In this episode of The Confab, Max dives into a wide-ranging conversation with Zach Herbert, CEO of Foundation. Known for his insightful perspectives, Zach returns to discuss a variety of topics that intersect with Bitcoin, including health, family, and the challenges of balancing work and personal life. Max and Zach explore the intricacies of the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as the potential for innovative mining solutions. Zach shares his thoughts on the current state of the Bitcoin hardware market and the exciting developments at Foundation, including the upcoming release of Passport Prime.
Max and Zach go into the realm of health and nutrition, discussing the impact of modern diets and the importance of natural foods. Zach shares his personal journey with health, emphasizing the benefits of a balanced diet that includes natural sugars and healthy fats. The conversation touches on the challenges of modern parenting, the importance of proper nutrition for children, and the potential for new business ventures in the health and wellness space.
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FOUNDATION
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(00:02:09) BOOSTS
(00:04:23) THANK YOU FOUNDATION
(00:05:34) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
(00:06:45) Welcome Back
(00:11:00) Family and Relocation
(00:17:23) Bitcoin Mining Dreams
(00:29:04) Passport Prime Updates
(00:33:20) Conference Vibes and HWWs
(00:49:02) Critique of Bitkey and Ledger
(00:52:03) Mental Health in the Bitcoin Community
(00:54:25) Health, Nutrition, and Family
(01:26:03) Future Plans and Business Ideas
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless. Bitcoin.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
Now what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:00:22] Unknown:
Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
[00:00:42] Unknown:
Welcome back to another confab episode. For any of you ungovernable misfits who have been around for a while, you'll know exactly what these are about. But for the new listeners, and we have quite a few of you, these episodes aren't just about the technical side of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin news, and the Freedom Tech. If you want a more focused show like that, you go to The Bitcoin Brief that I record with q and a every other week, Monero Monthly that I record with Seth, Action News for Mining Insights with John, or the new Freedom Tech Fridays, which will be released live every Friday going forward with q and a, Seth, and myself. For the confabs, we like to keep it loose. We have conversations like we would in a bar or a coffee shop, and I invite some of my favorite people on to shoot the shit and see where the conversation goes. Today's episode was with Zach Herbert, a return guest, the CEO of Foundation, and every now and then, I get Zach back on.
We always cover these interesting topics, either in the mesh to Dell or in private messages back and forth. He's interested in a lot of stuff, and a lot of our interests do cross over. And today, we went pretty deep into health, family, and a little bit of Bitcoin. I think you're gonna really enjoy this. Before we dive in, I just wanna take a minute to thank everyone who supported the last Comfab with Kerim, another health related one, actually. We got a really good response from it, starting with Jordan with 10,000 sats.
After listening, I ordered some ZMA to see what Karen was on about, and it really worked like he said it does. Very helpful with sleep, very alert when waking up, and you can notice a positive shift in electrolyte balance. Next up, MK six seven seven, late stage HODL with five thousand sats. I've typed out a long boost and then just decided everything I typed was gay. Anyway, here are the high points from this episode. Max, it was double hard for me. Kerim, yeah. There are always ways you can make it harder. You have a dirty mind. Late stage Huddle.
FOMO chronic with five thousand sats. House Shaman should be a more regular occurrence. I think he will be. Mister MDM with three thousand sats. Excellent. My go to supplement is tramadol, but might have to add ZMA to the regime for big, jizzy loads. AI BLE, listening to the ungovernable misfits is a great way to increase your testosterone. Back from the Fiat camps looking forward to catch up with the show. Your chats with Karim are always excellent and full of great information. Thank you also to all the streamers. I really appreciate it. It really does help this show grow. And thank you also to BC nineteen eighty four Adam. He actually sent a boost to my PayNim that I actually don't think I have access to anymore, and we should have taken off the show notes but I fucking didn't. So I really appreciate them, mate. But if they have got lost, I I do apologize, and it's my own stupid fault for losing those. And we just take it as a sacrifice, but, hopefully, I'll get them back, and I appreciate it.
He boosted saying, privacy is not a crime. The intolerant minority will win. Hashtag free samurai. Thank you, mate. I appreciate your message and sense. I'd also like to thank our sponsors. Thank you, Zach, for sponsoring the show. Thank you to the whole foundation crew. It's very nice to work alongside a team that actually care about privacy and do things properly and don't build shitty, ugly hardware and make it accessible where even a fuckwit like me can secure their SATs with ease, feel comfortable, and feel comfortable onboarding friends and family. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.xyz. If you wanna help support the show, you can use the code ungovernable.
