2:04:10 This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. Like they did to Kanye. Exactly, like they did to Kanye. My partner Ben's father has been debanked. Really? We had an employee who- For what? For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, okay, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms in the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person. And if you're a PEP, you're required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank. What? But what if you're politically on the left? That's fine. No. Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did? What they said that got them debanked? Oh, well, David Horowitz is a right-wing.
2:05:01 pro-trump i mean he said all kinds of things you know he's been very anti islamic terrorism he's been very worried about immigration all these things and they debanked him for that yeah they debanked him so you get kicked out of your bank account you get kicked out of the you can't do credit card transactions by the way how is that legal? well exactly so this is the thing and so and then you go to this thing of like well there's no this is where the government and the companies get intertwined back to your fascism point which is There's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech, but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you. Right? And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing, and then they don't have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to. But the government gets to say, we didn't do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course, JPMorgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? Because they're a private company.
2:05:50 And so it's this sleight of hand that happens. So it's basically, it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran. Whoa. Just kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service, because they're trying to protect the big banks. And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like. So a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about. Under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers. And just like you're done, you're out of the banking system.
2:06:42 And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what? You're doing your business all in cash. Because you literally can't get a bank account, you can't get a visa terminal, you can't process transactions, you can't do payroll, you can't do direct deposit, you can't get insurance. Like none of that stuff is, you've been sanctioned, right? None of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. Yeah, so that's been like super pernicious. I wasn't aware of that. Oh, 100%. And it's called, so it was Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns. Chokepoint 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it's hit the tech world, like we've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years. Real? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been a big recurring pattern. 30? This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like, we just can't,
2:07:35 We can't live in this world. We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable... By the way, no due process. None of this is written down. There's no rules. There's no court. There's no decision process. There's no appeal. Who do you appeal to? Who do you go to to get your banking bank account back. And then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side. And that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money. Yes, that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states.
2:08:16 Right, or you know, there'll be, there've been, you know, well-publicized examples of like, you know, there was like, you know, there'll be some investigation into like, you know, safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know, the Feds have seized all the contents of the state deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned. And so it's this, and this is when, you know, this is when Trump says the deep state, you know, like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power. It's political power being administered, not through legislation, right? So there's no defined law that covers this. It's not through regulation. There's nothing you can't go sue a regulator to fix this. It's not through any kind of court judgment. It's just raw power. It's just raw administrative power. It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it.
2:09:00 So what happens to those 30 tech people that you know? They go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to get... Complete upending of your life. Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to get away from the eye of Sauron. Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, okay, you know, it's okay. We've checked in. It's now all right. Whoa, but there's no so what do they do with their money? Like what happens? Yeah, I mean you go to cash. I mean you go to cash. You can't have a yeah. So where do you put it? Under your mattress?
2:09:39 Yes, exactly. Yeah, that is so insane. Yeah, someone has 30 million dollars in the bank and they get D bank diamonds art You know, do you I don't know go overseas somewhere. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it just like it just it just happens and again It's really important. There's no fingerprints like there's no Right. There's no person who... There's no stick above the strings. Yeah, exactly. It just happened. And we can trace it back because we understand exactly, you know, we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that the banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we can loosely, like, we understand the flow of power as it happens.
2:10:17 But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like you can't trace it back. There's nothing you can do about it. So what are the instances? Like what is the company? What are they trying to do? And how do they run afoul? Well, all the crypto startups in the last basically four years. So remember the crypto thing got like really, you know, sort of everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff. And then it just like stopped. Yeah. And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating, or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged. This is a fun twist. It's a fun little twist. So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden. And this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor.
2:11:08 The SEC can investigate you, they can subpoena you, they can prosecute you, they can do all these things. But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you. All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells Notice. And the Wells Notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future. You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future. Oh my God. Okay, so terrifying. That's the eye. The eye of Sauron is on you. Now trying to be a company with a Wells Notice doing business with anybody else. Oh my God. Right. Try to try to work with a big company, try to get access to a bank, try to do anything. So that's when they support DEI initiatives and they, yeah. Well, then the SEC under Biden became a, the SEC under Biden became a direct application of exactly. So DEI, they started, they did a lot with that. And then ESG, all the ESG stuff and ESG is a very malleable concept and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that.
2:11:57 So through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all. There are hearings where they get yelled at, but nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything. It was just the raw application of power. Right. And so, yeah. And this is your friends, this has happened to. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. And we had, like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title. He was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because he- That's it? Because they did a screen across, it's what they told us, is they did a screen across their customer base. Just anyone with crypto. Because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person. Wow.