main ideas right now is to create flexibility at the residential level, where you'll have a smart water heater, you'll have a smart thermostat, and whatever, you sign up for the programme, of course it's opt-in, we hope, for now, you opt into these programmes and when they send a signal, they can shut down or moderate down your air conditioner or moderate down your heater, or whatever it is that you've that you've signed up for.  The problem with those sorts of resources is that on an individual basis, it's not a lot of power; on a whole, it's a lot.  If you have a whole city that's signed up, that's quite a bit of power.  But the response rates are low, and they actually diminish as you get further into an emergency situation.

Peter McCormack: Also, you don't really want some centralised entity powering down your air con.

Dennis Porter: And we found that that's true, that there's a very rapid breakdown on how many people will stay in the programme, depending on how long the response goes on.  So, let's say Texas, you have Texas, you have ERCOT, winter storm Elliott came through and the grid is going to call out for people to turn their power down.  Well, it's a winter storm, it's an emergency, you're trying to stay alive, you're not going to keep your heat off for more than a little bit of time.  What happens that first day, you're like, "I'm okay on the first day", get into the second day, third day, you're not responding anymore.  You're like, "I'm opting out of this programme".  Where with the Bitcoin miners, it's 96+% we saw during winter storm Elliott, which is extremely high response rate and it's a lot of power. 

Peter McCormack: And there's no other load like it. 

Dennis Porter: Batteries can do some of the same thing, but there's a limitation because you can only absorb and distribute so much power.  One really interesting thing that happened to me at one point, and this is when I realised that we're on the right track, is I got a former FERC economist to get on the phone with me.  He had just retired.  Oftentimes, when you retire from government, you're looking for consulting jobs, so they will start to take calls when they retire, because they might want to get a consulting gig out of it.  I didn't realise that until after I'd done that a few times to people who were retiring.  Every time they were like, "By the way, I'm consulting now".  I was like, "Oh, that's why you're taking the call".

Peter McCormack: Another cheat code.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, another cheat code.  So, got on the phone with a former FERC economist, spent 20 plus years at FERC.  They have orders, FERC puts out an order.  Same with utilities, they're all called orders.  It's not a law, it's not an act, it's an order, once it gets signed and put into -- I don't know if you call it a law.  It's like, once it gets put into effect.  So, at FERC, a lot of the laws around demand response are generated through FERC.  For instance, "You cannot force someone to participate in demand response without just compensation", that's a FERC order.  So, you can't be like, "Hey, you have to participate in demand response, but we're not going to pay you for it". 

So, the guy that was the brainchild and was the main guy behind all of that, he had retired, and so I got him on a call, and I said, "Hey, you heard about Bitcoin mining?"  He's like, "I have heard about Bitcoin mining".  And I said, "Did you know that it's really a good demand response resource?"  And he's like, "I've heard stories".  He's like, "Let me ask you three questions, though, about Bitcoin mining, and I'll tell you if I think it's a good demand response resource".  He said, "Does it use a lot of power?"  I said, "Yeah, it uses a lot of power".  Then he said, "Does it want to be on all the time, if given the opportunity?"  And I said, "Yeah, wants to be on all the time, 24/7 running, if possible".  He said, "But then simultaneously, most importantly, I can shut it down whenever I want?"  I said, "Yeah, it's extremely flexible.  You can shut it down at any time and for any length".  And he said, "If what you're saying is true, then Bitcoin mining is the best demand response resource on the planet".

Peter McCormack: Well, this is what Sean Connell said to us, didn't he?  He said, I can't remember what it was, wasn't there something like a report or something that said, "This is the requirement we have for demand response", and Bitcoin mining was the only service that could fulfil all the requirements. 

Danny Knowles: It ticked every box, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Where did that come from?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember exactly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there was like some kind of, it might have been FERC, or somebody, who'd written what they need from demand response.

Dennis Porter: If you look at what they need from demand response, it's literally like they're describing Bitcoin mining. 

Peter McCormack: So, we have this perfect answer that we have to just get around people's pre-built biases.  We've got to get around that, which I guess you're doing. 

Dennis Porter: That's one of our main objectives is education on Bitcoin mining.  Yeah, this is it.  We use this one too.  I asked Sean if I could use them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so this is the chart that Danny's just put up, "Demand Response - Industrial Sector Application: Manufacturing Processes for Steel, Cement and Bitcoin Mining".  Yeah, I mean you're just going to have to go on the YouTube and look at this chart.

Danny Knowles: We'll put it in the show notes too.  But a key thing seems to be the unlimited hours; that's one of the things it can do.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, "Steel Plant - up to 96% Low Reduction", but can only do up to two hours.  That's because it destroys the production of steel, right?

