Before you listen to this conversation with Adam Smecha, I wanted to draw your attention to a few things that he brings up.
One, he talks about the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.
At the end of this video, I've linked our conversation about Natalie Smolenski's paper on this topic.
Please take a look at that.
It will help you understand a lot about how the legal system has made it more and more difficult for us to have good money.
And it's gotten progressively worse since 1970.
Second, Five Mile Farms is the operation that Adam gets his beef from that he gave to us as a gift on the show.
Absolutely fantastic.
Please check him out.
I've linked him as well.
Third, Adam is the guy on the ground doing this.
I'm in a text group with him and he's asking people, hey, please go through your credit card account.
See who you've done business with that uses a Square Merchant.
And I'll personally go to them and I will say, hey, do you realize if you switch over to Bitcoin, you don't have to pay fees.
You don't get chargebacks.
You can still get paid in cash if you want.
Everyone's better off.
He realized early on that if we don't spend Bitcoin in an economy, it will never become money.
It'll just end up being like that shiny yellow rock called gold.
And we don't want that.
We know where that goes.
So thank you so much for joining this conversation and listening.
It's been a year since we started this podcast.
Jeff Booth, Natalie Smolinski, incredible guests that we've had on here, and we've got even more
coming for you. So please subscribe if you haven't already and enjoy this conversation with Adam
Smecha. We are honored to have with us today our first in-studio guest. As you can tell by the
awkward arrangement, we've done our best with our ramshackle hackneyed studio here in order to
Squeeze in Mr. Adam Smecha.
Adam, your ex-profile, Christian father and developer,
Mana, you've created the Mana Bitcoin wallet,
which has a bunch of other fun tricks and toys
that's more than just a wallet.
But whenever I listen to a podcast
and I hear somebody give a biography of the person,
I always think, well, they're probably missing out
on what that person actually wants to say about themselves.
So if you would introduce to people who is Adam, how you got into Bitcoin, kind of your journey, and I guess really what you're excited about as we're moving here into 2026.
Sure. Thank you so much. By the way, thank you guys for having me. I actually really like this setup. This is cool. I watch the show that you guys put on pretty regularly. And yeah, I've been watching you guys.
Yeah. Yeah. You can see they got the, this is an apartment.
You say studio kind of very generously, but this is a room in an apartment and we're doing our best.
So thank you for that.
It's great. I think the atmosphere was awesome.
All right.
We've got the red light. Oh, I had the red light going.
So I think you mentioned this is your first in-person.
It is.
It is also my first in-person podcast interview.
I don't even know, probably somewhere in the ballpark of 20 or 30 different podcast interviews over the course of my,
time and developing but um this is really cool to be doing it in person and get to yeah guaranteed
that we're all wearing pants or that we've made an ironclad agreement not to yeah no we had to
have a strict pants policy after kind of the it is nice because when you are in person it's much
more organic to respond to people and to be able to interrupt somebody and interject and whatnot so
it is it makes i said something about sharing the room sharing a space when we were doing the
nick land one and yeah about told me to get out it's like i don't like it's just jargon right i
I mean, let's share space.
It's like psychological speak that's infiltrated.
Therapy speak is kind of infiltrated into regular talk.
So we've got to be careful.
Continue.
We cut you off.
It's all good.
So back to the question.
I would just, if I had to like describe myself,
the underlying principle of me is,
and I've probably recently kind of come into this idea
or being able to put a name to this.
because of bitcoin and that would be i consider myself a freedom maximalist first so i'm a bitcoin
maximalist as well but but i'm a bitcoin maximist maximalist because i'm a freedom maximalist and
that's a core tenet of my life um you know from you know as long as i can remember you know i've
always wanted to help people be more free and early on in my early adulthood um i thought that
meant joining the military. I joined the Air Force and I served in the Air Force for six years as a
firefighter. And that's how I knew best how to help people be more free.
What six years was that? Was that some geopolitically fraught period?
It wasn't necessarily. It was 2011 to 2017. So there were some small conflicts in there. And
And I ended up getting deployed in 2017 over in the Middle East.
And that's actually when I found Bitcoin.
So that's part of my Bitcoin journey is I was actually deployed and saving some money and trying to figure out how I wanted to preserve into the future and provide for my family.
I have a little bit of extra time on my hands.
And so I started investing into stocks.
So I just got into the stock market, started doing as much research as I could.
I didn't know anything in the beginning, but I was just doing lots and lots of research and seeing how people were investing and or trading.
I hadn't figured all that out yet, but I was on that journey.
And as I was doing all this searching on the Internet and stuff, I was obviously, you know, giving up some of my tracking data to some of these advertisers that were then able to target me, which was actually my Bitcoin salvation, so to speak.
because what happened was I got a targeted ad from Investopedia.
It was an Ethereum article.
So I found Ethereum before I had Bitcoin.
And the article itself described proof of work.
And so I started reading this article.
And as I'm going through this article, it's just completely blowing my mind.
I'm not even all the way, you know, probably even halfway through the article.
And I'm like, this is one of the most important pieces of, you know, literature,
if you want to call it that, that I've ever read.
It's it was game changing to me.
And before I even finish the article, I'm halfway around the other side of the world and I'm calling my brother on Skype.
I don't even know what time it was in here.
So it might have been like the middle of the night.
And so I'm just like ringing.
I'm like, dude, pick up, pick up.
And he answers.
And I'm like, I just read something that I think is going to change the world.
And it was, of course, the concept of proof of work.
I didn't know anything about, you know, anything else at this point.
Again, I didn't even know about Bitcoin, which is crazy.
I can't believe I hadn't heard of Bitcoin before this moment.
But so this, again, was in 2017.
And so that day I went home after my shift and I started doing just as much research as I could in a short amount of time.
And I'm like, dude, I just had to buy some of this and, you know, sold all my stock.
I bought Bitcoin, I bought Ethereum, and I bought Litecoin.
And those were the three options available on Coinbase at the time in that journey.
And so once I had those, I just kept doing more and more research over time and eventually got to the point where I became, you know, more or less a Bitcoin maximalist.
But again, this kind of goes back into the theme of, you know, my passion, my goal is to ensure that people are free, that people remain free, that I remain free.
And as a part of that, it's very important to me to make sure that I preserve other people's freedom, too, because it's reciprocal.
And without other people having freedom, then I am de facto less free myself.
So what about proof of work? Is it the technology?
I mean, there's lots of abstract ways to think about what proof of work is, like the real world reaching into cyberspace.
and there's more technical kind of summaries out,
but what about proof of work for you was like so groundbreaking?
Well, obviously, like you mentioned,
proof of work is so, you know, expansive
and in different disciplines and fields of study
that you could look at it through like different lens
that you could see proof of work and its impact and meaning.
But in this moment, it was simply taking energy
and converting it into a verifiable cryptographic proof
that represents value.
So essentially taking information
from the analog world
and translating it and bridging it into the digital world.
That was the part that blew my mind
because I realized that that has never been done before.
And I spent a lot of time growing up.
I was a big gamer, right?
Like lots of video games.
And so a lot of my experience is through the lens of, you know, virtual currencies and virtual economies in a digital space and seeing all the problems that come from, you know, game fiat, like in-game economies and the fiat systems that run these things, even though they're not real money, so to speak.
um you know i observed all of these things over time and then i saw this new virtual money that
could simply you know uh avoid all the pitfalls of uh somebody you know a developer being able to
print money or control economy in a video game and so uh yeah i saw this thing called proof of
work it explained you know essentially you're able to prove that the work had been done
in the physical world and then you could cryptographically prove in the digital on the
digital side that that work had you know been been done and then that becomes the underlying token of
course in this context it was referring to this peace token but yeah that that is what i think
was really pivotal to my understanding of what bitcoin was and is yeah um which by the way of
course you guys probably know but in case anybody else doesn't get there it was no longer proof of
work it is a proof of stake coin so that mind-blowing or earth-shattering moment that i had
no longer applies to it anyway so just wanted to make sure that was pointed out so this is a
fairly esoteric i would say podcast where we we go into you know a lot of hard to understand
writings about bitcoin or or things that honestly be honest very few people read
because a lot of people are just there for the grow up aspect of it.
But for those people that hopefully find this, that are a little less, a little less invested
in that, they're coming from that world that you came from where you were just trying to save some
money. You're just trying to buy some stocks. You're doing some research. So what were you,
what was influencing you then? Were you reading Warren Buffett's letters? Were you checking the
Motley Fool, like what kind of investment thesis did you have at the time? And has that changed?
And the reason I ask is because I used to be a investment advisor. And so when I started,
I was with Edward Jones and the name of the game was diversification, you know, and diversification.
Now I look at it as diversification is what you do when you don't know what to do, right? It's the
thing that you're, I'm just going to, yeah, I'm going to sell the winners in order to pay for the
losers. And so kind of, what was your, what was your investing thesis? And then how did that change
when you, when you came over and you saw what proof of work was? It's a bit of a self-deprecating
answer because it's a little embarrassing, but I was just a complete degenerate. So I was, of course,
you know i heard all of the good advice you know 60 40 portfolio um and all that stuff i didn't
listen to any of that i was looking for like the quick you know the quick fix right the stock that's
gonna you know rip overnight and i can get in and get out i did have some uh stocks that i bought
out of um more like an idealistic or like a um from a moral perspective too like just businesses
that I wanted to support and become invested,
have a vested interest in some of these businesses.
And so I did that too.
But again, my intent and the purpose was to get more money, right?
Because I was too naive to really understand
how everything worked and realize
that the whole system's completely rigged against,
you know, the small guy.
But that's where I was at that time.
And it wasn't until I found Bitcoin,
And in fact, many years later that I realized, you know, there's a different way of looking at things, specifically as it pertains to the economy as a whole.
So a lot of people recognize this as kind of a dichotomy of Keynesian economics and Austrian economics.
Obviously, there's a little more nuance to it than that, but more or less, you're probably going to idealistically fall into one of these two camps.
and before Bitcoin, I wouldn't have had any idea that anything other than what I was taught and
raised with, which was Keynesian economics existed. So I never even heard the term Austrian
economics. I didn't know any of the, you know, the classical Austrian economists by name.
I didn't understand. I will admit my whole life, I went to business school too, by the way. So I,
you know, I was in all these classes and took all the finance classes and everything, all the
economics classes and i didn't know that what i was being taught was canadian economics yeah
i will say my entire education i had i had trouble getting it to click for me because there were so
many like little things that just didn't make sense and no matter how many times i read in a
textbook i could not piece it together and it wasn't until long after i found bitcoin that i
realized it's because the amazing economics is fundamentally flawed it doesn't make sense it
doesn't make sense i trained as an economist for six years and i never heard the term austrian
economics i never heard anything about it nothing um you in your article um that we will get to talk
a little about here um you referenced a actually put in a nice big quote from um the creature from
czecholadon and uh i presume then that that was your understanding of how like that that really
probably pulled back the wool um and seeing how keynesian economics and modern monetary theory
was flawed um which i think is fascinating because that was written way before bitcoin was
racked right exactly put this out and um we're able to see you know step by step the process
of not just how flawed it is but how nefarious it was to begin with um but i i just i kind of i
I think it's interesting to point this out because you're unique.
Like very few people, I think, learn about Bitcoin because of proof of work.
Usually that's like eight steps down the line, right?
That's after the shit cone casino.
That's after the NFTs.
That's after all these other things.
And then you finally come to Jesus.
You know, you have your moment, right?
But yeah, so that book, when did you read that?
I want to say, I mean, it was probably...
coincidentally around like the covet era okay so i don't know 2020 like 21 maybe um which is
you know years past the time when i found bitcoin so i would say i actually read the creature from
jekyll island after i started to figure some of this stuff out but that book was extremely pivotal
to my understanding of the economic environment,
just of Earth.
So, yeah, it was an eye-opening book.
And interestingly enough,
the quote that I put in there,
I put that quote in there for a very specific purpose,
and that was to argue the point of,
I'm rejecting the premise
that Gresham's Law must apply to Bitcoin,
which is something that's pretty controversial
because a lot of people like to point that out.
They have this hesitation to spend Bitcoin,
to use it as a currency.
And it's a very common reason that people say
it's because, well, it's Gresham's Law.
But if you actually dig into that
and start asking them how that actually applies
and why they're actually going down that path,
it really starts to fall apart.
And so I have a very strong opinion
that Gresham's Law doesn't apply to Bitcoin.
