Bitcoin education doesn't matter.
The product of Bitcoin education does.
So what we are doing here is a means to an end.
The end is empowerment, the end is agency,
the end is sovereignty.
The best way to get there, I believe,
is via Bitcoin education,
via independent and partial Bitcoin education,
because the second and third order,
they're echoing out into the future are so profound.
So the way that the world is now,
we don't have power in our own lives.
And what that means is we are disincentivized
to build, to create, to plan, right?
Because the rules of the game are made by somebody else
and they could change them on a whim.
Not only do we control our money
once we understand Bitcoin,
if the path we take to understand in our money
is also one in which it empowers our mind,
then we have so much more influence on our future, right?
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
And that's what we're giving people.
["The Bitcoin Time Chains"]
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 856655
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is John Dennehy,
the founder of Me Premier Bitcoin,
aka My First Bitcoin.
Since 2001, Me Premier Bitcoin has taught over 35,000 students
in El Salvador about Bitcoin
and created open source resources
like the 10 week Bitcoin Diploma Program
and the Educators' Lesson Plan.
Their curriculum has been used in over 20 countries
by more than 30 different projects,
including independent education projects in Argentina,
Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras,
India, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa,
Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Wow.
But this is still very much the beginning for them.
So if you wanna support their incredible efforts,
grab the link in the show notes for their Geyser page
or go directly to geyser.fund
slash project slash Me Premier Bitcoin.
Me Premier Bitcoin is a non-profit
and they also have a commitment
to never take any government funding.
The only condition of this collaboration
that they have with El Salvador
is that all materials created are open source
and can be freely used by Bitcoin educators around the world.
In this conversation, John and I dig into the origin story
of Me Premier Bitcoin
and some of his very colorful history,
especially with the police,
discuss grassroots Bitcoin education and adoption
and how building a better system is more effective
than trying to change the current system from within.
This was an incredibly inspiring conversation
and I hope it inspires you to go out there
and educate others about Bitcoin.
And again, if you can donate a few sats,
head to their Geyser page via the link in the show notes.
These guys really do incredible work.
Before we dive into me,
a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast,
wherever you're listening or watching
and check out my sponsor, Bitbox, also in the show notes
or go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use promo code walker to get 5% off
the fully open source,
Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet.
You can also grab links to protect yourself
from SIM swap attacks using a Fani and cloaked wireless.
You can choose which one you'd like.
I am a one man show,
so when you use my partner links,
it genuinely helps me keep this show running.
So thank you.
And if you're a Bitcoin only company,
interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website,
Bitcoinpodcast.net.
All right, without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with John Dennehy.
John, welcome to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
It's great to have you here.
Good to see you again.
Not in the flesh this time,
but via the old interwebs.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Good seeing you again as well.
Are you fully recovered from Nashville?
Because I know I needed a couple of deep sleeps,
which I did not get right away.
But last night,
I started to kind of become a human again, I think.
Yeah.
So I'm on a similar trajectory.
So I was exhausted after Nashville.
And we had planned this way in advance
without thinking we're gonna be exhausted after Nashville.
But we had two days,
like immediately after Nashville,
we had a two-day leadership retreat
for Meek Merbid going on a volcano here,
which ended with like a big hike.
And it was like just intense conversation
and then also intense physical activity,
which was right after Nashville.
So yesterday was like my first day off
and there was a lot of sleep.
Only in El Salvador is it just very nonchalant for you to say,
yeah, we had our leadership retreat on top of volcano,
like as one does, just enormous stuff, right?
You guys not through that?
Yeah, that's not a normal thing for leadership retreats.
You don't have them by active volcanoes.
Okay, cool.
It's been a while since I've been to El Salvador now.
The last time was for, we went twice in 2022,
the first time just to visit.
And that's where we met Chimberra
and got to see some of the awesome stuff
that they're doing in El Sante and with Hope House.
And the second time we were like,
ah, man, I hope we get to come back soon.
And then lo and behold, a couple months later,
we were emceeing at Adopting Bitcoin,
which is like, wow, this worked out perfectly.
But now we haven't been back since,
I think we're going back again
at the beginning of next year.
So I'm excited about that.
It's been too long.
Yeah, and I think you'll notice so many changes
from 2022 to when you come back.
I noticed the changes and I'm living here, right?
Like I'm here every day.
Usually it's really hard to see a place change
if you're there.
It's easier if you're there
and you take a break and you come back.
But things are happening so quickly here
that you could be on the ground and see them too,
which is kind of incredible.
It's not something that is typically,
I guess not something we're really used to in the US,
let's say, to see the effect of change kind of in real time.
It tends to be more retrospective, it feels like.
You look back and you're like, oh wow,
look how things have changed,
not always for the better,
but it's pretty cool.
The biggest takeaway for me both times in El Salvador
was the energy and the optimism
that you feel there from people.
It's really palpable and people are really,
to a fault, everyone I talked to was so proud
to show you whatever piece of their country
they were occupying to have you experience it.
And that's a really profound thing, I think.
Just to have that unbridled pride,
which hasn't always been the case for El Salvador, obviously.
It's more of in recent memory that's been possible.
Yeah, very recent, in fact.
Yeah, I think that it's this intangible thing
that touches everything else, right?
So El Salvador and Bitcoin are such a complex,
sometimes confusing, but I think ultimately great couple
because I think they both encapsulate hope, right?
They both encapsulate that tomorrow not just can,
but will be better than today.
And that just echoes to everything else
that touches everything else.
I mean, that's why I'm attracted to Bitcoin, right?
Not I'm attracted to Bitcoin because it's the hope
that the future could be different from the present.
And that is something that is on the ground here in El Salvador,
something that you could feel in the air
that people believe that the future
will be better than the present.
And that, I mean, that's the only way to live, right?
Like I can't imagine anything else.
It's so true.
And it just, you notice such a big difference.
Like when, you know, for instance,
you know, I'm from, well, not from,
but I now live in generally the Chicago area.
And it's funny because, you know,
whenever you travel somewhere and you say, you know,
where are you from?
Like, oh, Chicago, USA, you know,
and people look at you like,
oh, pretty dangerous there, huh?
Like, oh, that's gotta be kind of rough.
Like, and I have to imagine that was the case
for most Salvadorans for a very, very long time,
except to the extreme.
I mean, Chicago is actually, it's pretty fucking brutal,
if we're being honest.
Like it's a bad situation.
But El Salvador was a far worse situation.
And now it's very much not.
Like I remember the first time going there,
even though I knew Bukele had already started
these gang crackdowns, people, you know,
when we said, oh yeah, we're going to El Salvador,
they're like, oh, are you worried?
Like, are you, you know, do you think you'll be safe?
And we're like, yeah, I think we'll be just fine.
Like they've really changed things drastically.
And truly, I mean, I came back and people are like,
was it okay?
And you're like, well, yeah, it was fine.
There weren't just marauding gangs on the streets.
Like there were, you know, previously it was,
it was quite peaceful.
It was quite nice.
The food was great, the people were great.
The landscape is unbelievable.
And it was an incredible experience.
And I am very excited to come back and just kind of see
how things may have changed in the couple short years
since we were last there.
Yeah, so there's this, or there was this monument
to the peace accords which were signed in 1992, I believe.
So the peace accords of the Civil War here.
And it was installed by the last,
by the president that preceded Bukele.
So quite recent, right?
We're not talking like 1993, we're talking,
would have been like 2013, 14, somewhere around there.
No, even later, I think.
But the term preceded Bukele's first term.
And it was in a very prominent location.
It was on the side of like a major thoroughfare
here in the capital.
And they tore it down and turned it into a park.
There's, you know, I don't want to get too into
the politics here, but there's a,
a framing of the Civil War,
which this current government adheres to,
that the Civil War didn't actually end in 1992, right?
That it just, it continued by other means.
And that led to the gangs and like that,
that peacetime period that they were celebrating
from 1992 was false.
Like now is the time to celebrate the peace.
And then there's some backstory with the specific monument
that it was the president's wife that designed it.
So there were some charges of nepotism there, right?
