Public Key Podcast

Tennessee AG on Crypto, Consumer Protection and Opioid Crisis: Ep. 84

November 28, 2023 | by Chainalysis Team

Episode 84 of the Public Key podcast is here and we are happy that you love the refreshed look.  The opioid crisis, consumer protection and of course, crypto are all high priorities at the Tennessee Attorney General office, and we get a chance to speak with TN Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti about the challenges of keeping up with technology in the legal field and the need for technical literacy among judges and prosecutors.

You can listen or subscribe now on Spotify, Apple, or Audible. Keep reading for a full preview of episode 84.

Public Key Episode 84: Crypto and consumer protection top priorities in Tennessee

As a young prosecutor, Jonathan Skrmetti (Tennessee Attorney General) worked on cases that had similar plots to the movie, Training Day. His early cases ranged from law enforcement corruption, human trafficking and presidential assassination attempts.

In this episode, Ian Andrews (CMO, Chainalysis) got to talk to John about his thrilling entry to prosecutions and the cases he works on as the Tennessee Attorney general, including fighting the opioid crisis, minimizing big tech’s influence on children using social media and consumer protection in the crypto space. 

John emphasizes the need for technical literacy in the judicial system and the evolving nature of technology and emphasizes the importance of collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the need for technological countermeasures to combat online scams and crimes.

Quote of the episode

“And because it’s so easy to move money around, because it’s so easy to communicate, you know, all sorts of friction that used to exist, having to show up in person or at least try really really hard to gain someone’s confidence,those protections aren’t there anymore, and I’m sure it’s a heavy burden on the financial institutions trying to defend against this stuff, and I know it’s a heavy burden on law enforcement on the back end.” – Jonathan Skrmetti (Tennessee Attorney General)

Minute-by-minute episode breakdown

  • (2:10) – Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmett’s responsibilities and daily tasks
  • (4:08) – Jonathan’s early DOJ Portfolio of Official Misconduct, Human Trafficking and Hate Crimes 
  • (6:20) – Shift in criminal activity towards financial crimes and technology-based scams
  • (8:45) – Importance of technical and blockchain literacy in the judicial system
  • (10:50) – Lawsuit against Meta and the exploitative nature of social media on children
  • (14:35) – Importance of collaboration and education in combating sophisticated crimes
  • (20:52) – Complexity of the fentanyl crisis and the role of cryptocurrency
  • (24:13) – Tennessee’s conservative approach to crypto and NFT investment
  • (27:45) – Need for policy environment that supports crypto innovation and protects citizens

 

Related resources

Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.

Speakers on today’s episode

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Transcript

Ian:

All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Public Key. This is your host, Ian Andrews. This week I am joined by Tennessee Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti. Sir, welcome to the program.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian:

Now, we’ve been fortunate to host prosecutors and law enforcement professionals on the podcast, but I’m honored to say, you’re our first attorney general. First of many, hopefully. Perhaps we can start with an explanation of what does a day in your life look like? What are the things that you focus on as an attorney general?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

My office has a really broad portfolio. We defend the state in all litigation against the state. That’s everything from people who damage their cars, hitting a pothole on a state-maintained road, to these giant constitutional cases and multi-billion dollars suits against the state. We also have consumer protection, which I know we’re going to talk about more, and that eats up a lot of time as well. Then there’s just back and forth with the federal government. Sometimes they come in and litigate with us, sometimes we litigate with them and that’s all part of the checks and balances of our system.

In any given day, usually there are case updates, there’s conversations with clients, which may be the governor’s office or legislators or different agency heads. I try to get out and talk to student groups and other community groups, rotary clubs, and just make sure that there’s transparency and that we’re educating them. There are frequently media inquiries about different cases we’re working on. Then I have about 360 people on staff. A lot of the day is just management, just figuring out who’s doing well, hiring people, moving people around, and trying to make sure the office keeps running.

Ian:

It surprises me to hear that the scale of your staff is that large, actually. I would not have picked that number, but given the scope and range of activities that you’re involved in, it must be necessary.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Unfortunately, yeah. We have about 16,000 open matters at any given time.

