Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin
could mean for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show.
Thank you so much for listening.
looking into for many years as you will find out in this conversation and for
whatever reason he's carried on down the rabbit hole and made connections and
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I've run out of music. Enjoy this one with John.
All right, John, lovely to have you on the show. How are you doing, mate?
I'm doing great. It's really good to be here, Daniel. Long time in coming.
Has been a long time coming. Definitely has been.
I've been watching your, I think I first picked up on you talking about private jets back in 21, maybe.
And then we started that little private little telegram group trying to get Bitcoin pilots from around the world into a little group.
And forgive the pun, but never really took off.
but and here you are just like a wee or two ago dropping fire on twitter announcing something big
which we'll get into but uh before i do lauren has a question for you um so yeah i heard that
you made like a private jet company i think that's what you said except bitcoin and my question is
how do you make businesses want to accept bitcoin because i know a lot of them are very skeptical
about it so yeah that's a really good question um well one of the ways that i
uh went about it was describing bitcoiners and how you know
you have this new kind of a new group of people who are growing in wealth and growing in influence
and um just by signaling that you want to accept their money uh you're kind of tapping into a whole
group of loyal customers. And so just from a purely capitalistic incentive base, like it's a,
it just makes sense. It's also for the private jet company. It was,
it's very value aligned. I think, I think it just makes sense. The connection between,
you know, sovereign money and private travel with Bitcoin, we're trying to
increase the amount of our personal freedom. And so for a private jet client, they're really,
they're valuing their time so much that they want to,
you know,
spend a lot more to save time.
And,
and so,
you know,
there's some value aligned incentives there as well.
But I think in when I spent,
I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica with Paul,
Paul in the jungle,
Paul Keating.
And he is incredible with this, just with the most basic vendors getting them to accept Bitcoin.
He's almost like single-handedly spurred the Bitcoin circular economy there in Bitcoin jungle, along with some other really great diehard guys down there.
and uh you know he's he's just great about showing the utility of it showing how easy it is
um uh that you can you can get this bitcoin and no one else has to know about it no one else has
to get in the middle of it and it's digital and it's there in your wallet you know
thank you any follow-up questions
um
and don't think by the way that we're going to start flying privately
all over what i was going to say
become useful um
i don i don think so all right okay all right yeah well thank you thank you for answering my question Absolutely Anytime If you have any more that you want to come back with later on
if you think of anything, let me know.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right.
Anyways.
Bye.
Have a good podcast.
Thanks, Lauren.
Right.
So, John, let's wind it back.
What were you doing pre-Bitcoin?
Oh, man.
Pre-Bitcoin, I have to apologize, I have a little bit of a cold as well, but hopefully the audio is fine.
Pre-Bitcoin, I was, I mean, pre-pre-Bitcoin, I was a mechanic, like welding trucks together in the suburbs of Chicago.
and I got to the point where I was like coming into work and talking to these blue collar guys and
on a Monday morning and you know they they've got this like grit about them and
they kind of hate their life and the one guy that I was working with every Monday that I would come
in. He's like, is it Friday yet? And so I kind of saw that the trajectory of that line of work
as like, man, the whole 30 years, the whole next 30, 40 years of my life, I can kind of see it all
playing out. And I'm like, that's not for me. I want to do something else. And I talked to a friend
who was doing real estate and he was doing really well. And he said that I would do really well. So
I came, moved into Chicago with like a few grand from, uh, from a tax return, uh, as a runway and
lived in a friend's den and just started hustling in real estate, trying to sell rental apartments
or rent apartments. And so yeah, for five years leading up to around COVID times, I was, uh,
I was a real estate broker and I started to make more money doing that than any, than, you know,
anything else prior. And so that was really exciting for me, uh, to be able to, you know,
work really hard in a month and earn what I could make in like three months as a mechanic.
and just kind of be in an environment where there wasn't really a ceiling.
That was really cool.
But around COVID times, the lockdowns started happening
and it started to interfere with my real estate business.
And at the same time, I was going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole pretty hard.
I had read The Creature from Jekyll Island.
I'd read The Bitcoin Standard.
And those two books are sort of the key ones that catapulted me.
Why did you pick them up?
What was the driving force behind that?
I had been interested in libertarian type ideas and Austrian economics for a while before that.
And I was listening to, I had learned about Bitcoin in like 2016, pretty further on.
I just never bought any, I never like got into it.
And well, I bought a little bit in 2016, but it wasn't much.
And, you know, watched it go up, go up and down through the market.
um and so i'd listened to some of these podcasts and i i know i knew about trace mayor he had come on
the um the i think it was anarchist uh jeff i forget his forget his name jeff something
uh jeff berwick yeah yeah he the dollar vigilante yeah yeah yeah i was listening to him
pretty regularly uh and jack spirko the survival podcast he didn't talk about bitcoin very much
but that was more like prepper libertarian style and jeff had uh trace mayor on uh quite a few times
and so i started listening to trace's podcast but trace's podcast he always had very technical guys
And at that time, most of the educational stuff around Bitcoin was pretty technical.
