Dr. Tonya Evans | The World of Digital Currency

On this episode of BGF, hosts Ava and Tashaunda interview Dr. Tonya Evans, a professor at Penn State's Dickinson Law School, about the world of digital currency. Tonya, initially skeptical of cryptocurrencies, emphasizes their transformative potential, especially for marginalized communities. She highlights the promise and concerns of digital currencies, stressing the importance of education in the evolving financial landscape. Tonya also introduces her upcoming book, "Digital Money Demystified," as a guide through the complexities of the digital economy. 

Dr. Tonya Evans:
Notes:  Ariel-Schwab Black Investor Survey (2022)
Book: Digital Money Demystified
Instagram: @IPProfEvans
X: @IPProfEvans
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyamarieevans/

CONNECT WITH US
Website: www.blackgirlflyofficial.com
Email: hello@podcast2impact.com
Instagram:  @blackgirlflyofficial

2:04 Entry Into Digital Currency

7:38 What is Crypto?

15:17 Digital Currency Myths

21:58 "Digital Money Demystified" Overview

26:50 Future of Digital Currency

35:00 Final Thought

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Transcript

12;55;03;19 | 12;55;25;25 | Welcome back to another episode of Black Girl Flight. I'm your Girl, April Marie and Dixon. And today we are joined by another lovely guest. We don't talk a lot about crypto on this show, but I'm always, always learning so much when we do. And so we have a wonderful, wonderful guest and I'm just going to hand it over to her to introduce her.
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12;55;25;25 | 12;55;55;16 | So thank you. Ava marie I am Tanya Marie Evans. So, hey, namesake. I am a professor of law by day at Penn State. Dickinson Law School. I also have a I'm a non technologist, but this is going to sound super techie. I have a CO higher appointment at the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. I am the author of a forthcoming book, Digital Money Demystified, and I'm also a pod host tech Intersect.
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12;55;55;16 | 12;56;19;22 | It's a weekly show that explores the intersection of tech, business law and now culture, because I think that's a really important layer to look at all of those things through the lens of race and gender and the transformative power of being at that intersection. So have a lot of fun with new notables coming on to explore all of those topics.
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12;56;20;03 | 12;56;43;22 | And yeah, I'm happy to be here with you both. I'm glad I did. I try to intro you, you know, at all. That's hilarious, you know, And I'm in for someone who is not a tech person, it sounds like you have a lot I know, right? A very good audio life. But I love just the multifaceted and layered approach itself.
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12;56;44;06 | 12;57;09;12 | I mean, I think the first question is like, how did you get here? Huh? I know all of that. I know I'm like one of the most risk averse people on the planet. I'm a lawyer. I am trained to see all of the problems. And when I heard magic Internet money, that sounded like a problem to me. I don't know about you, but it sounded like a huge problem to me back in 2017.
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12;57;09;12 | 12;57;31;16 | I didn't want any part of it. I didn't understand it. I was fine with my direct deposit. I was fine with it. Yeah, I'm a little, you know, PayPal Zelle on the side and I didn't understand the need. And we can kind of get into that later. But I often wonder how I got here as well. I've been in the crypto ecosystem doing law related stuff, teaching.
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12;57;31;16 | 12;58;01;11 | I created the first blockchain crypto and law online certificate program at my last law school, and the reason was, although I wasn't at all interested at the time in magic Internet money, the underlying method of organizing and protecting the data is about open source software. It's all software, really. And I'm an intellectual property lawyer and law professor by training, so I wanted to understand how someone could start to build on open source software, monetize it.
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12;58;02;02 | 12;58;40;07 | There was this discussion around decentralized applications and kind of like a computer, but that was a global computer, not something that was centralized. I just I needed to unpack it. I could immediately see a million legal issues in question, specifically in the in the copyright space in the patent area. And because I teach all of those courses at the law school, I wanted the next wave of lawyers to be familiar with the language, familiar with the legal issues, be a first mover and have a first mover advantage in a difficult work or job market.
