I wanted to share with those people that were like myself, that were in the
altcoin space of why Bitcoin matters.
I haven't read a lot of books that talk about the Altcoin space.
. And so the book Chronicles Here's what.
Is interesting about the coin space, but here's ultimately why that stuff fails,
or why that stuff falls on its face.
one of the biggest strokes of genius I think Mateo had when he was creating
the app was creating a paywall.
I would've never done that cause I would've thought, wow,
we're creating a social network.
We need as many users as possible because then that will make more users come in.
Mateo from the very beginning, had this approach of quality over quantity.
and that's just so in line with the Bitcoin ethos.
It's like, I, I don't care if I have a million connections or not.
I want a few really high quality, high signal connections.
but guess what?
When that happens, when you, when you create a few high quality connections,
People see that and they wanna be a part of that, and it actually grows and grows.
And so we're seeing a pretty nice little, uh, streak of growth right now because
people are connecting through the app.
Welcome back to the Freedom Footprint Show a Bitcoin philosophy show with Knut
Svanholm and me Luke, the Pseudo Finn.
Today we're joined by Brian De Mint, author of Bitcoin Evangelism and Chief
Marketing Officer at Orange Bill App.
In today's episode, we dig more into how Orange Bill app is connecting
Bitcoiners around the world.
We discuss Bitcoin's marketing problem and we hear about how Brian
is spreading the Bitcoin message to no coins and alt pointers through
his book Bitcoin Evangelism.
Before we dive in, we'd like to quickly remind you that the best way
to support the show is to send us a boost or a stream us some SATs.
Using a Value for Value podcasting app such as Fountain.
If you're listening to this show as a podcast, check out Fountain.
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and you can support your favorite shows through value for value.
If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like, subscribe to the
channel and turn on notifications so you never miss a weekly episode.
And finally, we want to thank today's sponsors Wasabi Wallet, orange
pill App, and Bitcoin Book Shop.
All their information is in the description.
We'll be talking a little bit more about them later.
And now, without further ado, here's Brian Dement on the Freedom Footprint Show.
Okay.
Welcome back to the Freedom Footprint Show.
Brian, welcome.
Thanks for joining us.
Well, thank you guys for having me.
I'm excited.
This is, uh, long waited.
I've, I've honestly, been excited about this one for a long time.
We, we get to do a lot with the, with the book tour and stuff, but, uh,
there's, there's certain shows that you just, you know, certain people you
look forward to hanging out with and, uh, you and I have gotten to do, uh,
you know, we, we did, uh, a a a spaces or a live broadcast for something else.
But yeah, looking forward to kind of being a little bit more focused attention today.
Yeah, that was a bigger, bigger group last time, so,
Yeah, we've done a bunch of spaces together at this point, right?
Yeah.
Um, oh, the OPA spaces where you're, you, you usually host the orange pill,
Twitter spaces and it's always good fun to be in those, uh, I don't know how you
manage to find all those nice guests.
I mean,
you know what, it's, it's been, it's been nice because orange pill hops starting to
get a little bit of its own reputation.
And so I found that, uh, as long as I don't reach out to them as myself, they
don't, they don't care when I reach out who on orange pill App reaches out.
They think that, that's interesting cuz I, yeah, there's just, I think
plenty of people have been sharing their experiences about meeting
people on the orange pill app.
There was a, there was a couple that had a, had a meetup the other night
and so it's, I think people are hearing these organic stories about
orange pill app and it's, it's kind of trickling up to, uh, you know, all
sorts of different Bitcoiners and so people are fascinated by what's going
on and that just gives us access to.
Plenty of interesting people.
Yeah.
Um, and, uh, the, that, that's sort of what you do too.
Like, uh, Luke, you, you, uh, reach out to people as the Freedom Footprint show
and not as the Canadian Finn, I guess.
Well, at least I can
say I'm, you know, the co-host and producer of, of commute stunt homes.
Well, it always helps when I name drop, but, uh, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
A nice, healthy name drop every once in a while.
Never hurt anybody.
Yeah, commute's a pretty good name
drop.
Definitely.
But Brian, can you, can you give us just like a, an intro on you, a tldr or like,
we like to say here an R on yourself?
An R I'll give you the R um, the, uh, yeah, so the tl I don't
think I've ever done anything.
It's tldr it's always, I always give the, the, it's gonna be too long.
You're not gonna wanna read this.
So, um, but anyways, yeah, I, I, I've been in the, the bitcoin space.
I don't know, that's such a weird thing to say.
Um, but for about.
10 years, I think 2013 I started studying it.
I, so I've been an entrepreneur since 2008 and, uh, there was these entrepreneurs
guys that I looked up to that were, tend to bought a little bit of Bitcoin.
And so I started studying Bitcoin, honestly, as a skeptic, trying to
tell them why they were idiots.
It's like, I, I really respect you guys, but uh, why are you
guys buying this funny money?
Um, and so of course when you peel that onion back, And if you,
truthfully, and, uh, you know, if you're rationally looking at these
things, it tends to be very eye-opening.
I'd never asked the question, what is money?
I had never asked the question of how does our system work?
How is currency created?
I mean, you just, again, we've, we've all been through that process and that was
how that process unfolded for me, was kind of coming at it from a skeptical lens.
Um, so then, you know, there, you know, a little shortly after started
buying Bitcoin, um, I wish somebody had told me about dollar cost averaging.
I was pretty broke at the time cuz all my money was, was, was
sunk into building my business.
And so, uh, you know, wish, you know, wish I would've had plenty more, uh, funds to
be able to, to buy and dollar cost average at the time, but, but just trickled in.
And, uh, went through my altcoin phase in that 2016 ish time, uh,
worked on an altcoin project, was, uh, was surrounded by guys that,
that genuinely had, had good motives.
So it wasn't like a, an outright scam on that front, but it was a, it
was a, I guess you could call it a, a centralized group of people that,
that didn't fully understand the, the, the big oomph to why Bitcoin
mattered in, in, in decentralization.
And so we could dive into some of the things that I got to experience
through being in the marketing role for a blockchain project,
um, that was very eye-opening.
And it is leads to very compelling reasons of coming back to, to Bitcoin only.
Um, so my, you know, my, my bell curve arc, or whatever you wanna call
it, was Bitcoin only alt coin phase.
And back here about, you know, 2019, uh, kind of landed back
in the Bitcoin only space.
and so, uh, then wrote a book kind of to, to talk about some of my experience.
I, I wanted to.
Share.
It's called Bitcoin Evangelism.
I wanted to share with those of those people that were like myself, that were in
the altcoin space of why Bitcoin matters.
I, I, I haven't read a lot of books that talk that are bitcoin only books
that talk about the Altcoin space.
I think one of the things I was getting from my Altcoin friends
was that, Bitcoiners just don't understand the coin space.
Therefore we're, you know, we were people that bought Bitcoin a long time ago,
and so we're just hoping that Bitcoin works, and that was the only reason that
we were pro Bitcoin or Bitcoin only.
And so the book Chronicles Here's what.
Is interesting about the coin space, but here's ultimately why that stuff fails,
or why that stuff falls on its face.
So it, it takes a very soft approach to it, um, but ultimately leads the reader
back to a Bitcoin only, uh, approach.
So I guess the hope with the book is if somebody's gonna go through it, as opposed
to doing what I did and going through, you know, your bitcoin phase, your coin
phase, and then coming back to Bitcoin.
Hopefully you could read this book and then experience that entire process before
having ever gone through your coin phase.
Um, and then that in the process of doing my book tour and, and just networking
and meeting people, I got to get in touch with orange pill app and I just
signed up for orange pill App as a user when they launched at Pacific Bitcoin.
Mateo, She just gave me the pitch and I was sold on the idea.
I said, you know, this is a, I believe that this is a critical
piece of Bitcoin's future.
I think that we need something like this in order to facilitate
this social layer for Bitcoin.
And so that's what got me involved in the, the orange pill outside of things.
Yeah.
And the orange pill app is, is way more than just the app.
Like, uh, now this sounds like a shameless chiller, but, but having, uh, having
been, uh, um, an advisor for the orange pill app for a while now, and, uh, seen
what it can do and how it brings people together, it's, it's truly remarkable.
And also like how, how we, uh, how the, it brings Bitcoin company people
together and all the synergies with, with Fountain App for instance, which
we had a spaces with the other day.
And, uh, all sorts of collaborations.
Not least with the Konsensus Network in my book.
So I, I know I'm biased saying this, but, but, uh, but these are not the only
companies and not the only people in this.
It's, uh, you can truly see the power of this thing.
It's bringing all sorts of bitcoins together and it's, it
is very nice and, uh, I think you're a very good spokesperson
person for the, uh, orange pill.
Uh, I mean, it's good to have a clear voice instead, uh, uh,
instead of just Mateo going, uh, you need to download the Apple.
I mean, I love Mateo and everything he does, but, uh, but, uh, it's good that
you're in the space too and, and, uh, such a good, uh, host of all of these spaces
and, um, and whatnot and whatever's coming down the, the Pipe for Inch Pill app.
