That was the biggest thing is realizing how much I did not know and how much all the things I thought
I knew were based on these assumptions that were all built on top of this foundation of quicksale.
People complain about the problem. They don't know that there's a solution out there. Bitcoin
is the only find it asset, right? We all wish we would have paid attention to Bitcoin the first
time we heard about it. Very few people actually did. I don't think Bitcoin is done running yet.
I think in 2026, we're going to see a massive influx of people. Like they don't want it when
it's on sale. They want it when it's at new all-time highs. That's when they pile in.
I thought it was dead, I thought it crashed again, but it's still here and wow, it's double
what it was the last time I looked.
That's funny.
Maybe I should go search for Bitcoin on YouTube.
If even one more person decides to start saving in Bitcoin to change their life by learning
about Bitcoin, my show will have been a success.
What is real?
How do you define real?
You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do?
You get out.
Walker America is one half of the crypto couple and the host of the Bitcoin podcast.
Walker is also the senior vice president of Vibes Capital Management.
He has the smoothest voice in Bitcoin.
And he's here to talk about the separation of money and state.
As he says, there is no red, there is no blue.
There is the state and there is you.
Walker America, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.
How are you?
I'm good, man.
Thanks for having me.
Stoked to be on here.
Yeah, man.
I'm excited to get into it.
I want to kind of go back to the beginning.
So where did this all start?
The crypto couple, your Bitcoin journey, your childhood.
Where do you want to kick it off from?
Because I want to hear about your background.
The crypto couple thing, that started during the pandemic.
Carl and I were working our fiat jobs, then also we're working on a startup.
the startup hit some snags with supply chain issues. We were trying to source some sensors
and different microprocessors and things like that. And we just like, at that time, it was like,
nobody could get microprocessors. Like it was, unless you were, you know, Apple or whatever.
And so we hit a bit of a snag there and found ourselves a little bit more time on our hands
that we were no longer dedicating to kind of getting the startup off the ground. And we had
been lurking on, on Bitcoin Twitter. It was Twitter at that time, obviously. And we, the vibes were,
The vibes were a little bit weird.
This was, we'd been stacking Bitcoin since kind of like the mid-start of the pandemic in 2020.
I can get back to when I first heard about Bitcoin because I've ignored Bitcoin longer than I've been stacking it,
which is a mistake I think a lot of people have made and mistake people will continue to make.
But we were, this was when things started getting really bearish in like 2021.
You know, we started coming, blew off the all-time highs.
Vibes were super weird.
People were just down in the dumps.
as Bitcoin started kind of cascading down maybe, you know, May, June, 2021.
And we said, you know, everybody's so down in the dumps.
Everybody's taking everything so seriously.
All of the Bitcoin haters, you know, the Peter Schiff's,
whether it's the gold bugs or the environmentalists,
environmental FUD was really big at that time.
It's kind of died off now.
But everybody was just taking the opportunity to dance on Bitcoin's grave.
And we were like, you know, what if we just made a little video
making fun of different types of Bitcoin haters?
Let's just see.
We'll start a TikTok.
TikTok had obviously blown up pretty big at that point, as most social media apps really did in the pandemic.
Like, what else were people going to do?
Made this TikTok.
And it was, I mean, it was pretty solid.
It was pretty funny.
It wasn't like world shattering, you know?
And the thing just took off.
Like, hundreds of thousands of views within a couple of days, like, really blew up.
And we said, oh, shit, people like this.
Okay, like, must be a fluke, though.
Let's make another.
In another kind of similar vein.
And it blew up also.
And now we're thinking, okay, maybe there's something here.
People are clearly kind of starved for this.
And then we just kept going.
At one point, we were making two or sometimes three videos a day.
Just a lot of content.
A lot of it not particularly great.
It was more of a volume thing, but we were just churning it out.
We started posting on Twitter as well.
Because initially, again, we just started on TikTok.
But very quickly, TikTok started kind of throttling our content.
I think because we said stuff about COVID, we said we're also saying stuff about Bitcoin, obviously, which is apparently fine for a little while.
Then it fell into that weird like you're giving financial advice or about an investment product.
So they start throttling it.
So we said, OK, let's go over to Twitter and start a new Twitter account from zero.
And that pretty quickly started kind of blowing up.
And the first Bitcoin conference we ever went to, shout out to Tone Vase and Mike Yarmaz, who were running Unconfiscatable in Vegas 2022.
It was right around Valentine's Day 2022, somewhere around there.
And they invited us.
Tone Vase said, I'd love you guys to run the Scammy Awards.
You guys are funny.
I like you run the Scammy Awards.
And so we did.
And that was our first conference experience.
Met some people who have now been our friends for years, which is just amazing.
At that conference, it was a great time.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Just kept making videos, making content.
We stopped, or I should say paused, making videos a little ways into Carla's pregnancy
because she was just like, look, I'm tired.
I'm making a child in here.
I don't really have the energy to be doing all this editing because she was the editing guru and everything, right?
All of the post-production, most of the acting too, and all of the singing as well.
She was really carrying the torch there.
And so I said, well, what is a man to do when he wants to talk about Bitcoin,
but is no longer making short-form content?
Well, of course, he should start a podcast, as should everyone.
Anyone listening should start a Bitcoin podcast.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
We need more Bitcoin podcasts.
There are still far too few.
Until there are more Bitcoin podcasts than TradFi podcasts, we do not have enough.
So maybe I'll pause there.
But the moral of the story here is you can just do things.
You can just start making content.
You have a supercomputer and a production studio literally right here on your phone.
Anybody can start making content.
You don't have to be super talented.
the AI tools that are available have gotten so like worlds better.
They didn't even exist when we started making content just a couple of short
years ago.
All of that's going to continue getting better,
lowering the barrier to entry.
And the legacy media is not the mainstream anymore.
The legacy media is dead.
Independent content creators in the mainstream podcasts,
the mainstream short form creators are the mainstream.
That is how people consume information.
And so if you have a message that you want to get out there,
there's nothing stopping,
you know,
there's no excuse.
The only thing stopping you is yourself.
You just have to start doing it.
All right.
I mean, there's lots of unpacked there.
That was awesome.
Okay.
So you started making content.
Did you have any background in making content before or, or performing growing up or anything?
Was it something you, you were noodling on or wanted to do or just kind of really did
fumble into?
No, I mean, not me.
Carla did.
Carla was like, was a classically trained like opera singer for a little while.
Also did theater and musical theater for many years.
she also learned like all of her editing stuff she learned because she went to school for journalism
and like a couple different journalism tracks and business and so she learned a bunch of
documentary filmmaking and editing and all these things so she's like a final cut whiz you know
she'll tell you she's not but she is at me no I'm went to school for engineering didn't have any sort
of background in in acting or anything like that you know besides like really really minor like
little things in school or something like that, but not even, not even like not, not
plays or anything like that.
And so no, didn't really have any of that.
That's why she did most of the singing and the, uh, the acting.
But I think it was one of those things we didn't set out to do this.
Like we didn't, our goal wasn't to say, we're going to start making content and here's our
plan for how we're going to grow to this many followers.
And then we'll start getting invited to Bitcoin conferences.
We'll become niche internet micro celebrities.
And, uh, and that'll be fine.
It was like, we just kind of started doing it and, and kept doing it.
And inertia kept us kept us moving.
And it was honestly a great outlet for us.
It was also an amazing way for us to learn about Bitcoin, because I think anybody who
teaches in any way knows this.
And like we're all teachers in some way, right?
We're all educators.
I think anybody who evangelizes on behalf of Bitcoin is an educator, right?
When you talk to your friends and your family, you try to distill Bitcoin down into into
simple terms.
That's that's education, right?
You're teaching.
And I think anybody who has tried to do that knows that the hardest thing to do is to explain something complex in simple terms in a short amount of time.
It's easy to use long, drawn-out sentences and verbose language and technical jargon.
That's easy.
It's easy to explain something complex in a complex way.
It's hard to explain something complex in a simple way.
Like to be able to ELI five, that requires that, you know, the material backwards and forwards, you have to master the material to be able to teach it well. And I think the act of teaching it or trying to figure out how to teach material forces you to master it. Like it's this beautiful Ouroboros, you know, you, you need to become a master of that domain in order to explain it simply.
And so for us, anytime we're making a video, we were trying to figure out, you know, this is how we went down all these different rabbit holes.
And, you know, shout out to amazing, amazing Bitcoin podcasters.
Shout out to amazing Bitcoin authors like the Bitcoin standard.
I think for for a lot of us was a huge kind of awakening point.
Right. Just really sending us down the Austrian economics rabbit hole for me, at least.
I didn't know what Austrian economics was until Seyfedean was talking about it.
So I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
But you have to learn about these things to explain them simply.
And then once you can explain them simply, once you can really break this down, it becomes a lot more fun, right?
Because then you can figure out, okay, it's not so much how do I, I know how to explain it simply,
but how do I explain it simply in a way that's going to be sticky?
Because we can, you know, saying Bitcoin is sound money, there will only ever be 21 million,
you know, nobody can corrupt it, nobody can debase it, da-da-da.
Saying these things, they may be true, but that's not sticky for most people.
It's certainly not sticky in our instant gratification, goldfish brain environment of
social media.
You need to hook people, you need to get them interested and you need to keep their attention
and then you want them to actually remember it after they finish because everybody knows
this, this feeling of being on, you know, scrolling X or scrolling, whatever it might
be.
TikTok, Instagram, doesn't matter.
Facebook, if you're still there, I guess I'm not.
But if you are, you're scrolling, you spend five minutes, maybe you're sitting on the
toilet while you do it.
Then you finish your business, you get up and you're like, I have no idea what I just read or what I just watched.
I literally like I couldn't tell you.
I can maybe remember the last thing vaguely, but I couldn't tell you any specifics about it.
Nothing actually stuck there in a deep way.
And that's because this information isn't meant to be to commit to long term memory.
It's meant to keep you dopamine addicted in the short term.
So how do you actually make sure that people remember?
Well, you got to get creative.
And that's where like the musical side of things came in.
I think that's been that was the thing where Carla was really able to shine.
She's got an incredible voice.
And, you know, if you can put something into song format with the songs that people recognize, you know,
it's raining men or cry me a river or, you know, some ABBA money, money, money.
