In a world where fiat trembles and the mempool never sleeps, one signal cuts through the noise.
Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, Layer 2, your premium passage to the hidden rifts of Bitcoin
culture. Buckle up and feel the voltage.
Welcome, gentle plebs, to Layer 2 Pleb Chain Radio. I'm your host, QW. In this episode,
I sat down with Sam Meads. When I say sat, I literally sat across from him. We did this
interview in person. You can tell we're friends. You can tell we got some jokes, but we had a lot
of fun. And I want to take a moment to thank all the subscribers, anyone listening right now,
that's you. We do have something in return, a little value for value. There are 12
PubChain Radio t-shirts left. We'd like you to reach out to either me or Sam,
and we'd like to get you those.
So first come, first serve.
We appreciate you.
We love you and enjoy the show.
All right.
Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio premium content.
This is our, you know, my guest today.
You pay well on this shit?
Yeah.
Come on, man.
We'll see how this goes.
But, you know, depending upon how you perform, Sam, it might just be free.
Do you need a koozie?
Sure.
Yeah.
I'm a koozie guy.
Anybody that doesn't know, this is my very first time doing a live podcast IRL.
I happen to know this gentleman who lives locally.
His name, and I think we can say his full name, right?
Are you fully doxxed?
Yeah.
I'm doxxed.
Sam Means.
Doxxed to oblivion.
Sam Means, who he runs a few failing companies, but that's the important part of today.
At least one successful one in many failed companies.
So I guess my first question to you, Sam, is why eggs?
Eggs are an excellent source of protein.
They're delicious.
They're, you know, I don't know, they're great.
Now, when you say that.
They're so universal.
I like a burrito.
I'm a burrito guy.
So I like an egg and cheese burrito.
I like,
like a fried egg sandwich.
I like just scrambled eggs with a little cheese.
So you're not,
you're not prejudiced how the eggs are prepared.
I don't,
I will take any egg.
I'll take egg anyway.
Soft.
I'll do it all.
I'm not,
I mean,
I don't,
I would say poach wouldn't be my first choice,
but I would never,
I have a rule that I don't ever deny an egg and I never leave an egg behind.
So,
yeah.
I mean,
basically,
uh, I, I would say I like a scramble, but start with butter, then stir it the whole time. Uh,
scrambled and add cheese. Yeah. So you don't pre-scramble, you scramble in the pot, in the
pan. Exactly. That's what I do. So it's the killer. And it creates a fluffy egg. I'll call it. Yeah.
And my son and I, uh, do it every Saturday morning. So it's an important regimen to have.
Do you ever like go crazy and throw a little cottage cheese in there or something like that?
Dude, I, I, yeah, it gets weird.
Yeah.
It's not really weird, but it makes a lot of sense.
It's weird to some people.
A lot of people are, are, are not cool with cottage cheese.
Yeah.
Well, cottage cheese.
I'm glad this premium content's off to such a great stuff.
Well, that's the important part.
We're really talking about the good, the good shit here.
I mean,
the kind of stuff people are going to pay five bucks.
Olives and cottage cheese.
You can put fruit in cottage cheese.
You can put, you know, I've never done olives in my eggs.
That would, um, that's interesting.
Black olives.
I'm more of a Spanish olive guy.
Okay.
Or even in the Mediterranean or Greek olives.
I don't like the Greek olives, but I might try black olives.
But if you do feta with it, then all of a sudden it makes sense.
Okay.
So, you know, olive has a complement.
You have to kind of balance that.
Dig feta.
How does feta melt in a scrambled egg?
Does it melt well?
You add it at the very end.
Okay.
So it's more of a garnish.
Yeah, but you roll it over.
So, you know, it's kind of like a, it would just be more like a sandwich.
You checking the Bitcoin price on that phone?
No, I get phone calls.
The fiat minds are crying.
But yeah, so that's kind of what I wanted to, so that's the end of our show today.
Thank you very much.
It's all about eggs.
But the second, maybe more important thing is, Sam, why music?
Why music?