And I'm looking forward to, to see where, where we can take this
thing and what it, what it can do.
Yeah, no, I, I think that it's, it's really exciting to be a part of this team.
I mean, that, that, that honestly was a big part of, aside from just seeing
the vision of what Orange Pop could be, Mateo had assembled a, a pretty amazing
group of advisors with you and Daniel Prince and Sessions and all these guys.
So for, for him, the, the pitch to me was, Hey, do you wanna
come work with orange pill Hop?
And I said, I said, yeah, absolutely.
I get to work with these guys and do a monthly meeting and, and talk to
some of these people that I get to, you know, pick their brains and hear
being a, an, an upstart Bitcoin author.
And I get to talk to Knut about, I mean, again, you, your
books in the background here.
It's like, these are books that I've read myself.
And then I found inspiration.
And so that there was a lot of value add to me.
Um, but one, I'd say one of the coolest things, like you said, that we get to
work with these other Bitcoin companies.
That are building in the space.
And, uh, I found myself, even though I've always understood from an early,
early time of being in Bitcoin that I need to lower my time preference.
When you build in Bitcoin, when you're, when you're creating something in Bitcoin
and, and working in that space, you lower your time preference even more.
I found that that.
I was finding out from other people in conversation that the Bitcoin
price was up on a certain day.
And I, it's like, wow, I didn't, I, I don't check the Bitcoin price, uh, you
know, 40 times a day like I used to because I've been so focused on just
pushing the social layer of Bitcoin, like how do we make more connections?
That was, those were the metrics that I started.
Um, I guess finding, finding excitement in my day is like, how many books did I sell?
Okay, great.
That means that there's x amount of more people that are potentially
getting orange pill today.
How many more people signed up for orange pill app?
That's great because there's that many more social connections.
Those were the metrics that I was constantly refreshing on my phone
rather than the Bitcoin price.
And so, um, it's, it's been very refreshing talking to
other people in the space.
Like you, you're constantly talking about how to lower our time preference.
I mean, what if this thing takes a thousand generations?
We should consider that a success.
Um, and that's the mindset that I think is, is very important to have.
And we're, you know, we're, we're, I'm getting a lot of that from working with
Fountain and working with Geyser Fund.
These companies aren't talking about what we're gonna do today or tomorrow.
They're talking about what we're gonna build for the, for the next
10 years, and let's, let's have a longer time horizon that way.
So it's been very helpful for me in a pragmatic sense.
A, another thing, yeah.
Just to give a, a shout out and a mention to B2C map and Nathan, uh, who's, uh,
Building this wonderful map of where, wherever the Bitcoin retailers and
the Bitcoin ATMs and whatever are, uh, there's been a whole bunch of such
services in the past, but none of them have, have been very e easily integrated
into other websites and other apps.
And, um, B2C MAP is work, working closely with orange pill app.
So you can, you can get all the Bitcoin locations, so to speak,
uh, in, directly in the app.
So it, it's, it feels like an app that's, Putting it all together, uh, laying the
final piece of the possible in a way.
Well, yeah.
And, and about 20 minutes ago, I just got off a phone call with, uh, Texas Slim.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he runs the Beef Initiative.
Um, oh yeah.
And so we're, we're, yeah, we're, we're partnering with them in some capacity.
Um, so we're, we're obviously promoting their events through the app.
Um, we're not promoting, we're just posting them through the app
and then they can promote 'em.
We're gonna, you know, obviously retweet and share those events.
But I went out to the Georgia Beach Beef Initiative, um,
last year, and that was great.
I mean, they're, they're, it's, it's very in line with what we're trying
to do through orange pill app is facilitating in real life connections.
And so they're, they're getting consumers to go and shake.
That's their, that's their whole, you know, catchphrase is.
Shake a rancher's hand, go and meet the rancher.
Go and meet the guy that's growing your food or, or harvesting whatever it is,
and actually look 'em in the eye, shake their hand, and you have this connection
that's gonna be much more difficult for, for any encroachment of, of tyranny or
legislation to break when you've made a, a personal connection, um, it's, it's
much more difficult to shut that down rather than if you have simply an online
connection and then, All they need, you know, all the, the bad guys need to do
is shut down their online store or, you know, pause their store for some reason.
Then you have no, you no longer have a connection.
But, but if I have a, if I have, if there's a street that I can take to go
to my rancher and pick up my food, that's a much more difficult bond to break.
And so those are, those are some of the partnerships we're working
on right now with orange pill App.
Um, and it's really cool to see somebody like Texas Slim.
Who I've met before, but I said, you know, how familiar are you with the orange pill?
He said, oh my gosh.
We were just, I was out in Australia and we were talking about that at
the Australian Bitcoin conference.
And, you know, people were getting really excited about this, this, uh,
this tool that we have at our disposal to connect with people, people see the
value of the in real life connection.
Um, one of the most biggest, or one of the biggest strokes of genius I
think Mateo had when he was creating the app was creating a paywall.
Like I would've never had the foresight if I was creating a
social network to have a paywall.
For those that don't know, the app costs three bucks a month.
But it's the best $3, $3 you'll ever spend because it filters out any bots
noise or any of that kind of stuff.
And, uh, I would've never done that cause I would've thought, wow,
we're creating a social network.
We need as many users as possible because then that will make more users come in.
Mateo from the very beginning, had this approach of quality over quantity.
Um, and that's just so in line with the Bitcoin ethos.
It's like, I, I don't care if I have a million connections or not.
I want a few really high quality, high signal connections.
Um, but guess what?
When that happens, when you, when you create a few high quality connections,
People see that and they wanna be a part of that, and it actually grows and grows.
And so we're seeing a pretty nice little, uh, streak of growth right now because
people are connecting through the app.
I was out at the, the swan salon at, uh, you know, a few weeks ago, and they
had, you know, it's this really posh house where Swan hosts their private
event for, for their, for their high net worth investor people or whatever.
Um, and I'm, I was talking to a guy JD from Cypherpunk Films and he, he had
his friend there and I said, oh, hey.
And he said, this is my friend Derek.
I'm like, oh, great.
How'd you guys meet?
And he goes, we met on orange pill App an hour before this event.
I had a plus one ticket and I didn't have any Bitcoiners that wanted to come
with me, so I went into orange pill app.
And found this guy that lives kind of in my neighborhood and, uh, I
just messaged him and said, Hey, do you wanna come to this event?
And I said, oh, you, you know, you, you trusted that, that's, that's why did
you feel so confident that you could go pick up a stranger in your car?
You just pulled up out in front of his house, you d you, you
DMed him and said, Hey, I'm here.
What made you feel comfortable with that interaction?
He goes, because I knew they were a Bitcoin.
He goes, it, it, it created this, there was this curation process
that happened where I had no problem picking up this dude and taking him
to this event right when I met him.
Because we've been able to interact within the b the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Um, and so it's, it's very interesting seeing how these, these
real life connections are, are playing out, that are, that are
manifesting through a social network.
I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before.
I think that this is gonna be, uh, a use case that's talked about
in textbooks for years to come.
And I can say that because I didn't create the app, so I don't get
to take any of the credit for it.
But I think that, that, that business textbooks of the future will, will
write about this is like how do you start a social network with a paywall?
It could only happen in the Bitcoin ecosystem because if you try to start
TikTok with a paywall, that demographic doesn't understand value for value, right?
But Bitcoiners inherently understand value for value and, and why it's
worth paying for something, um, to get something more out of it.
So it's been very interesting to have a front row seat to this.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
It's, uh, valuable value is substituting attention for attention,
I guess, or attention for ad revenue.
yeah.
And it's beautiful.
Um, absolutely.
yeah, that's one event.
Uh, event.
Was that the one in Miami or another event?
So
this was a, so this was one in Southern California.
They do monthly Yeah.
Meetups
and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, because I attended some swan party in, in Miami.
This, this, by the way, this is recorded between, uh, the Miami conference and the
Prague conference, which is next week.
So, uh, me and Luke will be in Prague and try to, try to do some stuff there, but I
guess this episode will be released after Prague, so there's no use in chilling.
That right Luke.
No, uh, we're actually really trying to build up a big, uh, a big backlog because
we've got a busy summer, but, uh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But, but Prague's gonna be really cool.
I mean, yeah, Brian and, uh, and I think a lot of the American Bitcoiners
in general, I, I think you should try and make it out to, to the
European conferences if you can.
It's, it's a different vibe, I think.
Have you been out to any of the European events?
Mm-hmm.
No, I've actually never been to Europe before, so, sorry.
I feel like kinda, uh, ashamed of that.
You should grab a ticket to Honey Badger.
Come see, that's a pure signal event.
Really?
Reg regains the beginning of September.
You should look into that.
Uh, it's one of our favorite conferences.
We'll be there if not, if not our favorite conference.
Uh, it's where we at first time.
Yeah.
It's where, yeah.
And it's where sort of where my Bitcoin career quote.
