Aarika Rhodes vs Brad Sherman: Getting Crypto into Congress CA-32

Transcript

hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation nighttime edition david and i are super excited to host erica rhodes the episode that we're gonna talk about today it's how we beat brad sherman okay david who's brad sherman for folks that don't know brett sherman is the sitting member of congress from california 32nd district who uh recently made a farce about crypto using things like mongoose coin and like rabbit coin uh and to make overall just doesn't take crypto seriously and has openly advocated for an open ban on just generally all things crypto um i'm not a fan of such a policy uh so i think that we can do we should do whatever we need

to do to make sure that that kind of policy does not work its way into congress and so it just so happens that a new person on the scene one named erica rose is not also not a fan of such a policy and we are going to talk about that here on today's state of the nation i think this is uh this is a conversation with erica rhodes and we're going to talk about uh her battle against brad sherman for this congressional seat we're also i think there's a bigger picture here because we're going to talk about pro crypto versus anti-crypto in the 2022 midterms really in 2021 one of the main stories was uh crypto finding its political voice for the first time and so i'm very curious as to whether we'll see

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

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

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one that tried to make a farce out of crypto using things like mongoose coin and has made statements about uh supporting a total shutdown of crypto uh and it's also no surprise that some of congress congressman sherman's biggest donators in the 2020 campaign were banks and bank lobbying organizations uh and so some of the statements out of brad sherman in the last couple years or so is that cryptocurrencies are a crock all bitcoin does is allow for a few dozen men in my district to sit in their pajamas and on their couch all day and tell their wives that they're going to be millionaires and that bitcoin also provides no real value to the economy so erica we have interest in your campaign and what you have to say about crypto policy and we are going to unpack that on today's show but before we do

that we want to learn a little bit about you who is erica rhodes well thank you for having me i'm really excited to be here um so i am an elementary school teacher i teach k through sixth grade science and i ended up um deciding to run for congress in 2020 um in 2020 so we have been at this for a really long time and it's just crazy like the primaries are so close away but um i really want to serve on the education and labor committee on congress and i want to sub kitty a subcommittee the financial services so i think that this is a real opportunity for us to bring change and really start addressing poverty our banking system how why people are

staying impoverished and more importantly present new ideas and a different way of governance i think that there is this this deep mistrust between people and their elected officials and for me it's really important that we come together like we i want to be like a unifying figure and model what a good representative is and so i'm really excited to be in this race and more excited that we can actually win i definitely also think that we can definitely take the seat right out from under brad sherman but i also want to keep on going down the erika roads rabbit hole what were some how uh tell us a little bit about your formative years that has shaped the policy or what you believe in today um

like the what policy specifically no just like uh your ideals your ideology or growing up what do you believe in so you know funny people don't really know this about me but um my family is very eclectic um so half of my family is republican half of them of my family's democrats so i think i approach my politics with good ideas and what's gonna actually solve problems and what's going to leverage people and so that's why i think i run a clean campaign i'm not really focused on like titles as much as i am about just getting things done and i think for me at this point at 36 young people and um i really i feel

we're not advocating and doing what's in the best best interest of young people and that's partly why i filed um i also was inspired by andrew because he was one of the only candidates to talk about financial literacy he brought people from all across the political spectrum and he automation he's obviously pro crypto and i think those things are really really important we're gonna change you know the future and i think the lack of things getting done has changed my like has kind of like shaped the way i view politics you know it's not about just being against someone as much as it is about being for something and i feel like today's politics is just character assassination and who does that impact

the most everyday people because people just want to see their lives get better they will they're sick of inflation they're sick of you know the education system and their kids not getting what they need and so that's kind of where i am politically so and i wanted to say one more thing i want to remind people like i am not like this career politician i'm not crazy polish i am literally myself i'm a teacher i was really frustrated with the injustices happening no one advocating and i just made the decision to do something about it and so if people people like kind of expect me to be a certain way i am just myself and i think that's refreshing for people that do support my campaign because i want