And that's not to say that there aren't some good reasons
to not spend Bitcoin if, you know,
you can convince yourself that that's the case.
But a big part of what that article was about
was basically convincing people
that not spending Bitcoin is illogical.
Yeah. So in your article,
you noted Gresham's Law as a reason.
You noted cost, cost of transactions
and things like that.
Code of conduct, which is basically
just never sell your Bitcoin.
And it's just kind of the ethos.
And then the taxation issue.
We were talking about this actually just before you got here.
And Gresham's Law, that's one of the ones I told you, like the class that I taught on this.
We talked about that as well.
What is?
Gresham's Law.
I was going to say Gresham's Law.
Gresham's Law says that bad money pushes out good.
It means whenever you have a money that loses value or that has some other type of characteristic that is not going to hold value, the money that stores value will be hoarded and the money that loses value will be spent.
And this began back in the, I mean, really since money ever existed, but with the Romans and coin clipping.
And now it's been adopted with the fiat versus Bitcoin.
Yeah, because like if you have two coins and there is a emperor of autocrat that says the face value of these two coins is the same.
I'm going to accept that they're both worth one coin unit.
But one of those coins is made of pure gold.
The other one is gold and lead or something like that.
Then people are going to want to spend the gold on the lead coin because they're giving up less gold in each transaction.
But it's been decreed from above that it's one unit of the coin.
So the bad coin will circulate and the good coin will be hoarded.
the gold coin, the pure gold.
I want to make something clear, though.
I'm not rejecting Gresham's law.
Right, right.
No, no, no.
Gresham's law is a thing.
I just don't think it applies to Bitcoin.
And yeah, the reason I think it doesn't apply to Bitcoin
is that it's not bad versus good
because it was merely inconvenient versus convenient.
That's what we have with fiat and Bitcoin.
Before it was bad versus good,
but now it's bad versus near as we can tell perfect.
Like there are no,
there may be flaws with Bitcoin,
Bitcoin, but there aren't any flaws that are greater than the flaws of the thing that they are replacing, is what I would say.
But what's your take on that, I guess?
Well, my conclusion is that Gresham's law applies.
Again, this is my opinion, but I believe that Gresham's law only applies because there is a difference in opportunity cost.
so it is because uh crush under gresham's law or we could say we could even go to the example of
you know coinage in the united states and the last you know 100 years um we we've seen this
we've witnessed this happen where we'll take the quarter for example they took the silver out of
the court and what happened guess what gresham's law happened right took the nickel out of the
nickel it took the nickel out of that right so now you're you're in a situation where you could
have two relatively identical visibly you know coins where one solid silver and the other is an
inferior alloy now at the time where when that happened it's you know it's possible that both
coins could have been close to the same value but silver held its value better over time and so
over time let's just say given given a few years now you have two 25 cent quarters they're both
25 cents but the value is different so that the cost is uh the same but the value is different
right so the opportunity cost which would be you know how hard is it to get the silver coin versus
how hard is it to get the inferior alloy coin those two things are different and so that is
where grashland's law comes in is when you have one thing with one opportunity cost one thing with
another opportunity cost and there's a third party that's imposing the value on it right so they're
saying these are both the same yeah when we all know they're not right so we're gonna spend the
one that we know yeah we all know this one's junk we're gonna get rid of that one with bitcoin that's
not the case because you can spend you know 25 cents worth of bitcoin for the same opportunity
cost you can spend 25 cents worth of fiat because of its fungibility because of its you know ability
to come in and out because of the exchange the the fluid exchange of the assonance um and the
fact that you can continually adjust and divide the amount of bitcoin you need to be able to send
to make that 25 cent payment with a quarter you would be forced to clip it or melt it down
um and recast maybe make a smaller quarter 25 cents worth of silver you can't extract 25 cents
worth of silver from you know a quarter that's now worth a dollar in silver you know what i'm saying
Yeah. So anyway, that is my argument. That is my explanation. And I've also kind of brought up the point that, you know, bad money drives out good money. That's not the definition of Gresham's Law. That's just kind of how we all recognize it. That is a very common characteristic of what happens with Gresham's Law. And I've also said it's kind of like gravity. We say what goes up must come down.
I saw the textbook. Yeah, you don't open the science and math books. Oh, it's an arrow down.
But if I'm talking to my, you know, my five year old, you know, what is gravity, daddy? Well,
it means, you know, when stuff goes up, it comes down. Right. Yeah. That's the five year old's
definition of gravity. But we could probably all agree that there are things that you go up.
Yeah. It also just seems like Gresham's law is kind of like an ex post facto explanation of
behavior that people already have. And so to say, I'm going to do something because of Gresham's
law doesn't make sense. You're already doing the exchanges you're going to do because you perceive
the values of the thing. And so you shouldn't say, oh, this other principle I just learned about,
therefore I'm going to act that way. It's like, no, that principle is to explain a behavior that's
already occurring. And we all know you can transact in Bitcoin in the way that you said,
and it's fungible with fiat and it doesn't matter. So the reason why I have such a chip on my shoulder
about this is because it's so easily identifiable and people say when people bring up questions yeah
i know it's because they haven't actually put any real uh understanding of their own into the
subject they heard somebody say it and now they're applying it yeah behavior yeah and that's why i
have a problem with this because people are thinking for themselves when they say nice yeah
you also had a really good line this is if i was a podcast host worth my salt i'd read it i forgot
to take a note on it and maybe you can repeat it off the cuff it's like um you summarize it that a
um the gresham's law is when you have something in an inferior unit of the same kind or something
like that i wish i had that line i don't have the article in front of me it would be yeah it's kind
of like i was describing it two different quarters yeah yeah and you just very pithily describe it in
the article this is an article from 2023 we'll link to it but it's worth the read because you
do a very good job of if it's hard to to get mental traction on this hearing it orally your
article does a good job laying it out too thank you and i think so the the one thing that that was
missing and you did a good job recounting that but the one thing that was missing was that there's a
there's an imposed value yes so you have you have one that one thing that's inferior one thing that
is superior but there is a third party of somebody value on it yeah so those those elements combined
is essentially what and that third party is always going to be the government that stipulates what
the face value of the coinage is yeah or you know what whoever's in whoever's in control of telling
you the values it doesn't have to be a government yes it could be cattle it can be a guy selling
cattle and saying that cow is the same right that cow yeah so yeah and so i guess if i had to like
wrap everything up just to hopefully stay off all of the uh the trolls out there that are like oh
this guy doesn't realize we get some trolls yeah didn't wait um gresham's law is absolutely you
You know, it's a real thing.
It's an economic law.
And I believe that just natural human behavior generally always results in the same things we're seeing in Gresham's Law.
My argument is that that is something separate from what people are thinking they're talking about when they say they can't spend their money for this reason.
I'm okay with, you know, if you have a logical reason for not wanting to spend their money, we can talk about that.
I can probably convince you otherwise.
It's been a long time doing that.
But, you know, I think that there's really no, once you actually work everything through and you talk everything out, if you're willing to actually go through that process of asking yourself the honest questions of, you know, is there a good reason for me not to spend Bitcoin?
Or you could frame it, should I be spending fiat?
Should I be spending Bitcoin?
What is better for me?
Right?
You can start there.
You don't even have to ask the question, what's better for Bitcoin?
what's better for the central bankers we don't need to even worry about that you can just be
completely selfish about it go down that path you know what is better for you what's going to
preserve your value the most what's going to end up with you having the most sats on the other end
of the table or even dollars yeah i don't even care if you're like just in this for the fiat
money or fiat currency it's not real money but if you're in this for the fiat like good work work
down that path too like go through that series of logical steps yeah ask yourself do i end up with
more fiat at the end because i'm spending bitcoin and again the the another caveat to this is
people will say you know never this is the code of conduct part right yes never never spend your
bitcoin yeah i think that that's actually a helpful thing to tell somebody that's new especially
somebody coming in from the ground level they don't have much savings you know they're just
trying to do the you know go through the motions and do the basics of accumulating bitcoin right i
I think that that's a perfectly fine framework to work from somebody that's new to this.
But what is really important is that you are contributing to society through some method to increase the value and production of the economy where you're being rewarded in such a way that is increasing your own purchasing power.
And so to break that down or feel back even a little bit further, you know, what you're doing is you're making money, right? And you're saving some and you're saving it in an asset that doesn't get arbitrarily inflated away from it.
So what is the goal? The goal is to save more than you spend. The second goal is to save an asset that preserves its purchasing power the best. And if we can all agree that Bitcoin is going up forever in terms of fiat, we can round everything else down to zero.
Well, one, whatever you want to frame it, right? Because, you know, the volatility is, you know, Michael Saylor would love to talk about. You can abstract all of that out, right? Bitcoin's a bumpy ride in the short term. But over the long term, if you can agree or admit or believe that Bitcoin is going to beat the dollar over a long enough time frame, then my argument would be that all of your money should be Bitcoin.
So your positive case, though, for using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, self-interested in a good way where it's about accumulating value, keeping value.
Is that in your heart of hearts the reason that you spend Bitcoin on a day-to-day, for day-to-day purchases?
Or is there some ideological reason behind that?
Like you say you're a freedom maximalist.
For you personally?
Yeah.
You're a freedom maximalist.
That's a great question, by the way.
because I think it maybe is a surprising answer.
That is not why I have so much passion
in doing what I do.
The reason why I am so passionate
about spending Bitcoin in the circular economy
isn't necessarily, well, I guess in a roundabout way,
going all the way around the circle,
yes, it's about me, right?
Because I want to raise my kids in a society
that isn't controlled,
where every moment of their lives is in control by a central banker,
which I believe we have that right now, or at least historically speaking.
I think we're transitioning away from that.
But historically speaking, central bankers have been at the root
of controlling all aspects of our society.
And it comes down to us in a very real way of losing our purchasing power,
usually subconsciously.
Most people aren't really aware of what's happening,
But it manifests in so many bad behaviors that people, I guess, you know, have.
Right.
So we call this high time behavior where you're just making decisions because you can't you don't have an asset.
Like if you don't make this decision now, you're going to be penalized.
Yeah.
And that's your you're prioritizing that high time reference.
And so, yes, it is selfish in such a way that I don't want that future.
That's me.
you know i could care less about anything else that's the world i want to live in right so we
could start from that fundamental principle with that said i think in order to get to that point
in order to achieve that goal um it's it's important for everybody else to realize that
same thing and so right now my goal is in the low-hanging fruit in my opinion is to help show
people that this is the logical path forward for them as well because if we can all agree on that
then you know my wish comes true and hopefully at that point i've convinced you that's your wish too
and you know we can all uh move further and further away from central bank control i mean this is all
keynesian and modern monetary theory and the current environment that's dying these are all
political obstacles to Bitcoin. And all politics is local. And I truly like, as you get older,
then you see that more and more, that truly all politics is local. And so if you want to change
something at a grand level, you know, first start with yourself, and then you start with the circular
economy around you in a way that, you know, if you show 100 people, they're going to show 100
people they're going to show 100 people etc etc so i i really applaud that i think that that's
that's truly the that boots on the ground that bottoms up that uh gorilla type uh approach to
to building something um but does someone then first have to have that ideology though if the
does that have to precede any sort of thing you like you come at this first as a freedom maximalist
i mean there's you know it shouldn't be this way but it is is the case that most bitcoiners come
Bitcoin from kind of libertarian angle, maybe first as DGENs, maybe first as something like
that. But then those that kind of center around it maybe end up in the sort of libertarian camp.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. But I guess I want to hear, like, is there an
underlying ideological perspective that brought that made you into a freedom maximalist that's
more general or something like that, that undergirds your being a Bitcoin proponent?
I'm not sure if this answers your question, but I want to hit on some of the things that you said that made me think about something.
But in terms of trying to communicate that message to other people, they don't necessarily have to come from the perspective of, you know, this ideological movement.
Right. I think that you can very clearly see benefits to taking steps in this direction.
We see Square, they just ruled out their Bitcoin purchases at their POS systems with their merchants.
And they're offering elimination of their fees.
So right now there are zero fees if you do this with all of these transactions.
There are no chargebacks.
You get a pretty good amount of extra free market, essentially.
and so it is not only just in this case but in many of the other cases many many cases it is the
path of least resistance why is that well there's no middle there's no there's no bankers to pay
there's nobody there's nobody you know there that needs to run the system and control us
right bitcoin is open it controls itself right you know we all contribute to it to keep it running
But at the end of the day, there's not one person that is able to flip the switch for make arbitrary change that affects that affects anybody without the rest of us going along.
