just because you think you fall in line today,
and just because you agree with the regime today,
the regime is going to change.
It just always has and it always will.
And if you believe in a system
where you believe in censoring the other side of the aisle,
then you better watch out for when that side of the aisle
gets in power, because you better believe that once,
once the precedent of censorship is set,
it goes against you just as easy as it goes for you.
And that's again why I love Bitcoiners,
because we believe in rules without rulers.
Because rulers are always going to be,
you know, back and forth and back and forth
and back and forth, but if you've got rules,
it's just like, here's the physics.
Like gravity is a rule that I don't care
what kind of what side of the aisle you're on.
If you're a right wing or a left wing
or a libertarian or a communist or whatever,
it's like, you're just subject to gravity.
Like you just get 9.81 meters per second
forced towards the ground, that's it.
I don't care who you are,
just get 9.81 meters a second.
That's it.
And no one has the power,
no one has the ability to turn that off for you.
We can't pick and choose people that get gravity
and people that don't get gravity.
Everyone just gets gravity, everyone gets the protocol,
and we all live within that.
And that's a rule without rulers.
And I think Bitcoin is like gravity,
where it's just everyone gets free and open source money.
Everyone gets programmable money,
programmed and designed to maintain its purchasing power.
And that's a rule.
I don't care if you're left or if you're right
or if you're up or if you're down
or if you're a dog or if you're a human or whatever.
It's just like, you just, that's just what you get.
["The Bitcoin Podcast"]
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 863111
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 Adam O'Brien.
Adam is the founder and CEO of Bitcoin Well.
This conversation started out with a journey
through Adam's own experience getting debanked
by literally every bank in Canada
while running a Bitcoin business back in 2013.
And this led us into talking about the why of Bitcoin,
making this episode perfect for someone
who is just beginning to tiptoe around the edge
of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
But if you are already deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole,
fear not, I think you're gonna love this episode too.
Because Adam and I dig deep into why fiat absolutely sucks.
Short-term fiat versus long-term Bitcoin thinking,
the political implications of separating money from state,
the general Bitcoin or ethos, family and a whole lot more.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe
to The Bitcoin Podcast,
wherever you are watching or listening
and give this show a boost on Fountain
if you find it valuable.
And if you're not on Fountain,
please do check it out because it is awesome.
Go to bitcoinpodcast.net for episodes
and additional Bitcoin and Austrian economics resources.
Grab discount links in the show notes
for my kickass sponsor, Bitbox and other partners.
And send an email to hello at bitcoinpodcast.net.
If you have any feedback
or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk
with Adam O'Brien.
Adam O'Brien, welcome back.
It's just you this time now.
I get some focused attention here, I love it.
That's it, we don't have Julian stealing the show here.
And I mean, he loves to hog the limelight, you know?
What can we say?
I won't hold it against him though.
We'll let it slide this time.
It's like, I'm the exact same.
I'm actually probably infinitely worse than he is.
So definitely cannot hold anything against him.
It's probably why him and I are such a good team.
You guys have been crushing it on the content front.
I mean, that's nothing new.
You have consistently crushed it
since you guys have started working together.
But I've just been loving it, like really high signal.
And again, it's like the stuff you put out,
it's not leading with Bitcoin.
It's, yeah, Bitcoin's in the message there,
but after you've already hooked them in
with like what the fuck is going on with this world.
Which is, I think like the proper approach.
It's not so on the nose as like the Bitcoin podcast,
you know, whoever would do something like that.
Hey man, you know what?
We actually just couldn't do the Bitcoin podcast
because it was already taken.
Like it was just, there's already one and so,
and so we're good there.
But not man, like Julian and he's our absolute tanks.
It's like, it's amazing watching them,
you know, in their craft.
And I get to kind of just sit down
and rant at a camera for a few minutes every day
and Julian finds something in there.
But it's pretty sweet.
It's pretty special when three people, you know,
with values and mission aligned get together
with a common goal, it's exciting.
It is just kind of wild.
Like, you know, just speaking of like value
and mission alignment, what I,
and this is gonna sound cheesy,
but what I genuinely love about Bitcoin and Bitcoiners
is that there is genuine diversity amongst Bitcoiners
because Bitcoin doesn't care, right?
Like you go to a Bitcoin conference
and yes, there may be a higher ratio of dudes to ladies
than at, you know, most places you go.
But like that is gonna even out more eventually.
And it's like, but in terms of just the actual backgrounds
of people, where they come from, who they are,
it is genuinely just this beautiful smorgasbord.
And yet everybody can get together under the same roof
coming from completely different places
and agree on fundamental things.
And that agreement on fundamental things
that generalized ethos, well, we may not agree on everything,
which is also good.
You need that debate within the community.
But that fundamental ethos being there
allows us to just, I think, create really strong bonds
like quickly, that's another thing you noticed.
So you spend a little bit of time with Bitcoiners in person.
You make new friends really quickly.
It helps that you may have known each other
from X or from Noester already,
but it feels like you've known each other for years.
And it's like you may have just met the other day,
but you have that alignment and that makes the friendship
so much easier to start.
Yeah, man, I call it instamacy.
It's like right away you've got this incredible connection.
I think it actually stems from,
because that doesn't exist at,
it doesn't exist at real estate conferences
or at stockbroker conferences
or in legacy finance as a whole.
It doesn't really, I don't think exist in like,
media conferences.
If you go to like, what's the South by Southwest,
big giant media conference,
I'm not sure that it exists there.
And it's because Bitcoiners genuinely want to change the world.
It's like we all are just absolutely crazy enough to think
that we are in the driver's seat to take over
the financial oligarchy and we have the power
to actually overhaul it.
This is like MLK revolution on complete steroids.
And it's powerful, man.
And I'm like, I don't know.
I'm so bullish on the future generation for that
because it probably, like once you kind of take back
the power of the money,
you really take back the power of the people,
which means the history books are gonna actually
properly reflect this event.
I saw this amazing quote the other day
that was like, you know, what are the chance?
Or it's like kind of being like a bit like sarcastic.
And it was like, it's amazing that the good guy
always wins throughout history.
What are the chances?
Who to thunk?
Like, isn't that wonderful?
The good guy always comes out on top.
You had in one of your recent videos,
I'm forgetting, it might have been the one on Telegram.
I wanna get into a couple of them.
It was either that one or maybe it was the corporate
one, you've had a bunch of bangers lately,
but you were rattling off some Orwell quotes.
And there's the one about, it's like Orwell's dictum, right?
He who controls, what is it?
He controls the past controls.
The present controls the past controls the past controls
the future.
And that's, there's a Julian, the first time I heard
that quote besides like, I think I actually heard the quote
from Julian Assange before I had read 1984.
And it's just such a powerful one.
And I remember at the time Assange was using it,
this was like back in, I think 2012,
he was talking about it in relation to Bitcoin being
in the Bitcoin time chain, being a protocol
for basically censorship resistant publication.
He was looking at it from the journalistic point of view.
Like the free speech, like actual speech
and like what Nostra has kind of since maybe picked up
and taken over.
Well, exactly.
And I just, I thought that was so powerful
because this idea, it's not that everything that is published
is going to be true.
But of course not, right?
But you do have proof of publication at a certain time.
And that in and of itself is really powerful.
And did you get a chance to just speak in a free speech?
You get a chance to read Ross Stevens paper
that he did for Nidig yet?
No.
It's awesome.
I actually, as soon as it came out, it was like,
I gotta read this out loud.
So I recorded it like yesterday.
I was editing until like one in the morning
and he's got some bags.
Today from that, but well worth it.
But really incredible, incredible piece,
heavily influenced by Gigi's inalienable property rights
that he did is basically the Bitcoin is speech thesis
from he published that years ago.
But it's fantastic.
And he walks through, Ross does a great job.
It's like, it is heavily cited.
Like there is so many different citations and footnotes
and all this legal precedent that goes into it,
which is really fascinating
because he's making the case that Bitcoin is
not just free speech in this kind of amorphous
or like feel good way.
Like this is actually the legal constitutional law case
for why Bitcoin is free speech.
Totally.
And I think that is so powerful
to be able to make that argument and say,
yeah, it's not just that you're publishing transactions.
It's that you can also,
whatever you think of ordinals and inscriptions,
that really lends a lot of credence to a free speech argument
as a publishing medium.
And then as expressive content is protected
under the First Amendment.
And then expressive association as well,
which is like miners and all of us,
Bitcoiners and psychopaths getting together at conferences.
That's expressive association.
But yeah, if you don't feel like reading it,
luckily you can listen to it in my buttery smooth voice.
So I got your cover.
Dude, I was just gonna say, like, come on,
I'm gonna like put that on before bed,
nice little walker in the ears, putting me to sleep.
Maybe I'll have some dreams about you that night.
That sounds like a win-win.
Don't threaten me at the good time.
Man, but no, go ahead.
It's like, it is, it's shocking how far away
our money has gotten from the root of it,
which is just simply to be a representation of our value,
of the efforts that we put in on a daily basis.
I heard Jack Mahler's, actually he was in Nashville.
He was talking about this and he was saying how,
the profit or excess that you as an individual have
at the end of a month is a demonstration
of your contribution to the world.
It's a tell that you produce, you give to the world
more than you consume from the world.
And that's such a beautiful picture.
People have like, sigh opted and demonized, you know, profit.
And it's like, no, like the fact that I can give
so much value that people are willing to pay for it
and that I can consume less than that is a heroic,
like you have that apart from animals.
You have that apart from every other species
on this planet.
That's what makes a human being unique.
And, you know, of course, when you start to dig in
and or like kind of introduce these foreign third party
objects such as government and regulations,
then that ecosystem gets all messed up
as all natural ecosystems do.
But it is such a beautiful peer mindset around like,
hey, I give to the world more than I take from the world
and here's my proof.
And it's just like, oh, that's so nice.
It is.
And it's, you know, you obviously need a measuring stick
to actually value that, right?
Because there are in this broken ass fiat system,
there are so many people that may have,
that are actually extractors, right?
That are probably net consumers.
But because of the brokenness of the system,
there are games that can be played that allow you
to make it seem as though you are a net producer
when you are in fact not.
You are, you know, it's.
This is like the corporatocracy versus communism kind of video
that you were just referencing.
It's like, you know, when it becomes,
when your marketing team turns into a lobbyist group,
you've lost.
Or at least you, that's like the indication
that you're in a system that's lost.
You know, tobacco industry would not have survived
without the ability to lobby.
And you know, even like big sugar,
like there's documented RFK does a great job explaining how,
like the documentation of big sugar fully just paying their
way into regulation.
