EPISODE: 73
BLOCK: 749139
PRICE: 4201 sats per dollar
TOPICS: riding across the country meeting bitcoiners, neighbors helping neighbors, starting your own bitcoin meetup, privacy tradeoffs
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[00:00:32]
Unknown:
Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks. It's your boy, Odell, here for another dispatch. So dispatch is the interactive live show focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech. I have we have a very we have 2 great conversations lined up for y'all today. Before we get started, I wanna thank all the freaks who continue to support the show, whether that's subscribing on their favorite platform or now on YouTube, and we've always been on Twitch, we're on Bitcoin TV, Any podcast app, search the dispatch, press the subscribe button, share with your friends and family. It really does go a long way.
And if you're supporting the show via stats, that's even more appreciated. We do not have ads or sponsors on sale of dispatch. We are 100% audience funded. I think it aligns the incentives really well. It's extremely powerful seeing all the support, you guys continue to give the show to keep it going. Easiest way to support dispatch is through podcasting 2 point o apps. My favorites are fountain podcasts, Breeze, and podverse dotfm. You simply load it up with some sats, search to dispatch, press the subscribe button, pick how many sats per minute you think dispatch is worth, and then it automatically streams the sats to my node as you are listening. You can also support the show at cildispatch.com using, my BTC pay server instance.
You can pay on chain or lightning there, or you can support using, my pay NIM, which is supported by, Sparrow Wallet and Samura Wallet. My pay NIM is Odell. Very easy to remember. So thank you all for the support. Another way you can do on so if you do podcasting 2.0 for support, it actually, will split with a bunch of open source projects as well. So if you support via podcasting 2.0, a portion of your support also goes to Rasp by Blitz, Robosats, Seed Signer, Sparrow Wallet, and Zeus. Really cool aspect of podcasting 2.0. And, also, it allows you to send boostograms.
Boostograms are single payments, that you can attach a message to. My understanding is that fountain podcasts are going to make it so we can view boostograms from all podcasting apps. But for now, all I can see are the ones that are coming in through fountain podcast. So as always, I'm gonna read the top 4, from the last dispatch, which was also this week. If you haven't listened to that, consider going listening to that. It's about the tornado cash situation. We have Law Bitcoin with 50,000 saying thanks for the work and advocacy the 3 of you are doing in the privacy space. Privacy is essential to exercising our rights.
We have Rica Mauro with 50,000 sat saying, Odell Seth is the best duo since Lennon McCartney. Please consider doing a regular pod together. I'm not against that idea. Appreciate you freak. We have Chad Farrow with 60,000 sats, because he sent 2 boosts of 30,000 sats. He said the first boost failed, so here's another. And then I also see the first boost, which says, keep up the great work. Thanks, Chad. And we have Roughneck Miner with 5,000 sats saying, you guys run the best pod in the space. I learn more here than any other pod. Keep pushing the boundaries, and I'll keep sending sats. Also, huge shout out to all the freaks who supported that I did not read.
I love you all. Couldn't do without you, and a huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to join us in the live chat. So the live chat, is an interesting aspect of the show. It is broadcast out to everybody, so everyone can see the live chat. The live chat, you can participate either on our YouTube feed or our Twitch feed or the matrix chat if you don't wanna use a big tech platform. To access the Matrix chat, you go to citadel dispatch.com and click that citadel.chat button. Okay. With all that said, there was crazy privacy news today. I will be covering that later, in the afternoon with rock star dev, but I'm fortunate enough to have captain Sid here in the studio at Bitcoin Park, and we we are gonna be talking about grassroots Bitcoin adoption this morning, a little bit of a happier topic. How's it going, Sid? Good morning, Matt. Doing well. How are you?
I'm doing alright. I you know, this is dispatch 73, and I still every I think every time I do that intro, so so it's a little bit different.
[00:05:15] Unknown:
I I used to have it written down, and now I just kinda fucking wing it. Yeah. Well, you did a great job. I mean, you've had enough practice now. You can just rip it out.
[00:05:24] Unknown:
Do it on the fly. So, Sid, I, I'm pretty excited about this conversation. The first time we met was, what, like, 4 months ago or 5 months ago in Nashville?
[00:05:38] Unknown:
Yeah. When I came through Nashville on the trip. Yeah. Yeah. We met at forget the name of the bar. But It was a good time. We did, like,
[00:05:46] Unknown:
spontaneous meetup. It wasn't we didn't have anything planned. It was just, like, captain Sid's in town. We gotta gotta all meet up.
[00:05:54] Unknown:
And Tommy made a little piece of artwork, and that was it. Yeah. We were off to the races.
[00:05:58] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, he made a piece of artwork on,
[00:06:01] Unknown:
like, a pizza box. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think sold it to Mills, and that's what paid for the drinks.
[00:06:07] Unknown:
There you go. I love it. Idea. So, Sid, you, let's I I I don't know where to start here, I guess. We I mean, you you bought a motorcycle, and you rode it from Florida to California. Yeah. It's a a little bit in between. And you stopped at as many Bitcoin meetups as you could along the way. Pretty much. Yeah.
[00:06:35] Unknown:
It's a pretty fucking baller. Yeah. It was great. I think, I I've never really been able to claim that I have authority in any space, but I've been to 30 meetups. I don't think Yeah. There's any Bitcoin that's been to more meetups in America than I have at this point. And I hope someone breaks that way. A Bitcoin meetup specialist now. Yeah. Now now I can claim that title, which is cool. Yeah. So I've I've been living abroad for the last two and a half years, and I really wanted to see America again, see what had happened. I've been gone since 2019, so I missed all of COVID and everything, and I watched all of that happen through Twitter, and I wanted to see what is the country like on the ground.
So I thought what better way to do that than through a road trip, and I fell in love with riding motorcycles while I was abroad. So I figured, let me buy a big American bike, a big touring bike, and go all around the country. And also on Twitter, I saw the rise of all these Bitcoin meetups. And when I left, there really weren't that many. There was a couple bit devs, but I don't remember there being small Bitcoin meetups all over the place. And I looked at a map and there's like 40, 45, 50 Bitcoin meetups, and now there's even more. As I was going on that trip, I kept discovering new ones. So I thought why not try to link these together and meet Bitcoiners all over the country?
[00:07:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty it's been pretty amazing to watch over the last few years because, I mean, you're completely correct that the the the meetups I I mean, I like to call it grassroots Bitcoin adoption has just absolutely exploded, throughout the world. Like, we we see similar happening in in Germany and India and Latin America, and it happened it's crazy to me because it happened at the same time that, like, the majority of the world was stepping back from in person social interaction. So, like, events were getting canceled, weddings were getting canceled, concerts were getting canceled. They were closing down small businesses, but at the same time, Bitcoin meetups were growing, which is absolutely crazy to think about. Yeah. And it's also completely agnostic of market and price. Over the entire ride, the price has been going down of Bitcoin, but
[00:08:47] Unknown:
I've seen, and from what I've heard from meetup organizers, it's level if not increasing in attendance. More people are interested in this and asking questions. And I think meetups have really hit on a new chord for the potential Bitcoin community. There's a lot of people out there who do not want to learn about Bitcoin by reading a bunch of articles online. Right. And I think all of us who've got in, who are in it now, you and I, who are very interested in Bitcoin, we were those types of people because we had to be. There was no other way to learn. Right. But we were option. Yeah. You had no option. You had to just read articles or, at best, talk with people on Twitter or some sort of online medium. But there's a whole crop of people out there who don't learn like that, who want to go meet people in person and hear what is this thing. I wanna sit down and look you in the eyes and have you explain to me how this works and answer my questions,
[00:09:40] Unknown:
and meetups are hitting right on that. And, also, I mean, like, I mean, obviously, conversations are great. I think a lot of times people overthink it. Just like having beers with local Bitcoiners is just a it's just a fulfilling experience. Yeah. But, like, also, the the in person workshops, I feel like, are really powerful. Like, actually having someone, you know, have a wallet in their hands and and be able to, like, feel it in person is,
[00:10:06] Unknown:
just it's just way easier to learn that way. Yeah. And I've seen every meetup seems to start with exactly that. Getting a bar. Right? Drinks at a bar Yeah. Couple people, but they grow from there. And, eventually, when you have a meetup page and a Twitter account, you start attracting people who don't know anything about Bitcoin. And then the workshops kind of start naturally from that as well. And you get 10, 15 people in a room, and you start walking around and asking, what are you interested in learning about? And then you hear a lot of people are interested in nodes, or they are interested in mining, or they wanna learn how wallets work, and then workshops kinda come out of that.
And that's one of the really cool things I've noticed at meetups is it doesn't really feel forced anywhere I've been. It's it's not that meetup organizers are have these grand machinations for Right. What they're gonna build and they're trying to, you know, get people somehow to come to their event with free food or whatever. It's very organic. So there's a lot of ambition among meetup organizers about what they'd like to do, but it's all happening at the right time when people are asking for it coming around and saying, we want speakers. We want workshops on this and that, and it's, very much a back and forth with the community.
[00:11:19] Unknown:
Organic is the word. Yeah. Organic. There's no, like, top down Bitcoin organization that is that is building out these meetups. Exactly.
[00:11:28] Unknown:
And it leads to a lot more ingenuity, I think, too. There's like, every meetup has some crazy idea for some new thing they wanna do.
[00:11:37] Unknown:
So let's, so you started is was it 30 meetups? Was that the total amount you've been to? I think 31.
[00:11:44] Unknown:
31. San Francisco that I was on the bike for.
[00:11:48] Unknown:
And and so you start you started in Florida? You started in Texas. You started in Florida. Started in Florida at the Bitcoin conference. At Bitcoin 2022.
[00:11:58] Unknown:
Yeah. And then we actually did a mega meetup there. So I organized a meetup of everyone who goes to their local meetups. That's how I kinda build it, and I was hoping maybe I get a 100 sign ups at an Eventbrite page. It was just a free event in the lobby of the convention center, and I got 996 sign ups. Holy shit. And about a 150 people, probably maybe 200 people came through, which was incredible. I got to meet a lot of the meetup organizers there before I started You got to coordinate it basically ahead of time and get put a face to a name. Exactly. Yeah. And see who who are the the real meetup organizers who really are doing this for Bitcoin, who want me to come versus, you know, I might see a Twitter page out there that says it's a Bitcoin meetup, but you start digging in, you're like, oh, it's a shitcoin meetup or
[00:12:46] Unknown:
for whatever it is. And that was very common for a long time. That was, like, Bitcoin in name only. Yeah. One of the crazier things is is is not just the not just Bitcoin meetups blowing up, but Bitcoin only meetups blowing up. They're not blockchain meetups. They're not crypto meetups. They're not talking about NFTs. This is a Bitcoin meetup. Yeah. And they're very, very different in flavor and discussion. I mean, before we move on, I just I realized I didn't highlight that That point that you make that attendance seems to be at least flat line, if not going up in a down market, is a pretty astounding fact. Because, I mean, I remember, you know, I used to be part of the New York Bitcoin community, and we had New York BitDevs, which is the 1st BitDevs.
Super technical conversation, no photos, no videos allowed to be taken, no price talk allowed. So, like, the type of meetup that you would think is most immune to price, and eve and even that meetup was, like, when the price would drop, the attendance would drop, like, 50% or whatever. Yeah. And then when price was pumping, we'd be, like, filled to the brim and you couldn't. Yeah. There was no space. Well, I think the macro environment is also changing
[00:14:04] Unknown:
really quickly. Over the last 2 years, the freedom, self sovereignty, censorship resistant aspect of Bitcoin has really been highlighted. Especially in America, we didn't have much of a reason for that before 2020. And and now we see, you know, just the country above us doing crazy things with people's bank accounts
[00:14:23] Unknown:
with, you know, no reason. So The country that must not be named? Yeah. I like referring to them as the country above us. I'm gonna I'm gonna adopt that. Go for it. Yeah. I think that's that's definitely part of it. Right? It's not just I mean, I asked we had, here, last month. And I said, like, as a CEO of one of the fastest growing Bitcoin companies, like, how do you handle building, you know, being sustainable in a bear market? And he was like, Matt, this isn't a bear market. This is a fucking macro recession. Like, this is a completely different environment than, like, a traditional Bitcoin bear market. Yeah. So I feel like in a lot of ways, even if the price is down, people are like, well, this is my hope. Right? This is, like, this is what keeps me optimistic in this crazy world. Like, I'm even more focused on it now than I would be while I was pumping maybe. Or
[00:15:16] Unknown:
Yeah. The price is down, but so is the price of everything else too. Even if you look at it just purely from an investment perspective, if you were DCA ing for a couple years, you're probably better off in Bitcoin than you would have been in any other asset.
[00:15:33] Unknown:
So we have a comment from weird robot who I got to it was a pleasure to meet him last, last month. He was visiting Nashville. He says, any recommendations to do that sort of traveling without spending a shit ton of money? Yeah. I mean, you actually you act you made money on this whole thing. Right? I broke even. You broke it. Minus the motorcycle. Everybody's a scammer. But, I mean, you bought the motorcycle. Right? Yeah. But now you're but you're selling the motorcycle. But I'm selling the motorcycle at some point. So, hopefully, I will have made money in Sats. And you got sponsored by Swan and the magazine. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And unchained and upstream data.
[00:16:14] Unknown:
Takes you through it all. Everyone's a scammer.
[00:16:17] Unknown:
So so and the the cool thing is this bike this bike, as you went along the meetups, like, everyone signed it. Like, my signature is on that bike. Your signature is on there. I mean, there's probably, like, 3, 400 signatures on both bags. Yeah. So, I mean, there's probably a good argument that that bike's worth more than when you bought it. That's the dream. That's the hope. Yeah. So Maybe just hold on to it for a little bit. Like, the collector value
[00:16:40] Unknown:
probably go up a little bit. Yeah. That's Especially if the price the Bitcoin price goes up. I'm gonna hold the saddlebags for sure because those can just pop off the bike too, so I can keep those. But I do actually have some thoughts on that. That's what I signed. I signed the saddlebag. Yeah. Yeah. You send the saddlebags. I made sure everyone signed just the bags because the bags you can just take off. Everyone's a scammer. And then the the bike is the bike. So
[00:17:01] Unknown:
yeah. You know, this I should have signed both sides.
[00:17:06] Unknown:
Well, somebody brought up to me. I should auction the saddlebag separately and see which one gets more money, like, which one has the more coveted signatures. Oh.
[00:17:17] Unknown:
Well, I imagine together, they're worth more. Yeah. Just from a collector's point. So anyway, let's answer this guy's question.
[00:17:23] Unknown:
Yeah. So traveling without spending a shit ton of money, the biggest thing that I saved money on on this trip, which was totally unforeseen, and I woulda lost money if it weren't for this, was just the hospitality of Bitcoiners. We talk a lot about privacy and security and don't trust verify, but a lot of Bitcoiners open their homes to me not have having never met me and let me stay with their families, sleep in their guest bedroom insane. Which was not something I expected at all, but definitely helped because especially with inflation this year, if I had had to pay for hotels, my trip cost would have been, like, 50% more than what it was. Would have been insane. So that that helped a lot, and and I think it was kind of a reputation thing at the beginning of the trip. It was a little bit harder. And then as I went on the trip and more people heard about it and more people heard, you know, I stayed with this big It's like a web of trust. It was like everyone's like, oh, he he's a good dude. And if it's, like, someone that respect it you respected says that, then Exactly.
Yeah. And, you know, as long as I don't break that reputation, then I can get a lot of benefit out of it. So I would say just reach out to Bitcoiners. They're more hospitable than than than you might think, especially if you're really into the privacy side. As I was, I I used to be I used to work at Kraken, and they just drilled it into you. Oh, I didn't know that. If you ever talk about Bitcoin, you're gonna get stabbed in the back and they're gonna take your Jesse takes it super seriously. Yeah. I mean, the whole company, the entire grain of the company, it's a cybersecurity company. They're very intense about security.