Yeah.
So again the point I trying to make is I think that it is it is not just ideological It is just logical Yeah Not just ideological but just also logical But the ideology though is there are people who want somebody at the switch
people who are comforted by a daddy, you know, who want, you know, a governmental structure.
They want the middleman.
They want banks.
They're going to...
These are only the people that grew up with somebody at the switch and they don't know different.
Maybe that's the reason.
But I think the ideological always precedes the logical.
There is no purely logical is what I...
It's kind of my default.
Yeah. And again, this is the reason why I say I go back to the phrase of the path of least resistance is because I think we're very clearly seeing what you're talking about happening in the real world. And what does that result in? It results in more money printing, higher inflation, and this system that requires the more control. The system that is the path of more resistance.
Yes. That one just gets further and further and further and further diverges from reality and from the other system. And it becomes more clear and more people become more aware. Adoption grows and people are going to naturally just start to wake up and see that their lives are being negatively affected.
Like there's a tipping point for everybody. For the three of us here, we've probably reached that tipping point, right? We figured it out. Whatever that point was, maybe we were more sensitive to it. Or maybe there was something going on in our lives at the time where we realized that, you know, we need to do something to change.
Yeah.
And we found Bitcoin.
I think after speaking with, you know, lots and lots of people, even very recently, you know, trying to, I've been, you know, trying to go to find Square merchants just to help onboard them and offer my help.
It's pretty incredible to see how many people I run into that identify the problems that they're having.
And they have real reactions to this.
you know i've a lot of times i'll start off by saying you know you can you know you know you
pay three percent your fees are like yeah that sucks like yeah that sucks doesn't it and like
what about chargebacks do you pay you know do you lose a lot of money on chargebacks and people
just like roll their eyes and like man we lose so much money on chargebacks i'm like you know you
can flip a switch to to fix those right i'm like okay and i start talking about bitcoin and that's
like a lot of times they're just like maybe another come back another time we'll talk about it yeah
it's like it's they can identify the problems but they haven't experienced the pain enough
to actually make this change even though it takes them you know i think it probably realistically
takes two to three minutes to go into your settings and set it up the way you want to set it up
and enable bitcoin yeah with no other changes yeah because if people at least the way uh square
the setup, you can still receive the payment as fee of cash, U.S. dollars.
So if you want to just take the cash and you get the benefit of the no transaction fees,
you get the benefit of the no chargebacks, you can still get those things.
And it's almost no work.
But it's the process of stepping out of the comfort zone that I think people have trouble
with.
And that kind of, I think, hits on your point.
Yeah, it does.
And we were talking about that beforehand, too.
Your article 2023, it could definitely be updated with this merchants now being able to take the middleman out and not having a very real impact in their bottom line.
But it's also, we're talking about this before we flip the switch on record, your talk at the Kansas City Bitcoin Summit.
That's what it was, yeah.
you began in a very interesting way I thought where you led into Bitcoin by beginning with
the very recent past and kind of a macro perspective of COVID some of the things that
happened and so that's what I think is really going to flip the bigger switch in people's mind
when you say like waking up it's going to be not just the bottom line but pulling people out of
authoritarian structures they're very comfortable with and using as leverage things like well what
happened during COVID, what happened with the Canadian
truckers and things like that.
And so your talk was just very
effective. There's different ways to come
at this. One is the bottom line,
but one is I think you can
dislodge people from
that default framework they have of
embracing the state. And you just did a good job at that.
Yeah, thank you.
So
I think the COVID era
looking at it
retrospectively was kind of like
I see it as like the soft launch of authoritarianism. It woke a lot of people up. And I think you're right. Events like this are going to be waking people up. I think a lot of Bitcoiners were made during that time frame. In fact, that's when I, like before COVID, I would have considered myself a Bitcoiner. I would have probably even said I was a Bitcoin maximalist.
But after that time period, I look back and, you know, in hindsight, I realized like I didn't, there was still a lot I didn't understand. And it wasn't until it got really, really real for me because I was, like I said, I was a Bitcoiner during that timeframe.
And so I kind of already had a lot of this mindset of, you know, this personal self-sovereignty that I felt like I was entitled to as a human, as an agent of this planet and as just like, you know, a free spirit of God.
And part of that is, you know, making sure that I can do the things that I feel like I need or want to do in a free country.
and so I can't say that this was always the case but at some point I was just like I'm not doing
this anymore I'm not playing this game right I'm not going to give up any more of my freedoms
and I can this was you know kind of a pretty serious moment for me but during this time
And as I'm coming to these conclusions and making these decisions, my fiat job, they came to me and they said was send me an email.
And they said, you know, due to the Biden administration's, you know, rule or whatever, you're going to have to do certain things by a certain date or you will no longer be employed.
yeah and i'm reading this and i uh you know this is my job my career i've been at this company at
this point for you know over 10 years and i'm reading this for maybe about about 10 years
and i came to the conclusion that i was not going to comply i was not going to do it and
And, you know, it wasn't about appeasing my employer with, you know, fake documents or something I saw people doing, stuff like that.
It was more about, I'm going to take a stand because if I don't take a stand now, then I might not have an opportunity or chance to do that in the future.
And it is only because of Bitcoin that I felt like I could make that decision.
if i didn't have bitcoin in that um not not just the financial um cushion but also from the fact
like i i knew that like i was seeing people get their bank accounts canceled right yeah
banks were like freezing people's funds during the covet era because they were doing things that
they didn't want them to do right it was complete draconian authoritarianism not even doing things
saying things saying things yes saying things being things yeah exactly yeah that's a good point
being yeah yeah um and so yeah again so you had the you know obviously i had the component of like
well they can't freeze my bank account so i can still spend money but also the component of like
the the infrastructure right i at this point knew like i could go buy gift cards with bitcoin right
if i wanted to or i could go find somebody selling something for bitcoin and if i didn't have that
that bitcoin backstop i don't know what i would have done yeah yeah because i would have been in
a very desperate situation um and so you know i i took a bit of a tangent there but to get back
onto the topic of of the presentation at the summit um that was kind of you know where i came
from right that that was my um uh i guess the history that i had that led me to this path of
trying to hopefully help see people help people see things from the way that i i see them now
yeah um because people helped me along the way when i was going through this and and i think that
like i like i said earlier covid is was kind of like the uh the soft launch of authoritarianism
i think there's more coming and i think they're going to be in the form of cbdc's
we talked about this so my uh kind of my my thesis around the presentation was this progression of
authoritarianism transitioning into cbdc's and how bitcoin specifically used as a medium of exchange
currency while preserving self-custody is the only way to stave off that um uh provision of
these centralized control technologies that give the government um and authorities ultimate
unilateral control over our very being yeah so biographically at this point you renounce your
job you quit your employment i mean are you just totally just like nothing going on you just like
i'm just gonna you know what happens well i shouldn't i shouldn't let you on such a cliff
yeah let me get back to that so um i it gets i don't know this is probably like
maybe june ish when they sent me the email and they said by october 19th or something i don't
remember this specific date that's just a rough time frame guess but by october 19th you gotta
you know do all these things and comply or we're gonna let you go and so i'm just like
thinking and praying and talking with my wife and figuring out how we're going to do things and
um anyway it gets down to two weeks and then they pulled it
they pulled it so i still have my job okay yeah so yeah it's uh yeah yeah you stared they stared
down the barrel though yeah yeah yeah apparently i wasn't the only one that stood up yeah but the
funny thing is none of us were like talking about this we were all scared to death to like talk
about it yeah yeah um and so we were all just like independently like we're just not doing it yeah
and uh yeah it was pretty pretty awesome to see that happen because we have like so i've got like
you know i work at like a corporate uh with you know a large corporate conglomerate but then we
have our own you know independent uh not really independent but our own local um office and you
know at some point the the the monster wasn't able to control the uh subordinates yeah so they
had they added to the name which is nice yeah i think that leads into something that i find to be
an interesting inflection point that we're at right now which is the fourth thing that you
mentioned in your article is taxes and you list out you know here's three things you can do you
can choose to not pay them you don't recommend you can never spend your bitcoin um maybe that's
the thing that you can do oh or you can just pay them right so it's just kind of like this that or
the other um also the idea of the currency swap which you kind of talk about yeah there's that
but um it's kind of a technical thing yeah but the when steak and shake started selling burgers
for Bitcoin. I think it was like the day after Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation,
he retweeted somebody posting their receipt and he said, this is how change will be made because
you know none of these people are claiming that Bitcoin on their taxes. And so that comes in with
the do not comply thing. And it's like, no, no, no, I bought a burger. I don't need to pay tax on
my hamburger. And so much like your situation where you're faced with it at your corporate job,
where it turns out that the subordinates who refuse to comply don't even need to peacefully
come together as long as there's enough of them. You know, I think this is how change is made from
the bottoms up, is that people will, and I know that we're not supposed to say, you know, you
You can't – well, actually, you can.
In this country, you're supposed to be allowed to say, no, you shouldn't pay your taxes because –
Well, you can't advocate it as a discreet act of –
I'm sure you can.
No, you can't.
I can say whatever –
It is the official position of this podcast.
You got to pay taxes.
I'll go on the record.
It's a great opinion to say, look, you're in a system where the thing that you're paying taxes on is a result of the value being extracted from you.
Like that's all –
If you want to be a political prisoner and go to prison, I'll support you.
You're a political person.
I'll represent you.
I think more so what Gladstein practically is also saying is it's not even an act of conscious noncompliance at that point.
People are just – if enough people are paying, it's not even like – not like I'm not choosing to not pay my taxes.
It's just like enough people are doing it.
You forget about it.
These exchanges happen.
And then it's just like, oh, man, enough people are not doing it.
Let's legalize what is de facto occurring.
Let's make it the new norm.
Here's what I'd say.
This is something I feel comfortable saying.
I don't believe taxes are constitutional.
I don't either.
So I think they're infringement on our rights.
And I also feel comfortable saying that I know for a fact that, like you said, like Gladstein pointed out,
the authorities that are responsible for collecting taxes have no chance against this movement.
Correct.
I think that that's going to lead to an inevitable conclusion that the administration, I guarantee you, they're all sitting around a table having the same conversation.
They know they can't do anything about it.
Taken down by double burgers and tallow fries.
I love that.
I mean, who'd have thought?
Like, that's the bomb that gets dropped, right?
That takes it down.
But stay good.
Good shake.
I think the IRS, I love it.
Yeah. And, you know, people forget we didn't have income tax in this country for a very, very long time.
And when we did, this is one of the fun facts, like the game Monopoly was created partly with funding in order to get people used to the idea that you pay income tax.
Like this is what you do now.
And they're like, wait a second. And I can only imagine what people in the 30s thought when this came out because income tax only started in the teens or something like that.
13.
You know, 13. Was it the same year?
Well, I think, yeah, it is.
Yeah.
But, you know, can you imagine like you're talking with your grandpa and things like income tax, you know, guy that was, you know, operating in the 1880s.
Like, why do I need income tax?
And, you know, and then you have the same type of discussion.
Why do I need a license to get married?
Why do we need a license to drive a car?
Why do I need a license to mow somebody's lawn or walk somebody's dog?
To cut somebody's hair.
That's a, you know, I hear Mark Andreessen talk about that on his podcast.
I was like, look, like the amount of tuition that you have to pay in order to learn how to cut hair, how to cut hair is just insane.
And so we just end up with all of these things stacking on top of one another, one another, one another.
and I agree that fundamentally
there is a reason for tax
but that was to keep from being conquered.
Hey, somebody's knocking at our door.
They're going to tear your heads off
and they're going to steal your chickens
and they're going to rape your horses
or whatever.
But it's a change.
Everybody give us some gold
and we'll pay an army
and we'll beat them up
and then we'll take them off
and then we end up in the situation
that Eisenhower warned us against, which was like, look, this monster learned not only can it feed
itself, it can make its own food. And so if it can make its own food and it has an insatiable appetite,
then it's just going to keep printing money forever and ever. And it'll keep wars going
forever and ever. And we'll never stop. You, by the way, we didn't say this. We should. Thank you
for your service very much. Thank you. Really. Truly. I tried to enlist in the Air Force. They
wouldn't have me um but you pay your taxes son i don't believe his taxes get out i had too many
but no like i i just think but this is the point we're all waking up point yeah exactly it takes
waking up to move one ideologically out of a certain position there are people who do vigorously
endorse taxation um and they are our fellow citizens for explicitly redistributive purposes
They want a more egalitarian society. They see that as we need to take from the rich and give to the poor. We live in not a capitalist society, but a sort of kind of quasi socialist society.