someone regular that understands in that seat in washington so it's cool to see erica it's really cool to see uh millennials get get involved in in politics because i know like you speak on behalf of you know some millennials dave and myself are part of that that generation so many people so many millennials are just apathetic right it's like they just like or so um many in crypto you know very much believe what you said earlier that institutions are failing us um like there's massive institutional distrust but then they really don't feel like they can do anything on the political front and i confess like sometimes i'm guilty of this too and so are a lot of people in crypto in fact crypto is

almost a protest movement for us where we're saying like hey the old system doesn't work so we're just gonna opt out but can you give the case for why people in crypto maybe millennials or some of the younger generations as well should stop being apathetic and actually get involved in politics why should they care about uh your campaign specifically or like politics in their local district in general i love this question i think you're nailing it dead on the systems are failing people and that's why when trump got elected it wasn't like okay i just because i just didn't like him it was more like well why did he get elected what was the cause of

that and then i had made the personal decision that i'm gonna get politically active i'm gonna pick a candidate i'm gonna support them like i've never supported anyone before and now i'm running for office and with me running my students are seeing that an everyday person can stand up and make a difference and a lot of my platform was inspired by young people like lowering the voting age to 16 when i first decided to announce that you should be the pro bitcoin candidate you should have that on your campaign and take donations in bitcoin and i said well i'm familiar with bitcoin i don't know how that works with fec compliance but a lot of young people have already participated

and i think for me i'm very intentional about empowering them and lifting their voices up and i think when you have people like me showing a different way of running the campaign i think that's going to trickle down and inspire other people to run their campaign differently because the old way isn't working the whole way of governing isn't working and that's why we've created such a mass movement and if you and this is what's wild is i work full-time as a teacher in a pandemic and we've raised over a quarter of a million dollars and we have two hundred thousand dollars cash on hand and it's not from big banks corporations pawn shops check cashing it's from everyday people that want an

everyday representative and so that's why young people should get in because this is the campaign for hope this is the campaign for the future and this is the campaign that's going to bring the change and and that kind of leadership in congress because the reality is if i go to congress and i serve maybe one or two or three terms i can go back as a teacher because i love my job i'm not trying to be like in the senate i'm not trying to run for president i'm really trying to advocate in the best way i know how i'm single i don't have children my dad was like erica you need to run for congress and we made it happen two teachers and a bunch of kids built this platform and here we are about to unseat brad sherman and one of the reasons why we're so

interested in this in this campaign is i think that this could be a microcosm for so many more races and the future of politics in america and perhaps even the world because if we can show that especially as the crypto industry if we can show that we can rally behind somebody that um not only reflects uh the interests of our our industry but also the generations of the people that make up this industry which tends to skew younger and we can show that we can unseat somebody who's backed by banks and just long-term incumbency then hopefully we can start a domino effect and really start to realign so much of what politics has uh left behind which is you know the younger generation and it pushes the narrative

that that seat you're not entitled to that you actually have to earn it that you can't just show up around election time that you need to be in your community all the time advocating for everyday people and that's the issue that i take with not just brad but several elected officials they think that c is theirs and we and myself and there's a lot of other um candidates running that run on a pro crypto pro bitcoin um platform which we happened we we try to ask people to do it and take lightning network and you know just be more open-minded and now the news is picking up to our campaigns it's becoming a hot topic and i my prediction in 2024 you'll

see presidents running a pro bitcoin crypto platform wow you think so presidents absolutely do absolutely do that would be incredible and if that's the case it's got to start this year it's got to start in uh you know 2022. but can you talk about this because this is um this is so hilarious that um brad sherman is running against such a pro crypto pro bitcoin candidate like it couldn't have happened i just love that it's happening to brad sherman but like i just so i mean i know you're not about you know slinging mud and campaigns and this sort of thing but like i i think that the crypto world is somewhat mystified a little bit about brad sherman and i'm