Took off, uh, I brought 50 bucks in my hand luggage, uh, in 2019 to Riga,
and that's where it all started.
Why do you think those European events are like so high signal?
Um, I mean, you could argue that in the US that that, that that's maybe not the case.
Uh, it depends on the event.
Uh, um, but yeah, why
I, I think the Amer American culture is much more, and I guess especially
after 1971, I should add that, but it's, uh, a much more, uh, it re it
revolves around advertisement a lot.
Uh, and that's not the case in Europe, uh, to, to the same extent.
So, so it's this, In a way, FII mindset where you need to move fast and break
things and just push your products, uh, as much as you can and big Strolight
and banners and stuff everywhere.
And you need to make as much noise as possible to get people's attention.
And Europe is a little different, I guess also the.
In the us like Bitcoin Miami is the biggest conference and it's
sort of also, uh, it claims to be a Bitcoin only conference, but it's
really, uh, a Bitcoin and, uh, a couple of shit coins conference.
Uh, it's very inclusive like that and, uh, that's all nice and
friendly, but it keeps the noise louder in relative to to the signal.
Yeah.
and I think in, in, in Europe that the conferences are, More separate.
So there are Bitcoin only conferences and then the crypto, blockchain, whatever,
shift conferences, um, uh, on the side.
So, so, uh, yeah, uh, maybe that's just me being ignorant
about other American conferences.
I don't know how many mixed coin conferences or if they're, I, I hear
bit block boom is quite high signal.
And, uh, also of course the, the Pacific Bitcoin that, that's higher
in, in terms of Bitcoin or to shitcoin or ratio during the conference.
Yeah.
I mean, then again, Miami is great because the Miami Conference is great
because of all the site events as well.
Mm-hmm.
It creates a, since it's so big, it creates this, these sub-communities
around, around the, the conference.
I remember when, when I landed in Miami, the first thing I did was I, yeah.
I, I bumped into Andy Edstrom and then we waited for his luggage for a while,
and I just took a cab straight to this, uh, kill idle rock venue where
I was doing the Satoshi Roto thing.
So I just gave my luggage to, to, and, uh, He said, Kurt, you need to go up on stage.
And I, I went up on stage and grabbed the guitar or a bass or something
and played a couple of songs.
And, uh, yeah.
When I finished playing a couple of songs, I went out on the street
again and there was my luggage under a table on the streets.
So like, ah, we need to put this somewhere.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Forgot about that.
And, uh, yeah.
But, but that, uh, event was pretty successful.
So we're, uh, we thought more recent because I, I thought we played all the.
The wrong notes and none of the good, the right notes, but, uh, people
seem to have enjoyed it anyway, so we're doing it again in Prague now.
Oh, that's cool.
That's really, uh, yeah, so looking forward to that a lot, uh, with a
slightly different band, but, uh, yeah.
Well I was in the audience.
I was in the audience for that.
I, I, you know, that was, that was, that was such a boss move, man.
It's like, uh, where, where's canoe?
Oh, I heard his flight's just getting in.
Okay, cool.
And then, There's, and he just walks up on stage and starts just rock it out.
It was like, this is how he says hi.
He just comes up on stage and just starts killing it on the guitar.
So, no man, that, that was really cool.
No,
but I'm, I'm living the meme and the dream at the same time here.
I'm doing all the things that I wish I was doing when I was 26 and I'm 46 and I'm,
it's actually happening and it's, yeah.
To me it's just a dream come true to, to be able to go to Miami and go straight
to rock venue and play a couple of riffs.
That was so cool.
Yeah.
It's great.
Uh, about your book, um, Bitcoin Evangelism, you say that it's
for, um, It's for shift corners.
Yeah.
Is that the, is that the target audience for it?
Or like, so
Brian, that they uses a different word than you to refer to?
I'm not ashamed of that.
I'm gonna call it shift corners.
Yeah, yeah.
You, you call that, that's, I, I have no problem.
I just don't like the cuss.
I don't know what it is.
I just, I just, I'm not, I'm not a swearer, which just
was, was raised that way.
Um, so I just say all coin, but I, I used it in select, uh, in select occasions.
But, Anyways.
Yeah, I mean, so the, the whole concept of evangelism, it, it
hearkens back to Christian evangelism.
So it was like Christian evangelism, whether you find merit in that or not.
It, it was one of the most successful, successful movements of all time.
And it was, it was because they had a really good formulated message
for two groups of people, right?
There was the atheist and then there was the pagan.
So there was the person that didn't believe, and then there was the person
that believed in a higher power or deity, but they believed in, you know, some
variation of, of God or Gods or whatever.
And it's like, that's kind of what we have here in the, in the bitcoin space.
We have the, we have the no coin or we have the skeptic.
And so there, there needs to be a, an argument formulated for them.
And then we have the altcoin pagans, uh, that, that believe in, you know,
they believe in blockchain, but they believe in some variation or they
believe that, you know, uh, you know, decentralization doesn't matter,
but what we really need is speed and scalability and those sorts of things.
So being able to speak to those two types of people, I think is, is powerful.
And I think that, If we want the Bitcoin community, maybe the lowest hanging
fruit for bringing Bitcoiners or, or, or increasing the amount of Bitcoiners in the
world is just orange pilling the crypto community, uh, because they're people
that, that are fascinated by, uh, maybe a change in, in, you know, a paradigm
shift in terms of money or value transfer.
Um, some of these people are just in it to get rich quick.
And so if you, if that's all they care about, then, then yeah, I guess
the, the merits of Bitcoin aren't necessarily going to appeal to them.
Um, because w yeah, I don't, we don't take much of approach of, of talking about this
is why Bitcoin's gonna go to the moon.
Um, and so maybe that's, that's the only thing that they're on,
you know, crypto Twitter for.
But if they do care about a, a fundamental change in the way that
value is transferred, um, I've talked to plenty of friends of mine.
That are really into Solana because they really are intrigued by
the, by, by the movement of defi.
all right, well, let's, let's break that down and, and, and fully
understand what, what that means.
And then most of the guys that I know that are on Solana, they
don't understand that it's been 51% attacked multiple, multiple times.
And so they, they don't realize how, how vulnerable their,
their money or their funds are.
And so just walking through that process is really important.
And then even sharing some of my experiences from when I was the, the,
the marketing guy for a blockchain project, like I was saying earlier,
there's some experiences in there that were pretty eye-opening.
I mean, so.
Kind of like how I, I'm in my role in marketing right now for orange pill app.
I was, I was in that similar role for this, this blockchain
project called Athenian.
And it was a education decentralizing education, right?
Like that's what blockchain, yeah, blockchain projects.
You take something, take lemonade stands and we're gonna decentralize lemonade
stands or whatever, whatever, X, Y, Z.
So that, that was kind of our mission at the time.
Right.
Well, you can imagine every day that I would wake up, I would have 10 dms
in my inbox from another blockchain project saying, Hey, we're x, y, Z coin.
Let's announce a partnership with you guys, and then we'll, we'll
pump it and let's, I mean, they were literally just messages about pumping
and dumping and, and scamming their, scamming their groups of people.
So I think it's really important for, for.
People that understand it when they're buying into these projects,
the, the, the people that you're buying these coins from are actively
pursuing a scam of your money.
They're lit, they're actively trying to siphon off your money.
And I think that most people don't understand it, that, that humans
would do that to one another.
It's crazy.
To us it's, it, it's, it's obvious, right?
We, we know that there's scammers out there, but most people think that the
blockchain spaces like this altruistic playground of, of people being, you know,
singing, you know, sunshine and rainbows and lollipops and all that kind of stuff.
And so the naivety in that space is pretty high.
And so just even sharing some of those stories about overt
scams is, is really powerful.
But one of the most eye-opening things that I saw, um, after I'd been asked
a thousand times to try and pump and dump our coin, which we never did,
we, we never did on our side of it.
We actually had people that, that weren't, weren't of that mindset.
I actually went to one of the, the exchanges that we had our coin listed on,
it was one of those small exchanges, c pay tax or one, one of the, one of the,
the, the, the exchanges, that's probably blown up by now, but I, it was, it was
late one night and there was about $200 worth of our coin on this exchange.
We had the, our coin was, uh, a e m was the name of the coin, and I
bought all $200 worth of the coin.
I said, I wonder what happens if I buy up all the liquidity of this coin and
now there's no liquidity on the market.
What happened was I bought the $200 worth of coin.
They were all 2 cents per coin.
And then what I did was I sold the next coin to myself.
So Wash traded it to myself.
I didn't even have to log in and, and go into a different account.
I was able to create a sell order and then buy it through my exact
same account, and I, I sold the next coin to myself for a dollar.
So I 50 x the price of the coin in one cell by selling it to myself.
And I said, okay, that's interesting.
If 50 x the, the, the price on this one exchange, right?
That was it.
No, no, no.
I went to Coin Gecko.
I went to Coin Market Cap, and our coin went from number 1300
in the world to number 400 in the world in one cell for $1.
Our market cap increased by 5 million.
According to these websites.