And it's like, what?
How, how is this, how is this an indication of capitalism?
How can you even call this?
How can you even look at this through the same lens
as a free market?
And you can't.
I mean, even to the likes of, you know, like Elon and Tesla
and all the subsidies and government, you know,
handouts that they get, it's shocking and mind blowing.
And what it does is it brings society further and further away
from a society that's, that's going to thrive and survive
for many generations.
And we like artificially inflate today
at the massive detriment of tomorrow.
And it just shows how little we care about our,
our little grand babies and like our little, like,
like, you know, I work hard today and, and be, you know,
like being in Bitcoin a long time, like it's, it's,
you know, we're super fortunate, it's all that stuff.
And people are like, how do you find the,
the energy, the passion? Like, you know,
I've got some buddies in Fiat land that are, you know,
working their cushy jobs,
making their half million dollar salary, you know,
like all good 30 hours a week kind of thing,
like all Fridays off, whatever.
He's like, what are you doing? Like, how are you?
And I'm like, dude, I'm working for my great,
great granddaughter.
Like I, I'm creating actual generational wealth here.
I'm not looking to just coast. Like what?
You know, God gave me a hundred years here
and I'm going to coast for 70 of them.
Like, I don't think so.
I'm here to, to make a difference.
And I think that Bitcoin is that measuring stick
that you indicated.
It's that system that so closely relates
to the human beings efforts.
And it's, it's like the perfect form of money.
It's the perfect measuring stick.
It's the perfect way to showcase to the,
to your future generations.
I worked hard, I sacrificed and now it's your turn.
Yeah. No, I, you know, and I, I think I,
I just kind of figured out a thread that I want to weave
for today's, for today's discussion, if you're game for it,
kind of a little bit of the, the why Bitcoin matters.
Because, and I think we, we naturally need to start out
a little bit with the problem statement of fiat.
Because you're right.
I've got, I've got a similar situation.
I've got a lot of, you know, buddies from college,
awesome dudes, love these guys.
They all do very, very well for themselves.
They work for big banks and investment firms
or their corporate lawyers make a lot of money.
And they're like, they're happy with where they're at right now.
And, and, and that's fine.
Like again, I think everybody should do whatever the heck
they want with their own life.
Like I'm not here to tell you what to do.
Some of them have started coming around to saving
in Bitcoin a little, which I think is great,
but they still look at it as like,
that's like that thing that Walker and Carla are kind of
into a little bit.
You know what I mean?
It's an investment part of our portfolio.
Right. Yeah.
Just, you know, take a, take a couple bucks, throw it in there
and see what happens and then sell it in a year or two
when it goes up.
But it's, it's that mentality shift.
And I think maybe a good place to start.
We're at this strange place in the world right now.
We have so much access to so much information,
whether that be information about Bitcoin,
whether that be information about your health.
You actually have the ability to do your own research
without needing to go to your local library
and order a copy of some outdated, you know,
manuscript that's maybe gonna give you some insight.
It's like, no, you can just, you can just use this thing.
Yeah.
This super computer in your pocket that we call a phone,
which is like the least exciting thing it does.
And you can go find out anything you want.
You know, this is amazing.
And yet so many people choose not to.
And I think that there's perhaps something
that the Fiat system has forced people to do
is I think it has taken away a lot of the attention span
that people have.
It's that high time preference mentality of,
I don't have time to go deep down that rabbit hole
because I don't have time for anything.
Like, I've okay, bust my asset work, get home.
If you got a family, try to spend time
with your wife and kids.
Try to, you know, do something fun on a weekend or two.
If you can manage it, you know,
try to be a decent human being,
but there's not a lot of time for a lot else
or so it seems.
And perhaps you're also just, you know,
spending three hours a night watching sports as well
or something, nothing, you know, nothing against sports,
but again, do whatever the fuck you want.
But I think that people lack the attention span sometimes
to get deep into things.
And part of the reason I think is because they're so used
to needing to constantly try to stay one step ahead,
to run on that hamster wheel faster and faster and faster
so that they don't fall off and they can keep the lights on
and they can keep their, you know,
their family together and happy.
And because, you know, the people that are able
to do very well and have that extra time,
it's because they really understand
how this fiat system works.
They understand how to play this system.
And that's great for them, but the majority of people don't.
And I think that's because it's a system
that is designed, whether purposefully or otherwise,
to be really difficult to navigate.
Yeah, there's lots of loopholes you can find
if you know where to look
and you've got good lawyers and that kind of thing.
But for the average person,
that stuff is not even close to on their radar.
And so maybe, you know, I would love,
you mentioned this a little bit in our,
when we had the discussion with the whole get-based crew,
but your story of coming into Bitcoin, I think,
very well illustrates some of the problems
with the fiat system.
Can you talk about that a little bit
in just your experience that kind of radicalized you
fairly quickly, if I remember correctly?
Yeah, no, it is interesting.
And when you're going through,
kind of like I've been in Bitcoin now for a decade,
and when you're going through the journey, so to speak,
it doesn't feel like a big deal.
But then when you look back on it
and you realize kind of like,
it's a little bit like battered wife syndrome, you know?
It's like, oh, no, no, that was fine.
Oh, no, no, this is okay.
This is normal.
It's like, whoa, actually, yeah.
There's a little bit of bad things here.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I think that like, to your point on the system,
whether it's intended or not,
it basically comes down to how we teach our children
and we've transitioned from teaching them how to think
and how to learn into what to think and what to learn.
And lucky for me, like that just never jived with me.
I was always like, much to my parents and teachers dismay,
I was like constantly challenging and asking why
and just like naturally inquisitive.
And you see that, the people that change the world
are the ones that question,
are the ones that ask why is it like this?
Are the ones that have the attention span
or more so the drive, I think,
because my attention span is completely shot.
I got like zero attention span,
but I just have probably like the drive and the desire
and the stubbornness to ask why and then find the answer.
And that's what's kind of driven me,
yeah, from finding Bitcoin in 2013,
and then just kind of keep on driving down this road
of the Bitcoin journey.
You find Bitcoin, you think it's a joke,
you think it's a scam, you think it's fake,
you think you're late,
and then you try to disprove it, like every hero, right?
I'm gonna be the hero on Reddit
at that time was the IRC chats
and tell all these idiots what's real.
And then it's like, well, actually the decentralization,
yeah, your first basic principles,
that kind of makes a bit of sense.
And well, I suppose proof of work,
like you actually do want some actual value
being tied to your digital token, so okay, that's good.
Yeah, the decentralized,
like the blockchain distribution system in nodes,
yeah, that checks out, that's pretty good.
But what about real money?
What about, it's gotta have some government backing.
Oh, well historically actually government backing
never really worked and here's why.
And oh, there's a lie about inflation
that it actually kicks our economies
and here's some historical, it's like, oh wow,
everything I just learned for the last 12 years
is just like unraveling every day.
Every article I read about Bitcoin
unravels a new history lesson, unravels a math lesson,
unravels the thread of the world.
And then again, lucky me, just like all in, let's go,
110%, I am the Bitcoin guy.
And as it turns out, our monopolistic Canadian banking
system just doesn't like that too much.
So from the span of 2015 to 2017, 18,
every single bank in Canada proceeded to debank me.
And to the point actually where it's not just me anymore,
my wife, who stays at home with our four children
and the Scotiabank, which is one of the large banks
in Canada, just debanked, sent her a letter,
I posted on Twitter, I think it was in May or so,
they were just like, outside of our risk guidelines,
like off you go, it's like what?
What are the risk guidelines?
What could this possibly be?
And yeah, it kinda showcased to me how little,
and I'm obviously happy to go into
as much a little detail as you want,
but it's like, at the end of the day,
it's like big bank doesn't like Adam,
big bank gets rid of Adam and his family.
And there's some funny things in there
because he can't buy a house with cash,
he can't pay your taxes in cash.
I went to go buy my wife a car,
negotiated the price all good, here we go,
go to the dealership with my suitcase of money,
which they told me I could use.
And they were like, whoa,
you didn't tell me you were paying in cash.
I was like, well, I said cash.
And they were like, well, we thought you meant check.
And I was like, well, no, I said cash and I meant cash.
And they're like, well, we gotta give that money to the police.
The police gotta keep it for 10 days, blah, blah, blah.
I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like,
you're not gonna give this money to the police?
Like on what grounds is this a problem?
Like here's money, you can like Google me,
you can see I'm like pretty, you know,
like I'm not some drug lord, like, you know, here we are.
And just the more and more and more you unravel,
the more and more and more you realize
that we're living in a system
that's not designed for individuals.
And I think that was what like that flipped the switch,
an irreversible switch, you know, it's like, it's on,
there's duct tape over top, do not remove,
like always on switch.
And as a result, I'm just some like insane psychopath
that is dedicated to enabling independence
for as many people on planet Earth as humanly possible.
And I think that's a net positive, you know,
I'm very thankful that I have the like curiosity
and things that have driven me to here.
But it is definitely like, it's not without its problems,
I suppose.
And if you want to change the world,
I suppose you need to be comfortable
in the uncomfortable chairs,
which is something that I'm lucky and thankful I am.
The great thing about Bitcoin is no one can debank you
because you are your own bank,
as long as you have custody of your private keys.
But you need to keep those keys safe.
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 or anything else in their store.
Then get your Bitcoin off the exchange
and into your own self custody.
So you actually can be your own bank.
Not only is the Bitcoin in your Bitbox safe
from government confiscation and of course fiat debasement,
but Bitbox is one of the only two wallets
to actually address the dark, skippy vulnerability.
So if you have a Bitbox, you are in luck.
Plus, and I cannot emphasize this part enough,
but the Bitbox O2 is truly easy as hell to use.
Whether you are brand new to Bitcoin,
it's your first time setting up a hardware wallet,
so you're a little bit nervous,
or you are a well-seasoned psychopath.
And you know this setup like the back of your hand.
Again, it is Bitcoin only and it is fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself.
There is no need to trust me or trust Bitbox.
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.
Amen to that.
I would love to know a little bit more
and just for folks listening,
can you explain what was the business that you were running
and are running that got the banks so fired up
about your risk profile and how dangerous it was
that they possibly banked you?
Yeah, man.
So started in, in 2013,
I was just basically the guy in Edmonton,
which is my local town selling Bitcoin.
And then we bought some Bitcoin ATMs
and had Bitcoin ATMs in Alberta and Saskatchewan,
the neighboring province and BC,
the other side province,
and kind of built up this network of Bitcoin ATMs.
From there, we moved into Interak E-Transfer,
which was like our local kind of like Venmo equivalent.