Anyway, so it was wrapped up in all these other things,
but the point is that this was,
this was a prominent monument in the capital.
And on Monday it was there, on Tuesday it was gone,
on Wednesday it was a park.
And like that's the speed of things here, right?
Like they have monuments in the US
that maybe weren't put up, but commemorate,
but either the Civil War or in the period shortly after.
So it matches with that.
And that's a debate that goes on for years,
decades later, what to do with them.
Like here it's literally from the start of the week
to the end of the week, like the reality just shifts, right?
Like that is the, when I saw that, I was like,
wow, that is quick.
That is so quick, how fast things are moving here.
It's, I mean, it's gotta be a pretty exciting place
to be at this time.
Like, yeah, you know, it's still,
El Salvador has a long ways to go
because it's starting from quite a deficit.
You know, it's needing to pick itself up.
But like, I mean, you can't help but feel
the contagious hope when you're there, which is cool.
You know, it's just, it's a neat thing.
It's an inspiring thing to see people that are like,
hey, things are getting better here.
And I know they're getting better
because they're getting better for me.
They're getting better for everyone I talk to.
That goes a very long way and it's cool to see.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
You know, before we get in too deep,
just for folks that don't know you,
I'd love to start out with just a simple question,
which is just, who are you?
And how did you get here today
to be doing something pretty incredible,
which is spreading open source Bitcoin education,
not just in El Salvador, but now around the world?
Yeah, yeah.
Good question.
And I'll try to, because I know we had talked previously
about kind of a more political angle
or maybe better phrased that we don't need politics angle.
So I'll try to keep that in the thread there,
which won't be hard because that's a thread coming
throughout my adult life.
So I'm from New York originally
and I was 19 when September 11th happened,
which had just a really profound impact on me in the moment,
but just like it was a fork in the road.
I was, I didn't really care about the world before that.
I didn't really know about the world before that.
Like it woke me up.
It woke me up in a way that was very different
from how it woke up most people in my surroundings, right?
It didn't wake me up like, okay, well,
and I for an eye, let's get some blood,
which was the reaction, the dominant reaction at the time,
both from the government, but also from the population.
My reaction was, holy shit,
this is a symptom of something really deep
and let's solve that, right?
Let's solve that.
There is a lack of understanding,
there is a lack of agency.
Like this is not something that happens
in a healthy world, in a healthy system.
So I was in the, within a few days,
me and a few of my classmates
at the University of Parkford in Connecticut,
we formed the People of Tomorrow,
which was just an activist group that ended up,
I mean, we had a few different things
that we were interested in,
like media literacy and financial literacy among them,
but our main focus quickly became anti-war
just because that was the drumbeat at the time,
was like towards war, right?
So to counter that, and we were inspired,
our mission statement was inspired
by the Port Huron statement
by the Students for a Democratic Society,
and inspired by student movements from the 60s.
And that was a very,
that led to a few years of pretty intense protest organizing,
pretty high incidents of arrest.
Because even then, right,
this is like pre-Bitcoin obviously,
but even then it always seemed absurd to me
to ask permission to show anger
from the person at which you were angry, right?
Like, is it okay if I dissent?
Like that always seemed so absurd to me.
So everything that we did was technically illegal, right?
Which meant that, yeah,
and I was the president of the clubs,
I was pretty well associated with it,
so there were even like preemptive arrests sometimes.
It really took the mask off,
the power of the state, right?
And it's like, hey, if you don't follow our rules,
then it's gonna be uncomfortable for you.
And that came to a head for me,
two years later in 2003, when the war began,
began, then I did civil disobedience with many other people.
We actually like shot down the federal building
in Hartford and said,
government's closed until the war is over,
which I just love that phrase.
But yeah, so I spent that night in jail
and with other protesters,
I were all like in the same wing
and the police kept the lights on.
And this was like the war had just started.
So there was this rally around the flag thing
and everybody was super patriotic.
I mean, patriotic would be the nice way to say it.
Everybody was super nationalist.
And the correction officers kept the lights on all night,
brought a boombox in and played the Star Spangled Banner
and repeat so we could be like better Americans or whatever.
And I gave up on the United States that night,
right, that's the night that I decided
I'm gonna finish my studies.
I was like half, I was less than a year away
from finishing my studies and I'm gonna leave, right?
Like I don't, I'm tired of trying to hold back the tide.
Right, I wanna go somewhere where I could push
the tide forward rather than try to hold it back.
And Latin America was very interesting to me
for a number of reasons,
but there was an economic collapse in Argentina in 2001
and it seemed from afar.
So I studied sociology and media and sociology in undergrads.
I did a lot of reading about social movements
and including modern ones,
like what was happening in Argentina.
And the economy collapsed and people kind of took charge
of their own lives.
There were these self-organized neighborhood assemblies
that took care of like, you know, health and security
and these basic needs, workers took over the factories
and kept producing, but just without the owners.
And you know, I'm sure there's tons of,
tons of problematic things that were happening, right?
Like I was probably romanticizing it,
you know, being 21 years old,
but I was like, cool, Latin America seems like a place
where people, people, not just in theory,
but they have effectively a veto power over the status quo.
Like if things get past a certain point,
people will stand up and change things,
which is something that I've never seen in the US.
Unfortunately, like I saw this,
the war wasn't necessarily popular, right?
There were a number of things
that weren't necessarily popular,
but there was this really defeatist attitude.
I'm like, well, that's just the way it is, you know?
Let's vote for somebody else next time.
So yeah, I lived in Ecuador, I moved to Ecuador
and I lived there for about five years, which is awesome
because I happened to arrive in Ecuador
at a time of political instability.
So I was able to like literally participate
in a couple of revolutions there,
like literally like people power movements
over through the government, you know,
like the president fled in a helicopter
because the airport was taken over.
And that was amazing at the time,
but then just another disappointment
because this new power class took over
and after not too much time,
the new power class looked a lot
like the old power class, right?
They said different things, they wore different colors,
they had different like lapels
that they put on their shoulder,
but it kind of seemed like for the average person,
they might have well have been the same thing.
So that was at the time,
inspired that like, oh, people could rise up
and change things, but hindsight disappointed
and maybe go back to that thread,
but just to bring it to modern day and Bitcoin.
I also got deported in Ecuador and snuck back in
and spent like a few years living there illegally
with the help of some unsavory individuals,
which is a whole different enlightening experience.
But yeah, 2013, so actually before that,
in 2011, I was back in the US, back in New York
and I could buy Wall Street, seemed very excited.
I was involved with that, you know,
spent some nights sleeping in the park,
spent some nights sleeping in jail again.
Common theme for help, right?
And that was again, at the time, encouraging,
but it just didn't have the right frameworks to resist.
I remember this was, this is just a cool story,
maybe worth a little tangent,
just to think about like the game theory
and like the challenge of really trying to,
because I think that the ideals of Occupy Wall Street
were revolutionary, right, it was to decentralize power.
Like it, but there's unanticipated challenges.
Like that is so much harder than people think.
And one of the things, so again, I'm staying in the park,
just like this liberated zone or whatever.
And it was great, people were so wonderful,
they were so helpful.
If you were cold, somebody gave you a jacket, right?
If you were hungry, somebody gave you food.
Like we're all in this together, great spirit.
And obviously the police weren't big fans
of what was happening.
So what the police did, so because there was like,
free stuff basically for people in need,
what the police did, and I don't know how organized this was,
like if this came from the very top,
or it was just like some precincts that thought of this,
but they started to pick up the big ones, right?
They started to pick up homeless people,
you know, drug addicts,
like people that they had picked up for like petty theft,
and drop them off in the park and say,
there's free food here, you know, there's like shelter here,
like, hey, go take advantage of these people basically, right?
And they did, right?
That like the movement wasn't built to handle that.
There was like people came that were hungry to the kitchen,
so they were fed, they came, but it created this disunity
within the movement, like within the people who were staying
at the camp, like how to handle this, like,
hey, we're all people, let's help everyone,
then other people were like, that's not the point.
We're not like, this isn't about social services, right?
This is about something bigger,
but it created this discord, which I think was probably
the beginning of the end, right?
