Mr. Rev Hoddle, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, good to be here.
Thank you very much for joining.
So today we have chatted before and shout out to Gary for putting us in touch via NOSTA
to talk about capital and the different forms of capital.
And I confess, I listened to a couple of the episodes you shared with me and you touched
on permaculture in a way that I'd never understood before.
and mentioned a couple of resources. And so I bought a permaculture book and was pumping through
that and didn't finish it, which is so often the way, isn't it? It's like, damn it, didn't get
through it all. But that's what I'd love to focus on today is the different forms of capital that
you are stewarding, blending together. What are they and why are they important? So Rev,
so what is capital? Well, yeah, to start off, I guess it's good to put a definition of capital
out there. And really, what capital is, it's any productive asset. And that doesn't necessarily
mean in the physical world, you can also have productive assets in like, as far as intellectual
capital or experience goes. And so you can also utilize capital as far as your mind, as well as
the things that you wield in the physical world.
But it's basically anything that you can utilize
to produce something.
Okay.
And I actually almost haven't said it,
or haven't heard it said as succinctly as that.
So anything productive that you can utilize.
My framing for this, Rev, is not the permaculture one,
and that's what I enjoyed so much about listening
to some of the work you've been doing,
but more from a multi-generational wealth planning perspective and listeners to the podcast will know
my backstory but just to very briefly share with you the that's a problem point where I started
this journey from which was the sudden death of my father and he was a wealthy guy I was the eldest
son we had a bit of real estate that I ended up deciding to sell and so I received an inheritance
and you have this pot of financial capital that you're like, what the hell do I do with this?
Like, obviously, I need to steward it effectively to give to my kids when that eventually happens.
And, you know, cue over a decade of trying and failing to use different asset classes
and realizing that actually this thing, Bitcoin, is just by far and away the best tool
for intergenerational wealth management, in my opinion.
But that's opened up a whole research process of like, well, actually, that's just financial capital.
And the episode I did recently with Jason Parks, who's a mentor of mine, we're looking very closely at the blend of financial capital, but with humanistic and intellectual.
So how I would think about it is you need humanistic wealth and intellectual wealth or humanistic capital and intellectual capital to drive financial returns.
and how I would define humanistic is really like the relationship with your partner,
the children that you actually have,
and intellectual being your mindset and the skills that you have to provide to the world.
And with those two together, you're actually then able to drive financial returns.
But a common problem seen in many families is the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves problem
where you get a much like the cyclical seasons, right?
You get some tough, strong, aggressive entrepreneur
that sees an opportunity and builds something.
And the generation that follows them saw it getting built
and they're able to then keep it going a little longer.
But generation number three, so the founders, grandkids,
they've only ever known wealth.
They've never known what it felt like to have nothing.
and often what that means is that the the life cycle of wealth is only three generations and by
the fourth generation they're back figuring out how to start again and so the lens of financial
humanistic and intellectual is very important when it comes to like how do you try and sustain that
over multiple generations um does any of that resonate and and let's try and weave in some
permaculture stuff because there's you know there's cultural capital there's social capital
is relationship capital. There's so many different kind of areas to it, essentially.
Well, permaculture is basically the framework that you can use to break that cycle. That's the
whole goal of permaculture, ultimately, is to build capital and save capital for future generations,
and not just for the next few, but for many leading forward. And the framework of permaculture,
utilizing the ethics and principles creates this guide that now you can prevent yourself from making
these mistakes intergenerate intergenerationally because you know if you break the word down
permanent culture that's not necessarily to say that it's permaculture's goal is to create an
ossified and unchanging culture but more so a culture that is capable of withstanding any
challenges, any uncertainty, and how to basically have a big enough savings to
insulate against any of the things that might come up as time goes on.
Okay. And so how does permaculture look to develop savings?
Well, I guess first, there's some ethics involved in permaculture and
any culture is ultimately built upon ethics. And so in permaculture, the three ethics are earth care,
people care, and the third ethic I call non-extraction now. David Holmgren and Bill
Mollison, the founders of permaculture, they define the third ethic as redistribution of the
surplus back to the system. And so that's kind of a wordy way to follow up the simple ethics of
earth care and people care. And so people have tried to shorten this third ethic in the past.
And most people that practice permaculture arrive at calling the third ethic fair share.
Now, fair share lends itself to a little bit of a more open interpretation, I think.
It's less straightforward than simply saying non-extraction.
And so that's why I call the third ethic non-extraction.
And in addition to the ethics, there's also 12 principles in permaculture.
And these principles you use to design and interact with complex systems. And cultures are complex systems, economies are complex systems, and ultimately economies are derived from cultural systems.
And so utilizing these ethics to build and interact with these systems, observe complex systems, allows you to have this framework, which then you can use to continue to build capital and maintain the savings of that capital for future generations.
okay and so i just was quickly checking the uh the resource that you mentioned so i was reading
the essence of permaculture by david holmgren and i thought i mean i could probably see
yeah 81 of the way through i'm at principal 10 and i really really enjoyed it what i think i
struggled with is the bitcoin journey has has made me more libertarian more free market oriented
and this third ethic of giving back or um sharing somehow it's a contradiction to some of those more
like hardcore libertarian views because it's like it's not yours what you created
i don't know is that like um do you kind of see what i'm saying there so
this this idea of of giving back at the end it's like why should i give it back
um so perhaps you could help me understand a bit more why that's such an important part of the
permaculture ethic process well and that's i think that's where this misinterpretation of that third
ethic comes in um as it's been shortened to fair share this lends itself to more um communistic
socialistic minds yeah that's what i got struck by like that's a really socialistic kind of frame
It's like, well, hang on. Why would I? That didn't sit very well with me as I was researching the concepts. Put it that way.
Yeah. So you can we can maybe use like natural systems.
A lot of times permaculture, when people hear about permaculture, they start learning about permaculture.
They think about it through the lens of farming, gardening, things like that. Right.
So we can take an example. I raise sheep here at the homestead.
I've got a 20 acre homestead.
I've been doing this, living this homesteading lifestyle for about 10 years and I've integrated
Bitcoin into it for the last five.
And so with my sheep, I rotationally graze these sheep.
Now, the name of the game here is to maximize the stocking density of the 10 acres of pasture
that I have in order to produce the most lamb meat in a given season.
So essentially, I'm just trying to catch as much sunlight as possible, turn that into
grass, feed the grass to the sheep, and then get the maximum yield I can out of it. Now, as I
improve and get more experience rotating these sheep and see some success in that, the tendency
here is to push more and more and more. And ultimately, when you're stressing the pasture
out, when you're trying to maximize the yield you can get, you can start to create an extractive
mindset around it or an extractive tendency and see this is where i i see the difference between
fair share uh and non-extraction when it comes to interpreting this redistribution of the surplus
back to the system uh it's not like it's not a forced sorry to jump in red but it's really got
my brain going it's it's not an enforced socialization of the gains which would be you
know some form of taxation it's like okay these are all the net earners in the economy and you
we're going to take 50% of your ship to give to everyone else and us because you achieve that.
It's actually like, if you want optimal growth of your ecosystem, don't overgraze, which would be
that's the yes. Okay, cool. I love that. So non extraction is the critical shift in your
terminology there. Right? Because if you start to overgraze, then you're now you're starting to
degrade the land. And you're, you're, you're not building capital, right? You're starting to go
You're starting to chip away at it. Yes.
But humans, we tend to try and push that limit.
That's it's just what's basically caused the downfall of cultures and civilizations over and over again.
And a lot of times when you look at it through the lens of money, right, we have a lot of times this fiat money works for a while.