And we accepted Interak E-Transfer for Bitcoin
and we had some other,
like you could pay your bills in Bitcoin
and all this other stuff.
And with that, unfortunately,
there's lots of cash in that ATM industry.
And the banks deemed the cash to be bad.
And in all fairness, like fair enough,
you can deem cash to be bad if you want to as a bank.
But what I pushed on was show me why.
And this is where things got really crazy was
the man in the front in the suit was saying,
like, no, no cash.
And I'm saying fine, how come?
And he's saying, oh, because of compliance.
And again, fair enough, show me, show me which compliance?
Cause like here I am, I got FinTrack,
which is our like FinSend equivalent.
Like I'm buttoned up, I've got my jurisdictions.
Here's my compliance manual.
Here's our practices and policies,
all written by some fancy person in like in Toronto.
And they got all the qualifications
and I got all the qualifications
and I wrote the tests and we got the certificates
and we've got the lawyers and like,
here's my compliance that tells me I'm onside with the law.
What am I missing?
Cause I wouldn't, I don't want to go to jail.
Please help me good, sir.
You're protecting me, obviously, right?
You're in the chair of protection.
Please can you showcase to me where I'm offside?
Oh no, we won't do that.
It's like, well, you told me I'm wrong.
I'm telling you I'm right.
You know, will you at least take my manual
to those people in the back room, the black box
and show them, oh no, we don't have
to see your compliance policy.
It's like, well, I'm offside cause of compliance,
but yet you don't want to see my compliance documents.
Like how does this work?
It's kind of like me accusing you of doing something
and you saying, no, here's evidence that I didn't do that.
And you'd be like, no, no, no, no,
I don't want to see the evidence.
Like, okay, and this happened over and over
and over and over again.
And this is when that was actually like the tipping point
for me to realize like Bitcoin is for freedom.
Bitcoin is not for some number go up investment.
It is for freedom.
And then, you know, this is like,
this is now almost 10 years ago.
This is eight, nine years ago.
This is happening to me and my family throughout
like all the banks in Canada.
It's not just a one off.
It's literally every single one in Canada.
And so, you know, I'm talking to my friends
and I'm talking to my like my parents and my parents' friends
and everyone's just like Adam's nuts.
Like lost it.
This kid is insane.
He's crazy.
Banks don't steal money.
Banks always want to have the money, you know,
Adam's wrong.
And then in 2022, we had our big trucker protest here
in Canada and like everyone flipped.
Everyone said, wow, Adam was right.
Like the banks are going to shut people down
who they don't lie with or the government
or like whoever the powers that be are.
It's kind of the same in Canada.
The banks and the government are all the same arm.
And it's just, it became very, very apparent
that the only funds available throughout
that trucker protest and also in my life
has been Bitcoin and self custody.
And you realize this is, you know,
a big part of my, of like when I, when I speak,
I give a presentation called self custody or bust.
And this is a big piece of it is like Bitcoin price
is one of five properties of Bitcoin.
The other four are for freedom.
And, and we ignore the other four so frequently
because we're so, as you said earlier, fixated on price,
fixated on the system, fixated on attention span
that can't really expand.
We don't fully understand the money system here in Canada
or in the world.
And as a result, we don't have the ability to, to zoom out
and see what the fix would be to a system
that we don't really even think is broken.
And so I kind of just made it my mission to, you know,
Bitcoin well exists to enable independence.
And this was a big piece of, I mean, even down to the name,
we used to be called Bitcoin solutions.
I wanted to make Bitcoin accessible and understood.
That was the initial like tagline that, that I came up with.
Unfortunately, it was like the max creativity
that I had at the time was Bitcoin solutions.
So that was it.
We were capped.
And then in 2020, we changed our name to the Bitcoin well.
And where the word Bitcoin well came from was thinking
about this mission of independence and freedom.
I thought back to like early settlers.
And when you were finding a new area,
the first thing you had to do was, was dig your well.
And the first thing you needed was, was a source of water
coming into your community and into otherwise life's dead.
Like you don't get to live.
And Bitcoin is the financial water for all of us settlers
that are kind of like coming out of the old system,
coming out of old Britain, coming out of old Europe
and traveling across this like sketchy ocean
towards the promised land of, of, you know,
of a Bitcoin circular economy.
And we're all digging wells.
And I wanted Bitcoin well to be the well that people came to
that learned about, you know, first principle self-custody
that learned about Bitcoin only.
And why, you know, only buying Bitcoin versus like crypto
is important.
I wanted them to learn about key management
and ultimately sovereignty principles that have, you know,
shaped my life and shaped my, my personality.
And then of course, like the double entendre of Bitcoin good
was just, you know, I'm still like a little kid at heart.
And so that, that was just too good to pass up.
So we've been the Bitcoin well now for, yeah, three years.
I'm not really the Bitcoin well, just Bitcoin well.
And, and that's us.
And, and you know, I'm super proud of what we've got today.
You can buy Bitcoin online.
You can sell Bitcoin online.
You can pay your bills.
We'll be launching gift cards here right away.
So we'll be able to buy gift cards with Bitcoin.
We've got like swaps from lightning to Bitcoin.
We're really trying to like backing up a little bit.
Overarchingly, we kind of ask ourselves,
how do you use money?
And there's many different ways to use money.
And then we just kind of go down the list and say,
how do you apply Bitcoin to this?
And then build it, launch it next.
Truly looking to create, like I have no interest
in competing with Coinbase or like other, you know,
crypto casinos.
I want to compete with Bank of America.
And I want to compete with, with the big banks in Canada.
And yeah, that's what we're about.
We want to enable independence.
I love it, man.
You know, I'm curious on the, the banks themselves,
did they all give you some version of the same line?
Oh yeah.
And was it, was there, so it was like,
that must have been kind of eerie.
So you're going from bank to bank.
You're like, maybe this is a one-off.
Maybe this is a fluke.
These guys just have some sort of really strict compliance.
Then as you're telling me that, I'm just wondering,
okay, so there are no, there are no ATM companies,
just fiat ATM companies in Canada that doesn't exist.
Like they're, they're deba...
So did you ever find out, did any of them ever mention
the fact that it was, I mean, I assume because you were
a Bitcoin associated business,
it couldn't have just been the cash, right?
I mean, that's otherwise again,
how does any ATM company get banked?
So not directly, but yes, that ultimately did come out.
There, and it didn't come out like in direct question
and answer.
How the bands worked in Canada for me was at certain banks,
I'd get like a timeline ban.
Some banks just outright banned me forever.
And some gave me, it felt like a cooling off period,
I guess.
And so after the few years were up, I'd go back
and they'd go through and they'd say,
you know, are you still in the Bitcoin industry?
Or are you still in the crypto industry?
And that was kind of like, oh, interesting,
like they're, they're catching on to, to this.
The hilarious, and I think where the,
where the hilarity kind of started for me,
and maybe I just got so disenfranchised with having a bank
that it, it just became funny.
But I was at one of the banks after my seven year ban was up,
they decided arbitrarily to give me seven years.
So my seven year ban is up, seven year ban,
like you can't have an account for seven years.
And so seven years goes by, I walk into the bank,
I've got my passport and all my documents
and I'm ready to get a bank account.
Like, look at me, I'm gonna get a checking account.
Like maybe I get a line of credits, you know,
do I get to ape into Bitcoin on someone else's cash?
Like, here we go.
You know, I'm just excited to be able to pay my power bill
out of a bank account in my name.
And so I walk in and we go to the back room
and we're getting all the docs set up.
And she's like, oh, well that's weird.
And I was like, what's going on?
She's like, oh, well you're, you're blacklisted.
And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
that was a seven year blacklist.
It's been, it's almost eight years now.
Like I'm, I'm good.
She's like, okay, let me go see.
So she goes to the back room,
talks to the black box people,
and then she comes back and she goes, no,
we upgraded your seven year ban to a lifetime ban.
And I was like, oh, how come?
And they're like, well, we weren't happy
with your banking practices.
And I was like, but I was banned.
Like, how, how could you be unhappy with practices
that weren't happening because I was,
I was not banking here.
Like it's just a, it's just a hilarious.
And of course, you know, like the girl at the teller
making 22 bucks an hour doesn't, like she doesn't know.
She just sees, do not open, you know,
talk to the manager who says, do not open.
And then that's it.
Like she doesn't care.
She's like, it's my smoke break soon.
Let me go.
So it is what it is.
But I've got a, I've got a pile and pile and pile of letters
and I've recorded most conversations in the bank, you know,
at the end of the day, none of that really matters
because I don't have the, my resources are not well spent
suing the bank.
You know, it's probably in their terms of service
that they can just do whatever the hell they want
at any time with your money.
So it doesn't really make a legal difference.
And at the same time, you know,
I decided to focus my efforts on building
what we're building at Bitcoin Well.
And I think that's a net benefit for humanity.
And that's, I think the difference overarchingly
in a Bitcoiner and someone in the fiat system
is the fiat system tends to breed people
that want to get even.
They tend to breed people that want to just like, you know,
get some level of like retribution
and like eye for an eye type of mentality.
But like the world becomes a better place
when we zoom out and focus the efforts
on fixing the problem that's caused us pain,
not hitting the person that's caused us pain.
And I'm a big believer in that.
That's like, you know, that's an age old teaching
like biblically that's like a teaching
that's probably just a sound form of thought and taught.
And I think that rings true in most Bitcoiners
that I know, the good ones anyways,
they're not really of the like,
we need to ruin someone else's life.
They're definitely closer to,
I want to fix the lives of the future.
And that's amazing and that's healthy
and that feels really good.
It does.
And you know, as you were telling the story,
it made me think of this Chinese proverb
that I heard Alan Watts recite once,
which is it's a very short one.
I'll just, I'll rattle it off here, but it's a, this farmer
and one day the farmer's horse, his only horse runs off
and the villagers come by to say,
oh, I'm so sorry, your horse is gone.
What a shame.
And the farmer says, maybe.
And then the next day, his horse comes running back
and it's brought with it five wild horses
that were following it.
And he's got six horses now.
The villagers come by, oh my gosh, you are so lucky.
Well, you must feel great.
How fortunate you are.
And he said, maybe.
And then the next day,
his son is trying to break one of the wild horses
and his son is thrown off, shatters his leg,
can't walk, laid up in bed.
The villagers concerned as always come by again
and say, oh, that's so terrible.
We're so sorry, you must feel just awful
at your bad fortune.
He says, maybe.
And then the next day, the army comes by
conscripting able-bodied young men
and his son is not conscripted.