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12;58;40;16 | 12;59;06;17 | Like, how do you distinguish yourself, particularly when there's this new technology that really is the next iteration of the Internet? So it was me taking a deep dive as an intellectual property lawyer, as an educator, and I'm intellectually curious. I'm a lifelong learner. Even though I'm at what we call tech adjacent. I'm always I was always at first that kids have like the first thing, I'm not going to date myself.
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12;59;06;17 | 12;59;24;24 | So I will tell you that my first things back in the day, but I was recognized in the Forbes over 50, so they dragged me for a few. You know, all of a sudden it was like you thought I was 50. I mean, it's true, but like, that's super rude. But anyway, that's story for another day. So that was my entry point.
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12;59;25;04 | 12;59;43;19 | From a professional point of view. What I quickly learned about blockchain technology, though, is to really understand and appreciate the why, not the how. Because I don't look under the hood of my car, but I know it gets me from point A to point B. I don't exactly know how the ATM works, but I know my money comes out right?
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12;59;43;28 | 13;00;04;03 | I don't exactly know how Bluetooth works, but I know how to set it up. So I wanted to know that much so that I could kind of be the smartest person in the room and make myself very valuable at the institution so I could call. I did what we call falling down the rabbit hole. I went to YouTube University.
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13;00;04;20 | 13;00;50;14 | I read things on the interweb, and every time I watched something, it was like getting to the next thing about the idea of having or using peer to peer technology in the same way people used to use it for file sharing to instead share or exchange value. I was lab. Now that's interesting, particularly when I think of systemically marginalized folks where black and brown people in general, women of the queer community being outside of an opportunity, outside of the opportunity for the real estate boom, outside of an opportunity during the dot com boom and bust, like there was a boom bust and reorganization before black folks even appreciated what had happened.
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13;00;50;26 | 13;01;16;21 | You know, we don't have those relationships to give us the heads up. This was the first technology where it was possible for us to have an alternative from being debunked or underbanked and ability to send money to other countries extended to the Caribbean or to an African nation ways that we could engage in money and money transfer, which is really powerful, right?
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13;01;16;27 | 13;01;40;28 | Money We what do we get for money, respect and power? I came over the it went but I wanted all of those things, not necessarily in that order. And I started to see the possibilities, but also the pitfalls. I'm a lawyer and so that is a is a long way around saying that's how I entered the space. And then the the possibilities and the power, the self-determination, the collective work and responsibility.
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13;01;40;28 | 13;02;00;09 | And we talk about like Kwanzaa principles. I found a lot of that in the space. You don't see those in the headlines, right? You see the sensational stuff, and that's accurate. We can talk about that, too. But we have to get clear about how do we move in a digital economy, Where's the power? And that made me really excited to want to learn more.
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13;02;01;02 | 13;02;17;28 | Now. I mean, you spent so much time. That's right. I think that's how to pull you back a little bit because our audience, I think it's so true that we don't know a lot about it, though. Can you so can you start us off without now to tell us so much? But I think it's so important to get to some of where you're going.
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13;02;18;04 | 13;02;40;18 | Yes. With a basic yes. What is crypto? How do we use it? What do we need to know about it? Perfect. Think about let's get at it this way. There have been a lot of ways over the centuries, over the millennia of exchanging value. A lot of it had to do with small communities where you trusted everybody. You lived in the same community, right?
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13;02;41;03 | 13;03;06;02 | The preacher, the person who ran the corner store, you know, director. Right. All of those people. We were together in the segregation times. And even before think about, you know, we our history didn't begin in the Middle Passage in the period of enslavement. You think of going back even before that where we rolled in communities, it was tribal quote unquote, and with good reason.
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13;03;06;02 | 13;03;34;00 | But when we started to engage in commerce outside of trusted communities, we needed a way to exchange not just, okay, you made some shoes and I have a chicken. Let's exchange like I know my people. I don't know your people. So you needed someone in between is like, But I trust this institution or this person. It's like it makes me think of systems and all sorts of other things where it's like you trust that person and they're holding the bag and there's a lot of trust involved.
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13;03;35;04 | 13;04;07;27 | We've put that trust in, in government issued currency, also known as Fiat. Right? And so let's use the United States as an example, and we will compare the United States dollar to the first cryptocurrency, which was Bitcoin, which is big. There were 30,000 different types. We have time for all of it. But let's let's focus on Bitcoin. The government, the United States government's currency is fractionalized, meaning if we all show up to get our money from the bank, we're not all getting our money right.