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  One of the things that's missing from this sort of overview of Bitcoin mining too is not just that it is the amount of energy that can go back to the grid, like as a percentage, or how long, it's also the programmatic ability of it.  So, if you shut down the melt shop, let's say it's 10 MW, you're shutting the whole thing down, you're not shutting it down programmatically.  So, with Bitcoin mining, because each machine is roughly 3.5 kW, you can shut down a percentage, an exact percentage.  So, you can laser focus in on not just demand response, but this is really important for frequency regulation as well.

Peter McCormack: I mean, the great thing about this chart, you look at steel plants, right?  You close them for up to two hours, you close down the mill shop, and then you've got all this other stuff that it impacts, the continuous casting, the hot rolling mills, the profiling, etc, and the same with the cement mill.  You go into the Bitcoin mining, it's like unlimited hours and you're closing down SHA-256 hashing; that's all you're closing down.  You have to see this chart.  I encourage anyone listening to go onto your -- Danny, can we stick it in the show notes?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, definitely.  Why would it be only 97% of peak load reduction?  That's what I don't understand.

Dennis Porter: I had talked to someone about that before, and the basic premise was that there are other things going on, other operations going on where you can't shut it down 100% of the way, all the way down.  The mining machines themselves as individual units, pretty much you can shut them all the way down, but it's like the motherboards stay on, or something like that. 

Danny Knowles: Oh, I see.

Dennis Porter: I don't remember the exact answer that I was being -- but there was some reason why it can't go all the way to 100%. 

Peter McCormack: Pretty compelling.  So, you sit down with people you show them this and what do they say next? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, they're pretty blown away.  So, this is why we need to do more research, because they want evidence to back it up.

Peter McCormack: Then how much have you got from ERCOT; do we have the perfect case study?  Because there's also kind of, and I can't tell if it's FUD, but there's also mixed things that come out of Texas.

Dennis Porter: So, you'll hear that anywhere.  So, when I talk to people about ERCOT, immediately they kind of, "Oh, ERCOT", like any energy professional, because ERCOT is kind of a mess in some ways, but it's good and it's bad.  The bad is that they are like a giant microgrid, right?  But that's kind of forced them -- that causes bad things to happen, but it's also forced them to innovate a lot.  So, that's why they are nationwide leaders on demand response and frequency regulation and then on grid telemetry, which is basically the measurement of what's going on, on the grid.  The amount of data that they have and the amount of programmes they have far out exceeds anywhere else in the United States by quite a bit.  And it's because they are forced to have to do that because of how kind of shitty it is there.

Peter McCormack: Is there any other demand response happening in any other parts of the grid now? 

Dennis Porter: Outside of Texas? 

Peter McCormack: Outside of Texas.

Dennis Porter: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because we only hear of Texas, or I only have heard of Texas, but what else is happening?  Is it little test projects or is it like serious parts now?

Dennis Porter: So, this is an important caveat into state work.  So, the majority of energy policy takes place at the state level.  That's part of the reason why Satoshi Action Fund is highly focused on the states; not only because we feel that there's a lever there of bottom-up grassroots ability to impact policy that can't be thwarted by DC, but also because almost all energy policy occurs at the state level.  So, any kind of demand response, any sort of shifts when it comes to utility regulation, are all done through the state; the decision of whether or not to opt into an RTO or an ISO occurs at the state level; all of that is the state policy makers.  And so there are plenty of states that have demand response.  They've opted in, they've decided to create those programmes through their public utility commission or public service commission. 

Those public utility commissioners, public service commissioners are the ones that oversee everything that goes on in that state.  So, let's say like even Texas has one, but let's say in the state of Oregon, for instance, you have the public utility commissioners and they're appointed by the governor there.  Some states elect them, nine states do, which is a very interesting area for us that we're looking into seeing if we can get folks elected to those positions that are that are favourable towards Bitcoin.  But anytime you want to change anything with regards to power in that state, you have to go through that.  You can use the legislator.  You can say, "Hey, state legislators, force the Public Utility Commission to do this thing", and that can happen.  But you don't always want to go that route.  You usually want to go work with -- if you want to change to happen, a positive one, you want to go work with the utility through the Public Utility Commission to let them do something.  We found out really quickly that utilities don't like being forced to do anything by the legislator. 

A funny story.  When we went into one state, we realised there was some backlash against one of our pieces of policy.  And so we decided to put it on the backburner and not introduce it anymore.  Well, when we went into a different state, we accidentally got introduced.  The communication didn't occur properly to nix it and it still got introduced.  Well, that really pissed off all of the local utilities because it was basically forcing them to -- a new programme to be created that they found was direct competition to their business model.  And so they went like all in on trying to push back on us.  And at one point we even had to sit down with all seven of the lobbyists from all the local utilities and we had to convince them that we're not here to kill them or mess with them, like it was an accident, we're sorry.  But they didn't believe us and they killed every single piece of policy that we tried to push in that state.