So I used to be so paranoid about talking about Bitcoin, but that's not my personality at all. I want to talk about it. I want to have in person interactions about Bitcoin. So when I started this trip, I was kind of still in that mind that most Bitcoiners are not gonna want to. They're gonna build a wall, and they're not gonna let me into their homes or meet their families or Right. Names or any of that. And I found that it was totally different. Once they trust you, it's like you're good until you break that trust. Yeah. I mean, there's this amazing part about
[00:19:32] Unknown:
being active in the Bitcoin community that you almost feel like you have family in every city in the world. Yeah. I do. I definitely do now. Super powerful. Like, I was saying, I was just saying we were just in Norway or whatever. We met a bunch of awesome Norwegian Bitcoiners, and I was like, if I got stuck in this country, like, there'd be a ton of beds that I could crash on Mhmm. Or couches or whatever, just because we have family everywhere. It's super powerful. Yeah. And the other thing you did to save money that was really cool was cooking steaks on the on on the road. I'm not sure about that. I love this. So
[00:20:13] Unknown:
it was at the beef badass. Yeah. Every single podcast, every single conversation I have about this tour, people are like, tell me about cooking the steak. So I went to the beef initiative conference, the first one in Kerrville, Texas. And while I was there, I was talking to Slim about, like, eating beef on the road and how he eats healthy on the road if you're trying to avoid all this processed food, but processed food is everywhere. And he said, well, I bring, like, a cast iron skillet and a little hot plate, and I'll cook in my hotel room. So I was thinking, well, I could buy that kit and kinda store it on my motorcycle. I didn't have much space, but I could maybe fit it on there. And then I was talking to the chef at the beef initiative about cooking on the road, and he said, man you got an engine you can cook on it it generates heat just get a like wrap something in foil and strap it to the exhaust pipe and it'll cook over a couple hours. And he told me to look up manifold cooking. And sure enough, it's it's not just a one off thing people do. It's a whole, like, type of cuisine. There's cookbooks on Manifold Cooking. It's kinda like Dutch oven cooking where you don't really know what temperature you're cooking at. Low and slow, and you just It's like a a a rap shoot. It's a metal box. Right? That you just Mhmm. You slap a steak in there.
[00:21:27] Unknown:
You attach it.
[00:21:29] Unknown:
What you what piece are you attaching? The one the one I got is called a muff pot. So you attach it to, like, the muffler. Right? You attach it to the exhaust pipe right where it comes out of the cylinder. So it's super hot. Super hot. And then you you're, like, just driving on the road, and 3 hours later, your steak is cooked. Yeah. Exactly. When I arrived in Nashville on the tour, I had a perfectly cooked pink steak all the way through. That's a nice hack. Especially, I mean, if if you're if you're biking, that's a great hack. Yeah. If you've got a just any engine, maybe other than a Tesla, if you got any engine that You can attach it to your car or whatever? It's even easier on a car because the way car engines are usually set up, like, say, you have a a 4 cylinder or a 6 cylinder, The exhaust manifold usually comes out kind of flat out of the side, and it's just like a grill. So you can wrap potatoes and foil and steaks and just throw them on there. You don't need a box or anything. You just need foil. Well, that's awesome. Well, that's a good life hack. There you go, freaks. That'll,
[00:22:25] Unknown:
that'll save you some money. Yeah. So where were we? So we we started you started in Florida,
[00:22:32] Unknown:
and then where'd you go from there? So from Florida, I blasted all the way to Texas Right. And 5 days from Miami to Dallas. Wouldn't do it again, but it was a good trial by fire. There was something you needed to get there for. Right? There was Yeah. So I knew when I was planning this that it would be kinda difficult to reschedule meetups, especially really big meetups. And the Houston and Austin meetups were just perfectly timed, like, 2 weeks after, Bitcoin 2022 and 1 week after each other. So I went to Austin BitDevs and then the big Houston meetup. So I went to Dallas first and then Austin then Houston, spent about a week in each, then back to Dallas for a Biplock barbecue, and then I headed east again back across Tennessee and,
[00:23:16] Unknown:
North Carolina. And that's when I saw you. Yeah. And then after that, which where'd you go from there?
[00:23:22] Unknown:
So through North Carolina, went to Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh, and then up north to Ohio through Virginia, West Virginia, and then did the Midwest. It's such an awesome path. Yeah. It was really nice. I totally avoided the East Coast. Weirdly enough, I didn't see any Bitcoin meetups on the East Coast other than New York. There's New York pit devs and there's a Harlem meetup. Yeah. There's a new Harlem one. Yeah. And there's a Philly meetup actually too in Philadelphia and some people in DC. But I just thought, you know what? It's a really long slog to get up there for a few meetups, so I just headed through the middle of Where are you now? Instead.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've seen some new meetups pop up there. There's, to the freaks who are looking for, like, a meetup in their area, I have a Twitter list. If you go to my Twitter account and go to lists, I have a Twitter list list called Grassroots Bitcoin, that I've just been adding, Meetup accounts as I find them. And if there's not a Meetup in your area, consider starting one. As we said earlier, it's as easy as putting up a meetup page, sending out a tweet, and meeting at a bar somewhere with a couple of big corners and starting from there. And I usually will people who have done this before know that I hate when someone sends me a tweet to retweet in DMs.
Usually, if it's a tweet that I was gonna retweet anyway, I will intentionally not retweet it because you sent it to me in DMs, and it pisses me off. But if you're starting a meetup, that's excluded. So if you if you send if you send me a tweet, because you're starting a meetup, I I will happily give you, more exposure on that. We actually had I met a ride or die freak in Texas who was from Boston, an elder individual, and he's that's what he did. He was like, I don't have any Bitcoin only meetups in in, like, the Greater Boston area or the outside of Boston. He's, like, in the suburbs or something. And he was like, what should I do? And I was like, just start a meetup. He's like, I'm gonna do it, and he started it. And it seems like he's getting some traction, which is really fucking cool.
Do you have any bad experiences
[00:25:46] Unknown:
with the meetups? At meetups? No. Not at all, which was also another surprising thing. I thought I would accidentally go to a shit coin meetup or meet more, you know, degenerate gambler types. But Yeah. I was shocked. I rarely, rarely ran into anyone who wasn't a ride or die Bitcoiner that was really into it. And and I think we we talk a lot well, recently about the whole maximalism thing and, you know, what is a Bitcoiner and toxicity and all that. And I found that at meetups and probably because it's in person that the negative the negativity of that world just appears. People are much more positive. They're focused on building a future that's better for them and their communities, and you lose a lot of that. People just ignore the shit coins. It's not like Do you think it's a Twitter. Do you think it's a Bitcoin specific thing, or do you think, like, Twitter is just set up in a way that it brings out, like, the worst in people? Yeah. I think it's because Twitter brings out the worst in people, honestly. I don't think people are really like that usually.
I mean, I I wrote a little bit about doom versus doing. On Twitter, there's so much dooming. There's so much because that's what it it feeds and engenders It's the extremes on both sides. It's like the doom and then, like, the bullshit hopium. Yeah. Or the puppy videos. They get, like, the most that gets the most engagement. Yeah. Yeah. So it pulls those types of things out. And in person, the extremes don't work very well, or at least the negative extremes. People don't wanna hang out with you if you're just always
[00:27:24] Unknown:
depressing like that. So it's just a much more No one wants to have a 3 hour conversation over beers talking about, you know, just dooming all day. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:27:34] Unknown:
It's not Not like shitting on people. Live your life. So meetups are much more focused on what can we do here and now in our community to push this forward.
[00:27:45] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I just I experienced that firsthand because, the other day, we had, like, 200 people at the park, and we were having, like, a great time or whatever, and I, like, didn't look at Twitter all day. And then I opened Twitter, and there was, like, all this bullshit drama of, like, people fighting back and forth and arguing about all this shit. And I was just like, well, I guess I'm winning. I'm just gonna sign off again. Exactly. I feel like meetup organizers
[00:28:09] Unknown:
and people who go to these meetups, they're the true winners in Bitcoin because they're, they're getting to move forward on Bitcoin and make progress without all of that toxicity and and back and forth and negativity. I'll I'll say it, are we still running? Yeah. I'll say say a few things about, starting a meetup as well because as I went to different meetups, I started to get an idea of what the whole space looks like. And I think a lot of people who are thinking about starting a meetup, it sounds kind of, difficult because you have to get everyone together and get a venue and all this stuff. Overwhelming. Sounds overwhelming. Exactly. That's the word I'm looking for. It sounds overwhelming.
You can start a meetup by just going to a bar with few Bitcoiners. So that alone is fine. Now I understand getting from that to a bigger meetup can also seem overwhelming, but there's a lot of coordination that's happening between meetups that I'm seeing. So, like, for example, in the Midwest, there's a Midwest Bitcoiners group, and it's mostly people who go to their local meetups. So it's people from Minneapolis all the way to Ohio and everywhere in between, and they're all talking about Bitcoin and about their different meetups and sharing ideas. So if you're starting a meetup, it's good to get integrated into those regional spaces because they're gonna have more time and attention for their own region. It's, it's harder if you just go out on Twitter and you try to advertise your meetup because you're advertising it to everyone all over the world. Right. In those smaller groups, you're talking someone in, like, India doesn't really like, they don't need to know you. You're running a Exactly. Like, maybe they might be in Lexington, Kentucky Right. At some point in their life, but it's probably not not gonna happen. But if you're in Lexington connecting with Southern Bitcoiners, then you might have people from Nashville that'll come up for your meetup. Yeah. I mean, we see that we see that a lot here as we've been building out the Nashville meetup.
[00:30:18] Unknown:
So this meetup, that we had on Wednesday was officially the 1 year anniversary. Wow. Congratulations. 1 year of Nash Bitcoiners. And I act I wasn't here for the first one. So the first one was in August of last year, and I started coming down in September. I came for the second one. I missed October, and then I've been to everyone since then. And so the August one was 35 people in the rain at a brewery outside, and now it's averaging over 200 people within a year. And one of the cool things that we've seen happen is there's a lot of people that come from cities within, like, a 6 hour radius, including meetup organizers.
So so they come from 6 hour radius. They didn't have a meetup in their area, or maybe it was a small meetup. And then they go back home, and then they create a meetup in their local town. So, like, we had the Knoxville Bitcoin meetup pop up. We had the Huntsville Bitcoin meetup pop up. Asheville Bitcoiners popped up. And then they all come here, and then we all kind of coordinate together or talk and share experiences and help boost each other. And, like, the whole region is kind of growing organically, but together. Like, everyone empowers each other. Right? Exactly. I think it's about empowerment and helping people get
[00:31:45] Unknown:
through different issues that they're having or give them ideas for things that they could run or ways that they can grow their meetup. And we're gonna actually if you're a meetup organizer
[00:31:54] Unknown:
and I haven't reached out to you already, reach out to me. We are doing a we're doing, like, a summit for meetup organizers in September here in Nashville, which I'm pretty excited about, which we're also calling Grassroots Bitcoin. That's gonna be awesome. But, yeah, I'm pretty I'm pretty excited about that. I think I think I think that's a really good recommendation just to like, if you're starting a meetup, consider going to meetups, like, within a 4 or 5 hour range. If you jump in the car, grab a friend or something, go to an established meetup that's somewhere in the region.
[00:32:30] Unknown:
One other thing I'll say is, even if there's a meetup in your city, you can start another one. A 100%. And I've seen this in a couple places. Like, I went to a small one in Houston where they have a very large meetup that's focused on the energy sector, and this small meetup is more it's at a co working space. It's around a big table. It's more conversational. It just attracts a different crowd, people who don't thrive in these big meet and greet type of scenarios, and they wanna have a smaller, deeper discussion with more technical people or, you know, what have you. So they've started another meetup. It's thriving. They're talking to other meetup organizers, but you can do your own thing if you want to. I think the Bay Area also does this well because it's so spread out. The Bay Area does it really interesting. Right? Because there's, like, an affiliation of a bunch of little meetups under Bay Area, big winner. Which makes so much sense for a large metro area. Like, maybe Nashville, not so much because it's pretty easy to get to downtown Nashville, but, like, Dallas, Fort Worth should be doing this. Because if you live in Fort Worth to come to downtown Dallas can be an hour both ways.
And same with the Bay Area to come to San Francisco, if you live in the North Bay, it can be easily an hour and a half drive both ways.
[00:33:42] Unknown:
Yeah. It's really what the Bay Area Bitcoiners did. I I I would say that I do not expect it to be replicated on you know? I mean, they they did it in a very it's, like, very cohesive and professional. Mhmm. They're, like, affiliation thing that's going on over there. But I I do see all the time, and this is something we talk about in Bitcoin in general, not just meetups. Just more options, the better. Right? And, I mean, we see I saw when I used to live in New York, like, we had bit devs, which was, like, our highly technical, you know, 200 person meetup that happened once a month, but then it was, like, a bunch of Bitcoiners started at another meetup that was just, like, a weekly, let's get drunk.
Let's just meet up at the bar after work and and drink and talk Bitcoin. And they all fill different purposes, and it it makes the whole thing more robust and more distributed, right, if you have more options in different areas. Yep. You don't want, like, one person or a group of people controlling,
[00:34:49] Unknown:
maybe Bitcoin conversations in a in a city. Right? It attracts different types of people. It engenders different conversations, all these different formats. So, yeah, many the more meetups, the better. Do you,
[00:35:03] Unknown:
so I asked you if you had any bad experiences. Did you have any particularly positive experiences? Was there anything that caught you, like, when you think back? Like
[00:35:15] Unknown:
Yeah. I I will I mean, every meetup was a positive Yeah. Experience, but I'll name one city in particular that was incredibly hospitable, which was Milwaukee. So I was super excited to go to Milwaukee because it's the home of Harley Davidson as well. So I went on the way from Chicago to Minneapolis. I stopped in Milwaukee for 2 nights. And the first night, there was nowhere for me to stay with the meetup organizers. 1 of the meetup organizers offered a long time ago to put me up. And then when I got the exact dates down, he was like, well, I we're both out of town, so we have nowhere to to put you up. And so they put me up at the Iron Horse Hotel, which is a Harley themed hotel, like, across the bridge from Harley's original factory.
Awesome. So it's so sweet, paid for it and everything. They took me out that night. Some people from the meetup met up with me and took me out, showed me Milwaukee. I learned so much about that city and what they're trying to do there, and they were just incredibly hospitable the the whole time I was there. It was it was amazing.
[00:36:17] Unknown:
Wow. Shout out Milwaukee Bitcoiners. Yeah. Great great meetup. You got the captain Sid. Massive endorsement over here. So what else do you wanna talk about? Let's see. I don't have anywhere I don't have anywhere to go right now,
[00:36:36] Unknown:
but I'm enjoying this conversation. So one thing I I came upon a lot while I was on the road is just how to talk to normal people about Bitcoin. Okay. You know? And I found for 1 that Probably shouldn't call them normal people right before you do it. Continue. I mean, you call your listeners freaks. Yeah. So how do you turn the normal people talking about freaks? Yeah. That's that's usually how I open the conversation, and that's maybe why it didn't go so well. But so I would usually open with the motorcycle trip because I found if I, you know, if I just start talking about Bitcoin, people shut down. They don't wanna hear about it. Right. And I I kind of figured that out after 2017 and it started to crash. If you talk about Bitcoin, people are like, shut up about your Ponzi scam. Right. So when I started with a motorcycle trip, it kinda disarmed people and then they became more interested in, you know, they're interested in the trip. Who doesn't like a cross country motorcycle trip? Exactly. Everyone is interested in that topic. So then when I combine it with Bitcoin, then they're like, oh, okay. Well, maybe there's something more to this that I'm missing. So I would talk about the local community and, you know, people had the same common misconceptions of, like, well, who organizes all the meetups?
And I had to try to explain to them, nobody from the top is organizing these. It's individuals who wanna meet up and talk about this open source protocol.
[00:37:59] Unknown:
And I had to really Gary k in the comments, by the way, saying that they prefer to be called normies.