Because there wasn't this thought out framework,
but that was a fascinating experience to me,
which everything informs, everything informs,
everything in the past informs what we do in the present,
but just these unanticipated challenges
when you're trying to forge a new path.
But anyway, fast forward to more years.
I'm in England and I went to grad school in England
and I had found Bitcoin at that point, right?
In early 2013.
And not intentionally, kind of a bit of,
a bit of dumb luck.
I realized that there was an arbitrage opportunity
between US dollars for Bitcoin
and British pounds for Bitcoin.
So, you know, I exploited that and would buy Bitcoin
in the, again, there was just no infrastructure
for Bitcoin in the UK.
Like there literally weren't Bitcoin exchanges
in the UK at the time.
So I was able to buy Bitcoin in the US
and sell it in the UK, take the pounds,
turn them into dollars, send them to the US
and recycle it and like each time, like,
I mean, it sounds crazy, but even with fees
and everything each time that pile was,
I think six or 7% bigger, right?
And I was just recycling the same pile for like every,
every couple of days.
It just was six or 7% bigger,
which was great for a few reasons.
One was it paid for grad school.
Two was I got to meet really fascinating people
because a lot of this was in person.
And three, I also felt, even though I had some selfish
interest, I also felt like I was helping Bitcoin, right?
I was making it a little bit easier for people
to buy Bitcoin in the UK.
I sold hundreds of people their first Bitcoin.
One of the people wasn't a good person.
One of the people was a criminal, like a pretty major one.
And he had, this wasn't in person meeting.
I also had a bank account set up throughout the country
so people could make direct like cash deposits
or also transfers from their accounts.
And one of these, so this guy had my name
and he had my, my route in number,
whatever my bank account number.
So, and it was like a Bernie Madoff type deal.
So he sold big stocks and bonds.
I think it was actually one of the biggest securities
broadcases in UK history and this guy set up a false lead
for the police using my information.
So he set up a shell corporation in my name
with my bank account.
So the police actually, so major crimes, like 30 police
officers descended on my house to arrest me.
I happened to not be home at the time
and I never went back to England after that.
But, and you know, I shut down like the business
and everything worked out.
And then I was able to explain to them what happened.
I was able to show them the chat logs
and show them like the transaction history
because this is all on chain, right?
So I was able to show them the transaction history
which also required me explaining what Bitcoin is
to these people, right?
Which was like, sort of, yeah.
Okay, that's kind of, this was 2013 still?
Yeah, 2014 when the police got involved.
Did they end up getting the guy, the Bernie Madoff-esque
character?
Did they end up tracking him down?
I don't know.
So I went back to England in 2019.
So I wrote a book and I had like a small book tour there
and I needed permission to go back.
So I got in touch with the lead investigator from 2014
and it's like, hey, can I come back?
Is everything okay?
And he wasn't on the case anymore.
So he didn't, he didn't really know he had passed off the case.
But I think him passing off the case meant that it wasn't a
positive sign that they were going to catch the person.
So this guy was good.
He was very good then.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, good in terms of how he obfuscated his movements,
not maybe so good in terms of the things he was doing.
But yeah.
Yeah, I mean, he was just so far ahead of the police.
Like he set up this very clear lead to me and it took the
police six months to knock on my door.
Right.
So I don't know.
He probably set up other leads for them to follow.
Right.
Like how many resources did they waste that like dozens of
police officers, right?
Many, many hours of interviews and interrogations with me.
So he was, yeah, I was like, I don't think they're going to
catch this guy.
Like he's just so far ahead of them.
But but the police officer in 2019 who was the lead initially
when I reached out to him, he told me that he had bought
Bitcoin in 2014 because of the case and was retired early and
was like so thankful to have been hard to build in 2014.
So he like went up above and beyond like, you know, I'm
going to check interpoles if there's any notices there and
this and that.
Here's my cell number.
Like call me if anything happens and so that was cool.
But but an important part of like lesson from that particular
incident or not a lesson.
It scared me.
I was attracted to Bitcoin because I saw it as anarchist
money, right?
The separation of money and state and all that.
And I, you know, it was a very gray area.
There wasn't like I didn't have a money transmitter license
to sell Bitcoin, but it also didn't exist, right?
So everything was like very gray.
But then there was this realization that if things had
been a little bit different, had I been home when that happened
and had the I mean, just that just that like it was so
different.
Our interactions was a phone call basically.
If our interactions was made like change to a chair, then
like maybe I don't know, they don't want to listen to the guy
talking about magic internet money, right?
Like that's just a made up story.
He's a criminal.
But it felt like it was so close to something very bad
that it scared me and well, I remained, well, I remained
quite enamored and enthusiastic about Bitcoin and its future
potential.
It scared me from interacting with it very publicly or like
much at all really.
In total, El Salvador said that they were going to use it as
legal tender in 2021.
That to me was tactic permission to be like, okay, the sandbox
is open, right?
Try to try to build something.
That's what I was actually going to ask you is so you were
you and you were not living in El Salvador prior to the legal
tender law.
You decided to make moves after that.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I was, I mean, this was also the kind of the talent
of the pandemic in 2021.
It's like a whole very crazy thing.
But so I had removed to Ecuador at the start of 2021.
So I was there in I believe it was June when the when the
president made the announcement.
So I was in Ecuador and like as soon as he made the announcement
that within a couple of days of him making the announcement
after getting over the shock, right?
Like is there a country that's actually doing this?
I was like, well, it's Bitcoin.
It's Latin America, which I have an affinity for.
And it's just like tactic permission.
I want to, I want to see what I could do.
I want to I want to participate like this is a big moment.
I want to I want to see if I could help.
So pretty pretty quickly I had in in Ecuador.
So during the pandemic, I had some thoughts, you know, long
walks in a collapsing world is is what I thought a lot about
not only that the world was on the wrong course, but how to put
it on the right one.
And my conclusion was basically frontline Bitcoin education,
right?
Bitcoin education that empowers people to think for themselves
have agency in their own lives because I think that that's
what got us on the wrong course is we're no longer thinking
for ourselves who've lost agency in our lives and and like
independent impartial Bitcoin education to bring people into
the space, but in in a way that focuses on empowerment.
Was the solution and more than that, it probably wasn't going
to start in a place like New York.
It was going to start in a place that wasn't advantaged by
the current system.
So I kind of tried some some things in Ecuador, but it didn't.
There was no traction.
It was still the pandemic and there was a lot of in person
emphasis in those first days, but then it seemed like El
Salvador, El Salvador is is like everything just lines up.
So I moved to El Salvador two months later.
So a couple of weeks before legal tender went into effect.
So I saw all my stuff and bought a one way ticket to El
Salvador to to arrive there before the law went into effect.
It's you don't waste any time, do you?
You were you were ready to make moves.
I love that.
Well, and you know this, it's a first of all, you have you
have quite an insane story in terms of what ended up bringing
you to this small little country that is the first one to
adopt Bitcoin as legal tender and now to be doing what you are
now.
I noticed that you've also had quite a few run-ins with the
law is to see that there's a common thread there that that
weaves across at all.
But I'd love to know a little bit just OK, so for those that
don't know what me, Premier Bitcoin is my first Bitcoin.
Can you can you talk a little bit about that?
Can you say kind of OK, so you know you're you're in El
Salvador, you decide that frontline Bitcoin education and
giving people not just the education, but actually, you
know, helping people, not just not just telling them what to
look, but helping them to think for themselves was was what
was driving you to go there and you had this kind of OK,
they're making it legal tender there.
So I'm presumably not going to get in trouble for doing this.
What was then kind of the impetus for like, or I should say
when did you then start up the whole me, Premier Bitcoin
curriculum?
How did that evolve?
And just what was that process like to get that off the
ground and kind of get some recognition for it?
Yeah.
So I think the most powerful thing about the project about
meeting Merbidcoin is that it can be a proof of concept that
we could do things differently.
So I met in those first days in El Salvador, it was a it was
a really interesting place, right, like late August, early
September 2021 was it had the air of I want to say like that
first week at university where like you don't know what's
going to happen, but everybody has this sense that things are
going to change.