Peter McCormack: So, where have you had the wins?  Where are your biggest wins?

Dennis Porter: Yeah, biggest wins for us are Missouri, excuse me, Arkansas and Montana.  I say Missouri because we came razor close to getting a third win there.  We passed our Right to Mine Bill into law in Montana and in Arkansas.  Arkansas is the cleanest version.  Rep McClure there, he introduced and passed that policy.  We actually introduced and passed that policy in one week, which is probably a world record.  We all need to thank Eric Peterson, our Policy Director, for that.

Peter McCormack: Why did it move so quick?  Why did they suddenly get it?

Dennis Porter: You know, I personally wasn't on the ground floor for that one. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dennis Porter: That was why I say Eric Peterson, he needs a big round of applause, because he was working very actively in the state.  Sometimes things just move like that.  That's the great thing about the state level is, let's be clear, there was a ton of work done before the introduction of the passage, but it was close to the end of the session.  And so it was kind of like, we got to do or die right now.  Introduced, committee, flipped to the other side, committee, voted on the House and Senate, passed to the Governor, all within one week.  Because it was so close to the deadline that it had to be super-fast.

Peter McCormack: And Right to Mine, just what does that mean?  And I know it's kind of obvious using the words "Right to Mine", but what protection does the legislation give?

Dennis Porter: So, it protects against mostly any sort of discriminatory practices that we've seen taking place across the country at the state level.

Peter McCormack: Oh, levy taxes on Bitcoin miners.

Dennis Porter: So, specifically, the Right to Mine Bill protects from any sort of discriminatory zoning changes.  We saw that happen in Montana, where in Missoula County, they ended up driving a Bitcoin miner, a $20 million operation into bankruptcy because they changed the zoning laws around where that miner was located.  What happened was, so Missoula, they have some people there inside the county board there that did not like Bitcoin mining and they viewed it as a climate emergency to get rid of it.  So, they called an emergency meeting and then they changed zoning laws so that the miner couldn't continue to operate.  And that's a form of discrimination that we made illegal in the state of Montana and in Arkansas. 

Peter McCormack: You mentioned there are other parts of the grid that are now using demand response, where else?  Like I say, I only hear of ERCOT.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, and just to be clear, there are multiple forms of discrimination we outlawed in states.  If people want to go look at the policy, we have it up on our website.  It gets pretty nerdy, but yeah, it's just rate discrimination, zoning changes, noise complaint, frivolous noise complaints, and we also exempted Bitcoin miners from money transmitter licences as well. 

Georgia is a really good place.  They have a very good demand -- they have some, I want to call it demand response.  They have the 12 Coincident Peaks programme there, which essentially says that every single time, every month, we're going to measure when there's the most demand on the grid.  And whatever percentage of energy you're using at that time, or strain that you're putting on the grid, that will impact how much you pay for energy for the whole year.  And so, what you want to do is you want to be able to figure out when those moments are and turn off, so that you don't have your transmission costs go up through the roof.  There is demand response, more or less in some version of it, in a lot of states.  

Like in Oregon, we have a residential demand response.  So, they have the ability for smart water heaters, thermostats to participate.  Yeah, I would say there's -- I'd have to go look at the map again.  Voltus has a really good map of where that industrial load demand response programmes are at.  But I believe there's about nine or ten states that have pretty significant demand response programmes. 

Peter McCormack: That's kind of insane, really, now.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, and Voltus is a really interesting company, because they're not even a Bitcoin miner, but I've spoken with some people at their company and all they do is demand response.  They just help people get in and participate in those sorts of programmes.  I don't know what their revenue model exactly is and how they make money off that, but they said almost all their largest customers are Bitcoin miners.

Peter McCormack: So, a couple of things that makes me think of is that, is there enough, does the Bitcoin Network have enough available capacity to support every part of the grid to be able to use demand response; and when I say that, are there enough ASICs available, is there enough infrastructure, I know you can get there, and can enough of them make enough money off it to make it?  Because it's a great demand response tool as long as the miners can profitably mine.  And then secondly I think, well, if America as a country adopts this nationwide as a demand response for every part of the grid, are we centralising mining into the US?