i'm wondering if you could kind of help us get in his head for a minute because it's really bizarre to us to see him talk about crypto in the way he talks about it right like with a com complete dismissal like you know there's gotta be thousands hundreds of thousands of people in his district that actually hold the crypto assets that he's disparaging that have actually benefited from the upside of these crypto assets that he's disparaging can you help us understand why like why does brad sherman hate crypto so much because brad sherman gets his money from the big banks chat cashing pawn shops

and so it's in his best interest to be anti-crypto and anti-bitcoin and i'm going to tell you something right now before work after work every weekend we are outdoor knocking phone banking canvassing and i have yet to meet one person that wants it regulated or wants it banned not one person and i'm talking people from all walks of life all across the political spectrum age gender whatever i have not met one person and even people have this consensus that even if they don't hold bitcoin or ethereum or whatever that it shouldn't be banned or regulated and why are you working on that in congress when we have an increase in homelessness in our district when we

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

it's like that can't be a winning position like back to your point who on earth is asking for it which of your constituents are actually asking for this and yet they're coming out very so strongly anti-crypto do you think this is but is this coming from the big banks like the big bang because if you're representing your constituents you're not taking this position and that's the truth if you had a town hall and said hey this is coming i'm doing a hearing on cryptocurrency stable coins how do you feel about it and then you're hearing an overwhelming amount of people saying look we don't want that please regularly whatever but then i can see him taking that position in the hearings but if you have a town hall and no one is saying that this is

their number one issue then it shouldn't be something that you're aggressively trying to ban and regulate and so obviously it goes back to where you get your money and that's why i am very pro and i know this can be controversial in the crypto space because there's there's this this feeling about printing money but public finance elections imagine if we can get the big money out of election process give everybody a hundred dollars they donate to the candidate that they wanted then an elementary school teacher wouldn't have to hustle as like way hard to try to unseat an incumbent and it would make the incumbent actually go to their community and find out what they care about

we have to fix the systems it's not like it's an it's not enough to just replace people we have to get to the root of it but you have to have bold leaders bold representatives that will introduce that legislation go on the house floor and give those impassioned speeches and rally at their constituents to put pressure on other elected officials that's how you get change and that's how you create a movement okay i want to specifically call out who you plan to actually represent because i think there might be a lot of listeners here that uh you know my pre might be in your district that maybe they don't actually know it so where is california 32nd district uh and can you tell us a little bit about that district who what

type of people lives there what is the constituency base uh and it's like what's the region so that we just had the redistricting we lost the congressional seat so ca 30 which was initially when i started running with ca 30 now it's ca 32 so it's the 32nd district and we represent majority of the valley and they just added the palisades and malibu and um if you go to my website ericaforcongress.com and you show to the bottom we have a whole map of the new district and all the cities there's like micro there's like smaller cities it took a long list and the demographic makes up for you know we have an an array of people from the from the um from the economic standpoint

it's very diverse in terms of like you know race and age we have the largest deaf community in the in the country which i'm very proud about i learned sign language when i was in college and i'm a huge advocate for the d and deaf community and we have a lot of like working class people and we also have people a lot of people that work in tech and and they're very pro innovation we oh thank you there it is and then we have so it's a very well diverse district um and so this is who i'm running to represent well that is fantastic because i from what i can gather this is a pretty well populated district um can you kind of just uh scale up how big

california 32nd district is versus other districts is this a big district is this a medium district what's the size of this i we don't have the census report yet but it's going to be around 800 000 people ish okay if we take a rat in that in that right so it's fairly big like if you compare it it is a bigger district and la has become an epicenter of the creative side of crypto especially with this uh just absolute boom of nfts uh crypto has all of a sudden become cool in the last like you know 18 months or so and a large part of that story has to do with the creatives outside of la uh and so when uh i think when we see you unc brad sherman maybe a lot of people

are surprised about that but maybe they're they're surprised about that because they weren't paying attention to how far crypto has infiltrated people's lives and how uh the nft movement and the creator economy movement has really taken a a seat in la and so i kind of see la as a perfect ground for flipping a seat that doesn't understand what an nft is or why people are paying money for a jpeg yeah i i agree with you and you know what i don't think people understand is like everyday people have crypto like i know lots of teachers we talk about it on our lunch break right so it's so it's like you're like everyday people have it um there's a there's a girl she doesn't live in my