It is a fact that many of our fellow citizens do believe the taxation is not only moral, but that it should be at a higher level.
And so I guess my only point is that, or maybe it's a question, to be a Bitcoiner, does one also have to ideologically be a freedom maximalist to such an extent that you think that taxation is theft?
Or does it inevitably lead one down that?
I think you could probably answer this with something else that I like to think about.
And that is, or recognize at least, that there is one truth, right?
That is the definition of truth.
There's only one of it.
And I'm not saying that I possess the truth.
I have my truth.
Everybody has their own truth.
But there is ultimately one truth.
And because that's the case, I think that these other things do start to converge.
And that's why you see Bitcoiners, you know, start going down this path of eating better and exercising and conducting their economic activity in a more beneficial way for themselves and the people around them.
You see Bitcoiners just taking care of things with a more long term focused mindset.
And, you know, people like to make fun of Bitcoiners for this because they're like, they think they're like, oh, it's a cult.
Well, the cult is really just a bunch of people realizing the truth about a bunch of different things.
Bitcoin is a part of that.
And so I think it's really just a convergence of a lot of different disciplines, fields and areas that we spend time and effort and energy in our lives converging to this centralized truth.
Whatever that truth may be, I believe Bitcoin is a part of that because it is truth in a sense.
It's truth money.
yeah right you can't you can't fake it like you can with fiat money fiat money is fake it's just
it's fake yeah um it's not real right it's just it's it's completely uh it's just an illusion
it's not money it's it's it's what the government has literally spoken into existence you know the
word fiat that's basically what that order yeah command yeah because i said so yeah right and uh
But Bitcoin is the opposite of that.
It's organic.
It became money because it just happened to possess all the qualities of a good money.
Yeah.
What a historical moment to live at a time when something is becoming money because the thing that measures value is changing.
And it's going to have sociological ramifications that are going to – you talked about being a DGEN, you know, my self-deprecatory approach or initiation to Bitcoin began as a DGEN.
We talked about that kind of general.
we talked about brady swenson's talk that he also gave the casey bitcoin summit he talked about so
like you know the the fiat system the way that it accounts for value also leaves the the way that we
approach and consider time changes and talk these the high low time high time preference which one
my time preference high bad yes socialized impatience is like golf yeah socialized impatience
is the really good phrase that Swenson uses.
It's not, being a degen is not like an individual failing.
It's a socialized failing.
We all learn about this is how you have to act
to survive in a society that is becoming a lottery.
It's so big right now.
Yes, exactly.
Everybody wants to strike it rich.
Yeah, and so it's just,
we're going to socialize ourselves into a new way of being
as we interact with Bitcoin, as it gains prevalence.
And it's a very interesting time to be alive
and see how that's going to play out.
The Bitcoin cult thing is interesting because it's making me think of something. We just got done talking about Nick Land's book, Zeno Systems. And in it, he explains the cathedral. Are you familiar with Nick Land?
Okay. So he explains the cathedral, which is Curtis Yarvin's idea for the conglomeration of all the things that make up the illusion that we live under.
The government, public relations, NGOs, all of these things that come together.
Media, academia, all the things that form public opinion.
All the things that come together and they say.
Is it Bitcoin focused there?
Yes. Yes and no.
Like, I mean, it's a he is Nick Land is one of the most probably the deepest thinkers about Bitcoin.
But he's also, according to Grant, who's I would I'll point to Grant because he knows philosophy far better than me.
Nick Land is one of or at least in contention for being one of the greatest living philosophers.
I say that one of the greatest living public philosophers.
He's outside of academia and doing philosophy on a level where it's getting a lot of traction among the public, which is a different type of philosophy.
But anyways, he talks about the cathedral and we bring up like Bitcoin as a cult.
And when we view, when you can step back and you can view it as a cathedral and you can say, this is the great religion that's telling you what you need to believe in.
And should you step out of bounds, then no, we shall smite you.
Then it's very easy to look at Bitcoin as a cult because a cult is just a religion that you don't agree with.
Right. And so.
It's the state religion saying here's a heresy.
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. It's very heretical.
Right.
Exactly.
And so that really strikes true to me.
And to bang off of true that you're talking about, the greatest truth is the one that explains all else.
It's the truth from which all the other truths spring.
And so I think it's no wonder that when you find the truth of Bitcoin, that all of a sudden the glass shatters.
And now you're looking at, oh, well, I have something to live for.
I should take care of my body.
I should take care of my relationships.
I should take care of my spiritual relationship.
I should take care of my house.
You know, I should take care of my vehicle.
I should walk my dog.
I should do my hair.
I should do all these things.
And you look around and we give this, it is a negative connotation, obviously, to say degenerates.
But these are not, as Grant points out, these are not degenerate people.
They are you and I.
They are we.
People have been pushed to the end.
Yeah.
I'll say they're like, you know, something, something else.
Exactly.
They're not necessarily intentional.
Yes.
Exactly.
They're desperate.
Right?
They're socialized into it.
They're acting as you would expect a rational agent to act given the nature of the system.
And they're taught to act that way.
And they're looking for hope.
Yeah.
And as Saylor said, hope.com, the coin is hope.
It gives people hope to move in a different direction.
One thing I wanted to ask you about on that object, it was the code of conduct one in your article.
Never sell your Bitcoin, never spend your Bitcoin.
They got Trump to say it.
you know, say, look, there's a caveat to that now too, which is that you don't have to spend
your Bitcoin. You can loan it against it. You can borrow against it. And so do you,
we're kind of going through your article one by one on these four points and we're saying,
well, Gresham's law doesn't apply. And the reason Gresham's law doesn't apply is because there is no
outside structure that is putting a value judgment upon Bitcoin. It's doing it itself.
that people are doing it.
Cost, cost is not an issue.
Cost is not an issue
because you want to pay 3%
on your credit card transactions
and have chargebacks
in a world where 3%
is literally going to be
for most retailers,
their profit margin.
You know, if you're a grocery store,
your profit margins
are typically one to two, right?
So you could really revitalize
the failing grocery store industry
and maybe would have fewer,
what do we call them?
Food deserts, right?
So cost is no longer an issue.
Code of conduct, no longer an issue.
Tax, we think that that's going to be taken care of from the ground up.
So we went through your article.
We knocked out all these things.
None of those are a problem.
What are the problems facing Bitcoin?
Are there problems facing Bitcoin?
As far as spending it?
No, no, no.
As far as Bitcoin becoming what we want it to become, which is the unit of account,
the store of value,
media of exchange,
all of these things.
What do you see standing
in the way right now?
Not necessarily as something
that I think we would all agree
that it's not going to be stopped.
Like you can slow it down.
You can't stop it.
But what do you think
is the next big domino to fall?
Well, I'm actually really glad
you asked that question
because I think this really
kind of points to
the whole reason why I do what I do.
And I actually alluded to it in the article.
I think I may have said that like there,
I was maybe planning on writing follow-up to it.
I don't know if I mentioned this inside the article.
So maybe you just happened to walk down
the next progressive part of that path.
But the next article I was going to write
was about that exact topic, right?
What are those things saying in our way?
And kind of even reframing that,
I was thinking about,
I haven't written the article yet,
I might write it someday.
Just been.
You're a good writer, by the way.
Yeah.
We read a lot of things.
So I feel confident in saying that it's a worthy,
it's a worthy,
worthy compliment for me to say that you're a good writer.
And I think you should write them.
Both on that article and on X too.
You just, because you have,
you have good, strong opinions,
you need to back them up and it's just refreshing.
I think, I think that's, you know,
kind of a double-edged sword for me.
And I say, you know, what I think and feel.
some people love that yeah some people absolutely hate it so anyway back to the point is um you know
i wanted to follow that article up with the explanation of of why it's so important why i
why i feel so passionate about spending that point and why i think that is a key component
And a lot of it comes down to infrastructure.
Okay, so what do we have?
We have a perfect, it's close to a perfect form of money that we could possibly conceive, at least as it relates or is comparable to other forms of money.
And that's, of course, Bitcoin.
And we have a really good system of preserving our value into the future.
And I don't want to discredit that by any means because I think that that is an absolutely critical component to make Bitcoin valuable, right?
It can't preserve its value in the future.
We probably don't really need it.
There's, you know, there's not much need for another, you know, currency that's not going to hold its value.
And so it comes down to really kind of the three parts of or the three aspects of money, of how we view money.
So, yes, it's for value. So it's got the store of value component.
You know, obviously money needs to be a medium of exchange.
Crazy enough, there are people out there that argue that.
but in order for money to actually be money,
you have to be able to exchange it with people.
And then of course there's the unit of account,
which also kind of even falls a little bit further off
because people say that comes later on,
it's down the road.
I don't want to get too much onto that
but my lane right now is medium of exchange.
And that's so important to me
because I feel like it is the low-hanging fruit
and it's the one thing that's keeping us
from moving into a Bitcoin standard
because we have Bitcoiners saying,
Gresham's Law.
Bitcoiners saying, you know,
you never sell your Bitcoin.
You have Bitcoiners saying
Bitcoin is capital on currency.
You know, when you
do that, what you're doing is you're actually
taking away
the value of Bitcoin because if Bitcoin
can't be used as a media exchange,
my argument is that it's worth absolutely nothing.
I think that it
actually has to be a media exchange
in order to be Bitcoin
because if you can't send Bitcoin to anywhere,
anyone, anywhere in the world
without permission from somebody else,
it's not a media exchange and therefore has no value.
That's what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin.
That is what Bitcoin is.
It's the ability to send value to anyone,
anywhere at any time
without permission from somebody else.
So that's why I'm focused on the media exchange aspect.
I think that there's a lot of room for growth
and that's why I talk about it
because I don't need to convince you
that you should save your money
into the future that's obvious and it's it's very easy to buy bitcoin even even for the dgens right
buy bitcoin to increase your purchasing power right number go up that's taking that marketing
is taken care of we don't need more marketing on number i mean it wouldn't hurt but uh that's not
you know there's not a lot of uh room for improvement on again i think the room for
improvement is on the medium exchange side because i think there's a lot of steps we can take to help
show people that using bitcoin as a media exchange is a good idea it's beneficial and during that
process what we're doing is we're building out the circular economy which is building out the
infrastructure so some practical ways to look at that are you i frame this question it's like
you know for people who don't want to spend their bitcoin right um think about it this way you're on
the other side of that transaction you do whatever you do you're a barber you are a janitor you're a
you know railroad worker you're a doctor you sell trinkets on etsy do you want to accept
u.s dollars or let me let me ask you this this way would you accept absolutely kyc free bitcoin
from a bitcoiner for your product or service i don't think that there are any bitcoiners out
there that would say no i mean maybe there are but probably few and far between um so frame it that
way then put yourself on the other side right you you need to enable that person to be able to
have that opportunity right and that's the part that's like the ideological component that's not
like intrinsically baked into all of us that is how we build out the infrastructure that is how we
allow somebody to say i accept bitcoin and put a bitcoin sign out you know next to their kiosk
right and then more bitcoiners are going to come and that that is how this this movement grows and
and how bitcoin becomes money and in other words how we reach hyper-bitcoinization or a bitcoin
standard however you want to frame that it can't happen unless we're all using bitcoin as a medium
exchange currency yeah it was a necessary component to this next era i think we're ready for that we're
until early but i think we're primed and we're ripe for that movement into you know i would say
from store value to me to move exchange i do i do agree that the unit of account component comes
later i'm not a huge advocate for using bitcoin as the unit of account if you really want to and
there's nothing wrong with it but from like a marketing perspective it's very difficult and
And obviously I have software and stuff and I reach people and I can tell you that adds a lot of friction.
So I'm perfectly fine with saying, hey, pay me $5 of Bitcoin.
I think that's great.
It also reminds people how much their fiat currency is losing value because now you can say, all right, it's not $5 of Bitcoin.
Now it's $6.
Yep.
That's nice.
$10.
So it's subtly reminding people that the other side of that equation is falling.
Yeah.
So long, long.
No, you are definitely a medium of exchange evangelist, like on all fronts, firing on all cylinders.