So I met a lot of other people doing or that had ideas for
other initiatives.
And almost all of them followed what I'll call a fiat
model in that they prioritized, they prioritized like legal
standing and financial standing, meaning, you know, registers
and NGO and get lineup sponsors and, and like get get those
things done and then, and then, you know, get to work.
Whereas what we did was we just got to work, right, and we
actually didn't even think about the other stuff.
It was like, well, we're, we're going to teach people.
So in the first, in the first days and weeks, I just every
Salvadorian I met, I asked them what they knew about Bitcoin
and if they wanted to help teach others about Bitcoin.
So it, so it created a quite an eclectic group in those early
days, right, just like quite random from, from different
sectors of Salvadorian society.
But it was, but it was just about like, we weren't perfect
at all, right, there was, you know, we started with just an
intro class, which, you know, in hindsight, if I looked up
like what the material was for the first class, it probably
wasn't that good.
But that wasn't the point.
The point wasn't to be perfect.
The point wasn't to be well-funded.
The point wasn't to be safe, right.
The point was to, to teach people, to empower them to, to
start a conversation.
And it took us, you know, that first, the first month we had
five students, so September 2021, we had five students
total, you know, distributed across three classes, I think.
And by that was September, by November, we had 300 students
that we were teaching.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, so it was just, I think, like one of the things that has
really given me hope for the future is that we don't
necessarily follow those rules, and we're able to be successful
anyway.
So, for example, we are mostly, we have some really, really
great grand tours and, you know, like OpenSats and HRF and
blocks, and some really great corporate sponsors, Space
Stand.
But most of our fundings, so 65% of our fundings today has
been grassroots.
It's just like individual Bitcoiners who, who see the
future, who see something that they, that they believe in and
will fund it.
And like that other chunk of money, so the other 35%, which
comes from more traditional sources, it doesn't come in a
traditional way.
So, it, we're pretty adamant about not compromising our
values, which means that, which isn't compatible with most
potential sponsors, you know, most potential sponsors want us
to show their product, basically, right?
Like, I'm sure there's a nicer way to say that, but that's the
reality.
That's, that's basically what it comes down to.
And it's like, well, no, we're trying to get people to think
for themselves.
So, we never want to thank for our students, even if we like
your product.
We're not, we're not going to, like maybe we'll say something
about it, but that's up to us.
Like, your money has no influence on that.
And, and that's, that's not, I got advice from some people that
I really respect early on to not do things that way to, you
know, like, you always have to compromise a little bit.
There's always the middle ground.
And we, I think we have been successful because we haven't
compromised at all.
And so we do have, we do get a chunk of money from outside of
grassroots, but it's like the best people, right?
It's people that are like, you know what, we just really like
what you're doing.
You know, of course, we'll have like follow up reports and try
to be professional about it and be like, this is what your
money goes to, right?
Like it's not like that part of the question.
It's not like a fiat NGO where the money just disappears into
a black box and maybe 1% of it maybe gets to some of the people
who are loosely associated with who you're supposed to be
helping.
Like that's what you're saying, right?
Yeah.
So just a quick question.
Do you get, so I mean, since you're, a lot of your donations
are coming grassroots and from Bitcoiners, are a lot of your
donations like on chain or a lot of them through like, through
like Geyser, like where are you guys, where's the biggest funnel?
Yeah.
So a mix.
We have, so we've done it twice, but it's going to be an
annual thing.
We have like a charity auction slash gala.
So people donate.
Sometimes they're timed like this past year, Jack Dorsey,
BTC sessions and Jack Booth all donated a phone call.
Basically, right?
You could auction for, you could bid to have a 30 minute
video call with them.
Other people donated more, more tangible things.
Like, you know, like a minor or things like that.
You know, people overbid on, on what the value is because it's
a donation.
That's one thing we do that once a year in the spring.
We have a Geyser campaign.
So, so a lot of it, the project we're about to our birthdays one
week from today.
And I want this is going to air for our birthdays August 9th.
So we're going to be three years old on August 9, 2024.
And between now and then, we're going to launch a campaign on
Geyser.
So we always have a campaign on Geyser.
Like that is, you could always donate there, but we're going
to be, you know, a new video, new trailer, new copy.
It's going to be some root boards, like just kind of a refresh
and a big push.
And we're, we're hoping to bring up the total.
Like to break all the records on Geyser to bring the total to
to five Bitcoin raised there.
So we're over two now.
So it'd be like two more plus by the end of the year.
And then there's, there's some passive stuff, you know, people
just donate.
I mean, all the time, right?
Like we're hoping to concentrate it this month.
But also some people donate direct on our website.
It kind of depends.
People are familiar with Geyser or not.
And we're Bitcoin only.
So we only take Bitcoin, right?
Again, this isn't recommended, right?
What's recommended is, is, um, make it as easy as possible to
donate.
So it's like, take, take dollars, take crypto, whatever.
Uh, but we, again, we want to be a proof of concept that we're
not trying to exist.
We're not trying to be successful in a world in which we
disagree.
We're trying to bring the future forward by creating a proof
concept about what is possible.
Um, and, and it's that I think all the people on the team get
that.
So they're willing to take bigger risks.
Maybe because of it.
Like, yes, it seems like not the standard strategy, but okay.
That's, I think that that's, that's actually such a beautiful
thing though.
And, and to those people who would say, well, you know, you
could probably raise more money if you, you know, did this or
that.
It's like, I mean, to a much lesser extent, it's the same
thing with like Bitcoin podcasters such as myself, who are
not doing nearly the quality of amazing work that you guys are
doing.
We're contributing in our own small way, however we can.
But, but if you decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to take
sponsorship money from, from any, any crypto company, any
exchange, you know, the ones who are typically in past cycles
have thrown around the most cash, you know, it's like, yeah,
you can do that and you can, you can get a lot more money that
way, a lot more fiat, that's for sure.
Or you can be selective and try to work with Bitcoin only
companies who share your ethos and, and who are willing to also
pay in Bitcoin because it's like, you know, nothing changes
unless we change it.
You know, somebody has to, somebody has to live the ethos
that everybody larks about.
And it's not easy, but it's also so much more rewarding.
And I have to imagine the NGO space is something I, I brought
up with, with Gladstein is that, you know, and an NGO, a
nonprofit, I should say, you know, let's obviously there are
many types of, of NGOs that are of various forms.
But one that is actually raising money in Bitcoin and also
distributing that Bitcoin in kind.
That isn't a very transparent organization inherently.
And there is so much dark money flowing around the world through
these NGOs, like obscene amounts of money.
And it's, you know, you start to raise the question like, back
to Gladstein, he said, you know, if you're not mining Bitcoin,
you're wasting energy.
Well, I think if you're not fundraising in Bitcoin, you're
probably trying to hide fraud.
And maybe that's a little harsh.
I'm not saying that every organization that's fundraising
in fiat is committing fraud, but I'd be willing to bet that
the organizations that fundraise in Bitcoin commit orders of
magnitude less fraud than those that fundraise in fiat.
Just a little aside there, like that, I think it's, it's such a
beautiful model for that to have transparency at the core of
your organization, which should be there anyway.
But Bitcoin forces it in a very positive way.
Well, it's proof of work versus proof of stake, right?
So it's like Bitcoin is proof of work.
And that is, I'm not just talking about mining, right?
Like everything.
And fiat is proof of stake.
It's about how shiny it is, right?
It's not about the work that's done.
But it's probably, it's probably worth, it's probably worth
spending like a minute on, on the project and what we've
accomplished.
Please Sam.
It's, yeah.
So we, like it's not, it's not just theory, right?
It's reality.
We have taught since inception ourselves direct here in El
Salvador, we've taught over 30,000 students and we have
developed a couple of different courses, right?
There's, there's intro, but our flagship, the one that, that
I think we're most associated with at this point is the
Bitcoin diploma, which is this 10 week workbook that is, I love
the subtitle, financial education for the Bitcoin era.
So the first, and this is basically our concept for, for all
the material that we create, the, the first roughly half in this
case, literally half because the first five weeks is essentially
financial literacy.
So it's, what is money?