And if you didn't understand the basics of computers, which I was just a regular blue-collar guy, a surfer from California, coming out and just trying to make a living.
And I didn't know barely how computers worked.
um and so they you know i i knew that it was important and i knew that it was going to be big
in the future um and so i want i start i was listening to it even though i could understand
only like 60 of what these guys were saying um and i'm glad that i did because eventually he had
Safedine on and that's how I got
I started reading the Bitcoin
Standard and I was
listening to that while I was reading
The Creature from Jekyll Island
and so
it
you know
The Creature from Jekyll Island
just opened my eyes to the existing
system. It just
showed how the sausage was made right
where you're
like oh my gosh this is a complete
scam and we're living
in the thick of it.
And it made me so hopeless almost to be like,
how do we even get out of this?
And with the Bitcoin standard,
it showed the history of how we even got into this mess
and then how Bitcoin is a real legitimate answer
and a solution for what we're facing here.
So then with COVID happening and the lockdowns,
it just showed a complete overreach of government power in my estimation.
and I saw things that I anticipated happening
maybe 5-10 years down the road
and that made me really convicted
that this is all going to happen a lot faster than I thought
so I better learn as much as I can about this Bitcoin thing
because it's going to be really important
in the years ahead.
yeah so covid yeah that's another one that went down the rabbit hole very very quickly
uh i remember it i remember it well i started the podcast in january 2020
and i remember thinking i wonder if these guys i'd been reading and listening to i wonder if
they'd ever you know come on some guy's pod and then before you know it we're locked down in march
and everybody's diaries were blown open.
It was just the moment, apparently,
to just launch a new Bitcoin podcast
because people were hungry.
Even the diehards at that point
still would have been able to list the days.
I remember I would be waiting two days
between podcast releases.
You'd have the Rabbit Hole Recap
or you'd have Valis
or you'd have Brady still had his Citizen Bitcoin going at that time
or Stefan's show.
There was only like a handful out there.
And, you know, you couldn't, you would download one and listen to it
and then you'd have two days of waiting around.
You're like, right, I've listened to everything else.
Like, where's the next one?
And, yeah, I, you know, just remember going fully down the rabbit hole
with the guests that were coming on because it was helping,
really helping me shape out my knowledge uh and at that point i'd been studying for a couple of
years but there was so much information coming and and i remember class of 2020 and class of 2021
were just woof they were they were in the rabbit hole covered in lube like they were down there
quick yeah i was one of them i was i was pretty deep and yeah it's starting i started my podcast
you know it didn't take it as further as far as you did um later 2020 in the fall
and that was one of the very one of the mechanisms to just you know sit down with
These guys that I was reading, I was listening to them on your podcast and many other guys.
And, you know, everyone was just so, like, open and wanting to, like, contribute word out.
And I'm so blown away.
It was, yeah, that really catapulted my learning and understanding of where everything was going.
And then once I started meeting, meeting up with people in person,
that was a whole other layer of it.
Yeah.
So was that the conferences that you started going to or there was a local meetup?
Yeah, the first
well I first went to the OC Bitcoiners meetup I grew up in Orange County and came back to visit family and Thanksgiving and met up with Brian Harrington and a bunch of the local Bitcoiners
in the OC Bitcoin network.
And they'd been,
they'd really grown the meetup
to be like 20, 30 people every week.
And it's a pretty dynamic community.
And I was really impressed
because,
you know a lot of the learning a lot of the experience for bitcoiners is online and just
interacting with people on x or back then twitter and uh podcasts or zoom calls and stuff like that
but when you're in the flesh uh talking to a real person and describing the things that you're seeing
in the world and they're actually agreeing with you and not being not looking at you like you're
crazy. Um, it's, uh, you know, it's a really powerful thing to have that,
to, to be in that kind of value aligned environment, um, and have, uh, a little bit
of a reassurance in that, in that respect. Then after, um, after that, I started, uh,
Because I was so impacted by that experience, once I moved to Miami to get out of the Chicago crazy lockdowns in 2021, I started the Miami Bitcoiners meetup.
And that was really cool because at that time, there weren't even any meetups happening, let alone Bitcoin meetups, just none of the meetups were happening because of COVID.
and even some of the Bitcoin meetups had stopped meeting.
So I was like, what the hell?
Why are we doing this?
We should be meeting up in person.
And the first one that I threw, like 20 people showed up
and some of them came not because it was a Bitcoin meetup,
just because it was the only meetup that was happening
in the entire city.
uh and yeah and then from there we did the some some of the guys that helped me with the meetup
we threw the pleb party in bitcoin at bitcoin 2021 that was in miami and that was the first
conference that i went to or that was the first big conference that i went to i went to uh the
first bitcoin conference that i went to was the bitcoin and guns conference that was the like 3d
printed guns in uh in austin that's pretty unique so people now are going to accuse me of trying to
shield club orange at this stage uh because uh you know i've been part of that journey with mateo
from the very beginning uh just in an advisory role and just you know meet once a month and
throw shit against the wall with a handful of other Bitcoiners that are willing to give up their
time and help a crazy guy build out a social app for Bitcoiners. But the reason I'm so happy to be
a part of that is because I, like you, felt exactly the same. Because we were all locked down so hard
and I'd been doing the podcast for 18 months or whatever, and I just hadn't met a real Bitcoiner.