I mean, you mentioned supporting the circular economy you brought as a gift for us.
This is very nice.
This humble podcast, some ground beef that you bought with Bitcoin.
And you are you mentioned the software you're doing.
You have the MANO wallet enabling medium of exchange, KYC, free and just simple to use your orange pilling merchants.
One thing I want to know if this fits it, you're writing articles about medium of exchange.
Another piece I wanted to know as far as the education, I think in the talk you mentioned you went to Africa.
Was that part of that?
I didn't physically go to Africa.
I've been an educator for a program called Bitcoin Safari TZ, TZ standing for Tanzania.
yeah um and so i've partnered up with them for a few of their courses um and hopefully we'll do
more in the future too but we've had a total of three cohorts and i've been able to be a part of
two of them um and so i teach bitcoin using the uh me premier bitcoin you may know yeah they're
all they also call it the my first bitcoin program it's based out of el salvador so we use that
curriculum and what is that curriculum kind of oriented to to get people using it like as a
of exchange or what's that? I gotta be honest, it is
all-inclusive. It is great.
So if you haven't dove into
that, even just, no matter what level you
are I will say like it taught me a lot And I would consider myself pretty far down the line as far as my understanding of Bitcoin but it was even challenging it was a challenge for me uh as part of this
education program um to teach this to other people so it challenged me um to learn more uh it's it's
it's very well thought out and very well done uh but it covers everything I mean you the intent
is to go into this course not knowing anything about Bitcoin or really being anywhere on the
spectrum are bringing you up to kind of almost an expert level right so somebody that's been in
this space for a very long time and understands the intricacies of the the economics of bitcoin
the technical aspects of bitcoin um you know using bitcoin of course that's a very surface level thing
but i mean it gets deep it's really deep so you go into all of the uh the tech i mean by the time
you're done with this course you could essentially theoretically conceive bitcoin from there yeah and
It's, I mean, the level that it's lodged at is somebody who is like high school or above kind of.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Probably high school, college, adult.
Yeah.
It's for adults.
Yeah.
Young kids probably, maybe they, I don't know.
They may have a kid's version of the curriculum or something.
I'm not 100% positive of that.
But yeah, it's probably more of like an adult type oriented class.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's very interesting, like the systematic ways to get a Bitcoin related education, because we kind of all come at it as a patchwork.
Like you mentioned being onboarded by Investopedia articles about proof of work.
And I kind of picked up random books, saw stuff on X.
But there is that curriculum people can use.
And the resistance money folks at the University of Wyoming, the Bitcoin Institute they have there, they have a public syllabus.
It's kind of like college student level, really holistic, the economics, the philosophy, the history, all that.
So we're going to kind of, I think as we move forward, maybe get these systematized bodies of knowledge or ways to approach Bitcoin so you get this holistic framing.
And it's not just like everybody passes through the same phases of shit coining and then this and that and then kind of stumble into it.
Yeah, I think one thing to mention is like this course that we're talking about, it's like it's free.
Yeah, nice.
I know they do take donations.
So if you're the donating type, just shout out to them.
They do a really good job. Bitcoin, Safari, TZ, Kool-Aid, Khan X.
But educating people in Eastern Africa, right?
These are actually, in my opinion, some of the people that need Bitcoin the most
because their financial system is so fractured.
And the problems that we're seeing here with our Federal Reserve in the United States,
our central bank, is not incomparable to the amount of trouble that they're going through.
with their central banks.
You know, some of these Eastern African countries,
they're going through new financial regimes
every few years.
And Bitcoin to these people
is a lot less on the capital side
and more on the currency side, right?
So people just need something
that they can use to exchange value.
And their first thought isn't,
how do I save for retirement?
You know, that's a, that's a, as maybe Gladstein may put, you know, that's our financial privilege, right?
We can, we can think about how we're going to retire and pass our, you know, inheritance down to our kids, you know.
Good problems to have.
Yeah.
But, you know, people like most of the people that I teach in these courses, they just want to be able to pay somebody for their food for that day.
Yeah.
And not have a government be able to steal from them.
Yeah.
um so uh it is it is really nice to see that side of things because we don't see that over here um
we were joking earlier about you know how i had been approaching people to adopt bitcoin like cash
out merchant or that square merchants and you know they acknowledge these problems and they kind of
laugh them off right you know these these people in these other countries that are much less
financially fortunate than us this is very serious yeah and they're very passionate about this so
So if you haven't experienced, you know, looking at money and Bitcoin through the lens of, you know, one of these other places on Earth, it doesn't have to be East Africa.
It could be, you know, anywhere.
I really encourage people to maybe just read Alex Velasquez's book.
That's probably a good place to start following him.
But it really does change you.
Yeah.
In Africa, one of the books that we read early on, there was an article in that paper.
National security and something, something, something, Bitcoin, something.
Yeah.
Digital money and I can't remember.
But yeah, anyway, this guy lays it out.
A former diplomat who had spent most of his career in Africa.
It's a nice collection.
Yeah.
We got the Bitcoin bookshelf coming up here.
This Annie, who you met, she makes Bitcoin-related art and other art too.
You got this B.
It's classy.
So, yeah.
Does she have a website?
She does.
She's an Etsy person.
Yeah.
If you want some Bitcoin stuff, she's thinking about some new ways to do it.
Maybe a matte black behind it.
Kind of.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's pretty long.
But anyway, he noted like, I can't remember the guy's name right now.
It's failing me.
But anyways, he noted that Africa, in his belief, is that's the battle now.
It's the youngest.
It's the youngest continent by far.
So they have the most upward mobility in terms of being able to grow their workforce into something useful.
Whether or not AI takes care of that is another thing.
But also hugely rich nation in terms of natural resources and stuff.
But there is a battle going on right now between the U.S. and China.
China trying to export turnkey autocracy to Africa in order to eventually get, you know, military bases on the west side of Africa.
And as he put it in his paper, you know, you're fighting someone who's exporting a nearly perfect system of turnkey autocracy.
You don't fight that with a lesser version of autocracy.
You have to fight that with maximal freedom.
And so you have to fight that with Bitcoin because that right now is the thing that's standing in between us and China.
another interesting part about his paper too like as far as bitcoin in africa was the ethos of africa
being community village oriented and how that informs the growth of the bitcoin protocol over
there he talks about fediment as a kind of community oriented around a community bank
model on the second layer for using um creating like he meant a currency within the fediment or
something like that and i don't know perfectly how it operates but it's just interesting how
regionally people's like the different ways that they have organized in their society will be
differentiated ways that they interact with bitcoin on second layer protocols how they're
comfortable using and transacting you know using the value so yeah i'm probably gonna get skin to
life for saying this because i'm you guys might see but i think uh the like fedements and just
federated systems and in cash and that sort of thing it reminds me of a lot of wildcat banking
in the U.S.
And I think that that's going to be,
that's like,
that's going to be a huge part
of our future.
I do think that we're really early in that,
but I have so many like high aspirations
for what that's,
what the possibilities are for that to become.
And again, you know,
maybe not the best use case for everything,
but for very specific cases,
right now it's already solving
a lot of problems.
You know, I saw on a video, this was probably maybe almost a year and a half, probably a year and a half old, of somebody in some country in Africa.
I forget exactly which country it was,
but you could tell that it was, you know,
very, you know, not,
they were not up to, you know,
the standards of, you know,
a local, you know, McDonald's here
in the United States, right?
We're talking like, you know,
dirt floor, you know, no walls, right?
This is just such a hut and, you know,
a very destitute area.
And it's a, like,
a kid and he's buying little donuts for like i think it was like five sats each
five satoshis or donut and they were using um e-cash to do it and that's that's a case where
you know e-cash is is needed it's necessary because um you know otherwise you're relying on
a centralized custodial lightning wallet right i mean even mana isn't suited to make five sat
transactions right now very easily um you know it's great for buying a coffee and for doing a
lot of things that we use money for here and and this country wherever this was if you're buying
you know a donut that's essentially you know worth less than a penny right that's uh you know
a very good use case for eCash.
Yeah.
Or I would say.
Yeah, no, definitely.
That's awesome.
I think one of the things we talked about earlier
was the way that to onboard people,
the thing that you're drawing them right now
to using like flipping the switch on Square
so that they can receive Bitcoin payments
is just that, oh, it's cheaper, right?
It's 3%.
They don't take anything away.
You don't get the chargebacks.
But, you know, I think in sales,
I've worked in sales for most of my life.
Selling on cheaper is never a good option, right?
Because the other guy always comes cheaper.
And you can foresee a scenario where there's a CBDC and they're like, oh, well, CBDC is here.
It's a 0% transactions, you know.
So that's not the way.
I think the thing that's in the mana wallet that I have shown other people as like, this is the thing that really sets it apart to me.
And this goes along with an interview that we did early on with Ivan Makadonsky, who's the chief of staff of Breeze, which is a lightning.
Yeah, good afternoon, right?
And he had written a series of articles justifying his belief why split payments is the ultimate killer feature of Bitcoin.
And I had thought about this.
Your Manna wallet allows me to, and I'm going to use it, by the way, tomorrow at our Christmas party.
It's also the official wallet of the podcast.
But, you know, it allows me to very easily create a point of sale system, put my items in there and not just put my items in there, but I can put your items, his items, her items, and they can each go to the individual addresses.
And this to me, Ivan's the one that really got me thinking about this, but this is where we all become owners.
This is where we all become, instead of the restaurant that is owned by the guy who wanted to start a restaurant and they start out as the cook and then they had to hire an accountant and they had to hire somebody to wait and they had to hire somebody to do dishes and they had to hire security, et cetera, et cetera, the plumber, everything else.
Now you've got the guy who wants to be a chef and they can be back there in the kitchen.
and when the bill comes, they pay their bill and this amount goes to the chef and this amount goes
to the waitress and this amount goes to the person that bakes the pie and this amount goes to the
guy that owns the building and this amount goes to the accountant that does it. And so it allows
us to seamlessly split all of this in, I hate this word now because it's been so abused, but in an
equitable way yeah right where we're all getting paid for what we contributed um you've convinced
me by the way through the course of the conversation that the means of exchange is the manner in which
bitcoin becomes everything that we want it to be that it has to be that way we cannot get to a unit
of account we cannot get we well honestly we won't even get to a a long-term uh store of value
because it'll just be hoarded and it'll be hoarded and then it'll be centralized, right?
And so I think you're absolutely right that it's the means of exchange,
but I don't think it's through the lower fees.
I think it's through the interoperability of being able to split and divide these payments amongst people.
And credit to Ivan for bringing this up and to you for building the thing,
which is, it's so easy to use.
It's so incredible.
Your daughter is the one who showed it to me and explained it to.
She's nine.
So we're talking about like, oh, you know, this probably need to be high school age.
No, no, no.
There's a nine-year-old out here explaining to people how in 30 seconds you can set up your own point of sale system.
You can receive sats.
You can get them free of charge.
Nobody's taking anything out of it.
They go direct into your wallet.
And not only that, you're baking pies.
He's making bread.
And I'm frying up steaks.
and we can all get paid for the meal equal to what we contributed you know so it's it's absolutely
that that to me by the way that's my favorite part of mana that's that is the coolest thing
that i think you built it you don't need square i love to get it yeah yeah you can have square but
you don't need it yeah yeah square square is great it has a lot of things that mana doesn't have
but not everybody can use square not everybody has square and if you don't have square mana is
a really good option. I'm glad you said that because that makes me feel really good because
I think personally, I think that is our most underused part of our app. Yeah, people are using
it, but I think it's in terms of how much value you can get out of something. There's just not
enough people using it. It's a very, I mean, it's don't, I don't want to like over-exaggerate
things here. It's simple. It's not like, I mean, it's fairly feature rich. We've got taxes,
We've got tips. You can add your own custom fees. We have receipts baked into the lightning, the invoice memo. You can put your pictures in there. You can do receipts, tallying. So it is capable, but it is very simple.
Right. So if you're, you know, a large franchise business right now, I mean, I think we're going to get to that point at some point.
But right now, man, it's great for like a small mom and pop shop.
That's like the sweet spot right now, like a farmer's market type thing or you've got like a little kiosk or stand or something where you sell stuff or you're a barber or you're, you know, you have a we have a musician.