Ian:

Unbelievable. Now, before you became attorney general, you’ve been in the legal field for almost two decades. You spent quite a bit of time at the Department of Justice. Can you talk about some of the work there? I think reading your profile, you got the opportunity to work on some pretty exciting cases.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I was the luckiest young prosecutor in the country. It was phenomenal. I went to the civil rights division after I clerked for a judge for a year out of law school. I was in the criminal section there, and the portfolio in the criminal section is official misconduct, hate crimes and human trafficking. I did six months of basically bootcamp. It was doing domestic violence prosecutions in DC, just misdemeanor prosecutions, very intense. Then the first case they sent me out on was a federal case in Memphis, Tennessee. I had never been to Memphis before. It was these police officers that were ripping off drug dealers and then working with their gang buddies to resell the drugs. It was like being thrown into a movie. Then a few months into that, some of the local police officers and some of the ICE agents there had identified this human trafficking operation.

It was these underage Mexican girls. It was, I believe the first trafficking case in Tennessee. Since I was already down, they said, “Why don’t you work on this one?” That ended up leading to a substantial number of trafficking cases I worked over the course of my federal career. Then we had these insane hate crimes. We had a group that was conspiring to assassinate President Obama. There was a racially motivated murder of a law enforcement officer in Memphis. The Aryan Alliance burned down a house of worship in Columbia, Tennessee. I was just a few years out of law school on these. They were terrible crimes, but when you’re a prosecutor, that’s what gets you going. I wish they had never happened, but I was really glad I got to be part of the response.

Ian:

I’m pretty sure that first one you described is actually a plot of a Denzel Washington movie called Training Day.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Training Day, yeah.

Ian:

That’s amazing. I don’t know if that movie was actually based on that case, but it sounds like straight out of the screenplay. I’m curious, this is a cryptocurrency podcast, did you actually have the opportunity to encounter any cases where cryptocurrency came into play during your time at DOJ?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I never did. I left DOJ in I think the tail end of 2013. I know crypto was a thing then, but we were starting to get educated on it. Most of the cases I was working at that point were either human trafficking dealing with relatively disorganized groups. Just like one, two, maybe three traffickers working together, nothing on a big scale, or the occasional hate crime or corrupt police officers. It wasn’t really my bag at that point. I’m a tech aficionado, so I was aware of it. I really wish I had been mining back then. It was more seeing the policies getting developed than actually being hands-on with anything.

Ian:

It’s amazing when I think about the technological change that’s happened in just the last 10 years, since you left DOJ. I think about my own career, the evolution of things like cloud and everyone now carries around their mobile phone. We’re all permanently connected to each other through technology. I have to imagine that, that has played a huge shift in the types of criminal activity that you see now as AG. I had a conversation recently with some prosecutors out of the New York area who are describing there’s actually a generational gap in gang activity, where the older gang members are what you imagine from movies. They sell drugs and they have street corner operations. Younger gang members see that as too dangerous, either due to violence or fear of prosecution. It shifted into financial crimes in a fairly major way. That fact just completely blew me away. I didn’t realize that these types of shifts were happening until that conversation. Are you seeing similar things?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

To some extent. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of the traditional violent gang crime. It’s an ongoing problem and hopefully that will shift at some point. We’re seeing a lot of crimes, especially against the elderly where people are using technology. I don’t want to skip ahead too much, but there’s an AI component there. I think that’s going to get incredibly more sophisticated very, very quickly. We need to figure out countermeasures and we need to equip people to protect themselves from that. Because the issue with online crime is it’s not necessarily localized. You can be preyed on by somebody in a different continent, and we see that frequently. For a while, ransomware was the thing. It seems like the incidence of that has decreased. I don’t know the statistics. There was a stretch where that seemed to be very widespread.

It looks now like there’s a lot more individualized scamming and hitting elderly people for their life savings in a disturbingly effective way. There’s a lot more sophisticated financial crime out there. Because it’s so easy to move money around, because it’s so easy to communicate, all sorts of friction that used to exist, having to show up in person or at least try really, really hard to gain someone’s confidence, those protections aren’t there anymore. I’m sure it’s a heavy burden on the financial institutions trying to defend against this stuff. I know it’s a heavy burden on law enforcement on the backend.

Ian:

The question about ransomware actually is an interesting one. It was at its peak in the summer of ’21. If you remember Colonial Pipeline getting shut down by ransomware. That was the height. We put out some research in the area and described it as the summer of ransomware. We actually saw a decline in ransomware activity in the second half of last year. It appears to be re-accelerating. It’s one of the faster growing areas of crypto related financial crime, at least that we’re tracking. The decline doesn’t appear to be permanent. There’s a resurgence coming, unfortunately.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

That is unfortunate.