I'd met two, but I hadn't had that immersive experience.
And the first time I really felt that was Miami 22, where I ran into you.
And it's tough to put into words.
So for people listening that hear me shill, like the idea of getting to your local meetup or getting to a conference, like make it this year, 2026 is this year.
Stop being the lonely Bitcoiner.
That's playing the victim card at this point.
You know, six years ago, you've had you'd have had an excuse.
There weren't there weren't that many people.
Now, there's no excuse.
You can download Club Orange.
There's 19 and a half thousand people on the app who are willing to meet you for a beer or a coffee or a meal or even put you up if you're traveling through.
This is like so, you know, you felt what I felt and what so many other people have felt that have been nice.
a visceral kind of feeling. It's like no other feeling you've ever experienced before when you're
around that kind of energy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's, to me, it's not just a feeling. It's
actually, that's what Bitcoin is. Like, that's the social layer of Bitcoin, which is us, are
the individuals who love and value Bitcoin and actually like pay attention to it and are
sharing about it. And then our relationships with each other.
And, you know, there's, there's that, there's also just like the fact that it's a,
it's a digital asset and we're, we're pricing it and there's the economic part of it for sure. But
yeah you uh i think if you're attracted to this thing you you're wanting to build more freedom
in your life and uh what other one of the best ways to do that is to connect with others who
are doing the same and that's what i've found to be um really really helpful in my journey for sure
so coming out of COVID then uh was real estate still your thing were you like trying to resurrect
that career um I was definitely interested in it I still I still am um I I owned a rental property
as well in Chicago.
And so from an investment standpoint, you know, and just the, especially coming from
learning more and digging into like Citadel theory and that kind of thing, you know, I
think real estate is a huge part of our lives.
It's going to be going to be for a while.
but I wanted to
since I was coming out of Chicago
out of the market
I was licensed in Illinois
I didn't practice after that
but
I was doing the podcast
and then I got connected with Swan
I started talking to Corey
and that's when I started working with Swan
to run a lot of their VIP events
and kind of building their social layer
for the Swan private clients
and helping with the Pacific Bitcoin events.
Yeah, that was an incredible experience as well.
and yeah it's crazy that it's been like you know almost i guess six years since since that
since 2020 that's wild a lot's happened since then so why have you drawn to like that the
private jet side of things and when did that start happening so it's actually kind of funny
I was at a Bitcoin, I was at Bitcoin 2022.
I think it was.
And that's when we met.
And afterwards, after the conference or at a certain point during the conference, I was at a.
The SOS Lux, my friend who's a lawyer, invited me to hang out on the on the rooftop at the not the SOS Lux.
Desiless, Miami, South Beach.
And while I was there, I met this guy who talked about how he was flying around in his jet looking at different universities to buy.
And he wanted to, he was really interested in it.
He had such a cool experience in college that he felt was being kind of ruined with the cultural decay and what the college education has become.
And so he was really interested in trying to recreate a more positive, I guess, freedom-focused values-oriented college experience.
And I was like, well, that's really interesting because, you know, we're really into education and, you know, personal sovereignties are really a big part of what we're focused on as far as like a lot of the Bitcoiners that we're connected with.
And so we had some meetings and I introduced him to Robert and who's also really interested in like sovereign education and stuff.
And we were exploring a way to create some sort of like sovereign university and maybe try it out for a few months at a particular university location.
but he was also very uh proud obviously of his jet he had a learjet 35a and you know he showed
his pictures and um was talking about how great it is that he can you know it's like his time machine
and i was like yeah i imagine it you know amazing to be able to fly anywhere that you want at any time And we had I mentioned a there was a Bitcoin meetup happening in
Austin pretty soon after the conference. And so I mentioned that to him and I also gave him
the sovereign individual, the book, and he read it and he was just kind of really impressed by it.
and amazed.
And he's like, wow, I see all of this happening.
This is really powerful.
So yeah, we just developed a friendship.
And he wanted to go to the Bitcoin meetup in Austin.
It was a BitDevs.
And so him and a few friends of mine and I,
we flew together in his jet to Austin for the meetup and stayed.
And then we all flew back to Miami.
commercial, obviously, than a couple of days later.
And so he was wanting to, he was newer to jet ownership,
but he had been in the industry for quite a few years.
And he was trying to create a jet share program
that would take older jets
because at the end of their life cycle,
they lose almost all of their value, market value,
but you can buy them and you can refurbish them.
And oftentimes, because of the way
that planes are maintained over their lifetime,
they have pretty much all new parts
and all new equipment throughout the,
because of their maintenance cycles.