I mean why not Doesn everybody loves music Have you ever met someone who doesn love music There people that like music and then there people that their identity
Yeah, that's true. I don't know. I think it ebbs and flows as people grow up and especially in our youth.
It's something that a lot of people hold dear, a lot of memories.
But as you grow up, as you become a responsible adult.
turning on right here it's all right there's gonna be some trains going by there's gonna be
trains there's i would i you know we could turn off the air conditioner but it's it's like 150
degrees outside i would not suggest it so you're just gonna have to deal with that premium noise
so going back to that so obviously growing up you know i remember my first tape beach boys uh okay
all right very topical right now r.i.p r.i.p brian right right um that was that was one of them
Do you remember which one it was?
It was the greatest hits thing or something.
I get around,
around,
around.
I get around.
So,
but then I remember my first CDs.
I remember my first concerts.
I remember Celine Dion.
That was your first in a joint and,
and,
and driving around before and after school.
I remember how music touched me so much,
but as I become a responsible adult,
as I,
as I kind of get drowned out,
I'll get there.
Fiat minds.
But this is very common.
There are, however, other people who music just is always absorbed in their life.
And I think you're one of those.
And I'm curious how, maybe because you have a very, your business is kind of surrounded by music.
Yeah.
But you, I mean, this whole room is.
We are in a music studio at the moment.
We are literally, I went to go grab a drink and there's instruments from 1970, 80, 90.
I don't even know.
What's that orange keyboard over there?
That is a Wurlitzer 200A.
And that's my guy right there.
Okay.
It's an electric piano.
So why music, I suppose?
How did it stick?
Short of, obviously, you were in a band.
Well, I mean, it started when I was like 10.
similar thing you know tapes uh beetle i had some beach boys tapes too but like road trips with my
dad um getting some beetles tapes just listening to them a lot and then um looking over in the
corner and singing a guitar there and just going like how does that work and then you know asking
my dad how do you is there like a book that will teach you how to play these beetle songs and then
he's like yeah let's go to the mall we went to the mall we got a book that used to be over there
I just brought it home for my daughter to try to learn bass with it,
but I still have it from when I was like 10.
Yeah.
And I don't know.
It's easy.
It's like,
it's an easy way into create,
like everyone,
most people love music.
Even if they just like music,
they still like,
I mean,
it's,
it's an easy gateway into creativity.
I think some people forget they like music.
It's just so accessible.
It's accessible to listen to and enjoy.
It's,
it emotes,
you know,
it like brings out feelings in people.
Mm-hmm.
um, it's an easy thing to learn how to do when you're young, if you're interested in it. I mean,
most people, you know, usually have like piano is typically the one, like your parents force you to
play piano if you're like six or seven or something. Cause it's, it, um, it, it's good
for your brain. It's good for learning. It's good for multitasking. It's good for being able to do,
um, you know, I don't know. It's just, I learned how to play guitar when I was 10.
So, and I just taught myself how to play in it.
And then I started realizing I could take these chords and move them around and write my own songs and stuff.
And it just was really fun.
So I just started doing that.
And then I think I had like a fake Beatles cover band with my next door neighbor when I was, by the time I was like 12.
And then once I got into junior high and high school and stuff, then it was just like real bands.
Let's start, let's start real bands.
Once the chicks start digging it, you know.
once I got my other friends to get instruments,
like,
you know,
figuring out who's going to play drums,
who's going to play bass.
Once you,
once you find a couple other people willing to,
uh,
to mess around and do that kind of stuff,
then I don't know.
It just goes from there.
And then,
you know,
I don't know.
I have,
I've always been the responsible one in the bands and there's things that come
with that,
like merch and booking shows and doing all those sorts of things.