Dennis Porter: That second question is highly debatable.  I think the United States, out of any country, is probably the most well-positioned to absorb the largest percentage of hashrate because of our governance structure, because of the ability for states to kind of say, "We're not going to do that" to the US Government.  An example would be like marijuana policy.  So, it's a federal crime to possess, distribute, grow, sell marijuana.  And yet at the state level, you have almost 75% of the country that's got pro-marijuana legislation on the books.  Started in 2000, and this is a model that we actually follow through Satoshi Action. 

In 2010, a new wave of pro-marijuana advocacy started taking place, and they really focused at the state level, and they focused in on what are the benefits of the marijuana industry, not of the plant itself.  There was the medical conversation was taking place, but that wasn't the driving force.  The driving force was increased tax revenue, more jobs, increased property prices, and lower crime.  And that pitch worked in two states first.

Peter McCormack: Colorado?

Dennis Porter: And Washington.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dennis Porter: 2012, they passed pro-marijuana legislation on the books.  And I think it was not just medical marijuana, but what do you call that?

Danny Knowles: Recreational.

Dennis Porter: Recreational marijuana.

Peter McCormack: Stoners.

Dennis Porter: That's right.  But stoners got to smoke weed for the first time, not because it was like, "Oh, this should be my right.  I should be able to do this.  I should be able to put it in my body what I want", but it was because of advocacy groups that went out and said, "Taxes, jobs, lower crime, higher property value".  So, that worked in those two states, and then it spread rapidly across the entire country.  And now even states like Texas are passed, or I think they did pass or about to pass pro-marijuana legislation, and that's the same model we follow at Satoshi Action.  So, we go around, we say, "This can create jobs, local investment, grid stability, environmental cleanup and the ability to enhance green and renewable energy projects".

Peter McCormack: We saw this in Texas when I went out and made my film, went out to Rockwell, met the mayor. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, and they love it.  So, that's why local is so much better because they actually still care about producing results.  Like DC, not only, I wouldn't say they don't care, I just would say the incentives are not properly set up to produce results.  And the incentives to produce results get diminished as time goes on.  One of the driving factors of that is that they have the unlimited money printer, so they can just print anytime they need to, they don't have to worry about whether or not they can afford it, they can just push a button and print more money. 

The other one, which is really interesting, that I became more aware of recently, is that back in the 1990s, there was a big push to get rid of pork barrel spending in the United States. 

Peter McCormack: What's that? 

Dennis Porter: Pork barrel spending, also called ear tag, dog ear spending, is like they would just essentially add random stuff in.  Like, "Oh, you want to school in your district?  All right, I'll just write that in here, I'll just write random stuff in.  Oh, you want a new stadium?  Let's write a special little card out for you right here".  You could basically bribe other elected officials to vote for your bill through this system.  You could just write in whatever they want, "Oh, what do you want?" 

Peter McCormack: "Sign my bill, I'll give you some shit". 

Dennis Porter: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: But that's the whole house of cards, backdoor, horse trading thing that feels very different from UK politics. 

Dennis Porter: You can still do it too, to some extent, it's just way more limited.  But you would think offhand, that seems bad.  We should get rid of pork barrel spending; that seems like a corrupt system.  But the negative outcome of that has been that it's been almost impossible, it's made it very difficult to pass policy now in a bipartisan way because there's no incentive.

Peter McCormack: There's no bribes.

Dennis Porter: Sure.

Peter McCormack: But look, if the bribes are good, if it's a new school, a new hospital, great.

Dennis Porter: Listen, I'm not pro pork barrel spending, I'm just observing what's happened.  What's happened is that we got rid of it, and so now it's like, we can't get politicians to agree on anything.  But that same dynamic does not occur at the state level necessarily.  I wouldn't say there's unabated pork barrel spending, partly because they don't have an unlimited money printer.  So, now they have to focus on, "How do I get my constituency to keep voting for me?  I have to produce results.  How do I produce results?  I need to bring jobs.  I need to bring economic value.  I need to", whatever the thing they care about, "clean up the environment".  And those are the five things that we really hit on and that's why.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, when you sit back and look now, you consider Bitcoin in America, which always felt like something that they would eventually outlaw nationwide, it always felt like -- I was always surprised it had never been outlawed early on in the days of Bitcoin.  There was always this extent existential risk, "Yeah, they're just federally outlaw this, they'll just say you just can't use Bitcoin".  It feels like we're beyond that now.  But when you step back, where do you see Bitcoin is now when you look at it through like a regulatory lens? 

Dennis Porter: Well, I think we're in a great position.  We weren't aware of where -- we obviously can't predict the future.  So, two-and-a-half, three years ago, we had no idea where Bitcoin was going to land with the federal government and also the states.  I was one of those early people who said, "I reject the idea that the United States is going to ban Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining, and instead I believe that we can have a brighter future where the United States leads on Bitcoin", because a world where the United States leads on Bitcoin is a much better world.