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13;04;08;07 | 13;04;31;13 | Or I guess it's nice to be FDIC insured, but I'm I need more than $100,000 back right. Because we're building wealth. We're not trying to just get from month to month. The U.S. dollar has not been backed by a physical commodity gold since the forties. It's based on the full faith and credit. People ask me like, what is crypto backed by?
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13;04;31;23 | 13;04;52;21 | What is the dollar back buy? We're about to go into another shutdown. Our credit rating has been downgraded for the third time in history. Banks failed in 2022. They keep saying nothing to see here, right? That's the money that we're going to be issued by our government. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm just saying the government was built.
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13;04;53;01 | 13;05;20;09 | This country was built by us, kind of we built this joint for free, but not for us. Why would it change now? And the money that supports the government comes from us. But it's I mean, it's not ever going to change for us where that where the power comes in is a decentralized form of money that still has a community that believes in it.
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13;05;20;09 | 13;05;40;27 | It's like if you have more buyers and sellers versus sellers than buyers, there are many things that you can do with a dollar. Assuming you have a merchant that accepts it, you can spend it, right? So that makes it a medium of exchange rate or a unit of account one, two, three, four or five. Right. Or a store of value.
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13;05;40;27 | 13;06;11;09 | That tends to be what people use. Bitcoin for. Certainly my bitcoin. You will have to pry it from my cold dead hands because I don't think it's great for peer to peer cash here in the United States. But there are other folks in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Venezuela, all sorts of other places where the money is very, very unstable, heavily controlled by the government and makes it very, very difficult to participate meaningfully in society.
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13;06;11;25 | 13;06;34;26 | Cryptocurrency is a programable form of money that gives you another option, but it's not going to replace the dollar over overnight. It may come back ten years from now and talk about what the global reserve currency is. Right now it's the dollar. But wouldn't it be powerful if there was a currency we all could use that wasn't beholden to a border, you know?
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13;06;35;23 | 13;07;04;10 | And so using a combination of peer to peer technology, the Internet, what we call consensus, where there's not one centralized person that keeps the balances of cash in, cash out with the balances. We also called it the term is a ledger. This is now I'm talking about blockchain to connect the two. But a blockchain keeps the the records or the ledger of transaction and balances.
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13;07;04;22 | 13;07;32;01 | And the first way it did that was for Bitcoin. So you can use crypto in the same way, but also you become your own bank that's threatening to the government, but also because it's decentralized. You can't control it. They can regulate the on boarding and off boarding. So that's why you see a lot of banks are like, I was okay with using internet in the peer to peer technology for music and for information.
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13;07;33;10 | 13;07;55;23 | But now you mess with my pockets because now we're doing it with value. And that empowers people in a way that's never happened before. And we can continue to talk. But kind of to the final point about blockchain that I wanted to say to connect, think about the the group text is always a good example. Group tax, you got ten people on.
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13;07;56;01 | 13;08;38;21 | It's like people have a job subsidies. But that was a fun putting me right. You're going back and forth, back and forth. Eventually you delete it from your phone. As long as nine other people still have that record, that record still exists, and that makes the records of transactions and balances really secure, impervious to attack, difficult or impossible to be undone through natural disaster, or a government that takes over decentralizing the means of saying this is the truth is very, very powerful in a world where we're struggling with people actually telling the truth, and that has a ton of power for the people.
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13;08;38;21 | 13;09;08;00 | That's why they call Bitcoin like money for the people, the other 99%, because it replaces banking and finance as we know it. Final point and then I'll pause to see your reaction or follow up questions. Cryptocurrencies in the United States are taxed as a capital asset, so we have the term cryptocurrency. But I've always felt like that was a bit of a misnomer.
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13;09;08;25 | 13;09;45;06 | It gets people to think spend when consumerism and a high income will never move the needle on generational wealth. Wealthy people actually don't want a high income because it's taxed at a higher rate. Pay me $1 and give me a fill in the blank tonne of stock. For example, like let me write out $10 million stock. You pay me $1 because not only write it or give me real estate where that asset has value, but you can also read the home in the same way you can experience capital gains and losses faster than you could with any other asset.