And so many of them, many of the older planes
are still able to be flown and able to be refurbished.
They're perfectly fine.
They're just older.
So he was creating a jet share program
where people could buy into a jet
and share the maintenance costs and things like this.
And, you know, he's wanting to open it up to Bitcoiners
And so, you know, that was something that we were talking about and we were exploring.
But it never, you know, after that, I started working with Swan and that was like my main focus, you know.
And even for him, he had another company that he was running.
And so he put the jet refurbishment business kind of on the back burner.
so that that kind of sparked my curiosity though because it just to me
even though the price point is so extraordinary and for you know for me I'm not I'm not going to
be flying private regularly you know it's just not in my wheelhouse I have some questions about
though, which I'm sure like a lot of the plebs would love to hear because not many of us have
ever flown on a private jet, whereas you have. So what is that experience like? I mean, obviously
it's a lot more common in America because you've got a huge country there and there's a lot of
wealth that's been accumulated and you know, you have business and corporate as well, right? So
it's a bit more common than most countries perhaps, but you know,
And because you're flying within the country, you don't have to do the passport control or all this kind of stuff.
So what's the experience like?
You just turn up at the small ancillary airport, I'm guessing, rather than one of the big ones.
It's hard for me to paint a picture, really, in my mind.
Yeah.
I mean, it depends a little bit because you can fly out of an international airport.
Sometimes it will, but oftentimes it's preferable to fly out of smaller executive airports.
And for example, in Miami, we flew out of a smaller airport in Fort Lauderdale.
because fuel costs are a lot cheaper there than they are in Miami International.
So there's little things like that that your operator and your broker
will just inform you of to let you know how you can save money here and there.
but at in Fort Lauderdale we just drove we took an uber to the airport and the uber drove straight
up to the plane and we were and you know shook hands with the pilot gave him our bags
You know, met our friend and got in the plane.
Wow.
It's pretty, it can be like that.
Sometimes there's, you're going through an FBO, which is fixed base operator.
uh those are going to be the the that's the company that is managing the flights that are
that are coming in and and the people who are getting on the flights and just kind of organizing
everything at the airport so oftentimes you'll pull up to the fbo which is just like a building
in front of the airport and you'll go through that uh that fbo check in with them and then
go on to the plane.
So it's pretty, you know,
that was the experience when I took an empty lake to Chicago.
I was actually for this, the company that I'm working with right now,
Quantum Jets.
It was a couple of years ago. I was just in,
And I was just working at home and I called him to catch up.
And he's like, oh, what are you doing tonight?
Do you want to go to Chicago?
And I was like, yeah, sure.
He's like, we've got a jet.
We've got a Lear 60 that's flying out and no one's on it.
So if you want to go.
I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll go.
Can I bring a friend?
and I asked if I could bring my friend Blake.
We got a pizza and some wine and went to the jet and flew to Chicago.
It was a pretty great experience.
That's amazing.
Yeah, and so that's what's called an empty leg,
where sometimes because of the jet's repositioning,
it'll have a charter flight.
Say in Chicago, it has to pick someone up,
but it's located in Orange County.
So it needs to be repositioned to Chicago
and no one's on the flight except the pilots.
So that's an empty leg.
And that's just to dip a little into the app.
That's one of the things that we feature in the app
is just a marketplace for those empty legs.
A lot of times operators will price those.
and if they're priced then our app will pull them automatically and list them in our in app and say
you know here's a flight that's going from here to here for this price and if you want to book it
you can book it but there are a lot of other ones that just kind of they're not priced you have to
kind of check with the operator and see what they're willing to take and so that's where
having an actual relationship with someone like me or in the in the brook in the brokerage helps
because then you get a little more access to those all right so let's talk about the company
sure sure yeah um yeah so quantum uh i i came i met the ceo of quantum through swan because
uh jan pritzker cto of swan is michael oglenick's brother-in-law believe it or not so they're uh
connected by marriage and there are even a couple other swans that got to fly private um
one one of the guys after pacific bitcoin had to go had to fly he was flying back to
london and from la and quantum had an empty leg going from la to london on a big jet
on what kind of plane it was uh it was a heavy jet it was a g it was either a g5 or g550
i don't know i don't remember which um but he was on the plane like all by himself
you're kidding and that that's a big jet that can hold like 14 to 15 people
um and it just can that do that flight in one stint or is it going to stop and refuel
uh the g5 can go all the way you're kidding wow yeah
yeah um that's i think it had just flown um
it had just flown a famous artist as well so that was kind of cool you know it's it's
So I met up with Michael because he was immediately interested in accepting Bitcoin on the app.
He told me about this app that they were developing.
and we
and he also
we were trying to get him to
do some sort of collaboration
with Pacific Bitcoin as well
we thought it would be cool to have
a jet on location
at Pacific Bitcoin
and
so we were just exploring
to see what might make sense
and
after we established a relationship,
but for Swan, just the engineering capacity
and the focus on payments just wasn't really there.
So we didn't really connect the dots for them at that point.
But over this past year, I came back to San Diego
after a year of travel.
and I was just wanting to get back into work
and get back and try getting into the private aviation industry.
And so Michael kind of opened up Quantum
and their app had been, at that point, was fully developed
and able to be launched and downloaded and everything.
And so we started working on it. And getting Bitcoin payments on the app was, for me, one of the bigger priorities because I know, I guess not everyone wants to spend their Bitcoin, but we want to open up the accessibility for this money.
And to me, it functions as money. Yeah, it's savings technology. And yeah, I know a sailor is not spending any of it, supposedly, but it should be able to be used.
And whether it's Bitcoin or whether it's stable coins or a bag of ETH that you don't want to tell anyone about that you have, you can burn it on private jets now.
So what's the name of the app so people can download it if they want to?
Yeah, it's Quantum Jets. The reason I joined up with them is just really because they're really more established in the industry. They've been in the industry for over 25 years.
they've served you know royal families heads of state global business leaders uh some of the
most high profile clients and they really have just an excellent reputation which is really
difficult in that industry because what's crazy about it and what i learned was like it's not uh
like licensed at all. Like anyone can go and just say they're a, say they're a private aviation
broker. And so when it comes to actually getting into the industry and getting trusted advice,
you really have to rely on solid relationships. Um, and up until recently, many of the,
many of the requests and just the way that things worked had been very antiquated to where you'd,
a lot of it is just on the phone, on phone calls back and forth, sometimes fax machines for,
for, uh, contracts for a lot of the operators. And so quantum is really trying to take the industry
to modern day times, update it and make it a lot more accessible for people who have the means
and want to elevate that part of their life. So quantum jets and with Bitcoin now,
you're able to make payment and everything, or you can use credit card as well. If you're using
fiat and everything is handled in app which is really unique cool so for for the plane owners
then because this is something obviously again very few people have ever experienced it's not
as if they're on these planes the whole time right and from my understanding if you've got
one of those planes just sitting around idle doing nothing for weeks on end that's about the worst
thing you can do with a plane it's got to be used and uh used a lot uh and you know obviously checked
after every flight and uh anything um that needs changing or whatever you got to be on top of it
so that is why they put these into a pool of planes like yours and this is what you're kind
of managing for so the plane owners become your clients and then you're finding rides or riders
to go in and use the plane?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so Quantum, we have our brokerage side,
which is sales and charters.
And on that side of things,
we will work with operators who are managing jets for owners.
Or operators can be just the owners themselves,
or pilots will be the operators.
or there'll be a management company that will maintain the jet
and take care of it for the owners.
Similar to property owners and property management, right?
But what's unique about Quantum is we actually have the brokerage side
and we also manage a fleet ourselves out of Chino.
So we have a couple heavy jets out of Chino.
and so we have our own fleet that we handle as well.
So for the owners, we're able to manage them,
but we have access to thousands of jets around the world
because of the brokerage side.
And that's how it's all sort of networked together.
A lot of the, there are certain operators
that we won't work with.
And there's a list that grows
because safety issues are like paramount in this industry.
And if you're not going to, you know,
you really have to vet the people you're working with a lot more.
Because it's not like you're just getting on,
it's not like you're just going on Expedia, you know,
and booking a flight commercially where you're trusting all of these,
all of the aviation standards in the commercial space.
so um yeah we that's one uh one way to describe it so as a use case i'm trying to think of a use
case for bitcoiners now let's say you got a bunch of bitcoiners in the u.s six to eight guys
gals whatever and they want to get across to uh a conference or something that's going on
the other side of the country. Is this cost viable for them if they pitch in and pay in Bitcoin?
Is that the kind of target audience you think is going to be attracted to the use of Bitcoin first?
Yeah, I think so. I think that is where, and I'm wanting to,
that's where I think it could work
for now
you know
there are people who fly private
regularly and I've spoken with them
and they're Bitcoiners
so for those people
we want to open up this avenue for them
if they want to use their Bitcoin
um but i think for for people who are just kind of getting to the point where this is something
that's viable for them it's it's not uh it's just so much more than you know a first class ticket
a first class commercial ticket that uh in order for it to make sense it's got to be
some sort of experience around it, I think.
So one example that I could see happening is for, say, our upcoming
2026 Bitcoin conference in Vegas by Bitcoin If uh there a group of people in New York that want to
want to fly private to,
uh,
to Vegas for the conference,
then,
you know,
14 people coming together to book a heavy jet,
uh,
would be,
uh,
it would be much more manageable for each of them.
They're just paying for the seat in that, in that sense,
or coming from Miami.
So for these like group events where there's more of a,
there's more people coming and,
and they're actually people who want to fly together as well.
Cause that's the other thing, you know,
people fly private to get away from people oftentimes.
So it's like getting on a jet with a bunch of people who you don't know, it's not really like, why would I pay a premium just for like a bigger seat or something like that if I could just fly commercial?
But if you're going and I think if we're building an experience around Bitcoiners coming together and getting together at the FBO, we have a reception there with some drinks and build a little camaraderie around a group and have that group get together.
and they're all people who are interested in getting to know each other
and whether it's for networking purposes
or just expanding their community,
then they're flying together to Vegas
and that is unlocking a whole new experience of the festival
and of that whole week.
Because then you're going with this group of like-minded people
and they'll probably stick together through the conference
and experience it together.
So that's one way that I could see it happening.
um it's also companies uh like 99 of a large majority of private travel is executive travel
so uh for corporations that uh need it as a utility um i think that that's that's where
it would make sense as well very cool mate so have you had any people reaching out yet have you got
any use cases or is this like hot off the press right now yeah it's very hot off the press and
even the app we haven't marketed it very much at all um because it's been very new and most of it
has been for our existing clients.
But yeah, just through my tweet,
like a little walk and talk tweet saying,
hey, we're accepting Bitcoin on the private Jets app.
I got, we did get a few downloads
and a few people interacting with it
and asking questions about it.
And a few people looking at empty legs
and stuff like that.
So yeah, this is something that's new. We take a very long-term view of it. And that's my understanding of it as well. I believe in Bitcoin as the future of money.
And Bitcoiners, I believe, who are stacking and networking in this world are going to be some of the most powerful, influential, and wealthy individuals in the world.
and so this is almost like they're my people and I want to you know open up this avenue for us
for and for the community when when they're ready you know it's a something that is there
people are utilizing it um every day and eventually people uh you know the plebs
will will be there as well and that's whether it's you know five or ten years
from now who knows but maybe sooner it's coming it always surprises us right exactly so
So is the company stacking Bitcoin as well?
The owners are, but we're, yeah, right now the Bitcoin that's paid in the app is transferred.
It's going to be just like straight to USD because of business operating costs.
but as we get more volume
I think it would be a pretty easy case
to take a percentage of that
and put it into Bitcoin and start stacking it
yeah
I bet
maybe if I could get him to sit down with Saylor
I bet he would probably convince them
what you should do is start a Bitcoin treasury company
well yeah just stack some profits into bitcoin that's uh that's all you need to do right and uh
well so you mentioned costa rica uh i'd love to get your take on on what's going on there i've got
a friend there at the moment who's absolutely loving it and uh english guy there with his
family already looking at land to purchase and build because of he just loves the vibe there
He's met some incredible people down there.
You said you spent some time with Paul.
I'm guessing it was at Primal House.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was at the Primal House for like a month in the spring.
Do you want to shill Primal House and Costa Rica
and everything that you experienced for those people listening?
Just so listeners are aware that these places are being built
around the world.
you know, the Bitcoin circle economies, as they're called in air quotes, are being built out.
And this is a great example in Costa Rica.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, well, Costa Rica, for me, holds a special place in my heart.
I went there when I was pretty young and I just fell in love with it.
The people, the jungle, the vibrance of it, the waves.
It's just a beautiful and amazing place.
And Paul, since Paul is working with Primal, the Primal app, and they are really creating something beautiful in Bitcoin jungle where you can live off of your Bitcoin.
You can go to the marketplace, you can go to the gas station, especially with the Primal app, you can live off of a social media app, which is pretty cool.
and one of the I guess one of the great things that I experience when I'm down there is just the
hyper connection to nature you know in civilized world we are you know we're in our houses here
we're in our we're getting into our cars and going to the grocery store and we go we go into our
job we go to the gym a lot of times our our like experience of of life is is just so like insulated
from actual like natural forces and actual like the wind and the waves and and you know the elements
um and so what i love about the jungle and this part of costa rica especially is just
you're kind of
immersed in it whether you like it or not
and
you have
it's a
you really get the chance to reconnect
to nature and to
your real
primal existence
you know
and
that's something
I love about Costa Rica
And when you're there as well, connected with the community, that's a whole other aspect of it that's just, you know, invaluable.
And that what when Paul and I actually took a trip to Argentina as well in 2024 with Mikael Marriota And Miquel is an Argentinian
And that was a whole trip to explore the Citadel concept in Argentina.
And yeah, like you said, there are communities and people around the world
who are getting together and just building things,
getting group houses, getting lands together.
And so that was sort of an experiment of this concept of living life together
and traveling to explore and potentially find a place to buy together
or just to continue nomading together.
you know, in different parts of the world. And, you know, in the Bitcoin world,
what I found is that we are hyper-focused on building our own personal freedom and personal
sovereignty. And that's an important aspect of it. That's an important step in the process
to build your own resiliency and to build your own self-reliance.
But as you pursue that path for yourself,
you start to realize that there's only so much self-reliance
that you can build for yourself.
And there's only so much sovereignty that you can have
as one single individual.
And in order to really amplify the freedom and advantages that you get with Bitcoin, it really takes connecting with a network, connecting with a community.
And once that happens, once you're able to build these interdependent relationships, then you can rely on each other's strengths to do so much more than you could do alone.
And that was one of the really cool learning lessons that we found on that particular trip in Argentina, where we're kind of documenting this process as well, where we're like, well, we want to expand our freedom.
We don't want to rely on the government for everything. We don't want to rely on them for protection. We don't trust them to tell us what the right way to eat is. We don't trust them with our health. We don't trust them with our money.
and so
instead of relying on the government
how about we try to create communities where we can
interact and rely on one another
in ways that's going to reduce our
reliance on government. So that's one of the cool things that I see happening
in Costa Rica and in Argentina and many other places where
groups of Bitcoiners are just coming together and building community centers,
building farms.
And I mean, one of the best things about Costa Rica is the farmer's market
where you're getting like really fresh food and, you know,
everything you need coming from the people who are growing it, you know.
and yeah, so it's, it's happening and we're, uh, I want, I would love to, you know, for people to
go and experience it themselves to see with their own eyes, um, you know, just what life can be like,
uh, cause I know, I know what it's like to be, uh, just in your own world, um, in the,
in the fiat realm so to speak and uh have all your friends and community uh just kind of
i guess be mpcs and not not really care about this kind of stuff um so i yeah i definitely
encourage people to go and experience it for themselves and 12 to 14 bitcoiners to get together
get a G5, fly down to Costa Rica, hit the Bitcoin circle economy down there for a few months and
just see what it's all about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then we can keep going to
Argentina. Yeah, exactly. To all the other ones. Mikael, my partner for the Argentina trip,
he's actually renting a house
in Cordoba
I think starting now
starting pretty soon
and he's just making it a
co-working, co-living space
where people can come
and rent a room for a week
or a month or however
long they want and to make
it kind of that ongoing
retreat experience
and that's a really cool
thing
I have
it's uh sovereign friends and oh cool sovereign friends in argentina then we got bitcoin jungle
in costa rica we have the free madeira uh project going on over there where they've got the sovereign
engineering cohort which is run by gg and pablo where people can go and live in madeira that
obviously you you can rent with bitcoin as well you just go through andre who set the whole thing
up and you can rent from him. He knows people you can rent cars from with Bitcoin. And you can plug
into the sovereign engineering cohort and just hack away with Gigi and friend. And, you know,
it's, it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing that these places are starting to appear and crop up.
And this is the whole idea of the MeshTadel as well, having citadels and mesh networks around
the world and now that you can get there via your own private uh travel uh with with the plane
is i mean that is a really nice cherry on top at this stage like yeah maybe uh a little early for
the the bitcoiners out there might be listening thinking yeah sounds great i'm not ready to spend
that amount of money yet on on private channel uh travel but uh it's definitely the way things are
going yeah yeah absolutely uh you know and that's that's what's the current uh elite elites do that's
what they have you know it's we think that uh we can be a little uh i guess limited in our in our
understanding of how the world works sometimes um where we think that people that everyone has to
experience what we experience um everyone has to be guided like cattle into a tsa line and
and violated uh every time they want to go somewhere yep um but for a certain group of
people who sit at the top of the kentolin effect you know they don't have to do that no they they're
privileged and and they have the ability to to have complete autonomy um and i think that that
is at the core what we're trying to do or what we're trying we we're trying to rise up you know
of the matrix, out of these systems of control and exploitation.
And these networks and these communities are seed forms of what's to come, I think.
And I really see that playing out well.
And yeah, like private jet travel is a tool.
And it's a tool that's going to be used for the sovereign individual going forward.
And so it's there for us when we need it.
Um, there's some, there are some details as well.
Like if you're flying in a private charter, um, there's a lot, there's a little more, uh,
transparency with, uh, as far as like having a manifest, uh, of who's on board and everything
and going through security and stuff like that.
Um, and so that's one level of private travel, but then there's a whole other level above
that which is ownership when when you own your own jet you have a lot more freedom obviously with
what you can do on your own jet when you're flying on it um so yeah we uh the the mesh del
is uh is definitely gonna be a thing and if we can connect it if we can connect communities
around the world with private flights I think it could be a very powerful very powerful thing Yeah A hundred percent I see it I see the future I see the vision
Right. Before we shut this one down,
I always ask the same last question. And that is,
if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody,
who would you give it to and why?
man
I think I would give it to my friend Michael
which
it's more of a personal
thing for me
It's like this friend and mentor of mine that I've had for the past six years.
He's an ultra-successful entrepreneur who has an e-commerce company that he's built to be extraordinarily successful.
and Bitcoin was just always this kind of blind spot for him.
He got it at a certain point,
but then he started getting more into crypto and ETH
and stuff like this.
So yeah, I would give it to Michael.
I think that everyone else will come to it
on their own terms.
but uh yeah you're always we're always like
trying once when we understand something a certain way we want to try to get other people to
understand it the same way you know and i get that i get that struggle
so how can people reach how can people reach out to you and what's the best way to uh
interact if there's any way that they feel they can add value if they want to use a service
yeah so find me on x my name john chenot j-o-n-c-h-e-n-o-t and you can email me at
john j-o-n at quantum jets um download the quantum jets app use code bitten
nice and and yeah let me know give me feedback on what you think of the app as well
I'd love to hear back from you
and check out
also citadel3.com
is my website
where I'm hosting
I have a little teaser
of a film that I'm working on
from our
Argentina trip
that's
slowly coming together
we've got
the filmmaking process
is crazy
um but but we've we've got a teaser there that kind of shows the experience and some highlights
and uh kind of what the what the theme is and what citadel 3 is all about um so you can find a lot of
information there sign up for uh you know for updates and stuff there at the website and yeah
i look forward to hear more from your audience excellent well john thanks for coming on mate and
thanks for everything that you've done in the past for Bitcoin,
continue to do and will continue to do for the future.
I don't think you're going anywhere.
And other than, I mean, reaching for the skies,
another pun fully intended there.
And hopefully, yeah, we'll just follow you along on your journey.
And if there's any way that I can help or get you connected,
I'm not sure whether this is like an area of interest for people over here in
Europe yet with private jets? I really don't know. It's not a world I've ever been exposed to.
Yeah. Well, it definitely is. I guess the app, one thing I should add is the app right now is
just for the US. So I think you do have a lot of US listeners as well, but for custom charters,
we can arrange for global charters.
So that's something we can do on a personal basis.
But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.
100%.
All right, John, thanks for coming on.
Great to have you.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me, man.
Well, there you go, guys.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you, John, for coming on the show and sharing everything that you've been up to there.
Exciting times.
Who listening is now going to go and get themselves?
I would love to hear the story of a bunch of Bitcoiners on the east or west coast of the US
that are trying to get to a conference that just go, you know what?
YOLO, let's spend some Bitcoin.
let's make the absolute freaking best experience we could even think about doing get a bunch of
our friends together and just do this the right way that'd be a cool thing to hear uh you know
i'm not saying go do it i'm just saying that would be a cool thing to to hear because look
the parallel economy right is being built and whether that is selling homemade jams
that you've made in your kitchen
at Bitcoin conferences
shout out to
you know who you are
mom
and your excellent preserves
two
advising private jet companies
on how to attract
the next wave of
wealth
that has been
accrued and built
over the last 16 years
that are going to be looking
for these kind of services
we've got everything covered in between too like so it's here it's been built and it continues to
be built we we have other marketplaces like plebeian or plebeian.market or we have dave
bennett none your business over there he's shilling the circle p he's doing absolutely
everything he can in his power to give power to small merchants people that are making the
chocolate bars you've got the Oshigai you've got Leather Mint who's now doing
all of the beautiful leather bound Bitcoin standard books but he was making
beautiful leather wallets as well you got Soap Miner the dude that's making
soap like I said we over here in the UK we've we go to these conferences we've
bought teas we've bought coffees we've bought soaps we've bought candles like
beeswax candles we've bought uh lem uh marmalade lemonade with beer uh absolutely so many things
with bitcoin it doesn't end it doesn't suddenly get switched off it only grows and it grows
organically and it grows quickly or i should say gradually then suddenly and if you've not read
that book by a friend of the show
Parker Lewis then you should
go and check it out if you want
to go back and listen we've gone through
I think three of the chapters
now you can just find Parker on
that on just search
on fountain and there's another one
fountain app
if you've
listened to this whole episode
on Spotify or Apple
or Google or Podbean
or Podcast Addict or wherever it is
that you've been listening to
podcasts over the years move just move your energy to fountain app because that is an app
enabled with NOSTA enabled with lightning payments and zaps and you can be part of that whole
network that whole parallel economy and support a company that is building bitcoin tools
do you have a NOSTA account yet have you spun up a NOSTA account go do it you have nothing to lose
It doesn't cost you anything.
And you might say, oh yeah, it costs my time
and I don't have time to get into and learn about it.
Well, you better fucking hurry up
and learn about what's going on.
Because the parallel economy is being built
and it is happening.
And if we're not going to keep championing it
and using it,
then we're just going to end up trapped
in this hell that we find ourselves in
for another lifetime.
And that's not what I think
the listeners of this show are here to do.
you're here to champion the bitcoiners you probably might even be at the point now where
you want to start your own thing and i don't know what that is it could be writing it could be
singing could be dancing could be making videos could be artwork could be making a podcast doesn't
matter go do it or if you are looking for support download club orange and find your nearest
bitcoiners so you can go find that support because i guarantee if you walk into your local bitcoin
meetup, which you might not have known has even existed for the last two years, and you walk in
and there's five dudes sitting there and you float an idea out there, you could have something
working within weeks. So get on Club Orange. Go find your people. It's so simple. Download the app.
Hit the link in the show notes. Come join us. There's almost 20,000 people around the world
looking to connect with you. Thank you, John, for coming on the show. Thank you, everybody,
for listening. I look forward to the next one. Stack safe and see you at one of the conferences
this year. Check the links in the show notes.