But then people start to say, hey, there's some there's some games I can play here to get a little bit more.
and then they start to extract more and more and more until there's so much extraction that
the system ultimately fails and so the reason why it's an ethical thing is because it's very hard to
define what extraction actually is um it's it's got to be um coming from your own interpretation
of that uh that's i guess that's what separates it from it being a principle because it's very
hard to quantify and so i'm intrigued the well i mean there's probably so many different ways i'd
like to take this but how you described um your journey thus far is is permaculture was something
you came across before bitcoin and bitcoin has been incorporated into those concepts so so let's
initially start with this then this idea of non-extraction did you used to consider that
third ethic as non-extraction or was there a problem or pain point you came across when
aiming for this permaculture future that meant that you kind of got it wrong and you were actually
chipping away at that capital not necessarily i just i i didn't agree with this i i just never
really understood that the the terminology of fair share never really spoke to me because it
was very hard for me to understand like yeah if i if i produce extra lamb and i have it in my
freezer does that does that mean um i've got a surplus and therefore i should distribute it to
my community for free. These kinds of ideas just didn't really make sense to me. And so I just kind
of let that stew in the background over, I mean, I've been practicing permaculture since like,
well, I started studying it in about 2011, 2012. And I really put it into use in 2015 when I got
the homestead here. And so really, I've been practicing, actively practicing permaculture for
10 years. And so over the course of those 10 years, I've started to, that's basically where
this change came from is like, I don't see it as a fair share. It's hard to define that. It's hard
for me to understand it. Eventually this realization of, oh, I just have to make sure that I'm not
extracting from my systems. And that's how I maintain the savings. Obviously, if you're extracting,
like you said, you're not saving, you're not building capital. You're basically taking from
somewhere else to subsidize the production and success of your system that you're working with.
Okay. And something that resonated when I was listening to you on some other episodes,
like I mentioned, was this idea of like, how can you blend two forms of capital at the same time?
And you were talking about how you've learned certain techniques on the homestead, where you're
actually, you're looking to constantly develop a state of symbiosis by which two forms of capital
are actually growing together.
Teach me a bit more about how that works.
Well, so there's this concept of capital building
and permaculture has been broken down into nine forms.
And this is something that I've changed.
Actually, I was taught that it's the eight forms of capital.
But as I've been practicing this framework
and thinking about it more,
I've added a ninth form, which we can get to.
But it really all comes down to
the expenditure of your time because that's the that's the currency essentially that you're using
to build any form of capital right and time is something that is a flow it's not when people
talk about saving time you can't actually save any time you can only spend it more efficiently
and so even when you're sleeping you're spending time so if you can find a way with one unit of
expenditure of your time to build more than one form of capital at once now you're uh you're
maximizing the efficiency and expenditure of your time. And so I can break down these nine
forms real quick. And I kind of have it separated now. Now that there's nine forms, it really becomes
easy to break the nine forms into three, what I call super forms of capital. So you've got your
physical capital, and that would be your money, your financial capital, material capital, and
natural capital. Then it goes into the second super form, which is your personal capital,
the stuff that's relating to yourself as an individual.
That's where the intellectual capital, the experiential capital comes in.
And this is the ninth form that I've added, which I call vital capital,
which is your mental health and your physical well-being.
After the personal capital and the physical capital,
now you've got relational capital,
which is how you're utilizing the relationships that you have,
your interactions with the world and the idea around the world.
So that's social capital, cultural capital, and then spiritual capital.
What are your ideals? What's your life's purpose? That sort of thing. And so when you're spending your time, basically, you're trying to find ways to build as many of these nine forms of capital at once. And this creates one good diversity or what's the when you rebalance your portfolio, right? You've got this reallocation.
Yeah, a good spread of a web of different forms of capital to lean on. And so then you can start to liquidate one form of capital for another and rebalance to get this nice, resilient base of capital, which that creates when, like I said, when society and problems and issues happen, instead of just relying on financial capital to buy you out of the situation, you might already have the capital that you need that will ease you through that hard time.
in advance so you might be able to for example draw down on some spiritual capital so you might
be in a moment of severe grief or a a relationship is broken down and you've already got stored
capital in the spiritual sense that you can actually use at that time or equally and i'm
just trying to kind of brainstorm some concepts like you you need a skill you don't have it you
don't necessarily want to use financial capital to attain it but your network is so developed that
you're like actually i know a guy that i can go to who's got the exact skill i need to do this
and i can get the job done faster in exchange for maybe a different form of capital your own time
or some something else okay and maybe you've already got a favor built up with this person
where they're happy to accommodate right and that's that's where you the social capital would
come in. I mean, an example of this would be that at least I see in one of my motivations for content
creation is you're putting stuff out there without necessarily being paid, but people get value from
it. So one of the, in a sense, bets that I'm making is that by putting out interesting information on
a regular basis that people enjoy, you're actually building a form of relationship capital without
asking for anything. And so if I suddenly was to ask for something, I might well see lots of people
come back and say, I can help you do this, I can help you do that. It's worth testing in some ways.
But in your case, Rev, how does that actually convey into, like, do you have any stories of
specific moments when you've actually kind of put that concept into practice?
Well, if we want to talk about it through the lens of Bitcoin, my favorite example is a Bitcoin
meetup. Yep. A lot of people, when they think about a Bitcoin meetup, it's just a, you might
be going to a bar or a restaurant or a coffee shop and with the goal of just meeting other
Bitcoiners talking about Bitcoin. And so when you show up to this meetup, you're spending your time
and maybe you're building some social capital and maybe some intellectual capital around Bitcoin.
But as I've gone to and I go to I use Bitcoin meetups as a way to access the Bitcoin market, right, as a as an economy.
So when I go when I started going to a meetup, the meetups, that was my initial experience.
All right, cool. I get to meet some people, meet other Bitcoiners locally, talk about Bitcoin.
And now I've got these relationships that I have access to.
But then I started to think, well, I've heard that, you know, earning Bitcoin is one of the best ways to acquire it.
And especially because you're earning KYC free Bitcoin.
And so I thought to myself, well, I've got some extra maple syrup.
I produce maple syrup here at the homestead.
Why not at the next meetup, I'll bring some jars of syrup and see if anyone wants to buy them, pay in Bitcoin.
I brought the syrup and sure enough, I sold out all the syrup.
And I was like, hmm, that's interesting.
This is pretty cool.
And the people there were like kind of surprised too.
Like, wait a second.
This guy's got something I can.
And a lot of times when I bring these items to the meetups, this is someone's first opportunity to actually spend their Bitcoin on a good.
I've had similar scenarios, yeah.
And so there was some excitement around this, like, whoa, this is cool.
And it became, obviously, I use Lightning primarily when I'm doing these transactions just because of the convenience.
And it's better for a lot of reasons when you're just selling something for $10.
But so as we've all heard, you know, a lot of times, especially this was several years ago when I started doing this, there's issues when it comes to transacting and lightning.
Transactions fail, all kinds of who knows what things come up.
And so now we actually getting some experience spending our Bitcoin because we having to troubleshoot how to actually make this transaction work And so that might lead to different kinds of solutions right instead of showing up with just one Lightning wallet now I make sure that I got a couple of different options in order to not miss out on a sale because my particular lightning wallet isn jiving with
whatever that person's got to send me the Bitcoin. So now we're building experience by spending our
Bitcoin. So now we're building social capital. We're building intellectual capital, talking about
Bitcoin, and we're building experiential capital by spending the Bitcoin. And I'm now starting to
build financial capital by selling the stuff. And people started to see like, whoa, if this guy's
showing up with something to sell, maybe I've got something. And now at like the Southwest Michigan
meetup, which is the closest meetup to where I live, I can buy honey, coffee, pork, beef, yogurt,
a lot of different food staples to where I'm actually kind of making a grocery trip
at the same time as I'm selling some of my stuff. So now we're building this little mini
circular economy. So I'm leaving not only with financial capital, but some material capital.
Maybe I bought several Bitcoin miners through these meetups and then also some natural capital.