[00:38:05] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I should use that label next time. Hey, normie. Let me talk to you about Bitcoin. So I I kinda made that a theme of the tour, like, don't talk about Bitcoin until someone really starts asking you about it and try to understand who they are. And I also got that from from meeting Texas Slim from the beat I was gonna say that you sound like Slim right now. Yeah. I mean, he's Seems like I don't talk to ranchers about Bitcoin. I just talk to them about life. Exactly. He he nails it. He's like, just talk to people about their lives and what they're concerned about, and then try to relate that to Bitcoin. But don't just push Bitcoin on people because they don't wanna hear it. They think it's a scam, and then it feels more like a multilevel marketing. You're just trying to rope them in because you're not interested in them. You just wanna sell what you wanna sell. So I found that to be a much better style for just opening conversations about what I was doing and what Bitcoin is and why why it matters so much to me.
[00:39:02] Unknown:
I mean, I guess your your your your bike also said Bitcoin on it. It's, like, all over the place. Right?
[00:39:09] Unknown:
Not really. I mean, it had the Swan Bitcoin logo on it. Bitcoin Magazine logo on it. Right. And the Bitcoin Magazine logo, but, yeah, Bitcoin Magazine, that logo said Bitcoin pretty big. Yeah. But if you're just looking at the bike, you wouldn't immediately see that it was about Bitcoin.
[00:39:25] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I guess I went in with preconceived notions. I'm trying to think of when I first saw the bike. I was like, oh, it's a Bitcoin bike. Well, when you see the orange saddlebags in the Bitcoin orange, and you're a Bitcoin What do you think about Bitcoin orange? Was that a mistake? Oh, I love it. I People are very,
[00:39:42] Unknown:
I think it's a love hate thing. It's like Really? Either love it or hate it. I have not encountered that. Well, I haven't really encountered opinions about it. It's just there. It's kinda like 21,000,000.
[00:39:51] Unknown:
We like to talk about the hard topics on dispatch.
[00:39:56] Unknown:
Yeah. I I like it because it's bright. It's it's really bright.
[00:40:00] Unknown:
Yeah. It's a very aggressive color.
[00:40:02] Unknown:
It's like the rising sun. Alright. Oh, it's a new dawn. It's a new dawn that will So so when Bitcoin does,
[00:40:10] Unknown:
what what how do you if you were gonna pitch Bitcoin to someone after so I guess, naturally, like, you're having that conversation. Right? And then Bitcoin eventually comes up. What do you what's what's your what's your quick pitch on Bitcoin?
[00:40:25] Unknown:
So I heard a really good one that I'm just gonna shamelessly rip from someone in, Charlotte. Ones. Yeah. Yeah. So someone in Charlotte, this was, you know, early this year, so inflation was really popping off. And they said it was something like, you ask somebody, you know, the that you say the Fed has printed 40% of all the money in circulation, of all the dollars in circulation in the last year. Did your bank account go up by 40%? Did your 401 k go up by 40%, your stock portfolio, your house, all these different assets? Maybe one of them did. Maybe you live in a really nice neighborhood and your house price went up 40%. But everything across the board did not go up 40%.
So where did that value go? Someone else took it from you. That's what money printing is, and that's what Bitcoin fights. When you buy Bitcoin, they can't do that to you. And I thought that was a really clear everyone understands that from a bartender to the investor because everyone, you know, looks at their income, their assets, and they see, oh, that didn't go up. And you can look at a chart that verifiably says the dollar, to some extent, went up 40% Right. In supply.
[00:41:41] Unknown:
That's just somebody else has those next dollars. That's a tactic I very rarely I very rarely go down the inflation. But I guess it is it's, like, hot right now. Right?
[00:41:52] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's tough. It's a mainstream topic all of a sudden. And I think that that is, like, fortunately or unfortunately, part of the game. If you want people to become interested in Bitcoin, you have to hit on something that's topical or something that really matters to them, or they're not gonna care. Because if you hit on what matters to you, they might not care about it. And
[00:42:13] Unknown:
So usually when I, if I am tasked with talking to someone who's kind of Bitcoin curious, I try not to I'm past the point in my Bitcoin life where I try and convince someone they need Bitcoin. So I only really talk about Bitcoin with people that already recognize they're curious about it. They they recognize that there is some kind of need for better money. Yeah. But, usually, what I line into is, that it's just ridiculous, this idea that you need to either be, a financial guru or hire someone that is to manage, like, this diversified portfolio to protect your wealth and all that bullshit that that entails.
And then at at its core, like, Bitcoin is immensely simple. Mhmm. Right? Like, I I feel like we get dragged down into I mean, obviously, I've spent hours, days, years going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and there's a million different things. There are different directions you can go down, and no one ever learns everything there is about Bitcoin. But to me, the promise of Bitcoin is, that it's extremely simple and that you just you're able to just live your life and do whatever you're passionate about, and then at the end of the day, save and better money, spend and better money, and you just don't even have to think about it. You just stack, and if everything goes as we expect it to go, it should increase in purchasing power over time, and you don't have to think about it. Yeah.
And I think that resonates with people because there's just such a mental burden. Like, our day to day lives are just filled with so much bullshit that if you can cut out that one aspect, all of a sudden, you're freeing yourself up to to actually live your life to the fullest. Yeah.
[00:44:23] Unknown:
I met a lot of people on this trip that don't even understand that you need a financial adviser to to make it, though. Right. You know, either because they're and this is all over crypto, they think, well, you just have to buy a Lotto ticket. They don't understand that Right. Anything has ever been different, or they just don't understand, like, the impact of inflation. I met a surprising amount of people that are just they just deal with dollars. Like a a Harley sales guy, I asked him. He said, you know, I'm a traditional guy. My son, you know, watches YouTube about Bitcoin a lot, but I don't really understand it. I just deal with cash. And then later I asked him Then he just holds cash. Yeah. I was like, well, you know, what you you have a family, like, what assets do you have? Do you buy stocks or whatever? And he said, no. I I told you I just have cash. He literally has cash in a mattress and in the bank.
That's it. And That's a losing strategy. With inflation, he just doesn't know what to do. You know? So and I think he That's interesting. An older guy. I think he just thought cash is king. You you just have cash, and then you're fine. Hasn't been horrible. Inflation hasn't been terrible. This is just how the world works. You're you know, they don't think about
[00:45:37] Unknown:
But it's that same thing. He he doesn't want the mental burden. He doesn't even wanna consider it. Right? Yeah. I guess that's true. But he has yeah. He doesn't even consider it. I guess what I I mean, especially with the younger people, it's, like, so normalized now that they have, like, a Robinhood account, and they're, like, picking random stocks. Like, I was, like, chilling with a buddy from high school, and he's, like, showing me his, like, Robinhood portfolio, and he's got, like, random, like, Chinese electric car manufacturers and stuff. I was like, how'd you pick this one? He's like, oh, well, Reddit said, like, I should just, like, buy it or whatever. And he's he like, he's aware that the inflation's an issue and that he he needs to do all this shit. I'm like, I already told you about Bitcoin. You already own Bitcoin. Just fucking stay humble and sack stats and don't Yeah. Fucking deal with this shit. It's a fiat mentality. I think you you
[00:46:24] Unknown:
think that gambling is the only way out because you're sitting on a melting ice cube and even investing in The melting ice cube. S and P 500. Yeah. I mean, e even a stock is a melting ice cube. If you really wanna grow your wealth, you gotta get out there and gamble. And that's sort of what you're billed in my generation.
[00:46:45] Unknown:
Right. I mean, that's I mean, the whole like, the Fiat economists, that's what they say. It's, like, inflation is necessary because it, like, basically forces you not to save. Yeah. You either have to invest or spend.
[00:46:57] Unknown:
Yeah. And invest in riskier and riskier stuff to get the same return.
[00:47:06] Unknown:
Well, the comments are popping off right now. Normalist. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. I it definitely it's a know your audience kinda thing. Right? Like, it's not a one size fits all. Bitcoin is is different things to different people, and so click for, like, I remember when I it's interesting, like, how, like, as you go down your Bitcoin journey, Bitcoin changes for yourself too. Like, I when I first got into Bitcoin, I was looking at it, and, like, I like to gamble, like, poker and sports betting and stuff like that, and I looked at Bitcoin as simply a ideal way to deposit and withdraw from gambling websites.
Like, that's what clicked for me. I was like, because the US government used Visa and Mastercard and all the traditional payment rails to block deposits and withdrawals from online gambling sites. And I was like, well, if Bitcoin is just used by American gamblers, just used by American it should be pretty successful. And, like, that was my entry into the into the rabbit hole. And, obviously, now, like, Bitcoin is is so much more than that to me. Mhmm. That's just a tiny little use case of Bitcoin.
[00:48:24] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's how people get onboarded, honestly, you know, now they're disarmed to reading an article about it because they don't think it's just some Ponzi scheme. They're like, wow, this actually solves a real need in my life. Right. Then they start learning more and more about it, and eventually, they end up as far down the rabbit hole as you or I are. Right. You know, but it starts with just something that hits on a real need for them. Clicks. Yeah. Clicks. Yeah. I we talk about that a lot that, like,
[00:48:58] Unknown:
I think everyone will eventually come to the conclusion and realize the need for better money. I don't really think and I I don't really think we need to convince people of the need, because they will like, I I don't think outward facing Bitcoin marketing is really that necessary, to convince pre corners to become corners. I think what's more necessary is that when they realize the need, we have the tools and education ready for them to make that as easy a process, accessible a process as possible. It's kind of the framing I've been looking at lately. Yeah. That's kinda how I think about it too. Like, you can
[00:49:42] Unknown:
the door is there. You can open it, but they have to walk through it. Right. You're you just make it easy to do that. That's what we can do. Like, I wrote a whole website about economics and finance. Really? With that in mind, yeah, it's called what is money dot info. And basically, what I wanted to do is rebuild, like, Investopedia and the balance to address makes questions like, what is inflation or how do how does fractional reserve banking work and answer it in a truthful way that actually exposes that, oh, our monetary system is complete BS. Oh, wow. You got a lot of stuff on here. Yeah. There's, like, 30 something articles that I wrote. Yeah. And the the idea is that people will come to it through Google by asking questions. So they'll Google things like Cantelon effect because they hear it somewhere, and then they'll end up on my site reading about what that is. And I've never really mentioned Bitcoin until the very end of an article.
And then I'll start talking about solutions. And what if we had, you know, a monetary system that at the base layer solved for this inflation that causes all these other problems? If that existed, that would be a great solution to that. Oh, by the way, there's this thing called Bitcoin that is exactly that. That's interesting.
[00:50:56] Unknown:
I love how Bitcoiners have, like, all these different so did you do the all these different projects? Did you do this before or after the ride? This was before. I wrote all this in 2020.
[00:51:06] Unknown:
I love it. Yeah. And put up some YouTube videos too that kinda mirror the articles. Fuck yeah. Yeah. It's been fun to do. It's it's an insanely rewarding experience to write all that content and then just watch people find it. Watch the Google search search console. You can see people finding articles, and watch articles blow up, and people find it interesting and useful. It's really cool. Let's talk about
[00:51:38] Unknown:
winsome hacks. Just don't run up to someone looking all sweaty and fervent and say, have you heard of our Lord and savior, big one? We touched on briefly. We touched on the beef the beef initiative. It's something that I've been diving into pretty pretty hard. I was just at the Colorado one. What are what are your thoughts there? I mean, it's it's to me, it's crazy because it's it's like all these different elements of empowering yourself as an individual all kinda coming together, and and and Bitcoin is just a a small portion of that. Right? Like, in the Colorado thing, my understanding was that was a a bigger Bitcoin portion than usual, and it was, like, you know, maybe 10% of the content or 15% of the content.
[00:52:31] Unknown:
Yeah. I love what they're doing with the beef initiative and that they're bringing these parallel communities who kind of understand the ethos behind Bitcoin, but ranchers are a great example of probably the last people who would ever really seriously read about or get curious about Bitcoin because they're not technical people. They're out in the field working with their hands. They're not the finance tech people that gravitate to and get interested in something like Bitcoin. And they're, to my understanding, scammed a lot by technologies and, you know, newfangled things that people say you need this for your farm or your ranch.
So they do not want anything to do with Bitcoin. The beef initiative bridges that and shows them that actually 90% of your values line up perfectly with how Bitcoin operates, so you should understand what this is. But Slim has done it really well and that you also need to know that Bitcoiners understand you. Before we just start pitching, We want you to know that we're interested in beef. We're interested in food. We're interested in getting to the root to, as as Slim says, the seed of the soil of the seed or something like that. Like, all the way down to the seed and the soil. He's got a bunch of sayings. Yeah. He's got all these catch phrases. Like, where do they where does what you're eating come from? Shake your rancher's hand. Exactly. And shake your hand. I mean, that lines up perfectly with with Bitcoin meetups. Like, shake a Bitcoiners hand. Yeah. Shake a local Bitcoiners hand. Exactly. Go meet real Bitcoiners in person. That's an interesting perspective that you had, because I actually
[00:54:05] Unknown:
a little bit thought the opposite. So I've done a lot of work with activists. And activists is very and activists is very fulfilling work because, first of all, I mean, you do not have to explain why Bitcoin is needed. I mean, they have a massive need for censorship resistant money that can be transferred around the world, across borders, and not be stopped by, like, the authoritarians that they're fighting against. They just want to be told, you know, what tools are available to them and how they can use those tools. And with ranchers, it felt very similar to me. Like, I I taught, I did a Bitcoin 101 in Colorado at Jason Reich's ranch, small family ranch. It's, like, 300 acres. He stewards, like, the surrounding 4,000 acres.
It's just a humble 300 acre ranch.
[00:54:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I visited on my trip. It's And Yeah. And, he's awesome. But
[00:55:03] Unknown:
the ranchers were really perceptive. Like, they were they were really interested, and they they had, I mean, generations of just getting, you know, stamped down and heard in every possible fucking way. Like, e Econo Alchemist did a so it mostly wasn't Bitcoin. It was it was ranching. It was sustainable farming practices, regenerative agriculture, raising children, home births, homeschooling, but Eco did one presentation, I did a mining panel, and then I did a Bitcoin 101. And Eco obviously joined for the mining panel too. Eco gets up there, and he's like, I'm not a rancher. I'm surrounded by ranchers. So I was like, how am I supposed to do this presentation? And he's like, well, one thing we can agree on is that the state hates us.
He was just like, this is how the state has I don't have to tell you guys how the state has trampled on ranching or whatever. This Bitcoin is this tool that can empower you and and and give you personal responsibility back, get back that individual power. And ranchers are the type of people that, like, they like, everything comes down to them. Like, they know personal responsibility. Like, one of the hardest issues with Bitcoin in the developed world, is that just people have been groomed to not have personal responsibility in any aspect of their life. They're like, oh, there's always excuses. We're a heavy litigious society. There's always someone else you can sue. Someone else's fault, it is. Someone holding your hand. Some regulation telling you you can't do something, so you don't do it. But with ranchers and with activists, that's not the case. They live lives of radical personal responsibility already.
So that is to me, has always been one of the biggest hurdles, and that hurdle just does not exist on the on the ranching side. Yeah. That's that's what I love about that community. And there's so many other communities, I think, out there that really get personal responsibility,
[00:57:06] Unknown:
proof of work, like, they're aligned to the ethos of how Bitcoin operates or I don't know how to put that, but how Bitcoin operates in kind of reinforces a certain ethos. It requires personal responsibility. It runs on proof of work, and ranchers get that innately. Their entire life is proof of work. You can't grow a cow without Exactly. Going out there every day and putting in the work. You can't bolt. You should have seen their eyes light up during the mining conversation. Yeah. I bet that was super interesting. And, like, it made so much sense to them. Yeah. Because they get that foundation. But it's then my point about them not touching Bitcoin before something like this is it's such it seems so foreign when you're not talking to someone who really understands it. Because when you hear about it everywhere else, you hear about it usually in the context of casinos and high-tech and finance stuff.