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13;09;46;13 | 13;10;10;13 | Well, I didn't think of it like that. All right. That's amazing. So as you think about where we've gotten to in crypto, what are some like what are the myths? What are you hearing? What like what are we hearing that we shouldn't believe? Yes, it's so this is why I wrote Digital Money Demystified because one, there were like 8 to 10.
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13;10;10;13 | 13;10;26;10 | I deal with ten myths in the book, but I was constantly answering questions in, you know, exploring them myself as I moved from scared of magic Internet money to I need to get a wallet and figure this out too. Oh my God, it's on cash it. Let me grab some of this. And it's like, Well, I don't trust Cash app.
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13;10;26;11 | 13;10;57;23 | Let me get it in my own wallet. Like, that was my thinking in a nutshell. Okay, I think. But I had to grapple with all of the myths and not and touch and agree if you've heard them that crypto is a fad bubble that we heard about, right? No value only for criminals, unregulated only for the crypto bros tend to be white men from like I describe it is it's like crypto.
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13;10;57;26 | 13;11;26;27 | The crypto ecosystem is a microcosm of the tech world in the finance world where we're already underrepresented. So then you have like this like so you get off your mints. But yeah, engineering itself, like built in feature, not a bug thousand percent, right? So I mean that part, but even I do have one chapter and I actually had to take a deep dive on it because it's even a myth for crypto pros.
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13;11;27;07 | 13;11;48;29 | Certainly speaking, when I think of the folks who were most involved in the creation of Bitcoin and the ecosystem in all of the coins and tokens that came after it, most of them are crypto pros, but it's black people. There's a survey I went, maybe I don't know if you do show notes or whatever, but you might want to share it with your listeners.
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13;11;49;10 | 13;12;23;03 | The aerials Ariel Schwab Report. It's an annual black investor report, and last year was the first year that they actually focused on the Black crypto investor. We over index black and brown folks. They focus specifically on black folks, but black and brown folks over index encrypt go around the first in black and Latino populations were found to invest in cryptocurrencies at higher rates per capita than white investors.
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13;12;24;07 | 13;12;56;26 | There was a Harris poll in 2021 that indicated that 49% of black and 42% of Latino respondents reported owning or having crypto that outpaced white counterparts 35%. We are over indexing here in the United States and also around the globe. The diaspora is about this crypto life and the Ariel Schwab report had all these great statistics, But I took great issue with a lot of the way they extrapolated the data and a lot of their conclusions.
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13;12;57;09 | 13;13;23;21 | Their conclusion was Black people are misinformed. Patterson, the head. If only you invested in true blue stocks, you would be support. Wow. That's the like, oh, wow, they really came right in. Right? Check out that report. So it was like statistics. Interesting. Okay. We're ahead of the curve. We're ahead of the curve. But it's our fault rate without fully appreciating.
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13;13;23;29 | 13;13;52;23 | Why would people who tend to be pretty conservative with their money tend certainly not to trust the government and would rather keep something like in a mattress or we build all of this physical wealth only for things to be burned down in one day, right? Why? Why would we do this? Why, after, you know, some of the research I did for the book, like going back to the Freedman's Bank, all the money first come out of enslavement.
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13;13;53;00 | 13;14;24;26 | Banks set up risky deals and all of this other stuff. Then those banks go defunct. All purpose feature not a book like Let's ask the questions of why we would choose something so volatile. Volatility is actually one of the myths that I deal with too. It's not the myth that crypto is not volatile. It is, But lots of nascent asset classes spend a large period of time in the beginning that the stock market was the same, being very, very volatile and so more people coming to the market is more liquidity.
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13;14;24;26 | 13;14;59;17 | Things slow down. Why? Why would we overindex in the space? I suggest my own conclusions that if you can't participate unfettered without people redlining and all this other stuff with true home ownership, if you can't participate meaningfully in having a job that has fantastic benefits over time, so you have a pension, so that you have a proper insurance, so that you take advantage of for one case or for three BS, like the ways that people traditionally transfer wealth from one generation to the other.