district but she's a huge volunteer for my campaign she was a veteran and when she came back she fell into poverty and she got into bitcoin when it was really really early on and pulled herself out of poverty and now she gives she's devoted her life to community service and helping um you know get elected officials into office that care about poverty and so a lot of people in the crypto space actually give and do a lot of community service work with their earnings and i think that goes unnoticed and so we have to cheat as like a community we have to change the narrative around bitcoin and the crypto and what people really do because there's like this misconception that's

criminals and all this stuff that's not true that's not true so you can tell me like teachers i work with they're criminals come on they teach kindergarten they teach kids to read like let's be real so we we have a lot of work to do in terms of bringing other elected officials along and i think that we're the campaign to do it so erica there's there's also a story i think for uh for the rest of the us around innovation here and um you put out this tweet uh recently in early december you said this congressman brad sherman wants to ensure our country's last in line to benefit from all the innovation that is occurring in the cryptocurrency industry it's time for new leadership and you position yourself as someone who will fight and defend the infrastructure

of bitcoin and stable coins and uh brad sherman has has been a notable anti-crypto uh advocate in many of these conversations what would you do differently how do you think america can can lead in crypto leave it alone and not try to regulate it to death um i would be the antithesis of him on that hearing right so i think that we need to embrace the innovation i think it is going to be the next big thing like as big as the internet we're already seeing signs of that and so if i were in that hearing you would be seeing me asking totally different questions that really highlight the benefit of embracing um bitcoin and blockchain and innovation

and what it could do because that's the educational piece and you'll also see me trying to inform other members of congress why they should also refrain from trying to regulate it and if they were going to do it then we need to make sure that it's done accurately and that the language is correct and that it's being presented to the public and like being intellectually honest i think is like the best way of framing it and then also i'm going to start um i want to i think there's already one i guess we found that you can't have a bitcoin caucus but definitely be a part of the bipartisan crypto caucus um because i think it's important that when

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

my district since 2006. i have never once seen him even canvas or campaign or anything because he just thinks that that seats his and so now he's actively campaigning so that's the really good thing out of fear out of well out of fear you know this is a historic race too and so we've never had a woman represent this district we never had a black woman or african-american represent this district so people are really paying attention to this race and we're starting to get national attention so he's really taking this seriously and we have the bankroll you know we still have you know about half a million more to go which i do believe is going to come q2 but he sees that this teacher has

actual cash on hand and can physically take him out and we're running a really solid ground game we are in the community every single day as i'm doing this interview people are phone banking and everything so we we're in this to win it and he knows it and so i think he does fear me well and he should uh and we will definitely be telling people where they can go donate at the end of this show but before we get there there's some other conversations that we want to talk about uh more details on your actual specific crypto policy uh stable coins are very hot subject right now as well as things like sec regulation and exactly what you talked about which we want uh to make sure that american policy doesn't

regulate away the value of crypto so we're going to get all into those subjects and more right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon avalanche finance smart chain and other chains trading on matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single easy to use platform and allows me to make limit on chain orders so you

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disenfranchising to anyone that doesn't have a million dollars in in assets which is most people uh and we also look exactly what we were talking about before we went to the break is we want to make sure that the united states leads crypto uh so erica with regards to the specifics behind your stance towards crypto or what you want to see when you become the representative for california 32nd district uh what will what will you focus on what are you interested in changing first you know something that um i've been and i'm still flushing out how this would work but i i'm trying to i'm wondering i'm curious is there a way that this can benefit our foster youth i've been thinking about that a lot lately because when kids age out of the foster care system they immediately fall

into a poverty or prison system and so i was wondering if there's a way that that could be linked um this is gonna be controversial but i'm gonna say it um i do like aspects of the green new deal i like the green new deal and i'm very mindful of the environment and i believe that the crypto space is really doing their due diligence on being more environmentally friendly and trying to uh make sure that when they're mining the coin that they're you know using renewable energy methane solar and wind power and when i met with miners i was blown away by that they're paying their miners six figures and they're being environmentally friendly so i i was wondering can we find a way