And a lot of times when I talk about natural capital, natural capital is essentially your
ability to produce food or food. And so you can start to see through one evening of going to this
Bitcoin meetup, I'm stacking all of these different forms of capital at once.
it's very interesting isn't it my example of this is on the receiving end of that i went to a
a meetup so i'm originally from the uk rev but now live in australia and dove down the rabbit
hole having owned bitcoin for a long time 2020 all the warning signs going off like what the
hell is going on out there and as an investor i'm always looking for opportunities and it's like hang
on there's a company that put bitcoin on the balance sheet i've owned it for five years best
investment i've ever made hang on this is a big deal i've got to got to get close to this thing
wow the last five years has changed my life but as part of the process going to physical meetups
was very important because as a extrovert i was already online kind of talking about shit and
suddenly it just became very bitcoin focused at the time it was twitter it's like my god what's
all this stuff going on and I went to one called the Bitcoin Bush Bash which is it's like a
geographically mobile meetup so they do one in most of the different states of Australia once a
year and this particular one was Victoria about four hours drive from Melbourne where I was living
at the time and I went there and there was a guy who'd brought his espresso machine and he was
pumping out espressos in the morning and i went and paid him in bitcoin and you're like oh my god
that was the coolest thing ever because yes you can go through the process like i had of like
all right if i'm going to actually reallocate in a size that that you know actually is like if this
goes wrong you've really fucked up your inheritance so first i had to figure out multi-sig i had to
figure out using something like unchained capital i had to figure out well what's the inheritance
plan you get hit by a bus tomorrow you don't want your bitcoin sitting on a fucking iphone
because your kids aren't going to get it so i had to put all that in place and ultimately
the the conference experience or the meetup experience is a crucial part of the puzzle
because you're not just shouting people online it was like oh my god a you can just use this stuff
b here's all of these other people that have asked the same set of questions from extremely different
backgrounds and ended up at the similar conclusion and then you're having a you know a beer with them
in the middle of outback australia like what what the fuck how did i end up here um but that coffee
moment was a really important one so what you just described resonates very strongly i have yet to
create a product and taken that to a meetup so that's another step that you know one might evolve
to um so so have other people seen what you were doing and reacted to that in your meetup community
Was it always the case that you could basically do a groceries run when you first took maple syrup?
Or has that developed since?
Well, yeah, I think that, well, and first of all, this meetup in southwest Michigan was very new.
When I started to attend it, I maybe missed the first several, but it was like at the very beginning of it.
So there wasn't much time for these things to have developed on their own before I started doing it anyways.
But it's kind of like the discovery of fire, you know?
like where it's just a good idea, just time has come.
And so people figure this out simultaneously
kind of at different meetups at the similar time.
Because there was a, basically there was a meetup
in Southwest Michigan.
And then there was shortly after that a meetup
in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
which is about an hour and a half from that one
in Southwest Michigan.
And about the same time, somebody started to bring eggs
and honey and things like that to that meetup to sell.
and so it was just kind of this very beginning stages of it and just sort of propped up naturally
because if you're trying to earn bitcoin the best place to earn bitcoin is where the bitcoiners are
at right if you show up to a place with a bunch of bitcoiners your chances of earning bitcoin are
much much higher than just kind of shouting out into the void and just putting a sign at the end
of your road at your farm stand saying i accept bitcoin and fishing for the bitcoiners right um
and so it just sort of slowly progressed where eventually so the the second guide uh to to start
bringing stuff was actually the Daniel who runs the Southwest Michigan meetup with DK. He started,
he didn't necessarily have anything that he was producing, but he had access to this creamery
that was close to his place. And, you know, we, I was like very interested in getting this high
quality yogurt. And so he kind of got the idea, well, I can spend my fiat, buy the yogurt, bring
it to the meetup, sell the yogurt, give market access to this yogurt, to the Bitcoiners.
And now I'm basically DCA-ing my fiat through yogurt into KYC-free Bitcoin and then providing this product that I want every month.
I would love to pick up yogurt.
And granted, aside, I started milking sheep and I produce my own yogurt now.
But for a long time, I was buying all my yogurt through the Bitcoin meetup.
And so you don't necessarily have to be producing something per se to attend the meetup and start earning Bitcoin.
You just have to know what that meetup in particular, what kind of products that those people want and then provide market access to it.
You can spend your fee out on that and bring it to the meetup and then turn that product into Bitcoin.
And this is a way to basically buy Bitcoin with your dollars through selling a good.
Wow. And it's this, how do I even describe it?
we're so unbelievably early on Bitcoin still,
even though one might feel like it's been a big part of their life
for half a decade now or more even.
But when I hear how you're talking,
it just reminds me of how effectively it is a bottom-up viral adoption
simply through people.
So how bullish are you, Rev, on the future?
And how long is this going to take to play out, do you think?
because it seems clear to me that this blend of sound money
and savings technology in the digital world,
it overlays with the physical operation that you're creating
in a magical way.
So that's just one example,
or equally like where I came from,
if you get given this money,
what the fuck are you going to do with it?
Well, actually, this thing called Bitcoin
kind of solves all your problems.
Where are we in the adoption curve, do you reckon?
And because it's so varied, isn't it?
Well, in this kind of, you know, there's this meme of hyper Bitcoinization, merchant adoption, these kinds of ideas.
Oh, why have why can't I just go everywhere and spend my Bitcoin?
And granted, with this new Square implementation, it seems like that's more the case.
But this was something that I didn't necessarily touch on with that initial story about how many forms of capital you can stack at a Bitcoin meetup.
Cultural capital is a huge component of this.
because now that we're starting to transact with each other
and we're starting to find out, you know, all of the different,
like what lightning wallets work for us, right?
Now we just, when a new guy shows up and he's like, what should I use?
It's like, well, we're all using this lightning wallet.
It works great for us, you know?
And so we're developing our very own subculture
within the broader Bitcoin culture.
And so as far as adoption is concerned,
It's like the most important thing is the adoption that you create in your own life, in your local.
Like if you want more utility out of your Bitcoin, you just have to go and find the Bitcoiners that are around you and create the opportunities for you to get you to utilize your Bitcoin.
Another example is like there's a corner store down the road from me.
Woman died. She was making a lot of food in there.
And then some young couple bought the store and sort of took it over and started carrying all of her recipes for it and everything.
And so I just liked those people more.
As I was going into the store, they were kind of my age and everything.
And so I started talking to them, building a relationship.
And every time I'd go in there, I'm like, well, you guys, you could figure this out.
You want to start accepting my Bitcoin for when I go and buy beer or smokes or whatever?
And they're like, yeah, yeah, well, we haven't really quite figured this out yet.
And how I cracked it was that I found out that they like lamb and I produce lamb.
And so I was like, well, hey, do you guys want to buy a lamb?
and they're like, oh yeah, that'd be great.
And then they actually made the offer
of trading me store credit for this lamb.
Very interesting.
And so they had a tab.
It's like a quasi money itself, right?
Yeah, this is another way of like basically taking
that natural capital that I had
and liquidating it for a different form
through this corner store, right?
And so they had this little piece of paper
with how much money was left on my credit.
And every time I'd make a transaction there,
they'd cross out the thing, write the new total.
And then they take cash out of their pocket and put it in the till. So their books were kept, you know, were in order at the end of the day. And so once I ran out of that store credit, I was like, OK, so now we can do the Bitcoin, right? Because it's the exact same thing. You just take your phone out. I pay you for the good or service right to your own personal Bitcoin wallet on your phone. Then you take cash out of your pocket, put it in the register. And you're like, oh, wow, yeah, this is cool.
and so now I get to go to this corner store, spend my Bitcoin, buy all my beer, whatever I want there
with my Bitcoin and this is a, I didn't have to wait for anybody to figure it out, I created it
for myself and now I've got this utility for my Bitcoin that I didn't have before.
Really cool and you touched on the Square features that have been launched recently and they've made a
big splash in the Bitcoin world, you know, we're all pumped, there's all these merchants that are
now I'm going to be able to use Bitcoin.
And I've had two interesting scenarios in my life recently
that chime with what you're talking about,
which is a cafe local to where I live and a butcher.
And the cafe owner has a square terminal
and is flat out busy,
is long altcoins thinking that they're going to go faster than Bitcoin.