And the villagers come by and say, wow,
you really are so fortunate.
And he says, maybe.
And that's, your story made me think of that
because at the end of the day,
if you wouldn't have had such,
I mean, that's one of the worst deep banking
and unable to ever get banking stories
you can possibly imagine.
Just time after time, shut down,
trying to run a business, can't do it.
Literally cannot get access to these banking rails
that most people would assume,
if you don't have that, how do you,
how do you even have a business today?
How do you even manage?
But you've managed and probably because that kind of
radicalized you so much,
all these steps brought you here to where you are today.
And without those misfortunes at the time,
I'm just imagining you sitting there and people are like,
wow, that sucks, man, you keep getting debanked
and it's just like, maybe.
Maybe, but look where you are today.
And so in a way, we have the shitty fiat banking system
to thank for radicalizing you to a point
where you've now made this your life's work.
Yeah, well, that's kind of a law of first principles too,
right, is you can try to manipulate a natural system
as much as you want, but eventually you get to a point
or the system gets to a point
where you cannot manipulate any longer.
And we just, you are always going to succumb,
you can never prevent a natural system from doing its thing.
You can just delay or accelerate
what would have already happened.
And Bitcoin has and is the inevitable way
to store the value that you create with your time.
Bitcoin is the most natural form of money
this world has ever seen.
And it's going to come.
Like the banks can try to stop it
and Kamala Harris can try to stop it
and PPC can try to stop it.
It doesn't matter.
It's going to be here.
And you might get lucky and delay it a year.
You might preserve your political riches
for another year or two or maybe a decade.
But when you zoom out,
it is completely meaningless to try to intervene
with this natural system.
And I think that you're just on the wrong side of history
if you're fighting against Bitcoin right now.
I would concur with that wholeheartedly.
I assume you would running that Bitcoin podcast.
One thing I want to dig into with you a little bit is,
because, OK, perhaps if somebody's listening to this
and I try to gear this show towards both well-seasoned
psychopaths but also newcomers who may somehow stumble across it
like I did with what Bitcoin did back in the day
and then Guy Swann's Bitcoin audible.
Those were the number one and number two podcasts
that I started listening to.
And one thing that I think is really important
is the actual problem statement of Fiat.
Because somebody may be listening and they hear that,
you know, all of these debanking stories and thinking,
oh my gosh, well, I mean, that's horrible,
but that's not going to happen to me.
I don't run a Bitcoin business.
I don't step out of line.
I'm not a Canadian trucker protesting, you know,
overreaching government mandates.
So, you know, maybe it's this, yeah, that's a nice story,
but that only happens to a few people.
And while that actually may be true,
I think that there is this other side of the
why Fiat sucks argument, which is,
you are literally having your life's work,
the fruits of your labor, your time and energy
stolen from you by currency debasement.
And I kind of want to riff on that a little bit
because I think that's something that people,
even when they, the way that the media and politicians
talk about inflation, they're never actually talking
about inflation.
They're talking about prices rising.
They're talking about the result,
the downstream result of monetary debasement.
But we just co-locally refer to it as inflation,
but it's price inflation, which happens with a lag
after monetary inflation.
Even the way economists and the folks at the federal
reserve and Bank of Canada will talk about inflation
is going down.
Look at inflation is the lowest it's been since whatever
year and they pat themselves in the back and the politicians
get their sound bites and aren't we wonderful and everyone's
happy.
But what most, if you zoom out instead of just going year
over year and you look at the fact that inflation is
cumulative, every, you know, they're looking at year
over year metrics, but just because it went,
inflation went down 1% from 3% to 2% inflation,
let's say inflation decreased, but no, it didn't.
That's just going up fast.
Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's just robbing you
slightly more slowly.
I heard a great analogy for this was someone tweeted and
they were like, well, I was 250 pounds and then I
gained 10 pounds and then I gained 12 pounds and then
I gained six pounds and then I gained two pounds.
My weight gain went down and it's like, but I'm still
280 pounds.
That is a great analogy.
It was so good.
It hit the nail on the head so well.
It's like, good for you.
You're gaining less weight, but actually the goal is not
to be gaining weight.
It's to be losing weight and our monetary debasement to
your point is in this state where it is always, it is
programmed to just debase and get less valuable because
prices, I mean, you and I know this prices don't rise.
The money we use to buy the things just get less valuable.
It's like, you know, things aren't more expensive in
Mexico.
It's just the money like, you know, oh, a car is, is 700,000
pesos.
It's like, wow, cars are so expensive in Mexico.
Like, no, just the money you use to measure your
car is less valuable than what we use here.
And it's such a, it's such a mind bender to get your
head around.
It's, it's insane.
And I mean, yeah, we can, I think though, before we dive
into like the theft, cause I'm, I'm a big believer in that
theory and I actually think I've got some like reasonable
logic to get us there, but just speaking to the person
that thinks that'll never happen to me.
I'm not an extremist.
I'm not some hardcore anti-vaxxer like the
criminal financial terrorist that is Adam.
One day you will be.
And what I mean by that is government control doesn't
just occur to one side of the aisle.
It occurs to both sides of the aisle and our political
system is designed such that the pendulum swings from
left to right.
It doesn't ever stay, you know, in the center where
everybody's happy.
And I think the best way to articulate this is actually
with the abortion argument because politicians are
on very, like two, it's very split, two very clear lines
on the end of that one side is pro life.
One side is pro choice.
It would be very reasonable.
Sorry.
I think both of this is unreasonable, but you can follow
my, my thought logic here.
It would be very reasonable for a pro choice, a
politician to debank and ban the pro life proponents.
And likewise, it would be very reasonable and expected
for a pro life politician to debank and punish the
pro choice people.
And that in my mind, as much as I'm a shocking, you
know, there's some like, there's some clickbait for
you, Walker.
You can, you can talk about abortion and get some,
and get some clicks, although that's probably getting
you demonetized now.
I'm not sure where the, where the rules are, but I
think that's a good indication that just because you
think you fall in line today and just because you
agree with the regime today, the regime is, is, is
going to change.
It just always has and it always will.
And if you believe in a system where you believe in
censoring the other side of the aisle, then you better
watch out for when that side of the aisle gets in
power, because you better believe that once, once
the precedent of censorship is set, it goes against
you just as easy as it goes for you.
And that's again, why I love Bitcoiners because we
believe in rules without rulers, because rulers are
always going to be, you know, back and forth and
back and forth and back and forth.
But if you've got rules, it's just like, here's the
physics, like gravity is a rule that I don't care
what kind, what side of the aisle you're on.
If you're a right wing or a left wing or a libertarian
or a communist or whatever, it's like, you're just
subject to gravity.
Like you just, you just get 9.81 meters per second
force towards the ground.
That's it.
I don't care who you are.
You know, you can like go in a plane for a little bit
and spend some energy and get up.
You can like crouch down and dig a hole and spend some
energy and go down, but you just get 9.81 meters
a second.
That's it.
And no one's, no one has the power.
No one has the ability to turn that off for you.
We can't pick and choose people that get gravity
and people that don't get gravity.
Everyone just gets gravity.
Everyone gets the protocol and we all live within
that.
And that's a rule without rulers.
And I think Bitcoin is like gravity where it's just
everyone gets free and open source money.
Everyone gets programmable money programmed and
designed to maintain its purchasing power.
And that's a rule.
I don't care if you're left or if you're right or if
you're up or if you're down or if you're a dog or if
you're a human or whatever.
It's just like, you just, that's just what you get.
And no one can change that for you.
And that's, you know, pure Bitcoin, obviously raw
Bitcoin, real Bitcoin on the blockchain.
And that's why I love Bitcoin.
That, that, do you get that?
So just, just before we, we, we riff on, you know,
how inflation creates slavery and why that's the,
I've even gone as far as to say like, you know,
a world without Bitcoin is more war torn.
And I, and I believe that to be true.
But before we get there, it's just very important to
note that if you are someone listening right now,
who's on the side of the regime and good for you,
I'm not going to sit here and criticize your beliefs.
You will be subject to authoritarianism one day,
either you or your grandkids.
And I think it's important to advocate for free and
open source, programmable rules, but not rulers.
I think that is, thank you for clarifying that because it is
a really important thing for people to realize.
Everybody thinks when they're, when their colored team is
in power, right?
Yeah.
You know, and there's also this, I think some of this
tendency to think, well, if we don't do it to them,
they're going to do it to us, whatever it might be in this
context.
It's almost this proactive approach to like, well,
we've, we've got to be the ones who are in charge of the
censorship because we can't let.
Yeah, let's shoot before they shoot us, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Shoot first, ask questions later and just make sure not too
many of our people get caught with friendly fire.
But that's the thing.
At a certain point, you are going to be on the wrong side
of a regime because that pendulum does swing back and forth.
And that's why I think people, we've lost so much,
we as a collective, not we as individuals, but we as a
collective seem to have lost so much of a principles based
approach to how things are done.
Like that was the whole point of the, in the United States,
the constitution, right?
And all the amendments that we put together was to, to, to
have founding documents that allowed us to operate as a
constitutional republic and have checks on stupid ideas that
would come down the pipe later because we could refer back
and say, no, that's not what we're about actually.
Like, yeah, it's a core values setting, setting a core value,
setting a filter to govern your decisions, rules, right?
We need, we need this ability to have filters for decisions
because, you know, any smart person can probably justify any
argument, but you have to have a set of core rules and as a,
as a filter to that, we use that in our organization all the
time. And the one that I struggle with the most, we have
excellence as a core value. And you think like, well, obviously
what a lame core value, what do you want?
Excellent things are not excellent things, but the
top of excellence is not not excellence. It's perfection.
And the key indicator there is the pace at which you deliver
because if you maintain a platform of perfection, you're
going to be slow. You just, you don't get to make perfect
things fast and no one, no one does because perfection
requires this insane, meticulous review, review, review,
review, review process versus a platform of excellence where
we kind of move fast. And, and we've got this first principles
approach of make the right decision the first time and then
trust it. And, and, you know, we obviously make wrong
decisions. We come back and we fix it, but it's a net, it's a
net faster movement. We get to build more things faster as a
result. And I think that having that filter, even for me,
because man, I'll spend, I'll spend hours looking at a
newsletter and it's like, we're looking at like, you know, the
copy and the receipts and it's like, and I drive myself crazy
and I'm up at night and I'm like, Oh, what do we need? What's
the word here? And then I just think to myself like, good
grief, ship it and move on. Like, let's just, let's just get
it out here. And having that filter, which is again, what
the constitution should be, what the amendments should be,
having that filter is so important. We actually just
launched one of those filters in Alberta, our premier
yesterday or two days ago, she made three amendments to the
Alberta, the equivalent of the constitution, bodily autonomy.