to put that into this um this the in the green new deal i was i've been wondering about that i think that's worth talking about because i think personally bitcoin should not be a partisan issue crypto is going to be a partisan issue anybody that wants to get it should be able to get it and not get attacked regardless of their political affiliations i really feel that way and so i think if we can find um a way to bring progressives more along and not be like so like you know oh my god you know i think that would be a positive thing but i definitely want to push innovation financial literacy and making sure that we are the forefront of this innovative technology because i do again think it's going to

be as big as the internet and it's not going away it's not going away so i think we should be the leaders of it so uh erica there there's been kind of another term that's been used over the past year or so that's kind of caught some steam uh rather than crypto people have been begun to talk about this um this industry is web 3 right so the third generation of of kind of the internet right and uh an internet where individual consumers get their data back they are in control they're they have full sovereignty over the data it's not no longer the big tech companies that are running things so it's much more decentralized internet i'm curious from your perspective i know the term crypto uh has been associated

with all sorts of things in uh in politics and in you know uh capitol hill like you know drug dealer money and all of these things from the past which you know like we don't have to revisit that but what do you think that of the term web three does that sort of maybe renew the conversation about what the possibilities are what the potential is for krypto if we sort of think about that term a little bit more does that get maybe more progressives excited in onboard with this movement you know i i i do find it to be exciting i'm gonna be very transparent honest i haven't really dug my you know my heels into this um deeply because i've been

really focused on um really understanding how we can leverage bitcoin and getting up making it a part of my campaign through lightning and really trying to understand the transactions how we could integrate it with small businesses so be honest like i haven't really done my full due diligence but i'm a person like i'm so open like i'm open for anything that is you know for about the future that's innovative that's cutting edge modernizes things and keeps up with the time so i'm not against it one thing i think that uh you feel pretty strongly about is the way that the banking system has disenfranchised so many people especially in impoverished communities where do you see crypto works its way into this conversation

well i found it interesting that bank of america just announced that they're lowering their fees i wonder why i do have i do have a great issue with the banking system i think that they take advantage of people that live paycheck to paycheck which is 75 of americans and i think that um it's worth noting that most americans not most but a large percentage of americans are a paycheck away from falling into financial ruin and so if you overdraft and then you're getting all those fees by the time you get your next paycheck a fourth of it's gone so how are you supposed to get ahead you know i volunteer at a food bank every single tuesday not today because

i'm with you guys i made this commitment but i try to go every tuesday and there are people that literally work all day and then they sit in a and they sit in this food bank line for another hour and a half two hours just to get a box of food for the week and you know you have to wonder like where are we going wrong like why like why why can't people get ahead and you start talking to them and it's the banking fees and then i also feel very strongly that pawn shops and check cashing should not be a financial institution for anyone the interest rates are absolutely insane and equally important i feel very strongly that financial literacy needs to be taught in schools kids really need to understand personal finance

i talk to kids all the time and this is something that they're craving is something they want they should not be going into college not knowing so i think the banks have um also they discriminate with loans and i have an issue with that and so that's why i'm very very pro um bitcoin because i think that it is an alternative to the banking system and people should have options now and it's hard to buy a house it's like that's a whole another rabbit hole can we talk a little bit more about uh financial literacy because that's something near and dear to our hearts like so uh you're an educator in a weird way david and i consider ourselves a little bit of educators too like in crypto sort of you know um

bringing stuff out of this this difficult opaque industry and and um you know telling more people about it uh but a lot of people we're finding especially uh kids are actually learning finance through crypto it's kind of interesting right it's like you know dave david's an example of this um but you know there are many others um there's a 12 year old you know kid involved in in the crypto industry that uh we know in in the bankless community it's you know building all sorts of things uh and you know learning learning finance learning how the world works learning you know money systems through crypto how how important is financial literacy do