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13;14;59;28 | 13;15;20;25 | This is the reason this is the reason that the only impediment to participation in this new economy is a mindset shift in our own education to make sure we're not getting caught with the bag or take being taken advantage of or getting involved in riskier assets. So, you know, some of those myths are keeping us from at least learning.
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13;15;21;10 | 13;15;51;06 | It's not a matter of if, but when. This digital economy is driving the future of web3 decentralized means of aggregating and protecting and securing data through blockchain technology, Internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning like that's all I think it's not in the future. It's literally right now. And crypto and blockchain is a part of that. So we have to push past the myths, right sized the conversation to understand like what times is a kernel of truth.
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13;15;52;06 | 13;16;19;21 | And I want to explain the origins of it as an educator, but we have to push past it so that we can prudently and successfully participate things. It was amazing. That was the no take in. What I'm thinking in my head is we've always been that way. Like when you think about the fluctuations of the stock market, we you think about we always just but we don't have the foundation.
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13;16;20;00 | 13;16;40;07 | Right. Right. So it's interesting. It's even interesting. You talked a little bit earlier about that way to tell the truth now in this society. And I wanted to kind of move past that a little bit to say, so you talk about this, but you mention it. You break down the myth. So so what do we get from your book?
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13;16;40;07 | 13;17;04;18 | Why do we need your book? What are you teaching us and why is it important as we move forward, as we get to the space that you're describing, that this is going to be necessary to have information? What do we do with it? Yeah, I think the bottom line is really helping people to separate fact from fiction from someone who is not trying to sell them a cryptocurrency or, you know, get them involved in a project or things like that.
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13;17;04;18 | 13;17;28;10 | And in fact, I actually have a lot of imposters online. My team spends a lot of time playing Whac-A-Mole with people who use a my good God given name or reputation to try and sell things at Forex, not even involved in Forex, but I promise you I am a full tenured professor. I am licensed in four states. I worked very hard to graduate with honors from Howard University School of Law.
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13;17;28;19 | 13;17;54;17 | You know, I have no intention of losing my licenses or doing anything untoward, so I feel like my voice is an important one as an authority and a trusted authority, but also as a black woman, a black queer woman. There are not enough books by us for us in this space. There are not enough opportunities for us to take a beat to get the information that we need to make good choices.
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13;17;55;17 | 13;18;26;07 | There are a ton of technical analysis books and reading candles and quite you can't quite understand it, right? Really. It's like who? Who even speaks this language? Like it's literally an entirely different language. So your point earlier, like if you aren't a current investor in the stock markets and doing swing or day trading or understanding like the technical aspects of it, although I personally think you don't need to to understand the purpose.
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13;18;27;16 | 13;18;54;09 | When people talk about this space, your eyes glaze over. We start talking about blocks and hashes and blah, blah, blah. Like nobody has time for that. Literally no one has time for it. So I wanted to create a book that people have access to before they start making those decisions so they have a better idea of what are the great resources that you can rely on, what are things are like, Professor Evans said.
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13;18;54;09 | 13;19;16;11 | That's not true. So I'm thinking because you can find anything you find. Lord knows you find anything on Tik Tok. Is clubhouse still? They I don't know. But you can find like people who are experts who are screaming all crypto all the time. And if you're not you stupid and no crypto any of the time. If you do, you're stupid and you just say I'm out.
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13;19;16;26 | 13;19;43;04 | Yeah, right. So that's really the reason and what the takeaway it starts with and shout out to the two dynamic women who contributed forward to the book. Arlan Hamilton, who is the founder and CEO of Backstage Capital, and also Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, who is known as the money coach on MSNBC and be seen all of that. So I'm very grateful that they waited.
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13;19;43;07 | 13;20;07;00 | They're also some important voices to say, let's pause, let's reflect, let's separate fact from fiction. And then at the end of the book, the final chapter is called From Cash to Crypto, where you actually have like Where Do I Start? Has a really great glossary. Actually, my eyes were glazing over as I had to do this very, very extensive glossary, but I thought it was important to include a lot of terms.