So it hasn't quite got to the like,
I just want to buy this stuff, Bitcoin.
and quite simply was like keen on having it there.
I was like, you could have your little get Bitcoin sign here,
but just super busy and not really that interested.
And you're like, fair enough.
I'm not going to chase that.
And the second situation was a farm
with a kind of farm shop and butcher's business,
which already is accepting Bitcoin,
is a sponsor of the local Bitcoin meetup
and is into it themselves.
and they are a primary producers, right?
They're literally, they're shifting meat,
whether it's, you know, chicken, lamb, beef.
And one of the concerns they had,
which was really interesting about using a Square terminal,
it's like, if I use Square for Bitcoin,
am I going to get flagged in some database somewhere,
which is going to kind of give me, give me away?
I'd actually much prefer you just to send me Bitcoin
to my wallet of Satoshi
and not even put it through that thing.
And that was a really valid concern
because on top of,
they're already taking risk, right?
They're not necessarily vaccinating the cows.
They're already doing things that they're not told.
You know what I mean?
They're like, no, I don't want to do that.
This is my farm.
This is my output.
I'm going to do it my way.
And they've got a brilliant
organic regenerative beef business
that people love buying from
because it's excellent quality product.
but equally it's like fight your battles where you can and maybe implementing that feature is
not the best idea and i don't know whether that is the case but um it was a really interesting
piece of feedback from the market not from some bitcoin news outlet that's telling you that you
know everything's going to go to the moon everyone's going to use bitcoin because of
square's feature implementation but like what does it mean if i do it this way um which i thought was
really interesting like have you got other people locally that have actually started using it or
any other like does that resonate at all well i think it's a good um like it's a good path there
right when you're trying to orange pill somebody you don't start with like all right so you have
to learn about this thing called kyc and you have to start thinking about your privacy and you have
to you know it's way too overwhelming right you just get set up with generally i set people up
on Cash App. All right, it's KYC. But it's better, in my opinion, for people to start interacting
with Bitcoin and having some Bitcoin, even if it's KYC Bitcoin. And that gives them the opportunity
to go further down the path and get rid of that KYC stuff. Personally, I think that KYC is the
biggest threat to Bitcoin of anything that we've got going on right now. To participate knowingly
in the KYC ecosystem is unethical, right?
Anyways, so there's a couple things going on here
when it comes to the Square thing.
And this is a heuristic that I've recently started
to kind of try and live by.
And that's, I try and prioritize spending Bitcoin
with people that I have the highest probability
of earning that Bitcoin back from.
And so like in the example of this corner store,
they need eggs and I produce eggs.
And so I started bringing them eggs.
And guess what?
Now the dude buys the eggs from me with Bitcoin.
He just takes the Bitcoin, sends it back to me from his wallet.
And now I've got like a little miniature circular thing going on.
And this was a kind of a cool experiment because the price just happened to be going up when
we started this.
And so I'm like, dude, watch every time I'm going to go buy beer and then I'm going to
bring eggs and you're going to buy the eggs from me and you're going to have more Bitcoin
left in your wallet over time.
And this is going to show you that this is a superior form of savings in addition to this
utility that we have.
The other thing, the white paper calls Bitcoin peer-to-peer electronic cash, right? So the cash-based nature of it when you're interacting peer-to-peer resonates a lot more with people that want to run these cash businesses.
um and so yeah that's why the square thing doesn't necessarily um like the store the people that are
using square are not typically running a cash-based business so it doesn't really um there's not much
of an incentive for them to switch if they don't already understand bitcoin yeah it's a great point
isn't it so actually they're they're they're maybe even a cashless business right you often
I'll often go to a cafe and be like no cash and so they've they've already kind of yes but then
that's where it's like ah like privacy is a big deal and arguably like the longer you go along
this journey the more of a big deal it becomes and it's something that I've started thinking
about a lot more um now my lens again to touch on is like if you're managing wealth from a
TradFi perspective, it's like you own real estate, some equities, some bonds, all of them are normally
purchased through some kind of intermediary. And it's KYC to hell, right? That's what it is.
And so even moving into Bitcoin, but with KYC, you still have self-custody. And that is a superpower
over and above all the other illiquidity issues, counterparty issues, credit issues that you might
find in the trap five space so it's it's a vast improvement but it's still like you want to sell
all your other shit and buy bitcoin but you're not going to be able to do that in a non-kyc fashion
you have to be using the rails that they're kind of funneling you into bitcoin with via registered
exchanges and you've got to share driving license and all this different stuff um what fascinated me
about a book that i read um renaissance money so andrew bailey shout out to andrew who'd been on
the podcast before and I learned for the first time about the idea of backwards privacy and
forwards privacy when it comes to the use of physical cash so if you pay me ten dollars I
don't know where that ten dollars has been and if I pay someone ten dollars I don't know where it's
going so that's like backward privacy forwards privacy and in the white paper very clear peer
It appeared digital cash.
But here we are 15 years later.
And because of the way that the on-ramp to Bitcoin is so heavily policed by the existing status quo, most Bitcoin is KYC.
And I don't know what the breakdown actually is.
But if you're smart enough, and this is where a lot of this on-chain stuff gets a bit more sketchy, they're able to actually follow exactly what you're doing.
So you don't have the privacy in Bitcoin that was initially, I don't think Satoshi envisaged that, put it that way. How do you get around that, Rev, in terms of your processes that you might put in place or the people that you've met, if that makes sense?
so yeah that i wouldn't say that most the most of the bitcoin is kyc but it's very difficult to
get started interacting with bitcoin without starting at the kyc point right okay it's just
the most i guess uh accommodating it's it's the least friction way to to get started
absolutely i agree with that and so that's why a lot of people start that way and it's just
once you're kind of you're like well i've already kyc'd and i don't really see any downside to
continuing to participate in this way it becomes hard to like wean yourself off of it
because you're ultimately making a lot of times you're paying a premium if you're buying bitcoin
with dollars uh no no kyc there's a lot more friction involved and um so it's it's hard for
people to make that jump. But like you said, as time goes on, you start to think about the
long-term effects. Like, all right, so I've got every time I withdraw from this exchange,
and like, dude, the best examples are like these wrench attacks. And granted,
these are people that have like millions of dollars, right, of crypto and Bitcoin.
But a lot of times how they get targeted is because the attacker finds that they've withdrawn
to this address. They can see that the Bitcoin's there on the address hasn't moved. And so it's
like a pretty sure bet. Like, all right, I got your, I got your name, I got your address,
and I can see that you're in your wallet. You've withdrawn this Bitcoin from the exchange and it's
still sitting there and your keys can protect you to a certain point. But as once they start
chopping off the fingers, right, uh, you're going to go and be like, all right, I got multi-sig,
but I'm going to stop cutting my fingers off. I'm going to go and get all these keys together
and sign and just get the fuck out of my hair. And so the best way to protect yourself is to not
have people have visibility into your addresses at all right and this is where the the no kyc
stuff comes in and it's um it's a much longer term play uh being uh aware of this privacy but
it's uh it's one of those things where you don't think about in 10 years if this is going to be a
problem for me or not right now yeah you're dealing with other lower level problems you know
It's like inflation.
Inflation is a fucking problem.
Okay, well, how do I get out of that?
Well, Bitcoin.
Okay, well, how do I buy Bitcoin?
Well, this is how you do it.
And boom, you do it, but you're right.
In 10 years time, there is no top, right?
The Bitcoin price you know interestingly we had whatever it been about 45 50 days of coming down coming down coming down everyone freaking out about like oh my god it going to zero type thing and admittedly like i feeling
the heat too you know when your net wealth takes a bit of a tumble all those like optimistic
decisions you were making i took a bit of leverage to buy a piece of real estate which i've got to
refinance in two years time you're like well i thought 23 months was ages to think about that
But now I'm like, oh, shit, I should probably start putting in a place to think about, like, what's my plan for two years time.
So it's funny how the sentiment shifts.
But a decade is a much harder viewpoint to kind of calculate around.