Peter McCormack: Well it goes back, me and Danny has talked about this for years.  I think Balaji and Marty hit it on their show.  In a world of CBDCs, if America does CBDC, it's never going to be as good as China because they're better at control tech, they're better at surveillance tech, they're better at using surveillance tech to control their people.  You're not going to get away with that here.  You have too many guns, you got too many people who -- you've got a country that was born in freedom, right?  So, if you're going to beat them, beat them with freedom money.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I think that we should do as much as we possibly can to make sure that we're printing as much freedom money in the freest country in the world.  So, all the Bitcoin mining here is great.  And I also firmly believe there's another main reason why we focus a lot on Bitcoin mining in America, tying back into this idea of, what can you produce today or what can you provide today for people?  Bitcoin doesn't have a lot to offer, other than kind of more or less to speculate on for Americans. 

But Bitcoin mining actually has something to offer right now.  It's my pitch again, like jobs, local investment, grid stability, but these things are true and these are things that people want and they need now.  In fact, in the case of grid stability, NERC, North American Energy Reliability Council, yeah, there's a lot of these things in the energy world, they came out recently and said that a lot of the United States is going to be dealing with rolling brownouts and blackouts for the first time in decades.  That's very uncommon.  We should be heading towards more stability, more reliability, but we're moving away from that.  So, Bitcoin mining can help solve that problem and make everyone's lives better.  And that's something that you can do today. 

Now, if you're able to get to a place where grids, energy companies are adopting Bitcoin mining, which is taking place, it's slow, but it's happening; in fact, one of the largest utilities in the entire country has been studying Bitcoin mining on one of their microgrids in one of the research arms as a demand response resource.  So, this is taking place, it's just a slow world in order to make big changes.  But as you get more energy companies at the state level, and utilities in particular to adopt Bitcoin mining, you'll put Bitcoin into an extremely positive political position. 

As I mentioned, all energy policy takes place at the state level.  Well, a lot of these utilities, they're regulated monopolies, and anytime they want to do anything, it has to happen at the state legislature.  Well, because they're so dependent on what goes on at the state legislature to make anything happen, they have a lot of power at the state legislators, so they are very close to the policymakers, they have teams of lobbyists.  And all of a sudden, when you turn on, make all these utilities be pro-Bitcoin, they're going to turn all those resources towards protecting Bitcoin at the state level.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so how much work is there for you guys to do, like how big a job is this that you're doing now?  Because I Imagine there's a scenario, there's two things going on here.  There's all the work you're doing for Satoshi Action Fund, really important.  Honestly dude, I'm very impressed, it's very cool.  There's also personal ambitions, where you want to go with your career. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, you've got a football team.

Peter McCormack: I have got a football team.  It's the cheat code.

Dennis Porter: It's the cheat code.

Peter McCormack: It's the Bitcoin cheat code, we spoke about that.

Dennis Porter: Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah.  The pre-talk, the pre-conversation.  So, politics is a very difficult game to be successful in.  There's a lot of people who try and don't get very far.  I've tried before and it just kind of didn't really seem to go anywhere. 

Peter McCormack: Same with football, man. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  Everyone wants to move to Hollywood and be an actor, right?  But sometimes it's a combination of luck, hard work, relationships. 

Peter McCormack: Timing. 

Dennis Porter: Timing is huge, oh my gosh, timing is incredibly huge.  I realised I was in a really good position to have a great career in the space, in the political realm, when I had a phone call with someone who led a grassroots effort to kind of grow the Libertarian Party back in the, I think it was the 2010s, and some of the stuff that I do today, I picked up on some of his strategies.  And some of what he did in the past, we will probably implement in the future as well.  So, he had a lot of great strategies and I was just like, "Hey man, yeah, really love what you did.  Really admired your efforts", even though I'm not necessarily like a full-blown libertarian, just his strategy was sound. 

He said, "You know, you're in like a really unique position".  He's like, "You don't realise how fortunate you are to be where you're at".  And I like used to think this guy was a big deal, like he's really smart and could pull things off really well in the political space.  He's like, "You're like so well positioned to do whatever the hell you want to do in the Bitcoin political intersection".  He's like, basically he was saying, he's jealous of me. 

Peter McCormack: What do you want to do?

Dennis Porter: I don't know!  I mean, it's a good question. 

Peter McCormack: Do you want to be a politician? 

Dennis Porter: I've thought about it, but I'm in a much better position right now to have the impact that I want to have by being in Satoshi Action, through my advocacy work.  If you care a lot about one issue, oftentimes it's better to not become a politician.  I'm not saying I've crossed it off the box ever, but people have definitely told me that I should run, but it's about timing part of it.  There's no obvious, like, "Oh, you should go do that".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that intersection of Bitcoin and politics is where you think right now you can have the most influence and impact?