How did we get here?
And what's the problem with the way that we think of it today?
So it's understanding the problem first and then the second
half is Bitcoin, right?
So all of everything that we do is, is focus on bringing new
people into the space, get in people off of zero.
So this, this workbook is, is open source and it is now, I
mean, I don't ignore it to begin.
I'll stay here and I'll salvage her first.
So it has been adopted by the ministry of education here.
So they've, they've taken that as their primary material.
They've, you know, a change of cover and probably a few things
within it.
But, but that's the base material for their own Bitcoin
diploma.
And we, along with Bitcoin beach, Bitcoin beach is helping us
with the trainings are in the process of training.
We're training 700 public school teachers.
So it's a little bit, it's a little bit strange.
We actually teach them the Bitcoin diploma are Bitcoin
diploma, but then they teach the ministry of education,
Bitcoin diploma.
Again, they're, they're very similar.
It's basically to give them a foundation of Bitcoin
knowledge.
So we're training 700 public school teachers now in, in
2024.
And that will roll out and in, in an even bigger way in
2025, we're also working with the little hodler to develop
some materials for younger audiences.
So the Bitcoin diploma is basically, I'd say 13 plus for
the age range.
And we're developing some materials along with the little
hodler for younger audiences.
So that will, it's about a year behind.
So the pilot, when we start to train the teachers before
expense throughout the country should be next year.
Like this year's is just development work.
So that's, that's super cool.
The El Salvador is, is going to have Bitcoin education at
every level of its school system, probably within two years,
like literally from, from, you know, first grade until when
you finish school, the longer term plan is actually to not
make it a separate thing, but incorporate it into existing
materials.
But I don't know how things are going to change between now
and five years from now.
Right.
But I want to pause on that for a second because that's
actually such an incredible thing that I, it's, it's one of
those things that, okay, yes.
Okay.
How nice you've created this, this Bitcoin diploma and how
nice you open sourced it and now that, you know, Ministry
of Educate, da, da, da.
But like you zoom out for a second and then you just look a
couple of years into the future.
You, you look even, you know, five years into the future and
you're going to see massive implications from that, but you
look one generation into the future and that's a complete
paradigm shift.
You've educated an entire country from, you know, whatever
pre-K through high school about Bitcoin.
And I love that you, you don't lead with Bitcoin, you lead
with financial literacy.
You lead with what is broken so that you can show how you fix
it, you know, Bitcoin fixes this.
But I think it's really hard to, and I'm sure you have clearly
thought about this much more than, than I have, but to even wrap
your mind around what the implications of that are in a
generation because that's, I mean, we're not doing that in
American schools right now.
It's, they're not doing it in any schools in Europe.
They're not, you know, this isn't something that's being done
at an institutional level.
And I also think that, so I was, I was homeschooled until high
school and having that experience being homeschooled and then
going to public school, I, I have been able to very see, I've
been able to see the stark contrast between teaching
children how to think versus teaching children what to think
and teaching children what to think is what our public school
system in America does.
It is an indoctrination machine.
It is meant to check.
So you check the right boxes and you've, you walk in a straight
line, but your, your curriculum, as you said from the start,
it's about teaching people to have agency to think for
themselves.
That's incredible.
So, so it's much harder is, is why I think it doesn't happen
as much.
It's so much easier to tell someone what to think than it is
to empower them to think for themselves.
And, and, and it's about time preference, right?
It's like what's hard in the present is usually, or is often
best for the future.
What's easy in the present is often worst for the future,
right?
And like we have this very, our time preferences is just off,
right?
But yeah, it's, it's, I want to get back to, to all the
accomplishments that meet.
Yeah, sorry.
I just think it's started making my head spin.
Yeah.
No, no, no, I was going to go off on, on attention on, on why
we do it.
Like it's not, it's, Bitcoin education doesn't matter.
The product of Bitcoin education does, right?
So what we are doing here is a means to an end.
The end is empowerment.
The end is agency.
The end is sovereignty.
The best way to get there, I believe, is via Bitcoin
education, via independent and partial Bitcoin education,
because the second and third order, third order effects echo
and out into the future are so profound.
It's like if you, if you understand, so the way that the
world is now, we don't have power in our own lives.
And what that means is we are disincentivized to build, to
create, to plan, right?
Because the rules of the game are made by somebody else and
they could change them on a whim.
So, it's, it's, people are not incentivized to, to build in
that environment, right?
And it's subconscious.
It's not something that, that people are actively thinking
about, but it's a subconscious effect of, of the, of the modern
world.
So in this future world, the step one of which is
what the whole world speaks to.
This is one of the threeань steps that we have, we have
the first and last one of the creative groups to have
support in the future.
For now, one of the other things that gave me the
opportunity to discuss, is vers политговacy in the
to predict the future is to create it.
And that's what we're giving people.
That's the ability to predict their future
because they control their money, they control their mind,
they have like more possibilities
once they realize that they do have agency.
Because we do, it's a false narrative
that we can't affect change.
We actually can, we're just not taught that.
So once people have those two things,
control over their money and the ability
to dictate their own life, right?
That changes everything and that,
one, it makes you a lot more hopeful about the future
because you're in control.
You're not at the whims of someone else.
It also encourages you to build, right?
And that could be starting a business,
it could be starting a movement,
it could be starting a family.
It encourages you to create, to plan,
to, in some, to define your own destiny
rather than allow someone else to define it for you.
And that is like, I'm so motivated and inspired
because I personally see so much wrong with the world
and I would probably be pretty depressed
if Bitcoin wasn't around by this point, right?
But like, there's a path, there's a path
and it's not a short thing.
It's not like, oh, we'll do nothing
and we'll just end up in a good place, right?
No, we have to be pretty active in this.
And I think that's the point.
I think that's the point.
No, we have to be pretty active in this
to put us on the right path.
And it's not a battle, the status quo is pretty entrenched.
So it's hard, but it is so worth it.
And there's so, I mean,
and there's gonna be other effects
that we can't even conceptualize now, right?
Like, what's it gonna be a generation from now
in El Salvador if everyone growing up here
has this sort of education?
Like, how does that change things?
Like, I could guess.
But there's probably a bunch of cool stuff
that I'm not even anticipating.
The best way to have agency over your own life
and your financial future
is to hold your own Bitcoin keys,
keeping that Bitcoin safe for the long haul.
And the best way to do that
is to go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use the promo code walker for 5% off
the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
Then, of course, get your Bitcoin off the exchange
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You may have seen people talking
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which is kind of scary.
But luckily, Bitbox is one of the only two wallets
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Plus, the Bitbox O2 is easy as hell to use
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And again, it is fully open source and Bitcoin only.
And again, it is Bitcoin only and fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself.
There is no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
Plus, when you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use the promo code walker,
not only do you get 5% off,
but you also help support this fucking podcast.
So thank you.
It's a beautiful thing.
And I do want to get back to some more of the accomplishments
because I got a soft track here.
But again, I make no promises about tangents or rants
in this show.
It's a safe space for all.
But maybe a good place,
because you were going over just some of the things
that you guys are doing in El Salvador.
I think with the teachers, with 30,000 plus people educated
with this program already, that's huge.
But maybe it's a good time to talk about the node network.
You call it the node network, right?
That you guys have and how that's expanded.
Can you go into that a little bit?
Cause I think it's fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And just one quick point on El Salvador and beyond
is all the work that we do with them is unpaid, right?
So we never accept money from this government
or any other government, right?
Just as a point of principle,
because that becomes a slippery slope.
We don't want to have that overhang, right?
That we owe something. So no government funding,
not now, not ever.
And yeah, so internationally, so we have a,
we're pretty ambitious.
We have a vision statement
that is three simple steps to change the world.
And what I've talked about is step one.
So step one is to make an example out of El Salvador,
make an example out of El Salvador,
make to demonstrate that empowerment focused,
independent Bitcoin education could be a force for good.
Step two is to make that example easy to replicate
around the world.
And that's what the node network is.
So the node network began in March, 2023.
So about a year and a half ago at this point.
And what that is, is it's Bitcoin educators around the world
who agree to a core set of values
and use common open source Bitcoin education materials.