Ian:

Now, I know you have some expertise in cybersecurity and particularly, cyber law. Reading your profile, it looks like you actually taught at University of Memphis for a number of years. I’m super curious, what would I have learned if I’d had the opportunity to take your class?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

The biggest takeaway was the law does not do a great job of keeping up with technology. In particular, we saw this unbelievable acceleration over say the last 30 years or so. For a long stretch, you could just tell there were judges that didn’t have much exposure. My favorite case, I think it was from ’96, and it was this court writing about the internet, except they didn’t say the internet. They said internet, and it was in all caps and it kept appearing over and over through the opinion. We got our first modem I think when I was like 10 years old back in the 80s. My dad was a computer scientist. We were always a little ahead of the curve and spent money we probably shouldn’t have on technology.

By the time the judges were writing this, it was already so dated and nobody who actually worked for this stuff talked that way. There was just a giant gap. The more ubiquitous the technology become, the smaller the gap becomes, but it’s still there. Particularly with AI acceleration upon us, I worry we’re going to see the expansion of that again. At this point though, you at least have judges who understand the basics of what it means to do something online and what social media is. You don’t have to explain every little thing like it’s some completely alien, esoteric technology that normal people don’t know. We’ve closed the gap a little bit for the time being.

Ian:

I’m glad to hear you call out this idea of technical literacy being necessary in the judicial system. It’s something that I think is necessary everywhere. I have kids that are elementary, middle-school age, and I’m encouraging them every opportunity to learn more about technology. It seems like a necessary skill for everyone. An interesting case though that I saw you were part of the lawsuit that’s been brought against Meta, which I think goes to this kind of, we didn’t understand what we were getting ourselves into at the start. Now in retrospect, maybe these companies have gotten a little too big or a little too influential for society. At least that’s my summary on the case. I’d love to hear your perspective.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Sure. This is a case that’s targeting Meta and it’s nothing that Meta alone is doing. We’re looking at the industry. Our consumer protection laws say you have to be honest with your consumers and you can’t do things that hurt them. We’ve seen particularly where kids are involved that just the mechanics of social media, the engagement mechanism at the core of these apps is exploitive and it exploits vulnerabilities in human psychology. Because they’re able to AB test on such a big scale and because they’re able to hire the smartest researchers in the world who understand the nuances of our neuroscience in ways that most people don’t. They’ve created these unbelievable engagement machines where it’s really hard to stop once you start, and that’s by design.

When you’re talking about kids and you’re talking about the psychological impact of this stuff on kids, I think anecdotally everybody’s seen it, but if you look at the data, over the last 15 or so years, America has fallen off a cliff. Our kids are having all sorts of mental health issues on a scale that they just didn’t before. The internal conversations and the experts all say social media is a big contributor to that. We’re just looking for accountability. I know a lot of people think, “It’s a big company with a lot of money, and you’re just trying to get your hands in that pocket.” I don’t care if we get no money out of this. It’s very clear what the mechanisms are that deal with controlled dopamine releases. The companies know neuroscience and they’re hitting kids so hard using social dynamics to keep them on.

Using every possible mechanism of interaction to drive people to use it more, to minimize the length of breaks they take. You see the effects, like sleep deprivation because kids are on too late at night. Kids saying, “I wish I could use it less, but I just can’t. I feel like I can’t.” FOMO being weaponized to a degree that’s really bad for children. There’s a lot of good that comes from social media. This is not a crusade to eliminate social media, but we understand very well that it’s having a terrible effect on a generation of kids. There are decisions that the companies have made that can be undone, and we can make this a useful but not exploitive tool by putting up guardrails and making sure that they’re not doing the things that they are currently doing to take advantage of that neuroscience.

Ian:

Well, I certainly applaud the effort as a parent of three young kids who we don’t allow to access social media, by the way, for a lot of the reasons you just laid out. It really is, the research is terrifying. We might try and find some links to a couple of good papers that go into this and include in the show notes here. I’m curious, what is the resolution that you’re asking Meta for? What are the specific changes? Because I imagine it’s not as simple as, just turn off the magic algorithm that makes kids want to stay on this all day long.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

We’re not getting too specific about relief that we want. What we want is for kids not to be addicted to their social media. These are really sophisticated companies and they’ve got unfathomable amounts of data on their users. I think the key is the outcome. We don’t want kids to stay up too late. We don’t want kids to be using during school hours. We don’t want kids to be using when they feel like it’s hurting them. The company’s able to adjust targets. They’re able to make all sorts of changes to the ultimate effect of the app based on review of data. They’ve been using it to maximize engagement. That’s caused problems. They’re sophisticated actors. If the harm is clearly identified and the goals are clearly identified, technologists are in a much better position than attorneys to say exactly how the platform should behave.