Dennis Porter: Absolutely, yeah.  I mean, this last year, in our first year, we passed Right to Mine into two states, into law, almost three, it was about as close as you can come, and we're going to keep doing that.  Also in Montana, we passed a ban on additional taxes on Bitcoin when it's used as a form of payment, so that we're really happy to be able to include something a little bit different.  It's not quite Bitcoin mining focused, we thought that was really cool.  We're going to be expanding that sort of inclusion of policy in the Right to Mine as we go to other states.  We've looked into private key protection as one thing, like you can't force someone to show you their private key unless you have a warrant.  We think that's really important to protect bitcoiners.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, do you even want that; a warrant to your private key means a warrant to take all your money?  It's a weird thing, it's not like a warrant to see a balance. 

Dennis Porter: Well, I mean in the case of a criminal case where you are forced to give up. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, proceeds of crime, we call it proceeds of crime in the UK.

Dennis Porter: Yeah, something like that, or could be anything really, like there's a lot of different types of criminal activity that can result in a legal process where you are forced to give up your money.  You still need that legal process for Bitcoin, it's not going to go away, it's always going to be there.  But if, let's just say, you get pulled over and a cop snaps a shot of your private key that's in the back seat, then he now has all your money.  So, that sort of behaviour we don't like.  There's already a law that has worked towards that in Wyoming.  We like what they did there.  We think we might need to expand on it, though. 

But the plan is to continue.  There's a lot of work ahead of us.  We are going to continue passing Right to Mine, so we're going state by state.  We have already picked out our target states for 2024.  This work has to start really early in advance.  We're way ahead of where we were last time, so we feel great about our position.  We've already picked our top states out, feel confident about them.  We've touched base with some of our kind of key supporters, the people that really like what we're doing, and they've said that those are states that they're looking at too. 

One of the key distinctions, I think, that's really important about the work at Satoshi Action, is it's not guided by anyone outside of, like, myself and my co-founders.  So, we don't take orders from the industry, we don't take orders from anyone, we purely just care a lot about Bitcoin and proof of work, and that's why we're out there doing what we think is important for the space.  But we're going to continue passing Right to Mine, and then also we are really interested in banking policy.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dennis Porter: So, a lot of digital asset companies that really, you know, it definitely includes Bitcoin miners care about what's going on in the banking space.  I know you've probably had people on here have talked about some of the Choke Point 2.0 stuff. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Dennis Porter: And what's going on with the FDIC and the overreach of the federal government and the feds, denying the Master Account to Custodia.  We're really interested in those sorts of events that are taking place.  And we think there can be something done at the state level.

Peter McCormack: How big is your team?

Dennis Porter: We have myself, my Policy Director, we have my Research Lead, my two Co-founders and my Business Developer.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  And how are you funding this; is it just all donations?

Dennis Porter: Yeah, 100% donation based.  We do also do events where we do benefits and stuff like that.  So, it gives people a different way to give to the organisation.

Peter McCormack: So, I guess more money you could do more? 

Dennis Porter: Oh yeah. 

Peter McCormack: So, what is, I mean, just use this, speak to the people, tell them what you need. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean for instance, last year, $25,000 was enough to go into a new state.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Dennis Porter: So, it's much more affordable.  So, money goes a long way at the state level.  Now, that's smaller markets, so that's like a Missouri, that's an Arkansas, that's a Montana.  And there's probably additional costs beyond that, but generally speaking, it's roughly about $25,000 to go into a small market.  If you want to go into a medium-sized market, it's about $50,000.  If you want to go into a large market, let's say as large as Florida, you're going to need like $100,000, maybe more at minimum.  If you want to go to like a California or New York, you need $1 million dollars. 

Peter McCormack: Right, okay. 

Dennis Porter: So, we're not going to those states yet because they're too big.  Not only are they hard to influence, but they're very expensive. 

Peter McCormack: But at the point where you've won over a bunch of smaller states, I'm assuming that makes it easier to tell the story to other states. 

Dennis Porter: Yes.

Peter McCormack: It's like, "Look what we've done here, look at the impact".  This is what it always feels like right now, I feel like we're on the cusp of Bitcoin really, really exploding, not just as a bull market where a bunch of people buying it; use cases, whether it's mining, spending, etc, it just feels like we are on the cusp of a real explosion.  Everything seems to be pointing in the right direction.  Whether or not you agree with BlackRock or you think, "Yeah, what they're up to, it's pointing in the right direction", Coinbase winning against the SEC, the wins you're having.  It feels like everything is just pointing in the right direction.  I've never felt more confident about the success of Bitcoin than I do right now. 