So the way that we think about it, we're the Genesis node.
So we created the consensus rules for the network
and those consensus rules are fairly simple,
but very important.
And that's that the education must be independent,
impartial, community led, Bitcoin only, quality,
and focus on empowerment, right?
So we don't teach people how to get rich.
We teach people how to get free.
And so long as you agree with those six core,
core values and you could demonstrate proof of work,
like you're actually applying this in your community,
then you could apply to the network.
And at this point, the network is self-covenant.
We're in the long process of basically spinning it off
from me from rabbit going outside of it.
Be a part of it, but just be one node in it
rather than to dominate it. And yeah,
so it's self-covenant at this point.
So the network itself would then determine
whether this was a good applicant or not.
We reject more applicants than we accept.
So the network has pretty high standards,
but we have currently, we have 25 nodes.
No, I'm sorry, we have more than that.
We have 34 nodes in 25 countries.
So there's a couple of countries with multiple nodes.
So it's everywhere.
It's actually this map behind me.
It's a map of like, I don't know how well you could see it,
but it's one of those scratch off maps,
but instead of the places that I've been to personally,
it's all the countries that I've been to.
Personally, it's all the countries that have,
all the countries are in the case of Canada
and the US states and provinces
that have active nodes in the network.
Some of them are easy to see, but then there's like,
Haiti or in the Caribbean or Georgia in Asia
are a little bit hard to see on the map, but they're there.
That's awesome though.
And I think the fact that you have that Bitcoin
open source ethos is so central to everything you're doing.
You're not trying to say, okay,
this is me, Premier Bitcoin,
and we're the gatekeepers of this knowledge.
You're saying, yeah, we're the creators of this knowledge,
but the knowledge is gonna evolve
and we want it to evolve for different countries
because obviously different places have different needs.
They've got different things that are gonna be relevant
for their curriculum that may not be relevant
for El Salvador's, for example.
Yeah, and that's a challenge.
It's fascinating to be involved with this
because there's so much gravity
to follow in established norms, right?
And that's an established norm.
An established norm is like,
once you have control over something, you don't give it up.
Like why would we create a network and then give it away?
Like that doesn't make sense, right?
That doesn't make sense in the old world.
That does make sense in the world
that we're trying to create.
And again, it's proof of concepts for the future,
but there's so much gravity that pulls us and pushes us
towards trying to fit in to the world
we are trying to leave behind, right?
And like I see that, I feel it.
Like it takes a lot of energy to push against it.
I think that's something I didn't realize
until this project.
I mean, how hard changes, right?
It is, it's, you know, revolution is sexy
because people think of something
that isn't actually revolution, right?
They think of like just this, you know,
fire and brimstone sort of thing, but that's not,
revolution is much harder than people think
and much easier at the same time.
It's actually just, it's your everyday decisions.
It's not, it's not like a grenade.
It's what you do everyday.
I like that perspective a lot just because
I agree people tend to, we're human, right?
And it turns out humans like romanticizing things.
And sometimes that process of romanticizing
makes us overcomplicate things as well.
And also maybe seems like there is a higher barrier
to entry to making change happen
than there really is.
And I couldn't agree with you more.
It's that revolution is the decisions
that we make every day.
It's a decision that, you know,
when you decide to take self-custody of your Bitcoin,
that's its own little part of that revolution, right?
Of deciding that you are going to increase yourself
along that sovereignty spectrum and become more sovereign.
It's deciding that you want to educate people
and spread the word.
Like those are all individual decisions.
And then sometimes like in the case of you guys,
a bunch of like-minded individuals can get together
and decide that, you know what,
we all want to make these decisions individually,
but also together.
And we can do a lot if we team up and combine our forces.
And I think it's incredible to see,
because this has been such a,
I mean, it's a true grassroots movement.
You're not, I love the pledge not to,
I know it would have been a lot easier for you
to probably take money from the government, right?
I mean, that's, it seems these days,
everybody loves putting their hand up,
please, may I have some more?
Like, but you maintain your principles by not doing so.
Not that who's to say, you know,
maybe the government wouldn't have tried to exert any force,
but it's about the principle of the thing.
It's about saying this is not how we're going to operate.
And we've made that decision.
And so, you know, thank you, but no, thank you.
But this is a true grassroots movement because of that.
And I think that's so powerful at a time where,
especially in the United States,
and I think you have a very unique perspective on this too,
because you've come from the United States,
but you've spent now many years living outside
of the United States.
You've seen it from within and from without.
And in the United States, as I'm sure you saw
at the Bitcoin conference,
there is now a lot of focus on that top down, right?
A lot of focus on, which I think it's great,
let me preface this by saying,
I think it's fantastic the Overton window is shifting.
I think it's fantastic that because of presidential candidates,
because of senators, because of members of Congress
speaking positively about Bitcoin,
that may make far more individuals decide to wake up
and say, oh, I thought this was, you know, Elizabeth Warren
told me that this was just for criminals and whatever.
But now these other people are saying that it's not.
So maybe I should take a look at this.
I think that's the really positive thing.
It's making people who would otherwise not take a second
look at Bitcoin do so.
But I think a reliance or an assumption that we need that
is first of all, a false assumption.
And second of all, becomes problematic.
It goes back to what you were saying about,
it's about asking permission from the very people
who have created the oppressive system in the first place,
or maybe who have not created it,
but who perpetuated it.
So I'd love, that wasn't really a question, I guess,
but I'd love just kind of your thoughts on that,
because this, I mean, you guys are true grassroots.
And I think that's beautiful, but that's not easy.
But how do you approach that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there.
Yeah, sorry about that.
No, no, no, that's a good thing, right?
I'd love, and you could recite it
because I don't remember exactly how it is,
but you have a phrase or a meme
that you've shared a few times.
There is no red, there is no blue,
there is the state and there is you.
Yes, that's the one.
That's the one, I love that.
I love that.
And just maybe I'll rant a little bit about voting,
which I'm not anti-voting,
I am anti-this system, though.
And I think that the way that voting is designed
ends up entrenching it, right?
And so I'm against that.
I'm pro-delegating decisions to experts
if we don't know about particular subjects, right?
That we could delegate some of our power
to somebody that knows better,
which is effectively what we're doing with voting.
We're delegating our power to somebody else
to make decisions for us.
But that's such a blanket,
like when we vote for politicians,
it's like for everything.
Nobody knows your own life better than you do.
Some people might know,
like if I have some weird growth on my finger,
I'm gonna go to a doctor, right?
I'm not gonna be like,
it's up to me, I'm in charge, right?
I'm gonna delegate that to somebody else.
But the problem with voting
is when we're told that voting is most important,
by default, that means all else is less so.
And it sends us unconscious message
that we can neglect other avenues of change
and it minimizes their appeal, right?
So voting takes away, and this is voting for,
I'm not talking about like your local councilman,
I'm talking about president, something at that level.
It takes away your burden of responsibility, right?
Like you put your little sticker on,
you did your part, it tells you,
you voted for someone to make decisions on your behalf.
And what that does is it allows us to see injustice
in the world and think it's not our role to change it
or worse, it allows us to become blind to it completely, right?
We're pushing that off onto someone else
rather than doing it ourselves.
And that perpetuates this state that we find ourselves in,
in which we don't have agency in our own lives.
And by and large, it's been our choice, right?
We are giving that up.
That is not the solution.
Like electoral politics are not the solution.
The solution is what you do every other day.
The solution is what you do every other day of your life.
Like what you do on election day matters.
I'm not gonna say I'm not like,
if you vote you're a bad person, right?
Like go vote, but don't put that much importance on it, right?
That's not what really matters.
What matters is what you do every other day of your life.
And yeah, I think I got off track a little bit there,
but it is, we'll never vote our way
into an alternative future.
When you vote, you're voting twice.
Once for the candidate and once for the status quo, right?
Once for the system that put that candidate there.
So if you really wanna change the status quo,
don't give it power, right?
Don't give it legitimacy.
Build something better and it will crumble, right?
We are giving ourselves, we are giving the state,
we're giving the status quo our power and our agency
and we don't have to.