I worry anytime the government’s interacting with a sophisticated or even a simple piece of technology, there are loads of opportunities for unintended consequences. I think that the optimal way to resolve this, and if we can’t get there and we have to do it in a more heavy-handed way, that’s fine. That’s a possibility. The best outcome is always one where the company that understands its product is working with a government that understands where the lines need to be drawn and they have the opportunity to do it in a way that causes the least harm to their overall model. That allows the utility of the product to remain to the fullest extent possible within the guidelines of minimizing harm to kids.

Ian:

I love that approach. Because as soon as something’s prescribed that has a specific technical implement, excuse me, a particular technical implementation, it almost certainly will be overcome by some advance in the technology in another way. Attaching to the goal of let’s not harm children seems like the right one, and then trust the companies to follow that lead. I’m curious, shifting gears back to this concept of technical literacy, and you touched on AI earlier being a big challenge. The technical depth that I see in some of these criminal activities like SIM swapping cases, which is at the heart of a lot of the financial fraud or even AI fakes.

I’ve had my grandmother tell me that she’s gotten phone calls that sound just like me saying that I’m in some sort of distress and I need money urgently. Now, fortunately, she was smart enough to call me first on my phone number and verify that I had actually been the one calling. I often hear stories about victims who then come to report these crimes. When they come to the authorities, it’s sort of like, “That’s really hard technology.” Or if it’s crypto related, “That’s crypto, it’s untraceable. Nothing we can do.” I’m curious, what’s your perspective on that? How can we fix that problem so that there’s not a double harm to the victim there, the original crime and then inability to offer any support or resolution?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Part of the issue is coordination. There are some really sophisticated crimes out there where you need the federal resources to have any opportunity. I don’t have international jurisdiction. My ability to influence things that go on around the world is very limited. Federal government has better tools for that, has better connections overseas. For foreign-based crimes, there needs to be coordination between the people dealing with the victim and the people who can do something about it. Part of it is education. There have been other issues. The war on drugs, for instance, there has been a ton of education. There’s all sorts of coordination. There are joint state, federal, local working groups, task forces, people detailed to other levels of government to learn techniques so they can carry those back to their agency. There’s a lot of interaction there.

With technology, we really need to do the same thing. Part of it is it’s not just a matter of the investigators, it’s also the prosecutors. Even if you’ve got somebody at a local agency who’s able to investigate, if you don’t have prosecutors who are educated, if you don’t have the resources for them to deal with relatively complex white-collar cases, some of these may look simple from a white collar perspective, but the amount of work that needs to go into bringing a case is a whole lot more than an aggravated assault or something. There’s a resource issue there. Then victim services. At the end of the day, because a lot of these guys are pretty sophisticated and are able to get away with it, maybe we need to look at victim compensation and how that works in ways that are a little more effective.

Because it’s very distressing when you’re talking to an elderly victim who has been totally scammed into giving away 50, 80, $100,000. You want to do everything you can for them. Sometimes recovering that is really hard. Sometimes it’s difficult to identify who did it or even exactly what happened if they don’t have appropriate record keeping and they were confused throughout the process. There are real obstacles there. I think the ultimate answer is law enforcement needs to work together better and get a lot more sophisticated at communicating both among different agencies and with the public to try to minimize these risks. Of course, financial institutions too. I know there’ve been some great very sophisticated innovations there. The more that they can do to stop these transactions, the better.

Ian:

One really impressive story, we recently had on the podcast detective Matthew Hogan from the Connecticut State Police. They saw a surge in activity related to Bitcoin ATMs. These kiosks where you can put money in and then send as Bitcoin those funds off to some address somewhere else/ they were unregulated. There were little, if any, penalties on the operator of the ATM unit who was not necessarily participating in any illicit activity directly, but was obviously, a facilitator. He was able to work with their banking division in Connecticut and actually, got a piece of legislation passed that completely shifted that balance of power.