It It will also get you a discount. So if you haven't already got yourself a Passport Core or Passport Prime, go and get one. Go and support this team who are doing things properly. Everything is open source. And if you get one of these devices and you have any questions, you can bug me. And if it gets really technical, we can bug q and a every other week, and he can't get away from the boosts. Go and check check them out at foundation.xyz. I'd like to say a huge thank you to Cake Wallet. Cake Wallet is a wallet that I'm leaning on more and more. The UX has changed and become incredibly clean. They're always pushing forward in both Bitcoin and Monero security and privacy.
They have over half a million users, and for good reason. You can do swaps in app. You can buy gift cards. You can literally use your cryptocurrency. And as I know, many of you Ungovernable Misfits actually live on this stuff. There really is no better place than kWallet. You can use this on any device, Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Linux, download the APK, do this any way you want. And, again, we have a very close connection with that team. Anyone who has any questions or feedback like we did on the last episode I just recorded with Seth on Monera monthly, people are jumping in, and we even had someone do a pull request. So that was pretty cool. Anyway, if you haven't checked them out, go to cakewallet.com.
Download today. And any questions, reach out. Enjoy the show. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Take two. How am I doing? Coming through loud and clear. It's good to have you on, mate. It's been a while and a lot has happened in the was it been six months, a year?
[00:06:58] Unknown:
I don't even know at this point. I feel like last time I was on, I had a shitty mic, and I apologize profusely for
[00:07:06] Unknown:
that. May have been almost a year somehow. Was the last time we did was the one on the Pyramids, or was it when I had you and Q on? I'm trying to think. Oh, I have no idea. It was one of the two anyway. But, yeah, since then, huge congratulations. Not only marriage, but
[00:07:22] Unknown:
become a daddy. That is two huge life events right there. Two months ago. He turned two months yesterday, actually. Oh. But thank you. It's It's been awesome. It's been amazing. Really has been. It's been basically consuming all of my energy and focus as you can imagine besides the company. I can't take a proper paternity leave. I took, like, I don't know how many days, but, it's been truly an incredible experience.
[00:07:47] Unknown:
Yeah. That's a tough one to sort of balance the two. Like, if you're very, very busy with work and then wanting to be present as a father and a partner and they conflict, You want to do the absolute best you can so that you can support and be there financially, but you also want to be there physically.
[00:08:08] Unknown:
The two clash quite a lot, I find. Yeah. I think it helps that my wife and I have pretty clear roles and responsibilities. I don't think we, like, naturally talked about it or planned it in the beginning, but it just gravitated to the idea that, you know, I feed her and she feeds the baby. And so I do almost all the cooking at home these days, which I've I've always done a lot of it. And so it's easy for me to have internal foundation calls all day long. Mhmm. Messages, everything like that while I'm in the kitchen or or doing something. So it's only things like this, right, where I have, like, a important call that's external or a podcast or something like that, though I don't think I've even done any podcasts, but where I would actually come upstairs to my office and step away completely. Mhmm. So usually I'm in the kitchen. And, I mean, the team knows I've always been in the kitchen if you get on calls because I'm always apologizing for cooking sounds in the background even before the baby, but now it's to the extreme. But I think it really helps, you know, to have the defined roles. Right? I'm not really the one feeding him. We've barely even introduced the bottle yet. Mhmm. It's very, very clear that my wife is on baby duty and, you know, I'm there to take care of her, you know, make sure they have what they need, pitch in a little bit, you know, here and there Mhmm. And just be present and around the house.
[00:09:29] Unknown:
I found the same. I felt like I was redundant really for the first sort of year. Baby's like, I want mom. Like, I want milk. I want mum. Like, yeah, you're cool. But until they get a little bit older, there's so little you can do for them. Yeah. It's an interesting one. Exactly. Yeah. I changed diapers. Right.
[00:09:48] Unknown:
You know, unless we have a bottle prepared or something, which like we're starting to do a little bit more now because we have, we have weddings, we have things, you know, throughout the summer. And so we're gonna need a family member to pitch in a little bit here or there to watch him trying to do the bottle a bit. But like, there's not much I can do. I can hold him. I can change his diaper. But then as soon as he's hungry, I gotta pass him to mom.
[00:10:11] Unknown:
Yeah. Are you quite lucky in that sense where you've got family and people who do chip in or they're close by and they can help?