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13;20;07;17 | 13;20;36;06 | I use terms because I want people to get familiar with, become familiar with the language or to say either I said it or you see it somewhere else. So you have a glossary. You have my own personal experience of my rabbit hole experience that I describe is like Alice in Wonderland, like you're tumbling down into this magical, very confusing but very intriguing space and then go through the ten myths with facts, with anecdotes, with my own experience.
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13;20;36;18 | 13;21;03;12 | And I just want people to have facts. And then once you go forward, I just realized obviously isn't as an educator, our ignorance won't save us. Right? And we don't have the luxury of time because I really believe that in the next 2 to 3 years, our world is changing more quickly and more significantly that it in certainly in the last ten.
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13;21;05;17 | 13;21;27;15 | And so that's that that's really the reason to bring this information to the fore. And so this is I describe it as the book that you get before you invest or if you got rekt in the last cycle or you think you know enough but know enough to be dangerous, test your own assumptions about your level of knowledge because this will give a real solid foundation.
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13;21;29;09 | 13;21;46;09 | So I think great play. So I want to go back to so you, you said it's important to be in this space and you even mentioned I mean, I hope you guys are hearing this live. There are a couple of gems in there about, hey, you know, this changing and this thing that we're afraid of now is the future, whether we like it here or not.
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13;21;46;22 | 13;22;11;05 | Can you speak to my understanding now the importance of your well, how is that important to what's to come? Thank you. And, Jeff, a couple of things in there, because you've already dropped some hints. You were like you were like, digital has already taken over a number of industries. Let us take a moment. You said make music, right?
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13;22;11;21 | 13;22;41;01 | Do we remember eight tracks? I know that was no, you know, but. Right. Seatings. Where do those live now? Right. As an example, Netflix. Let's think about Netflix. Let's think about YouTube University, which you say right out of say no houses greater than that is what about the impact those had on the people. Right. So so so you said music you remember okay VHS you remember blockbuster 80,000.
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13;22;42;26 | 13;23;01;02 | You know I do you funny side of that. I think the important thing is the money side of that. Right? So think about that and think about what this means to the financial industry and what impact the money side of that will have if you are the users of that. So, yeah, you you said it, but I want to I want to hear, you know it.
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13;23;01;02 | 13;23;36;14 | Stay at home. Take it home. Yes. I feel like it's the altar call. So let me go Let me go deep. Let me go to the best indicator of the fact that the future is now is to see the government's reaction to it. And it's kind of getting us to the impact on us. You may have heard recently that the Federal Reserve level of the banking system, we really have this, we have the central bank, we have commercial banks and then, you know, we have does you have crypto over here, thank goodness.
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13;23;37;06 | 13;24;04;18 | But generally speaking, we are going through retail bank and it's commercial for a reason because they're there to make money. They also are the backbone of the government and banks are also too big to fail because, you know, the central bank will always print more money if need be to inject it in. They're involved in monetary policy is kind of like calibrating interest rates, go up and a little too much money, interest rates goes down.
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13;24;04;18 | 13;24;48;02 | Come on, consumers, consumer class and all your money spend all your money, right? It's a puppet. KING Interestingly and intellectually, this is a good idea, having people have access to a central bank account that doesn't rely on commercial banks. Intellectually, I get it. Totally understand. It would have been easier to move pandemic funds to people, easier to get like a range of things, making the transition or the transfer, I should say, of money from government to people, and also vice versa, taxing, which as a matter of financial privacy, makes it of concern.
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13;24;48;02 | 13;25;20;24 | Let me not get ahead of myself, but intellectually understand this the thing called central bank digital currencies, where governments will start to have a digital alternative that is recognized as legal tender from the government, right Recently Fed now which is not a currency, but is the rails that ultimately will support a central bank, digital currency or cbdc Crypto has forced the hand of even the government because now the government has a customer service issue.
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13;25;21;07 | 13;25;47;26 | When it was weird, crazy cyber punks back in 2009, 2010 or crazy professors in 2017 didn't matter. But now it's like a critical mass of people who are starting to wake up to say that. It's interesting, right? It's a critical mass that a customer service issue. We have Visa, MasterCard, we have PayPal all making crypto transactions available, can get it on cash, get it without going there.