Limited the transaction value amount, the number of transactions, and actually, got a clause in there that said that under certain circumstances could be a reverse of the transaction. Meaning, that the operator was now financially liable for facilitating one of these scam tactics that had someone show up and start feeding bills into a crypto ATM. I’m curious, do you see things like that happening in Tennessee where there’s collaboration across law enforcement and some of the regulatory to try and make some gains here?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Yeah. We’ve got a very receptive legislature, and I think they’re interested in ensuring that we have an environment where innovation can happen and where innovators want to come, but also to put up guardrails and keep our citizens safe. I don’t know what activity we’re going to see on the legislative front in the coming session. Given that we’ve seen more sophisticated scams out there, and there’s particular attention right now on elder abuse and elder scams, I suspect there are a lot of conversations going on about what the most effective legislative interventions could be. I definitely look forward to working with everyone as those emerge.

Ian:

I think more broadly on the consumer protection avenue, and we’ve touched on this a little bit earlier in the conversation. As criminals are getting more sophisticated, their opportunity to reach targets at scale, it’s mind-boggling. How does your office think about that? You mentioned consumer protection is one of the big areas that you and your staff spend time.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

It’s disconcerting. I know a little bit about what the capabilities are out there, and it seems like they’re only going to get better and better. There are your traditional Nigerian prince scammers who are using different LLMs to come up with some really sophisticated, really individualized email approaches to people. They’re just going to get better and better at it. I think there are legal possibilities out there, but ultimately, there’s got to be some sort of technological counter as well. I don’t know what that might look like. Some assistance for people to help weeded out the scams. I’m sure that the various big email platforms are already working on this to some extent. The law can only do so much, and it invariably moves slower than the technology does. It can be a part of the solution, but it’s never going to be the whole solution.

Ian:

That’s a great point I think for everybody listening. We can’t stand idly by and wait for a new law to be passed. We’ve got to take some action from the side of the technology. Shifting gears a little bit, we’ve been pretty active at Chainalysis in researching the links between Mexican cartels and import of fentanyl into the US, which I see as the scourge of our generation here. It’s just absolutely awful, the number of deaths that are attributed to that drug. It wasn’t too long ago that we weren’t talking about fentanyl, we were talking about the opioid crisis. I’m curious maybe combining those two topics, because I know that you’ve recently made some significant progress, reached a settlement related to opioid distribution in the state of Tennessee. Then talk about progress made there and now, what do you see when it comes to the challenges of fentanyl?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I do think they’re related problems. Opioids really opened the door, and then as demand went up for opioids, synthetic opioids came in and Fentanyl had a foothold. It’s certainly metastasized beyond the original scope, but it’s all a continuous problem. We settled with one of our regional food pharmacy chains that had been involved in distributing opioids. We had a pretty detailed complaint about our concerns with it, and we talked to them. Eventually, reached a settlement. This is probably the sixth or seventh settlement that we’ve had dealing with opioids, distribution and manufacturer. We settled with the big three distributors of pharmaceuticals. We settled with Walmart, Walgreens, CVS. There have been a few others. Purdue settled, but they’re in bankruptcy right now. This is something that’s mattered a lot to Tennessee. Every day around five Tennesseans die of an opioid overdose.

Thing scale here is really bad. The scale nationally is really bad. For every death, of course, there are all sorts of people who survive but have horrific outcomes in their families and their careers, cause all sorts of law enforcement problems. It’s just awful. With fentanyl, the scale is totally different. You’ve got these Chinese chemicals being imported to Mexico. Over the years, the cartels have gone from requiring fairly sophisticated factories along the lines of what you’d see in Breaking Bad to mastering the process such that they can just have these little standup labs. Not even labs, kitchens. Just churning it out and sending it across the border. This is a serious crisis. It’s one of the generation-defining crises that we have. I think you’re seeing increased work in state federal collaboration. The DEA Administrator or former State Attorney General, Anne Milgram, is obviously very concerned with these issues.

Everybody’s just trying to get a handle on it. I don’t know what the answer is. I think better border security to stop the incoming supply is a key part of it that we’ve not done a great job with. Reducing demand by getting people counseling, by deterring people from engaging in this. Better detection is important. Crypto is a piece of it too, because it does make it easier to engage in transactions at a big scale related to criminal activity. The more law enforcement gets on top of that, the better. Of course, crypto is designed to make it hard for law enforcement to get up on top of it. There are benefits that come from having that kind of anonymity. I’m not going to say it’s an intractable problem, but it’s a really complicated problem. Unfortunately, as we work towards solutions, the human cost is just astonishingly high.