[00:10:19] Unknown:
We do. Yeah. Exactly. So my mom is close by. My wife's parents are close by. I'm talking like ten to fifteen minutes away for each of them. So Perfect. Yeah. I mean, that's why we're here and why we're not in, I wanted to be in New Hampshire, which is, a little bit north of where we are. We're Greater Boston area. Mhmm. You could be in New Hampshire, like, thirty minutes north, maybe less. You know, during COVID, I wanted to just get out of Massachusetts, which became very dystopian, but we decided to stay more local just and buy a house here because of the support that we would get from the parents when we knew we were gonna have a kid. So that so we kind of planned everything around that, which I think makes sense. Right? I mean, if you're completely isolated, I think it can be really hard to do it alone. It it could be expensive too. I mean, we're talking. We don't know exactly my wife's taken six months off from work, which is amazing. We don't know exactly what it's gonna look like when she goes back to work, but we didn't have family, you know, parents close by that could help out. You're you have to end up going through some daycare route or something like that. It's so expensive here. Oh, yeah. It's just just completely insane.
We were talking to some neighbors, and they're putting their, sub one year olds, right, in some kind of day care, like a five day a week thing, $3,000 a month. Mhmm. Yeah. And not even, you know, one year old. It's just it's it's mind boggling, you know, to me, the cost of, you know, all this childcare.
[00:11:40] Unknown:
It's mental. It's not as good as you get from family because, obviously, you want them to be with family, and then you pay. Yeah. We were the same as, like, I was paying the same in childcare as I was for rent, and it was for a few half days for one of the kids. My god. It was absolutely I don't know if I told you. I've left The UK now. Wait. I've gone. No. I didn't know that at all. Yeah. I got the fuck out of there. Oh my god. I felt that dystopian creep and things starting to fall apart and things getting a little bit less safe and less happy to have kids there. Yeah. And so we left two months ago.
[00:12:18] Unknown:
Wow. Well, I've been living under a rock the last, two months. Oh, yeah. I know how it goes. Am I am I allowed to ask where you are, or is that, top secret?
[00:12:27] Unknown:
Way in Sweden and Iceland and Finland and Germany now I want peace. Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Turkey, and Greece.
[00:12:34] Unknown:
Wow. It's, it's quite a big change. That's incredible. How are the kids liking it? Yeah. They love it. I mean, they're young stills. It's not too different for them, if you know what I mean. Mhmm. They had didn't have, like, a friendship group that they had to be torn away from or anything like that, which is why we kind of did it when we did it. But, I mean, yeah, the weather's better. The people are friendlier. There's less stabbings, you know, all those good things.
[00:13:02] Unknown:
Well, that's that's one of the really good things about The United States is that if you ever feel like you don't wanna be where you are, you do not necessarily have to leave the country. Right. You can move to another state, oftentimes an adjacent state. Just knowing that we have that option to move thirty minutes away or if things got a little more dystopian is actually a great option to have as opposed to, you know, having to actually leave the country, which is unfortunate.
[00:13:29] Unknown:
Yeah. It's I I really like that about the states. It's not like Europe where it's like, okay. You can move from this country to this country, and the food is different and the language is different, but the governing structure is very much the same. You're not really escaping anything. Whereas in America, you can have pretty polar opposite places. You know, you look at somewhere like LA and then Texas or something like that. It's like, okay. These are different countries in my mind. They're completely different. That's a pretty cool thing to have. I don't know if we would exercise that option or not. I mean, we put so much into this house already too over the last couple years. I'm actually talking to you from the attic where I basically
[00:14:11] Unknown:
built it out as its own studio office for myself complete with a full bathroom. Oh, very nice. It's awesome up here. I also want to be a little further away from the crying if I have to take an important call or Yeah. Or do a podcast or something. Yeah. I don't think it's perfect. I spent the last probably five months working on that. Had to bring in, you know, contractors and everything and Mhmm. Designed the space myself, did all the floor planning, a lot of the small work myself as well here and there. Got in trouble from the town for Oh. Installing my own central vacuum up here.
Really? Yeah. They said you have to have a permit for that. I'm like, come on, man. Like, I put in a PVC pipe and, like, can I Jesus Christ? I know. It's insane, the the whole process, but I really enjoyed it. And so now I my office became the baby's room, and I'm up in the, attic these days. Nice.