And that's just far out something that they don't really wanna deal with for the most part. But when you connect it back to what they do care about and their values, then they get it immediately.
[00:58:11] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. You have to you have to know mean, you have to know your audience. I also don't think, like, I think Bitcoin is falsely perceived, right, as being like a a fintech innovation or something for finance pros. Like, I, like, I've had so many people say that to me. Like, oh, I'm not interested in Bitcoin because I'm not the finance person. Mhmm. It's like, no. That's why you should be interested in me. Yeah. That's who it's for. Yeah. So I have an interesting so so I had this issue myself because I was I was I was, like, a very privacy focused Bitcoiner in the beginning, and I was, like, very concerned about going to meetups when I was first getting into Bitcoin because I didn't know if I was gonna get scammed or robbed or targeted as a Bitcoiner.
Sounds like you were, like, kinda the same way. Like, what advice do you have for people that, you know, maybe they're a NIM on Twitter, maybe they've never really had a face to face conversation about Bitcoin, that is anxious about going to a local meetup?
[00:59:26] Unknown:
I would say just start small. Start with the meetup organizer, maybe try to have coffee with someone, like, broach the in person thing in a way that you feel comfortable with and steps that you feel comfortable with, and then go more and more out there as you get more and more comfortable going to meetups, meeting people, being a public face. I use a NIM. I use a NIM on this trip, and that's just sort of the the line between privacy and convenience. Like, I don't wanna be so private. It's a trade off balance there. It's a trade off. Yeah. And we talked about that at the meetup yesterday here in Nashville. It's all a trade off. So when you think about privacy, it's very easy to go down the rabbit hole and be like, I need the cleaned up phone and the tails on my computer. Right. The full extreme side. Yeah. But it's so hard to really live life like that for most people. And for most people, it's not enjoyable to live life like that. So you have to figure out where's your balance there and to get more comfortable
[01:00:22] Unknown:
revealing selectively parts of your It's not all or nothing. It's not all or nothing exactly. I think that's a mistake a lot of people make too. So they think, and you see people, like, overexpose themselves because they're like, oh, well, this stuff is already out there, so I might as well Yeah. Go even more. Right? But, really, like, every little thing you do is there's there's this trade off here, and you can you can balance it to a degree. And, I mean, ultimately, I mean, I've met so many lifelong friends, you know, people that I consider family that I've only met because I was willing to step out of that box.
Same.
[01:01:03] Unknown:
Yeah. I went to a really interesting meetup in, Costa Mesa, California that's run by a guy who goes by Hetty Wook on Twitter. Oh, yeah. Don't know his real name. Nobody knows it. And I interviewed him, and he wore a mask during the interview. But at the meetup, he just said no pictures of people. You take pictures. I had the bike there and stuff. People were taking pictures of themselves or whatever, but do not take pictures of the group. And he talked a lot about Bisc and different privacy tools and mixers and things, and that's kind of the focus of that meetup because he's super into privacy. That's awesome. But he's also a meetup organizer, and he's shows his face, but I think the calculus for him is, like, look, people are not gonna come out to this meetup to try an in person scam just me because there's so many easier ways to
[01:01:51] Unknown:
scam than to It's a balancing act. Yeah. It's a balancing act. I I really like the, basically, no photos or videos of people without their consent Mhmm. As a meetup rule. It's something that Jay from New York BitDevs, you know, also a NIM, doesn't put his face out there or whatever, says no photos, no videos. It's something that he was very strong about, to the point where, like, if someone new came to the meetup and they, like, pulled out their phone to take a picture, like, the whole meetup would just, like, stop and everyone would just turn and look at them. Like, the peer pressure is very, very strong.
And we borrowed that, like, for nat NASH Bitcoiners, for the Nashville, things. And it's it's definitely a balancing act because photos get you a lot more exposure. So it's the easy option is to just have no photo restrictions, But there's something really special in the like, this world that's, like, so we just, like, live in this digital panopticon now where, like, all of our lives and all of our conversations like, we saw that happen during COVID where, like, all these conversations that were happening in bars and stuff started happening on Zoom and Clubhouse and Twitter spaces recorded forever, sometimes publicly broadcast as well.
And just to have these, like, in person meeting spaces where, essentially, this conversation's happening, and the only people that know the conversation happened or what the conversation was were the people that were there at the moment just seemed so real and so special Mhmm. That I think people are sleeping on that as a line. Like, I'm not saying that everyone should do that. And there is a balancing act like this guy's awesome that started, Knoxville big corners after he came to Nashville big corners, and he's like, this is awesome. I gotta start 1 in Knoxville. He takes pictures.
He'll he'll post, like, one picture per meetup, and he'll just, like, black out everyone's faces. Mhmm. And then he gets that exposure out of the picture, but he doesn't actually dox anybody in the picture, and that that's an interesting balance. We have, Bitcoin in the comments saying phones are always listening, though. Well, I mean, I'm not against the idea of people putting
[01:04:27] Unknown:
like, having, like, Faraday boxes or something. Everyone turns off their phone and puts it in the box. Or That would be really cool if, like, the meetup organizer brought a little safe to the bar or whatever, and everyone put your phone in there, not just for the microphones, but for the quality of conversation. Yeah. So people aren't looking at their phone. Like, I wanted,
[01:04:45] Unknown:
like, we're gonna have a bunch of different events at the park. And one of the things I've been playing with is, like, when you go to, like, comedy shows nowadays, a lot of times, they don't want you to record the conversations because, otherwise, their jokes get old. So they have these things that are, like, you you just wear them around your neck, So you're holding on to your phone, but it's in a sealed it's in a sealed bag, so you can't access it unless you go to the staff, and the staff unlocks it for you. Yeah. I've seen that at, like, sometimes at concert venues. Yeah. I think that'd be great for, like, small Bitcoin events, because everyone would be present. You don't have to and people would feel more comfortable that, like, oh, like, maybe this person is secretly recording me,
[01:05:27] Unknown:
that they're not doing that. I wonder if we could talk to one of those companies and and talk to them about, like, we'll give you a bunch of free press if you just give us a bunch of these bags Yeah. You know, for different and we can hand them out at Grassroots Bitcoin. Like, every meetup gets 10 bags or whatever. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do that. I really like that idea. Yeah.
[01:05:45] Unknown:
Did did you see were there a lot of meetups that had a no photo policy, or was it rare?
[01:05:50] Unknown:
Kinda half and half, maybe. A good amount of the more established meetups had a no photo policy. I found that, honestly, a lot of meetups, people were just too intent on talking to other Bitcoiners. They weren't really caring about photos. Like, that wasn't why people came, you know? So the no photo policy was implicit. It's just no one takes photos anyway, so it's not an official Right. Policy.
[01:06:14] Unknown:
I mean, it always what really, like, bothers me is when people do, like, the I'm at some, like, event or something and people do the, like, the pan shot. Shot. Yeah. Where they, like, just they, like, sit there and they just literally hit every single person in the room.
[01:06:31] Unknown:
I just don't think Bitcoiners by and large are that kind of person that are clout farming on Instagram.
[01:06:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I notice it just everywhere now. Yeah. I mean, I notice it in other circles, but I didn't Like, I was just at, like, the Music City Grand Prix or whatever, and, like, people are doing it all over. I was at the HRF's, you know, Oslo Freedom Forum, and, like, people are doing it in, like, in the crowd or whatever, and I was like, this is, like, completely out of touch. I do not Yeah. That's the last place I would expect that. And I'm, like, just sitting there with, like, my hat my hat down just, like, turn off your fucking camera. Wow.
Yeah. I like the the no photo policy is interesting. I think people should do that more. And there's a mix there too. So the other issue is, like, okay. A lot of people, I think, agree on no photos of crowd, but then it's like, do you allow pictures and videos of, like, a if you're having a panel, like, or a presentation of the panelists. And then it's like, okay. Well, if there's this great content, like, why are we limiting it to just the local people? And I'm, like, pretty torn on that one. Obviously, I have a podcast that is explicitly public. Like, it gets broadcast worldwide, but there's something to be said about the conversations are different when you don't have a camera and mic pointed at you. Mhmm.
So a lot of the conversations, like, I wish we had captured a NASH big corners and posted online, might not have even happened
[01:08:11] Unknown:
if we were recording them in the 1st place. Right? Yeah. There's kind of a catch 22 there. Yeah. I don't know if that's the right expression, but, yeah, there's certain things that when when it's purposefully recorded, it just totally changes the nature of the conversation.
[01:08:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And there's this other thing that, like, there's a reason why, so I've noticed that, with with podcasting, there's been a big push towards video, and it's because just people like seeing faces.
[01:08:41] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[01:08:42] Unknown:
They you just all the incentives are lined up in a way that, like, people that have videos of them and their guests, they do better on all these platforms. And what I've noticed is that, yeah, a lot of them, especially in the Bitcoin space, like, if you go on as a NIM, they'll let you have your camera off, But it's almost like those people are penalized Yeah. In terms of situation. So, like, with with dispatch, I've made it I've made it audio native. So, like, no one feels there's there's, like, this peer pressure almost where, like, a lot of people have I think a lot of people, myself included in the beginning, like, our we, like, did we, like, our faces became public because we felt almost like this unspoken peer pressure to do it. You didn't wanna be the only panelist or whatever or the only person that that had, Just wearing a mask. Just wearing a yeah. And as soon as you wear a mask, you look like a fucking terrorist too. Yeah. Exactly. I'm so sorry. Face like, criminalizes you Mhmm. Or at least, like, the perception.
And I would just say, like, 2 items on that topic is that, first of all, if you're someone that's anxious about it, first of all, you know, speak up. You you don't have to you don't have to do it. You can you can you cannot expose your face. A lot of people don't. But then second of all, like, to people that are running shows and people that are running meet ups, to be aware of this, like, to make sure that people are, like, actually comfortable with going through with it, and they're not just kinda getting pressured into it and don't wanna speak up. Yeah.
[01:10:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Always ask. You know, assume that people don't wanna put their face out there. I think that's a pretty safe assumption. I like, Bitcoin's comment that avatars could help. It'd be pretty cool. Like, you know, you can do those Zoom backgrounds and on Instagram and stuff, you can do, like, face filters to have that kind of thing. I mean, it's not perfect, obviously, but because you're not controlling it. It's Yeah. Digitally done, so you don't know exactly what's happening behind the scenes, but that would be pretty cool because it a lot of it, I think, with faces is you can see emotions. Yeah. If you wanna see them, you can read more. Expressions.
[01:11:08] Unknown:
Yeah. You it just makes it more live and interesting. There's a reason why, like, we, like, have face to face conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Trying to emulate that. Little closer to that. Yeah. No. Avatars kinda make sense to me. Yeah. I mean, I think that adds an element. I mean, I kind of so, like, my tactic with dispatch, obviously, is that, like, I have the live chat in the mempool, Well, Wizz's mempool up. So, like, there's something going on on the video screen. It's just not our faces. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. I like this. That's, like, the trade off that's the trade off balance I took here.
[01:11:48] Unknown:
Or show like, on on, Rod's podcast on building with Bitcoin It's a screen share. Screen share. Yeah. Yeah. So you can pull things up and look at stuff without showing any faces.
[01:11:59] Unknown:
So there's still something to do there. Yeah. I mean, we had a long conversation about this exact conversation before we launched that. Yeah. And I think that's a cool balance that he did. Yeah. It's really nice. And it works well for the format of his pod, like, showing what people are building. I actually get Marty has been giving me a lot of shit on rabbit hole recap because, he uses, like, a really nice, like, 4 k camera, and I'm using, like, a $30 webcam. And and the reason is is because I just I still to this day do not feel comfortable on camera, and I I just I like that it's intentionally poor quality. Yeah. It's like I it's like, okay. My trade off is you're still gonna see me, but you're gonna see me a little bit blurry. It's not gonna be
[01:12:43] Unknown:
Marty and a handful of pixels to a pod.
[01:12:47] Unknown:
He's like, Matt, is it a costing? Like, I'll buy you the camera. I was like, no. I like my webcam. Dude, this has been a fucking awesome conversation. I think the freaks will find it very helpful. Before we wrap up, you know, I like to end it with some final thoughts.
[01:13:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I guess my my final thought would be start a meetup or join your local one. I think there's a there's a lot more to in person Bitcoin than meeting up at a bar and chatting with people. There's a lot coming out of this. A lot of circular economy, workshops, education, good friendships. I mean, like you said about having a family, after this trip, I now feel like I have a family around the world because not only have I met and stayed with a lot of Bitcoiners in the US, but Bitcoiners all around the world have seen what I've done. And now that's the first thing I think when I'm going somewhere. Where are the Bitcoiners? Because I wanna meet them. They're gonna be my local guides to the area and the people who I get to know to get to know the culture of that area, what I wanna do in that area, and just have a friend on the ground. It's it's an incredible network.
[01:13:54] Unknown:
I cosign that. Go to a local Bitcoin meetup. If you don't have 1, start 1. If you do have 1, you could still consider starting 1, and Bitcoiners, it does feel like a family all around the world. Mhmm. Actually, I have one more question for you before we wrap up. To big corners that are considering learning how to ride a bike, what is your recommendation there?
[01:14:18] Unknown:
Okay. So I had kind of a strange route to learning to ride. I got a motorcycle license in the US, but never had a motorcycle. So I did the it's called MSF, Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, and it basically teaches you how to roll off 0 and get to 20 miles an hour. It's doesn't and kinda lean over and do slow speed stuff. It doesn't really teach you how to ride a motorcycle. I think only experience can do that. As soon as I got the license, I moved abroad, and I started riding in Southeast Asia. And that was looks like a terrible place to learn, incredible place to learn.
It's much, much, much safer for motorcycles than the US. Because there's just so many motorcycles. There's so many motorcycles. I think a lot of it is the kind of instinctual cycle psychology of riding, other people riding motorcycles since most people are on a motorcycle, most people are in a t shirt and shorts with flip flops and barely a helmet on, if a helmet at all. Right. Sometimes they got a whole family on their back. So they have as much, if not more to lose by hitting you than you have from hitting them or from you 2 colliding. So people are just watching more, like f 150 that can just, like, knock you off the road. Yeah. Driving to Dallas, you got f 150 just going 90 while they're texting because they don't care. They're gonna be totally fine if they run over a Prius or they run over you. They're not even gonna notice if they hit you on the So your main advice for someone who wants to get started with motorcycles is to go to Southeast Asia and learn that? To move halfway around the world.
I mean, you can learn in the US too. I would say just go out of cities, go out into the country and learn on country roads where there the drivers are to give you a little more space. There's more room to breathe. Don't try and learn on the 405 in LA. Right. That's not the place to do it. Just gonna die. Yeah. You're you're gonna injure yourself and invest in the safety equipment. It's worth it even if, like, hopefully, you never have to use it, but get a jacket. You can get jeans with pads in them that have Kevlar. So if you slide out, you're fine. Because normal jeans, you slide out on the highway. They will burn out in about 2 seconds, and you're right on skin. Get boots, gloves, at least gloves and a helmet, and ride with that every time you ride, and, you know, that's the best that you can do to
[01:16:38] Unknown:
to help yourself if you do. And and have some kind of Bitcoin plan in place in case of a head injury.
[01:16:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Get your ducks in a row.
[01:16:48] Unknown:
Awesome, Sid. This is fucking fire conversation. I wanna thank you again. Thank you. For joining me, and it's always a pleasure kicking it with you. I'm sure we're gonna have many good moments in the future in person face to face, which is awesome. I wanna thank all the freaks for joining us in the live chat and who continue to support the show. Reminder, I will be going live with Rockstar in the studio in about 2 hours, and we'll be talking about a bunch of different things, including the tornado cash sanctions. So be sure to join us for that.
Appreciate you all. Stay humble, StackSats.
[01:17:31] Unknown:
Peace.
Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks. It's your boy, Odell, here for another dispatch. So dispatch is the interactive live show focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech. I have we have a very we have 2 great conversations lined up for y'all today. Before we get started, I wanna thank all the freaks who continue to support the show, whether that's subscribing on their favorite platform or now on YouTube, and we've always been on Twitch, we're on Bitcoin TV, Any podcast app, search the dispatch, press the subscribe button, share with your friends and family. It really does go a long way.
And if you're supporting the show via stats, that's even more appreciated. We do not have ads or sponsors on sale of dispatch. We are 100% audience funded. I think it aligns the incentives really well. It's extremely powerful seeing all the support, you guys continue to give the show to keep it going. Easiest way to support dispatch is through podcasting 2 point o apps. My favorites are fountain podcasts, Breeze, and podverse dotfm. You simply load it up with some sats, search to dispatch, press the subscribe button, pick how many sats per minute you think dispatch is worth, and then it automatically streams the sats to my node as you are listening. You can also support the show at cildispatch.com using, my BTC pay server instance.
You can pay on chain or lightning there, or you can support using, my pay NIM, which is supported by, Sparrow Wallet and Samura Wallet. My pay NIM is Odell. Very easy to remember. So thank you all for the support. Another way you can do on so if you do podcasting 2.0 for support, it actually, will split with a bunch of open source projects as well. So if you support via podcasting 2.0, a portion of your support also goes to Rasp by Blitz, Robosats, Seed Signer, Sparrow Wallet, and Zeus. Really cool aspect of podcasting 2.0. And, also, it allows you to send boostograms.
Boostograms are single payments, that you can attach a message to. My understanding is that fountain podcasts are going to make it so we can view boostograms from all podcasting apps. But for now, all I can see are the ones that are coming in through fountain podcast. So as always, I'm gonna read the top 4, from the last dispatch, which was also this week. If you haven't listened to that, consider going listening to that. It's about the tornado cash situation. We have Law Bitcoin with 50,000 saying thanks for the work and advocacy the 3 of you are doing in the privacy space. Privacy is essential to exercising our rights.
We have Rica Mauro with 50,000 sat saying, Odell Seth is the best duo since Lennon McCartney. Please consider doing a regular pod together. I'm not against that idea. Appreciate you freak. We have Chad Farrow with 60,000 sats, because he sent 2 boosts of 30,000 sats. He said the first boost failed, so here's another. And then I also see the first boost, which says, keep up the great work. Thanks, Chad. And we have Roughneck Miner with 5,000 sats saying, you guys run the best pod in the space. I learn more here than any other pod. Keep pushing the boundaries, and I'll keep sending sats. Also, huge shout out to all the freaks who supported that I did not read.
I love you all. Couldn't do without you, and a huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to join us in the live chat. So the live chat, is an interesting aspect of the show. It is broadcast out to everybody, so everyone can see the live chat. The live chat, you can participate either on our YouTube feed or our Twitch feed or the matrix chat if you don't wanna use a big tech platform. To access the Matrix chat, you go to citadel dispatch.com and click that citadel.chat button. Okay. With all that said, there was crazy privacy news today. I will be covering that later, in the afternoon with rock star dev, but I'm fortunate enough to have captain Sid here in the studio at Bitcoin Park, and we we are gonna be talking about grassroots Bitcoin adoption this morning, a little bit of a happier topic. How's it going, Sid? Good morning, Matt. Doing well. How are you?
I'm doing alright. I you know, this is dispatch 73, and I still every I think every time I do that intro, so so it's a little bit different.
[00:05:15] Unknown:
I I used to have it written down, and now I just kinda fucking wing it. Yeah. Well, you did a great job. I mean, you've had enough practice now. You can just rip it out.
[00:05:24] Unknown:
Do it on the fly. So, Sid, I, I'm pretty excited about this conversation. The first time we met was, what, like, 4 months ago or 5 months ago in Nashville?
[00:05:38] Unknown:
Yeah. When I came through Nashville on the trip. Yeah. Yeah. We met at forget the name of the bar. But It was a good time. We did, like,
[00:05:46] Unknown:
spontaneous meetup. It wasn't we didn't have anything planned. It was just, like, captain Sid's in town. We gotta gotta all meet up.
[00:05:54] Unknown:
And Tommy made a little piece of artwork, and that was it. Yeah. We were off to the races.
[00:05:58] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, he made a piece of artwork on,
[00:06:01] Unknown:
like, a pizza box. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think sold it to Mills, and that's what paid for the drinks.
[00:06:07] Unknown:
There you go. I love it. Idea. So, Sid, you, let's I I I don't know where to start here, I guess. We I mean, you you bought a motorcycle, and you rode it from Florida to California. Yeah. It's a a little bit in between. And you stopped at as many Bitcoin meetups as you could along the way. Pretty much. Yeah.
[00:06:35] Unknown:
It's a pretty fucking baller. Yeah. It was great. I think, I I've never really been able to claim that I have authority in any space, but I've been to 30 meetups. I don't think Yeah. There's any Bitcoin that's been to more meetups in America than I have at this point. And I hope someone breaks that way. A Bitcoin meetup specialist now. Yeah. Now now I can claim that title, which is cool. Yeah. So I've I've been living abroad for the last two and a half years, and I really wanted to see America again, see what had happened. I've been gone since 2019, so I missed all of COVID and everything, and I watched all of that happen through Twitter, and I wanted to see what is the country like on the ground.
So I thought what better way to do that than through a road trip, and I fell in love with riding motorcycles while I was abroad. So I figured, let me buy a big American bike, a big touring bike, and go all around the country. And also on Twitter, I saw the rise of all these Bitcoin meetups. And when I left, there really weren't that many. There was a couple bit devs, but I don't remember there being small Bitcoin meetups all over the place. And I looked at a map and there's like 40, 45, 50 Bitcoin meetups, and now there's even more. As I was going on that trip, I kept discovering new ones. So I thought why not try to link these together and meet Bitcoiners all over the country?
[00:07:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty it's been pretty amazing to watch over the last few years because, I mean, you're completely correct that the the the meetups I I mean, I like to call it grassroots Bitcoin adoption has just absolutely exploded, throughout the world. Like, we we see similar happening in in Germany and India and Latin America, and it happened it's crazy to me because it happened at the same time that, like, the majority of the world was stepping back from in person social interaction. So, like, events were getting canceled, weddings were getting canceled, concerts were getting canceled. They were closing down small businesses, but at the same time, Bitcoin meetups were growing, which is absolutely crazy to think about. Yeah. And it's also completely agnostic of market and price. Over the entire ride, the price has been going down of Bitcoin, but
[00:08:47] Unknown:
I've seen, and from what I've heard from meetup organizers, it's level if not increasing in attendance. More people are interested in this and asking questions. And I think meetups have really hit on a new chord for the potential Bitcoin community. There's a lot of people out there who do not want to learn about Bitcoin by reading a bunch of articles online. Right. And I think all of us who've got in, who are in it now, you and I, who are very interested in Bitcoin, we were those types of people because we had to be. There was no other way to learn. Right. But we were option. Yeah. You had no option. You had to just read articles or, at best, talk with people on Twitter or some sort of online medium. But there's a whole crop of people out there who don't learn like that, who want to go meet people in person and hear what is this thing. I wanna sit down and look you in the eyes and have you explain to me how this works and answer my questions,
[00:09:40] Unknown:
and meetups are hitting right on that. And, also, I mean, like, I mean, obviously, conversations are great. I think a lot of times people overthink it. Just like having beers with local Bitcoiners is just a it's just a fulfilling experience. Yeah. But, like, also, the the in person workshops, I feel like, are really powerful. Like, actually having someone, you know, have a wallet in their hands and and be able to, like, feel it in person is,
[00:10:06] Unknown:
just it's just way easier to learn that way. Yeah. And I've seen every meetup seems to start with exactly that. Getting a bar. Right? Drinks at a bar Yeah. Couple people, but they grow from there. And, eventually, when you have a meetup page and a Twitter account, you start attracting people who don't know anything about Bitcoin. And then the workshops kind of start naturally from that as well. And you get 10, 15 people in a room, and you start walking around and asking, what are you interested in learning about? And then you hear a lot of people are interested in nodes, or they are interested in mining, or they wanna learn how wallets work, and then workshops kinda come out of that.
And that's one of the really cool things I've noticed at meetups is it doesn't really feel forced anywhere I've been. It's it's not that meetup organizers are have these grand machinations for Right. What they're gonna build and they're trying to, you know, get people somehow to come to their event with free food or whatever. It's very organic. So there's a lot of ambition among meetup organizers about what they'd like to do, but it's all happening at the right time when people are asking for it coming around and saying, we want speakers. We want workshops on this and that, and it's, very much a back and forth with the community.
[00:11:19] Unknown:
Organic is the word. Yeah. Organic. There's no, like, top down Bitcoin organization that is that is building out these meetups. Exactly.
[00:11:28] Unknown:
And it leads to a lot more ingenuity, I think, too. There's like, every meetup has some crazy idea for some new thing they wanna do.
[00:11:37] Unknown:
So let's, so you started is was it 30 meetups? Was that the total amount you've been to? I think 31.
[00:11:44] Unknown:
31. San Francisco that I was on the bike for.
[00:11:48] Unknown:
And and so you start you started in Florida? You started in Texas. You started in Florida. Started in Florida at the Bitcoin conference. At Bitcoin 2022.
[00:11:58] Unknown:
Yeah. And then we actually did a mega meetup there. So I organized a meetup of everyone who goes to their local meetups. That's how I kinda build it, and I was hoping maybe I get a 100 sign ups at an Eventbrite page. It was just a free event in the lobby of the convention center, and I got 996 sign ups. Holy shit. And about a 150 people, probably maybe 200 people came through, which was incredible. I got to meet a lot of the meetup organizers there before I started You got to coordinate it basically ahead of time and get put a face to a name. Exactly. Yeah. And see who who are the the real meetup organizers who really are doing this for Bitcoin, who want me to come versus, you know, I might see a Twitter page out there that says it's a Bitcoin meetup, but you start digging in, you're like, oh, it's a shitcoin meetup or
[00:12:46] Unknown:
for whatever it is. And that was very common for a long time. That was, like, Bitcoin in name only. Yeah. One of the crazier things is is is not just the not just Bitcoin meetups blowing up, but Bitcoin only meetups blowing up. They're not blockchain meetups. They're not crypto meetups. They're not talking about NFTs. This is a Bitcoin meetup. Yeah. And they're very, very different in flavor and discussion. I mean, before we move on, I just I realized I didn't highlight that That point that you make that attendance seems to be at least flat line, if not going up in a down market, is a pretty astounding fact. Because, I mean, I remember, you know, I used to be part of the New York Bitcoin community, and we had New York BitDevs, which is the 1st BitDevs.
Super technical conversation, no photos, no videos allowed to be taken, no price talk allowed. So, like, the type of meetup that you would think is most immune to price, and eve and even that meetup was, like, when the price would drop, the attendance would drop, like, 50% or whatever. Yeah. And then when price was pumping, we'd be, like, filled to the brim and you couldn't. Yeah. There was no space. Well, I think the macro environment is also changing
[00:14:04] Unknown:
really quickly. Over the last 2 years, the freedom, self sovereignty, censorship resistant aspect of Bitcoin has really been highlighted. Especially in America, we didn't have much of a reason for that before 2020. And and now we see, you know, just the country above us doing crazy things with people's bank accounts
[00:14:23] Unknown:
with, you know, no reason. So The country that must not be named? Yeah. I like referring to them as the country above us. I'm gonna I'm gonna adopt that. Go for it. Yeah. I think that's that's definitely part of it. Right? It's not just I mean, I asked we had, here, last month. And I said, like, as a CEO of one of the fastest growing Bitcoin companies, like, how do you handle building, you know, being sustainable in a bear market? And he was like, Matt, this isn't a bear market. This is a fucking macro recession. Like, this is a completely different environment than, like, a traditional Bitcoin bear market. Yeah. So I feel like in a lot of ways, even if the price is down, people are like, well, this is my hope. Right? This is, like, this is what keeps me optimistic in this crazy world. Like, I'm even more focused on it now than I would be while I was pumping maybe. Or
[00:15:16] Unknown:
Yeah. The price is down, but so is the price of everything else too. Even if you look at it just purely from an investment perspective, if you were DCA ing for a couple years, you're probably better off in Bitcoin than you would have been in any other asset.
[00:15:33] Unknown:
So we have a comment from weird robot who I got to it was a pleasure to meet him last, last month. He was visiting Nashville. He says, any recommendations to do that sort of traveling without spending a shit ton of money? Yeah. I mean, you actually you act you made money on this whole thing. Right? I broke even. You broke it. Minus the motorcycle. Everybody's a scammer. But, I mean, you bought the motorcycle. Right? Yeah. But now you're but you're selling the motorcycle. But I'm selling the motorcycle at some point. So, hopefully, I will have made money in Sats. And you got sponsored by Swan and the magazine. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And unchained and upstream data.
[00:16:14] Unknown:
Takes you through it all. Everyone's a scammer.
[00:16:17] Unknown:
So so and the the cool thing is this bike this bike, as you went along the meetups, like, everyone signed it. Like, my signature is on that bike. Your signature is on there. I mean, there's probably, like, 3, 400 signatures on both bags. Yeah. So, I mean, there's probably a good argument that that bike's worth more than when you bought it. That's the dream. That's the hope. Yeah. So Maybe just hold on to it for a little bit. Like, the collector value
[00:16:40] Unknown:
probably go up a little bit. Yeah. That's Especially if the price the Bitcoin price goes up. I'm gonna hold the saddlebags for sure because those can just pop off the bike too, so I can keep those. But I do actually have some thoughts on that. That's what I signed. I signed the saddlebag. Yeah. Yeah. You send the saddlebags. I made sure everyone signed just the bags because the bags you can just take off. Everyone's a scammer. And then the the bike is the bike. So
[00:17:01] Unknown:
yeah. You know, this I should have signed both sides.
[00:17:06] Unknown:
Well, somebody brought up to me. I should auction the saddlebag separately and see which one gets more money, like, which one has the more coveted signatures. Oh.
[00:17:17] Unknown:
Well, I imagine together, they're worth more. Yeah. Just from a collector's point. So anyway, let's answer this guy's question.
[00:17:23] Unknown:
Yeah. So traveling without spending a shit ton of money, the biggest thing that I saved money on on this trip, which was totally unforeseen, and I woulda lost money if it weren't for this, was just the hospitality of Bitcoiners. We talk a lot about privacy and security and don't trust verify, but a lot of Bitcoiners open their homes to me not have having never met me and let me stay with their families, sleep in their guest bedroom insane. Which was not something I expected at all, but definitely helped because especially with inflation this year, if I had had to pay for hotels, my trip cost would have been, like, 50% more than what it was. Would have been insane. So that that helped a lot, and and I think it was kind of a reputation thing at the beginning of the trip. It was a little bit harder. And then as I went on the trip and more people heard about it and more people heard, you know, I stayed with this big It's like a web of trust. It was like everyone's like, oh, he he's a good dude. And if it's, like, someone that respect it you respected says that, then Exactly.
Yeah. And, you know, as long as I don't break that reputation, then I can get a lot of benefit out of it. So I would say just reach out to Bitcoiners. They're more hospitable than than than you might think, especially if you're really into the privacy side. As I was, I I used to be I used to work at Kraken, and they just drilled it into you. Oh, I didn't know that. If you ever talk about Bitcoin, you're gonna get stabbed in the back and they're gonna take your Jesse takes it super seriously. Yeah. I mean, the whole company, the entire grain of the company, it's a cybersecurity company. They're very intense about security.