you think and like how does the us um you know how do we change our education system to prioritize that it's very important and we need to rewrite the curriculum it's not a standard it's not a math standard that's that teachers are asked to teach and so we have to rewrite the curriculum i think it's it's incredibly like vital that we do this you know um funny thing i and i i do think this is worth mentioning when when you brought up kids are starting to learn themselves gamestop is a great example of that because when that happened that was pretty epic and ironically i had taught the stock market to my students um two

weeks before and so when that happened it was like the most iconic teachable moment because we were able to really dive deep into that and what that all entailed and i think that's really really important and i also think that we have to um really talk about when they take out loans like what that means so there's this big push to talk about like cancelling student like the student loan debt and all that kind of stuff but i also feel that when they were taking out the loan that should they should understand the interest on that loan and if they were in a position like at 35 40 45 years old do you still want to be paying this amount of this amount of money for this particular art degree you know are you

going is that an arctic or 200 000 art degree a big return is that a good return on your investment is that a good is that wise and we need to be guiding our kids better you know my mom um you know made it a point to teach me financial literacy when i was um in college and so i didn't even really get it until i was in college and so i just think that we need to keep up with the time and and also school is more fun when it's connected to the real world and i think it will engage kids more and i've always talked like that stuff in my classroom even when second grade we had a class bank account we hustled i taught them how to hustle and how to make money and we saved it and then okay now you guys raise x i don't remember

the amount but you raised this amount of money what do you want to do with it and they actually invested the money back into their classroom and a field trip so i just think it's really really important and it could be taught literally throughout all the grades and just age appropriate maybe that could be a new slogan for the crypto industry is making finance fun again because that's certainly why i learned about crypto in the first place was it finally made money and money stuff fun to learn about uh and so i'm bullish on crypto maybe making its way into the educational system just as a route of you know something that kids gravitate towards towards when they want to learn about basic math and and how the economy works yeah and you have kids that want to be

entrepreneurs that are already entrepreneurs and they don't even realize that they're being an entrepreneur and i don't believe college is for everyone i believe that we need to invest in trade schools i think that we need to meet kids where they're they're at and not just to say like oh that's the way to do it because i know a lot of people that went and got a college degree that still live at home or rent a one-bedroom apartment from someone so you know room for from someone so i i do think that we need to make this a priority and keep up with the times i really i really do erica i want to ask about this status of your campaign and just for people that perhaps aren't just politically tuned in what is the timeline how many months

until election time how much money have you raised how much more money do you need to raise and what's left for you to do in order to take this seat away from brad sherman so um the primary so this is very important so we are california so we're a jungle primary so that means anybody that's running the top two people then go to the general election so it's not like the top two democrats and then the top two republicans and then they go toe-to-toe it's literally no matter the party the top two people we are number two right now i'm really excited about that um so right now if we people were to vote we probably make it to the at least the general so that's how competitive our race is right now um so the primary dates june 7th california

just passed a law that million ballots are now allowed so that's off that's to our advantage so it makes it more accessible for people um we've raised a quarter of a million dollars a little over a quarter million dollars and we have 200 000 of that cash on hand so we've been very fiscally responsible holding our money until we need to and um then we then as we get ready for a get out the vote we are going to just just drop all our coin and give it everything we we need and so to execute our entire vision that will lead us to victory we need to raise another half a million dollars i think that would ensure

um our victory i really do brad had almost 4 million at the end of q3 he's been actively fundraising because he knows that we're starting to gain momentum and i want to remind people we don't need what he has i don't even want what he has i don't even want to win this election with that kind of money because i think it's such a freaking waste i just want to make sure that our message gets out to voters i want to do it under a million dollars and i really want this to really show that everyday people can unseat an incumbent to bring hope again and so if you can just be like a five to ten dollar recurring donor between now and the end of our campaign or um donate any amount the max donation is 2