Dennis Porter: I'm in the same boat.  I think that this last hype cycle was really like the mass media, like really everyone understood now, or maybe they don't understand, but they are aware of Bitcoin.  There's not a person on this planet that I say Bitcoin to, and they don't know what that word is. 

Peter McCormack: Well, we have mass awareness. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, there's mass awareness, that was the last cycle.  This next cycle, I think, will be, I don't know if I would call it mass adoption, but I would definitely say that the next bull run is going to put us in a very good position.  And I hope, I know we're pretty far along, we're in the longest bear market now, they said? 

Peter McCormack: I don't know, man.

Dennis Porter: I don't know, I lose track.  Someone said the other day, "We're in the longest bear market ever".  I was like, "I barely even noticed".  But it means we're closer to the next one, I guess is what I mean.  Halving is on the way, you've got companies like BlackRock and many other large organisations all of a sudden that are very interested in Bitcoin.  Larry Fink was calling it like --

Peter McCormack: Digital gold. 

Dennis Porter: Well, he was calling it a "barometer of crime" in the past. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah.

Dennis Porter: And now he's calling it digital gold, and that it's a safe haven.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, most of the poor narratives have been defeated.  And I think what'll be interesting in the next one is how much of the mainstream media start to flip and actually report accurately.  There was a thing on Twitter this week with Forbes a couple of days ago, all the positive articles and saying, "Oh, it's all since BlackRock", actually Forbes have been pretty good for a while.  But the point is, we are getting better articles coming from the mainstream.  It just remains to be seen if the people like The New York Times continue to produce garbage.

Dennis Porter: You know, Right to Mine is our most popular victory, and we've passed that in two states, but we have had a lot of other victories along the way that are really important to us.  We were able to go into New Hampshire.  There was a commission there where they asked us about Bitcoin.  I did my 40- to 50-minute long presentation and at the end, it was a governor's report that came out, and it essentially directed the state to adopt Bitcoin mining into its energy infrastructure as much as possible.

Peter McCormack: Love it.

Dennis Porter: We recently went before a Utah task force where they asked us about Bitcoin mining, and at the end of it, they said, "We're going to introduce two pieces of your public policy".  In Texas, that was a big one that we haven't talked about at all, where there was an anti-Bitcoin mining Bill there.  That was where Pierre and I were kind of engaged.  And that was SB1751, and that was an attempt to go after the industry. 

Peter McCormack: It was defeated, right? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah.  I mean, I would say that there were many important participants in that effort, as there usually is in big political efforts, one of the most important definitely being the TBC with Lee Bratcher.  And then there was others as well, the Digital Chamber that came along and supported as well.  We were a big part of that effort.  We actually had a lobbyist on our team down there at one point where he was helping us.  He's still working for the organisation.  We played a minor role in killing two other anti-Bitcoin mining bills, a different one in Texas, another one in Pennsylvania, very minor role in those as well.  We've spent over a thousand hours researching, excuse me, we've spent over a thousand hours educating policy makers and regulators on this technology. 

So, we've become somewhat of like expert educators on why Bitcoin mining is good for grids, why it's good for utilities, why it's good for cleaning up the environment.  And now that's pretty much where we spend almost all of our time.  Another fun one too is I also got two presidential campaigns to adopt the Lightning Network. 

Peter McCormack: Good one. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah that's the last one. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, who? 

Dennis Porter: Vivek and RFK.  Did you see when they put those QR codes? 

Peter McCormack: I did, I didn't know that was you. 

Dennis Porter: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Well done.  All right, last thing I do want to ask you about, we touched on it earlier, how useful has Jason's book been? 

Dennis Porter: I've been waiting for that book to come out.  It was so long, it felt like!  I mean, it wasn't that long, but it was like, we needed a book like that badly, desperately in the space, because like you've mentioned before, it's pretty one-sided, the attention that Bitcoin gets.  And Bitcoin is supposed to be money for everybody. 

Peter McCormack: Anyone, not everyone. 

Dennis Porter: Literally anyone.  I mean, even BlackRock, right?  It's like, it's supposed to be for everyone, so why are we having this sort of conversation that it is a Republican- or conservative-oriented money?  And there's even this kind of dialogue that, "Oh, when people find Bitcoin, they become more conservative".  I don't think that's true at all.  In fact, I've found that in general, when people look at Bitcoin, they tend to see -- if you look at it objectively, you tend to see your own values reflected back at you.  So, if you're a conservative, you're going to see, "Oh, it's small government and it is anti-money printer and it is protecting people from this runaway inflation that's going on right now". 