Yeah, artist. Yeah, exactly.
that's the yeah chiropractor we have you know i know chiropractor doctor um you know offering
services that way um some of our customers are also i say customers we don't have customers just
people use their software of your cool right yeah um yeah you don't you don't make a hammer and then
say this is a customer of my hammer uh yeah they're these businesses these merchants um whatever
they you know they are um food trucks um anyway just kind of going over since you pointed that
out um not a lot of people realize that that powerful tool is baked into this wallet um
and there should definitely be more people using it in my opinion which by the way shout out to
square and the block and spiral team they uh they actually uh featured mana on their website
So, yeah.
Dude.
No way.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
That is really cruel.
Okay.
So I want to ask this.
So Manna, I want to ask about the growth that Manna is experiencing because the reason I, because the other day I looked up, what is the growth of the transaction networks like MasterCard and Visa and Lightning?
MasterCard and Visa, they grew about 11, 12% this year, which that's just literally the inflation.
Like prices went up that much.
So that's how much their transaction throughput went up.
Lightning went up 200%.
What kind of growth are you experiencing with Mana Wallet?
Keep talking.
I'll give my numbers.
Here's a question, though, that I think is really interesting.
I have a question that builds into this one.
Just tying it all biographically, when do you start working on Mana in relation to kind of your Bitcoin journey and things that happened in COVID?
and then building, crescendoing into this business taking off.
Okay, sorry.
I wanted to get this number.
We're growing right now like 572% month over month.
Month over month.
Yeah, so it's great.
That was worth it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we're still really small.
Right.
So a lot of growth early on, but that'll, of course, taper off as time goes.
But I mean, I just like right now, I mean, I'll be honest, like we're not like making money or losing money.
Right. So we're not profitable or anything we're doing is we're just getting a tool out there that gives people freedom.
And that's what makes me happy. You know, that's why I built this business.
It wasn't to get rich. It was to obviously solve the problems that we've been talking about.
I saw a problem. I didn't have a solution for it. I wanted to help.
In fact, I was going to tackle this objective, you know, as my like way to give back to Bitcoin and onboarding people.
So I just wanted to go around and be like a Bitcoin evangelist and onboard people.
But I kept running into these problems with onboarding people with these wallets that were, you know, the best ones were all centralized and all had custody, right?
You had to ask these people for permission.
They monitored or could surveil your data.
They could sell your data.
You know, it's just all really bad stuff.
And I never felt comfortable recommending that to people.
And during the time when I started building mana, the self-custodial options existed. And don't let me like degrade or demean anything that these companies have done because they're great tools. But I also had problems with them, mostly from like the learning curve, right? The barriers to entry were just a little bit higher than I could really get people to wrap their minds around.
So they have improved. And now I think there are a lot of a lot of really great Bitcoin wallets that work very similarly to Manna. The environment was just a lot different back then. So that's kind of why I built Manna was because I needed a solution that didn't exist at the time.
um and so again my my excitement enthusiasm around the growth isn't about you know fantastic
wealth or whatever it's it's about spreading for you yeah so you're not losing money you're
investing in your freedom of maximalism right it goes back to really yeah well like we were
talking about earlier you know it's it's selfish because i have this world you know fantasy world
that i want to live in yeah and that's what i'm investing into yeah right and i say fantasy in the
sense that like people might think that i'm thinking that that's never going to happen i'm
doing everything i can to make sure it does so yeah it's a fantasy but it's one of one that i
think we have a shot at yeah this wallet and this is this this will sound like an advertisement for
the other but i i love the product i was there at the meeting when you introduced it um at the
KC Bitcoiners meet up about a month or two ago.
And in your talk, you said, oh, it takes two minutes to set out.
I, it took me about 30 seconds.
Like it did not take a full minute for me to get a Bitcoin wallet.
There's no phone number.
There's no email address.
I didn't have to give my name.
I don't have to do anything in order to download it and create a wallet and be able to have a point of sale system, be able to have self-custody of my Bitcoin, have encrypted anonymous messaging, a Bitcoin map with.
I love that map.
That's really cool.
I love that map.
Start out the BTC map.
Yeah.
I think there's a fifth feature on there as well that I'm not saying.
Well, there are...
I mean, let me see.
As far as features...
I thought there was five big things, but maybe I'm missing it.
I think you hit all the decked ones.
There are obviously lots of really small
quality of life things in mana,
like being able to receive two of a lightning address,
which is fairly rare with self-custody solutions
because it's difficult.
Breeze actually did a lot of the pathfinding in this.
area so shout out to them um you were talking about breeze earlier i was actually in vegas on
the panel with uh mr scheinfeld and i'm for the breeze uh so we were actually talking our topic
was from capital to currency that was the name of the cool that's cool but anyway um so yeah i'm
very familiar with the team over there they do a really good job and they're probably one of the
one of the groups of people that i'd say we wouldn't have been able to do what we did without
them. We both were building kind of
a very similar solution at the same time. They may have been a little bit
earlier than we were, but we kind of both came to the same conclusion at a very
similar time. They released, or they had this development
hit, Nodeless is what they call it, and it's great.
We had already kind of built all of our stack
out by the time they were perfecting that. And so we didn't build on
on the Nullis SDK.
In hindsight,
it would have been kind of cool
if we did.
And we may,
you know,
be able to use some of that
open SDK at some point
in the future too,
which would be nice.
But yeah,
it's,
again,
we,
we came to a lot of the same conclusions,
which was really cool to see,
especially as it pertains to like
interacting with people,
like sending and receiving payments
because up to that point,
you know,
obviously,
you know,
started to get really popular
with all of Satoshi
and some of these other
tools out there where you can push a payment to somebody's lightning address so you had like
nostr and stuff um that were getting really popular around the time and you could just
zap evil sats right so but before that especially as it pertains to self-custody wallets it was
very difficult to say the least to do it in like a kind of plug and play type of a solution
you know so there's a lot of lightning wallets out there that don't have this ability and it's
it is just simply because it's pretty difficult.
And there's a lot of complexity that goes on,
on a,
like a infrastructure and development and software side that,
that needs to happen in order to make this take place.
And again,
I just want to point that point out to the fact that breeze probably was more
crucial,
pivotal to figuring that out than anybody.
So they have a great product.
And I just,
I would be your best if I didn't,
you know,
mention how much work they've done on that so if there anything like i we we we came to know ivan
because the first five episodes we did were on jason lowry's software thesis and ivan reached out
to us he wanted to talk about it and the man is a literal force of nature with bitcoin i think he
has single-handedly uh made bulgaria a hotspot around the world uh for bitcoin and there's a
movie that's uh being made um where he plays a huge role um that kind of explaining how he has
been really boots on the ground like i heard that movie has some good music in it too i am doing a
theme song movie i kind of talked about that yeah that's awesome it's it's really it's really
fantastic um but uh it just i i think one of the things that i want to point out is that you're
talking about a competitor in a very kind way. And that's one of the, that's the thing that
brought me, that was my like lightning spark moment about Bitcoin was that it makes things
collaborative, was that I can put out a song and you can take that song and you could add rap lyrics
to it. And then you can get the split payments on it. We could both grow and we can both benefit
from that. There's nobody in between it. I want to go back more to a, I don't want to say
conspiratorial because I know where the term conspiracy comes from, thanks to Bitcoin and
all those rabbit holes. But stable coins are merely a bait and switch in order to hook the world on
surveyable and confiscatable and controllable central bank digital currencies. That is something
that I have had something itching at me a little bit that just didn't seem quite right.
And I just watched a presentation that Michael Saylor gave at the Middle Eastern Bitcoin conference.
And he's laying out the plan that strategy holds the Bitcoin, they hold the capital.
And if you're a giant bank, maybe a central bank, and you buy the stretch and you put it in there and you put your currency with it.
And then you put a buffer on top of that in order to keep it at par so that then you can create your currency.
This is taking the capital to currency.
You were on a panel called capital to currency.
So there's that.
And then there's also the aspect of 21, which just debuted on the NASDAQ, Dow Jones.
You know, it's backed by Cantor Fitzgerald.
It has all kinds of ties to the government with Bo Hines being part of Tether.
And the current administration seems to have a bit of a hankering for nationalizing companies by giving them opportunity to participate with the government.
Do you think it's that obvious?
You know, I think in retrospect, we look at some of these things that are psychological operations and we look in the rear view and we're like, man, they were telling us what they were doing.
the whole time, and they were blatant about it, and we just didn't see it, and we weren't paying
attention. But do you think it's that obvious? Is it going to be that 21 is the vehicle through which
the United States government offloads their debt into the cloud through Tether,
globalizes it, and pushes it out of the world, and then rolls it back into a CBDC? Is this
kind of where you're going is this kind of what you're is this what you're building against and do
you see instead of instead of instead of knowing that the monster is somewhere behind the fog are
you now starting to see that monster up close is this what it is do you think yes i think that's
actually a good way to put it because i think i for me it's easy for me to say you know people
just need to open their eyes. It's, you know, it is obvious to me. It may not be obvious to everybody.
I think that, you know, at times I'm insensitive and think people should be able to see these
things. I've been personally talking about this for many years, but as far as it being closer
right up in front of our faces, that's kind of part of what motivated me to actually get into
action with with building what i have also sometimes referred to as an anti-cbdc so mana
is an anti-cbdc that's that is what it is that is essentially the um the underlying principle
of what is guiding how we are building and developing at mana right we are giving somebody
an alternative to the system that we know is coming it may be a while before it comes to the
u.s i hope it's a very long while um i have no idea how long it's going to take for it to be on
our doorstep what i do feel confident in saying is that it's going to spread you know on planet
earth from this point forward it's going to there's going to be more cbdcs on earth in 10 years
in 10 years from then there's going to be more and i think that eventually it does come to the u.s
whether that's relatively soon or not i don't know um i uh you know just because like i i think that
i saw these things maybe it's maybe it's because some people might refer to me as you know
neurodivergent other people might call me a tylenol american high functioning autism
whatever you want to whatever label you want to put on me um i just like i i i see i see through
a lot of the facade pretty easily um or at least i convince myself i do to make me feel better about
myself sometimes um but i've been pointing out things specifically about tether for a while and
i don't want to spend too much time on this because uh i will say i i do at my core
at this point believe that the team behind tether has good intentions that's what i currently believe
i i thought other things in the past but i've come to the conclusion based off of my observation of
how they've conducted themselves and everything i think they are just driven and i think they
actually believe that it is a core component of ushering in uh hyper bitcoinization okay
um however i just obviously i have a different conclusion than they do i i think that every step
every dollar every investment into stable coins which obviously tether is the 900 pound gorilla
so we can almost you know consider them you know synonymous yeah yeah um every every step
into Tether is not a step toward Bitcoin, in my opinion.
Now, obviously, there's arguments to this.
Alan Frankton has a piece where he makes a case for this.
I don't think that it's case closed.
Are you guys familiar with Alan?
Familiar with Bitcoin is Venus.
It's his book, but we haven't looked at that one yet.
I got it on my bookshelf.
We haven't read it yet.
It's been a while since I've read it,
but I think he has a disclaimer at some point
where he's like this is not a real article this is just like some bots on paper kind of thing but
it is it's it's still i mean he's a genius it's very well done pretty much so um so i would if
you're interested in stable coin a topic it's definitely worth reading um maybe i'll send it
to you guys and yeah if anyone else wants to yeah maybe you could share a link but uh very good uh
guy swan also did a piece on it too so he read it um it's easily digestible if you're a listener
so where am I going with all this
I think that
stable coins are a detractor
from the future
that I want to try to build
and so I have just
personally I mean if anybody's
followed me on X for any lengthy period of time
I probably don't go more than a month
I don't know if that's accurate
but I would say on average I probably
would post something negative about stable coins
at least once a month in fact
I very regularly tweet a very specific set of characters that doesn't deviate.
And it just says, Tether is a scam.
Fairly straightforward.
On this podcast, Jeff Booth called.
He said, we need to call things by what they are instead of by what people want us to call them.
Stable coins are guaranteed lost coins.
They do not keep stable values.
They guarantee that you lose value.
I don't disagree with you.
I don't disagree. And the problem is it's very tasty. It's very easy, easily consumed.
Yeah.
Because people can just go, oh, well, here's my dollars. Here's my dollars in stable coins.
Yeah.
I mean, the argument for them is like they serve a purpose perhaps as a historical bridge or as a necessary stopping point onto a better currency in places like Argentina and Africa.
that, I mean, Gladstein in his piece
in the Journal of Democracy,
I mean, he notes the stablecoin usage
is very big amongst the dissidents
and people that-
For cross-border remittances.