It aggregated across the entire internet.
And it told everybody that the new price of this coin is now $1, because
I sold one coin to myself for $1.
So the, the market increased by $5 million.
By the sale, and I know this because I saw it.
It was me.
I did it myself.
The market increased by 5 million because of the sale of a $1 coin.
I sold it back.
I equ, I created equilibrium in the market.
I just did that as an experiment and I put it back to where it was.
The next day I resigned and I focused on Bitcoin only education.
I said, this is way too, I had no idea.
I knew that there there might be problems in the market.
I had no idea it was that fickle of a market that 5 million could
move off of a $1 transaction.
Yeah, but this is why, uh, Bitcoin dominance index is such a bullshit metric
because all of the other ones, like the way they calculate the market cap is ju
just how you, you described it like they issue, they, they sell one coin for a
dollar and then they issue a billion coins and all of a sudden you have a billion
dollar market cap and it's all bullshit.
It's, it's not because they actually sold a billion dollars at all.
They sold $1 and Yeah.
And, and, uh, more often than not to themselves in, in one way or or another.
Yeah.
And so, so we, yeah.
I, I, I get that you've been working with a lot of sincere people in the Alcon
space and I think, I think that a, a huge chunk of the people working with.
Uh, alt coins, for lack of a better word, or there is a better
word, but anyway, uh, you can say
it.
I'm not offend, I'm not offended by hearing
it.
No, but I, I don't wanna offend them.
It's that, uh, it's that there's always an asshole on top, for lack of a better word.
Uh, uh, with all of these projects, there's always someone who knows
what's going on and that person, because they, they, they must have,
you know, at some point, stumbled upon Bitcoin to be in the alt coin space,
quote unquote altcoin space at all.
You need to know about Bitcoin.
Like you need to, you need to at least have heard of Bitcoin, and if
you've done the tiniest amount of research, you realize that there can
be only, there can be only one, that doesn't really have anyone on top.
And furthermore, the decentralizations, uh, part.
As you say, they want to decentral, decentralized shoes and, and, uh, you
know, hairdresser, education and whatever.
decentralization in Bitcoin is an unfortunate means to a
greater end and nothing more.
The only it, it is unfortunate that we need decentralization because
the only reason we do is because we can't trust one another with
money, with or with a money printer.
It has never worked in history.
The, the, the guy with the money printer, Can never assist the
temptation to press the copy button.
That is the problem with all, with all money, uh, throughout history and so, so,
or with all currencies throughout history.
So that's the problem we're trying to solve, uh, through,
uh, by using decentralization.
But what we want, what we want to get to is sound money that
is censorship resistant and no, no one can do anything about.
And no one can take away from you by force very easily because they
cannot know how much you have.
And that is the greater end.
And it has nothing to do with decentralization.
It has everything to do with markets and, uh, meritocracy and, uh, you know,
fairness, truth, all of this stuff.
So, uh, yeah, we had, this was in our conversation with Alexander Bar as well,
uh, Luke, how, how, uh, Bitcoin, because speaking of evangelism, excuse me for
going on a little ranter, Brian, but, but I, I get some, some nice ideas here.
Like the, the, uh, some people view Bitcoin as a religion and uh, that's
all fine and some people view it as a cult and that's also fine.
I find it more, uh, to be.
That what we're living in now is the cult because what we're living
in now requires belief and Bitcoin doesn't really require belief.
It's very rigid and it's very, it's all about the logos, uh, and uh, the logos.
Uh, being that it's all once and zeros and it's all communication and
you can look up every step of it, and you don't have to trust anyone
really, if, if you do your homework.
Uh, in all these little sub caverns of the rabbit hole.
So, so in that sense, I, I view it as financial atheism,
as I wrote in my first book.
Like You, uh, that, that's another angle on this, that we're,
we're the ones breaking out of a cult, not the ones in a cult.
Uh, however, that's sort of hard to promote to when 99% of the
population is still in the cult.
So it's, maybe it's better to, to take the other angle,
uh, split feelings about that.
But in that sense, I feel that Bitcoin is using this ultimate logos to create the,
the pathos and the mythos, which is the, the other two aspects of the human psyche.
So we get, we get to morality and spirituality through having perfect logic.
So we are using logic to create the other two.
And that's what I find so, So wonderful about it.
One of the aspects because it creates, uh, something outta
nothing, for lack of a better phrase.
Uh, it creates, uh, when you have truth in the bass slay of, of just,
just like your story with a guy that picked up a new found friend
via orange biap to this one party.
Uh, when you have truth in the base layer of who we are, uh, then it's
much easier to, to trust other people because, you know, if they're a true
Bitcoin, they have good intentions.
They don't have this shitty shit coin intentions.
So, so, so that's, that's what I find the, the duality of that, having
this, uh, Absolute truth in the base layer en enable, or that you can
verify every step of the base layer that this adversarial thinking in the
base layer that enables this truth layer, which enables trust between
people on the other side of the coin.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Well, I mean in, in, in, in praxeology you talk a lot about
axioms and, and things that we can, that, that are apparent, right?
That, that can lead to human action.
Um, I was thinking about this on the plane ride home is, is how there's a
tremendous amount of centralization.
When I was sitting on the plane, I'm like, there's a tremendous amount
of centralization in this plane.
There's a hundred of us on the plane.
There's two pilots in the front.
Why, why do I actually trust this centralization right here?
Because I was just at a conference where all we talked about was decentralization.
Why does this work in this case, uh, that that a hundred people are trusting too?
It's because there's aligned incentives, right?
And so my, my human action, I, I, I can get on a plane and be comfortable
in that interaction because I, I believe that those pilots want to get
home to their families in the same way that I want to get home to my family.
But as soon as incentives become disaligned, then, then,
then centralization and, and power no longer works, right?
And so across an economy, across, especially the globe,
we can't, we can't really.
We, we've never really had a good way to align incentives and, you know,
until something like Bitcoin where we can verify every, every process,
every step of the transaction, we don't have to trust, we can verify.
So I no longer have to trust that the pilot wants to get home to his family.
I, I no longer have to trust that the central banker has
my best interest in mind.
I can just verify that, that the, that the greedy minor that's trying to mine Bitcoin
because he wants to enrich himself.
I can trust in the fact that.
While he's enriching himself by mining, he's securing my Bitcoin and therefore
I'm benefiting from that interaction.
Um, the, the incentives become aligned, through, through self-motivation in
the same way that the pilot, his, his self-motivation to get home, it aligns
with my self-motivation to get home.
And so I think that that Bitcoin's found a way, and that's probably, that's
part of the revolution is that it, it was the first time that that humanity
found a way for the monetary system to align incentives with people that have.
Completely different motivations.
Um, and so that's, that's, yeah, I, I think that that's fascinating.
The, the, in terms of how you're talking about the logos leading to the Yeah.
Spiritual
side.
It, it's, it's sort of what, what money is supposed to do, but has
never been able to do because money has always been corrupted.
So like with the, with the airplane and the airline and the airport and
everyone involved, the thing we trust is the division of labor because we d
we trust the pilots drive the plane.
We trust the c e o of the airline company to run the company, and
we trust the, the barista in the airport to make our coffee and so on.
And that's beautiful.
It's the division of labor.
Uh, however, if that, if that mechanism, uh, gets distorted by
crappy money and doesn't function anymore, then, then we have to.
Resort to, to, uh, to trust the pilot not wanting to kill himself.
Like then again, the pilot has to trust the, the, the fuel guy to
have, uh, you know, top really have topped up the plane so that we can
get to our destinations and stuff.
But, but the, uh, the more fiat gets corrupted, the, the harder it will
become to trust the pilot to do, uh, to do his job for, for the proper reasons
and the more we have to trust him.
To just not crash the plane because he has an incentive to survive.
Yeah.
That's, that's the doom and gloom, uh, the doom and gloom motive
versus the, uh, the market motive.
I, I like, I like yours, yours is a bit more optimistic.
The division of labor is much more compelling than the,
I just don't want to die.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But, uh, Fiat makes us believe in a way that, that everyone is just in
it for the, I, I just don't wanna die thing and are willing to do whatever
for money and on a Bitcoin standard, that, that is not necessary anymore.
Because once you're above a certain threshold, nobody knows what
that threshold is, by the way.
But you can, you can be sure that if you just don't spend it all, uh,
it will provide you with all the security you need for the future.
Making, making each human being a much calmer, a much more, you
know, at ease person, that, that is just better to interact with.
Mm.
As we know.
Yeah, I agree.
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Brian, I'd
like to hear a little bit more about, since you have a background
in, in marketing, uh, I guess I've kind of got two questions.
I'll start with, I'll start with the first one.
So how did you get into marketing?
How did that turn into the, the role that you, you tend to have these
days?
Um, well, I, uh, in college, I, I didn't study marketing.
I, I studied something that, uh, commute would call a fake
science of, I studied psychology.