We could build something better
and if we do build something better,
if we build a better financial system,
if we build a better value system,
if we build a better, like the same with proof of work, right?
Like this is happening.
This is happening and I think Meeper Bitcoin
is an example of this that we don't have
to follow these established paths.
We could forge new paths and then the only way
you could get on a entrenching new path
is to get off of the old one, right?
So we should collectively in our own lives,
we should just imagine the future world we want to live in
and start to act that way in the present
and we should support others that do that, right?
Like, I mean, Meeper Bitcoin
has been successful not because of any single person
but because it's an idea that people can contribute to, right?
Whether it's their time, their money, their intelligence,
and that's, its success is so powerful
because it's creating this new path, right?
So I don't know, I think I went off on a little bit
of a bullet.
No, again, safe space for tangents here, as I said.
I think just one point I wanted to double back on there
was that you're talking about these entrenched systems
in the status quo and thinking that it's basically
the idea that you're not gonna change a system
from within a system, not really.
That's kind of this false idea that has been floated
that well, if we just get the right guy
or the right gal in there, they'll fix the system
from within because then there'll be an insider
in the system and they'll know all the right levers
to pull and they'll fix that system from within.
It doesn't work like that.
No status quo has ever been changed by people
who are a part of the status quo.
The status quo changes, the system changes
because an outside system, a parallel system,
exerts such a powerful force on this entrenched system
that it starts to break down because enough people
start moving to this new parallel system.
And that's what fundamentally Bitcoin is, right?
It's a parallel monetary system.
And that's why it is so powerful
because the more people that come over
and join this parallel system, the more energy
it sucks out of that entrenched system,
the less power that system has,
the more that system starts to fall apart.
And the more it falls apart, the faster it falls apart,
the more people jump over the parallel system.
And then it just accelerates.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Yeah, 100%.
I actually think that Bitcoin in a certain way
could be humanity's first real revolution, right?
Because it's not changing who is in power.
It has the potential to change our relationship with power,
which are two different things.
It's not okay, instead of red, we're gonna put blue,
instead of X, we're gonna put Y, right?
Instead of being subservient, we could be self-determined.
And that has never happened before.
Again, like back to Ecuador,
I had a front row seat to a revolution,
like literally at the barricades,
tear gas, beating, all that stuff, which was romantic.
And it was like what we think of
when we think of revolution, right?
But it led to something that rhymed with what it replaced,
which is, you know, look at history,
that's basically how it always is.
A true break won't come from within
a true break.
So my favorite essay, philosophical essay of all time
is Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.
And he has a great line in there
about you lend legitimacy in opposition, right?
So to oppose something actually empowers it
to makes it more powerful, because it gives legitimacy.
If you really want to change a system,
you should walk away from it,
you should remove yourself from it, right?
So in this case, get rid of your dollars, right?
Get rid of your euros, like don't go back and forth,
just move to Bitcoin.
The sooner you move to it, the faster
that transition can happen.
And it's a bit of a leap of faith, right?
But a little bit less with each pass and day, I suppose,
but, you know, revolution was never supposed to be easy.
Change wasn't supposed to be easy.
In fact, change has to be difficult, right?
There is no such thing.
That's like another thing with giving that impression,
but I'm just like, I hate quoting.
No, I don't think, I think many of the listeners
of this show will feel very sympathetic
with your views on voting.
So again, safe space here, like a real safe space,
not like the bullshit safe spaces, you know?
Yeah, so we have, I'm just reading,
this is an article that I wrote in the last selections I go,
but we're beaten over our head our entire life
with the notion that change begins at the ballot box.
That's false.
The reality of change is that it's uncomfortable.
Voting will never yield to substantive change
because it is designed to prohibit the very discomfort,
which is a necessary prerequisite to substantive change.
The civil rights movement, blacks that sat at
a segregated lunch counter did not wait
for an election to create change,
and that's exactly why they were successful.
When we look back, we think of those citizens as righteous
and assume they were popular.
They were not.
Force and change never is.
Lunch counter citizens were effective
because they disrupted business as usual
and forced people to look at what many
would have preferred to avoid.
Change happens when the discomfort of its success
is less than the discomfort of our present.
That means that the push to create a better future
will almost always be unpopular in the present.
And the great tragedy of voting is that it tricks us
into believing that we could have progress and comfort.
That's really fucking well said.
I like that a lot.
And I think, again, it's such an important point
for people to actually internalize.
Because neither of us are saying, oh, don't vote.
I always say, do whatever the fuck you want.
I'm never here to tell people what to think,
to tell them how to think, or to in any way
try to dictate what their actions should be.
I just hope that people think for themselves, at least,
and are honest about what the results of their actions
really are.
And whether those results, or I should say,
whether those actions are actually meaningful
at affecting the results that they would like to see
versus perpetuating the ones that they are actually
trying to get rid of.
Yeah, right, right.
And it's this other concept that this is something else
that I love about Bitcoin.
So going back to my own history in the beginning,
then I mostly tried to slow the bad.
I was like, war is bad.
I want to make war harder to start or to continue.
And that's wrong.
That's the wrong mentality.
You shouldn't try to slow the bad.
You should try to speed the good.
And it's the same energy.
But one energy is trying to make the Federal Reserve better.
It's more transparent or whatever.
Try to make this beast that is before us
a little bit less of a beast.
Or you take that same energy and you put it into Bitcoin.
Or some other alternative.
But in this example, you put it into Bitcoin
and you put that energy into making Bitcoin stronger, easier,
more attractive, more resilient, just more adopted.
And what ends up happening with the first one,
if you try to make the blunt the edges of the Federal Reserve,
maybe you do.
Maybe you don't.
But who cares?
All you've done is blunt the edges.
The Federal Reserve is still there.
In the other case, if Bitcoin is successful,
we don't have to worry about the Federal Reserve.
It will just implode.
It will collapse.
It will become irrelevant.
And I don't mean to amusimus as an example,
the Federal Reserve being a stand-in for the status quo,
basically.
Right?
And Bitcoin being a stand-in for an alternative future.
Like, I don't think we ever accomplish anything by tearing down.
I think we accomplish everything by building up.
It's the idea of are you running away from something
or running towards something?
Yeah, you also feel better.
It's like more fun.
Right, right.
Yeah.
And that's why so many folks who have been, let's say,
like calling for, let me put it this way,
I think that so much of the general anxiety and anger
and depression and fear that we see in our society today
across the world is because people
are more aware of the problems now than ever.
Because we have the internet.
Because we have real-time 24-7, 365, every second of every day news.
And we are inundated with it.
And typically, algorithmically, if you're using Noster,
you don't have this much of a problem.
But if you're on X or any other, I
don't know if folks still use Facebook that much
besides the boomers.
That's a different story.
But you are algorithmically inundated
with things that are meant to make you more afraid,
make you more anxious, make you more angry.
And when that's what you're bombarded with all the time,
when you're always bombarded with the problems
and you're never shown a solution,
yeah, I can see how you'd be pretty nihilistic.
I can see how you'd be pretty down and out about this feeling
like, oh my god, you know, woe is me.
Woe is the world.
There's no way out of this.
Look how terrible everything is.
It's all I see all the time.
But the problem there is there's the other side,
which is where I think a lot of Bitcoiners have gone, which
is, wow, yeah, everything is really fucked up.
But there's so much hope.
There's so much to hope for.
The future is actually going to be brighter.
And when you have that thing, that beacon,
that bright orange light shining, you can say, oh, well, yeah,
everything is really messed up.
I'm going to acknowledge that.
I'm not going through saying everything's fine.
If everything were fine, Bitcoin wouldn't need to exist.
But it does exist because things aren't fine.
But it's OK that they're not fine because we have a brighter
future that we're building toward.
And that's one of the reasons I think Bitcoiners talk about
Bitcoin so much.
It's not most of them.
I won't make a blanket statement.
But most Bitcoiners that I know that I've spent time with,
Bitcoiners like yourself, they're not
shilling Bitcoin to try and pump their own bags.
Because you, you know, you random person on the street
that I'm talking to about Bitcoin or whatever
at a restaurant about Bitcoin, you're not going to pump my bag.