These are things that are already sticky in people's brains.
You're just putting new lyrics to them, you know.
So I think that was a huge kind of a huge moment that was made it a lot of fun
and also gave us the ability to make content that was going to be much more sticky in the long term
and be evergreen.
Because that's the other thing.
It's like having content that people can go back to
and go back to and send to their friends and family
years later, that's what you want to be able to do, right?
You want to make stuff that's going to be,
that's going to have a long lifetime to it.
If that makes sense.
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Well, I mean, there's a lot there, too. So maybe, though, I agree.
I think we need more voices. People are going to relate to voices that are similar to theirs, maybe.
or, you know, there's always probably a desire to hear a different way of, you know, talking about something and breaking it down.
But maybe you could talk about the work that goes into running a podcast.
So it you know you make a couple of pieces they take off that fun But you know to be consistent to like the grind maybe some of the things you didn anticipate or you know what is sort of the work that goes into running your show on a
consistent basis so that it is still high quality and, you know, is good at orange
filling people or even bringing people further down the rabbit hole?
Yeah.
So after, again, you know, Carla had been pregnant for a little while and was getting
getting bigger. And she decided to like take a step back. As I mentioned, I went and started
making the podcast and kind of wanted to initially, I wanted to make a podcast that was going to be
like a, it was going to be satire. It was going to be another fucking Bitcoin podcast was going
to be like the actual title of it. Because at that point I really thought like, oh, there's so many
Bitcoin podcasts, you know, how can I possibly like, you know, compete with all these? I'll just
make a Bitcoin podcast about Bitcoin podcasts. You know, it's Bitcoin podcasters podcasting about
Bitcoin podcasts, really meta and satirical, make it all a joke. And I was playing with that idea
for a while. And then I thought, well, okay, but, but what if you just actually tried to make a
high quality podcast? Like you didn't make this joke. It doesn't mean you have to take everything
super seriously. You can have some fun with it still. You can, you know, get the domain titcoin.org
and call it titcoin podcast, you know, and the handle, like you can still have some fun with it,
but maybe there is room for more voices. And it turns out there was, and there very much still is
again, everybody should start a Bitcoin podcast. If you're passionate about Bitcoin, there's plenty
of room. And so for me, honestly, I was, I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but you know,
this, like it's, it is a lot of work to run a podcast. Like it's, it doesn't stop when the
microphone's off. You then, then like the most of the work comes after the fact, most of the work
is prepping and then all the post-production, all the following up, everything that goes with it.
And so I was kind of, I was a little bit surprised at how time consuming that work was and the tools
have gotten a lot better. We're recording on Riverside right now. It's what I use as well.
Just Riverside alone, since I started using it for the podcast in the space of, you know,
two years, it's improved by leaps and bounds. There's way more automations, way more cool
things you can do. So that's great. Like, it's great to see technology making things better for
us. But in terms of like what, what goes into it for me, I guess I've, I've just recently actually
brought somebody on to help me do the YouTube side of things. I hate the YouTube side of things.
I hate playing to the algorithm. I don't like that. I initially wasn't even going to have video
on my podcast. I was just going to have it be an actual audio only podcast, you know, a true podcast
because I never watched, I literally never watched podcasts on YouTube ever. That was not a thing
that I did. I only listened to them and I just assumed, you know, that most people probably did
the same. Then I realized, Oh my God, no, actually for most Bitcoin podcasts where they have the most
reach is not their RSS feed. It's on YouTube. So then a little ways in, I'm like, okay, I guess I
got to start. I got to get a camera. I got to, you know, get a setup and all of this. And so that was
again, another learning moment. I think for me, what I try to do is make sure that I I'm, I'm not
going to try to be anything that I'm not when it comes to how I conduct myself for my podcast. You
know what I mean? Like there's like the very Lex Friedman style of podcasting, which is like,
let me ask you a lot of very serious questions and I'll ask them one after another. And I really
won't follow up with the questions. If there's a cool tangent, I'll just kind of stick to my script.
And when did you first realize that you were in love with your own mother? You know, like I,
I can't do that. Right. I'm, I need to be a little more off the cuff. I need this to be a conversation.
I let, you know, I like Joe Rogan style of doing things. It's just a conversation. I think more
interesting, more interesting dynamics, more interesting takeaways come out of those conversations.
And so trying to make sure that I kept it light and kept it fun, that was always a priority.
In terms of, I mean, are you curious like about like nuts and bolts wise, like how,
like actually, like, what do I use? I'm happy to tell people because I actually started,
I got so many questions because I've been evangelizing for Bitcoin podcast saying everybody
should start one. I put together something on my website that just like, this is the gear I use.
Like just, you can go to bitcoinpodcast.net slash gear.
There's links to, to, to get all the gear that I have on Amazon.
You, the nice thing is that you can start a podcast with a very small capital investment,
right?
You don't need a nice, like a super nice microphone.
You can get a pretty inexpensive one.
That sounds great.
You can use your phone for filming, like phones shoot 4k.
Like you're, you're good to go.
You don't need it.
Like, that's the cool thing.
It's the barrier to entry is very low.
And for me, I wanted to make sure, cause I still have a fiat job.
Like I still have a quite a demanding fiat job and I needed to make sure that I was going to be able to still excel in that role while also making a podcast that is quality.
So it all came down to how can I optimize this as much as possible?
How can I make sure that I'm going to be able to put out a quality product without it taking absolutely all of my time when my time is already scarce?
Chris and I have a young son as well, and I have a wife,
and they both presumably want to spend time with me,
and I want to spend time with them.
So for me, it's about, okay, what do I do?
Riverside is one of the best tools that I have,
and I'm sure it is the same for you.
I'm able to automate so much of things
that being able to do text-based editing is amazing.
But really, it just comes down to, I don't know,
utilizing the incredible tools that we have at our disposal,
whether those be software or hardware,
utilizing the platforms that are going to be the highest impact.
Like I focus on X and I focus on Noster.
I focus a lot on Noster.
I've got more podcast followers on Noster than I do on X by like four or 5,000.
It's up to almost like 20,000 followers in the podcast on Noster
because that's also a dedicated audience of people who I know care about Bitcoin.
So I like to focus a lot there.
And then, yeah, where I was lucky is I was able to get a lot of people to come on the show
that are, you know, quote, like big, big names because I'd met those people already through
just being a court jester. So I had a little unfair advantage there in that I already knew
a lot of people. I was able to have some doors open where I could say, would you mind coming
on the show and shoot them a text and they'd be happy to do so. I'm very, I think you know,
this as well, people within the Bitcoin space are so generous with their time,
even though they know better than almost anyone in the world, how scarce your time is, you know,
Bitcoin is the only finite asset, right? Besides your time and your time is even more finite and
more unknown unlike Bitcoin. And so I think that's, that's an incredible thing, but I don't know if I
really answered the question there. That was just kind of a roundabout way of me saying,
I use Riverside. I do what I can to keep my workflows optimized as possible. And I focus
on trying to, uh, to interact with people on the platforms where I know, or the protocols where I
know the impact is going to be highest. Like I don't mess around with tech talk. I just don't
have any interest to. I've never had it on my phone. Carla had it on her phone. I was like,
you can have the Chinese spyware. I'll just keep mine clean. So never focused on that. Only recently
set up an Instagram account for it. Don't really like using that either. I just find it to be kind
of hollow. So Noster is where I spend most of the time focused for at least the conversations
around the podcast. When it comes to Bitcoin, the rules are simple. Run your own node, hold your own
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a discount on your order. Yeah, not only are Bitcoiners, I think, generous, but I find them
courageous to go on little to no known shows, not know what they're going to be asked, where it's
going to go, how they're going to be edited. I think it takes an element there of courage.
Maybe how long do you think or how much time do you think during the week does it take you to
do the whole show to give people an idea? I mean, if I had to guess, I mean, well, it's at least a,
you know, hour and a half to two hours for every recording prep time for each is probably about the
same because I want to, it depends, it depends who it is. It depends, depends who I'm prepping
for. Cause some people have had them on before. If I know them well, if I know we're going to talk
about, I don't need to prep very much at all. I can just, I know the conversation is going to flow.
If it's somebody new, then I need to maybe do a little more research, dig into their background
a little bit, figure out more about them so that I can make sure that it's a, a well-structured
conversation that still has room to go off on tangents and rants and everything else.
And then editing wise, I mean, that's honestly what takes the most time. I think the editing
is probably it's the same amount of time as the recording, not, not just for like, not really doing
any real editing besides picking the parts from the episode that I want to put as the kind of
highlight reel at the beginning and then getting it all structured together and throwing in ad
reads and intro, outro, whatever. And then honestly, posting takes a shocking amount of time,
just going through and doing it across everything. Like it's such a pain in the,
pain in the ass. That's why I brought somebody on to do the YouTube side. Cause again, I just,
I don't like constructing YouTube thumbnails and doing that kind of thing and figuring out what's
going to, it's going to please the algorithm. I just, I can't stand that. So, I mean, it's a good
amount of time. I do most of my editing, uh, and most of like all the podcast work besides the
interviews themselves in the late evenings, uh, into the wee hours of the night after my wife and
son have gone to bed. So yeah, uh, I, I spend, I mean, I guess probably it's probably at least
five plus hours per episode on either side of it. Plus the recording, I would say like at least,
I don't know maybe maybe you're more efficient than I am but yeah that's now that time's going
down that time's going down a little bit but you know with uh bring some people on to help with the
YouTube side but yeah this stuff takes a while you're probably talking about 10 to 20 hours a
week and you're probably trying to grind it down to 8 to 12 as much as you can so you can spend
time with your family and get that back but it's amazing how that stuff just kind of builds even
just that administrative stuff like posting I saw your panel in Vegas that you did with your wife
Carla and Katie the Russian and JD Lott and George McHale. And it was called Raising Future
Bitcoiners, sort of fiat families versus Bitcoin families. You know, a lot of Bitcoin families are
interested in homeschooling. Either they are or they want to or they want to know more about it.
From what I gather, you grew up homeschooled. Can you talk about your experience? I mean,
was it just something that your parents initiated and you didn't know any different?
Were you sort of the weird kid or an outlier? Did you have opportunities to socialize, play sports?
How would you sort of characterize?