Yeah, and stuff like that.
So it has a use case that it's currently serving.
But as far as your point, though,
I mean, it's not historically where we want to go.
It's not the term we want to see.
I think what it ultimately does
is it prolongs the-
Inevitable.
Yeah, it prolongs the inevitable,
What I have a problem with mostly is that it prolongs the fiat central bank fractional reserve regime.
For sure it does.
It keeps central banking alive.
It does this through its purchase of government debt.
And it's just another form of the same drug that we're all addicted to.
And one of the points that I made at the summit that you were at is that stablecoins...
What's the call of this?
We're at the summit.
You're speaking on stage.
You making a point about stablecoins Stablecoins are just a hyperized version Instead of snort cocaine you in your veins now If you ever need a colorful analogy It fine
All right.
Well, we might need to come back.
And please do.
Please do come back to that.
I had a, yeah, because.
It's so much fun.
Yeah.
We've got to do more.
I just want to know who Adam is.
I'm trying to piece together your biography because I'm kind of left in the military and then I got into COVID.
and then now you have the manna wallet and from my perspective of just always having a dirty fiat
job never doing anything entrepreneurial to someone to do something like that just seems like
what are you just are you just a renaissance man like where'd you come up where did the technical
capacity to do this come from where did the internal reserves like how did you do this
well first of all i want to address something i think is really important and that people don't
here enough and that is you know these fiat jobs like working in the fiat minds people always tend
to have this mindset of like i need to get into working in bitcoin and i i push back on that like
hardcore i think that the best thing you can do is provide a service or a product like provide
your human capital to the world in the best way you can and save in bitcoin if you can
accept the payment in Bitcoin directly.
It's not possible for everybody,
but at a minimum, just go buy Bitcoin, right?
That is the most efficient use of your human capital
in terms of moving us toward, you know,
Bitcoin standard, if you want to call it that.
I think that is the most efficient use of your energy
is to do what you're good at.
Use the systems that are in place already.
Like you don't have to recreate the wheel.
Like almost literally speaking, you know, going and leaving something that you already have that's established and trying to do something in Bitcoin because you think you're going to push the needle faster.
You're not.
What's really going to push the needle is you doing something in the real world that is making you a lot of money.
And you're literally just a siphon, a massive siphon from, you know, fiat into Bitcoin.
That is going to be much more effective than, you know, trying to go get hired at some Bitcoin company where they're just you're a problem looking for a solution.
But that being said, though, you did make the man a wallet.
So having put that asterisk there, like, I mean, it seems like such a I guess I don't know where your education was.
You were a business major.
It seems like a technical enterprise.
Say someone is a foolhardy person and they do want to do something similar to what you did.
Did you just acquire talents?
You just learn by yourself on your own what you need to do to get this going?
Or how did this happen?
Yeah, let me go kind of chronologically because this might help build into what became mana.
So in 2017, I told you about this period where I'm reading this article.
I had this epiphany, proof of work.
It was literally in that same moment that I realized the next thing I wanted to do.
And that was I wanted to build a computer that people could put in their house and they just plug it in and turn it on and it starts mining for them.
Beautiful.
In this exact moment, of course, it was Ethereum, which I'm glad, you know, changed direction at some point.
So while I was on my deployment, I started building my plans for a business that I built called Hands Free Bitcoin.
And that's literally what it was.
We built miners.
We built the hardware, so we put all the hardware together.
We had custom power supplies.
We did some custom circuitry.
We had our own custom case and some of our own custom components
so that all you had to do was pull it out of the box and flip the switch,
and it starts mining Bitcoin for you.
We also did the software, of course, and then custom tuning firmware
to make it like a palatable, consumer-grade product.
You buy this product, you run it in your home, and it just works.
And it doesn't annoy the heck out of your wife, right?
It's girlfriend friendly.
I think I was on a podcast or somebody said that.
So this started in 2017.
The business is still going today.
We're not selling any new product, but we're servicing existing customers still to this day.
But ultimately, economy scale and difficulty adjustment got the best of us.
And so we're kind of sunsetting that business.
But it was a really cool journey for me.
um one it was you know profitable so it allowed me to financially position myself to do what i'm
doing now with mana so that's how i'm funding that's i'm no i don't have to go to a vc and
you know give them my risk to chain up and you know to tow me around and tell me what to do and
you know conform to their wishes um which i have also talked a lot about because i see a lot of
in the space, especially in Bitcoin.
And without naming any names,
I will just say, you know,
there are only a very small handful
of people in the Bitcoin space
where everybody knows
when you run out of funding,
this is who you go to.
And again, I think it's a dangerous path.
And so at this point, in this moment,
you know, Man has never taken
any venture capital investment.
We've taken no donations.
It's literally been just a labor of love
than something that I've invested myself into.
So if you agree with me,
if you like the way that I think,
then maybe mana is cool
from an idealistic perspective for you.
If you don't like the way I think,
then mana might not be for you
because I think mana is very closely aligned
with the way that I believe.
And so this is kind of building into this.
The hands-free Bitcoin
is where I got a lot of the skills
to do what I've done with mana.
And you got those, again,
just on your own researching, talking to people, I suppose, and putting it all together in your
mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And finding the right people. So, you know, I, I, I found it. I don't
know how deep you want to go into this, but I found a developer to help me with the coding for
hands-free Bitcoin. So there was a lot of actually it was a handful of people over the period of a
few years but um i figured out how to find people to help me do what i need to do and so that
networking led to you know being able to find the people that now i need to work with to help with
manna so i'm not the only one working on manna um you know i have a very good uh software engineer
that has done most of the code um he's he's great so pretty much everything on the back end is him
And we also have another, he's a product, lead product manager, platforms manager.
And he helps with kind of basically, I mean, there's three of us.
So we all do everything right now.
So it's a really small team.
And it's really exciting because, you know, we get to do exactly what we want to do and nobody can tell us not to.
Yeah.
So I don't know how close, if you follow Mana on X or not, but we put out like some stuff that most people probably wouldn't say or do.
You know, we're, you know, we're religious.
You know, we say we say things from a religious perspective.
It's called manna.
I mean, we don't all have the same faith either.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's just it's part of our brand.
It's part of what I think, you know, I want to glorify God because I believe that he's gotten us to this point.
And it's kind of my way to incorporate, you know, that message into what I do.
So I can tell people about Bitcoin and the saving powers of Bitcoin, but it also gives me an opportunity to tell people about Christ.
The saving power of Christ.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah.
Wow.
I like it.
Yeah.
And I get to do that because nobody can tell me not to.
And if I had, you know, I'm not saying that other people don't have that ability to speak their own mind.
But going back to like the story of me almost losing my job, it's because of Bitcoin that I'm able to do that.
is because I have my own self-sovereign.
I have my own agency, right?
Without my own agency,
I can't do or say whatever I want to say.
And so I'm very outspoken on X.
And I have a lot of people that point that out to me.
And I'm like, man, I wish I could say
half the things that you say to people.
And I'm like, well, why don't you?
I lose my job, man.
I'm like, well, you know, Bitcoin is F you money, right?
Like, whatever.
I'll just, you can't freeze my bank account.
You want to fire me?
See ya.
yeah you know so um that's kind of that's kind of where i am uh you know from an ideological
perspective and how i built into mana from from where where i learned what i learned with my
others yeah business is there future projects that you got kind of machinating in the back or is it
i do yeah just talking to my wife um i mean i have everything from like you know i think this
is a cool idea to like i have ideas that i'm not going to talk right guys about today that would
absolutely change the world fundamentally as we know it but you know i don't i'm they're very lofty
goals and i it would take a lot but i think that you know i said you know if i ever get really
really really stupid rich i'm gonna do this okay yeah you're not afraid to go into jail the samurai
all guys um i've seen you on x uh supporting uh supporting uh kianro griegas and uh for the other
name bill um builders of open source software um is that something that you've had to take into
account building mana thinking every step i can go to jail yeah um yeah um man there's actually a
lot that i can unpack here uh when i first started building that up um i'll just be like super open
and transparent with you guys here uh i had like this desire like i knew like in my heart like this
is what I wanted to do but I prayed about it and felt like God was telling me it's not time
and I was kind of frustrated about that I was like okay whatever so I just kind of like let
it simmer and it kept coming back up I'm like man there's something that I need to build and
it doesn't exist like I just need to do this and I kept again coming back to the point where I felt
like i was being led not to at that time like just just wait like god was just telling me just just
hold on and wait and then um the the it was i don't know why this was the day that things changed
but i was following um some a bunch of a bunch of my friends uh on x were working for swan and they
just had a massive layoff i remember that yeah yeah and by the way this kind of goes back to some
of the tanner stuff that we kind of touched on we don't need to get into that but it is just a little
bit of irony if you uh want to dive into that lore that's an interesting rabbit hole to go down but
um uh so i i remember seeing that news and that was i was sitting in a car dealership
getting my car serviced uh oil change and uh that's where i had this moment where i just felt
like that that was a switch and i felt like it was just placed on my heart where god was just
saying go nice now's the time it's time to go and i'm like i'm like freaking out because this is the
samurai stuff the tornado catch stuff this was all like mainstream news i mean our right yeah
at this point. Like everybody's talking about it. Um, and things are really kind of scary. Um,
and choke point to point out was still alive and well. And so we have people facing, you know,
serious charges. We have people getting, you know, cut off from the financial system. Um,
and basically turned into criminals. Right. And so I'm thinking about all this. And then
just over the course of the next few months it was like a very strong shift of events so we had a lot
of positive messaging coming out of dc and uh you know essentially our bureaucrats telling us that
they're not going to be you know uh that they're going to be treating these things more fairly you
know more less severely or like uh i can't forget exactly which uh messages were coming out but there
were a series of positive things that were coming out regarding uh you know more favorable for
bitcoin developers anyways just a bunch of a bunch of these different series of events that happened
and then then the elections were coming up and then trump got elected and like i was like okay
this is like perfect timing because uh all the other wallets have just got kicked out of the
country basically they all just left they they ran away and the u.s is in desperate need of something
to use because we didn't have it like we if even if you wanted to use a wallet of satoshi it was
ip blocked so uh as well as phoenix right yeah yeah so they were they were not available in the
u.s and then uh mutiny you guys remember in mutiny um i think matt odell was involved i
remember i don't know yeah um anyway uh i don't know how involved he was i just the i heard from
him and mutiny i just announced that they're closing their doors and so there was like during
this time frame it was like nothing and so i was like okay it's just like firing in all cylinders
let's just go so i built it um i i went hard and then released it in like eight months or so so
So from, you know, from concept to on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in eight months, which is pretty fast for a functional working product.
Now, it's been an iterative process. It's come a long way since then.
But, you know, it was pretty quickly.
We were just moving really fast because, you know, saw things changing and we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity.
but the question about
where I stood with
what I was thinking about this
whole process is
I'm still
very cautious about what I feel
like I can say. There's so much
that I want to be able to say about
mana that I
have reservations to even talk about
these things aren't
illegal to say, these things are
constitutionally protected
they're
ethical
right i think that they're beneficial for humidity and i just can't talk about them like i want to
um i i could but there's there's a line you know being a target i risk being a target tall blade
of i'm not gonna i think i'm gonna learn what i can from the samurai case and uh it's pretty
incredible like a private what's up message is taken out of context in that case and used to
build the criminal conspiracy case that he says bitcoin is for money laundering or something like
that as part of a private exchange he's having with somebody as part of a continuum of the exchange
like this is a part like one analogy he gives and then it's used to build a criminal conspiracy
case that's insane and now it's chilling your first amendment right to say what you would
otherwise say i was actually talking about this on uh bitcoin today space on x um this last week
and i was just like telling everybody kind of like where my thoughts are as a as a developer
because now i'm questioning like how much i even want to invest in building this business and this
technology in the united states right it's technology that you know helps move freedom
forward it helps you know build bitcoin innovation which supposedly the administration is for
and now i'm taking these things into question and i'm a lot more cautious about these things
So I guess the question is, you know, do we really want the Bitcoin development to happen in the U.S.?
And if that's the case, you know, we should probably consider some of the implications of things like the Samurai case and how it affects how other developers are looking at this.
So we saw the opposite happen.
So obviously when the election happened, Trump got elected, he established his cabinet, and they started coming out with all of this, you know, very positive stuff.
We had Danx come back to the U.S.
We had Wall of Satoshi come back.