And so, I mean, even I'm wondering, how does someone get hold of your name, address, and Bitcoin wallet?
That attack vector that you mentioned.
So they've basically led you or someone gets hacked again, and there's your email address, and there's your physical address that you got the hardware wallet sent to.
And then somehow they're able to get hold of an exchange that you used.
And how would they even do that?
Well, so you could think about it like, all right, you get SIM swapped.
Maybe you don't hold your Bitcoin on the exchange, but now they can log into the exchange.
They can see your addresses that you've been drawn to.
They can see all that history.
um and there you go now you've got all the information you need to go and find the person
and get the get the stuff yeah and that stuff is just there waiting to be found someday and 10 years
from now you don't really know like all right the exchange goes out of business or something where
are those records destroyed who has access what do they do with them yeah yeah and it actually
makes me think about um an angle to more recent kind of rabbit hole i'm diving down which is
NOSTA and a situation in which it's like okay I've fired up a couple of different NOSTA key pairs
and ended up using predominantly one and now two years has gone by and you've got all of this kind
of proof of work supposedly connected to your different key pairs but I also signed up with a
bunch of clients when it had no value attached to the key pair I couldn't even remember the names of
some of those clients two years ago and I posted about this relatively recently and the conclusion
was it's it's extremely unprobable or unlikely that those key pairs you shared will cause you
any headache in the future so just crack on with what you're doing and see what happens um but it
is something to be wary of right it's like okay you're logging into all these different clients
some of them disappear after a couple of weeks you're receiving sats online most importantly
you're building a digital identity that's yours, that's capital. I don't want the threat of my
capital being taken away from me if I was to lose my NOSTA keypad. So I know that you're active on
NOSTA as well. How did you end up getting into that? And what's your view on NOSTA today? Because
it's something that I'm really leaning into. Well, so I guess this comes down to, once again,
the Bitcoin culture and sort of the pillars of any culture that I've kind of arrived at.
And there's probably more, but basically it's money is a defining border of culture.
Location is a defining border of culture.
And your morals and ethics are a defining border of culture.
And so Bitcoin, the Bitcoin culture is essentially a diaspora, right?
Like we're all spread out.
It's very hard.
Like there's a lot of Bitcoiners out there, but we're not really concentrated in too many
places to build these effective economies. And so Noster is like a place. It's a location in which
Bitcoiners can go to start to build more cultural capital because it's not like Twitter where you
can be shadow banned or you can have your account suddenly removed and it's harder to spin up new
identities and all of this stuff. And so I think that Noster is like an incredible, it's the
location where Bitcoiners can go to build cultural capital online in a digital way, where we can all
come together there in this digital space to build cultural capital. And when it comes to like the
rotating of keys, like, all right, if I, if my keys get leaked and something happens, we, we don't
really have too many examples yet of the techniques or things that can be done in order to like
basically recover that, what, what you built up, right? Your social graph and all this stuff.
I was thinking about trying to like just test out rotating keys and,
and,
you know,
saying like,
all right,
in three months,
my keys are going to rotate to this and I'm going to like,
stop using these keys.
And you start following me over here and pay and do a post on both of them.
But I haven't,
I haven't taken that jump yet because that's just,
I'm kind of waiting,
you know,
to see what somebody else does.
When they're like some important person or somebody who's built up a lot of
this,
this capital in Noster.
to see if their keys get leaked, what do they do,
and how do they recover from that?
Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking through it.
Like, if you were to develop cultural capital
through a NOSTA account or NOSTA key pair,
that cultural capital is connected to you.
The key pair is a representation of it.
So if the key pair was to be compromised in some way,
then if you were to spin up another one and share with you know the world on NOSTA that like my key
pair has been compromised this is my new one if the cultural capital reserve is strong enough
then you have to assume that a core group of people with other NOSTA accounts would switch
to the new one and that web of trust which is a fascinating concept is transferable to whatever
the new incarnation is. Now, I think about things like, you know, what does a media business look
like with NOSTA at the center of it? And you're going to have people with information that's being
shared as entertainment or as news or whatever it might be, video, short form text, long form
articles, maybe even some kind of books. I don't quite know how it will work, but there'll be
multiple revenue streams generating sats into some kind of probably holding wallet on the lightning
network that then will be filtered through to somewhere else so that there's like a it would
be kind of like having your your operations bank account hacked so the quicker you can kind of
drain that and get it into whatever your longer term treasury account would be as a business the
better or equally if it's just you as an individual then you'd want to do that um because
whoever gets your key pair would have access to that lightning wallet to some extent um but maybe
there's a way around that too they would just i mean okay if i were if i had access to someone's
um noster key pair i would just switch the lightning wallet out with something that looks
very similar and they would be zapping instead of me or instead of the the person whose keys yes
you're receiving zaps from other people to your own lightning one they're not going to be able to
take any of your bitcoin but they're just going to be able to for a short period of time until
people realize it get whatever uh revenue you'd be earning through the zaps because i've recently
been through the process which i must admit i found pretty painful but i think i've now done it
of getting a albi hub set up and having some lightning channels for the first time that are
essentially mine and previous to that i was using and i haven't fully done this as a podcast or as a
nostra account but primal have a custodial wallet as part of their client and fountain you know if
you're posting stuff on fountain have a custodial wallet and you can easily switch that out for a
lightning address with with albi and so actually as you say that if someone got the key pair they
could try and log in via fountain or log in via primal but actually if the if the wallet was
self-custodial via albi then you're controlling it somewhere differently anyway so those custodial
wallets would have no exposure if the key pair was compromised am i right in saying that yeah
well that's a good point i i didn't think about it in regards of if you're using a client that
has a a wallet that is controlled by the keys itself right this custodial wallet
like but that's why nost is so cool isn't it the wallet now yeah that would be different bits off
the shelf and putting them together in such a way that even if the key pair was compromised
then you're protected on the back end basically um yeah cool and at this stage it's still very much
like we're playing around with nostr it's extraordinarily valuable but like how do you
make a real business with Nostra right now? I don't know necessarily. Is there enough people
on it to actually create a full-time Nostra media business? I'm not sure. And that's what we're all
testing and trying. But the fact that, as you quite rightly point out, it's become the meeting
place for people who've adopted Bitcoin as sound money. That's already massive because there's not
many people out there that have actually done that in a meaningful way. You know, 50% of assets,
as Bitcoin in self-custody.
I don't know how many people in the world
have actually done that, but it's not very many.
And therefore, a place to communicate
and convene to do commerce is insanely valuable,
but it's almost like a public good
because it's a protocol, right?
It's actually quite communist in that sense.
Like, here's the playground, guys,
and you just got to look after it properly
and you can build on it.
Wow, cool.
So, Rev, where I'd love to go now
is more back to the homestead side of things.
And equally a question I had around
these different forms of capital,
like does debt play into this?
Are you able to take leverage
and buy a piece of real estate
and then do permaculture on top of it?
How does the permaculture ethics
and forms of capital approach debt?
So yeah, what I basically live by here,
because fiat money is basically
the most extractive system you can observe,
today, right? Ethically, I'm trying to avoid my interactions with fiat as much as possible.