So I used to be so paranoid about talking about Bitcoin, but that's not my personality at all. I want to talk about it. I want to have in person interactions about Bitcoin. So when I started this trip, I was kind of still in that mind that most Bitcoiners are not gonna want to. They're gonna build a wall, and they're not gonna let me into their homes or meet their families or Right. Names or any of that. And I found that it was totally different. Once they trust you, it's like you're good until you break that trust. Yeah. I mean, there's this amazing part about
[00:19:32] Unknown:
being active in the Bitcoin community that you almost feel like you have family in every city in the world. Yeah. I do. I definitely do now. Super powerful. Like, I was saying, I was just saying we were just in Norway or whatever. We met a bunch of awesome Norwegian Bitcoiners, and I was like, if I got stuck in this country, like, there'd be a ton of beds that I could crash on Mhmm. Or couches or whatever, just because we have family everywhere. It's super powerful. Yeah. And the other thing you did to save money that was really cool was cooking steaks on the on on the road. I'm not sure about that. I love this. So
[00:20:13] Unknown:
it was at the beef badass. Yeah. Every single podcast, every single conversation I have about this tour, people are like, tell me about cooking the steak. So I went to the beef initiative conference, the first one in Kerrville, Texas. And while I was there, I was talking to Slim about, like, eating beef on the road and how he eats healthy on the road if you're trying to avoid all this processed food, but processed food is everywhere. And he said, well, I bring, like, a cast iron skillet and a little hot plate, and I'll cook in my hotel room. So I was thinking, well, I could buy that kit and kinda store it on my motorcycle. I didn't have much space, but I could maybe fit it on there. And then I was talking to the chef at the beef initiative about cooking on the road, and he said, man you got an engine you can cook on it it generates heat just get a like wrap something in foil and strap it to the exhaust pipe and it'll cook over a couple hours. And he told me to look up manifold cooking. And sure enough, it's it's not just a one off thing people do. It's a whole, like, type of cuisine. There's cookbooks on Manifold Cooking. It's kinda like Dutch oven cooking where you don't really know what temperature you're cooking at. Low and slow, and you just It's like a a a rap shoot. It's a metal box. Right? That you just Mhmm. You slap a steak in there.
[00:21:27] Unknown:
You attach it.
[00:21:29] Unknown:
What you what piece are you attaching? The one the one I got is called a muff pot. So you attach it to, like, the muffler. Right? You attach it to the exhaust pipe right where it comes out of the cylinder. So it's super hot. Super hot. And then you you're, like, just driving on the road, and 3 hours later, your steak is cooked. Yeah. Exactly. When I arrived in Nashville on the tour, I had a perfectly cooked pink steak all the way through. That's a nice hack. Especially, I mean, if if you're if you're biking, that's a great hack. Yeah. If you've got a just any engine, maybe other than a Tesla, if you got any engine that You can attach it to your car or whatever? It's even easier on a car because the way car engines are usually set up, like, say, you have a a 4 cylinder or a 6 cylinder, The exhaust manifold usually comes out kind of flat out of the side, and it's just like a grill. So you can wrap potatoes and foil and steaks and just throw them on there. You don't need a box or anything. You just need foil. Well, that's awesome. Well, that's a good life hack. There you go, freaks. That'll,
[00:22:25] Unknown:
that'll save you some money. Yeah. So where were we? So we we started you started in Florida,
[00:22:32] Unknown:
and then where'd you go from there? So from Florida, I blasted all the way to Texas Right. And 5 days from Miami to Dallas. Wouldn't do it again, but it was a good trial by fire. There was something you needed to get there for. Right? There was Yeah. So I knew when I was planning this that it would be kinda difficult to reschedule meetups, especially really big meetups. And the Houston and Austin meetups were just perfectly timed, like, 2 weeks after, Bitcoin 2022 and 1 week after each other. So I went to Austin BitDevs and then the big Houston meetup. So I went to Dallas first and then Austin then Houston, spent about a week in each, then back to Dallas for a Biplock barbecue, and then I headed east again back across Tennessee and,
[00:23:16] Unknown:
North Carolina. And that's when I saw you. Yeah. And then after that, which where'd you go from there?
[00:23:22] Unknown:
So through North Carolina, went to Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh, and then up north to Ohio through Virginia, West Virginia, and then did the Midwest. It's such an awesome path. Yeah. It was really nice. I totally avoided the East Coast. Weirdly enough, I didn't see any Bitcoin meetups on the East Coast other than New York. There's New York pit devs and there's a Harlem meetup. Yeah. There's a new Harlem one. Yeah. And there's a Philly meetup actually too in Philadelphia and some people in DC. But I just thought, you know what? It's a really long slog to get up there for a few meetups, so I just headed through the middle of Where are you now? Instead.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I've seen some new meetups pop up there. There's, to the freaks who are looking for, like, a meetup in their area, I have a Twitter list. If you go to my Twitter account and go to lists, I have a Twitter list list called Grassroots Bitcoin, that I've just been adding, Meetup accounts as I find them. And if there's not a Meetup in your area, consider starting one. As we said earlier, it's as easy as putting up a meetup page, sending out a tweet, and meeting at a bar somewhere with a couple of big corners and starting from there. And I usually will people who have done this before know that I hate when someone sends me a tweet to retweet in DMs.
Usually, if it's a tweet that I was gonna retweet anyway, I will intentionally not retweet it because you sent it to me in DMs, and it pisses me off. But if you're starting a meetup, that's excluded. So if you if you send if you send me a tweet, because you're starting a meetup, I I will happily give you, more exposure on that. We actually had I met a ride or die freak in Texas who was from Boston, an elder individual, and he's that's what he did. He was like, I don't have any Bitcoin only meetups in in, like, the Greater Boston area or the outside of Boston. He's, like, in the suburbs or something. And he was like, what should I do? And I was like, just start a meetup. He's like, I'm gonna do it, and he started it. And it seems like he's getting some traction, which is really fucking cool.
Do you have any bad experiences
[00:25:46] Unknown:
with the meetups? At meetups? No. Not at all, which was also another surprising thing. I thought I would accidentally go to a shit coin meetup or meet more, you know, degenerate gambler types. But Yeah. I was shocked. I rarely, rarely ran into anyone who wasn't a ride or die Bitcoiner that was really into it. And and I think we we talk a lot well, recently about the whole maximalism thing and, you know, what is a Bitcoiner and toxicity and all that. And I found that at meetups and probably because it's in person that the negative the negativity of that world just appears. People are much more positive. They're focused on building a future that's better for them and their communities, and you lose a lot of that. People just ignore the shit coins. It's not like Do you think it's a Twitter. Do you think it's a Bitcoin specific thing, or do you think, like, Twitter is just set up in a way that it brings out, like, the worst in people? Yeah. I think it's because Twitter brings out the worst in people, honestly. I don't think people are really like that usually.
I mean, I I wrote a little bit about doom versus doing. On Twitter, there's so much dooming. There's so much because that's what it it feeds and engenders It's the extremes on both sides. It's like the doom and then, like, the bullshit hopium. Yeah. Or the puppy videos. They get, like, the most that gets the most engagement. Yeah. Yeah. So it pulls those types of things out. And in person, the extremes don't work very well, or at least the negative extremes. People don't wanna hang out with you if you're just always
[00:27:24] Unknown:
depressing like that. So it's just a much more No one wants to have a 3 hour conversation over beers talking about, you know, just dooming all day. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:27:34] Unknown:
It's not Not like shitting on people. Live your life. So meetups are much more focused on what can we do here and now in our community to push this forward.
[00:27:45] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I just I experienced that firsthand because, the other day, we had, like, 200 people at the park, and we were having, like, a great time or whatever, and I, like, didn't look at Twitter all day. And then I opened Twitter, and there was, like, all this bullshit drama of, like, people fighting back and forth and arguing about all this shit. And I was just like, well, I guess I'm winning. I'm just gonna sign off again. Exactly. I feel like meetup organizers
[00:28:09] Unknown:
and people who go to these meetups, they're the true winners in Bitcoin because they're, they're getting to move forward on Bitcoin and make progress without all of that toxicity and and back and forth and negativity. I'll I'll say it, are we still running? Yeah. I'll say say a few things about, starting a meetup as well because as I went to different meetups, I started to get an idea of what the whole space looks like. And I think a lot of people who are thinking about starting a meetup, it sounds kind of, difficult because you have to get everyone together and get a venue and all this stuff. Overwhelming. Sounds overwhelming. Exactly. That's the word I'm looking for. It sounds overwhelming.
You can start a meetup by just going to a bar with few Bitcoiners. So that alone is fine. Now I understand getting from that to a bigger meetup can also seem overwhelming, but there's a lot of coordination that's happening between meetups that I'm seeing. So, like, for example, in the Midwest, there's a Midwest Bitcoiners group, and it's mostly people who go to their local meetups. So it's people from Minneapolis all the way to Ohio and everywhere in between, and they're all talking about Bitcoin and about their different meetups and sharing ideas. So if you're starting a meetup, it's good to get integrated into those regional spaces because they're gonna have more time and attention for their own region. It's, it's harder if you just go out on Twitter and you try to advertise your meetup because you're advertising it to everyone all over the world. Right. In those smaller groups, you're talking someone in, like, India doesn't really like, they don't need to know you. You're running a Exactly. Like, maybe they might be in Lexington, Kentucky Right. At some point in their life, but it's probably not not gonna happen. But if you're in Lexington connecting with Southern Bitcoiners, then you might have people from Nashville that'll come up for your meetup. Yeah. I mean, we see that we see that a lot here as we've been building out the Nashville meetup.
[00:30:18] Unknown:
So this meetup, that we had on Wednesday was officially the 1 year anniversary. Wow. Congratulations. 1 year of Nash Bitcoiners. And I act I wasn't here for the first one. So the first one was in August of last year, and I started coming down in September. I came for the second one. I missed October, and then I've been to everyone since then. And so the August one was 35 people in the rain at a brewery outside, and now it's averaging over 200 people within a year. And one of the cool things that we've seen happen is there's a lot of people that come from cities within, like, a 6 hour radius, including meetup organizers.
So so they come from 6 hour radius. They didn't have a meetup in their area, or maybe it was a small meetup. And then they go back home, and then they create a meetup in their local town. So, like, we had the Knoxville Bitcoin meetup pop up. We had the Huntsville Bitcoin meetup pop up. Asheville Bitcoiners popped up. And then they all come here, and then we all kind of coordinate together or talk and share experiences and help boost each other. And, like, the whole region is kind of growing organically, but together. Like, everyone empowers each other. Right? Exactly. I think it's about empowerment and helping people get
[00:31:45] Unknown:
through different issues that they're having or give them ideas for things that they could run or ways that they can grow their meetup. And we're gonna actually if you're a meetup organizer
[00:31:54] Unknown:
and I haven't reached out to you already, reach out to me. We are doing a we're doing, like, a summit for meetup organizers in September here in Nashville, which I'm pretty excited about, which we're also calling Grassroots Bitcoin. That's gonna be awesome. But, yeah, I'm pretty I'm pretty excited about that. I think I think I think that's a really good recommendation just to like, if you're starting a meetup, consider going to meetups, like, within a 4 or 5 hour range. If you jump in the car, grab a friend or something, go to an established meetup that's somewhere in the region.
[00:32:30] Unknown:
One other thing I'll say is, even if there's a meetup in your city, you can start another one. A 100%. And I've seen this in a couple places. Like, I went to a small one in Houston where they have a very large meetup that's focused on the energy sector, and this small meetup is more it's at a co working space. It's around a big table. It's more conversational. It just attracts a different crowd, people who don't thrive in these big meet and greet type of scenarios, and they wanna have a smaller, deeper discussion with more technical people or, you know, what have you. So they've started another meetup. It's thriving. They're talking to other meetup organizers, but you can do your own thing if you want to. I think the Bay Area also does this well because it's so spread out. The Bay Area does it really interesting. Right? Because there's, like, an affiliation of a bunch of little meetups under Bay Area, big winner. Which makes so much sense for a large metro area. Like, maybe Nashville, not so much because it's pretty easy to get to downtown Nashville, but, like, Dallas, Fort Worth should be doing this. Because if you live in Fort Worth to come to downtown Dallas can be an hour both ways.
And same with the Bay Area to come to San Francisco, if you live in the North Bay, it can be easily an hour and a half drive both ways.
[00:33:42] Unknown:
Yeah. It's really what the Bay Area Bitcoiners did. I I I would say that I do not expect it to be replicated on you know? I mean, they they did it in a very it's, like, very cohesive and professional. Mhmm. They're, like, affiliation thing that's going on over there. But I I do see all the time, and this is something we talk about in Bitcoin in general, not just meetups. Just more options, the better. Right? And, I mean, we see I saw when I used to live in New York, like, we had bit devs, which was, like, our highly technical, you know, 200 person meetup that happened once a month, but then it was, like, a bunch of Bitcoiners started at another meetup that was just, like, a weekly, let's get drunk.
Let's just meet up at the bar after work and and drink and talk Bitcoin. And they all fill different purposes, and it it makes the whole thing more robust and more distributed, right, if you have more options in different areas. Yep. You don't want, like, one person or a group of people controlling,
[00:34:49] Unknown:
maybe Bitcoin conversations in a in a city. Right? It attracts different types of people. It engenders different conversations, all these different formats. So, yeah, many the more meetups, the better. Do you,
[00:35:03] Unknown:
so I asked you if you had any bad experiences. Did you have any particularly positive experiences? Was there anything that caught you, like, when you think back? Like
[00:35:15] Unknown:
Yeah. I I will I mean, every meetup was a positive Yeah. Experience, but I'll name one city in particular that was incredibly hospitable, which was Milwaukee. So I was super excited to go to Milwaukee because it's the home of Harley Davidson as well. So I went on the way from Chicago to Minneapolis. I stopped in Milwaukee for 2 nights. And the first night, there was nowhere for me to stay with the meetup organizers. 1 of the meetup organizers offered a long time ago to put me up. And then when I got the exact dates down, he was like, well, I we're both out of town, so we have nowhere to to put you up. And so they put me up at the Iron Horse Hotel, which is a Harley themed hotel, like, across the bridge from Harley's original factory.
Awesome. So it's so sweet, paid for it and everything. They took me out that night. Some people from the meetup met up with me and took me out, showed me Milwaukee. I learned so much about that city and what they're trying to do there, and they were just incredibly hospitable the the whole time I was there. It was it was amazing.
[00:36:17] Unknown:
Wow. Shout out Milwaukee Bitcoiners. Yeah. Great great meetup. You got the captain Sid. Massive endorsement over here. So what else do you wanna talk about? Let's see. I don't have anywhere I don't have anywhere to go right now,
[00:36:36] Unknown:
but I'm enjoying this conversation. So one thing I I came upon a lot while I was on the road is just how to talk to normal people about Bitcoin. Okay. You know? And I found for 1 that Probably shouldn't call them normal people right before you do it. Continue. I mean, you call your listeners freaks. Yeah. So how do you turn the normal people talking about freaks? Yeah. That's that's usually how I open the conversation, and that's maybe why it didn't go so well. But so I would usually open with the motorcycle trip because I found if I, you know, if I just start talking about Bitcoin, people shut down. They don't wanna hear about it. Right. And I I kind of figured that out after 2017 and it started to crash. If you talk about Bitcoin, people are like, shut up about your Ponzi scam. Right. So when I started with a motorcycle trip, it kinda disarmed people and then they became more interested in, you know, they're interested in the trip. Who doesn't like a cross country motorcycle trip? Exactly. Everyone is interested in that topic. So then when I combine it with Bitcoin, then they're like, oh, okay. Well, maybe there's something more to this that I'm missing. So I would talk about the local community and, you know, people had the same common misconceptions of, like, well, who organizes all the meetups?
And I had to try to explain to them, nobody from the top is organizing these. It's individuals who wanna meet up and talk about this open source protocol.
[00:37:59] Unknown:
And I had to really Gary k in the comments, by the way, saying that they prefer to be called normies.
[00:38:05] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I should use that label next time. Hey, normie. Let me talk to you about Bitcoin. So I I kinda made that a theme of the tour, like, don't talk about Bitcoin until someone really starts asking you about it and try to understand who they are. And I also got that from from meeting Texas Slim from the beat I was gonna say that you sound like Slim right now. Yeah. I mean, he's Seems like I don't talk to ranchers about Bitcoin. I just talk to them about life. Exactly. He he nails it. He's like, just talk to people about their lives and what they're concerned about, and then try to relate that to Bitcoin. But don't just push Bitcoin on people because they don't wanna hear it. They think it's a scam, and then it feels more like a multilevel marketing. You're just trying to rope them in because you're not interested in them. You just wanna sell what you wanna sell. So I found that to be a much better style for just opening conversations about what I was doing and what Bitcoin is and why why it matters so much to me.