[00:15:03] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. There's something nice about doing at least part of the construction yourself and, like, knowing that you've put your heart and soul into it and that things are done properly. I always find that nicer than, like, just paying someone who they don't care. I don't know if you have the same saying in America, but in The UK, I've worked in and around a lot of building sites and always you hear the builders saying like, oh, yeah, that'll do. Can't see it from my ass. And you're like, you lazy cunt. Like, can you just have some pride in your work? Whereas if you do it yourself and it's your own place, it's like, oh, no. I'm gonna make this perfect. It's not gonna be like, oh, I can't save from my ass now. Do. It's like, no. I wanna do this right.
[00:15:42] Unknown:
Yeah. So I do a lot of, like, electrical, HVAC, not so much plumbing, but a lot of that kind of stuff I've been doing myself for everything, you know, like installing the whole home humidifier, for last winter, which is, you know, electrical. And I guess there's some plumbing and and stuff involved, you know, cutting open duct work, doing all the thermostats. Obviously, all the networking. I have, like, the fancy Ubiquiti networking set up, so that's extended up here with physical Ethernet jacks now for the computer, which is amazing. I never had that, you know, before. The lighting was really important to me. We did do LED lighting, but I found some super fancy, very high color accuracy or CRI, they call it. Okay. Flicker free. You know, all these cheap LED bulbs tend to flicker, and it can really mess with you and cause, like, fatigue over time. Very warm lighting, and everything's dim to warm. So, like, if I come up here at night, I dim it all and, which goes all through the home automation system, you know, with home assistant. Mhmm. And it gets warmer as it dims. So it feels like a nice kinda orange glow, you know, in the evening. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So I do all that kind of, like, little stuff to try to make the space as best as it possibly can be. We also added a second ERV or energy recovery ventilator up here to bring in, fresh air for the whole upstairs of the house. So not just the attic, but also like the upstairs where we have the different bedrooms. Like the baby's bedroom is upstairs. And so you got, like, the fresh air coming into the house, the stale air getting exhausted out of the house. Mhmm. All that kind of stuff wanted to make sure it was perfect. We are saying here is, you know, well, while the walls are open, you know, you may as well Yeah. Do all the little things that you wanna do. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
[00:17:24] Unknown:
Have you thought about if you're good with electronics and you get involved with HVAC and stuff, have you ever considered
[00:17:31] Unknown:
doing anything with mining, home heating, or anything like that? I have. Yeah. I mean, Massachusetts is interesting because we have natural gas heating in this house. Obviously, the state is pushing more and more for electric heating. I did a pretty popular blog post a few months ago that was more targeted towards the Massachusetts community Mhmm. On my personal blog about why everything's so expensive, the electricity, the gas, and that that's a whole another separate conversation. I don't really wanna heat the house on electric. If you had to heat the house on electric, I think doing something mining related makes a lot of sense. Right? Because, of course, you are offset a huge amount of that cost, then you get the heat out of it. So I've thought a lot about that. I don't have any plans to start a business doing this anytime soon, so I think it's okay to talk about it. It's just the idea that everyone thinks about mining for being heating only. Mhmm. Is that your view? Like, I don't think I've ever heard it discussed for air conditioning.
[00:18:30] Unknown:
I've heard it discussed years ago when we first started Pleb Miner monthly Pleb Miner monthly. Pleb Miner monthly. We did a whole month on mining. Yep. And it was discussed, and I can't remember, like, how it was possible to do it, but no one that I know has built it out. What a lot of the guys in our Plev Minor group, they do is, like, drying meats or drying weed or heating
[00:18:52] Unknown:
and stuff like that. But, yeah, never really the air con. I would even, like, angel invest in a company that wanted to do this if anyone was listening in the Plugminer suite. I just not that I would wanna do much. Like, it wouldn't be anything significant. But in some places in The US where natural gas is very cheap and abundant Mhmm. You'll see natural gas air conditioners. Right. The first thought when you hear that is like, how the hell does that work? Right? Because you think natural gas, you think heating, right? You think just burning it. We have natural gas furnaces to heat the home, which are like 95% efficient, way higher than I think most. The guy who built the house originally was a little psycho and put in all these like commercial grade fixtures, which is good, but then also bad because it's more expensive when it comes to maintenance and stuff. But, so you have, like, 95 efficient furnaces. We have the tankless hot water heaters that are natural gas. So, you know, as soon as you open up the faucet and call for hot water, it'll start heating, you know, right away. Mhmm. And it's so much simpler. It's just easy that you have the natural gas. You burn it. It gets hot, it heats the water. Right? Like, it's very simple in terms of, call it, the architecture.
I almost feel like our country or even, like, this whole modern civilization could have been on an entirely different technology path where there used to be natural gas powered refrigerators. There probably still are in different places. I had one in my Airstream. Oh, did you? Seriously?