Ian:

It really is. It’s one of the things that keeps me up at night as I think about the world my kids are growing up into. We’re at Chainalysis, I’ll give a little shameless plug here, though trying to help law enforcement on this detection and make them a little more attuned to understanding the flow of funds as they rotate from that cycle through the Mexican cartels into the Chinese precursor shop. Trying to do our part here to enable support law enforcement sophistication in taking action there.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Thank you.

Ian:

Different topic. Early last year, a couple of lawmakers in Tennessee introduced bills proposing to allow the state as well as counties and municipalities to invest in crypto and NFTs. I’m curious your take on this. We’ve talked a lot about the illicit side of the world of crypto, but there’s also legitimate businesses who are doing real things in the world that have nothing to do with crime that are connected to crypto. What’s your take on the state potentially being able to invest and transacting cryptocurrency?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I think the key there is stability. Tennessee is fiscally probably the best state in the country, certainly one of the very best states in the country. We have the lowest per capita debt burden. We have the lowest per capita tax burden. We take our fiscal situation here extremely seriously. We’ve got a treasurer, a comptroller, all the officials in the administration that oversee our state’s fiscal foundation. They’re really good. With crypto, it’s been around for a while, but there are obviously still some problems. There’s a trial going on right now that reflect some of those problems. From my perspective, there’s nothing inherently invalid about crypto as compared to other assets. I think the ecosystem, we need to make sure before big chunks of state or county money get invested that there is a secure and reliable ecosystem that filters out the scammers. I don’t think we’re necessarily far off from that.

I know there was a lot of debate from various people concerned about that legislation who want to make sure that Tennessee’s money does not go anywhere where we’re not going to be able to get it back. I think as crypto matures, it’s going to be easier and easier to sell that, and it will be viewed in a different light. It’s not quite the Wild West anymore, but we’re still dealing with the vestigial Wild West-ness is my impression of where we’re at. The state is not looking to hit a unicorn and swing for the fences here. This is reliable, stodgy investment, and you want to have some exposure to risk, but more limited here than in most contexts. I think it’ll be a while before that’s fully embraced by all the relevant actors here.

Ian:

The conservative attitude makes a lot of sense given the current economic climate. As you said, the still being early in the world of crypto, so I appreciate that. As we come to the end of the discussion, I’m curious, what can our audience do to help you? We’ve got founders, innovators, we’ve got current and former law enforcement, policymakers. They all listen to the show regularly. What would you like to say to them?

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I think the biggest thing we need is information and advocacy. If there are things that we are not doing, I’d love to hear about it. If there are things that we should do differently, I’d love to hear about it. White papers can be really handy. Shorter is always better when it comes to white papers. Feedback is critical here. I think at the law enforcement level, it’s a little bit easier. At the bigger policy level, there are points of entry that you can have, but it’s a little bit trickier. My team and I are very interested in hearing from people coming at this from a practical perspective and from an academic perspective. We’re still trying to better understand everything about the mechanics and the legalities. It’s a moving target on both fronts. Anything that will help educate us is very helpful. The other thing is just thinking ahead and identifying in the longer term what it might look like to have better integration. Privacy concerns are huge. We’ve seen what happened in China with the social currency or the, sorry.

Ian:

The digital Yuan.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

I have to cut this part. I’m freezing. It’s the social credit score. We’ve seen what happened in China with the social credit score and the potential abuse and government oppression that can come from keeping too good a track of people’s transactions, of centralizing everything into an easily monitored mechanism. Figuring out how we can maximize the opportunity to use technology without accidentally or intentionally creating a dystopia is really important. There are going to be things that are purely legislative on that front, but there are going to be policy decisions and enforcement decisions that come into play there as well. Giving us as much of a heads-up about potential future missteps is also useful. We’re not all crypto all the time.

There’s a lot going on, and I have to try to stay on top of many different issues. I recognize that there is a great deal of opportunity here that in Tennessee, we have a vibrant ecosystem of crypto founders and investors and innovators. I want to make sure that we’re giving them a policy environment that supports them, gives them opportunities to do whatever they need to do to succeed, while at the same time, provides protections for all the people in the state to make sure that they’re not on the losing end of new technology, that they’re not being exploited. That by being creative and open, we’re not being so open that we allow the harms to come in unchecked.

Ian:

Well, I think that is a great place to end our conversation today, Jonathan. This was terrific fun. I learned a lot. Thanks so much for joining us.

TN Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti:

Thanks for having me. It’s been a great talk.

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