And so,
yeah,
I was that guy for years and that just turned into,
starting businesses to support music and just all goes hand in hand to me you find a lot of bands
that are successful they have one madman that yeah there's almost almost always there is a
a person in the band that's like the me of the band that is you know dealing with the day-to-day
stuff or is designing the merch in the posters and all that kind of you know kind of thing so
I did a lot of that stuff and I did a lot of the managerial type duties and those sorts of things So so moving along in your life um beyond the bands what radicalized you what radical radicalized me um
where which which which which why are you talking about exactly why bitcoin why lightning store why
wave lake um what what kind of was your trigger i suppose uh and you know what it maybe it's just
why did it relate so much with you?
You know, I think a lot of people
either get it from a technical aspect
or they get it from an emotional
or just something happened
where they're like, screw it.
But like for me, I've been a libertarian a long time.
I've never trusted the system.
I've kind of always wanted to,
I saw that sly roundabout way
and I kind of grasped onto that.
I was kind of built to appreciate.
I was a Bitcoiner before I owned Bitcoin, I would say.
but what was there anything that made you say i want to start building things that are different
yeah also a little backstory i guess because that's it's important to how i got here as i
started i had access to the internet pretty early um and so i started similarly to realizing that
you can just grab a guitar and play music i also realized that you could look at the code
on these on websites and um take blocks of it and make your own thing so i started figuring out how to
make websites um early days html websites and i started making websites for um bands
like music sites and so that was probably like the earliest entry point into that part of it
um and then i would always make the websites for my bands as well and all that so you were doing
it for other bands i was doing it for other bands the the first so you were you notable band i ever
did it for was weezer wow well it was actually it was for weezer's fan club to be very specific
um i made a website for their official fan club because they didn't have one and uh they had two
these two girls michael and carly that were running it and uh i just kind of communicated
with them they would give me content for it and i would upload it and yeah it was really cool um
so you you learned to cater to bands um yeah i just learned that aspect of it like being in a band but
you i mean building a website uh building websites yeah i mean that was like being code or very um
rudimentary you know version of being a coder when you're like i guess at that point i was probably
15. Um, but you know, I continued sort of having to do that sort of thing. And then,
uh, fast forward, you know, maybe like, I don't know, however many more years later, um,
I made, I guess 13, 13 years later to be exact. I made a, uh, I started this business,
Hello Merch that that's where you are right now. And that was an e-commerce site that sold,
it's kind of like a mall for bands. So you could sell, buy merchandise from a number of bands on
this, from the single source. And I built that out. And about six years into that, I had a friend
who had been talking to me about, here comes the train. I had a friend who had been talking to me
about Bitcoin and this guy, Mike Germ, as a lot of people know him. He does a thing called Lightning
Ventures and he just started a project called Thunder Funder. He's in the investment world of
Bitcoin, but we've been friends since middle school. And he had been telling me about Bitcoin
and I've been hearing about Bitcoin through Max Kaiser,
who I had been listening to because of like post 2008 gold stuff,
you know,
like started realizing that money was weird and looking into how money worked,
getting kind of weirded out by it and seeing how it could be manipulated.
So I started looking at gold and listening to these sort of like weirdo,
you know,
podcasts and I guess YouTube shows and stuff, whatever they were at the time. I don't even
remember. Um, you know, at that point, Bitcoin was probably like a dollar when I first heard
about it, but, you know, skip ahead a few years, I was running a, this e-commerce site and, uh,
bit, bit pay came along as the first plugin that would work with the e-commerce platform I was
using. So I just turned it on and that was just sort of this thing. Like, I don't, I don't know
what this is. I've, I've had some opportunities to try to buy it and it seemed sketchy. It just
seemed really sketchy. This was like 2014. So it just seemed really weird still, but, um,
I be weird if you bought it and held you know it too weird I mean I mean even like even I mean even just to buy worth it seems sketchy to put your credit card into this like weird website you know And like it just didn seem um didn make a lot of sense
I didn't have a lot of context around it at that time, but I figured if somebody wanted to, to just give it to me, you know, in exchange for a shirt or something, then I would be okay with that.
In 2012, I almost worked for a gold company.
Really?