I having, I wouldn't say that having studied psychology and, and gotten a
degree in, in human behavioral science, I think that that, uh, yeah, it's, it is one
of those things where, Perhaps I would've done something different in hindsight,
uh, if, if I'd known the conclusion of it.
But it did, uh, it did grant some, some, or it did lend itself
to the, the field of marketing.
So after college, I actually went in and started, uh, my
wife and I started a business.
Um, we, we, we do, we've been running it for the last 14 years.
We do a light therapy.
Uh, we have a small chain of light therapy studio.
So we do infrared, sauna, red light therapy.
I don't know.
These things are becoming popular now.
Um, but when we started, they certainly weren't popular.
We even do, uh, like vitamin d sunbeds, there's people that,
believe it or not, even in Southern California, don't get sunshine.
And so their doctors have them come in and, and get sunshine.
So it was this, I think I really was able to sharpen my teeth a bit, um, in a field
and starting a business that was kind of this holistic type of business where,
uh, people were treating aches and pains.
Um, People that were looking to get off their prescription meds and maybe treat
their arthritis through infrared sauna.
Um, how do you, when, when, when the paradigm of society is you have a pain
and you take a pill, uh, it's really hard to unwind some of that thinking.
And so here, here, instead of taking the pill, it's gonna make
you feel good in about five minutes.
Here, let's, let's do this therapy that's gonna take you a month to start
feeling good and it's gonna take a month for you to, to kill your inflammation.
But I promise you, in the end, you might not ever need that pill again.
Cause we might, we might not cure, but we might treat the underlying cause of
your problem and fix it in the long term.
So from, from even when I was still in my fiat mindset when I was in, you know,
pre Bitcoin, I was marketing a business that, that had low time preference.
And so I've just been programmed with this idea that if something is true,
Then we just continue to champion it and talk about its merits, because
there will always be a portion of the population that's interested in that.
People are drawn to truth.
Um, there's people that are actively trying to suppress truth.
But even just like in, in, in psychology, we know, we know all the
time the things that we're trying to suppress are often the things that
we're wrestling with the most, right?
So our culture is in this state of suppressing truth, but I think it's
because young people or the, the TikTok generation, they're trying
to suppress truth so much because it weighs on them so heavily.
So I think that in the end, marketing and championing these things, there,
there's, there's, I don't think there's any secret sauce to this.
It's, it's the same if we're promoting Bitcoin, it's the same if we're promoting
holistic treatments of, uh, to, to, you know, to treat, you know, your
whatever, your vitamin D deficiency.
All of these things are kind of the same way, is.
This stuff works.
If you stay the course, if you're looking at a short-term fix, this isn't for you.
But if you're looking for a long-term remedy, then this
is the way you want to go.
And so just being honest and tipping your cards, the, the greatest piece
of, of business advice that I, I think I ever give to people is, don't
hold your cards close to your vest.
In business negotiations or whatever I've done in the past, when I just lay
everything out and I tell somebody in a business negotiation what I want and what
I need, and I ask them what do they want and what do they need, if we just lay
the cards out on the table, I found that the best business negotiations happen.
It, it's the, it's the most mutually beneficial exchange that we could
possibly have by telling the other person what I need and them telling me what
I, what, what they need, um, and being honest in the fact that if, if what I'm
providing to them, Isn't a short-term fix.
Isn't, isn't, Hey, this isn't gonna fix what you need right now, but if you, if
you stick with me, we can get you there.
Um, people love authenticity and so to me that's the most powerful form of
marketing ever is, is being authentic.
And I think that that's why it didn't work out for me being in the crypto space.
That was just, it was a, it was a natural filtration process that the crypto space
kicked me out because I didn't like my, my, my, my message wasn't received by
taking a long-term approach to things.
Um, and so I, that's why Bitcoin, the gravity of Bitcoin drew me back
in was because I like long-term real, authentic truth and, uh,
that's what brings me here today.
Yeah.
You know, you've, uh, uh, you said a lot of really good things, so
I feel bad for, uh, for steering in this direction specifically.
But you, you, uh, you, you do infrared sauna only.
Yeah.
Oh no.
So we do, it's a, the three, three spectrum infrared.
So I don't know, are you familiar with, it sounds like you know, your, in like
a little bit about infrared stuff.
Well,
uh, I'm, I'm just saying I, I've, I've got a traditional sauna at 10 meters that way.
And, uh, you know, the, the one where you pour the water
on the stove and everything?
Yeah.
You don't do that one?
We don't do the stone one.
Okay.
Um, we like it pretty much every gym that that's in my area in California,
they, they do, they do the stone saunas.
Yeah.
And so we actually just have a, a lot more people that
gravitate towards the infrared.
Um, it tends to be a little bit quicker.
Um, you start the infrared light penetrates your body a little quicker,
so you, you tend to get a little, uh, uh, More bang for your buck in
terms of a 15 or 30 minute treatment.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and, and there's some other effects that come along with infrared light,
aside from just the heat benefits.
So, um, now of course this is leading to people getting into cold punches
and all this kind of stuff, so yeah, we
sometime We'll, sounds very good.
I'm sorry
about this next question, Brian, but I can't help myself.
Did they tell you about the placebo effect in psychology class?
They Sure, they sure did.
We, we learned about that a lot.
Yeah.
So you, you're, you're not a, you're not a holistic guy.
You got, we got a fiat killer.
Look, look, uh,
the thing is, I'm skeptic to everything.
So I, I don't believe in alternative medicine.
And for the most part, I don't believe in traditional medicine either.
So, because I think it's all, most of it is placebo.
Fair enough, fair enough.
And
to be fair, the placebo effect works and the nocebo effect works.
And the mind, the mind can do wonderful things for the body.
Uh, that's what I, that's what I believe.
Like, and, uh, if you set your mind to something, uh, that, that's way
more powerful than people believe.
Uh, so that's, that's my sort of holistic approach.
And then the rest is
skepticism.
I mean that, who knows?
I mean, yeah, may, maybe it's a placebo effect in order, but when you come
out to Southern California for Pacific Bitcoin, I'm gonna get you feeling good.
So whether it's your mind playing tricks on you.
Yeah.
Nice.
I'm.
Uh, infrared pill you look looking forward
to.
That's a lot.
But I, I think Finland is a more natural environment for
saunas than Southern California.
For sure.
You got it.
We'll, we'll take that one.
We'll, we'll come to California and see you there, but then you
have to come to Finland and, uh, have a, have a nice proper finish
sauna.
Yeah.
Yes.
And in the finished sauna, you also have to get shit-faced, which is another health
treatment that is, uh, traditionally
finished.
Right?
You do.
Is that
really is that I would never think to drink alcohol and then go on.
To me, that sounds like that would be, that'd be awful.
Is that really part of the tradition?
It's semi mandatory.
Yeah.
With a focus on man, mandatory
wife gets into it too, so, you know.
But, uh, hey, you, you've, you've walked into a little den of us jokers,
uh, picking knits here, but, uh, no.
Matt, while you were saying Brian, about kind of like, what, what you do with
the, with the marketing kind of thing, like I'm, I'm interested in how you, you
take that into, uh, Bitcoin in general, like Bitcoin, I, I think, really does
have a marketing problem generally.
And what's your take on that?
Because I, I, there's, there's so many angles to it.
It's like, does Bitcoin have a scaling problem?
Does Bitcoin have a problem with being too toxic?
All all of these sorts of image things, what's your take on it and,
and how are you trying to address.
All of the issues with within Bitcoin's image, I guess, uh, so to say.
Yeah.
Go.
No, that's a great question.
I think it's just, it comes down to, to sales 1 0 1 and I think that a lot
of Bitcoin purists hate saying, well, we don't need salespeople in Bitcoin.
Well, that was, everybody made fun of me the first day of, of the Miami
conference cuz I was dressed up in a suit and Mateo told me I looked
like I was an insurance salesman.
So, so maybe I'm the guy that doesn't mind looking like the, the salesy person.
But I think that that 1 0 1 of sales.
Is, is asking questions and figuring out where people are.
So I've been able to do, uh, booths at Freedom rallies
here in Southern California.
I mean, we're, we live in California, so we're, you know, we have a
lot of, we have a lot of, uh, people that are tyranny minded.
They love, they love good old Gavin Newsom, but we have a, we have
pockets of people that love liberty, and for some reason those people
just don't know about Bitcoin yet.
It's crazy to me that I, I assume when I go to one of these Liberty rallies and
I set up a Bitcoin table and I'm just like, here's some information on Bitcoin.
I figure people are gonna come up and love me.
But everybody comes up and they're like, this is the market of the beast.
This is the one world currency of Revel.
I mean, it is, it is crazy.
And I'm a Christian Guy.
I like, I I, I can speak the language, but it's crazy to me that this
is the reaction people have to it anyways, so it's the, the, the image
that we have in the Bitcoin space.
It, it changes from group to group.
When I go and talk to these, these liberty minded people, and they, they
wanna know why Bitcoin has value.
And so me explaining the, the Austrian economic answer of, of market value
and marginal utility value, like that just falls on deaf ears to them.
