interviews
It's All About the Money
by Mike Williams
October 20, 2021
This interview with Mike Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Mike | I'm on the energy and environment team, but my focus is on how we put forward energy, environmental, and climate policy in a way that supports working people. My background is working at the intersection of labor and environmental movements. I spent 12 years at the BlueGreen Alliance, focused on passing some significant climate, energy, and environmental policy alongside the labor movement.
frank | How has your work been lately?
Busy, but positive. I think there's a lot of good things that are on the horizon.
I think it's nice that everyone is starting to engage in infrastructure. Does it feel like people are finally paying attention to some of this work you’ve been doing?
Yeah, when I worked for the BlueGreen Alliance, we started pushing the connection between solving the climate crisis and remaking our infrastructure. I think we started really putting it out as a public proposal in 2012, with a report called Making the Grade, when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City. So yes. Been at this for quite a while. It's phenomenal that this has finally broken through, that folks have made the connection between climate change and infrastructure, and that hopefully, we can get to some significant solutions.
To look at the infrastructure as it exists is to realize how massive it is in scale, but also how regional it is. How do you start thinking about modernizing the infrastructure and outlining priorities?
It's an incredibly important question and it's one that gets into the nuts and bolts of how you actually implement infrastructure policy. Some folks think it can be quite boring, but it is so important because what this will eventually come down to is actually building projects that change how our systems work. We have to think about it in a couple of different ways. One, there's obviously the function of the project. We have to make sure that whether we're rebuilding roads, rebuilding bridges, building transit systems, repairing the electric grid, or rebuilding water systems, they have to be safe and reliable. In the end, we're humans who need these systems to live and to have a decent quality of life.
Water, electricity, the internet — these things are public goods. They truly have to be safe and reliable.
The mindset around infrastructure in the past has been "we need to get the best bang for our buck." There needs to be a better purpose for our infrastructure projects. In addition to being safe and reliable, they need to meet the moment and achieve the goals that we as a society have. We need to make sure that our infrastructure projects think about their goals in a holistic manner. How are our goals lifting up communities and working for people who live in them? The projects need to be paying people decent wages, providing benefits, and using unionized labor. The projects need to pollute less, or potentially eradicate pollution at the point source. So that it's making everything around it better.
When we think about reductions, specifically reducing our emissions by 50 percent, what steps need to happen for that to be seriously attempted or achieved?
Before the last nine months, I would have been pretty worried that we could get to that metric, but with the investments at the forefront in Congress right now, I think we can get there.
When we sit down and we again look at it comprehensively, each system has its role to play. Some more than others, but they all add to emissions. When you think of the big ones, like the electric system, the shift to renewables and electrification is huge.
How do we get to zero emissions? Renewables are the biggest driver of that, but additionally, there needs to be a corresponding investment in transmission and storage. We need to be able to build transmission projects to move that electricity to the population centers where people need it. These renewables are to a certain extent intermittent, so we need high capacity transmission, and be able to store energy and then deliver it when people need it.
The technologies are there. We just need to be able to deploy them, at scale. We need rapid deployment of electric vehicles, and we need a major expansion of electric vehicle infrastructure. That's not just charging stations, but an updated and functional electric grid that can deal with all of these vehicles being plugged in.
All of these pieces together can take us beyond the emissions reductions set forth in the Paris Agreement. It can get us on the path to a 50% emissions reduction, which President Biden has called for. But again, this is across multiple sectors. I didn't even get into manufacturing. I didn't get into municipal wastewater management, so on and so forth. They all have their roles to play, but it's that direct investment that will get us there.
As far as implementation goes, how does this rollout? The scale makes it seem top-down.
The coordination from local all the way up to the federal government will be critical.
Funding is top-down. Planning and implementation are generally local.
There are municipal planning organizations in every city across America that are specifically focused on planning for infrastructure projects in their area. So, whether that is Austin, Texas figuring out what we are going to do with their transit system, or whether it is Trenton, New Jersey saying their road situation is a mess, all these planning organizations have put forward their ideas of what would we do if we had this money?
Now it is a matter of starting to put those ideas into motion. The money is hopefully coming. A lot of the planning has already been done locally. The federal government has the capacity to start to approve currents and future projects quickly, and then it's just going to start to move.
But, there isn't much planning needed. A lot of this stuff has been thought out. A lot of it is fairly straightforward. For example, there's been work from the Department of Interior for more than a decade, specifically on how we permit and locate offshore wind projects. These projects need an injection of funding right now from the federal government, and we need to set forward clear goals for what that funding is used for. And so, again to harp on it, the bills that are going through Congress right now do both of those things. It's helping us meet the goal that we need to reduce emissions by 50%, and it's providing the money to back that up. Once we give the money to local municipalities, I have full faith that it can be done.
I wanted to ask about challenges that rural areas face in terms of climate and adaptation, that are different from cities which we talk a lot about.
For a long time, rural areas have been under-invested in. We can see that across multiple areas. Broadband is the most obvious one. Rural areas do not have decent internet access. That is inequitable for people who live in rural areas. You're not as competitive in the job market if you do not have high-quality broadband. That is a hallmark of underinvestment in rural areas. We're about to go hopefully forward with massive investments in our country that will include rural areas. President Biden has called for 40% to go to disadvantaged communities, black and brown communities, environmental justice communities, and that will include rural communities. That's incredibly important.
Hopefully, we make this investment, and hopefully, we do it right. We also need to be thinking about 5, 10, 20 years down the road, when ongoing maintenance needs to happen, will we have set up processes that are providing consistent financial support to ensure disadvantaged communities aren't left behind? Hopefully, this will not just be a one-time thing, but that we actually provide the consistent financial support to ensure that there's equitable access and equitable funding available to these places.
In terms of revitalizing parts of the US that were sucked dry from abandoned industry – when it comes to new climate-oriented infrastructure do people seem excited or is it politicized and pushed back against?
Yeah. It's a critical question. And I appreciate you asking about it. Deindustrialization has been one of the biggest drivers of inequality in America. We should be thinking about how this could be a way to help communities build for the future.
One current example is Rivian in Normal, Illinois. It was the old Mitsubishi manufacturing facility. They closed down, they were purchased, and are now making electric trucks. I think they're gonna start putting them out in public by next year. It's a pretty darn cool story, that would be even better if they honored that plant and town’s history and allowed their workers to collectively bargain. Normal, IL is benefiting from this investment. I saw an article that referred to them as a boomtown because of this investment. It's a great story. But, it's not always going to be just that specific story. I hope there'll be a lot of those stories. The way we make this happen, the way investments need to be made, they need to be made with domestic content included so that we're making investments that have American manufacturing incorporated into it. They need to make the investments that are made so that when projects are built, they're built using union labor so that we are truly lifting up as many people in the community as possible. Again, we need to think about this holistically.
Investment in infrastructure allows for that community to build for the future to think about what they can do to support the people there. So whether it's building out broadband, refurbishing the schools, making a small incubator for craft beer – that's a choice that they can make once the investment in infrastructure comes on top of that back.
And circling back to your question with this massive investment and influx of funds into the clean economy, there will be an expansion of the supply chain. Batteries, the parts, and components of wind turbines–there's roughly seven tons of steel per turbine–all of this can be made in America.
If we're truly incorporating domestic content in these investments, that's going to support American manufacturing. Same with solar panels. You know we make glass in America, that's put into solar panels. We used to make polysilicon, it's critical for making photovoltaic solar panels, but over the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of that production moved to China. That's a long way to answer your question, but thinking about how this investment should help de-industrialized and disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged communities is critical to the success of this investment, and should be prioritized.
Outside of rehab, what are your thoughts on helping people move from areas that can’t be saved? I know retreat is looked at in this really negative way, but sometimes that’s inevitable.
It is a hard and controversial question. When will folks say, “South Beach doesn't work anymore?” I mean, it's a horrifying question to ponder, but if you trust science, it's a real question that will need to be pondered. It coincides with a need for investment in resilience in communities, the ability for a community to adapt and thrive in the face of climate change and its impacts.
Because we will see these changes, they are already baked in. We are going to have to deal with that in places like Louisiana, Miami, New York. We have to invest in resilience, so that we can make that determination in the future, with more clarity.
I'm punting because I think we have to punt at this point.
We haven't actually made that investment in resilience in our communities in any big way. We have to do that first to see what we can salvage for the people who live there. That is job number one. And then from there, we then can start to evaluate the really hard question of places we can't. That's already happening in Louisiana.
The seas have risen across Southern Louisiana in the Gulf, and they are losing a football field a day of land. There are communities down there that are already swamped. There does need to be an investment in and support for communities that are already dealing with this, that can't punt that question, but for the rest, it truly is a matter of, we have to make this investment in resilience first.
I want to be careful of your time, so I'll make this additional question quick – are we past the point of arguing about the existence and impacts of climate change? There will be arguments about how to move forward, but are we done with the denial?
I hope so. I really hope so. It's hard to say that I'm optimistic that we can get there, but I sure hope so. There has been polling done by Yale and others, and the polling is positive across the board. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals agree that yes there is a problem, and yes, we should deal with it. The vast majority of people seem to agree. Where it starts to falter is when it gets into our political system.
And our political system is making a lot of things falter these days. I think climate change has been a harbinger. This issue became very partisan, but it didn’t used to be. We entered the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an effort to bring all countries together to fight climate change in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush ran on pursuing climate action in 2000. He didn't actually do anything. In fact, he made it worse. John McCain ran on passing a cap-and-trade bill in 2008. These things used to not be partisan, but they are now and that's terrible.
It would seem like Governor DeSantis would have a lot to gain from putting Miami first in terms of resilience and climate. Even if that’s cynical, I don’t understand the hold-up.
Do you know who one of the few Republicans in Congress has stood up and said, “We need to act on climate change?”
Who?
Matt Gaetz.
Right.
A very far right-wing representative from Florida. He's from the panhandle of Florida and has seen direct impacts.
A number of years ago, Congressman Bob English from South Carolina came to a realization that we need to do something about the climate crisis; he got primaried because of it and lost.
But, that was a number of years ago. I agree with you, I think a person like Governor DeSantis could actually make a positive move on climate that would be very politically beneficial.
That the climate crisis became such a partisan fight was simply a harbinger of how everything has become a partisan fight. This was just the first of the other big issues. We have seen this happen to others. Immigration used to be a very bipartisan issue. It is no longer. Hopefully, this fever will break. Again, as I said before, I don't know if I can say I'm optimistic right now. I hope so, but I'm not sure.
interviews
Into The Fold
by Will Reeves
January 31, 2020
This interview with Will Reeves, CEO of Fold App, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank | I’d like to talk about how you found yourself at Fold, and the idea of incentivizing people to use Bitcoin.
WR | I've been working in technology, specifically building payments and consumer facing products, for a while now. I've been a founder creating startups around different ways of transacting. My first one was a recurring payments platform to allow anyone to Amazon Prime their business, give certain perks to your subscribers. From there, I spent time building out the Google store, another great example of creating great checkouts and great content to support Google's answer to the Apple store. Then I moved on to building peer-to-peer marketplaces where people can exchange goods without middlemen. Whether that’s their car or a house – high value transactions that require quite a bit of trust, and right now there’s quite a bit of infrastructure to support those types of transactions. How can we do that in a way that brings it to a place between just two people in a way that keeps everyone safe and happy and secure?
My work has always been around building consumer products that introduce new ways of transacting. Whether it’s the idea that you pay for a service on a subscription on a recurring basis as opposed to one offs, or how do we do exchange in a peer-to-peer way as opposed to relying on middlemen, and how do we create new retail stores that are able to capture attention in a very crowded market.
I consider Fold a consumer first business. It's introducing new forms of payments and rewards to people that can give real benefits in people’s everyday lives. It just happens to be based a lot around Bitcoin. I've had an incredible history with this asset, learning about it, using it, seeing it being used in various circumstances that really point to the promise of it as a technology and a social phenomenon, and Fold is really all about accelerating that.
It’s about making it easier for more people to start learning about and start accumulating Bitcoin. The way we've chosen to do that is through rewards and payments. Everyone spends money every single day and there's an existing pattern of earning rewards for spending. We have taken that existing pattern and are introducing a new paradigm with a new asset, a new type of money to people in a way where they don't have to purchase it. They don't have to go through onerous KYC or go to an app that looks like a casino with money being made and lost, it’s a low commitment way to start learning about an asset which I believe can change the world.
You don’t even need a wallet to participate in Fold?
Our whole approach is to meet merchants and consumers where they are today. What do we know about consumers? They have a credit card or a debit card, which they spend with every single day. We have merchants that have existing POS systems, so Fold works in that reality and meets both consumers and merchants where they are today. With Fold, a consumer can download the app, load in their credit card or debit card, and they purchase credit at these retailers. Amazon, Uber, Starbucks – they might buy $50 worth of Starbucks credit that they spend down and earn 5% back in Bitcoin on that purchase. That Bitcoin is instantly deposited to their Fold account, which they can use on a future purchase or they can withdraw to a wallet. We are changing the whole idea of onboarding.
It used to be that to onboard into Bitcoin, you would need someone to, number one, go to an exchange where they can actually buy Bitcoin. They'd buy it, they'd go through the KYC, submit all their personal sensitive data, load a payment method, they would then buy some Bitcoin and then maybe get a wallet, set that up and then send that Bitcoin from that exchange to that wallet.
Fold changes the whole thing saying you don't need a wallet now. You don't need to buy Bitcoin now. You don't need an exchange. All you need is this app and you're going to be passively earning Bitcoin on every purchase. This gives Fold the opportunity to help people accumulate this asset, learn about it, and then when they're ready, we can suggest the right wallets that make it easy for them. We can help them use that Bitcoin to send it, to spend it, to save it – whatever pathway that user thinks is best for them.
Why are you so interested in promoting Bitcoin?
I think Bitcoin specifically is an unprecedented experiment that's happening in real time that I don't think many people understand the magnitude of.
The idea that no matter where you live or what you do, you can participate in an economic system where the rules are transparent and it cannot be manipulated by economic misfortunes of a certain country – really all of the problems that we've seen with mismanaged economies around the world. It is, in my opinion, an experiment that is very deserving of attention and focus. I want to do everything to help see this experiment through. However, I would say we're already at the point where this is looking a lot less like an experiment and more like an actual thing. An alternative system is starting to arise.
And why do I think that's great? Well I believe it gives individuals more freedom and ability to transact without censorship. I think it opens and makes our world a more connected place. It is more forgiving and open to people of all backgrounds, regardless of where they're from.
It’s hard for many people to wrap their heads around – both technologically and theoretically. Do you feel the barrier to entry is beatable?
I think on the macro level, Bitcoin is money. It can be sent to anybody, you can use it to buy things, you can put it away and, and use it as a savings just like the dollars in your savings account. Now, there are some differences – and that's because Bitcoin is the first successful native digital currency created. That requires new infrastructure, new wallets, new behaviors to arise to be able to make that money usable. What we're seeing right now is not a thing of insurmountable user experience challenges to get people to use Bitcoin. It's that we're actually building that infrastructure now. You can imagine the way you used to use your email back when that email provider first started.
You're catching it at the time where the infrastructure is just starting to be ready for mainstream audiences to start to use. At the same time the idea of Bitcoin is being more and more solidified in mainstream people's heads as something real. It's been around for 10 years, it was the highest performing asset over the last decade. It's having some incredible use cases that have proven out several different values for it. But, at the end of the day, it's just money.
Imagine building our current monetary system from scratch. You have to build the banks, you have to build ways for people to loan money, send money, receive money. Think about how you have to send money.
All those things take time to develop and come to fruition. The interesting thing is that Bitcoin is different enough from our existing types of money that you can't just take a carbon copy of what we have in today's world and adopt it for bitcoin. Bitcoin has some very different things about it that are really great, but the infrastructure still needs to be built for it. When I really look at this stuff, it's just about the time horizon, I’m confident that all of the UX problems and engineering issues will be solved. That's not a doubt in my mind. It's just going to take some time to do so.
Blockchain will be able to move as quickly as Visa or MasterCard. It could run that many transactions that fast.
Yes. You know, when we think about crypto or Bitcoin there's many ways people have decided to judge the success of it as an asset. Initially what it was created to be an alternative money that wasn't controlled by a government. It wasn’t created to have a transaction throughput as fast as Visa or MasterCard because that's not what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is the fundamental underlying money, it’s more like the treasury system than Visa and MasterCard. What we're building now are the credit card networks and banks of Bitcoin.
You start to see how even our existing traditional system is just layers and layers of different structures and operations to eventually get to a Visa. Really Bitcoin is going through this evolution. It has the raw material at the base and now what you're seeing is the infrastructure built on top of it that you will begin to recognize. How to use it, to spend it, to save it, to earn it to, to earn interest on it – all that is what we're currently building on top of what is fundamentally just a new type of money.
Regardless of theme when we look to big new ideas that fundamentally change existing infrastructures, like solar or wind replacing coal and gas, there’s an idea that a) regulation stifles innovation and b) new is good – especially when replacing something suspect. Money is central to so much of our lives, what’s keeping crypto ‘good’, why do we think Bitcoin replacing Fiat currency is definitively good?
Technology is fundamentally amoral and apolitical. However, it can be used in ways that promote certain morals and politics. Anytime we are looking at a new technology, I think you have to start from that perspective. If it wins and does take over, it will produce a whole set of new challenges, new inequities, new benefits, and new opportunities. The only thing that's going to change and decide whether it goes one way or the other is the people who are building and using it every day, and what they build it for. We can kind of see how Bitcoin would work because we've actually had periods of time where we've seen the qualities of it.
Bitcoin is peer-to-peer cash and we've actually had peer-to-peer cash for a long time. It can be exchanged privately amongst individuals. It can be used for whatever purpose you want. We know what happens when you have that. But, physical cash is increasingly being eliminated as a form of currency. Across the world the use of physical cash is going down, and it seems that that trajectory shows no signs of stopping. Physical cash gives us certain freedoms and ability to transact with one another, and that freedom is potentially going away in favor of more closed controlled systems that have much more restrictions.
We know what that is like, we know the freedoms afforded by it and the problems afforded by it. Bitcoin is saying, okay, if we are outlawing physical cash, Bitcoin can preserve the fundamental qualities that we have been able to enjoy with physical cash. We can think of bitcoin as a brand new technology, but also as a new technology that is securing older freedoms; it’s not an unknown future. We know that Bitcoin, like cash, can be used for good and for bad – the funny thing is a lot of criticisms can be equally applied to U.S. dollars and so you start to think about it, we actually have a really good blueprint of how it will work.
What we don't have a good blueprint for is what if Bitcoin doesn't exist and physical cash goes away? All of a sudden we have ceded an entire area of rights and freedom of transaction to corporations and governments that have the ability to censor all activity. In my mind, not doing something, not supporting a project like Bitcoin, is in fact leading to an unknown world, that has negative impacts that we haven’t seen before.
Do you think Bitcoin will stabilize enough to be used every day?
Right now, Bitcoin is volatile because people don't know how to value it yet. Some people look at it as digital gold where you don't use it, some people do believe it can be used as a form of digital cash, others see it more like real estate. Others think Bitcoin could become the standard of a new global monetary system. All three of those things address different markets with very different capitalizations.
You have the real estate industry, you have gold, you have payments, all of those are very large industries. But even amongst those, there's a huge disparity. What we're seeing is people making bets about what bitcoin is. What market does it actually fill? Does it fill multiple of these markets? It could be all of the above, or it could just be one or two of those. The world is grappling with something fundamentally new and trying to categorize it. And, the way they're categorizing it guides their investment.
Do I think this is the new property investment? Would you invest differently than if you thought this was a new Visa or MasterCard. People are all doing this independently of each other. And what Bitcoin's price represents is the sum total of all of those individual decisions coming together at once.
Right.
You have people investing in it like it's a really great startup. If Bitcoin was a startup it would be the most profitable successful startup over the last 10 years. Over Uber, over all of that. Is it a new mechanism for investing? All of those bring different market caps that have different implications. We're not going to see stability until all of that is figured out.
To me, the idea that it's volatile is actually what generates the interest. That's what gets people involved. They see the ups and the downs, but the downs are always higher than the previous year. You start to get more and more people in it.
This is where Fold comes in – to accelerate this price discovery by bringing and applying a product that can attract millions of customers to start holding Bitcoin. They start to make their own decisions about what type of asset this is. Is it just a better reward? That's how Fold brings them in, but Fold also introduces it as a form of money and payment or savings so we get to inject a million new users who are going to help us figure out what the price should be and what their coins should be used for.
Outside of your work what makes you excited in this space?
If we can imagine building an imaginary house, Bitcoin is a solid concrete foundation and it does little else, maybe a little electrical wiring, but there's no light bulbs, there's no light switches – the doors are a little hard to get to. You have to climb a ladder into it and then go down a spiral staircase and then a door appears. That's how it is now. I'm looking forward to the foundations and the plumbing, the electrical, as Bitcoin continues to improve. That's everything from a protocol level about making sure the protocol is secure and improved to have better privacy or efficient transactions. But I am also looking forward to better doorways.
We're building the foundation, the plumbing, better doorways and staircases like the Fiat to Bitcoin on ramps and off ramps. Then we need better signs above the door. We need better reasons why you would even want to come in this house. And that's what Fold is about. A sign on the door saying, hey, you earn airline miles, you earn points, you earn cash back. We have a better reward for you now.
Not only can you spend it like cash back, not only can you send it to friends and family like cash back, but now this cash is increasing in value. It was the best performing asset over the last decade. It's going to, on the whole, appreciate and value, and you can do all these other things with it. We believe fundamentally Bitcoin is a better type of money. I'm very confident we can win the argument that Bitcoin is a better reward than what we currently have. That's how we're going to bring people in, put that sign up, earn Bitcoin the best performing asset of the last decade on every purchase. People are going to come in and start accumulating it and start adding their little piece to the house that we call Bitcoin.
Right.
Cashback is also about building an electorate. What I mean by an electorate is that regulations will come and go, and it will all be dependent on the people who are using it, and how they want to defend it. Fold is about building a constituency that holds it and sees the value of it in a way they can understand to defend it. Any work that you're doing with frank news, even this whole crypto month is helping us demystify it, educate people about it, and the more that that happens, the easier my job is at Fold and the closer we are to making sure we don't miss out on this opportunity, that I think is a once in a very long time opportunity. I don't want to screw this one up.
At least from the small amount of time I've spent looking at it, people feel really determined to make it different – the approach is entirely 360.
I hope so. It's one of the industries where you can look around at one point, be like, "Oh my God, who the hell am I bedfellows with?"
It really has an incredibly large tent of people that may not always see eye to eye. But Bitcoin is intended to essentially become the universal measuring stick of value. We have the metric system to universally measure distance and clocks to measure time, and Bitcoin can do the same thing but for value. Because people see it as an equal playing field that can be used for their own self interest, Bitcoin is welcoming to a very diverse community. And I think that's what makes Bitcoin so interesting and strange at the same time, Bitcoin is equally a technological and sociological innovation.