But at the same time, don't hate the player, hate the game, right? So I still live in a fiat world,
and I'm going to utilize the advantages that fiat has to my benefit whenever I can. And once again,
this is a compromise in my ethics, but you have to make some trade-offs, right? It's hard to...
to, yeah, anyways, if I tried to be perfect, I wouldn't get anywhere. It's just that the tooling
is not set up to be Bitcoin only all the time. So I hold as little dollars for a short a period
of time as possible, as much Bitcoin for as long a period of time as possible. And that's what I
try and do. And so to accomplish that, debt can be a useful tool in order to hold the Bitcoin for
as long as possible and not really play with real dollars, right? You're playing with imaginary
dollars. And so it's funny. I tried to get a home equity line of credit. And because I'm so,
so much of my cashflow is Bitcoin based now. They basically said, I don't have enough income
to qualify for this home equity line of credit. So I'm kind of stuck with you playing the credit
card game um last winter uh so i heat i heat the house the homestead with bitcoin um and so you're
essentially buying kyc free bitcoin through the expenditure of your electricity and paying the
utility company the fiat and you're buying bitcoin with this this way right and so and yeah and
you're getting the heat yeah and so um there was an opportunity for me to basically my my electricity
bills are quite expensive in the wintertime versus the summertime because I'm really pumping
up the hash rate. And so I basically did a balance transfer from one credit card to another and paid
the utility company with my credit card balance transfer that over to another one. And now I've
got 12 months. I just pay 4% up front. And I've got 12 months to see how the price plays out
before I have to pay off that debt. And so I'm starting to pay that off now. And granted,
you know i you know in hindsight it's 2020 i should have been paying it off over the summer
um but i've still got some time maybe the price will go back up but either way i'm gonna i'm gonna
win on that trade you know uh and so you can utilize debt to your advantage when you have
bitcoin because you you're you're you're playing this opportunity cost game right you get to keep
the sats today um and wait to see if the purchasing power increases uh before you have to pay off
whatever that expenditure that you had was. It's very interesting. The use case I'll explain to you,
which I proceeded with is I sold real estate three years ago when I only had one child. And then
three years later, I had three children moving from rental to rental, turned out to be much more
difficult than I expected to rent a place where we wanted to be. And I was like, enough, we've got
to get back into some real estate so I can have a family home for us. But it's like, if I'm going
to do that real estate's the most not the most but is a a highly uh it's a very well-developed
market with lots of options to leverage it's like if you're going to get back into real estate from
a family home perspective you want to sell as little bitcoin as possible and take as much
leverage as possible so okay well what kind of loan to value can i get um and again like yourself
the bank didn't like me because my demonstrative affordability is very poor because i live of
capital gains and capital gains are seen as one-off disposals rather than regular forms of
income which they like to leverage against so the irony being is they prefer you to have a hundred
thousand dollar a year income and give you a five hundred thousand dollar loan and be negative equity
than have a balance sheet you know of whatever um that you might be sitting on and if you have no
income they're like well i can't give you a loan and it's that's in a sense that the extraordinary
extraction that you're referring to of the fiat system so that doesn't make sense i've got this
value sitting right here i could pay you the loan tomorrow why don't you give me a loan and they're
like no sorry i need to see you have an income otherwise my my calculator doesn't work you're
like that's so backwards but the price at the time like my my net asset calculation
even now like when i think back to august was 40 percent higher than what it is today
and you're like ouch that's a big change now i have bought house during that process and taken
leverage i had to do it through the private lending markets so it's only a two-year long
duration and so in 22 months i've got to think about well actually i've got this quite big loan
on this house now and you're like it's just so interesting isn't it you can you can get leverage
but like it's not without its emotional roller coaster that goes with it and like you said i'm
pretty confident that two years from now it's absolutely going to be a good trade because
there's a whole load of bitcoin that i didn't have to sell in order to enter that position
but right now the bitcoin price has come right off and you're like well if i have to repair it
tomorrow i'm in i'm in a bit of problem um so yeah i guess like anyone listening like absolutely
have a look at these different options but it doesn't come with a stress-free life um but i do
think you know it's as you get more sophisticated and better educated and in particular asking the
question what is money you you start to see the fiat system for what it is which is a debt-based
credit system and it's a tool and if you're able to carry your debt then leverage is actually very
helpful in certain scenarios so you can use it um i guess i'm just learning a quite serious
lesson as to how to do that um so rev yeah does any of that resonate in terms of the feeling of
like oh the price has come off damn it have i got this one wrong well and you know there's a couple
ways i i have come to interact with the price right you learn really quick that your assumptions
if you try and pay attention to what people are saying,
oh, the price is going to do this.
And by this time, the price is going to be here.
Oh, we're going to have a crash soon.
If you're trying to make your decisions based on this information,
it's really easy to make a wrong choice.
And it's funny because a lot of the advice is don't use your emotions.
Use the information to make your decisions.
And I've actually switched to the opposite.
when I'm jumping up and down, if the price is ripping and I wake up in the morning, I'm jumping
up and down, I'm having a beer at noon, you know, that's the time for me to spend the Bitcoin on
some things that I've had my eye on. And going back to the eight forms of capital, it's not like
I'm going to go and buy a Lambo, right? And just this frivolous thing, but it's time for me to
upgrade my systems, maybe buy a RAM that has better genetics to give me more capital,
right, to continue for my systems to flow better and work more for me.
A good example of that, so I bought a car last December. This is a hybrid electric vehicle.
I bought it with Bitcoin from another Bitcoiner, and this was the case. The price at that time was
going, it seemed like it was really, I was happy about it. Right. I just felt good.
And my wife was saying, well, we don't need a car. Why are you, why are you buying this car?
And I'm like, well, I'm going to be going to all these Bitcoin meetups. This car is going to be
really good on gas mileage. And, and we'll see if this plays out, how this plays out. Because
if I spend the Bitcoin on the car now, I might be able to make up for the, like, basically now I'm,
I'm making the trade that I'm going to make more in fuel savings than the opportunity costs of the
price going up. And so Bitcoin has essentially been sideways this whole year. And that ended up
being like a really good decision. And that was like a purely emotional kind of like, I mean,
it wasn't purely emotional, but emotions was what drove me to like say, hey, I should, I should make
a big purchase right now. Like the Bitcoin's ripping. I think it's time for me to fire off
something that will be useful for us. And it turned out to be a really good choice. And there's
another saying that I've got when it comes to price. And that's when the price goes up,
you work faster, right? Because you're trying to keep up the sales that you can make today.
The sooner you can make that sale, the sooner you get, you're getting full exposure and you're
riding the price up. And when the price goes down, you work harder and you have to work harder
because you have to convince people that now is the time to let go of their sats for your thing.
But if you can stack when the price is down, now you're getting the most Bitcoin for your time.
yeah so price goes up work faster price goes down work harder and it's funny it strikes me so when
you when you talk about natural capital the ebb and flow of life is natural you know you don't
wake up feeling fucking amazing every day and i think it's very difficult when bitcoin is this new
thing right digital scarcity digital sound money a measuring stick for value that's better than
anything that's ever come before it and so of course it's going to be a process of trial and
error a process of finding product market fit a process of adoption but it doesn't mean that you
know how it's going to feel but of course life itself is up and down and so everything we're
talking through here it strikes me as it's it's very natural so i know natural capital you're
referring more to like your livestock and things like this but um does bitcoin fit into that sense
of like it just it fits in much better than fiat currency essentially to your to your forms of
capital well i think that bitcoin is really the first natural digital system if that makes any
sense. Yes. It much more follows closely the laws of nature than it does of any other digital thing.
And so and people often complain about the volatility of Bitcoin making it hard And that why it so hard to be a hodler right Because you have to have the diamond hands and your conviction is constantly being tested But when you live this homesteading lifestyle like I do
I mean, the volatility of nature is equally as bad,
if not worse.
There's things, you walk out the door every morning
and you don't know what the fuck's
going to be happening out there.