And so,
subject subjective theory,
value, subject, subjective.
Yeah.
There you go.
Excuse me.
Um, so subjective value, it's like th that just falls on deaf ears.
And so I need to talk about.
Immutability and censorship resistance.
Right.
I immediately will go to, we have to talk about the Canadian trucker rally.
Like they don't care about scarcity.
Like, that group doesn't care about scarcity.
But when I'm talking to my, my stepfather, that's a gold bug.
Uh, then I need to talk about scarcity.
Right?
So I think that that's, I think Bitcoiners just need to be willing and ready to be
flexible in, in tailoring what we say.
There's, there's so many components to Bitcoin that I think get
lost on the general population.
Um, we geek out on it and we think that, man, there's, there's, there's
so many things that Bitcoin solves.
There's so many really interesting facets to it.
The, the, the difficulty adjustment of Bitcoin mining is, wow, that's such a
cool innovation that, like if you study Bitcoin mining, this is fascinating, but.
But my mom doesn't want to hear about that.
And so how do I appeal to my mom?
Or how do I appeal, again, back talking to the altcoins, like how do we appeal
to the Altcoin community when this 21 year old kid got into to Doge because he
could buy a million Dogecoin for 12 bucks.
Like how do you, how do you talk to those people?
And so I think being able to tailor a Bitcoin message for each of
those people is really important.
So that's kind of how I wrote the book.
That's a Bitcoin evangelism is, is here's, here's different, uh, ways to sharpen
your argument for the Dogecoin guy.
And that's as easy as telling them about SATs.
I was pretty shocked at the Bitcoin Miami conference about how many
crypto people came up and, uh, they said, oh, how much is your book?
And I said, oh, it's 75,000 SATs.
And they go, what's a sat?
And I said, oh, a SAT is a piece of a Bitcoin.
And here they are at the biggest Bitcoin conference in the world
and they haven't heard of a sat.
And guess what I asked this guy, I said, well, what do you do?
He goes, I work, I work for an exchange.
And a guy that works for an exchange, he actually makes his living in this space
somehow didn't understand what a SAT was.
And so the, the person that wants a lot of something, SAT's appeal
to them in, in, in, in a major way.
So I, I think this fundamentally comes down to the argument of, I know
there's, there's Bitcoin purists that, that say, we, we don't need those
type of people in the space, right?
We don't, we don't need the guy that just wants a lot of something.
If he wants a million Doge, let him have his doge and he can be on his merry way.
Um, and so I I I, I'm of the belief that I do want those people in the space.
I want them to, to touch some Bitcoin.
I want them to touch SATs because I think that that's a gateway drug into them fully
understanding the, the rest of the space.
Um, and so I think having an argument or a questions prepared for those
type of people, a line of reasoning, a logos that appeals to those type of
people, um, is, is really important.
And, and that's, again, that's the message of my book.
And that's, it's, it breaks those different, those different, uh, uh, you
know, sections down based on different groups of people you might interact with.
Y
you know what, Brian, I, I kind of wanna back you up a little bit here on this one
point too, because, uh, It's not true that someone can't get into crypto and actually
understand Bitcoin because my, my own journey with it, I, I played around with
Ethereum for a little bit in 2017 because it's what was going around my office.
I don't know why my office thought Ethereum was cool, but whatever.
Like, it's, it's what I heard about and it crashed and I forgot about it.
And then crypto is going up back in 2021, whatever.
So, so I check on my Coinbase account and oh my goodness, my $30
of Ethereum is a lot more money.
And, and I start playing around with it.
And I get on like Reddit and, and a bunch of other places.
Not Twitter, though.
Twitter, uh, that's probably good.
Actually at that time I would've gotten into crypto Twitter.
Not Bitcoin, Twitter, but I got into Reddit and I went to do
the cryptocurrency sub Reddit.
And honestly, the only reason that I went into Bitcoin at all was because I kept
on seeing people say, okay, you gotta have a little bit of Bitcoin because.
That's kind of the safe thing.
You gotta have that in your portfolio.
Whatever I did, I did all the things that a, a new crypto person should do, have
a balanced portfolio, whatever it is.
And the, and the thing about it was, I, like, I thought I was
doing that in a, in a good way.
And I, I had no idea what Bitcoin was.
Any idea about it.
And the, the, the thing was of course, I, I went down the
bitcoin rabbit hole properly.
I found proper people that were talking about it in a good way.
But it, it took that to get me from baseline crypto to Bitcoin.
And I mean, now I'm a balls deep toxic maxi, like, you know, don't get me wrong.
But, but the, the, the thing here is that like I, it really, you, you can
be super ignorant about Bitcoin and be, and still be into crypto otherwise.
Mm-hmm.
And even be into having some Bitcoin in your portfolio just because it's
the so-called blue chip or something.
So, yeah.
I, I, I think it, I think it is important to, to try and bridge that
gap to the, to the crypto people.
Yeah.
Uh, well, just to clarify what I was saying before, I think the creators of
the share coins all know about Bitcoin, not, not the people buying them.
That's, that's, uh, most people buying them have no clue.
Like, uh, they wouldn't be buying them if they had, it's like, like, uh,
socialists who, who, who understood economics wouldn't be socialist.
It's about the same thing.
Right.
I, I have a question for you.
I brought this up the other night, and, uh, it was, yeah, I just,
I think it's, it's a fascinating thought experiment for me.
It's like I, me, me trying to really learn.
So if we go back to, to, to January of 2009, would you consider
Bitcoin a shit coin at that point?
Was was, was there, was there certain markers or is there a certain point
where, where bitcoin maybe was a shit coin and it no longer is, or
how, how, how would you define that?
Yeah.
I, I wasn't aware of Bitcoin in 2009, so, so I have no
like, personal story with that.
But when I discovered Bitcoin, I was skeptic.
and then I took a course about digital currencies in the plural form, and I
got to understand like the basics of the elliptic curve, cryptography and
all of this and the maths behind it.
And I, uh, studied quite a lot of maths in my life.
So, so I understand stuff like that fairly, fairly easily.
what what always puzzled me though was like, uh, if there's, if the thing is
that, uh, If the value proposition has something to do with this thing being
finite, how then can we create, how, how could copies of it ever work then?
Because all of it is, it's a number on a computer, so making copies of that, it's
just like you can make infinite copies.
It's like the, the regression there.
I I, I never, I never bought that, that narrative.
So, but, but, but then again, I was still skeptic towards Bitcoin be,
because to me, like either, I always thought either Bitcoin work, either
Bitcoin works or none of it works.
Uh, so.
And I'm sort of still there because there's, there's a small chance
that Bitcoin, for some odd reason, that I can't foresee will just
break down and not function anymore.
But if that happens, I'm still happy because I have this fantastic network of
people, uh, honest people around the world that I, that I, I know people, the best
people on every continent at this point.
But, uh, so, so it was all worth it anyway.
Having, having said that though, the, the thing that really convinced
me about Bitcoin being sufficiently decentralized to actually pull off rules
without rulers was during the, the, when the seg two x hard fork was denied.
Because for, for those you that don't know, there's a quite a good book
called The Block Size Wars about this.
Uh, I do not agree with that description of events.
Fully, but I say I agree with like 80% of the description of what happened
in that book, uh, that the guy who wrote it is still sort of trying to
keep this, that what we did might have been wrong and what the other
side might have had some merit to it.
I view it a slightly differently because, so there was an upgrade
Bitcoin called Segregated Witness, which all the users wanted because that
would enable the Lightning Network in the future and, and stuff like that.
So everyone sort of wanted that except for a few, Well, very wealthy players
who, uh, who, um, could make more money from, from mining if, if SegWit wasn't
there to, to give the short version here.
There was something called ASIC Boost, which SegWit would sort
of deny, and this debates of whether that was ever used or not.
And I'm not the most technical person, so I don't, I wouldn't
want to go too deep into that.
But then, uh, there was a big, uh, cabal of the biggest.
Biggest companies in Bitcoin at the time, uh, gathering in New York,
uh, to form an agreement on the, the, the roadmap for the future.
What, what to do.
And they decided that we're, we're first going to implement SEG and then increase
the block size by a hundred percent.
Uh, so the second hard fork was called, or, or Segway itself was
not a hard fork, it was a soft fork.
But then there was a proposed so, uh, hard fork called SEG two X, which
would, uh, increase the block size, double the block size, uh, because
fees were getting high in 2017.
Also, uh, similar to what's happening now.
And, uh, it's kind of fascinating how the narratives from 2017
seem to repeat themselves.
Now this, you know, documents on the blockchain and all, all this
stuff that was going on back then too, and it was proven wrong and,
you know, discard that and move on.
So, so, uh, but anyway, um, The, the two x hard fork never happened
because the users didn't want it.
All the nodes signaled the, or a sufficient amount of nodes signaled
that they didn't want this upgrade.
So after a while, the mi, the miners who had, like, they were
sitting on like 99% of the wealth in Bitcoin, uh, at least the fee at 12.