[00:39:02] Unknown:
I mean, I guess your your your your bike also said Bitcoin on it. It's, like, all over the place. Right?
[00:39:09] Unknown:
Not really. I mean, it had the Swan Bitcoin logo on it. Bitcoin Magazine logo on it. Right. And the Bitcoin Magazine logo, but, yeah, Bitcoin Magazine, that logo said Bitcoin pretty big. Yeah. But if you're just looking at the bike, you wouldn't immediately see that it was about Bitcoin.
[00:39:25] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I guess I went in with preconceived notions. I'm trying to think of when I first saw the bike. I was like, oh, it's a Bitcoin bike. Well, when you see the orange saddlebags in the Bitcoin orange, and you're a Bitcoin What do you think about Bitcoin orange? Was that a mistake? Oh, I love it. I People are very,
[00:39:42] Unknown:
I think it's a love hate thing. It's like Really? Either love it or hate it. I have not encountered that. Well, I haven't really encountered opinions about it. It's just there. It's kinda like 21,000,000.
[00:39:51] Unknown:
We like to talk about the hard topics on dispatch.
[00:39:56] Unknown:
Yeah. I I like it because it's bright. It's it's really bright.
[00:40:00] Unknown:
Yeah. It's a very aggressive color.
[00:40:02] Unknown:
It's like the rising sun. Alright. Oh, it's a new dawn. It's a new dawn that will So so when Bitcoin does,
[00:40:10] Unknown:
what what how do you if you were gonna pitch Bitcoin to someone after so I guess, naturally, like, you're having that conversation. Right? And then Bitcoin eventually comes up. What do you what's what's your what's your quick pitch on Bitcoin?
[00:40:25] Unknown:
So I heard a really good one that I'm just gonna shamelessly rip from someone in, Charlotte. Ones. Yeah. Yeah. So someone in Charlotte, this was, you know, early this year, so inflation was really popping off. And they said it was something like, you ask somebody, you know, the that you say the Fed has printed 40% of all the money in circulation, of all the dollars in circulation in the last year. Did your bank account go up by 40%? Did your 401 k go up by 40%, your stock portfolio, your house, all these different assets? Maybe one of them did. Maybe you live in a really nice neighborhood and your house price went up 40%. But everything across the board did not go up 40%.
So where did that value go? Someone else took it from you. That's what money printing is, and that's what Bitcoin fights. When you buy Bitcoin, they can't do that to you. And I thought that was a really clear everyone understands that from a bartender to the investor because everyone, you know, looks at their income, their assets, and they see, oh, that didn't go up. And you can look at a chart that verifiably says the dollar, to some extent, went up 40% Right. In supply.
[00:41:41] Unknown:
That's just somebody else has those next dollars. That's a tactic I very rarely I very rarely go down the inflation. But I guess it is it's, like, hot right now. Right?
[00:41:52] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's tough. It's a mainstream topic all of a sudden. And I think that that is, like, fortunately or unfortunately, part of the game. If you want people to become interested in Bitcoin, you have to hit on something that's topical or something that really matters to them, or they're not gonna care. Because if you hit on what matters to you, they might not care about it. And
[00:42:13] Unknown:
So usually when I, if I am tasked with talking to someone who's kind of Bitcoin curious, I try not to I'm past the point in my Bitcoin life where I try and convince someone they need Bitcoin. So I only really talk about Bitcoin with people that already recognize they're curious about it. They they recognize that there is some kind of need for better money. Yeah. But, usually, what I line into is, that it's just ridiculous, this idea that you need to either be, a financial guru or hire someone that is to manage, like, this diversified portfolio to protect your wealth and all that bullshit that that entails.
And then at at its core, like, Bitcoin is immensely simple. Mhmm. Right? Like, I I feel like we get dragged down into I mean, obviously, I've spent hours, days, years going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and there's a million different things. There are different directions you can go down, and no one ever learns everything there is about Bitcoin. But to me, the promise of Bitcoin is, that it's extremely simple and that you just you're able to just live your life and do whatever you're passionate about, and then at the end of the day, save and better money, spend and better money, and you just don't even have to think about it. You just stack, and if everything goes as we expect it to go, it should increase in purchasing power over time, and you don't have to think about it. Yeah.
And I think that resonates with people because there's just such a mental burden. Like, our day to day lives are just filled with so much bullshit that if you can cut out that one aspect, all of a sudden, you're freeing yourself up to to actually live your life to the fullest. Yeah.
[00:44:23] Unknown:
I met a lot of people on this trip that don't even understand that you need a financial adviser to to make it, though. Right. You know, either because they're and this is all over crypto, they think, well, you just have to buy a Lotto ticket. They don't understand that Right. Anything has ever been different, or they just don't understand, like, the impact of inflation. I met a surprising amount of people that are just they just deal with dollars. Like a a Harley sales guy, I asked him. He said, you know, I'm a traditional guy. My son, you know, watches YouTube about Bitcoin a lot, but I don't really understand it. I just deal with cash. And then later I asked him Then he just holds cash. Yeah. I was like, well, you know, what you you have a family, like, what assets do you have? Do you buy stocks or whatever? And he said, no. I I told you I just have cash. He literally has cash in a mattress and in the bank.
That's it. And That's a losing strategy. With inflation, he just doesn't know what to do. You know? So and I think he That's interesting. An older guy. I think he just thought cash is king. You you just have cash, and then you're fine. Hasn't been horrible. Inflation hasn't been terrible. This is just how the world works. You're you know, they don't think about
[00:45:37] Unknown:
But it's that same thing. He he doesn't want the mental burden. He doesn't even wanna consider it. Right? Yeah. I guess that's true. But he has yeah. He doesn't even consider it. I guess what I I mean, especially with the younger people, it's, like, so normalized now that they have, like, a Robinhood account, and they're, like, picking random stocks. Like, I was, like, chilling with a buddy from high school, and he's, like, showing me his, like, Robinhood portfolio, and he's got, like, random, like, Chinese electric car manufacturers and stuff. I was like, how'd you pick this one? He's like, oh, well, Reddit said, like, I should just, like, buy it or whatever. And he's he like, he's aware that the inflation's an issue and that he he needs to do all this shit. I'm like, I already told you about Bitcoin. You already own Bitcoin. Just fucking stay humble and sack stats and don't Yeah. Fucking deal with this shit. It's a fiat mentality. I think you you
[00:46:24] Unknown:
think that gambling is the only way out because you're sitting on a melting ice cube and even investing in The melting ice cube. S and P 500. Yeah. I mean, e even a stock is a melting ice cube. If you really wanna grow your wealth, you gotta get out there and gamble. And that's sort of what you're billed in my generation.
[00:46:45] Unknown:
Right. I mean, that's I mean, the whole like, the Fiat economists, that's what they say. It's, like, inflation is necessary because it, like, basically forces you not to save. Yeah. You either have to invest or spend.
[00:46:57] Unknown:
Yeah. And invest in riskier and riskier stuff to get the same return.
[00:47:06] Unknown:
Well, the comments are popping off right now. Normalist. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. I it definitely it's a know your audience kinda thing. Right? Like, it's not a one size fits all. Bitcoin is is different things to different people, and so click for, like, I remember when I it's interesting, like, how, like, as you go down your Bitcoin journey, Bitcoin changes for yourself too. Like, I when I first got into Bitcoin, I was looking at it, and, like, I like to gamble, like, poker and sports betting and stuff like that, and I looked at Bitcoin as simply a ideal way to deposit and withdraw from gambling websites.
Like, that's what clicked for me. I was like, because the US government used Visa and Mastercard and all the traditional payment rails to block deposits and withdrawals from online gambling sites. And I was like, well, if Bitcoin is just used by American gamblers, just used by American it should be pretty successful. And, like, that was my entry into the into the rabbit hole. And, obviously, now, like, Bitcoin is is so much more than that to me. Mhmm. That's just a tiny little use case of Bitcoin.
[00:48:24] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's how people get onboarded, honestly, you know, now they're disarmed to reading an article about it because they don't think it's just some Ponzi scheme. They're like, wow, this actually solves a real need in my life. Right. Then they start learning more and more about it, and eventually, they end up as far down the rabbit hole as you or I are. Right. You know, but it starts with just something that hits on a real need for them. Clicks. Yeah. Clicks. Yeah. I we talk about that a lot that, like,
[00:48:58] Unknown:
I think everyone will eventually come to the conclusion and realize the need for better money. I don't really think and I I don't really think we need to convince people of the need, because they will like, I I don't think outward facing Bitcoin marketing is really that necessary, to convince pre corners to become corners. I think what's more necessary is that when they realize the need, we have the tools and education ready for them to make that as easy a process, accessible a process as possible. It's kind of the framing I've been looking at lately. Yeah. That's kinda how I think about it too. Like, you can
[00:49:42] Unknown:
the door is there. You can open it, but they have to walk through it. Right. You're you just make it easy to do that. That's what we can do. Like, I wrote a whole website about economics and finance. Really? With that in mind, yeah, it's called what is money dot info. And basically, what I wanted to do is rebuild, like, Investopedia and the balance to address makes questions like, what is inflation or how do how does fractional reserve banking work and answer it in a truthful way that actually exposes that, oh, our monetary system is complete BS. Oh, wow. You got a lot of stuff on here. Yeah. There's, like, 30 something articles that I wrote. Yeah. And the the idea is that people will come to it through Google by asking questions. So they'll Google things like Cantelon effect because they hear it somewhere, and then they'll end up on my site reading about what that is. And I've never really mentioned Bitcoin until the very end of an article.
And then I'll start talking about solutions. And what if we had, you know, a monetary system that at the base layer solved for this inflation that causes all these other problems? If that existed, that would be a great solution to that. Oh, by the way, there's this thing called Bitcoin that is exactly that. That's interesting.
[00:50:56] Unknown:
I love how Bitcoiners have, like, all these different so did you do the all these different projects? Did you do this before or after the ride? This was before. I wrote all this in 2020.
[00:51:06] Unknown:
I love it. Yeah. And put up some YouTube videos too that kinda mirror the articles. Fuck yeah. Yeah. It's been fun to do. It's it's an insanely rewarding experience to write all that content and then just watch people find it. Watch the Google search search console. You can see people finding articles, and watch articles blow up, and people find it interesting and useful. It's really cool. Let's talk about
[00:51:38] Unknown:
winsome hacks. Just don't run up to someone looking all sweaty and fervent and say, have you heard of our Lord and savior, big one? We touched on briefly. We touched on the beef the beef initiative. It's something that I've been diving into pretty pretty hard. I was just at the Colorado one. What are what are your thoughts there? I mean, it's it's to me, it's crazy because it's it's like all these different elements of empowering yourself as an individual all kinda coming together, and and and Bitcoin is just a a small portion of that. Right? Like, in the Colorado thing, my understanding was that was a a bigger Bitcoin portion than usual, and it was, like, you know, maybe 10% of the content or 15% of the content.
[00:52:31] Unknown:
Yeah. I love what they're doing with the beef initiative and that they're bringing these parallel communities who kind of understand the ethos behind Bitcoin, but ranchers are a great example of probably the last people who would ever really seriously read about or get curious about Bitcoin because they're not technical people. They're out in the field working with their hands. They're not the finance tech people that gravitate to and get interested in something like Bitcoin. And they're, to my understanding, scammed a lot by technologies and, you know, newfangled things that people say you need this for your farm or your ranch.
So they do not want anything to do with Bitcoin. The beef initiative bridges that and shows them that actually 90% of your values line up perfectly with how Bitcoin operates, so you should understand what this is. But Slim has done it really well and that you also need to know that Bitcoiners understand you. Before we just start pitching, We want you to know that we're interested in beef. We're interested in food. We're interested in getting to the root to, as as Slim says, the seed of the soil of the seed or something like that. Like, all the way down to the seed and the soil. He's got a bunch of sayings. Yeah. He's got all these catch phrases. Like, where do they where does what you're eating come from? Shake your rancher's hand. Exactly. And shake your hand. I mean, that lines up perfectly with with Bitcoin meetups. Like, shake a Bitcoiners hand. Yeah. Shake a local Bitcoiners hand. Exactly. Go meet real Bitcoiners in person. That's an interesting perspective that you had, because I actually
[00:54:05] Unknown:
a little bit thought the opposite. So I've done a lot of work with activists. And activists is very and activists is very fulfilling work because, first of all, I mean, you do not have to explain why Bitcoin is needed. I mean, they have a massive need for censorship resistant money that can be transferred around the world, across borders, and not be stopped by, like, the authoritarians that they're fighting against. They just want to be told, you know, what tools are available to them and how they can use those tools. And with ranchers, it felt very similar to me. Like, I I taught, I did a Bitcoin 101 in Colorado at Jason Reich's ranch, small family ranch. It's, like, 300 acres. He stewards, like, the surrounding 4,000 acres.
It's just a humble 300 acre ranch.
[00:54:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I visited on my trip. It's And Yeah. And, he's awesome. But
[00:55:03] Unknown:
the ranchers were really perceptive. Like, they were they were really interested, and they they had, I mean, generations of just getting, you know, stamped down and heard in every possible fucking way. Like, e Econo Alchemist did a so it mostly wasn't Bitcoin. It was it was ranching. It was sustainable farming practices, regenerative agriculture, raising children, home births, homeschooling, but Eco did one presentation, I did a mining panel, and then I did a Bitcoin 101. And Eco obviously joined for the mining panel too. Eco gets up there, and he's like, I'm not a rancher. I'm surrounded by ranchers. So I was like, how am I supposed to do this presentation? And he's like, well, one thing we can agree on is that the state hates us.
He was just like, this is how the state has I don't have to tell you guys how the state has trampled on ranching or whatever. This Bitcoin is this tool that can empower you and and and give you personal responsibility back, get back that individual power. And ranchers are the type of people that, like, they like, everything comes down to them. Like, they know personal responsibility. Like, one of the hardest issues with Bitcoin in the developed world, is that just people have been groomed to not have personal responsibility in any aspect of their life. They're like, oh, there's always excuses. We're a heavy litigious society. There's always someone else you can sue. Someone else's fault, it is. Someone holding your hand. Some regulation telling you you can't do something, so you don't do it. But with ranchers and with activists, that's not the case. They live lives of radical personal responsibility already.
So that is to me, has always been one of the biggest hurdles, and that hurdle just does not exist on the on the ranching side. Yeah. That's that's what I love about that community. And there's so many other communities, I think, out there that really get personal responsibility,
[00:57:06] Unknown:
proof of work, like, they're aligned to the ethos of how Bitcoin operates or I don't know how to put that, but how Bitcoin operates in kind of reinforces a certain ethos. It requires personal responsibility. It runs on proof of work, and ranchers get that innately. Their entire life is proof of work. You can't grow a cow without Exactly. Going out there every day and putting in the work. You can't bolt. You should have seen their eyes light up during the mining conversation. Yeah. I bet that was super interesting. And, like, it made so much sense to them. Yeah. Because they get that foundation. But it's then my point about them not touching Bitcoin before something like this is it's such it seems so foreign when you're not talking to someone who really understands it. Because when you hear about it everywhere else, you hear about it usually in the context of casinos and high-tech and finance stuff.
And that's just far out something that they don't really wanna deal with for the most part. But when you connect it back to what they do care about and their values, then they get it immediately.
[00:58:11] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. You have to you have to know mean, you have to know your audience. I also don't think, like, I think Bitcoin is falsely perceived, right, as being like a a fintech innovation or something for finance pros. Like, I, like, I've had so many people say that to me. Like, oh, I'm not interested in Bitcoin because I'm not the finance person. Mhmm. It's like, no. That's why you should be interested in me. Yeah. That's who it's for. Yeah. So I have an interesting so so I had this issue myself because I was I was I was, like, a very privacy focused Bitcoiner in the beginning, and I was, like, very concerned about going to meetups when I was first getting into Bitcoin because I didn't know if I was gonna get scammed or robbed or targeted as a Bitcoiner.