I moved, I moved to Florida.
the economy hit and yeah I was like you know fuck it let's just let's go babe uh if we can't afford
a vacation let's go live one so we moved to South Florida and we sold everything uh I had a 61 inch
TV DLP in my back seat I had my dog in the middle of us I was towing my wife's car and I had a
mattress that ended up getting uh completely moldy driving through Louisiana nice so when we showed
up it looked like I was a hardcore hodler yeah I had two folding chairs a 61 inch DLP in an empty
apartment we ended up getting a blow-up mattress and we said all right so I started looking at
different companies to work for and I went to this one it was a gold sales like a it was like
a cold call for gold and they're like read this book I read it in a day I resonated with gold
like you were saying, but
I looked around
and I'm like, no, this isn't the culture.
No, the gold culture
is totally weird.
When people would find out that I
I hadn't
learned about Bitcoin really
so if I was talking about money
I was usually talking about how
it's such a bad store of value.
I mean, you love gold because
it kind of makes sense because at least it's been around
forever.
ever yeah and it's this thing that i don't know it seems like it's i don't know that this is the
thing but it seems better than whatever is going on right now right um yeah i've since gotten
completely uninterested in gold obviously but but it was a good entry point you know to like
thinking outside the box in a very extreme way when people are calling you a pirate for like
you know buying gold and silver and i sure whatever like it's dorky it's super dorky
you know, but, um, I don't know. It was like, I,
I think of it as a good transition from what was going on. I mean,
that was like, it took me a minute, but you know,
from like 2008 to 2014 to really start thinking about the,
how, you know, messed up. Can you,
can you cuss on your premium content? Just kidding. Yeah. Um, uh,
thinking about how fucked up money was.
And you know,
like I had a house that I,
I bought a house when I got signed.
It's like the only thing I knew,
I got signed to a major label and I got some money and I'm like,
I don't know what to do.
I'll just buy a house,
I guess.
And then I like lost it,
you know,
like of course,
cause it was a 2008 house like where I just like walked in and like,
someone just gave me a house for nothing.
They're like,
how much money do you make?
I was like,
nothing.
They're like,
cool.
Here's a house.
I was fresh out of college,
bought a house.
Yeah.
they're just giving loans to everybody.
Like I literally called my friends and I was like,
I'm not joking.
This place just gave me a house.
Like everybody needs to come into this office right now and get a house.
And all my friends did.
And we all lived in the neighborhood.
It's the Oprah meme.
Yeah.
It was amazing.
Everybody gets a house.
But then when you realize like,
Oh wait,
what just happened?
Where'd my house go?
Um,
you start looking at it and then it's like,
wait,
how did all these promises that the bank was like,
don't worry,
you can refinance.
And, you know, when the time comes, it'll be easy, you know?
Yeah.
And then of course you can't.
Mine actually told me I need to be delinquent three months.
Oh, they told me that.
I refused to do a foreclosure.
So I did that.
I did, well, I did delinquent three months so I can refinance.
Yeah.
And then they just said no.
Yeah, I kind of knew that wasn't going to happen.
They told me that too.
And then they said, you know, it's best just to foreclose.
And I'm like, well, I'm not going to do that.
So what's my best case scenario?
I rented it out to a buddy until they, they basically knocked on the door.
Yeah.
I did a, I ended up doing a short sale, which was fine.
And it was, you know, on the old credit report, which is worthless anyway,
um, for a while.
And that was a long time ago.
So who cares?
But, but I learned a valuable lesson at that moment.
You know, do you have your credit report with you?
Yeah, I can pull, I can pull it up.
Cause I mean, I do look at it every night before I go to sleep.
Yeah.
You got so I know I can sleep easy.
Yeah.
Check your app, uh, subscribe.
Yeah.
Full monitoring.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
You can monitor all your afterpay purchases.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm really heavily into debt.
Actually, you're probably going to have to leave pretty soon
because usually at about 5 o'clock, the guys with baseball bats show up.
I have to get out before then.
All right.
That wraps up our Layer 2 preview.
If you're interested in hearing more or the full episode,
it's about 90 minutes long with Sam Means.
please hit the subscribe and we greatly appreciate any of the support that
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