Recently, a storm came through,
a tree fell on the fence where I had my rams,
the rams got out.
and so i walk out in the morning with my coffee going to uh give the hay to my ewes the the female
sheep and there's uh you know our dairy ram in there and he's breeding them and we didn't want
him to be bred right now and so i'm like okay here we go gotta get this guy what happened
get the ram out of there find the hole in the fence and i'm like wait a second our other ram's
gone our prized ram like this uh katahdin hair sheep registered ram the most valuable sheep we
have gone just totally disappeared and uh so i go we go spend time looking for him and everything
um it's been a month haven't found the guy he got eaten by coyotes i don't yeah he's gone and so
you know when you're working with with nature and this natural capital stuff
the volatility is insane you you cannot the saying don't count your chickens before they hatch right
you can you can have all these these eggs in the incubator and you're like oh man i'm gonna i have
50 eggs in my incubator and i'm gonna have 50 chickens and then i'll be able to sell all the
pullets for this much and i'm gonna be able to produce this much this many eggs and you make all
these calculations based on these eggs in the incubator that haven't hatched yet. And then
something happens and half the eggs don't hatch or you lose the whole batch. And if you made bets
based on that, if you started to leverage up, you know, start to make deals in advance based on
these chickens that you thought you were going to have, you're in big trouble. And so you start to
learn to like, not like stay humble, stack sets, you know, you stay humble and just let nature play
out and respond more than make your plans around it. And sorry, Rob, I wasn't expecting your story
to end up with such a disaster that the the your lead ram just disappeared i'm sorry about that
the the thing that got me giggling was like the comic concept of like walking out the front door
and like oh my god anything can happen and and i was hoping for a happier end to that story i'm so
sorry that that happened the the the process though so what i'd love to learn more what does
a day look like when you're managing a homestead so what is your i mean obviously every day is
going to be different. You're talking about the volatility of nature. But just walk me through,
like, you know, what have you done today? And you wake up, you're like, okay, I've got all these
tasks to achieve. How do you go through it? Well, I think it's, it's really, it's seasonal, right?
So there's different, we've learned that you build your routine based around what season it is and
what's going on. And so we've also learned that, you know, you can't suddenly have the routine
ready to switch right at the change of the season. It's sort of like an, uh, a continuous ebb and
flow one by the time you've finally gotten into the rhythm of one season, you're in that rhythm
for a month and then it's starting to transition into the rhythm of the next season. And so we
could take like, I mean, I made some videos on Noster over the summertime, uh, of like a day in
the life of the homestead. And so that, that's kind of a, I I'll start with that example. Right.
So I get out the door.
You got the chores to do, right?
So in my instance, I start with my chickens.
And so I bring the food scraps out to the chickens, give them a couple of scoops of the grain.
And my chickens, what I use them for is to compost my horse manure.
And so every day I bring, well, I turn the compost piles.
I rebuild the compost piles that I built in there the day before.
This is giving my chickens access to worms and fly larva and whatever else.
and my chickens are doing the work of turning this compost for me.
And then they're paying me in food.
They're paying me in eggs for that work.
I collect the eggs and then I go get my wheelbarrow.
I collect two wheelbarrow loads of horse manure.
I dump that into the chicken area, build a new fresh pile of compost for them to work.
And then I take the finished compost that the chickens have made,
take that wheelbarrow of finished compost, add it to a garden,
put it somewhere where I need fertility.
Maybe I'm putting it in bags and selling it at a Bitcoin meetup.
after that then I've got to give my horses their hay if they need hay, feed some hay to the rams,
feed my rabbits and so I've got a rabbit colony integrated with the cannabis garden
and so my rabbits actually grow my cannabis for me and rabbits are cool because they're vegetarians
and unlike a chicken, chickens are omnivores. This is why the compost works so well to feed
the chickens because they need bugs in their diet to produce those high quality eggs.
A rabbit, on the other hand, does not need anything but vegetative material.
And so I'll do some weeding.
I'll take that wheelbarrow after I've dumped it to the compost somewhere.
I'll weed some area like maybe my food forest, for example, where I've got all this perennial
garden intermixed with where I grow subsistence crops, garlic, potatoes, onions, squash, carrots,
that sort of stuff with fruit trees, berries, hazelnuts, that sort of thing.
And so that area needs a little bit of weeding.
I fill up a wheelbarrow full of weeds.
I take that wheelbarrow of weeds.
I mulch around the base of my cannabis plants, and this is food for my rabbits.
My rabbits eat the weeds that I fed them.
They're now weeding and, well, now they're depositing their fertility at the base of the cannabis plant.
And this is the other thing that's cool about rabbits is that their manure is not hot.
Unlike any of the other manures at the homestead, the chicken manure, horse manure, sheep manure,
all those manures need compost time, aging time before you can actually feed them to a plant.
Rabbit manure special, it's directly accessible to the plant right out of the animal.
And so by feeding the rabbits at the base of the plant, now I'm actually feeding my cannabis too.
And so I'm taking my weeds from my area where I'm growing my annuals and perennials.
Instead of composting that, I'm turning that into rabbit meat.
And then I'm also feeding my cannabis and mulching my cannabis.
and so you could see that the chores kind of like go on like that for uh the morning right before
lunch and then i've got some short-term rentals here i built a tiny house and a yurt which i
access the ecotourism of my area i'm i'm not far from chicago so there's a lot of people that come
to my area to come stay nightly and enjoy the homestead lifestyle i'm about uh 15 minutes from
the beach at Lake Michigan. So there's people coming to go to the beach, hang out at the
homestead, enjoy the animals and stuff that we've got here. And so I might be turning over one of
those units or both of them. And then it's lunchtime, you know, and then after lunch,
then it's like, what problem do I have to, what do I have to fix? What do I have to, like,
that's where you kind of get some forward moving progress for the day. Uh, you're building on top
of a system you're refining a system you're fixing a system um not just maintaining it strikes me
rev what you just described is like in the morning you're working in your business then in the
afternoon you get to work on it so there'll be something that needs your attention to make sure
it functions and so and so lunch are you are you are you always eating something that you've created
from your homestead? That's the goal, you know, and basically the way we've got things set up is
that we produce enough food to where we don't need the grocery store, right? Like we could eat
and survive off of all the food that we grow here. But the grocery store offers a lot of variety and
a lot of convenience. And so there's times in your life where you just, you know, to take a lamb and
slaughter it and butcher it and cut it up into the different parts and then freeze it and then
thaw it and then prepare the meal, right? There's a lot of steps involved in from taking that live
animal and turning it into food for yourself. And so sometimes you're busy and you just want to,
you know, something convenient and easy from the grocery store. Slice deli meat, right? Make a
sandwich and eat the sandwich and go on with your day. And so we try to eat as much as well that we
produce as possible this is obviously lowering our um overhead our expense like our lifestyle
cost in general but it's not always the case like i don't like to ever speak in absolutes when it
comes to this kind of thing right there is definitely some trade-offs that you can make
that are good for you if the grocery store ceases to exist i'll be just fine you know um but we do
access the grocery store it's incredible sovereignty when you describe that and i'm the opposite end of
scale where I'm currently renting the real estate that I'm living in and I'm buying my food from
a store a different store every single day I mean I guess that was one of the lessons of the COVID
experience I was actually in central Melbourne which was one of the worst lockdowns everywhere
um I owned a house at the time it's like it's 195 square meters and you walk out the front door onto
the government's pavement and they control everything and at the time there was a COVID
testing center that was put up on the street so there were people queuing up on my front gate
waiting to get a test to see if they could travel overseas or interstate it was crazy
but I didn't know where my water was coming from I didn't know where my food was coming from I
didn't know where my electricity was coming from and even though I did think that I owned a house
it was quite clearly in someone else's fiefdom because you're now not allowed to go to the
grocery store you know more than five kilometers away or you can't go and see a family member or
you can't go to the sports stadium unless you get this medicine or whatever the case might be
um it's interesting in a sense that four or five years later i'm still living in that similar
tangent and what you've just described is like the complete opposite end of the spectrum where
it's like no okay well i could survive without a grocery store i mean wow that's so different and
you talk about stored capital like that's a that's an amazing thing to be able to fall back on
I'm intrigued because as a home chef like we're really into our our health and always investing
in it and we're very specific about what we do eat and what we don't eat eating your own food
directly out of the land around where you're sleeping every day it must be incredible quality
you know exactly what's got into it like do you feel different from 10 years ago before you started
this process yeah and this is this is kind of where it comes into that that vital capital
component, right? Your mental health and physical. Not only do I get the health benefits of the high
quality food that I'm producing, but I get the health benefits of actually producing it because
it takes physical work and it it's you're very proud of the things that you produce. This is good
for your mental health. You know, when I when I have a hand in my own sustenance and the sustenance
for my family. This is, uh, this gives me a lot of strength. Um, and so it's, it's kind of this
compounded effect where not only are you getting these like physical health benefits from the
nutritional quality of the food, but you're actually getting all of the mental health
benefits from producing it, the physical health benefits from actually using your own effort,
uh, your muscle to produce it. Um, and so it's, it's, I, I, Bitcoin really, you know, it enables,
I like to think that we live this like future, what the future looks like of living a subsistence lifestyle.