900 we happily accept bitcoin and crypto to our campaign um so that makes us really cool and at the forefront of election season we're like we were one of the first campaigns i think the first to even start this you could donate that way and so that's the state of our campaign well while we're talking about it where can people uh donate erica so um erica for congress.com and it's a-a-r-i-k-a for congress for congress and if you follow me on twitter i have the link right in my bio and yeah one of my favorite there's a book that's very famous in the crypto space called the sovereign individual and one of my favorite lessons i learned from that

book is that throughout history if two armies of equal size went head to head it was always the army that cared about what they were fighting for that won and so i think when erica rhodes receives one dollar that goes a lot further than brad sherman receiving one dollar because you were actually tapped in to who you are fighting for uh and so and i saw if anyone wants to help erica rhodes unseat brad sherman who is backed by banks uh definitely there's a link in these show notes both on the podcast and on the youtube uh to go to her page learn more about her learn more about her policy and then click that donate button erica do you have any last messages for our listeners on the bankwest nation yeah go for it i do i want to say something

about our our campaign dollars we are very intentional about being a community service driven campaign and empowering youth campaign so any young person that's 16 or older that wants to canvas on our campaign we actually pay them i actually paid them for their time because gas is really expensive and so i want to make it very clear that we do our due diligence and we do the right thing with our campaign money also we started a lending library program we were able to do a community garden that's free for our d and deaf youth foster youth and so even if we were to lose i don't think we will but if we were we've done a lot of good with the money so it's not just a waste it really upset me during the 2020 um races people

would raise millions and millions of dollars just run ads and then they lose and it's like where all that money go you know and so i was very intentional about making sure that you know a percentage of it filters back into the community that we do good along the way and that our youth can leverage off of our our campaign and i'm very proud to say pretty much every single kid that we've ever had work for us ended up going to the school of their choice because we were able to write meaningful letters of recommendations they were able to put you know really cool experiences that they've had on our campaign and there are future senators you know president one wants to be a president and they're also very pro bitcoin so i just want to plug that because i don't think people pay

attention to where the money goes that much because it gets like oh gotta be bragg i'd be bad but we also have to do good along the way and and really uphold integrity be principled have values and and let this race really mean something when it's all said and done and that's all i want to say that's fantastic erica you know thank you so much this has been great i you know i i want to just maybe address one one last cohort i think we addressed the uh the apathetic um listeners really not into politics earlier in the show but um can we talk up to the the listener who's maybe doesn't typically vote uh blue or your side of the the aisle at all because i think what we're seeing a lot in crypto

is um single-issue voters right the rise of people who like crypto is a bipartisan issue at least it should be it's not a democrat or republican thing it's not a red or a blue thing it's completely uh bipartisan so how how would you represent the the single issue voter and why is it important for a single issue voter to uh vote for a pro crypto candidate rather than a brad sheeran can you make that case too yeah you know i think it's important to vote because that's your you're a citizen and that's just your you know that's sacred and you know that's just something special and it does matter elections have been lost off of a hundred votes 500 votes and i would hate

for us to have this really supreme opportunity and lose it because we didn't get a couple hundred votes so that's one two you you can see the hearings stable coins is coming up again in a couple weeks there's another one in february so it is a political issue and if it's something that you care about it takes five minutes to go past the vote probably takes 30 seconds to register and five minutes actually vote and i think it's i think it's really important and just out of and i'm gonna just be honest i'm just gonna say it i am a teacher i like i'm really doing the best that i can i'm really genuinely trying to make a difference so if you live in the 32nd district just vote for me because

i really like i'm a regular person and i'm really trying my best like this is the best way i know how to advocate for young people and for everyday people and so that i hope incentivizes you to to cast a vote because i am a decent person i'm not i don't have my mom is a 20 like i know she's a five dollar recurring donor and then when we had when we were trying to raise our last 23 000 my dad gave 25 dollars he was like because i don't come from money i'm just i'm super regular so i hope that will inspire people to to to cast a vote and to chip in a little bit to help us win there you go erica rhodes we are cheering from you and uh make sure you come back and keep

us updated on the campaign let's get brad sherman out bankless nation erica rhodes thank you so much for joining us thank you so much guys written disclaimers we didn't talk about financial advice this time but we never do because bank list never provides financial advice of course ethan's risky bitcoin is risky all of crypto is risky you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks