Ben Bartlett is a Berkeley City Councilmember, appointed member of the CA Blockchain Working Group and internationally recognized policy leader. Ben has passed more than 60 measures focused on innovation, opportunity, and inclusion, including:
- Prefabricated Housing for the Homeless
- Health Innovation Zone
- Electric Vehicle Infrastructure
- Telemedical adoption
- Unionized Jobs in Robotics and Automation
- Ben is currently working to integrate government and Blockchain through public finance, Opportunity Zones, and new markets.
Ben is the architect of the Berkeley Tokenized Debt Offering — a first-of-its-kind effort to create Blockchain based municipal bonds. Professionally, Ben is a partner in the San Francisco offices of Tackett Bartlett LLP where he counsels Blockchain entrepreneurs, governments, funds and businesses.
This episode we talk about:
- How can blockchain solve wealth inequality?
- What are micro bonds?
- What are smart contracts and how will they impact people?
- What is the California Blockchain Working Group and what it is currently working on?
- Are ICOs Initial Coin Offerings dead?
- What is the future of Bitcoin?
We want to thank Wendy Xue who organized the delegation trip to Guiyang which is where I met Ben, allowing this interview to happen.
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Learn more about Ben Bartlett
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Pre-Intro 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast.
On today’s episode, we have Ben Bartlett, who’s a Berkeley City Council member, appointed member of the California Blockchain Working Group, an internationally recognized policy leader. Ben is the architect of the Berkeley tokenized debt offer, a first of its kind effort to create blockchain based municipal bonds. Ben is also a partner at the San Francisco offices of Tackett Bartlett LLP. On this week’s episode, we talk about how can blockchain solve wealth and equality? What are micro bonds? What are smart contracts? And how would they impact people? What is the California blockchain working group and what is it currently working on? Are ICO initial coin offerings dead and what is the future of Bitcoin? Also, want to announce that we are raffling off a 30-minute coaching session with Ben for anyone that writes a review or this episode. Enjoy.
Intro 00:50
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see Tomorrow’s World Today.
Shawn Flynn 01:10
Ben, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Ben Bartlett 01:13
Well, thank you, Shawn. Good to be here. Good to see you.
Shawn Flynn 01:16
Now, Ben, can you give us a little bit of background on what your career has been up to this point?
Ben Bartlett 01:21
Well, well, my career is has had a quite a long series of twists and turns that have led to this interesting position I’m in now with you here. So, my first job out of college, I worked in investment bank and at the bank I worked on sort of investigating IP scenarios for around different printing technologies and essentially helped my bosses acquire printing companies and then make them use different inks. And it was really interesting. But in so doing, I learned a lot about these entrepreneurs. It started these companies. And then myself, my friends and I started a company. We had a handbag with lights in it, cut it loose. We had a built in Italy and the parts manufactured in China, the internal parts, it was like it was a beautiful purse. When you open it up, these amazing lights would emerge like imagine a really heavenly refrigerator as a purse. It was really beautiful and we had some traction on that. But alas, we couldn’t really support the manufacturing costs. And then from there. I started dating a woman and she was in the theater. And so, I ended up going to a lot of her 24-hour theater sessions with her and ended up writing some plays and then somehow getting talked into going and learning theater at Carnegie Hall. So, I am working at the bank by day, doing my purse business on the on days as well. And at night at Carnegie Hall, studying theater and acting and writing and producing and directing. And I did this for a while and eventually let go of everything else and was all in theater in New York. And it was great. Package plays, write, produce, direct. So I picked up all these skills around just coming up with a concept and constructing it for use, for maximum enjoyment of other people like a customer, and then packaging it and selling tickets and having the reward from creating some value in someone’s life that you have created. Then from there, I got called out to Los Angeles to go work in Hollywood. So, I went there and ended up working in movies and TV shows and commercials, producing. And at one point, I was a producer on Survivor, Amazing Race, Hell’s Kitchen and American Gladiator. Those were amazing times. Really, really neat. And that was kind of culmination of all my work, just creating from scratch a character. Those people in the shows are characters and then a concept around the character, then the show and getting the advertising and negotiating with the labor unions and getting it out on TV. And so that was really cool. Around that time, Barack Obama was running for president. It’s first time some friends of mine were connected to the campaign and they said, hey, come, come on, come help me and come help this. Help, help this first. But this first black man ran for president. I said okay, you got to do it. I took off, went to Minnesota and was there for six months doing town hall meeting and organizing it, writing persuasion scripts and things like that really, really working hard to help them win Minnesota. With a bunch of other organizers, we need lives of the family and a moment on during that experience is what pivoted my career, my life. A bunch of us were at a at a wind turbine factory in the neighboring state. The president, Barack Obama. Before he was president then, the senator came to town. The candidate he was talking to, the CEO of this company, is a wind energy in his massive warehouse with turbines like as long as like a football field to look like. And Barrack was like, all right, guys, this is the future right here. This the future. And he looked at me and everything touched my shoulder and also. OK. All right. So, then OK, this the future. So renewable energy. What is this? I know it’s cool. I know I like solar panels. I know I like electric cars. They don’t exist yet. But I know I like them. It sounds like could be awesome. And tell you the truth, I was getting kind of stunted with my previous career as kind of creatively kind of running into a bit of a cold sac in my habit of saying yes to opportunity, just saying yes every single time. I said yes to renewable energy. So, I went off, sold my business in L.A. and moved up to Berkeley, where my family’s from originally, and ended up starting a coffee shop. My father right next to the city hall of Berkeley. We import coffee from Yemen. It was our own brand, Bartlett’s Coffee, organic coffee from Yemen. It was really a fun labor of love. My father passed away a couple years ago and it was his dream. I thought, okay, I’ll sacrifice for a year or so and can arrange near my life and help my father’s with his dream and get to spend time with him. As you know, I’ve been living away from most of my life and but the way we’re set up, we’re right next to the city hall where all the local politicians come in to get coffee now, talk them all, became friends at the mall and the mayor, etc. And I said, look, I want to do this renewable energy stuff. And Berkeley sort of blessed with lots of commissions. There is a commission for every topic. There’s one for transportation, one for health care, one for education, one for planning and zoning, one for homelessness. And there’s one for the environment. And specifically, actually, two and one environment, one for the zero waste. And so, one of the politicians said, OK, we’ll have an opening on the Zero Waste Commission. You can learn about the environmental business there. Okay. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll do it. So, I got on the commission and it was, you know, recycling. And I learned that Berkeley was the first town, the country to install curbside recycling. And it was my neighborhood that was doing it first that I represent now. It’s really cool. So, I learned about recycling and learned about the intersection with recycling and energy, because if you take garbage and especially biodegradable garbage and pack it in the earth or pack it anywhere, it begins to break down and release gas, methane gas. You can capture and power a city on. On my tenure there. And it’s all there for us there for a few years. We created the first sort of garbage into energy deal for the city of Berkeley. It was a groundbreaking major deal. So, I learned all about that, that world and from then someone told me to go to law school, do you remember that?. So, I did that. And law school said environmental law and business and other stuff ended up working on cap and trade. This is the carbon securities stuff in California when it came out. I worked on electric vehicle infrastructure. So, learning how to set up the physical infrastructure and the financial infrastructure and funding for electric vehicle charging stations, networks of batteries and smart manufacturing, and then ended up getting into deeper and deeper into that world. And graduate law school was working the California Clean Energy Fund, where we really went to bat on this stuff and dug deep and created loan losses funds for people to buy electric cars in advanced battery manufacturing facilities around the country. My original ideas of using creative business to make a difference and to expand opportunity. Now we’re getting into innovation and environmental repair and slow this thesis started kind of emerge hone in on innovation. Let the innovation create opportunity. And make sure it was included in the opportune. Innovation, opportunity and inclusion and that sort of emerge in that period of time. Then from there that when you’re trying to innovate, you run up against capital problems because institutions are not that into innovation, because you can threaten their dominance. Right. If you’re a big company, the new guy gives out the better widget. Right. So that’s with funding is the issue. So we spent so much time trying to move the economy into renewable energy and move transportation into electric vehicles and electric E.V. adoption. Well, since we can’t fund these charging station networks that have to happen, we’re talking millions of charging stations. Right. Who is going to pay for that? We say, OK, well, maybe we can crowdfund them some way. Maybe there’s a way to create micro economies that can create wealth for people that use them. So, a low-income person can be financially incentivized to engage with electric cars and electric charging and capture electrons and move them around and sell them to each other, little marketplaces. And at that time, the crypto revolution was really, really taking off. It was starting to really, really get hot. ICOs and things like that. And so we designed a solar coin. A coin representing solar energy and renewable energy and capturing the electron and creating markets for that around it. And as we need it, it didn’t go anywhere. We had no idea what we’re doing. We don’t know who to call, you know. We don’t know how to how to stand it up, how to work it out. We designed it and thought about it. Thought about it. Hard to. And then. And that sort of kind of became the genesis of the next iteration of innovative financing that I’m involved in now.
Shawn Flynn 11:06
You talked about ICO coin there and blockchain technology. Is the government still involved or interested in this type of technology?
Ben Bartlett 11:16
So, yes, in a nutshell, yes, the government is deeply involved. All governments are deeply involved, deeply interested, deeply suspicious, deeply covetous of the technology because it’s the new Internet. And I guess the challenge is for governments to use it and leverage it for their benefit without alienating their existing partnerships. And so, you see that through the regulations are happening everywhere. This is a huge stop. A basic government are faced with either kill the blockchain revolution or embrace it or somewhere in between. And so to that end, there’s you know, there’s probably a consensus that among governments around the world that they need to adopt it and they are doing so in a multitude of ways.
Shawn Flynn 12:10
Can you give an example of a government adopting this technology? And before that, even you give a brief definition or explanation of blockchain technology. Just a brief.
Ben Bartlett 12:22
So blockchain technology is it’s a database. And it’s really simple. It’s a database and holds information and information is written in a super code that’s hard to break. And there’s a permanent record. And the database and the record, because it’s so secure, allows you to automate things on top of it. The best way to imagine this is to those people that if you ever used Google Drive, Google Doc, Google Docs. Right. How do you write together like you’re here and I’m there and we’re both typing at the same time on the page? That’s blockchain. You have ten dollars. He’s got two dollars. He’s got one dollar. And the three of us are changing money. It’s showing up at the same time on the screen. And then the next level, of course, is to set rules for where the money can go. And that becomes a programmable currency, the future in the and the possibilities are endless. Once you have that, essentially it’s just a distributed. Distributed way to trade information and track things together.
Shawn Flynn 12:33
And then who are governments adopting this technology right now?
Ben Bartlett 13:36
There’s a number of initiatives that are happening. Finance and infrastructure and health care and education, because you see the underlying technology of the crypto and the coin world, the blockchain, ledger technology that we talked about is useful for streamlining information sharing and tracking things. So, Australia was a really early adopter, they put much of their government on blockchain. And it’s a pilot there. They’re running a government into blockchain now. Austria did a did financing via blockchain in offering. I believe that they were probably inspired by the work we did in Berkeley. Which I guess we’ll get into later. Or we can do it now. Why not? You know, the you know that my favorite use of government adoption blockchain technology is one that we did in the middle of doing right now in Berkeley. We going back to the issue of financing and getting financing together and getting around obstacles to financing right. And finding new ways to funding. We determine at our homeless population was with so great and growing. And it is growing now all over the place. Every country and every state as well. And California in particular. But homelessness is growing. And there is very little public investment to create housing for people that just cannot afford to pay high rent. And so, to that end, people create portable housing and homeless housing and housing for senior citizen housing for person with disabilities. But that that money is not big market return. So it’s hard to get it funded when to do that. Governments rely on write off mechanisms, either direct money from the government or tax credits, which is corporation or rich person can sort of lower their tax bill by investing in some of these good projects like housing. We decided we forecasted that market conditions based upon the tax cuts that were coming our way a couple years ago, that rich people and corporations would have little incentive to invest their tax moneys into products because their tax bill go down. There’s no need to lower their tax bill. So we decided to not wait for that train to come into the station, but to go ahead and change the course, the tracks. We decided to crowdfund the fund. We were due to do this through a bond and the bond would be meant to be accessible to the very people. That would be living in his buildings and the people who would soon be does not earning that much money. The average American is supposed to have a net worth of zero dollars in the next three decades. We’re on a collision course with ultra-poverty and homeownership, which is the basis of wealth in America, is out of reach at this point for too many people, because since the crash in 2008, the mortgages got absorbed and these large venture funds now own tens of thousands of houses. And they don’t they don’t sell them. They rent them. And the population grows. People are just shut out of the economy. And you add to that than the normal does the fact that the capital velocity of the velocity of money 2008 has slowed to a crawl. Lots of money is the how many times a dollar spent. Or whatever unit currency is spent and the more it spent, the more hands it touches. The better your economy is. The more fair your economy is, the more shared prosperity you have. When the crash happened and the governments are issuing cheap money and inflating stocks, inflating these large bundles of mortgages, what not only the top people in the economy get them. So, go straight from government to a couple of hands and there’s no velocity. The ordinary folks are not enjoying this money and they’re having to work two and three jobs, no benefits, you know, four hours, five hours and automation’s coming in the middle of that. So you have this this real specter of an intense social equation where you have massive have nots and a few haves. So, a lot of economists are thinking, how can we speed the velocity of money? Like we get money moving around, and so one way to do that is to look at the needs, right. And one need all governments have around the world right now. It is deep capital expenditure, infrastructure, and the ends were hold. Is woefully underfunded and has been decades and decades of underinvestment. So that that’s your sewers, that’s your roads, that is your bridges. That’s your health care apparatuses. Then you have global sea level rise. So, all the coastal cities need to be rebuilt and move back. And you have pension obligations, none of which is met. So you have this this crisis and funding. It has to happen on a governmental level, rather, for cities, counties, states, countries, you name them. And so you have these two twin goals, these two twin needs people needing assets and capital assets needing funding. If you could solve for that kind of bilateral equation, could drive the economy forward and try and open it up again. So we came up with this way to issue bonds to those people to fund those projects. And the issue, of course. Right. You know, of course, is do a bond, right? Well, yeah, of course. But the bonds are they are not meant for ordinary people. They are really expensive because $5000 is the bare minimum. Right. But it more effectively one hundred thousand dollars or more. So ordinary folks trying to get an asset, can’t buy a house, can’t buy stocks, can’t buy bond. Right. Let’s give a bond. And so with the technology, the blockchain technology, the we talked about here the ledger. Right. The Google Docs kind of arrangement where much of the costs and bonds is baked in is people tracking who owns what and how it got issued. This is called a ledger. Right. Which is all money is. Money is just a ledger. You know, I bought the shirt from you and have a record of it here. Right. So, this ledger is distributed an automated. It streamlined. So, you can automatically cut the cost of issuance. By as much as half. And then also because it’s so frictionless and so streamline, it’s just a bit on a computer. You can issue the bond in a whole new way, in a much smaller way, and go for five dollars and go for one cent, because there’s no there’s no expenditure in writing checks or keeping track. It’s super cheap to do. So that became the community of micro-bond admission on an issue. That idea. And so, we spent a year and a half crafting this with industry and talking to people and learning about it. And really, coming up, a new form of financial inclusion. We drafted we passed it. It was a crazy year and a half to draft it and pass it. A lot of education. A lot of people thought it was Bitcoin or something and didn’t understand that this is not Bitcoin. This is just the new Internet at work, magic e-mailing money. It’s like that. And we’ve passed it. And some were excited. And the funny thing is, since we published that over a year ago, multiple countries and jurisdictions have issued bonds via a blockchain. The World Bank, you know, Austria. There’s more. So, it’s really cool that we started this revolution that has just begun.
Shawn Flynn 22:07
How is California going to adopt this technology, not just Berkeley, but how is it going to be spread out throughout the state?
Ben Bartlett 22:15
Well, I know that probably no less in 33 cities called me to watch this and see how we do it. They can copy because the neo I told you is so severe for people for infrastructure. No money velocity. Multiple cities. I’ve been watching and states, right? But now in California, we’ve kind of taken a big step, big step forward. The legislature passed a measure creating Blockchain Task Force, a working group. Blockchain working group to study. All the ways blockchain can be integrated into the California government and economy. And so I’ve been appointed by the governor to this task force working group and with 19 other people. A lot of high-level operators in the space and high-level technologists and high-level thinkers. Really smart, dynamic and really fortunate to spend time with these people, they are just incredible. And our job is to write the official report outlining the different ways blockchain could and should be integrated to California. It’s pretty crazy. So just a quick overview. The ways in which the technology can be implemented here are numerous. Whether it’s stream money, health care process for healthcare payments or keeping track of your medical records when you go to the doctor, it’s crazy, right? You know, they got to look you up. It’s they don’t know what happened over here. Over there, you know. So the what they call portability is a game changer that the technology really enables of course, all the anything involving money and payments and proving and also identity identification, identity receiving payments in the estate, tracking payments to vendors. There is there’s cannabis from the infrastructure. There’s the supply chain tracking of the cannabis, all the way from seed cultivation in manufacturing and delivery to sale to retail. All that’s mandated to be tracked. And it’s hard to do it. It’s really labor intensive. But this mechanism is really it makes it much easier and tax payments. Right. So just streamlining all these processes. It goes on and on, on. There are so many different applications, people exploring.
Shawn Flynn 14:38
What about smart contracts? Will that have an impact on the people?
Ben Bartlett 24:44
Smart cutbacks are essentially an automated transaction. You give it a set of rules and it does it. Smart contracts will be the main game changer at play. So, for instance, if you could go out and combine Internet of Things, technology, sensors and communication devices, you could go out and pre-negotiate a series of deals and arrangements around a non-toxic form of some product, air culture product. Let’s say a shirt, let’s say you find cotton that does not use a lot of water and is not used, not break humanitarian labor laws. And you find this cotton. OK. The challenge, of course, though, is to get this supply chain unlocked and get it out to market. Now, traditionally, you’d have to go out and raise a bunch of money and buy it all up and have all the apparatus to move it to the store. And it’d be more expensive because it’s better. It does because it doesn’t degrade the environment or humanity that much more expensive. But you can imagine where you could identify the cotton and negotiate the rights to it, then identify the transport company, pre-negotiate a contract with them, then the assembly people, pre-negotiate the assembly, the knitting the cotton into the shirt and then the final store, the retail outlet, negotiate with them. To have these 10000 cotton shirts for sale this quarter, pre-negotiate all of this supply chain dynamic and encoded, coded into what you call a smart contract. If this happens, then this happens. So, this cotton gets bought him. It goes here than there than there all the way to there. And when you have that lined up, you can go out and just fundraise off the entire smart contract and roll money into it. And so it’s like an automated business. This how Amazon works. Amazon is a system. There’s warehouses and the packaging and the boxes and that robot move in here and the robot that goes there and your phone and the truck and it gets there. This sort of mechanistic, systemic approach to movement of capital and goods, I think is really enabled by smart contracts. And all that does is lowers the price for things that happen. Or just the opportunity to unlock new markets. Markets that we need to bring, that we need to bring out in order to, you know, either open up new opportunities or change environment or you name it. And smart contracts also are just good for everyday use, everyday people to have passive income and starts to, you know, monetize their data, get paid for their data. And instead of a series of contracts where, OK, well, your personal data can be, you know, like right now. Each one of us, when you go online, if you know this, but if you’re go to open your laptop, go online and you know the banner that pops up, banner that pops up on your screen. Well, in the millisecond. That banner is popping up. There is a real time bid happening for your attention. So you will have company A, company B, company C. All having an auction for you. We’ll. Oh, here we go. I got a guy lives in a major city. He goes out to restaurants. He eats at these restaurants three times a week. He’s traveled here. He’s traveled there. He wears his clothes. They know everything about you, all your data is being harvested. You are on a minute by minute basis and they take that data. And with that data, they from the profiles of you and try to tailor advertising. So, in the millisecond that banner comes up, you are being profiled and auctioned off and find the winner. Some hotel chain wins it by with OK. And go into the hotel chain for 0.25 cents. And when you open your computer, all you see is bam, hotel chain banner. Right. Now what if. All the data points they used to identify you an auction for you. You owned it. And you can participate in that market. And that your personal smart contract was set up so that any auction that goes down, you get half of that 0.25 cents. And that becomes the really strong economic driver. Personal wealth building and a personal passive income, because at this point, you, as a normal person with your phone and your movements about town and your computer activities going out using your credit card, you could probably earn two hundred dollars a month. Off your data transactions. So imagine if you could do that. And imagine if your money meant something to you. Imagine if you grouped up with friends, you and ten thousand of your friends or everyone from your college or your friend from your church could all pull your data together. And then have bundled earnings that you could apply to invest whatever stock market, anything, buy houses, anything and all that, you can just automate that and program that. That’s a smart contract. Is it good, if you want to see that in action? Look at that company called Brave. They’re really doing it really well.
Shawn Flynn 30:36
And we’re going to stop this episode right now, so stay tuned for next week when we give you part two. And don’t forget to write a review and items and share this episode with your network if you enjoy it. All right. Thanks, everyone. And see you soon. Take care.
Outro 30:52
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