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13;25;48;02 | 13;26;17;16 | Huge customer service issue. It forced the hands of the government to start to set up the rails to issue a cbdc. I would say in 3 to 5 years they're moving exponentially faster than they would have. But for this customer service issue, you're going to need to speak this language to make sure that you do not fall victim to what looks like a great idea with a cbdc that compromises your financial privacy.
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13;26;18;01 | 13;26;48;21 | In general, as in black people, as in women, as in those who have the freedom of speaking out. Sort of until you don't until you have someone in a position of power that makes you makes you pay a price for going against the government, which isn't supposed to happen in the United States, but clearly it does. We have a lot of political unrest and God only knows what's going to happen in 2024.
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13;26;49;29 | 13;27;17;11 | The most the easiest way for you to know a person is to look at what they spend their money on. Not my conversations, not my texts, not my diary. Check my my bank account. You know everything about me. Digitizing the dollar also brings in financial privacy issues that we have to be really cognizant of. We have to have an alternative form that is not beholden to the government.
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13;27;18;07 | 13;27;50;05 | And in order to understand stablecoin and central bank digital currencies, Bitcoin, Etherium Crazy Dogecoin. Sorry, those people don't come at don't ask me. I promise you, stay warm. They'll come for me. I'm just saying we have to get this because I. I just got back. Final point from DC. I went down for some CBC legislative conference things, but I also met with the counsel to the Secretary of Treasury, Janet Yellen's counsel.
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13;27;50;21 | 13;28;20;06 | Me and three other dynamic black women in the space to start to engage with them about legal and policy issues, to engage with them about how to tax that space because it's a mess right now. These are the conversations your government is having about you now. I read that right. So enclosed. That is the reason we don't have the luxury of time.
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13;28;20;06 | 13;28;38;08 | We don't have the luxury of waiting. We don't have the luxury of somebody else saying it's safe to come in the water other than me to, at a minimum, start learning the language. You'll have your own rabbit hole experience and you will organically find your way. You find your way to folks like me, to the right resources, to the right opportunities.
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13;28;38;22 | 13;29;05;25 | You're going to take some L's. I certainly did. I talk about all of those in the book. I sound like I have it all together, but I felt all right and I lived to tell I was able to buy a home in Philadelphia for my mother, and I have no mortgage in the art museum area of Philadelphia was able to take care of a lot of things for my parents that it's just unheard of given where we are.
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13;29;07;02 | 13;29;25;16 | And so those are the reason, again, I'm so passionate and we got we got to get this. I have an opportunity for folks to do so. I also have membership opportunities. It's a companion to the book because this space moves so quickly, it's one thing to have the book, but it's another thing to stay involved and connected with community having the conversations that we've had today.
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13;29;25;16 | 13;29;53;13 | So that's what I leave you with. I love it. Yeah. So many days. Well, realize I'm like our last guest had my head turning and I've been circulating on this since and I was so excited that we have the opportunity to connect with you, Dr. Evans. So we appreciate the gyms that you have dropped. If y'all did not hear it, let me say it again.
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13;29;53;13 | 13;30;18;25 | The future is now. The future is here. And if you are not ready, you need to get ready. And so I appreciate that. In your upcoming book and opportunities plug in to continue those conscious conversations even beyond the book with your group support. And so I want to just thank you to Shannon. Do you have any last questions, last thoughts, before we even move into this twice retreat?
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13;30;21;00 | 13;30;42;20 | I read there were tons of gems that I hope you guys want to have me back on. I'd like to continue the conversation. It's important that we I feel like we just scratched the surface. Absolutely. Absolutely. I took this on a wild ride. I apologize. But if people want to connect with me, go to Advantage Evans dot com slash activate.
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13;30;43;04 | 13;31;03;19 | It's a way to learn more about the book. It's the way to please, please come to my virtual launch party. You'll hear more about that advantage. Evans is the company. There's also a companion website but you can find all of that information at advantage Edmonds.com Forward, slash, activate, activate because it's time that we activate for sure. I love it.
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13;31;03;19 | 13;31;15;13 | Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so very much. And I am looking forward to the next time we connect. Yeah. And until next time I am, you grab and Nicole. And I'm Shannon Dixon. And we are black girl flag.