Like you're just you're not going to.
And I don't give a shit if you pump my bag.
My bag will be pumped regardless.
What I do care about is you getting some glimpse of the
potential future that we Bitcoiners see that we see
because we're we're inside this parallel system already.
And then people that are still in that old system,
they can't see because they're stuck in that old system.
They they they can't see outside of that system.
You have to remove yourself from it before you can see how
messed up it is.
Yes. And the extent to which it is messed up because it is
fucked up.
But there's hope.
It's going to be okay.
And and I think so you and I both have a a young child or
I would both have children under one.
He was crying before I hope that didn't cross.
Don't worry about it.
This is a family friendly podcast except for the amount
of times I say fuck.
So for any kids listening, I'm sorry.
But that's a small sample size.
But let's let's let's expand that.
So I have about half of my half of my friends are non
Bitcoiners and half of them are Bitcoiners.
Right.
You know, people I went to high school with and all that
but by and large aren't Bitcoiners.
The non Bitcoin group, the amount of children that those
people are having, you know, it's a small sample size.
But I'm talking maybe like 50 people, 50 people on either
end of this and the number of children from that 50 people
making these numbers up.
But this is an approximation.
There's like four kids and on this side, there's like 20.
Right.
There's there's a noticeable difference with those non
Bitcoin and Bitcoin, how many, how many children they're
bringing into the world.
And then I think that has everything to do with hope.
Right.
Everything to do.
Again, if not for Bitcoin, I don't know.
I don't know how optimistic I would be and be like, well,
probably be a bit nihilistic, maybe, right, which is kind
of a trend in the in the modern world.
And I probably wouldn't want to bring a new life into the
world.
Right.
So there's it's this really tangible thing that I don't
even think that we are conscious of.
It's not like, well, Bitcoin's around.
So I should have a kid, right?
It's not like this, like in this flow chart, but it, but it
changes your mentality.
And again, I think that's why me from my Bitcoin is so special
and revolutionary because we're not.
Yes, we are teaching people about Bitcoin, but that's not
the point, right?
The point is to change how people view their potential
future and their own role in that.
And that is profound in ways that I don't even think we're
capable of understanding, right?
But you see it, there's these examples.
Why are Bitcoiners having more kids than the non-Bitcoiners?
Right?
Like it's not, it's not this, it's not a very conscious thing.
It's a subconscious thing.
The Bitcoin baby boom is very real, which is awesome.
Like, I mean, apparently people were really building in the
bear market in more ways than one.
And you, you love to see that.
You know, there, there was, there was hope even in the depths
of the bear.
I love it though, and it, I mean, I think about, I think about
my own son and back to, you were talking about time preference
earlier, and that has been such a seismic shift for me.
I realized after having my son that my notion of time preference
was really more academic, more theoretical, you know,
thought I had a handle on what it meant to have a low time
preference, thought I was living that fairly well.
And then our son came along and it's like a light switch flipped
on and then was ripped out of the wall and that light is on
forever now.
And now I, I realized that I did not understand time preference
before I realized that me thinking in the long term was again
academic theoretical.
And now I realized that I'm thinking about long after I'm dead,
what's going to happen.
And again, not, not in this theoretical like, yes, let me
ponder the future.
No, no, no, like, I really care about it because my blood is
going to be living on after me, after Carl and I are gone.
Hopefully that's not for a very long time, you know, knock on
wood, but I want that world to be better.
Not for me, not for me at all, but for my son.
And that's a powerful thing.
And it, I, I again did not realize how, how theoretical my,
my grasp of time preference was until having a son.
And you can't know, you know, everybody tells you, you won't
know until, until it happens and you're like, okay, thanks.
You know, great free, free advice.
I didn't ask for, but then you're like, it happens.
And you're like, oh shit, yep, you, yep, you were all
exactly right.
I couldn't possibly have understood it.
Now I do.
And you can't, you can't, you can't unlearn that.
Like it's just, it's there now, but that's beautiful.
Yeah.
All the cliches are true.
Yes.
All the cliches.
But you know, I want to, I want to be conscious of, of your
scarce time and allow you to as well get back to your young
child, but I want to make sure, was there anything that we,
that we didn't cover about me premier Bitcoin specifically that
you wanted to get out there?
Cause I know we've gone on some tangents.
We pulled some different threads.
So I just want to make sure if there's anything else, maybe
just a place to start would just be where can people go to
support you?
What's the best way for them to support you?
How can they do that?
Yeah.
So on, on X and other socials, our, our name is my first
Bitcoin underscore.
So find us there.
Our website is in English, my first Bitcoin.io in Spanish,
me premier Bitcoin.io.
If you are interested in joining the node network, then you
could find more about that on the, on the website.
And that's great. Like if you, if you want to, if you're
interested in educating others in your own community, then
this, I mean, a core concept is we are more than the sum of
our parts, right?
Like we actually, the each individual becomes stronger as
the network grows.
And it's, we're just starting to see some, some of the effects
now, which is amazing to see that theory become reality.
And that's a whole different tangent.
But, but yeah, if you want to support me premier Bitcoin,
there's a variety of ways, but we are launching on in the, in
the next day.
So in August, we're launching a, a fundraising campaign on
Geyser.
So that's geyser.fund is the website.
If you don't know, Geyser is a great resource.
It's basically like a crowdfunding platform for Bitcoiners.
So support us there.
Come to El Salvador.
Come to, we have a, we have a house slash school slash office
and we have open hours there.
Come to a graduation.
I mean, like we, we work in public intentionally.
So come check out what we're doing in person.
And finally, don't wait for anyone else.
Right.
Like we, we had, so we have a lot of tools.
Go to our website and we have like open source tools that you
could use if you want to get started, but do don't, whatever,
that's not the important thing.
The important thing is don't wait for someone to give you
permission.
You can and should be active in creating your own future in, in
our own future world.
I think that going to education is, is the best way to have an
impact there, but just be active.
If you, if you are not active, someone else will fill that,
that power vacuum.
We all have power that we give to the world.
Right.
And if you're not contributing that, then someone else is doing
so on your behalf.
So be active in your own life, in your own future.
Don't wait for anyone to tell you it's okay.
And that's a, that is a fantastic note to end on.
I'll link, I'll link all of this in the show notes as well.
So if anyone wants to skip on down to those, grab these links,
support me, premier Bitcoin, my first Bitcoin.
I think it's fantastic what you guys are doing.
And I, if you're game for it, I do have one more completely
unrelated question to any of this that we've just discussed,
but it's one that I like to ask everyone just selfishly.
I'm always curious, are you reading anything right now that you
particularly recommend if you're not actively reading something
right now, is there something that you would always recommend to
people?
Okay, I'll go, I just started a new book, but it's probably too,
too early to recommend it.
I just like, so something that I would always recommend.
You know, I'm going to go back to go back to the classics.
So civil disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.
It's quite short.
Don't quote me on this, but something like 20 pages or so.
And it has, it's been so influential in my own life,
but it's also been influential in, like the civil rights movement
and in the independence movement in India.
Like it's, it is a profound document.
So yeah, I would recommend that.
I love it.
That's a, it's a great thing to always recommend a classic for
folks because there's a lot of them out there and I guarantee
nobody listening has read them all.
So that's a good thing.
Well, John, I can't thank you enough for your time here today.
This was fascinating.
And again, I want to encourage everybody if you enjoyed this
conversation, if it got you inspired, go and, you know,
donate a few sats if you have them to me,
Premier Bitcoin, as you heard, they are not taking any money from
any near dwells or from the state, even if the state may have
good intentions with it.
So it's a grassroots thing and grassroots means that it requires
people like all of us to chip in a little bit if you like what
they're doing.
And I mean, that's, that's value for value.
You guys are putting out value into the world.
And I think already we've seen the world give value back and I
hope this next fundraising campaign, I hope it,
hope it shatters some records on Geyser.
I'm, I'm, I have a feeling it just might.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, John, thanks so much for your time, man.
We'll talk again soon.
Thank you.
Bitcoin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are
abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another
fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.