Sounds like you were, like, kinda the same way. Like, what advice do you have for people that, you know, maybe they're a NIM on Twitter, maybe they've never really had a face to face conversation about Bitcoin, that is anxious about going to a local meetup?
[00:59:26] Unknown:
I would say just start small. Start with the meetup organizer, maybe try to have coffee with someone, like, broach the in person thing in a way that you feel comfortable with and steps that you feel comfortable with, and then go more and more out there as you get more and more comfortable going to meetups, meeting people, being a public face. I use a NIM. I use a NIM on this trip, and that's just sort of the the line between privacy and convenience. Like, I don't wanna be so private. It's a trade off balance there. It's a trade off. Yeah. And we talked about that at the meetup yesterday here in Nashville. It's all a trade off. So when you think about privacy, it's very easy to go down the rabbit hole and be like, I need the cleaned up phone and the tails on my computer. Right. The full extreme side. Yeah. But it's so hard to really live life like that for most people. And for most people, it's not enjoyable to live life like that. So you have to figure out where's your balance there and to get more comfortable
[01:00:22] Unknown:
revealing selectively parts of your It's not all or nothing. It's not all or nothing exactly. I think that's a mistake a lot of people make too. So they think, and you see people, like, overexpose themselves because they're like, oh, well, this stuff is already out there, so I might as well Yeah. Go even more. Right? But, really, like, every little thing you do is there's there's this trade off here, and you can you can balance it to a degree. And, I mean, ultimately, I mean, I've met so many lifelong friends, you know, people that I consider family that I've only met because I was willing to step out of that box.
Same.
[01:01:03] Unknown:
Yeah. I went to a really interesting meetup in, Costa Mesa, California that's run by a guy who goes by Hetty Wook on Twitter. Oh, yeah. Don't know his real name. Nobody knows it. And I interviewed him, and he wore a mask during the interview. But at the meetup, he just said no pictures of people. You take pictures. I had the bike there and stuff. People were taking pictures of themselves or whatever, but do not take pictures of the group. And he talked a lot about Bisc and different privacy tools and mixers and things, and that's kind of the focus of that meetup because he's super into privacy. That's awesome. But he's also a meetup organizer, and he's shows his face, but I think the calculus for him is, like, look, people are not gonna come out to this meetup to try an in person scam just me because there's so many easier ways to
[01:01:51] Unknown:
scam than to It's a balancing act. Yeah. It's a balancing act. I I really like the, basically, no photos or videos of people without their consent Mhmm. As a meetup rule. It's something that Jay from New York BitDevs, you know, also a NIM, doesn't put his face out there or whatever, says no photos, no videos. It's something that he was very strong about, to the point where, like, if someone new came to the meetup and they, like, pulled out their phone to take a picture, like, the whole meetup would just, like, stop and everyone would just turn and look at them. Like, the peer pressure is very, very strong.
And we borrowed that, like, for nat NASH Bitcoiners, for the Nashville, things. And it's it's definitely a balancing act because photos get you a lot more exposure. So it's the easy option is to just have no photo restrictions, But there's something really special in the like, this world that's, like, so we just, like, live in this digital panopticon now where, like, all of our lives and all of our conversations like, we saw that happen during COVID where, like, all these conversations that were happening in bars and stuff started happening on Zoom and Clubhouse and Twitter spaces recorded forever, sometimes publicly broadcast as well.
And just to have these, like, in person meeting spaces where, essentially, this conversation's happening, and the only people that know the conversation happened or what the conversation was were the people that were there at the moment just seemed so real and so special Mhmm. That I think people are sleeping on that as a line. Like, I'm not saying that everyone should do that. And there is a balancing act like this guy's awesome that started, Knoxville big corners after he came to Nashville big corners, and he's like, this is awesome. I gotta start 1 in Knoxville. He takes pictures.
He'll he'll post, like, one picture per meetup, and he'll just, like, black out everyone's faces. Mhmm. And then he gets that exposure out of the picture, but he doesn't actually dox anybody in the picture, and that that's an interesting balance. We have, Bitcoin in the comments saying phones are always listening, though. Well, I mean, I'm not against the idea of people putting
[01:04:27] Unknown:
like, having, like, Faraday boxes or something. Everyone turns off their phone and puts it in the box. Or That would be really cool if, like, the meetup organizer brought a little safe to the bar or whatever, and everyone put your phone in there, not just for the microphones, but for the quality of conversation. Yeah. So people aren't looking at their phone. Like, I wanted,
[01:04:45] Unknown:
like, we're gonna have a bunch of different events at the park. And one of the things I've been playing with is, like, when you go to, like, comedy shows nowadays, a lot of times, they don't want you to record the conversations because, otherwise, their jokes get old. So they have these things that are, like, you you just wear them around your neck, So you're holding on to your phone, but it's in a sealed it's in a sealed bag, so you can't access it unless you go to the staff, and the staff unlocks it for you. Yeah. I've seen that at, like, sometimes at concert venues. Yeah. I think that'd be great for, like, small Bitcoin events, because everyone would be present. You don't have to and people would feel more comfortable that, like, oh, like, maybe this person is secretly recording me,
[01:05:27] Unknown:
that they're not doing that. I wonder if we could talk to one of those companies and and talk to them about, like, we'll give you a bunch of free press if you just give us a bunch of these bags Yeah. You know, for different and we can hand them out at Grassroots Bitcoin. Like, every meetup gets 10 bags or whatever. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do that. I really like that idea. Yeah.
[01:05:45] Unknown:
Did did you see were there a lot of meetups that had a no photo policy, or was it rare?
[01:05:50] Unknown:
Kinda half and half, maybe. A good amount of the more established meetups had a no photo policy. I found that, honestly, a lot of meetups, people were just too intent on talking to other Bitcoiners. They weren't really caring about photos. Like, that wasn't why people came, you know? So the no photo policy was implicit. It's just no one takes photos anyway, so it's not an official Right. Policy.
[01:06:14] Unknown:
I mean, it always what really, like, bothers me is when people do, like, the I'm at some, like, event or something and people do the, like, the pan shot. Shot. Yeah. Where they, like, just they, like, sit there and they just literally hit every single person in the room.
[01:06:31] Unknown:
I just don't think Bitcoiners by and large are that kind of person that are clout farming on Instagram.
[01:06:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I notice it just everywhere now. Yeah. I mean, I notice it in other circles, but I didn't Like, I was just at, like, the Music City Grand Prix or whatever, and, like, people are doing it all over. I was at the HRF's, you know, Oslo Freedom Forum, and, like, people are doing it in, like, in the crowd or whatever, and I was like, this is, like, completely out of touch. I do not Yeah. That's the last place I would expect that. And I'm, like, just sitting there with, like, my hat my hat down just, like, turn off your fucking camera. Wow.
Yeah. I like the the no photo policy is interesting. I think people should do that more. And there's a mix there too. So the other issue is, like, okay. A lot of people, I think, agree on no photos of crowd, but then it's like, do you allow pictures and videos of, like, a if you're having a panel, like, or a presentation of the panelists. And then it's like, okay. Well, if there's this great content, like, why are we limiting it to just the local people? And I'm, like, pretty torn on that one. Obviously, I have a podcast that is explicitly public. Like, it gets broadcast worldwide, but there's something to be said about the conversations are different when you don't have a camera and mic pointed at you. Mhmm.
So a lot of the conversations, like, I wish we had captured a NASH big corners and posted online, might not have even happened
[01:08:11] Unknown:
if we were recording them in the 1st place. Right? Yeah. There's kind of a catch 22 there. Yeah. I don't know if that's the right expression, but, yeah, there's certain things that when when it's purposefully recorded, it just totally changes the nature of the conversation.
[01:08:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And there's this other thing that, like, there's a reason why, so I've noticed that, with with podcasting, there's been a big push towards video, and it's because just people like seeing faces.
[01:08:41] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[01:08:42] Unknown:
They you just all the incentives are lined up in a way that, like, people that have videos of them and their guests, they do better on all these platforms. And what I've noticed is that, yeah, a lot of them, especially in the Bitcoin space, like, if you go on as a NIM, they'll let you have your camera off, But it's almost like those people are penalized Yeah. In terms of situation. So, like, with with dispatch, I've made it I've made it audio native. So, like, no one feels there's there's, like, this peer pressure almost where, like, a lot of people have I think a lot of people, myself included in the beginning, like, our we, like, did we, like, our faces became public because we felt almost like this unspoken peer pressure to do it. You didn't wanna be the only panelist or whatever or the only person that that had, Just wearing a mask. Just wearing a yeah. And as soon as you wear a mask, you look like a fucking terrorist too. Yeah. Exactly. I'm so sorry. Face like, criminalizes you Mhmm. Or at least, like, the perception.
And I would just say, like, 2 items on that topic is that, first of all, if you're someone that's anxious about it, first of all, you know, speak up. You you don't have to you don't have to do it. You can you can you cannot expose your face. A lot of people don't. But then second of all, like, to people that are running shows and people that are running meet ups, to be aware of this, like, to make sure that people are, like, actually comfortable with going through with it, and they're not just kinda getting pressured into it and don't wanna speak up. Yeah.
[01:10:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Always ask. You know, assume that people don't wanna put their face out there. I think that's a pretty safe assumption. I like, Bitcoin's comment that avatars could help. It'd be pretty cool. Like, you know, you can do those Zoom backgrounds and on Instagram and stuff, you can do, like, face filters to have that kind of thing. I mean, it's not perfect, obviously, but because you're not controlling it. It's Yeah. Digitally done, so you don't know exactly what's happening behind the scenes, but that would be pretty cool because it a lot of it, I think, with faces is you can see emotions. Yeah. If you wanna see them, you can read more. Expressions.
[01:11:08] Unknown:
Yeah. You it just makes it more live and interesting. There's a reason why, like, we, like, have face to face conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Trying to emulate that. Little closer to that. Yeah. No. Avatars kinda make sense to me. Yeah. I mean, I think that adds an element. I mean, I kind of so, like, my tactic with dispatch, obviously, is that, like, I have the live chat in the mempool, Well, Wizz's mempool up. So, like, there's something going on on the video screen. It's just not our faces. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. I like this. That's, like, the trade off that's the trade off balance I took here.
[01:11:48] Unknown:
Or show like, on on, Rod's podcast on building with Bitcoin It's a screen share. Screen share. Yeah. Yeah. So you can pull things up and look at stuff without showing any faces.
[01:11:59] Unknown:
So there's still something to do there. Yeah. I mean, we had a long conversation about this exact conversation before we launched that. Yeah. And I think that's a cool balance that he did. Yeah. It's really nice. And it works well for the format of his pod, like, showing what people are building. I actually get Marty has been giving me a lot of shit on rabbit hole recap because, he uses, like, a really nice, like, 4 k camera, and I'm using, like, a $30 webcam. And and the reason is is because I just I still to this day do not feel comfortable on camera, and I I just I like that it's intentionally poor quality. Yeah. It's like I it's like, okay. My trade off is you're still gonna see me, but you're gonna see me a little bit blurry. It's not gonna be
[01:12:43] Unknown:
Marty and a handful of pixels to a pod.
[01:12:47] Unknown:
He's like, Matt, is it a costing? Like, I'll buy you the camera. I was like, no. I like my webcam. Dude, this has been a fucking awesome conversation. I think the freaks will find it very helpful. Before we wrap up, you know, I like to end it with some final thoughts.
[01:13:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I guess my my final thought would be start a meetup or join your local one. I think there's a there's a lot more to in person Bitcoin than meeting up at a bar and chatting with people. There's a lot coming out of this. A lot of circular economy, workshops, education, good friendships. I mean, like you said about having a family, after this trip, I now feel like I have a family around the world because not only have I met and stayed with a lot of Bitcoiners in the US, but Bitcoiners all around the world have seen what I've done. And now that's the first thing I think when I'm going somewhere. Where are the Bitcoiners? Because I wanna meet them. They're gonna be my local guides to the area and the people who I get to know to get to know the culture of that area, what I wanna do in that area, and just have a friend on the ground. It's it's an incredible network.
[01:13:54] Unknown:
I cosign that. Go to a local Bitcoin meetup. If you don't have 1, start 1. If you do have 1, you could still consider starting 1, and Bitcoiners, it does feel like a family all around the world. Mhmm. Actually, I have one more question for you before we wrap up. To big corners that are considering learning how to ride a bike, what is your recommendation there?
[01:14:18] Unknown:
Okay. So I had kind of a strange route to learning to ride. I got a motorcycle license in the US, but never had a motorcycle. So I did the it's called MSF, Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, and it basically teaches you how to roll off 0 and get to 20 miles an hour. It's doesn't and kinda lean over and do slow speed stuff. It doesn't really teach you how to ride a motorcycle. I think only experience can do that. As soon as I got the license, I moved abroad, and I started riding in Southeast Asia. And that was looks like a terrible place to learn, incredible place to learn.
It's much, much, much safer for motorcycles than the US. Because there's just so many motorcycles. There's so many motorcycles. I think a lot of it is the kind of instinctual cycle psychology of riding, other people riding motorcycles since most people are on a motorcycle, most people are in a t shirt and shorts with flip flops and barely a helmet on, if a helmet at all. Right. Sometimes they got a whole family on their back. So they have as much, if not more to lose by hitting you than you have from hitting them or from you 2 colliding. So people are just watching more, like f 150 that can just, like, knock you off the road. Yeah. Driving to Dallas, you got f 150 just going 90 while they're texting because they don't care. They're gonna be totally fine if they run over a Prius or they run over you. They're not even gonna notice if they hit you on the So your main advice for someone who wants to get started with motorcycles is to go to Southeast Asia and learn that? To move halfway around the world.
I mean, you can learn in the US too. I would say just go out of cities, go out into the country and learn on country roads where there the drivers are to give you a little more space. There's more room to breathe. Don't try and learn on the 405 in LA. Right. That's not the place to do it. Just gonna die. Yeah. You're you're gonna injure yourself and invest in the safety equipment. It's worth it even if, like, hopefully, you never have to use it, but get a jacket. You can get jeans with pads in them that have Kevlar. So if you slide out, you're fine. Because normal jeans, you slide out on the highway. They will burn out in about 2 seconds, and you're right on skin. Get boots, gloves, at least gloves and a helmet, and ride with that every time you ride, and, you know, that's the best that you can do to
[01:16:38] Unknown:
to help yourself if you do. And and have some kind of Bitcoin plan in place in case of a head injury.
[01:16:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Get your ducks in a row.
[01:16:48] Unknown:
Awesome, Sid. This is fucking fire conversation. I wanna thank you again. Thank you. For joining me, and it's always a pleasure kicking it with you. I'm sure we're gonna have many good moments in the future in person face to face, which is awesome. I wanna thank all the freaks for joining us in the live chat and who continue to support the show. Reminder, I will be going live with Rockstar in the studio in about 2 hours, and we'll be talking about a bunch of different things, including the tornado cash sanctions. So be sure to join us for that.
Appreciate you all. Stay humble, StackSats.
[01:17:31] Unknown:
Peace.
Introduction to the podcast and the purpose of the dispatch
Acknowledgment of support and ways to support the show
Discussion about the podcast format and upcoming topics
Introduction of the guest and conversation about their background
Discussion about the rise of Bitcoin meetups and their impact
Conversation about the benefits of staying with Bitcoiners during the motorcycle trip
Tips for traveling on a budget and cooking on the road
Positive experiences and the hospitality of Bitcoin meetups
Approach to talking about Bitcoin with non-Bitcoiners and the importance of understanding their perspective
Discussion about the need for better money and the pitch for Bitcoin
The importance of in-person Bitcoin meetups and the sense of community
The balance between privacy and exposure in the Bitcoin community