And so there was a very clear message that, hey, we're not going to criminalize this activity.
And then the sentencing came through.
The plea deal, Samurai.
And then we had the sentencing with Fornado Cash.
Yeah, so they got obviously charged as well.
So all that to say, I think, you know, where I stand now is I am cautiously optimistic about the future of mana.
I am going to keep building it unless, you know, there's some very clear reason or legal reason why I can't.
You know, I'm never going to break the law.
I will always build things in accordance to the law.
Mena is fully self-custodial.
We don't, we're not a money transmitter.
We never touch anybody's user funds.
We never custody anybody's funds.
You don't store any private data.
Everything is all local.
So it's just free software you can put on your phone.
But again, that's sometimes not enough,
as we're seeing at the Samurai case.
You know, it doesn't appear to me
that they really did anything egregiously wrong.
Again, messages taken out of context is kind of where they got them,
which is, I mean, that is a very disgraceful justice system.
Yeah.
Have you felt, I mean, you've never,
it sounds like you've never got a tap on the shoulder
or you've never felt that you were being monitored
or that you were being looked at by any regulator or agent
or anything like that.
You've never felt that type of presence, though.
I won't go into details.
I thought there was at one point.
I've changed my mind. So at this point, the answer is no. I don't think that there is anybody
breathing down my neck at this point. I'm doing things completely in the open. I'm hiding nothing.
Everything like, you know, my name is attached to it. You know, literally, you know, my business
address, everything is like kosher. Like I have a registered business. Again, open software, like
we're using open source tools. There's nothing that we're hiding and we're not breaking any laws.
So the only thing there is like making sure we don't say the wrong thing, which is really kind of sad.
Yeah, it is very much so.
I should have the right to say whatever I want to say.
And this all, in my opinion, as I've said this before, I think this really all comes down to the fact that we have built a series of laws and legislation on top of an unconstitutional piece of legislation called the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.
So we established the BSA of 1970, and then we built all of these laws and case law around the BSA. And so we have the KYC and AML laws, which are part of that as well. And that's the fundamental problem.
In my opinion, that's kind of where this all sees from is because, yeah, they, you know, said things that, let's say the samurai folks, you know, said things that potentially implicated them as conspiracy as an unlicensed money transmitter, right?
To operate as an unlicensed money transmitter.
I think that's what the charge they pled guilty to, if I'm not.
Some sort of conspiracy charge.
So it wouldn't surprise me if that was that.
I thought it was related to money transmission was one of the charges brought against him.
I don't know if that's the one that he's stuck with.
Anyway, my point still stands that, you know, even if you're not transmitting money, you know, how can you charge somebody for unlicensed money transmission, you know, if they're not actually transmitting any money?
But it goes back to the fact that this is all built on a series of unconstitutional laws, which are built on an unconstitutional piece of legislation called the VSA.
So my message is we need to repeal the VSA.
It does not belong in our country.
That was Natalie Smolenski's big ask, too, on Twitter when she like one thing the new administration should change.
And in her introduction to the Satoshi Papers, she writes like the Bank Secrecy Act is her big bait noir that she calls it the banker's revolution when you have all this legislation, the 1970s creeping authoritarianism.
And yeah, and I think that you're absolutely right.
That is, I mean, you're just a living example of your speech being chilled.
It's just it's so just to see that in person, to know that you can't say what you want to say, what you might want to say in this country.
That's incredible.
I mean, and it is because of these unconstitutional laws and also just that conspiracy is such a vague criminal.
You can build a conspiracy case with very little, like not even the act itself, but conspiring to do the act.
And Keenan said it himself, like, it's the only thing that they could get him on that they didn't have to bring a victim.
Everything else.
True victimless crimes.
Yeah.
But this is the one charge that did not require a victim.
Yeah.
My wife and I, well, my wife was actually asking me about this literally as I was walking out the door to come see you guys.
Yeah.
Are you going to go to jail?
Obviously, I've been watching a lot of the human podcasts and stuff and trying to do my best to spread the message about his case.
Yeah, there's a petition on like what the petition website is, change.org or something like that to sign.
Yeah, I've signed it.
I did too.
If you guys haven't signed it, I would encourage you to at least consider doing it.
you do have to dox yourself, I think, to do it.
But I think in this case, for me, it was worth it.
So, but my wife was asking me about it.
She's like, are you going to go to jail?
Or she said something like, are you going to go to jail like Paul from the Bible?
And I was like, well, I don't know.
If they try to do the same thing to me,
at least a whole lot more people are going to hear about Jesus
because I'm not going to shut up about it.
So there's my protection.
I feel like you wouldn't go to jail.
I feel like you would be a prisoner of conscience.
I feel like you would.
I mean, you went, you looked down the barrel to lose your job and everything.
I think that, I don't know.
Yeah.
I'm not saying you wouldn't go to jail.
I'm saying that if the situation arose, I don't see you standing back.
You know, for the sake of my kids, though.
Yeah.
I think, I don't know.
That would be my determining.
Yeah.
100%.
Whatever's in their best interest, I'm going to make sure I do.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
I got one more.
So you've got a vision and you've been moving from this inflection point in 2017 towards that vision that seems to have been the motivation in the wellspring for you to first create miners and now create this incredible product.
That's more than just a wallet.
It's a communication and it's a more to sales system.
And it's an accounting of who can you do business with.
spit out your Bitcoin shibboleth as you walk along the path of life.
And I think that you have a vision for where we go. And I just kind of wanted to hear it because
I'm a songwriter. I'm a storyteller. I love to hear the vivid landscapes that people can paint
with their words and what they see in their mind. Where do you think we go in the next
10 years like where and it can be with anything it can be geopolitical it can be war it can be
the authoritarianism issue it can be is there a great man that arises is there
you know does the fourth turning happen and we all just end up blown to bits what what's the
future that you see coming i think that that's going to be well there's a lot of different forces
moving at high velocities in all different directions um so it's really hard for me to like
guess and it's just like you know if you tried to ask me you know what the price of bitcoin is going
to be in you know 10 months i'd probably have to be it's just clueless um but also there's there's
a lot of factors that i think i do see kind of converging toward certain directions and there's
a lot of different ways people like to um quantify it um one of the one of the philosophies of thought
is like the turnings right you've got the the fourth turning type of um philosophy and i think
there's a lot of credibility credibility to that i think that that explains a lot of what we're
seeing and i i align with that theory quite a bit um that i think that we are quote unquote in a
forth turning. And we're seeing a lot of those same things. I mean, historically, there's a lot
of these, obviously, a very common phrase is history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.
And that's just another way to look at, you know, the fact that we have these events that kind of,
they set cool, cool events throughout our history. And we're at a pretty big inflection point in a
lot of different types of cycles. You know, we have different business cycles, we have political
cycles we have you know fourth turning type cycles these uh ideological cycles um and uh
a lot of these are kind of converging right now and at the center of this is bitcoin and
i think that that's really cool because as bitcoiners we get a front row seat
but it is also there's a lot at stake there's a lot on the line and um
you know if i had to say like where are we going to be at in 10 years i think it's going to be up
us today what we do today i think we actually as bitcoiners again back to the point where i think
bitcoin's really at the heart of a lot of what's going to happen for the next 10 years if we can
build a system around ourselves because you know people will say yeah we'll tick tock next block
bitcoin's never going to stop working obviously you know we know that but and i've also said it
this way like you can't ban bitcoin but you can ban yourself from bitcoin you know as geopolitically
speaking so bitcoin is going to be okay but bitcoiners are what what really matters it's
the bitcoiners it's what the system we have for us and the amount of freedom that we have at 10
years you know so that's why i am so passionate about teaching people how important it is to use
bitcoin as your money buy sell you know um any type of trend transaction payroll you know whatever
anytime anytime you're touching money it ought to be bitcoin because this is what moves us closer
to the freedom that we want in 10 years and takes power away from those that are incentivized to
steal more from us. And so I am optimistic. I think we have a very good shot at, with the amount
of freedom that we have in the United States, we do still have some semblance of fair law and
constitution that people actually still believe in. I believe in this constitution and I swore
an oath to protect and defend it. And I will until probably the day I die, unless it conflicted with
something else that i believe it more right but i think the constant the american constitution is
is very unique i think it is something that is worth you know dying to protect um and you know
so that that's where i stand on things i think that because we have these beliefs in our country
i think we actually have a good chance to do something i think that every other nation maybe
not every other nation, but at least almost all of them, they're all handicapped because
fundamentally, and this is my personal belief, it's fundamentally because they don't have
the right to the second amendment.
They do not have the right to bear arms.
And I think it is because we have the right to bear arms, we can keep the government in
check.
And it's not necessarily that we have to threaten to, you know, civil war or anything
like that, but it is there, right?
That is a very rare and unlikely possibility, but it is there.
And what a lot of people probably don't even remember, we talked about the Canadian trucker protest, the summit. And there was this freedom convoy that happened and the Canadian government was shutting people's bank accounts down, stealing their money, you know, and doing all these terrible things.
and the truckers weren't giving up and it wasn't very popular news but there was a similar movement
happening in the united states at the exact same time yep i so uh i don't were you guys in Kansas
City it was I was not now it was featured on have you ever seen the uh the YouTube channel channel
five news they did it I don't know yeah it's a I forget the guy's name but um yeah he did a whole
episode on it it was big i mean it was not 50 guys so so describe this though what is significant
right so i don't i don't know all the details i'll tell you what i know from my perspective
i'm close to a major highway that runs through the state of kansas which is like the heart of
the country right and so we had you know thousands of trucks going past where i live zero news
coverage zero news coverage right and so they were guess where they were all headed washington dc
They were literally in their trucks halfway across the country. And you know what happened? Canada gave up on the trucker protest. They, you know, they're like, all right, fine, you know, just we're good. We're done. Get them out of here. We'll appease you in the near term.
um and so they basically kind of they they ended that and gave up because of the united states and
what it really came down to is that all these truckers they were all you know essentially
potentially armed you know what i mean yeah right so they didn't have that luxury in canada
in the united states you're you know you're legally allowed to arm yourself and so they
didn't want this escalating into a physical um conflict with you know bullets right and so uh
Not to say that that was guaranteed to happen, but again, it came down to the fact that it was a possibility.
And you don't want, like, really angry Americans with a lot of guns in one location that are very passionate, and then you start taking away their freedoms that the Constitution says you can kill people if they do.
You know, so I think that that that is ultimately in my in my mind, a big reason for what keeps the whole world in check is the Americans have the ability to keep our own government in check to some degree.
Now, in practice, that doesn't always.
Yeah. Yeah. The base layer is kinetic power.
I mean, it comes down to proof back to proof of work.
I mean, yeah, I remember what I was going to say.
Just in case anybody was like, oh, man, he was on, you know, he needed to finish his thought.
I was talking at the summit about Tether and how it is basically the infrastructure portion of a CBDC.
That's all I was going to say is that Tether is the infrastructure.
It is the money component of a CBDC.
So you kind of have stable coins plus digital ID.
Yeah, yeah.
There was a control of the government.
That is what is, that is a CBDC.
Yeah.
yeah that was what i was gonna ties together very nicely yeah the the fact of having tying
the identity to it definitely turns it up a notch into a cbdc yeah well that's all i got man
i'll tell you what this has been absolutely fantastic i really uh can't thank you enough
um this is wonderful adam smeka um you are uh you're a father you're a christian you're an
entrepreneur. We thank you for your product. We thank you for your passion. We thank you for your
service. And we thank you for being here and taking the time to come be with us. We want to let you go
and we want to want to make sure that people know where to follow you on X and for Manowallet. And
then anything you want to say going out, the floor is yours. Sure. First of all, thank you so much.
this was a pleasure it was really fun
looks like you guys actually put quite a bit of work
into this setup today so
it's surprising when you watch it but we do put work into it
but
no it's an honor thank you for so many
kind words
it in a way makes it
all worth it so we really appreciate that
I'm on x at Adam Seneca
just my name and then if you're interested
in the Bitcoin wallet
stuff it's at mana Bitcoin
just one word at mana Bitcoin
two N's on mana so
Right on.
Yeah.
Best follow you'll find all day, man.
Exciting stuff on X.
Always fun to read your stuff.
So.
I will definitely admit.
You're something little.
I am entertaining.
No, no.
If nothing else.
If nothing else, I'm entertaining.
Yeah.
All right.
Right on.
We're going to put the lid on this one.
Yeah.
Cut it.