Then if you're on the Democrat side, if you're on the progressive side, you're like, "This is money that anyone can have access to, no matter where their position is, no matter where they are ranked on the socioeconomic ladder and that when they possess it, that they cannot be discriminated against, their access to that money cannot be discriminated against.  So, it doesn't matter what your sex is, what your gender is, sexual orientation, what your political beliefs are, no one can stop you from using it".  That's like the most progressive, you know, that's a huge component of progressive ideology, is equal access, and Bitcoin is the most equally accessible money that's ever existed.  At least digitally, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dennis Porter: Maybe not physically, because that's one of the benefits of physical money, is that it's more permissionless and anyone can access it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, when he reached out to us, we knew straightaway.  When he approached us, it was like, okay, if you can pull this off, you're making the most important book for Bitcoin right now, that's what I felt, because we were missing.  Like, we used to get a lot of emails or comments, people like, "All your show is right-wing and libertarian", and they kind of put them together.  And then we'd look through our history, "I guess, fair play, you're right".  So, we tried to get more progressives on, and we knew it was important, and we knew it would get pushback.  That's why I wrote the forward as I did, because I think people really missed why, like if you're a Republican, you missed why it's so important to have progressives into Bitcoin.  And so we thought if he pulls this off, it's going to become -- it will be the most important book written right now for Bitcoin.  And he did pull it off, he nailed it. 

I'm so proud of him, honestly.  It's like, to go out there and say you're going to do it, to drop an email and just reach out to a few people, and he made it happen, and the book is fantastic.  But as a tool for you, for what you do, how important has it been?

Dennis Porter: Oh, it's extremely important.  I mean, almost every time I'm engaging with an elected official and folks that are politically engaged, progressives, Democrats, I'm giving it to them.  And it's important for them because they're able to see the value of Bitcoin through a progressive lens.  I love the Bitcoin Standard, and if there was no other book, that's good to give to them and then say, "Hey, here's a book", and then you can have a conversation with that person and build that relationship.  For instance, some people got upset about us handing it out in DC.  It's like, "Listen, it's not necessarily about the book itself", it really was used more as a tool to engage those political offices.  We gave as many of Progressive's Case for Bitcoin out to Democrat offices as we could.  We didn't raise as much money for that one, because it was the third one. 

We raised money for Bitcoin Standard, Layered Money and then Progressive's Case and also Progressive's Case was much more expensive per book.  So, we were only able to get like 25, 30 copies of that.  But now what I'm doing is I'm giving it out to as many people as possible, because it's like a tool that you can use to get people that are traditionally less interested in Bitcoin to see the value of it.  And it's only going to -- we were just getting started, it just came out, and we just did the DC thing.  And then, I also was part of a fundraiser for Senator Cantwell in Portland, Oregon; she's a Washington Senator.  And Senator Wyden was there, and I gave it to both of them.  Just handing it out as much as possible to people that see Bitcoin or that we want to see Bitcoin, but need to see it through a progressive lens. 

Peter McCormack: Brilliant.  Well, well done Jason, big shout out to you, buddy.  Right, anything else you want to talk about?  Do you want to tell people where to go and how can they support you? 

Dennis Porter: Yeah, I mean for us, there's two ways that you can really support the organisation.  Obviously money always helps us a lot.  And so, if you care a lot about Bitcoin, you care a lot about Bitcoin mining, feel free to hit me up via email to have a conversation about the work that we're doing, and also what we have planned for the future.  We have big plans for 2024.  You can email me at dennis@satoshiaction.io if you want to email me directly; on Twitter, it's @Dennis_Porter_.  I read all my DMs, as I mentioned earlier in the show.  We have small-dollar donors, we have big-dollar donors.  That's one of my favourite things about our organisation, is we are funded by the broad masses, we're not just funded by a few large corporations.  And then, relationships matter a lot too. 

So, in the political space, money is the fuel, but relationships are the engine.  So, if you have relationships with elected officials that you know, that would be open to what we're talking about, if you are close to people that are staffers or in the political world at all, maybe a large organisation, maybe there could be like an industry group for an energy company, I'm happy to come speak to them.  I do presentations all the time, very regular presenter for the space, educator for the space.  So really, if you feel like there's any way that I can be helpful in educating large groups that will have a big impact on policy or the way the energy companies view Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining, then please reach out to me.

Peter McCormack: Brilliant.  Well, Dennis, well done, congratulations.  This is important work you've done and it's impressive what you've built up.  Anyone listening, you want to find out or support it, we will put it in the show notes.  Good luck, man.  Just keep going.  It's amazing. 

Dennis Porter: Thank you, thank you for having me on. 

Peter McCormack: No problem.