Uh, and, and they, they still had to bow down to whatever the users
wanted because they knew if they, if they wouldn't do what the, the node
runners told them to, to do, they would've, uh, they would've lost
their business completely because Bill Bitcoin would've failed at that point.
So, so the, the hard fork never happened, which to me was, was proof enough, that,
that, uh, The, the users were actually in control, or, or rather, the, everyone in
the network was in control and it, it was resistance resistant to change in, in that
crucial way that was needed because what, what the two x hard for would've done is
that it would've set the precedent for.
Hard forks like that happening over and over again in the future.
So then they could have just doubled the block size and doubled it and doubled
it and doubled it, which in the long run leads to people not, not being
able to afford to run their own nodes.
And when people do, do not afford to run their own nodes, because
they're, they need these giant hard drives, uh, which are costly.
Uh, then Bitcoin is not decentralized anymore.
And then, uh, then they're a small elite forms that can make
decisions for everyone else.
Uh, so it becomes much more vulnerable to text.
so, so that's the denial of two x was when bitcoin, when I discovered
Bitcoin because I, I think all of this is a personal journey.
hyperbitcoinization is a personal thing.
The discovery of Bitcoin is a, is a personal thing.
It wasn't created by Satoshi.
It emerged from the community.
That was a product of Satoshi's actions, but also of other people's actions.
And the white paper is just a tiny part of Bitcoin's history and how
it emerges from smaller parts in, into becoming this bigger thing.
Um, yeah, so, so that's the way I view it.
Um, And, uh, that's, that's the story of how I got.
How I got to a point in the rabbit hole where I couldn't
climb up of it's out it again.
Um, the seg two x hard fork failing.
It's, yeah, it's fascinating how something failing could, could be so compelling.
But yeah, I, I agree that, that, that seemed like a pretty, a pretty, uh,
substantial moment in the history of Bitcoin and yeah, probably if you had
to point to, to one period of time that.
Showed Bitcoin's resilience was, was that because I think that it was really
easy to gravitate towards the Segway two x for a lot of people, which, you know,
ended up being Bitcoin cash because the, the, their, their ar their arguments
sat, anybody that had a kind of a fiat mindset would've gravitated towards that.
Right.
Faster, faster transactions and, you know Yeah.
More profitability and, you know, they, all the, all the arguments
they were making were, were, were sounded very compelling if you
had a, uh, a, a short time horizon or, or a high time preference.
Um, the, the de node operators through that process really kind of took the,
the long view and like you said, said we're gonna keep the block size, the
block size smaller so that we can continue to run these nodes so that
people don't have to outsource these to Amazon web services or what, whatever.
So,
Yeah.
Um, I, I replied to a, a, uh, clip of Eric Weinstein, uh, talking
about Bitcoin this morning.
Uh, and how I disagreed with, with almost everything he said, uh, be because
I felt I, I had to because someone was wrong on the internet, you know?
So he said, first, he said that you are all here because of a white paper.
I mean, uh, I'd love to have Eric Weinstein on the pod someday.
I, I, I, I like the guy a lot, and this is nothing personal against him, but this
is just a reply to his points because I think I have a different perspective.
He said that we're, we're all here because of a white paper,
which I don't think is true.
Like the white paper is only, uh, a tiny part of, of Bitcoin's history, as I said.
And, uh, then, then he said, uh, Uh, we, we need to stop
pretending that Bitcoin is perfect.
And what he misses there is that Bitcoin never needed to be perfect.
It just needed to be good enough to last forever.
Which of my is one of my favorites?
Tomer Strolight quotes.
Uh, so that's the thing.
Uh, you, you reach this point where it's good enough and then that lasts forever.
And that's the point.
It doesn't change like it sies.
Uh, so, and, and then he said that we still need to innovate.
Innovation is, uh, crucial to this surviving, and it's not,
uh, lack of innovation is, in a way, resistance to change is way
more important than innovation.
We can innovate, innovate on layers on top of it, and we can in, but
we want the base layer to stay as static as absolutely possible.
So, so, uh, and then says in order to, to, uh, for.
To, to provide societal freedom and not only personal freedom, and I think
that's oxymoronic because I think society is made out of a people and personal
freedom is like, you can't have societal freedoms without personal freedoms.
Right.
It always starts with individual.
I'm an anarchist or Konsensus, so, so there's no societal freedom
without individual freedoms first.
Yeah.
And, and then he says like, uh, uh, uh, claims that Bitcoin is, uh, you know,
if people know you have Bitcoin, they can come home and, and do the $5 or $20
wrench attack and, and, and threaten you and take all your stuff, but.
What he misses there.
Uh, this sounds like an attack on Eric, but it isn't, it's really just
replying to these points because I think there's, there's a lot of confusion here.
The, the thing is, you are being attacked right now with a, with a very cheap
wrench at all times because someone is allowed to run a money printer.
Mm-hmm.
And all further on top of that, you, you need to pay taxes,
otherwise you go to jail.
Mm-hmm.
So this is already happening.
Fiat has that problem with.
Bitcoin makes violence way less profitable.
Mm-hmm.
Because when you cannot know when, uh, how much another person has, or,
and you cannot take it, uh, by force very easily because the person can
give up a fraction of their Bitcoin and not tell you about the rest.
Yeah.
The, the, the better choice for you as the attacker is to just provide
something of value to the person and get something of value back.
So, so it, it moves the shelling point of violence in that, in that sense.
And Fiat does not, Fiat does the opposite.
It's, it's extremely easy to take stuff from people in fiat, especially if
they have credit cards and debit cards.
Tracking every single payment they do.
Then a centralized authority has all the information, uh, a about
all of your financial transactions.
They, they, they can and are being violent to you and
stealing your stuff all the time.
So you're not, you're not living in peace.
You're, you are living in a, in a perpetual war mm-hmm.
That the government wages against you.
Yeah.
You're being violated against.
Every single microsecond because someone has a mic, uh, a money printer.
That's the main reason, and that's the problem that Bitcoin solves.
So yeah, just wanted
to ramp there for what their, their vi their violence doesn't need to be perfect.
It just needs to last forever.
Right.
Exactly.
And that's what Exactly, and that's what they've done.
They've figured out full of violence.
Yeah.
That, that, that's just perpetual and it's below the surface and it's
constantly simmering, not below the balance, best riding the nads.
Um, so, but yeah, I mean, to your point, I think this is one of the
most compelling things that Yeah, when I, I find that this is a more
interesting talking point for the, the gold bug or the fiat minded person
that maybe is a little bit wealthier.
They said, well, yeah, $5 wrench attack.
I like that you've added the inflation into the wrench attacks and now it's $20.
Um, but, but yeah, they say, well, if somebody puts a gun to my head,
All my, they, they know that all my Bitcoin could just be on, you
know, my, my seed signer somewhere.
And I said, yeah, you know, I'll bring up the points.
Like you said, well, of course you need to have your, your, your dummy one, right?
You need to have your one that has a thousand dollars worth of
Bitcoin or what, you know, has, has two, 2 million satoshis on it.
You give that one over.
So obviously there's, there's, there's things that you can put into
your, your, your protection plan, but they need to understand that.
It doesn't make sense to rob somebody for Bitcoin in the same way that it would
make sense if you have a safe in your house with a hundred thousand dollars
of fiat, uh, that that actually could be a very lucrative, lucrative theft.
Right?
They're actually incentivized to kill me because as soon as they pull the trigger
on that gun, they have an unlimited amount of time to search through my property
or search through my residence to find that safe that's under the floorboards.
They will given enough time, they will eventually find that safe and
they'll be able to extract that value.
But if they have a gun to my head and I never gave them my seed phrase,
then they've automatically lost the ability to access my funds.
So them pulling the trigger, disqualifies them from being able to
perform that theft in the same way that it actually frees them to roam
my property, to find my funds in, in, in a fiat sense or in a gold sense.
If I have a stash of gold in my house.
It's the same thing.
And so, uh, Bitcoin has this built in protection that.
I'm the, as soon as you blow my brains, my brains were the only thing that,
that, that had access to those coins.
Yeah.
And uh, at the end of the day, all of the bitcoins are in someone's head.
It's all about keeping a secret, like the seed phrase, if you broadcasted
the sec seed phrase, put it on TV or at a billboard somewhere, the
Bitcoin would disappear pretty quickly because someone would figure it out.
But to even know that a seed phrase is a seed phrase, you can hide them in a poem,
for instance, or like, they're, they're such a, We've just be begun to scratch
the surface of how to do Bitcoin security because there's, there's so many ways of
keeping a secret, and that's all it is.
It's all about just keeping a secret.
And you can keep one secret, you can keep many secrets, but at the
end of the day, all Bitcoin's rec reside within a person's head.
Uh, or a couple of persons had a couple of people's heads, right?
So that's all it is, and that's, that's what makes it so much more resilient
to violence than physical things, because physical things are, Physical.
Mm-hmm.
This is not physical.
This is in your brain.
Yes.
It's a different thing.
It's in the intellectual realm, not in the realm of physical violence.