You do not, there's not, there's not going to ever be any
vaccine mandates in Alberta ever again. She's given right to
medical bodily autonomy, I suppose. Firearms, she's given
amendment in there, guaranteed rights to, to bear arms.
And there was one more, which seemed less important than the
other two. So I just must have forgotten it, but it's
interesting. Now that said, that so my mind goes, oh, you
know, Bravo, she's a Bitcoin or I've gotten to meet with her.
She's like, she's great. And that's all good. But it's like,
Hey, wait a second, someone in charge just changed the rules.
So it's like, well, is it all just a shell game? Does it
even matter at this point? If the next person that comes in
charge can just control Zed that and sign a new piece of paper
and re-change the rules back? Like, what does it matter? It's
just all virtue signaling at that point. Because it's not
protocol driven. It's just still trust and centralization at
work.
I think that for so many people, it's really difficult to wrap
their minds around the fact that the people in power are in
fact just people. They are not, they are not endowed with
some incredible mental acuity or some this fortitude to be
this amazing leader. They're just people. They are fallible.
They make mistakes all the time. They may, you know, the line
between good and evil cuts through the heart of all of us,
right? There, it's, you know, some people are that line goes
way more to the evil side, like you might be a murdering
psychopath and like, okay, that's a different story. But
for most people, they're treading that line, and they do some
good things. They do some shitty things. You try to be more on
the side of good, right? But they're ultimately just people.
And when you have an incentive system that is so warped that
because that's what this all comes down to, right? And we're
talking about, you know, kind of the Bitcoin versus fiat
mentality. And for me, so much of it comes down to that
incentive system. What is the system itself or the protocol
itself? What is it incentivizing people to do? Are the
incentives to be, you know, to create value, to try and be a
good steward of what you have and to grow your, you know, your
lot in this life and build something of lasting
significance for yourself and for your family for your
grandchildren's grandchildren, as you were talking about earlier,
or is the incentive to consume as much as you can as fast as
you can, as long as it's given to you, because you just got
to eat as much of that pie as you can possibly get. And there
are winners and losers and you know what, screw everybody
else. The best thing you can do is just play the game as well as
possible. And it doesn't matter who you step over along the way.
But when we look at our elected leaders or our unelected
leaders like who run our cartels of central banks, the
incentives are just so broken. And those broken perverted
incentives create broken perverted outcomes. And that's
I think what again, a lot of people may still be laboring
under the delusion that if the, if the elected leader is on
your side of the aisle, they want what's best for you. And if
they're on the other side of the aisle, they must want what's
worst for you. And of course, the truth is, is neither of those
things are true. The truth is somewhere in the middle. But I
guess what I'm trying to get at here is the reason that this
fiat system that we have is so broken is because the incentives
themselves are misaligned. You are incentivized to consume as
much as you can as fast as you can, as long as you can. And it
doesn't matter what the consequences are in, you know, in
as John Maynard Keynes would say, you know, in the end, we're all
dead anyway, which is just like true, true. But what a terrible
way to approach things. And he was saying that in reference to
like, we may as well just print the money, you know, like, we're
all dead anyway. It's like, yeah, you're dead, but your kids
aren't. And they're kids aren't and their kids aren't. And I
think this short term thinking versus long term thinking for
me is one of the biggest demarcations between that fiat
mentality and the kind of Bitcoin or mentality. And I'd
love to just hear, you know, because for you, you were really
forced out of even having the option of having a fiat
mentality. How do you look at that? How do you think about that?
How does that change just either the way you run your business?
How do you think about your family? Yeah, let me know.
Dude, yeah, the family thing is, is absolutely massive. And on
the business side, you know, don't get me wrong, we have not
been perfect. We've, we've levered up, we've done the, you
know, we went public, like we're, we're, we're inside this fiat
game, make no mistake. I, there's very few businesses that I
that I can point to that are outside of the fiat game and I
commend the leaders in charge because it's, it's, it's a
challenge and it's hard to do. And that's one thing that I am
charged with here at Bitcoin. Well, is, is moving us closer
and closer and closer towards that, that Bitcoin or principled
balance sheet and that Bitcoin or principled shareholder group
and that Bitcoin or principled operating line. And yeah, like
the business itself, we talk a lot about time preference and
and we talk about, you know, helping, helping more, you know,
that, that profit line of giving more to the world than, than
what you consume. We talk about all of that specifically to
the family and man, I am honestly speaking of incentives
and how, how the, the monetary system that you're a part of
the, the team, so to speak, that you're a part of can influence
like just different aspects of life. I, there is no other
industry in the world other than Bitcoiners that are having
more kids and more bullish about the future. And frankly, if
I wasn't in Bitcoin, you know, I have, I have like a Christian
faith that probably would, would tie in and I actually personally
believe that, you know, Bitcoin is a biblical money. I actually
give a presentation called Jesus is a Bitcoiner and it talks
about that as a whole. And I'll be giving that actually at
adopting Bitcoin this year. I'm not sure if you're going to be
there, but it's a, it's a cool and it's an interesting
presentation anyways that, that, you know, is also a bit provocative.
But barring all that my optimism on the future thanks to
Bitcoin allows me to have children. It gives me permission
to bring, you know, a bloodline into the earth knowing that
they won't be subject to suffering, knowing that they won't
have the same, the same level of despair that people who don't
have Bitcoin and not because they're going to be wealthy, not
because of their purchasing power, but because of the freedom
they're going to have because of their ability to, to flee to
a different jurisdiction that maybe is more favorable to Bitcoin
because of their ability to find and instantly connect with
a group of like-minded individuals. Bitcoin truly gives you
the ability to understand almost immediately where someone's
core value set lies. And if it's, if it's a core value set of,
of yeah, production or consumption or of, or of, you know,
ultimately of, of slavery or freedom because what you're
talking about, like today, I would say the world is, is a dark
place today. You have to lock your doors at night. You can't
really trust your neighbor. There's, you know, you think back
to like our grandparents and it was like kick the kids out of
the house. You don't see them for, for 10, 12 hours. They come
back when the street lights come on and that was your curfew.
Today you can't, today you've got PDT going to jail for molesting
how many hundreds, you know, thousands of children and, and, and
horrible things. And, and this stems back from again the root
of where our money comes from. We have a money system that is
rooted in theft, rooted in slavery because we've put people in
charge of money. But if you take, you know, money is all fake,
money is all irrelevant. Money is but a representation of our
time, of our value, of our efforts. And so if someone's in charge
of the money, but the money is actually just representation of
our time, that means someone's in charge of your time, which is
like rooted in, in, that's like the root of slavery. And so now
we've got someone in charge of our time, someone who controls
our time and someone who's just arbitrarily producing more time,
making my time worth a lot less. And that's where the theft
comes in. So now I have this like unknown invisible force all
around me making my time worth less. That feels bad, right? I
think that feels good for anyone that your value is just being
stripped away. You know, I imagine this is how someone who paints
a beautiful painting feels when they see a rip off of it on
eBay or on Etsy. It's like, damn, I spent days or months, you
know, crafting that, picking the perfect color set, the perfect
brush stroke. I didn't paint for three days because my hand was
tense and I couldn't get the right stroke out. You're going to
snap a picture and just print that out and sell it at Walmart.
Like that sucks, right? That's my value being stripped away,
but it's invisible. We can't point at it. We can't, we can't fixate
our energy on getting rid of that invisible force. And so what
happens? All of a sudden, everyone becomes that invisible force.
Your neighbor is stealing from you. You're, and then back to
what you said, you know, well, if they're stealing from me, I
better steal first because this is a normal part of life now.
Stealing is natural and, and look at me. I'm being stolen from
you're being stolen from someone, something is stealing from us.
It might be you, but it might not be you, but I better steal
from you before you steal from me. And now we've turned our backs
on you. Look at me. I'm getting all excited. I'm flipping my
mic out of there. Yes. We're no longer as cohesive species that
works together. And you can see how broken and dusted this is
when you look at like, you know, animal packs and you look at
how they respond without money. Now don't get me wrong. We're a
lot better off than the animals because we have money. But you
look at how a collective species works together when there is
no invisible force stealing from them. And I'm not sure if
you've watched, have you watched chimp empire on Netflix?
I have not yet. I've been debating. Dude, you got to watch it,
man. I've watched it a lot. It's the perfect background show.
If you're like, if you're editing your, maybe you're listening
to yourself speak, which if I had your voice, I would also want
to listen to myself speak at one in the morning. But if you're
ever like editing or you're doing something, you just need
to listen on in the background, you throw a chimp empire on.
It is out of hand amazing and showcases like there's rivalry.
There's two chimp clans that get after it. But the clan itself
is shocking to see their hierarchy. It's shocking to see how
it works. It's amazing to see how, you know, a natural form of
politics looks and the, you know, the chimps, they don't have a
perfect, but they got it better than we do. And it just goes to
show how I would hazard a guess that there are more like chimps
have another chimps back more than humans have another humans
back. And you got to look at the differences. And one of the
main differences is that we've got someone who's in charge of
our time as humans and Bitcoin removes that and Bitcoin removes
that invisible force. And that's why I think, you know, I meet
a Bitcoin or like Julian and I is actually a great example.
I didn't know him at all. Saw his videos. We had a couple phone
calls and then we shared an Airbnb at a Bitcoin conference in
Calgary. And it's like, you know, you hear there's some horror
stories of meeting people online and then going to share houses
with them. And I'm not going to lie. I don't even know if Julian
knows this. I like when I went to bed, we chat our own rooms. I
like piled the chairs up in front of the doors just in case he
was like crazy axe murderer. And I would at least have some time
to like, I'd hear the chairs come down. I'd be able to like jump
up and maybe defend myself. I can't wait for him to listen to
this later. He's gonna be like, I did the same thing. I had all
the chairs up against the door. Totally. I didn't trust you
either. But I just even that aside, outside of the Bitcoin
industry, you don't get to share houses with people that you
don't know. And it's because you don't have that common set.
He and I both know the truth that there's no invisible force
stealing from our Bitcoin stash. And that's a special thing
that's a bond. And that what that also means is that we're
aware of the secret force that's that's stealing our power.
But we also want to fight it. We also want to go against it.
We're voting against it with our with our time and efforts.
And those two things just like point your core values in the
same direction. And it's super special.