A hundred, well, maybe not, maybe it's been longer than a hundred years ago now, but roughly a hundred years ago, let's say.
Natural capital was like one of the most valuable forms of capital because that was the ability to produce food.
And it wasn't like you could just ship food from one continent to the other.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And so locally, the excess natural capital that you had had a high level of liquidity, right?
Because if someone had a hard time and they couldn't produce their food, now you can provide that to them, right?
There's a much higher market for it.
And so the natural capital now with Bitcoin, right?
It's the purchasing power that you gain allows you to sort of make that short term sacrifice in building up the systems to produce your natural capital again.
And it's like when you buy food at the grocery, like if I were to buy the quality of food that I produce here, I could I mean, I couldn't afford it.
right? To exchange my Bitcoin for the same level of quality that I'm actually growing myself.
So I'm actually saving Bitcoin in a sense and not having to sacrifice my vital capital by buying
lower quality food, extra processed food, so on and so forth. And so because I have the Bitcoin,
it enables me to actually live this higher standard of living. But I'm not necessarily
like extremely wealthy as far as financial capital is concerned it just gives me this
savings account that gives me the stability to now focus on natural capital but like what is wealth
in that sense rev like you know the more i've studied it in a sense i think wealth is time
and the more time that you have to yourself to investigate under your own steam whatever it is
you might be interested in, whether that's homeschooling your children or living off the
land or whatever the case might be, that's wealth. So you can have a financial wealth figure that
would blow people's minds. But if you have to work 366 days a year, 18 and a half hours a day
to get that, like, is that actually wealth? And the fiat system incentivizes that. It comes back
to that like, oh, mate, your income is not strong enough. I can't give you a loan. It's like, yeah,
but look at the balance sheet.
And they don't even care about that.
It's like, okay, well, obviously,
people are going to work as long and as hard as possible
to try and increase that fiat number.
But at what cost?
And the morning that you've painted is so interesting.
It's like, okay, I've got a morning's worth of work to do
to sustain the momentum of my homestead.
And then I'm going to take a break, feed myself.
And then the afternoon is about how do I increase the capital
or the momentum of my homestead?
And I think that's so cool because that's wealth.
You know, you've bought yourself half a day or whatever the case might be to do that.
Sure.
I had one last question, Rev, that I wanted to go through that I heard you describe yourself or someone asked you if you were a mad scientist.
So this is just we'll spend five, ten minutes on this before wrapping it up.
Do you like to make experiments?
were you always curious as a young boy and like what is a mad scientist like i feel like we need
more mad scientists in the world yeah i think i i feel like it a lot of times um because i
so i do a lot of the the mad science the most like obvious stuff you could look at for what i put out
there as far as the mad scientist stuff is concerned is the work that i do with the bitcoin
miners. And, um, I've always, as a, as a kid, I was, I was always kind of handy. You know, I used
to like to ride, um, BMX bikes and skateboard and stuff. And so I was always building ramps.
And even before that I was building tree houses and just like taking whatever junk I could find
in the garage and making this into something that I could utilize. And, and so my style is very
makeshift. You know, there's some people out there that they have, uh, excellent engineering prowess
and then they, they take the time to really get the right materials and make it look nice. And
I like to work, and this comes a lot down to like the permaculture principles. Um,
so there's a permaculture principle, uh, produce no waste, uh, use in value, another one, use in
value, renewable resources and materials. And, uh, basically when you start to look at these
permaculture principles, what it suggests and what it distills down to is like, use what you have
first, try and utilize what's in front of you first, rather than going out and getting this
outside input to work with. And so the reason why a lot of my stuff looks like mad scientist work is
because I'm trying to find any old bucket or broken piece of junk or whatever, and repurpose
that. And a lot of times I'm repurposing that into maybe a Bitcoin mining hot water heater,
or a Bitcoin mining clothes dryer, or a Bitcoin mining food dehydrator. I have very little
outside investment in these contraptions. And they look like that. They look like a contraption
made out of trash and junk, but it mines Bitcoin and it does the thing that I want it to do.
And one of the beauties of when you build things with trash like this, and you could kind of think,
and I don't know if this is true or not, but I romanticized the idea of the Native Americans,
they have these teepees, right? That structure does not last forever. And so you could imagine
being a young man, an Indian, and today your dad's like, you're going to build your first teepee today.
And you go and you find out how to cut the wood down and you tan the skins and you build this teepee
and it's like a piece of shit and it lasts only a year and it degrades, right? And even the father's
teepee will degrade. He's really good at it. His teepee degrades in five years or something, right?
But you're constantly having to rebuild the teepee out of stuff that you can find in the environment
and unhoned a craft.
And each time you do it, you build a better teepee.
And so when it comes to these Bitcoin mining contraptions,
I start off with the junk that I've got laying around.
I build the contraption.
It does the thing.
And then it fails for most of the time
because I built it out of junk.
And if someone had built it with all of this,
the right materials,
right material might be the wrong word,
but with these outside materials,
purpose-built for the application to start with,
it's going to last a lot longer.
But I get to iterate my way into something that lasts a long time and have much less.
I have to spend very little sats in that process.
It's almost like a prototyping process.
So you're creating a minimum viable product somehow.
You're proving the use case.
And then if you chose to spend your sats on creating something, you've got a much better understanding of whether or not it will work.
Yeah, very cool.
And that in itself, that is capital stewardship or capital growth management at its very core.
Well, Rev, listen.
Okay.
So we're running up to the 90-minute mark.
So I'm going to say thank you so much for your time.
And thank you so much for sharing everything you have today.
I really love learning from people.
And the fact that we're able to jump on a video call and have a conversation like this in completely different parts of the world,
doing completely different things, is a real pleasure.
So thank you.
if anyone wants to reach out and get in touch what's the best way to do that
well you can find me on Noster that's pretty much where I hang out
that's the the good touch point to find me I'm Rev Hodel on Noster not to be
confused with Reverend Hodel there's another guy over there we get mixed up
all the time I'm not Reverend Hodel I'm just R-E-V
Rev.Hodel find me on Noster connect with me happy to to talk about permaculture
talk about Bitcoin mining talk about ways to live life on a Bitcoin standard
whatever. And another thing I can close out with too is just, so a lot of the stories and a lot of
the stuff I talked about, just to relate it back to these nine forms of capital, you've got time,
which is a flow, right? You're spending your time. And so you can try and think about, try and
look at all of these examples that I was giving my day-to-day and with each expenditure of my time,
try and deduce how many forms of capital am I stacking with each expenditure of the time.
In my morning routine, am I just doing my chores or am I stacking many, how many forms
of capital am I actually stacking there?
The name of the game is to design your life and build the lifestyle around when you spend
your time, you've got to be trying to build, if you're aware of this concept, then it becomes
much easier to start to say, oh yeah, when I did that trip or when I built this thing
or when I had that interaction, I didn't just get the main driving purpose for that expenditure
of your time. If you can recognize all of these different things that you might have built
alongside that, then you can really start to wield this concept and use this concept of the
nine forms of capital to your advantage to build a savings that is resilient, which you can then
pass to your children and carry this on for future generations. Awesome. That is the name of the game.
It's, you know, how do you steward the humanistic, the intellectual capital to help people then flourish?
And, of course, your kids are key in that.
Well, Rev, thank you so much for your time today.
If you guys want to talk again, man, I'm happy to do it.
It was great.
Good to meet you.
Yeah, man, keep at it.
Love the podcast.
I listened to a few episodes.
Awesome.
Thanks, Rev.