Right.
And everybody has intellect where not everybody has physical strength or
physical means to protect themselves.
So it's, it's literally the most equalizing type of, of, of property
that you can have because everybody has the ability to secure that.
It's the only, I believe you've said this before, it's the only true property Right.
That that could ever exist because they can't be taken by physical force.
Um, and, and, and Luke, to your, to your earlier question about, uh,
marketing, I think, I think that one of the things that, um, I found was a,
was an early, um, boost in the shot, uh, or, you know, boost in the arm of,
of my book sales and kind of got, when I was starting to do my book tour,
people were, were fascinated by my book.
They'd never heard my name before.
And so, you know, how, how am I gonna sell a book to people if they don't know who
I am or they don't know my background?
So what I did was I actually hid a seed phrase.
In the early copies of my book, and I said that here, this is meant to be a lesson.
There's, there's 12 words hidden throughout the book, and the first
person that finds it wins 5 million sets.
And so I want people to understand that, that it, yes, it, Bitcoin
is about keeping a secret.
You can even.
Be kind of loose with that secret.
I can try to give that secret out to the world, but unless
you, like here, I promise you those 12 words are in this book.
But unless you know how to find them, it's still a secret.
And so even by putting that out publicly, like you said,
you could hide it in a poem.
I hid it in my book.
My, my, my daughter.
She, uh, she has this, uh, fun way of, of her, her seed phrase is written down.
I, I won't tell you the exact method.
Methodology, of course, but she, she wrote a, uh, a poem in crayon that she
keeps in her safe and will say every, every fifth word is her seed phrase.
And it just looks like a child's poem written in crayon.
But it's, it's all of her, you know, it's her, you know, 50,000 SATs she
owns or whatever it is, and it's, it's her way of securing that.
And it's so fun to talk to children about.
Securing a seed phrase and, and, and just here, here, this is why it matters.
It's the secret.
This is something that you can keep and you don't have
to tell mom and dad about it.
Um, she came up with this own interesting way of securing her seed phrase, uh, that,
that I, that I wouldn't have thought of.
Um, and so she, she even told me, she goes, yeah, if somebody were to,
to break into my safe, if my brother was to break into my safe, he would
see this and he would just think it was a story that I wrote down,
or it was a poem that I wrote down.
He wouldn't even know that it was my seed phrase, you know,
tho those types of things.
So it's, uh, it's very fascinating talking to children and see how when
they, when they start to grasp Bitcoin, what are the, the innovations in
Bitcoin aren't, like you said, don't need to happen at the base layer.
They need to happen at the intellectual layer.
Our children are gonna have more layer.
The social layer, right?
Yeah.
So, so, so yeah.
In a way, it's safer to keep the seed phrase outta the safe than in
the safe, because if, if there's a safe, so that implies that there's
something valuable in the safe.
If, if the, if it's just a poem on a, in, in some notebook somewhere,
then no one, no one will ever know.
Like they, they don't even know what they're looking for.
Yeah.
So, so that's the thing.
And I just realized I can make a lot of people do a lot of stupid stuff by
claiming that there's 12 words hidden in each and every one of my books.
And I stored about a hundred big bitcoins in each.
There may or may
not be.
Yeah.
There's not, don't believe him.
So good one.
Brian.
Has anyone found, I guess no one has found them yet.
Somebody found it.
It took about six months.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Alright.
I made it pretty complicated too.
Um, it was a, it was a woman from the, the, that I met at the BEEF Initiative.
She, she found it nice and yeah, it was, uh, it was good.
So.
Excellent.
Did you hear about Michael Dunworth?
Uh, the Peter Dunworth brother?
Uh, my Australian friends, uh, he, no.
Michael sent a Bitcoin to the future, to the year 2,140.
Uh, uh, time locked it and, oh, the, the key is, is on the
internet for everyone to see.
So anyone who claims that in 2,140 gets an, an entire Bitcoin, whereas like a
couple of cities, uh, gosh, at that point,
that's amazing.
It's right.
And the, the most amazing part of it is that you can actually do that.
You can just tell the, the tell the network that these, this Bitcoin
here, this here Bitcoin cannot be unlocked and sent to some other
address until this block height.
That's amazing.
And then you protect them from even yourself.
So that's
a really good point.
I don't trust my kids, but I'm gonna pass this on to my
grandkids so I'm gonna time one.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's possible right now.
And people ought to be doing it, but they are.
And some are, but far
too few.
Wow.
Thank you for sharing that cause I didn't know that actually.
That's really interesting.
Yeah.
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what else do we have, Luke?
Um, it's a good time to wrap up
maybe.
Yeah.
Honestly I think, I think we've had a good convo, so yeah.
Thanks Brian.
Yeah.
Loved it.
Can you tell us, our listeners, where to find you and uh, maybe any
last words you have about orange
pill app?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Well, thanks for, for having me on.
This was just fun.
Like, if there was no recording, I would just love to hang with you guys and chat.
So, um, you know, this is, yeah, my pleasure.
As far as reaching out to me, touch, touch base with me on the
orange pill app, um, I'm much more responsive on the orange pill app just
because I, I know it's Bitcoiners.
Um, I try to get back to everybody on Twitter, so I'll do my best to
get back to, to people on Twitter.
And uh, you know, we, we love interacting with the social layer of Bitcoin, so,
um, that, that's really important.
There we go.
Always, always doing a nice show for it.
Um, but I think it is important.
That mean, that's my, my one last pitch to sign off with is that, We can all do
something in Bitcoin today to, to help build, to lower our time preference.
Your time preference will just naturally lower if you're trying to
do something that's of material value.
So whether that's hosting a meetup, whether that's going to, to to Prague,
whether that's doing something that's, you know, being Konsensus, Network and
selling books, like all, all of these things, it, it gets you focused on, okay,
I can do something we, cause every human wants to do something here and now, right?
Like we have a, we have a high time preference.
With our day.
What, what's my checklist for today?
That's fine.
Like on productive things, we should have a, a, a high time preference because if
I need to make this hamburger, I can't wait forever for the hamburger to be made.
So we need to build today.
Those are the things we can have high time preference on.
But what is the focus in the long term?
Are we building something that's gonna last till 2140?
So I can unlock Michael's dunworth to Bitcoin, which I, which I for sure
am now gonna strive to live to be 170 years old just so that I can get access
to a few cities worth of Bitcoin.
Um, but what we, what we pitch with orange pill app is if you don't have an idea
for how you wanna build in Bitcoin, Help build the social layer, help build the
social layer of Bitcoin by plugging in.
Um, if you're the first Bitcoin that you know of in your area, cuz you
live in a remote area, then, then plug into the network and be that
first node in that local community.
Because what happens is every network needs to start with
a node somewhere and then the network will build out around you.
So be willing to be that first person.
Or if you're in an area that's high density already and you have 50 Bitcoiners
that are on orange pill app near you, then start interacting with those people.
Go grab coffee, create an event in your area, and, and, and host a meetup
or you know, there's, there's Bitcoin games that you can play now you can,
you know, Buy one of these games and, and host a game night or do, you know,
monopoly party or a poker party or whatever, and just get together with
Bitcoiners and, and, and do those things.
Um, and so that, that's my pitch to people is find a way to, uh, contribute
to and build in Bitcoin today.
Um, because we'll have a, a brighter orange future tomorrow.
Um, and, uh, yeah, orange pill app, if you go to the orange pill
app.com, you can sign up, you can pay in Bitcoin if you want.
You can sign up through the app app store and pay through the app store
if you prefer the, the fiat method that's, you know, fine as well.
Um, and, uh, yeah, look forward to later this year.
We will have our orange pages, our, our merchant section of the orange pill
app, where you can find local Bitcoin merchants, um, which we are very excited
about as well because I think that that's gonna contribute to hyperbitcoinization,
um, of, of being able to just pragmatically orange pill merchants.
So, um, and as far as my book.
It's available on Amazon.
It's called Bitcoin Evangelism.
Uh, feel free to to check it out.
Um, it's on Audible, all of those places as well.
So thank you guys.
I, I really appreciate it.
Luke and Canoe guys are, are awesome and you guys are an inspiration.
You guys are really, uh, pushing the intellectual layer of Bitcoin and, uh,
I always find it challenging and fun.
Thanks a lot.
Um, yeah, everyone, everyone thinks they need to be a developer to contribute
to Bitcoin, but the opposite is true.
Everyone's a fucking developer in this space.
We need the division of labor, we need all those sorts of other skills.
So, uh, yeah, go make yourself useful.
Um, thanks so much for coming on.
Um, Brian, looking forward to the next spaces and the next, uh, OPA meeting,
whenever that is, after Prague, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
Hope Perfect.
And, uh, yeah, we'll fill you guys in on this orange pilling Congress
thing that should, we should have lots of fun content to provide, uh, yeah.
Hopefully some fun reactions from politicians on Capitol Hill.
Yep.
Yeah, that'll be fun.
Awesome.
All right, take care,
Brian.
What did you think of that episode with Brian?
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