I think there are so many people to your point earlier of not
if you didn't have Bitcoin, you would be not in the place that
you are now just like mentally even just hopeful about the
future. And this is something I hear about and talk about with
Bitcoiners time and time again is that that the existence of
Bitcoin is what enables you to have hope in the future. It's
not just Bitcoin itself. It's not just the number go up part of
it. It's the fact that it exists. And all that that means as
far as what we have the power to create going forward, yes,
what exists now, yes, what is being built now, but the
implications of that down the line. And knowing that this is a
system that cannot be shut off, that cannot be co opted.
You then have some hope that okay, there's something there that
this, you know, the invisible hand of government fuckery can't
can't dittle. And you have that not just for yourself, but for
your children and your grandchildren. You have something
that you can that actually allows you to plan long into the
future. You have something that you can have certainty in even
after you are dead. Which is not the case with fiat. I don't
have certainty what fiat is going to do tomorrow or next
week or next month. I don't know. I'll have to listen to what
the you know, the shamans in the Federal Reserve say after
they come out of their smoky room and have decided how much to
change the price of money. It's just insane. Larry LaParte
said something to me, which I just thought was great. He was
like, Walker, we're going to look back or grandkids are going
to look back at this era that we're living in right now. And
they're going to look at it the same way that we look at
bloodletting. Like, you know, that like blood, blood, like
bloodletting is insane. We look at that now and like, what do
you mean you thought you could just drain someone's blood
when they were sick and they would get healthy. That's fucking
nuts. Like anyone can see that that's a dumb idea. But at the
time, like if you were the leading medical experts were
like, they're they're coughing up a lot. They look pretty pale
and peeky. And what if we stuck some leeches on them, cut
them a little bit, drained out some of that blood, get the bad
blood out. No, not like that's nuts. But they're going to look
at what we have now in our monetary system the same way.
Like what he said is you let 12 guys and maybe a couple of
gals, but you like a group of small, unelected people control
the value of money. That is insane. Yeah, that is grandpa.
What were you guys thinking? Why didn't you say something?
It's like, well, we did we kind of tried we I had a podcast
at least I did something, you know, but but it is nuts when
you think about it. And that's one of the ways I've really
started to try formulating this a little bit better so that it
is more approachable for people. Yeah, because sometimes when
you if you just talk about the solution, which in I think we
agree here and a lot of folks listening that that solution is
Bitcoin, that's you know, that's that's part that's what
enables the solution, right? But if you don't understand the
problem, then it's really hard to see why you should even
care about the solution, you know. And moreover, if you
don't understand the radical difference between what exists
in fiat and what exists and is possible in Bitcoin, you
really can't get it. So drawing that comparison of what
would you rather have? Would you rather have a system that is
arbitrary, controlled by a small group of people that you
cannot, you have no insight into, you are constantly waiting
to react to what what they do, you every you can work as hard
as you want, but they will still be able to steal arbitrary
amounts of your time and energy. Do you want that? Or do you
want a system where you know exactly what is going to happen
with it? Programmatically, you can look 100 150 years, 1000
years into the future, and you know what's going to be
happening. And no one can steal your time and energy. Which
one do you want? And in the resistance money book that Bradley
Rettler and Andrew Bailey and Craig Warmke just released,
which is for anyone out there, it's really excellent. But they
have a great line in there, which is a great framing for why
Bitcoin, and they put it as, if you didn't know who you would
be tomorrow, if you could wake up and you have no control over
who you are, you're not you right now, you could be absolutely
anyone. Would you rather live in a world in which Bitcoin
exists, or one in which it doesn't? Because you could wake up
tomorrow and be a Russian oligarch and you know, you don't
know, or you could wake up and and be a struggling entrepreneur
in South America, or you could wake up and be Julian Assange
or Michael Saylor, the point being, you could be anyone and
if you didn't know who you were going to be, what kind of
world would you want to live in one where only fiat exists?
The only method of money is this extractionist system, or
one in which Bitcoin exists. And I think that's a really
compelling way to put things for people who are still just
struggling to get why folks like you and I and some of the
people we know are so passionate about this technology.
Yeah, man. And unfortunately, the passion comes from,
passion comes from that level of curiosity that's kind of
talking about earlier, and the ability to unlearn things that
we've been taught, because we've kind of gone through this
change, and you mentioned earlier about how we've got all this
access to information. And like you said on that note, just
because it's published doesn't make it true. And I think I
haven't watched it yet, but I was talking with, you know, Dave
Dave Bradley. I'm not sure if you've met him or not.
Not sure. He's like, he's a wicked OG Bitcoiner. He looks like
bubbles is the best way to describe him.
This one's familiar. Yeah. Okay. He hosts the Bitcoin
rodeo in Calgary. Anyways, him and I were talking, and we were
talking just about kind of a wide variety of things. And he
brought up Joe Rogan's recent comedy special. And he said,
you know, before the pandemic, I was pro vaccine and pro
medicine. And he said, and now I'm not even sure if we landed
on the moon. And it's like, such a, an unraveling of the
thread of the things that we've learned. And it's caused me as
a result to like take that thought process and now extrapolate
it out into the future around like my kids and what they're
going to learn. And I like I'm looking a lot, I got so my oldest
son has just turned eight. And we kind of my wife and I, when
they went to kindergarten, the oldest one went to kindergarten,
we kind of said that grade four, they're coming out of school
up until grade four, like grade one, two and three in kindergarten,
we kind of figured it's mostly play, you're not going to learn
anything too harmful. But the indoctrination kind of begins in
year four. And so I'm like looking at, at different alternatives
home schools and obvious one. I'm linking up with a couple of
like NPO private education structures here in Alberta, which
seemed pretty awesome. And, you know, naturally this comes up
frequently with my friend group who has lots of kids the same age.
And like, what's the problem, you know, look at the textbooks,
they're all fine. It's like, yeah, I'm not wildly concerned about
the textbooks today, but a textbook today is different from a
textbook 30 years ago. And a textbook in 30 years is going to
be different from a textbook today. And I don't trust that a
textbook in 30 years with updated data is going to have valid
and real data. And I don't necessarily want to be subject
to, you know, changing, changing data. And I think about how
much I had to unlearn and I'm happy to unlearn because I'm
confident and curious and I have the luxury of unlearning
things. But, you know, I've got a lot of friends that just
think I'm nuts. And granted, I'm a psychopath, I am a little
nuts. But I'm nuts and right a lot of the times, like, you know,
I'm not sure what it was like for you, but going through the
like people called me wicked and evil for not getting the COVID
vaccine. And they told me that there was no problems, that it
was all good and all safe. And we're seeing that to just be
completely false right now. And it's, it's like, that just
keeps happening, you know, Bitcoin was a scam and Bitcoin's
not going to work, all the same stuff that I believed. And then
all of a sudden it works. And, you know, the bank's going to
have your money and like, you're not crazy or you're crazy,
the bank will never sell your money. And then the bank steals
the money. And it's like, man, you know, this crazy guy keeps
getting all the stuff right. Maybe, maybe, you know, he's not
the crazy guy, I guess is kind of the point. And it makes me
very sad that we live in a society that's got the ability
to label someone crazy, because they're questioning what the
man on the TV says, what the man in the suit says, what the
man, you know, with the with the fancy hammer in his hand
says. And that's, that's a sad world. Another thing that the
chimps don't have, but that's a sad world that we live in,
where rather than like, you know, actually getting curious
and not thinking less of, but just like engaging in reasonable
conversation with someone back down to what you said, that
first principles approach, we don't do that. We just discount,
call them crazy. And even like, not just non Bitcoiners,
Bitcoiners do this too. And it saddens me, right? That's kind
of where some of that, you know, negativity in the space can
kind of stem from is, is in what you're talking about, the
space becomes less accessible. There's like an inverse
relationship between space accessibility and toxicity of
Bitcoiners. And, you know, I don't want to be a part, I don't
want to, I don't like, if there's, if there's eight of the
cool kids at a table with their backwards hats, and they're
smoking their cigarettes, and they're like, you know, making
fun of everyone, I'm going to kind of keep my distance. And
I'm going to gravitate towards people that are like, hey,
come on, like, let me help you out. I want to grow you and I
want to build you up. And Bitcoiners have a choice to make
right now. They're going to be the cool kids with the
backwards hats and the cigarettes in their mouth and the, the
chains in the pocket, like, you know, the guy, right? Or
they can be the welcoming, the Bitcoin podcast, making things
accessible, the get based channel, making things accessible.
One more shout out, the Bitcoin Well platform, making things
accessible, and, and make this space one that will grow and
flourish and keep the diversity that you talked about and keep
the growth that we're currently seeing. You know, is it a, is
it a secret or is it a surprise to anyone that the guy, the
founder of the Nostra protocol is a Bitcoiner? Like, does that,
does that shock anybody on planet Earth? Is it unreasonable to
people that Jack Dorsey is one of the bigger funders of that
protocol? Like, no, like, that's not surprising to me. Is it a
surprise to you that the politician in RFK, who's most
advocating for the scam of the food industry knows a lot more
about Bitcoin than any other politician on planet Earth? No,
doesn't surprise me. Is it surprise to anyone that the first,
you know, presidential Bitcoin kind of advocate in Naid
Bukeli is like also, you know, fixing and innovating the way
they use volcano energy in El Salvador and turning that into
one of the safest places on Earth. Like, is this a surprise
to anybody? And as a result, do we not want more people to be in
this space doing more innovative things? Like, I don't know about
you, but volcano power wasn't on my, you know, radar.
It's so cool, man. It's amazing. I think about, you know,
here in Alberta, like we've got so much opportunity to use
excess energy for Bitcoin mining to help decentralize that
network, to help bolster that network to simultaneously reduce,
you know, the power struggle and the power problem that exists
in Alberta and more broadly in Canada. And I just like, there's
so many Bitcoiners doing so many maybe like tangentially
Bitcoin related things, but that are bigger than Bitcoin that
are more for the human race that I just think we need to be
better and hold ourselves to a higher standard to be the cool
welcoming crew, not just the cool kids that made their, made
their millions and, you know, kind of like tell you to get bent
and have fun staying poor. But that's my, that's my rant on that,
I suppose. I appreciate that because it's something that I,
I personally try to be cognizant of because I also am somebody
who I enjoy, I enjoy ridiculing things. Now, I don't mean that
in a mean spirited way. I mean, to ridicule, to satirize, to,
to make fun of in, in the,
Like a roast. Yeah, right. And, and there's so much absurdity
in our world today. There's so much to do that with, right?
But I, it's, because it's so tempting sometimes when you see
a really dumb take on, like, you see a real dumb take and you're
like, I just want to say, you know, if it's about Bitcoin,
you know, have fun staying poor, or if it's whatever it might be
about, like it's, it's that, it's that knee jerk reaction to
wants to, to go that negative path. But if you can just breathe
for a second, and this is something I have to always tell myself
because I'm not always perfect with it, right? But I try as much
as possible and I agree with you that leading with positivity,
leading with inclusivity, and I don't mean that in the bullshit
like, no, I don't mean in that way. I mean, genuinely being
inclusive because Bitcoin itself is inclusive. It is not
exclusive. It cannot be pro it. The protocol does not allow
for exclusion. That is really powerful. And people, of course,
are going to naturally form tribes, right? And are naturally
that that's what we do as human beings. We, we form tribes
with people that are similar to us. But that similarity, the
great thing about Bitcoin is that that similarity doesn't have
to be any of the usual markers that we go by for what makes us
similar to others. Doesn't have to be where you live, what you
look like, what religion that you use, you practice doesn't have
to be any of that. It can just be, I believe in better money.
And that's my tribe. And so I think, you know, as far as I'm
curious what you think is you guys with with get based, you're
very much, I think, trying to cast a wide net into, okay, how do
we reach out to more people? Peter McCormack with the
rebrand of his show to Mr. Obnoxious. I think that's a good
thing. He's trying to, you know, what he was saying is, yeah,
it's, it's not a Bitcoin show, but it's a show with a Bitcoin
heartbeat still. Yeah, it's, it's weaving Bitcoin in as part of
the, you know, part of that narrative versus the focus of the
narrative. Not again, nearly as on the nose as somebody who'd
have the Bitcoin podcast, you know, geez, the in capital
letters to you. I love that so much. The first couple of times
I saw it, I was like, is that a type for it? I was like, no,
no, no, that's just the brand. And I respect that. I appreciate
that. But no, so my point being, I'm curious what you think
there, there are. So what you guys are doing with get based,
what Peter is doing to try and widen this net, because
personally, I want more people to know about Bitcoin, not just
know about it, because I think now we're a lot of people know
about Bitcoin. But the ratio of people that know about
Bitcoin versus hold Bitcoin, I think is actually growing
larger. There's a greater discrepancy because more people
know about it now. It's more in the, everybody has heard of
at least Bitcoin for sure. As opposed to like, if you heard
about Bitcoin in 2013, the ratio of people who had heard about
Bitcoin, and then we're using Bitcoin, like, it might have
been fairly, fairly even, right now, there's a massive
discrepancy. The more people, but so how do you begin to close
that gap? Does it come down? I mean, is it does it always come
down to education? Does it come down to content? Does it come
down to focusing on the problems of fiat clown world and
using that as a lead in to why Bitcoin or how do you look at
that? Or, or, you know, is it just, you know what, though
everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve, if you don't
get it, have fun staying poor, you know, see you later, I'll be
on my island. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think from, from my
perspective, I consider myself pretty lucky that it was a
left leaning kind of more authoritarian regime in power
while Bitcoin was coming to light. And I think that Bitcoin
was created to oppose that level of regime, understanding
still that both sides of the coin want to oppress and, and,
and, and, and want to control. And so I consider myself lucky
there and I want to preface this with that. But I do think
that the Bitcoin adoption curve probably looks unlike
anything we've seen, which is a slow, a slow adoption curve
up, kind of like just like very, very similar to what we see
in like a normal tech kind of industry, the phones, the
computers, the, the whatever, like that standard S curve.
But I think it does the S doesn't complete. It just shoots
straight up at the end. And similar to we maybe you've seen
the clip of safe talking about Bitcoin adoption being like
gunpowder, I think he's 50% right. I think it will be gunpowder
for the left, because the left are going to experience their
censorship moment. They're going to realize that Bitcoin is bigger
than left versus right. Because right now Bitcoin's money for the
right, money for the libertarians, money for the freedom
crew, money for, for people that think we are for those
crazy tinfoil hat people in the government is trying to
control them. Money is only for those people. And maybe it is.
And frankly, you know, we believe that Bitcoin's for everyone,
but it's half the population doesn't believe that they're
included in the people. And, and, and so we're going to see
that like slow adoption through the right side of the aisle.
And then the pendulum's going to swing. That's what political
pendulums do. We're going to have a censorship moment on the
left, where we're going to get some, you know, fascist in charge
who wants to put all the pro lifers, or the pro choicers in
jail and, and something's going to happen. Something's going to
happen. I don't know what it's going to be. I'm not going to try
to predict it. Something's going to happen where that entire
side of the aisle gets almost overnight what the anti-vax
freedom community has been getting for the last few years.
And it's going to be like gunpowder at that point where
Bitcoin adoption just, it goes straight up from there. And so
it's like a half an S and then a line in my opinion. And I think
that that is probably in our lifetime. I would say I don't
think it's in this decade, but I do think that we're seeing the
pendulum swing in such a way that it probably swings back too
hard. And the thing about, the thing about freedom is like,
I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure out how to say this in my
head. The pendulum swung towards the left. We had Bitcoin
introduced and it kind of like created this like stop to the
ball moving over too far left. And now that inertia is pushing
back, but you just, there's just nothing that can prevent,
like Bitcoin was like a great bouncing off character to go.
And so I think kind of inevitably the pendulum swings, it's
going to swing a little too far. We're kind of going to head
into like fascist, Hitler, right, crazy, you know, right wing
territory. And again, not that's like, that's not what
Bitcoiners want. Bitcoiners are above that system. We are a
political, I don't want left or right. I actually don't even
participate in elections because I just think it's a clown
show and I don't really care. It doesn't make a difference to
me. I have my sats and self custody. Thank you very much.
But like, we're, we're just, it's in my opinion, inevitable
that the pendulum swing so far to the right, we get that level
of like, that level of oppression kind of comes and starts
coming back in, not to Bitcoiners because it's probably like
pretty good for Bitcoiners that believe in our, in our
ideology, but that whole other side gets oppressed and then
they adopt Bitcoin and then finally Bitcoin is for everyone.
Maybe that's the final crumbling of the system. Like right now
we're kind of watching and witnessing the crumbling of the
left. Like all this DEI, you know, rainbow stuff is like,
it's pretty obvious the crumbling of the left, you know, all
like exposing the BLM stuff, exposing this critical race
theory, exposing the gender ideology, like it's just, just
being, it's just blatant at this point and you have to be,
you have to have your head pretty far down a hole to not
see it. And, and so that's getting obliterated. And then,
you know, it'll swing too far the other way and then that
side will also get obliterated. And then man, who knows, who
knows what's going to happen. Who knows what the world
looks like on a Bitcoin standard. But that's when a
Bitcoin standard comes in, is when both sides of the aisle
have felt oppression of finance, both sides of the aisle
have been controlled due to their finances, their money
being obliterated. And both sides of the aisle realize that
we were just, what are those bugs that you put in a jar
and shake and they fight each other instead of like coming
out of the jar. Both sides of the aisle realize that we've
just been, you know, not doing this. And when we start doing
this, that's when society gets cool and like the rebirth
happens.
I want to dig into kind of, I guess, hopeful visions for the
future in a second. But one thing I wanted to double back on
is talking about this, this right left dichotomy in the US,
you know, the red, blue kind of false dichotomy, right, that
is pushed.
It's so funny, Canada is opposite.
Oh, right.
Red in Canada is like left leaning, like our liberals are
left and conservatives are blue. So it's just so funny how
like, you know, the red, blue, right, left is just like flipped
in Canada. I always find that amusing. But anyways, I think
that's a great illustration of just the arbitrariness and the
true nature of this. It's a Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, right?
Like, you know, pick one and there's no other choice.
That's right.
It's only Coke or Pepsi. But what I was going to say is,
obviously Coke, but, but yeah, of course, yes, we can all agree
on that. Yes, Coke is far superior. Okay, so this idea that I
agree with you, Bitcoin does not have a party preference, right?
Bitcoin can't have preferences. One thing that I do want to
clarify, though, is I think that while I think money is
inherently political, I think Bitcoin is inherently political.
However, Bitcoin is not partisan. It is political in the sense
that we are talking about the separation of money and state.
How could that not be political? But again, to emphasize,
being political is not the same thing as being partisan.
It must be. It is necessarily political if we are talking about
breaking down the status quo, which is having money and state
together like this and separating those two. That is an inherently
political idea. And that's okay. It's okay. Money has always been
political, right? Bitcoin is just the best money humans have
ever discovered. It is political, but it is not partisan. And I
think that that I agree with you completely that once folks on
the on the left start feeling, you know, the pendulum always
swings back too hard, right? And then swings back harder again
and harder again and harder again and over and over again.
This is the story of human history, right? It is always over
reactions to what the last group did. It's always dealing with,
you know, some fiat psychologist would probably call it some
sort of repressed trauma or some, some right generational trauma.
Yeah, there we go. That's that's what I was looking for.
But it will be interesting to see does Bitcoin enable that
pendulum to stop swinging so violently at some point? And is
that the point that's I hadn't heard it phrased as you did,
which I think is is a really nice way of putting it that you
won't have, you know, whatever people think of as hyper
Bitcoinization, because I think people have a lot of different
ways that they personally think about that it's kind of open to
interpretation to a certain extent. But whatever you think of
that is, you're really most people get smart by force, not by
choice. And Grocking Bitcoin involves getting smart. It
involves killing your ego, setting aside your preconceived
notions about what money is about how the world works, about
what it means to save. And it means admitting that maybe I know
nothing and I need to start again with an open mind. But most
people will not do that until they have been forced to, because
external pressures require it. And for a lot of people, I think
it was COVID, right? And and all the money printing that happened
there. And like that was it for me. I didn't get into Bitcoin
until 2020 after hearing about it in 2017 and in 2014 and
thinking, All right, whatever, that's cool nerd. But yeah, back
back to my fiat bullshit. But I got a four one. I got it. Yeah,
that's okay. I work for a big consulting firm. I think I'll be
just fine, you know. But then in 2020, I got it because and I'm
still getting it, right? I'm still not there. I'm still going
down this rabbit hole. But I needed some of that force and I
applaud people who make the choice who are not being actively
forced. They're not being actively pressured by negative
externalities. But they electively say, I'm gonna like this is
something I need to pay attention to. And I think like, that's
amazing. And I really applaud people who got Bitcoin kind of
of their own accord without there being some external force
censorship, government general government fuckery, whatever it
might be that was like the the catalyst for them. But I think
for most people that is with the cattle, there has to be a
catalyst. Because until there is, you just aren't gonna fully be
ready to get it and why it means so much. Totally man. And I
think that's part of the initiative behind the content that
we make it get based is like, it's like, here's here's
something that you know is happening this invisible force
that we've kind of discussed, you can't quite put your finger
on it. And here's kind of the root to all that which is a broken
money system. And I think that I think that that shows I'm
hopeful anyways, that that will help kind of like, ignore or
maybe fast track and potentially reduce the amount of pain
that is required to get Bitcoin because you're bang on man, it
does require an immense amount of pain to reach hyper Bitcoin
isation. And I would much rather there being no or less
pain towards hyper Bitcoin isation because hyper Bitcoin
isation is inevitable. Bitcoiners need to march towards the
path that causes humanity the least amount of pain. And I
think that that's probably where some of the nuance and
differences comes in around Bitcoiners, which is where the
fund begins. That's where we can actually get into like, you
know, reasonable debates. And, and you can see how democracy
and decentralization works in a real democratic and
decentralized system. Like you can see it in the block wars.
You can see it in how Bitcoin has responded to giant forks in
the road. Do we go this way or this way? And you have all of a
whole group of people, not sigh opted, not corrupt, not paid
by anything purely with a self interested, but a self
interested that stems toward a collective interested approach
using first principles, using basic thoughts, using, you
know, this extraction theory, where we can take this leads to
this leads to that, make your own choice. And it was like, dude,
being around during the block wars was insane. And I think
that, you know, Nostra is going to have its equivalent for the
block wars. It's going to change Nostra forever. And there's
there's it's so cool seeing decentralized democracy at work.
And I hope that we can have enough decentralized democracy in
Bitcoin to eliminate pain towards hyper Bitcoinization.
Yeah, and, you know, we'll never, we'll never eliminate all
pain, right? Like, and that's the thing, you know, every fiat
currency in the history of mankind has collapsed eventually.
They all go to zero eventually. When that happens, it results
in an unimaginable amount of pain, suffering, war, famine.
A lot of people die. Obviously, if that and I think that's why
we talk about Bitcoin as being a lifeboat, that's actually
such an apt metaphor. Maybe it's not even a lifeboat, it's
like a whole new, you know, fully decked out cruise ship that
just pulled up alongside you and is like, look, here, I'm dropping
a ladder down your boat is clearly sinking. The water is
freezing cold. You've got like three minutes in that water
before you go hypothermic and then you will die. But still,
some people are like, it doesn't feel that cold yet. Like, it's
just my feet in the water. I think I'll be fine. You know,
plus I got a jacket. So don't worry about it. Yeah, I've got
I've got my little life preserver. I'll be I'll be okay, you
know. But I that is why I genuinely care so much about it.
I genuinely care so much about Bitcoin education. It's why I
started, you know, another fucking Bitcoin podcast because I
don't think we have enough Bitcoin podcasts until we have
more Bitcoin or podcasts than there are Tradfibro podcasts and
there are a lot. Wow, we we have barely scratched the surface.
We got a long way to go, right? But and I know like you and
Julian and he said this is why you guys do this too because
you care about the education and because there are great
stories to be told as well. Yeah, that's the thing that's this
one of the things I I love most about Bitcoin. There we don't
have to lie. We don't have to lie about any of it. And all the
fiat system can do to try to disparage Bitcoin to try and
look at the Elizabeth Warren types or any of the others who
have, you know, Greenpeace bringing their crusades against
Bitcoin. All they can do is lie. And all we must do is tell
the truth. That is powerful. That puts us in a position of
power. Even even one step further from that, not even tell the
truth, maybe just encourage people to think about it
reasonably because like there's a there's a small and
diminishing chance that we're wrong. And if we are, I'd love
to know about it. And this is you know, every time someone
pitches me on the new crypto, I'm like, all right, bet, I want
to I want to hear about it. Tell me why this preserves my
value better. Well, this, this and this. Okay, so that doesn't
work because of this first place of principle. So we'll put an
X over that. How is it more decentralized? Well, it was
pre-mined and we control the code, but okay, bet. So that's
that's not it. Put an X over that. So it's not going to
preserve my value. It's more centralized. Remind me again why
it's worth saving for my great, great granddaughter. Remind
me again how I can trust this will be here after I die. I
can't air go not better than Bitcoin. I'm always open to
seeing, you know, new things. I'm always open to seeing the
next Bitcoin. I just, I'm just so locked in on my mission
and the reason why we're in Bitcoin that I've yet to find a
project or a token or a money supply that actually works
even like even like the Peter Schiff gold kind of Sega that
we're currently in in this ecosystem. It's like you just
can't call yourself a logical thinker and think that gold is
better than Bitcoin because it has all the same properties to
gold, but for the fact that it's infinitely divisible and
infinitely transferable, which just like makes the money more
valuable. Like that's just like, it's just like root base
economics. This is just how it is. And I think the only reason
the gold silver people are around is because they kind of
they don't have that like single mission focus like
Bitcoiners do. There is no second best as a common phrase
in Bitcoin, but they got gold and silver, right? They're all
kind of like si-opped around like diversification and have more
than one thing. It's like, no, no, no, the world doesn't work.
There's not two kinds of gravity, right? There's not like two
kinds of rules that exist. You just get one set of rules and
the money rule is Bitcoin, right? The gravity rule is 9.81
meters per second. The money rule is Bitcoin, not like Bitcoin
at some percentage of your portfolio and then some tax
advantage, GTF and then some over here where you're getting
yield and then, you know, some physical metals and don't
forget your oil barrels. And it's like, no, no, no, no, forget
all that. The money rule is the Bitcoin protocol. Everything
else is garbage and goes down against that money protocol.
Man, that was fucking well said. Thank you. That was beautiful.
It is funny to see these, the traps that people fall into.
And I think that even Peter Schiff is an interesting one
because I think he probably does. It's gotta be cloud at this
point. He's too smart. That's the thing. He's not an idiot.
Clearly. Bitcoiners agree with him on basically everything
leading right up to you get to gold is better than Bitcoin.
But otherwise, it's like, you know, any tweets of his that
aren't about Bitcoin, I'm like, yeah, no, it's a pretty solid
analysis. Yeah, solid analysis. Yep, you're spot on here, Pete.
But yeah, I don't even know how to follow that last part up.
So, you know, that may be a great note to end on. But first,
I want to give you a chance. Anything else we didn't cover
that you want to get into? Anything, any last words, piece of
advice, thoughts? Man, I always got thoughts for days. I love
that. I want to just like commend you, man, and like thank
you for the good work that you're doing. I think it's great to
see Bitcoiners marching towards a common goal. I think that
Bitcoin is such a unique industry to be able to live in. And
this time, like, think about how good everything got when the
church left the state and we decentralized religion. That's
a net benefit for the world. And I think that the state and
money have been kind of linked for so long. And when we split
that, it's good. And so I want to encourage everyone listening,
just find your path and like reduce your thinking to first
basic principles. Understand why you're doing something and
understand and really, really dial into how and why it makes
the world a better place. And then I think probably the last
thing is just don't be afraid to be challenged on it. And don't
be afraid to be wrong and like back yourself up. It's totally
fine to be wrong on things. And that's how we learn. And man,
like, I love the, you know, like the, the entrepreneur's
inspirational Instagram page or whatever you see, like, you
never, you never see a pro athlete shaming the first time
football player or like, you know, a pro athlete that doesn't
shame you for working out trying to get better. I certainly
don't shame, you know, like many entrepreneurs are in my DMs
and we chat and I've got a great group of people that I'm lucky
to be sharing my experience with and trying to help them navigate
their business in whatever industry they're in. And I, and I,
and I love that. And when they make a mistake, it's never like,
I told you so, like you idiot, you know, it's, it's very much
like, all right, you know, do we know why we made the mistake?
How do we revert that and then, and then push forward? And I
think that the world's just better when we care less what
other people think, but listen more to what they say. And I
would like to encourage people to do that, go after it with a
first principles approach. I love when people call me crazy.
And then I ask them why, and then they tell me why they think
I'm crazy. And then I go, I think you're wrong. And, and
that's fine. And I'm confident. But if I'm crazy, I want to know.
And if I'm wrong about Bitcoin, please tell me why. But this is
what's important to me with Bitcoin. And you have not shown
me how I'm wrong based on what's important to me. If what's
important to you as someone else can tell you what you can do
with your money, how your inheritance gets laid out between
your children, that you can, can or cannot leave your country.
If that's important to you, then good, stay in the fiat system.
You actually probably wouldn't like Bitcoin very much. But
what's important to me is freedom. And as a result, I like
Bitcoin quite a bit.
And possibly I didn't think you could do it, but an even better
note to end on. Adam, thanks for your time. Where do you want to send people?
Yeah, definitely would encourage people to follow me on, on
Twitter, at Adam O'Brien underscore or on Nostar. I've been,
so I'm a big Nip05 proponent. So I'm not going to rattle off my
NPUB right now. And I'm being facetious because of, you know,
obviously I'm not going to rattle off an NPUB. You can go to Adam
at btcw.app is my, is my Nip05 verification. And you can, you
can follow me on Nostar. And then also would, would love people,
you know, in the, in the spirit of what I just ranted on, go to
Bitcoinwell.com, use the platform, send me your feedback. I love
getting feedback so much. Use your feedback is the number one
most valuable thing to me. I like, we're building a platform for
me. I joke about it. It's like, you know, why are you building
Bitcoinwell? It's like, so that I can interact with the legacy
financial system before hyper Bitcoinization, because I got
to pay my power bill and, and, and like some of my paychecks
somewhere. So, you know, admittedly it's built for me. Lucky
for us, you know, 25,000 people also love it and, and use it.
But I would love for it to be 250,000 or 2.5 million. And so
use, you know, use Bitcoinwell. We're early. We're in the states
now. So you can buy and sell Bitcoin directly to and from
the U.S. and the U.S. A. We're the only non-custodial platform
in the U.S. A. And if you're in Canada, you can pay your bills
and buy gift cards and swap lightning to main chain and all
this good stuff. So, yeah, use the platform, tear it apart,
tell me why it sucks, and then let me make it better.
That's awesome. And I encourage people to check that out for
sure. Well, Adam, thank you for your time. Bitcoin is scarce,
but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thanks for sharing
your scarce time on this one. This was a, this was a treat.
Thank you, man. It was a pleasure to be here.
Or don't Bitcoin doesn't care, but I always appreciate it.
You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker.
If you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to
at Titcoin podcast and at Walker America. You can also find
the video version of this podcast at YouTube.com slash
at Walker America and at Walker America on rumble, or just
go to Bitcoin podcast.net slash podcast and find links
everywhere. Coin 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.