I would say the older I get, the more grateful I am to my parents that they homeschooled me.
It's a sacrifice that parents make. It's obviously, it's a lot easier to put your kids on a school bus,
send them off for eight plus hours a day and go about your business, right?
That's the path of least resistance.
The problem is that I think that that path creates more resistance later in life, and it ultimately takes away so much time that you could be spending with your kids.
So I'm very grateful that my parents took the initiative to homeschool my sister and myself.
I was homeschooled until high school when I decided, I told my parents, I want to go to, I want to try public school.
I was actually, I was legitimately worried that I might be really far behind, like that I might, you know, maybe I, the reason I thought that I was going to be
so far behind the kids in public school is because I, uh, I did a lot of socialization,
right? This, this myth that if you're homeschooled, your kids won't get socialized. It's like,
it's bullshit. It's complete bullshit. You, you have sports, you have community activities,
you have church, you have whatever you have, whatever it might be for you and your family,
but there are so many different things you can do. We also, we started a small charter school with
like five other families bringing in tutors from the outside, things like that. There are all these
things you can do to create opportunities for socialization. That's not hard. That's something
that humans naturally do. Maybe you have to do a little bit more work, but it's also more natural
socialization. It's socialization with people that aren't just exactly the same age as you,
sitting in a room for eight hours a day, being told to walk in a straight line, and you can go
to the bathroom at this time and raise your hand if you want to speak and all these things.
It's socialization that's normal. I think the type of socialization that happens in public school is
quite abnormal. It's based on this, where does mandatory public education come from? It comes
from the Prussian era, right? It literally comes from the Prussians lost some major battles.
And the king, I'm forgetting his name at the time, but the king basically said,
we need to get our kids in shape. We need to start training them to be good soldiers
from the moment they're young children. How do we do that? Well, we make sure that we get them
into a giant big hall together.
And we tell them exactly what to do
and what to think and how to follow orders.
And then they'll be primed and ready to be good soldiers.
Or if they're not soldiers, good little worker bees,
good little citizens, just good little drones.
This is exactly what they did.
Another group that happened to love mandatory public education,
compulsory public schooling a lot, was the Nazis.
Hitler was a big fan of that.
Homeschooling has been illegal in Germany since the Nazis.
It's funny that Germany gets rid of absolutely
every other vestige of the Nazis,
but they kept compulsory public schooling.
It's still illegal to homeschool your children in Germany.
I think that's insane.
I think that is insane that you should not be allowed as a parent
to do what you think is best for your child.
I think that is honestly criminal and a massive state overreach.
Again, why Germans?
Why Germans have you kept this last vestige of Hitler and the Nazis?
It doesn't make any sense.
Or maybe it does.
Point being, I was worried that I was going to be behind these kids.
I saw all of my friends who I was in sports with or whatever, you know, friends that were
a little younger, a little older, same age as me.
I had, you know, friends across the age spectrum and, you know, was used to interacting with
adults as well and how to speak with adults because again, you should like no time in
human history besides the past 150 years have kids just been like locked in a room with only people their own age exactly their own age It just doesn make any sense And I saw that my friends would always they would be in school for eight hours a day
And then they would come home and they would do hours and hours of homework.
And I was like, oh my God, they must like, I get all of my work done in two, three hours in the morning.
You know, get up at six, I'm done by nine.
Then I go play outside.
Or like, you know, my mom takes me to apprentice with a blacksmith.
or like to go do like random, random things like that, like incredible things. Like I spent some
time with this awesome, badass blacksmith dude who literally was the first one who taught me
about the Fibonacci sequence because how he uses it in his, uh, in his craft. These are experiences
that you just don't have if you're locked in a room with only people your own age. And so then I,
you know, I told them they were like, okay, it's your choice, but you know, you make the decision.
If you want to go to public school, you can go to public school. It's like, we're not going to
stop you. And I did. And then I found out, Oh no, it's not that you're stupid or that you're behind.
You're, you're actually quite far ahead. I graduated number one after those four years
of high school. And it was one of these realizations where I got into school and I realized
very quickly, like, Oh wow, everything is catering to the lowest common denominator.
We're going at this snail's pace. We're not even doing all the problem. We're not doing all the
problems in our math textbook. I didn't know that Bob back of book existed, you know, like this,
you could just find all the answers and that's where kids would just go and you know get the
answers and write them down and like I don't know it was it was kind of a shock to the system for me
because I realized not only are you are you not behind you're you're quite far ahead of 99.9% of
of your peers here and also that this system is not incentivizing you or rewarding you for being
ahead. In fact, you're, you're kind of throttled, right? And so that was, yeah, I'm glad that I got
that experience because I think it showed me both sides of the coin. But to anybody who's thinking
about homeschooling, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful thing and the greatest gift you can
give your children. And it's also a great thing for yourself. Like now we live in this time where
a lot of people work remotely or are able to work remotely. We can, you know, it's also a problem
that most people, in order to keep their family afloat,
both parents need to work.
I think that's one of the greatest destructive forces
that fiat has wrought on us,
is that you can't have a mom staying home,
spending all of that quality time with the kids.
The kids are in school, the mom and dad are both working,
and then they see each other just at night.
In the early mornings and at night after they get home,
when everybody's all tired and everybody's worn out,
how much time are you missing?
that could be spent doing what I think is the most important thing in the world, which is
raising your kids. Like I'm, I'm so grateful to Carla that like, that is, that is what she is
doing. We're going to homeschool our son and any future kids that we have. I work. I also am able
to work from home, which is nice. And, and her focus is how do I make sure that this kid has the
best childhood possible, right? And spend as much time with us as possible. Because again, time,
Time, that's the only thing that is truly, truly finite besides Bitcoin, right?
Our time is very finite.
We don't know how much of it we get.
What a shame that this system incentivizes people to spend the majority of their time
away from their kids instead of with them.
I think that's just a, that is truly a shame.
And I think we're seeing the effects of it too.
We're seeing the effects of all of this.
So if you have the ability and the desire, I think homeschooling is a wonderful thing, wonderful thing to do for your kids.
If you're in Germany, I'm sorry, you're shit out of luck.
You can't do that. It's illegal.
Maybe you should petition your government or move elsewhere.
But boy, what a crazy world we live in where it's been normalized to ship your kids off and spend so little time with them.
Yeah, for sure. What do you think is maybe the benefit or difference of being a Bitcoin family
versus a fiat family? And I like to think of that as something that's not related to how much Bitcoin
or how many sats you have. But what do you think is like sort of the difference there? Like, so
you're stacking sats, whatever you have, and what does it mean to be a Bitcoin family versus, you
know, fiat family? It's a great question. If you're comparing Bitcoin family versus fiat family,
so much of it has to come down to time preference it has to come down to how are you thinking about
the way that you spend your time the actions that you take the moves that you make the choices that
are brought before you are you thinking about it in terms of the short term are you thinking about
it in terms of the long term because a lot of times the the choices that may be easier for the
short term and and harder in the long term those are the ones that are so much so so so detrimental
really. Like, again, it's very easy. It's very high time preference. You know, look, it's very
just short thinking to ship your kids off for eight plus hours a day, five days a week to public
school. I think that's, you know, that's easy, but what effect does that have in the long run?
Like you can't get that time back. And I think, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners,
no matter how much Bitcoin you have and no matter what your particular place is on the
socioeconomic ladder, having even just a little bit of Bitcoin allows you to have more control
over that time. You have more of a safety net for your family. You also have something that you know
is going to continue growing and purchasing power year over year over year over year.
I thought I understood the idea of time preference pretty well. I read the Bitcoin standard after all
and I'm a Bitcoiner and thought I understood it pretty well. And then I, our son arrived and I
said, Oh wow. Now I understand what it means to have a low time preference. Now I truly care about
what happens, not just 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, but when I'm gone, I care about what happens
when I, when I eventually die, because I will, we all do what happens then. And then what happens,
what happens another generation after that? Like, how am I setting up? What kind of legacy am I
going to leave? And not a legacy from, I think legacy gets a bad rap sometimes. It's, it's
associated with this idea that you you're somehow feeling so self-important that you want to you
know impose this legacy or whatever but I don't look at it that way I think it's about how do you
give your family and your descendants the best possible shot at success how do you instill values
in them that are going to last generations how do you build things how do you build structures
whether physical or figurative that are going to last far into the future and so I think that that's
that Bitcoiners think about a lot.
The Bitcoiners I talk to,
they think about this constantly,
especially the ones that are fathers or mothers.
They think about what are we going to do for the long term?
I think this is contrasted with a lot of the boomer mentality.
Not all boomers.
Again, I've met a lot of incredible boomers
through Bitcoin, right?
But that generation,
I'm generalizing here again, boomers,
if you're listening,
like there are a lot of incredible boomers out there.
This is not directed at you specifically.
this is a broad strokes, a broad stroke statement. You hear all these stories. And I know these
stories personally from, from talking to friends and, you know, hearing from family and whatnot.
And of course, reading them on the internet, you shouldn't believe everything, but that's why you
can talk to people in the real world about this, this idea that the boomers, they think that
everybody needs to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Like, you know, just go ahead and
give them a firm handshake and hand them your resume and you'll be good. Just, just buy yourself
a house. I got, after all, I got mine for two strawberries and it's worth, you know, $4 million
dollars now. Why can't you just do that? This complete disassociation from the actual reality
of the economic situation that allowed those boomers to benefit disproportionately. And then
seeing the way a lot of boomers, you know, it's kind of like a lot of boomers like don't want to
give their accumulated wealth to their offspring. It's kind of like a, well, I earned this and I'm
going to enjoy my twilight years. And, you know, you can, you can figure it out just like I did,
Sonny boy. I think that that's just such a, such a, such a selfish mentality. Like I want,
I'm building things now. I'm working hard now, not so that I can sail off into the sunset and
ignore my offspring and say, pick yourself up by your bootstrap, Sonny. It's so that I can be able
to provide a framework that is going to give my son and future children the greatest probability
of success. And so that I can spend as much time as possible with them. That's what I want to do,
right? Like I work because it is satisfying, right? And I think men, we have a desire to work,
to create, to be providers, to be fulfilled through that work of providing. But also it's
like the whole point of working is so that you can have more freedom to do great things for your
family and spend time with your family. Like that's the point. If you're just always working
and working and working and working, but that doesn't actually equate to more freedom for your
family or more, uh, more time spent with your family just equates to shinier objects that you
bestow upon your family to excuse all the time you spent away. I don't really see the point in that.
Like for me, it's about how do I, how do I make sure that I'm working in a really purposeful way,
focusing on the things that matter most? Because any time that I'm working, that I'm spending,
you know, that's time I'm spending away from my family. It's time I'm not focusing on them.
I'm doing it for them, but it's time that I could be spending with them. So it's, it's for me,
a constant calculus of, is this worth my time? And I have more freedom to make those decisions
because of Bitcoin, because of what Bitcoin allows. It gives you more freedom over your time. It gives
you more agency, I think, over your time because you have that way to actually save the value of
your time and energy into the future without it being debased. You don't have to be stuck on that
hamster wheel forever. So for me, I think to sum that up, the biggest difference between fiat
families and Bitcoin families is just how they think about the time that they're spending.
Is the time that both parents are working?
Like there's a lot of parents you could have, you know, the wife or the husband, but let's
be honest, usually the wife, because women are naturally more nurturing.
Like this is a fact, but he has to be offended by this.
You could have the one parent stay home and spend time with the children and homeschool
your kids.
You'd be, you'd be bringing in less money, right?
but like I know a ton of people who send their kids off to uh you know to like really nice private
daycares or we'll send them to private elementary schools or things like that that cost I mean they
cost as much as college tuition and it's like one pair after taxes basically all of one parent's
earnings are going towards just financing somebody else taking care of your fucking kids what the
fuck is the point of that why the fuck is one of your parents spending all this time working
away from the kids just to pay for somebody else to take care of your kids who does not care about
your kids. No matter who they are, nobody's going to care as much as the parent. It's not possible.
The state does not give a fuck about your kids. Some daycare instructor, they may be really nice
and really sweet, Mrs. So-and-so, but they don't actually give a fuck about your kids in the same
way that you do. They don't love your kids in the same way that you do. It's not possible.
So for me, it's like being able to make those value judgments, being able to make those value
judgments about how you spend your time. That is the biggest separating factor between a fiat family
and a Bitcoin family. That was very well put. So before you were the Bitcoin family, you were the
Bitcoin couple. So who found Bitcoin first? Who went down the rabbit hole first and was the other
one easy to convince? Because I think a lot of people, they find Bitcoin and maybe their spouse
or partner doesn't come along for the journey. Yeah, it's a question I get all the time. I've
got this question of like, oh, you know, your wife is so into Bitcoin and how do I get my wife to
care about Bitcoin. And I'm at a little bit of an advantage here because we kind of went down the
rabbit hole meaningfully at the same time. I first heard about Bitcoin in 2014 during the Silk Road
days. Now, let me clarify, I ignored Bitcoin. Somebody told me about Bitcoin. They were like,
Walker, I'm buying such and such thing on this website called the Silk Road. It was a finance
buddy of mine. And he's like, me, the engineer. So he asked me, have you heard about this Bitcoin
thing. You know, I've got to buy these Bitcoins in order to buy such and such. And I'm like, I,
I don't know what you're talking about. I have no idea what this Bitcoin is. Um, I don't really
care, man. Like back to whatever fiat stuff I was doing. So completely ignored it, dismissed it.
You know, that's, that's on me. Right. Uh, we, we all wish we would have paid attention to Bitcoin
the first time we heard about it. Very few people actually did. Then it was 2017 and Carla actually
brought it up to me. She brought, you know, have you heard of this Bitcoin thing? Yeah. Yeah. You
know, heard about it. It's been, you know, around you see news articles pop up every once in a while.
I don't really know much about it. Oh, you know, it's like, this was like top of the top of the top
in 2017, like when Bitcoin's like ripping off. And, you know, we're both looking at the price
of Bitcoin and we're like, geez, can't afford a full Bitcoin, you know, and assumed you had to
buy a full Bitcoin, did absolutely zero meaningful research into it. So I always have empathy for
people who, you know, have that same idea that, oh, you have to buy a full Bitcoin. It's like,
no, you don't. You can buy a fraction called a Satoshi. I didn't know that. Cause again,
I didn't put any time into it. So I bought a couple of Litecoin at the top, you know, sold
them a couple of years later at a loss. Cause I don't, I still don't think Litecoin has recovered
to its 2017 top. Carla bought a couple of ETH, you know, like, cause that's what we thought we
could afford. And maybe they'll be worth as much as one Bitcoin is someday, you know, the classic
shit coin trap. And then it was 2020 and we started locking people down. They started sending
out checks. And we both kind of had this like, what the fuck is going on right now? None of this
makes any sense. And we both started kind of looking back into Bitcoin a little bit, like
actually looking into it. I can't even say looking back into it because neither of us really went deep
into it at all, either of the times we'd heard about it before. And so really started taking the
time and you know listening to podcasts and reading the Bitcoin standard then things start to click And then you start spending some time on Bitcoin Twitter and you know following calling different people and learning from know listening to podcasts and reading the Bitcoin standard then things start to click and you start spending some time on Bitcoin Twitter and you know following different people and learning from them listening to podcasts And so we really we really went down
that rabbit hole together. It was kind of a unique, unique situation. And once we started making
content that just accelerated that process of going deeper down the rabbit hole, really finding
out all the unknown unknowns, you know, the things that you don't know that you don't know. And with
Bitcoin, as we all know, that rabbit hole is deep and there are many winding passageways that
are, you know, go off tangentially from Bitcoin into other directions, whether it be Austrian
economics, energy, just, you know, the nature of the state itself, whatever it might be. So
the other difficulty is like people ask me, okay, you know, again, how do I get my wife into Bitcoin?
I'm like, I don't know. Make her the daughter of parents who grew up in communism and think
communism is horrible and we're communist defectors. That helps. That helps a lot if
She's got a really innate hatred of the state and of communism and totalitarianism.
That's generally helpful for getting somebody to really grok freedom money.
But yeah, I wish I had better advice here to give people because my situation was just fairly unique.
The one thing that I would say is that it's not always just not with Bitcoin, but with anything.
If there's something you really care about that you want your significant other to care about,
the best course of action is not to like browbeat them with it and try to shove it down their throats repeatedly.
And, you know, make it the only thing that you will talk to them about because that's
just going to turn them off.
What will help is you being passionate about it and being ready to answer questions when
they have them.
And this goes for, you know, this goes for spouses.
This goes for friends and family too.
I think that's a big thing that a lot of people realize that myself included on this Bitcoin
journey.
What's the first thing you do once you really start grokking Bitcoin and you're feverishly
excited about it and it's all you can think about?
You want to tell everyone about it.
You know, you want to just tell absolutely everybody.
it's all you're going to talk about with your friends and family. And you know what?
Most of them are just going to be sick and tired of hearing about it from you.
And they're not going to go down the rabbit hole themselves, no matter how compelling an argument
you make. Some of them will, very few though. What ends up working out better is just living
your life, living, you know, living the Bitcoin or life, doing the best you can and being a
resource for them when they eventually do hear about Bitcoin a few more times from news, from
other friends, from whatever it is. And when they start seeing the price go up and wow, that's
weird. It's like, you know, it's, it's 10, you know, 10 times the price it was when so-and-so
first told me about it, what's going on there? Like, that's what eventually brings people over.
That's what gets people orange pilled is, you know, you can't, uh, you can't, you can give
somebody an orange pill, but you can't make them take it. I think it's something we all need to
realize. They have to take it themselves. Uh, they have to be want, they have to want to do
the work to understand it. Yeah. All right. I, I, you know, I want to, before you were in the
Bitcoin couple, you were just Walker. So how did you become one half of the Bitcoin couple? Because
I think, you know, maybe a lot of people, depending on when they found Bitcoin, they find Bitcoin before
they find their partner in life. And they're just not sure how that happens for others, or maybe even
they're wondering how it's going to happen for them. But how did you meet Carla?
Yeah, we met like the first week of college. So we've known each other for a long time now. And we
were, yeah, we were, we were married before we started making Bitcoin content, right? We'd been
together for, you know, engaged for some time before that, you know, dating for some time before
that. So we've, we've known each other for, for a very long time. And I'm not one to give, you know,
relationship advice here. I'm, I'm no expert. We're all just figuring it out. But what I would say
to anyone who is out there, especially, you know, younger guys who are looking for a wife to spend
the rest of their life with is, man, I think it's the most important decision you can make.
I think it is the number one decision you can make beyond your individual career or job opportunities or anything else, who you're going to spend your time with.
Who are you going to spend the rest of your life with?
And hopefully you're going into it with the expectation that you're going to spend the rest of your life with them.
If not, you might want to kind of check your priorities.
If you can't see yourself spending the rest of your life until death do us part, you might want to rethink that.
But I think that it's such an important decision.
And honestly, I don't envy the plight of especially younger guys, younger gals who are trying to date and find people in this environment of dating apps and all that.
I never had to do any of that.
I can imagine that that is fucking exhausting and honestly really difficult in this generation where this, I should say, not even just generation because it's multi-generational.
But in this time where everybody only presents the most polished, perfect version of themselves, it is only looking for the most polished, perfect version of other people.
in this dopamine-charged, gamified online dating,
or not even online, app dating environment.
Man, that's just, that's got to be tough.
But maybe a great place to meet your future Mr. or Mrs.
is at a Bitcoin meetup or a Bitcoin conference.
There are, in fact, women that go to these things.
Yes, the line at the women's room,
a Bitcoin conference is the only place
you'll find a giant line at the men's room
and no line at the women's room.
But that is changing, I think.
That is changing.
and so yeah it's a I'd say you want to find somebody who's who's they don't have to be
perfectly ideologically aligned with you they don't have to be exactly the same as you they
don't have to share all these similarities with you in fact you want somebody who is at least
different enough from you that they're going to be able to help you grow right because you are not
a finished product you are constantly in a state of growth I'm very lucky to have found an incredible
wife in Carla who is now an incredible mother to our son but I would say yeah I don't I don't have
relationship advice. I don't have dating advice. I don't have any of that. I would just say,
be very, be very purposeful about who you decide to spend the rest of your life with. Because
if you find a great, great woman or a great man, if you're a lady, you will, your life will be so
much better for it. And other decisions become a lot easier because you've got somebody else there
to, to, you know, be able to bounce ideas off of like, enough cannot be said for that.
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yeah i agree it is the most important decision you'll make maybe how has bitcoin changed you
i mean you grew up you're homeschooled you're kind of going against the grain a little bit already
or a lot you know for some people you'd say maybe it doesn't change them at all maybe it just
enhances them do you think bitcoin has like changed you in any way i think that it has uh
i and i think that it's it's about the process of discovery right i think that one thing i say
Bitcoin fixes a lot, but it doesn't fix you, right? It's not going to fix you as if you are
somehow viewing yourself as deficient in some way. It's not going to fix you. Just you buying Bitcoin
doesn't automatically make you a better person. It doesn't make you holier than now. It doesn't
make you smarter. It doesn't make you anything. Just the act of buying Bitcoin does not do that.
The act of discovery, the act of learning, the quest for knowledge that I think Bitcoin inspires,
that is what changes people. That is what changed me. It sent me down so many different rabbit holes.
It's made me read so much more. It's made me listen so much more. It's made me learn
so much more, it's made me question things. I think that before Bitcoin, I very much suffered
a lot more from both the Dunning-Kruger effect and also Gelman amnesia. Both of those syndromes
I was suffering from to a certain extent. And I think it's because so much in the world is obscured.
So many of our systems are so opaque. The way that things actually work is hidden behind so
many different layers and so much jargon and so many academics and, and just, and just so much
noise, but like there is signal. You have to be able to find it. I think finding Bitcoin and
learning about Bitcoin and going down the tangential rabbit holes that are involved there,
that helps you find signal. The world is very noisy, but that helps you find some signal because
now you at least have, you have something fundamental that you are gaining a better
understanding of. You're getting a better understanding of money and how money works
and energy and how energy works and time and how you should treat it.
And once you start thinking about those things more,
the questions that you need to ask in other domains, I believe, become clearer.
It becomes easier to start to parse the signal from the noise in everything you're doing.
And again, this requires you to still remain curious.
I think the worst thing you can do is say,
well, I've found Bitcoin and now I know what money is.
And now I know that I must, all of my other previously held opinions must also be correct
because I now have the correct opinion about this.
It's not the case.
You're probably wrong about a lot of things.
I know that I was and still am and certainly will be long into the future.
We're all works in progress, or at least we should be.
You should do whatever you can to try and grow and learn and expand your mind and expand
your horizons every single day.
But I think that, again, that act of discovery in Bitcoin is what is so powerful because you
realize, it's that realization with Bitcoin, that you realize, I never understood how money really
worked. I never really understood what money could be. And now that I understand a bit better
how money works, how Bitcoin works, and how fiat money works, and I understand that what the
implications of that are, what the implications of this broken monetary system are for the incentives,
that this is in fact the disease that was underlying all of the rot that we see. Every
other symptom that you see people talking about, every other problem that you see people talking
about, it's a symptom of the disease. It's not the disease itself. The disease is that the money
is broken, the incentives are broken, and everything breaks down because of that. This is how
civilizations fall. Every revolution is ultimately a monetary revolution, right? It comes back down to
a breaking of the monetary order. It comes back to the debasement of money ruins so, so many things
but even though that problem like that disease is central to it it's the thing we learn least about
growing up like being homeschooled didn't help me there at all right like parents were both
english majors like they weren't you know uh savvy uh you know savvy finance people or anything like
that they they did a great job to work hard and provide an amazing life for me and my sister and
i'm forever forever grateful for that but i didn't just because i was homeschooled didn't mean i like
you know, learned about Austrian economics when I was young. I wish I would have. I can't wait to,
you know, uh, you know, read, read some, some Hayek and Mises and Rothbard to my son already
have a little bit, uh, doesn't really quite crock it yet, but I think he will soon, maybe by age
three or so, uh, he'll be reading it on his own. But I think that that's really the fundamental
thing is that learning about Bitcoin and going down that Bitcoin rabbit hole makes you realize
that if you did not, if you did not, in fact, understand how something that we use every day,
something that's seemingly so obvious and easy and simple as money, if you didn't understand how
that works, what else don't you understand? What else is hidden from you? What else are you missing?
And it turns out you're probably missing a lot. So for me, that was the biggest thing is realizing
how much I did not know and how much all the things I thought I knew were based on these
assumptions that were all built on top of this foundation of quicksand.
It was built on top of nothing. And how many things I was just believing, because that's what,
that's, that's just the obvious thing. It's what any prudent person would believe. You know,
you realize how much bullshit is out there, basically, Cedric. That's what it comes down to.
Yeah, no, I hear you. I want to riff a little bit about podcasting. What is your goal with your show?
My goal is to try and educate as many people as I can that do not already know about Bitcoin
one. Also to provide a forum for Bitcoiners to be able to, for people who are already down the
rabbit hole, to learn more, to speak if they're, you know, if they want to come on my show and
speak about things, I want to provide an avenue by which we can have important conversations.
And I know, you know, people are always like another fucking Bitcoin podcast. Like,
how many times can you talk about Bitcoin? Right. And it's like, well, it turns out a lot because
it turns out money touches so many things. And so my goal is ultimately education.
But also I think for people that are already Bitcoiners, like I'm speaking for myself here
too, it's like, it's a sanity check.
Like listening to Bitcoin podcasts is a sanity check for Bitcoiners.
Like letting you, it reminds you, you're not the only crazy one.
In fact, you're not crazy at all.
Like the system is, that's what's crazy.
And so for me, at least, I think for a lot of folks, especially during the pandemic, when
everything was just so nuts, having this outlet where you could learn and hear conversations
that like where people, it sounds like they're speaking, you know, right to you.
that was really powerful for me. And I think powerful for a lot of people and hopefully still
is. But ultimately my goal is I, I want to do what I can to help more people find Bitcoin.
I hope that I can do that. I hope that through, uh, through my show, at least if even one more
person decides to start saving in Bitcoin, decides to change their life by learning about Bitcoin,
my show will have been a success. Like if you, and hopefully it's quite a lot more than one,
But even one, I think that that matters and that ripple effect matters.
This is why I encourage more people to start podcasts or just start making any sort of Bitcoin content.
It doesn't have to be a podcast if you're not into that kind of thing.
You can make any sort of Bitcoin content you want.
Julian Figueroa is doing an amazing job of this with the exit manual that he's doing through GetBaseTV, the DC session.
legendary, you know, it needs no introduction. The educational work that he has done has helped
so many people, like countless, countless people. I can't even fathom how many, like you have the
potential to help somebody, to help somebody else who is now where you once were. And I think that's,
that's really the thing. It's, it's in a way it's trying to, to pay it forward a little bit,
right? Cause you never know who you may be able to, to help. Like you never know what's going to
resonate with someone. You never know whose voice, whose attitude, whose persona, whose manner of
speaking, even like little things make a difference for people. Maybe, you know, they see something of
themselves in you. And that is what allows them to say, okay, like, you know, I like the way this
guy thinks. I like the way he talks. I like the way, you know, conducts himself. And this is
somebody I want to try and learn with, you know? And so for me, that's what it comes down to. It
It comes down to education.
And then beyond that too, selfishly,
it's a great way for me to talk to really amazing people.
That's one of the best things about Bitcoin podcasting
is you get to talk to some really incredible, inspiring people
who through those conversations,
you yourself become a little bit better, a little bit wiser, hopefully,
make you question your own preconceived notions.
I think that that's a beautiful side effect of Bitcoin podcasting
is you just get to have amazing conversations.
like that's uh so selfishly that's that's why i love doing it unselfishly i hope i hope that
people listen to it they find it and that it helps them to go deeper down that bitcoin rabbit hole or
to orange pill a family member or whatever it might be maybe orange pull their wife who can say
maybe not maybe that's that's what i hope though i hope it's the the small thing that we can all do
to try and forward this mission is to to just bring a couple more people on board the life raft
with us. So I hope that I'm able to do that. I'm going to keep trying for, for until they shut me
down. So, yeah, I mean, I agree that, you know, I think everyone probably feels like they're always
late to a lot of things, whether it's like the.com era, social media, mobile. I remember even in 2000,
2003, me and my best friend, we wanted to open a brewery and we were like, we don't know how to
make beer. We don't own a brewery. There's all, you know, but we, we didn't realize you could just
do things. We thought we were late then. And the explosion in craft beer since then, you know,
I went to Florida in 2007, 2008 to visit my parents. And I was like, oh, it's already too
late here. And then there's like, you know, millions of breweries there. And you always
think you're late. And even through watching the beer industry for decades, I thought I was
late and it was always early. Maybe now it's saturated. But so thinking about, you know,
the show, did you have full confidence or what do you make of the phenomena of how large your show
is now in terms of a platform and being able to speak to people. What is that like for people who
are like, should I start a show? I remember when I started my show five years ago, my personal
profile had a thousand followers. And I looked at someone like Princey, Daniel Prince, who has a
great show. And he had like 4,000 followers. I was like, wow. In my mind, I was like, if I could
just quadruple my followers, I've made it. You know, John Vallis had 19,000 followers at the time.
And it just, the idea of kind of 10Xing, 20Xing the show, the platform, and it's something I still don't think about.
I try not to think about the audience.
I mean, do you think about the audience?
What do you think about having an audience?
And this idea of kind of going from zero to one, did you have a lot of confidence in it?
What's that experience been like?
I think about the audience from the perspective of the larger my audience grows, the greater the network effect of the message is,
and the greater chance I have of getting that message in front of more and more people.
and this is you know like honestly one of the reasons i started i just hired somebody to to
help me out on on youtube is because like youtube is an area where i just i just i just hate playing
that game but that's also top of the funnel that's that is top of the funnel for people getting into
bitcoin what the algorithm serves up to them right like growing your rss feed you know growing the
audio side that's that's super super important and that's like i feel like i view that as for
like the diehard fans, right? But a lot of people, it's about, is the algorithm going to serve them
up this thing that might change their life? That's where the algorithm can be a positive thing,
right? Because it just so happens you watched such and such video and such and such video,
and there was a little confluence of different keywords there that then served you up with this
Bitcoin podcast video. And that sent you down the rabbit hole. You never know what it's going to be.
So I think about the audience in that way, because the larger it gets, the greater the chance it is
that it continues to grow larger and get out in front of more people. I don't think about it from
the perspective of like, I don't have like, you know, metrics that I'm trying to, that I'm trying
to hit or things like that. It's just, it's just, I would like to keep growing it so that it can
reach more people. From the, in terms of like kind of going, let's say zero to one, let's say,
or just initial growth, that's the hardest part. I mean, that's the hardest part. Some,
there's some crazy statistic I'm going to botch it, but it's directionally correct.
it's like 90 some percent of podcasts don't make it past 12 or 13 episodes something like that
like the vast majority of podcasts just they you know people start they're super stoked they've got
an awesome podcast idea they start making the podcast they get you know a dozen episodes in
and they're like i mean nobody's listening to this i give up you know and you know how this is like
the you know first few episodes you make there's a couple people you know a couple people tuning in
And you're like, wow, you know, like you see like 10 people that listen to an episode.
You're like, oh, 10 people listen to this.
That's incredible.
You see like 100 people.
Holy shit, 100 people, like 1,000 people, 2,000 people.
That's as many people as are in my hometown.
Like, holy shit, it's like my entire town listening to this podcast.
That's insane.
And so it's all relative, right?
And I think that it's also important for people to realize that you don't have to have a,
like a giant, giant audience to still be effective.
to still be effective in the sense that you are providing value and that you are reaching people.
Joe Rogan, biggest platform on the planet. I'm never going to be Joe Rogan. You're never going
to be Joe Rogan. You know, no Bitcoin power. Nobody's going to be Joe Rogan because he's Joe
Rogan. Like you're not going to catch him, but you don't need to be that big to be able to have
a massive impact on somebody's life. You can have a small audience, but a dedicated audience who are
our diehard fans. And that, that like, that's enough.
It depends what you're looking for personally, I think. And for me, again,
it always just came back to the,
and this is the reason Carl and I made made videos in the first place.
It wasn't to like, wasn't to make money. Like we weren't,
we weren't doing sponsored videos thing.
We did maybe one or two sponsored videos and like out of hundreds and hundreds
of videos, just cause somebody reached out and we were like, it was a, you know,
a friend and they're like, would you want to do this? We said, okay. Yeah.
We never really thought about that, but sure. Like that wasn't why we were doing, we did it
because we wanted to hopefully do a small part, our small part to educate just a couple more people
or to dispel a little bit of FUD. We went on a crusade against Greenpeace. You know, I mean,
we like those fuckers. But we made it our mission, you know, to FUD bust Greenpeace,
not because somebody was paying us, you know, we didn't get $5 million from Ripple like Greenpeace
did. No, we were doing it for free because we care about Bitcoin and we care about the message
of what Bitcoin can do for people.
And so I think where people run into trouble
is if you, one, think that your show
is going to be some overnight success
and have millions of listeners,
it's just probably not going to happen that way.
It's gonna be a slow and steady grind.
Some people, yeah, some people may have
this astronomical trajectory.
I think in the Bitcoin space, that's harder to do
because it's still a niche.
It won't be a niche forever,
but it's still a niche now. It's like still the majority of the world doesn't know about Bitcoin.
We're so early. Bitcoin is a roughly $2 trillion asset. There's $1,000 trillion worth of global
asset value out there. We're at 0.2% of global asset penetration. We are not even close. We're
not even in the first inning. We're still warming up. We're still jogging the bases. We're just
barely getting started. We're at less than a percent of people own Bitcoin around the world,
like far less than a percent. We're not even close. So given that we are so early, we're also
very early to Bitcoin podcasting. And so I would say you have to be realistic about the total scope
of your reach. Somebody like Peter McCormack has been able, and shout out to Peter, one of my
favorite people, just an awesome dude. His podcast was the first one I ever listened to, first Bitcoin
podcast I ever listened to, Guy Swans being the second. That was like my perfect, you know,
double punch. But he's been able to really actually, I think, do a great job of pivoting
to go outside of the Bitcoin echo chamber. And now he focuses on the UK and the political.
He still slips Bitcoin in there. Bitcoin's still the heartbeat, but he has now expanded that
audience. I think he probably hit the maximum that you could, at least within the Bitcoin-only
type content, right? If you want to talk about crypto and all that stuff, there's plenty of
DGENs out there, but we don't want to do that, right? We want to focus on Bitcoin only. So I
think you have to be realistic about what the potential growth is, but you also have to be
mindful of the fact that even if you don't have a ton of people listening, you can still have a
massive impact on those people who do. And to me, at least that's enough. Like maybe I'll Peter
McCormack pivot into a political show at some point too, you know, but, and I don't really like
wrestling with the pigs as much. He's good at it. He's great at it. He's the master. But for me,
it's like, I like to talk about Bitcoin. So I'm going to keep doing that.
Oh, Peter's great. I mean, he really built an empire. He was one of the first show I listened
to was Peter and Marty Bent and Stefan Lavera Peter was traveling the world It was very kind of experiential to kind of hear his journey He be in different cities interviewing different people He like the Michael Jordan
Football club and everything too.
Yeah, football club.
And congrats to Peter.
Great work.
Well, it was an interesting part of my Peter story.
So I remember I had lots of reason to start a podcast.
This interview is not about me.
But the final straw was after I had sent my wife a few Peter McCormick episodes
I thought would really be great for her and I to share.
She started listening to Peter on her own and I'd come home from work and
she'd be in the kitchen and be like, Oh, this is great podcast host.
And I was like, all right, fuck this. I'm throwing my hat in the ring.
Maybe you'll listen to my show. And then, you know, I think,
I think I drunk DM'd Pierre like midnight on a Saturday night. Like, you know,
I want to start a podcast. Would you be like my first guest?
And he was 8am on Sunday morning. He was like, yeah, how about this week?
And I had to throw a show together.
And I remember I released four episodes on the very first day I dropped with Pierre in there.
And I think I got like 54 spins and downloads across all four.
And I was just like, I guess we're done here.
I guess this is not happening.
But, you know, I stuck with it and grinded until I got 100 an episode and 1,000 and et cetera.
But is there anyone that was on your bucket list that you were like, if I start a Bitcoin podcast, I have to, you know, for my own gratification,
I would want to talk to have this person on the show, these people.
And did you get to talk to any of them and who's still remaining?
Honestly, one of the people that I always wanted to be able to talk to,
or I should say two of the people are Jeff Booth and Preston Pish,
just because I like really look up to those guys and they're awesome dudes.
I'd gotten a chance to meet them, meet them, you know,
a couple of times kind of, you know, briefly prior to starting the podcast,
just again, because of Carl and I making content and, you know,
they found our videos, you know, got to say, you know, hello to them at a couple of conferences,
you know, nothing like crazy though. And then they were both two of the first guests on my show
and said yes immediately. Both took time out of their busy schedules. They both, I just had,
I just had both of them on again, actually within the last couple of weeks, I just released the Jeff
episode, Preston one. I just talked to him, what? Yes, yesterday. That'll be coming out soon. And so,
and I've had them both on like several times throughout the course of this
podcast. And now they've both become like what I consider really,
really great friends, which is, which is an amazing thing.
It's like some,
you see these people that you really look up to and learn so much from,
and I still learn so much from both of them. And then to see like, wow,
not only do you get to interview them,
but you are able to actually become, become friends with these people.
Call these like, that's, that's an amazing thing about Bitcoin.
It will not always be this way with Bitcoin when Bitcoin is,
more normalized, when Bitcoin is more mainstream, it's, you know, how long do Bitcoin conferences
keep going on? Right. When it's, when it's just like, you know, you don't have internet conferences
anymore in that same way. Right. And then again, you have gold conferences still, and gold's been
around for 5,000 years. So you know what, maybe, maybe we got at least 5,000 years of conferences.
I'm not sure, but, but it's amazing that right now where we're at, this is still this niche
industry, this niche community. I know people don't like calling it a community, but for lack
of a better word, right? Happy to hear alternate suggestions for that. So those were two people who
I was really excited to speak with and, uh, and was able to have on very early. And now again,
I've had on multiple times since learned something new from these guys every time, uh, respect them
both a lot as, uh, both, you know, businessmen and Bitcoiners and thinkers and, uh, and fathers
and family men too. You know, it's, it's cool. There's a lot of great examples out there in the
Bitcoin space. So yeah, those were two people, those, those, those dreams have already come true.
I guess I got to, I got to find a new one, you know, got to, got to find a new, a new white whale
to, to slay. If, uh, I think of Bitcoin, maybe I, I think of a culturally more like maybe hip hop
and even the dollar. So I don't think that like, there are conferences now about the dollar. People
aren't like, we love fiat, but there might be conferences about how to like make money off the
dollar or have instruments that are tied or, so I'd imagine that as Bitcoin becomes more ubiquitous
and mainstream, it might burn out culturally, like in hip hop, like where people aren't
going to, like now they would wear a Bitcoin sign.
But in the future, I don't think you'll wear your Bitcoin sign, like you wouldn't wear
a dollar sign.
And then I think the conferences will become more mainstream where they're about like lending
your Bitcoin or borrowing against your Bitcoin.
Specialized.
Yeah.
Or for Bitcoin investors.
And then there'll be like the breakaway, like the Burning Man Bitcoin for like, you know,
the real Bitcoiners and the Maxis.
And they won't even announce these events.
They'll just be like in the know, you know, peer to peer.
But who knows?
Can I ask you who was or is your white whale for a guest?
Well, before I started the show, if you want to ask it from that perspective,
I was like, I want to interview Pierre Richard.
He was sort of like my Morpheus.
American HODL was really big, you know.
And so there were a few like that.
Bitcoin Tina, I guess that's a whale I haven't landed.
I've actually gotten, I put up a tweet and Bitcoin Tina DMed me.
He said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
You're a fucking moron like all of them.
And then I said, oh, you're right.
Oops.
And he was like, can I call you?
And then we talked for like an hour just offline before he had to go catch a train to work.
And for me, that was kind of epic.
It wasn't recorded, but he's someone.
uh it's really those are like american how bitcoin tina pierre these were the people that
orange pilled me the most um there's been a lot that have kind of come after that maybe i didn't
know before the show started you know like maybe michael saylor was a big one um you know jeff
booth was later on but that was great and jeff was like episode 27 and that was like a real kind
of level up for the show you know but uh who's still left um well who who's left for you like
who would be, you know, maybe a huge Bitcoiner and maybe a huge no, not huge. What would be like
the, a no corner you would really love to interview? That's tricky. Um, no coiner. I mean,
hell, I'd love to talk to Jerome Powell. You know, if we're really like, if I'm shooting my shot,
I think that'd be fascinating. I think it would be fascinating to talk to him, especially after
he's gone from the fed. I think it would be fascinating to talk to a federal reserve, you
the chair of the Fed, I think that would be illuminating,
especially if we could get a little drunk.
We could get him loosened up a bit, get him to have a few beers,
maybe a couple shots of whiskey and really get his tongue wagging a bit.
I'd love a peek behind the curtain, I think, of the Fiat Panopticon.
I don't know if that's probably never going to happen.
But you know what?
I'm putting it out there in the universe.
Maybe at some point.
I just think that that would be fascinating.
and then talk about, you know, a no-coiner.
Maybe he owns some Bitcoin, slyly on the side.
I don't know.
He's actually spoken about it in not too disparaging terms.
I mean, he's literally said Bitcoin is like gold but digital.
It's digital gold.
Like there's been a lot worse things said about Bitcoin than that.
That's the same thing that a lot of Bitcoiners say.
So, you know, you could certainly find harsher Bitcoin critics.
I'd be interested to talk to Peter Schiff too, actually.
Just as far as people who are so wildly against Bitcoin, or say they are anyway, he still accepts Bitcoin.
You can pay for Peter Schiff's gold in Bitcoin.
He had an ordinal series on Bitcoin with his little Schiff gold.
So I don't know.
I'm not entirely convinced Peter's a no-coiner.
I think he at least has some, but he's certainly a good actor, if nothing else.
I'm a good actor from the sense that he's good at acting.
So I'm going to give you my full list here.
Dream guests for the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.
This was written, I wrote this over a year ago.
So Snowden, Stella Assange, Jack Mahlers, Jack Dorsey, Whitney Webb,
Cat Williams, Ross Ulbrich, Lynn Ulbrich, Zabo, Bukele, Max Keiser,
Stacey Kaiser, Giacomo Francis, Jack Dorsey, Ron Paul, and Luke Roman.
It's a great list.
There's definitely no no-coiners in there.
But that's a very solid list.
I think talking to Snowden would be pretty incredible.
He's going to be a tough one to pin down, I think.
But, you know, hey, it'd be pretty darn cool.
I almost had Lynn Albrecht on the show.
This was like three years ago.
And she agreed to come on the show.
And then about a week before we were supposed to do the recording,
the Daily Mail came out with a piece that Trump was considering a pardon.
This was, I guess, in 2020.
And so she was just like, I can't do this now.
You know, we were on silence.
So she backed out then.
And I completely understand.
And, you know, we lost communication from then on.
But yeah, I think that Bitcoin podcasts have gone through like a weird, they're in a weird moment, I think.
So I think that, you know, pre ETFs, Bitcoin by default was sort of zeitgeisty.
And you could kind of find what Bitcoiners or what was sort of interesting in the world and look at it through a Bitcoin lens.
I think almost after the ETFs, Bitcoin has become sort of like the antithesis of zeitgeisty, like zeitgeist, like sort of like, oh, that's.
That's now a hundred thousand dollar thing.
That's, that's wall street.
That's more suits.
It's all treasury companies.
It feels less revolutionary.
It feels less about self custody.
It is like, it's almost a little like, you know,
I think Peter McCormack like left on top.
It feels like there a little bit less for and I don I think it going to come back I not trying to be ultimately pessimistic but but I But I think even things like world events like Charlie Kirk assassination has took a lot of the algorithm
I think as your show, it just shows in general,
the content is much more YouTube-based now.
Even Bitcoin podcasts, which I agree with you,
you have your sort of loyal audience on the RSS feed.
It's audio. It's sort of pure.
And then you bring that show to YouTube,
and you get a whole different imagination around how you title it,
how you do your trailer, how you do your thumbnail.
And that might even affect how you think about what topics to bring up,
when to bring them up on the show.
And so how do you think through like maybe the sort of where Bitcoin is
in sort of podcasting right now?
I think so.
I definitely see what you mean.
I think that I don't know if I completely agree with the fact that Bitcoin
is kind of no longer this cultural zeitgeist.
I think that it is.
I think that it's just somewhat obscured.
I think there's so much, again, I think we're just so early.
I think we're so early that, and it's hard to square that, right?
Because you mentioned the ETFs and like now it's like, okay, how can we be early when Larry Fink of BlackRock is promoting Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs?
How can that possibly be when the world's largest asset manager is speaking favorably about Bitcoin?
they've got their ibit etf and a number you know obviously there's a lot of different bitcoin etfs
but you know speaking of black rocks they've got that and it's their you know it's their number one
money maker it's the biggest etf launch in history so how can you say you know that we're still early
but it's like all you have to do is you just just even talk to your immediate group of you know of
friends friends and family you know outside of like the bitcoin space right you know how early
where I talk to talk to random people, you know, on the street, uh, about like most people just
still aren't there yet. They're not, they're not even close. People are like one of the biggest
topics of every conversation that you have with people, wherever you are in the world,
is that the price of everything is going up. Everything's so expensive. Oh yeah. It's never
been, this is just ridiculous. The price just, you know, it's like, it's every conversation you
have very few of those conversations ever go back to, well, you know, at least we can save in Bitcoin
and retain our purchasing power
and actually grow our purchasing power.
It's like people complain about the problem,
but they don't know that there's a solution out there to it.
And they don't even necessarily understand
what the actual root problem is.
That's a whole different story, right?
Because most people don't think about what money is
or what it's supposed to be or what this fiat money is.
So I hear you from a, I think also from,
let's just say a content creation standpoint,
from an algorithmic standpoint,
like it is way easier like if you if you were starting a podcast from scratch let's say just
from if you wanted to start something from scratch zero followers zero subscribers zero anything
you would be able to grow a political podcast you know a really kind of like edgelord politics
podcast exponentially faster than a bitcoin focused podcast right because people are kind of
I think people are addicted to the rage bait.
They are addicted to that algorithmically fueled rage.
This is one of the reasons I also like Noster so much
is because there's so much less of that, right?
You're not being just served things up
that the algorithm believes are going to keep you
on the application that you're using longer.
It gets you're finding things
that are a little bit more valuable,
a little more high signal.
But I think obviously most people don't use Noster either.
That's an even tinier subset.
And so I do think that like we, I don't think we ever really got the, the quote, retail wave
in Bitcoin, uh, this, you know, in this past, you know, year and a half, two years, like since the,
since the bottom of the bear in 2022, I don't think there has been a very significant influx
of just, you know, retail plebs, let's say maybe, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know if you,
if you feel differently, but I haven't felt that. I don't think that's been the case.
I think that as I've watched my podcast grow, I think it's been amongst – primarily it's been I've been pulling from a bucket of Bitcoiners that are already out there.
It's not like a bunch of – a huge new wave of people came in trying to learn about Bitcoin.
I think that's going to change.
I don't think Bitcoin is done running yet this year or next year.
I don't think we're going to be in a protracted bear market here as some people are saying.
and number go up is the number one way to get people to pay attention to Bitcoin, right?
That's, let's be honest.
Like nobody wants to buy Bitcoin after it's crashed 30% or 60% or 80%.
Nobody wants it then.
They don't want it when it's on sale.
They want it when it's, when it's at new all-time highs, that's when they pile in.
And I just don't think we've seen that from the retail perspective.
We've seen, you know, a lot of, a lot of, you know, I mean, let's say like, like boomers
have been surprisingly diamond handed buying up these ETFs, you know, from massive retirement
accounts. You've seen now even like, you know, Bank of America is now Bank of fucking America
is recommending a one to 4% Bitcoin allocation. You know, you've got Vanguard who finally bent
the knee. And even though they said we will never offer Bitcoin ETFs to our clients, well,
that CEO is gone now. And now they're offering Bitcoin ETFs to their clients. Like that's,
you know, another $11 trillion of assets under management. That's at least some portion that's
going to come into Bitcoin. Not real Bitcoin, unfortunately, but IOU Bitcoin, PDF, ETF Bitcoin.
But my point being, I think that there's still, from a content perspective, I think that there's
still a massive desire for new types of content, whether it be podcasts or there be short form.
I mentioned Julian Figueroa and the work that GitBased is doing on this new YouTube channel,
the exit manual, they've hit like, they are, they hit, uh, um, after eight or nine videos,
they hit like a million views already. And they, they hit 20 some thousand followers. They've
already got more followers than my YouTube channel has. And they started it like a few weeks ago.
Right. And it's, it's shorter form. It's like seven to eight minutes, super high energy,
incredible editing. That's really resonating with people. So people are looking for it. But I think
when it comes to, especially YouTube or, or, or X or any of these centralized social media
platforms, there's so much noise to wade through. There's so much noise. And for something new to
break into your particular algorithmic bubble, you have to kind of go out and look for it first.
That's the only way. Otherwise, the algorithm is just going to keep serving you what it knows you
like. It's going to keep serving you what it knows keeps you using that particular platform,
that particular application. It's not going to deviate from that unless it has a reason to,
because its job is to make people spend more time on the platform, to put in more viewing hours.
That's what it does.
So I think that you have to find ways to break outside of that echo chamber to be able to see kind of a new wave of people come in.
I also just, I think that new wave is coming, but I just don't think it's here yet.
I think we're still like, I think in 2026, we're going to see a massive influx of people.
Like if you look at the Bitcoin search term or search frequency in Google, like it's still not that high, relatively speaking.
You know, people just still don't care.
Most people just don't care.
They will.
They will come and they will care.
But I think a lot of them are just kind of like, I don't know, there's a lot of distractions out there in the fiat circus.
You can't entirely blame them.
We were all distracted by it for a long time before we found Bitcoin, too.
So, you know, we've got to have some empathy there.
But I think, you know, they're coming.
Printer is coming and plebs are coming.
It's just maybe might take a little bit longer for both.
Less time for the printer.
And the printer will ultimately bring the plebs because people are going to be wondering why the price of everything keeps getting higher.
And why the heck is that Bitcoin thing?
I thought it was dead.
I thought it crashed again, but it's still here.
And wow, it's double what it was last time I looked.
That's funny.
Maybe I should go search for Bitcoin on YouTube.
And that's how that new trickle starts.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the greatest lessons I learned from listening to Bitcoin podcasts was from Bitcoin Tina.
And it was about trading against your future self.
Don't trade against yourself and don't trade against, don't trade against others and don't
trade against your prior self.
You'll always lose and you'll always feel hopeless and demoralized.
And I find that in real life, whenever I'm trying to orange pill people, I feel like
they are trading against me.
You could kind of feel it like they're not thinking about their own future, thinking
about how long you've been telling them about Bitcoin.
They're speculating on what they think you might have or when you're trying to convey
not so much the this is how much bitcoin you need but this is what happens when you start
stacking sats don't you want this for yourself don't you want to live like this you're worried
about bitcoin's volatility but your entire life is volatile your career your family your personal
time but you know when i moved at 24 years old i moved to san francisco and i was an accountant for
a big four cpa firm and you know let's say i made 75 grand a year well i had some friends who made
half that, but they, uh, happened to work at startup.com or whatever, and they became millionaires.
And at that point in my life, I was just looking around you and I was definitely trading against
my peers and how come I, I have a master's in accounting and, uh, he or she is a sales rep
at some bullshit startup. And now they're a multimillionaire. And then they, they, they might,
it feels like they're turning to you and say, Hey, why don't you quit your accounting job?
You don't even like that. Go work at a startup and be like me. Try to win the lottery and be like me.
And you're like, I can't I'm not going to give up my accounting career to be a sales rep.
And, you know, or even I'm not maybe I'm not even going to go try to make an accounting career of working at startups and hoping, you know,
I feel like that's where a lot of people are when you when you try to talk about that to them about Bitcoin in real life.
I think that it a it a great great point I just interject quickly like people are it it hard for people to change their ways right Like change change is hard change is scary Maintaining the status quo always seems
like the, again, the short, uh, short-term thinking, the high time preference, easy option,
right? Just to, just to keep doing inertia is powerful. You just, just keep doing this. That's
a lot harder than going over here and start starting this parallel thing that is always
going to be harder for people. And I think, again, it comes, it comes back to meeting people where
they are. Uh, and like, I've got, I've got a lot of buddies who are in extremely, uh, extremely
like high paying finance, you know, jobs at, at very, either very big banks, uh, or other firms,
you know, consulting firms, that sort of thing, like, you know, very high flying finance jobs.
So they do very well, right? It's hard to convince those types of guys that, Hey, you should look at
this Bitcoin thing. Cause it's like, I don't know, like I'm doing pretty well, man. You know,
like I'm doing pretty well for at least two of them that what finally convinced them was
Trump coming out as pro pro Bitcoin. Like didn't matter all the orange billing I'd been trying to
do for years, didn't do anything. But the second Trump came out, they were like, Oh, I like Trump
and all right, I'll buy some Bitcoin then. Like if Trump likes it, I was like, so that's all it
took you know so my my point being like that that's about meeting them where they are like it
wasn't a mentality shift for them it wasn't like something that i had said it wasn't any of the
properties of bitcoin that did it it was just something that they like who they respect who
they you know who they're going to vote for who said i like bitcoin and that that was all it took
so it's like you know again it's like we go out there with the these best laid plans of we're
we're an orange film this is how i'm going to position it for this person it's like
it just comes out of meeting, meeting them where they are, or just somebody they care about and,
and respect. That's a public figure talking positively about it. Like that makes a sure
a lot of like, that's, that's two people I know personally. There's probably more that I know
personally, but those are two people personally that I know started buying Bitcoin because of
Trump. I'm sure there were a heck of a lot more, you know, like think what you will about what,
what, uh, Trump is doing is this is beside the point. It's just the point that
that moves the needle a great deal you know all right i love it yeah who if you could orange pill
anyone in the world who would it be hmm i'm gonna go with i'm gonna go with christine lagarde
i'm gonna go with christine lagarde because i think she clearly hates bitcoin so much
she i like i i wonder if i i don't know if she can be orange pilled i think she's just honestly
like she's so corrupt and this is not just me speculating like you can look into her past at
the imf and all the shady dealers she has she is so incredibly corrupt that like i i don't know if
she would ever want to grok bitcoin because it would be uh in some way hold a mirror up to her
and that corruptness but boy if i could i would just love to see the havoc that that would wreak
like if she truly uh truly got orange pilled truly went down the bitcoin rabbit hole and then
all of a sudden just starts sabotaging the European central bank and central banks around
the world from the inside out. Now that would be interesting. Uh, that, that would be quite
interesting. Or maybe more, maybe Jerome Powell, honestly, Jerome Powell got him orange building.
He gets out of his job at the Fed. He just, now he's a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist, throws laser
eyes up on his Twitter PFP and just starts telling all the dirty secrets of the federal reserve.
He's like, the people must know Bitcoin is the truth. We need to tell the people about the,
the machinations behind the scenes of the federal reserve.
I think that would be quite fascinating.
What about you?
Who would you orange pill?
Who would I orange pill?
Uh,
my,
my brother,
one of my brothers,
both of them would be great,
but you start with one of them.
Uh,
I think it's really,
I don't really try to care about famous people getting orange pilled.
I try.
I think we all care about the people in our lives and the people closest to
us that that will get to us to the same place that they have people that
love them too,
I guess,
you know,
But what is Vibes Capital Management?
A Vibes-based investment firm.
It's primarily a group chat where we share a lot of memes.
But yeah, it takes a Vibes-based approach to analyzing current market sentiment and determining where to deploy our own Vibes, to put it one way.
You guys hiring?
Vibes Capital Management is always hiring if there are good Vibes to be had.
There you go.
A great answer.
If a job interviewer ever asks you, why do you want this job?
Just say, because you're hiring.
Exactly.
I've enjoyed this immensely.
Thank you for taking the time to come on the show.
My pleasure, man.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
I'll leave it to you for any parting words.
Let people know where they can find you, your show, and any parting words you might have.
Sure.
You can find my show if you go to bitcoinpodcast.net.
You can find all the links there.
It's at Walker America and at Titcoin Podcast on X.
You can just search for The Bitcoin Podcast or Walker America on YouTube or Rumble or wherever.
You can find me on Noster, primal.net slash walker, primal.net slash titcoin.
You should check out Noster if you haven't already.
And yeah, the other thing I would say is there's a petition going around that you can sign to request a presidential pardon for Bill and Keone, the Samurai Wallet developers.
and I think everybody should take a couple of minutes and go sign that petition and maybe go
post about it on social media and go tag Trump and the White House and the Trump family and tag
your elected representatives or give them a call. I think that those guys should not have to go sit
in prison for years away from their family. So that's what I would end on is that, yeah,
do what you can to support open source software developers, whether they be Bill and Keone or
whether they be any of the incredible people that are working right now behind the scenes to make
sure that we have the freedom tech available to us that we will certainly need. We certainly need
it already and we will sure as hell need it in the future that is to come. We wouldn't be here today
without anonymous and pseudonymous open source developers writing code. So if you are one of them,
thank you for what you do. And if you're not, you can do whatever, if you know, you can start a
podcast and talk about it, or at least, you know, podcasters are there to, they should be there to
provide some cover for the people doing the real work behind the scenes,
right? We're, we're the, we are the shield and they are the tip of the spear,
but they need a little bit of cover to be able to do that work.
So we get to be the useful,
the useful idiots on the front end who can hopefully give them a little bit of
a little bit of cover while they make sure that we have the tools available to
us that we need to actually be able to move along that sovereignty spectrum
towards a, towards a future that we want to live in.
So thanks so much for having me, man. This was a pleasure.
Yeah. I just want to squeeze one thing because it was in my brain.
So on the Lagarde thing, I always wonder, the Christine Lagarde, the Peter Schiff's, these types, like, do they secretly hold Bitcoin?
Because they hate it so much they get Bitcoin in a way.
Like, they are orange-pilled.
They just refuse to rationally admit it.
And the only way I kind of – one of the ways I dwell on that is, like, when I was a shit-coiner when I first came to the scene, I didn't know – I thought the blockchain was the technology.
I thought it was about new technology, like the way Apple or mobile or Facebook was technology.
And I was trying to understand it.
And after a long time, I decided I'm a Bitcoin maximalist.
I want to separate money from state and that, you know, I see Bitcoin as savings.
I think you can invest and speculate on top of that.
You know, how much do you save of your income and versus how much do you use for, you know, whatever.
And I vacillate on that.
But there was a point in time where I said, I'm not going to hold shit coins.
Uh, I've ethically moved on and I even lost some money by selling some things before they ran,
even, you know, and so I've tracked those things. I said, Hey, I sold X amount of this thing. And I,
if I held it as I traded, I sold it, I went into Bitcoin and this other thing did do better. And
maybe I wouldn't have timed and all that. You look at these things and you say, Oh,
uh, but it was a choice not to hold it. I wonder if the Lagarde's and the Peter Schiff's actually
choose ethically like, hey, I rail against this thing. I should not hold it. Or do they secretly
love it and they just want to publicly rail against it? I think Peter Schiff, I know he has
a Bitcoin address because he's talked about this publicly and been like, you can send me Bitcoin
if you want. And people have done that. I think he also probably has other Bitcoin besides that.
I think so too. I'm pretty certain. Christine Lagarde, I doubt that she personally has any
bitcoin i know her she's publicly stated that her son does like she said that in multiple interviews
not like peter schiff's son spencer was a huge bitcoin advocate for a while it's like you're
railing against bitcoin out the front door and you're buying it out the back and one day you're
going to switch and be like we're a bitcoin exchange now you know we sold all our gold it's
like a nice transition it's a way to be like i'm still the gold figurehead but it's my crazy son
who's doing it right same thing right i mean like you're and they had yeah if you were really against
I'm not going to insult my mother by buying this thing that she tells people that she hates.
And if some of the wealth is being trickled down, it's just the irony there.
The irony that that's publicly known.
It is kind of hilarious.
It's like, well, you know, at least one person in the family gets it.
Maybe more.
Who can say?
All right, bro.
This has been so dope.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, man.
Cheers.
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