[00:20:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Not natural gas, but Like a propane powered refrigerator. Yeah. It was dual. So I had a dual fridge freezer. So if we did run out of battery power or pure power, then we did have that as as a backup option. Yeah. So you can use, like, your refrigeration
[00:20:40] Unknown:
cycle depending on the refrigerant used, Right? Where you could introduce heat into the system and you can essentially cause a chilling cycle. Right? You can create with that. And so you could do an ASIC powered refrigerator. You could do an ASIC powered central air conditioner. In this state, Massachusetts, and in a lot of liberal states in The US, and I know in Europe, everyone's pushing heat pumps. So they're all Mhmm. Everything's heat pumps, heat pumps, heat pumps Yeah. Where you, of course, get the heating or the air conditioning where you kind of have, like, a reversing valve that reverses the flow of refrigerant, and it can do either.
And that that's a great technology if your electricity is really cheap. And here, ours is not. And I'm sure, you know, in The UK. Right? It's also not. Definitely not. And so a lot of the resistance to heat pumps amongst maybe a more right wing or conservative is more around probably not the technology, but around the cost, right, because your electricity is so expensive. So in Massachusetts, like 90% effectively of our electricity is generated by natural gas at the state level, at the utility level. And so if you think of it from an efficiency perspective, just pipe the natural gas to my house and let me consume it at the furnace, as opposed to converting it to electricity, losing a lot of that, you know, efficiency. Right. Because there's losses when you convert it to electricity at, like, the power plant. And then you shoot it to my house's electricity, and then it goes into the heat pump. Right. So it's actually, cost perspective, at least it's cheaper for us in Massachusetts to heat our home with natural gas than heat pump. But, you know, lawmakers are talking about trying to ban all the natural gas stuff requiring that everyone upgrade to a heat pump. So that's why I think, like, the more conservative folks get uptight when they hear that kind of stuff. But you could theoretically go build a heat pump like device. Right? Something that could provide both heating and air conditioning to your home by using the heat from ASIC mining. It doesn't just have to be home heating. You could build something that was also an air conditioner, and that would completely change the use case for home mining.
Because right now they talk about it as this is a space heater or this is a radiant floor heating. This is something you put only in cold environments. And so if you don't need it in the summer, the spring, the fall, then you only have it on for maybe 40% of the year, or you have it on, but you're just dumping the heat into the ground. So maybe you have a radiant loop and they use the, the yard as a heat sink to dump the heat. And then if it's cold, you don't do that. Right. You have it flow through the home instead. But if you could do air conditioning too, that completely changes the game. So I've been thinking a lot about it, but I mean, there'd be a lot of work involved. You'd have to actually go either to one of the HVAC makers or go buy, you know, these parts and figure out the refrigerant and and make your own kind of all in one system and try to make it compatible maybe with existing home solutions.
[00:23:38] Unknown:
Club minor mafia. If anyone can build this, it is the 200 absolute psychopaths who are in our telegram group Yeah. Who build all this sort of crazy stuff. They're all engineers and smart motherfuckers. So they'll be listening to this. If anyone can build this, you can reach out to Zach and have a conversation because, yeah, you I agree. I mean, if it's possible and it, makes financial sense to do it, then, yeah, definitely.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
I think that just having to deal with refrigerant, right, is probably something that's been more of a barrier to entry because pure heating, if you wanna build a space heater, we all know how to build a space heater. Right? You have the a six. You have a heat sink. You have a fan, and you just blow the fan towards where you want heated. Or, you know, if you're doing radiant, right, you you just need a pump. Mhmm. But now we're talking about refrigerant. We're talking about things that are a bit more complicated, maybe not as easy to buy either. But I'm sure some crazy person could go buy some, like, a natural gas air conditioner, and they rip out the natural gas part, and they stick in. And they like, you could probably hack something together as a proof of concept if you wanted to.
[00:24:45] Unknown:
Let's do it. I I'm telling you, give it a couple of weeks. They'll have something for
[00:24:50] Unknown:
you. The biggest issue though too is, like, the supply of chips, and that's always been something that has bothered me. Mhmm. Behind the scenes, I mean, we've talked to so many companies over the years. Like, if we wanted to make an ASIC related product at Foundation, like a Home Miner, something else Mhmm. Where do we get the chips from? And the problem is is, like, if you want to start a real company that was selling, let's say like an air conditioner, something like that, you're not gonna be able to be successful if you can't warranty it properly. You know, you go buy an air conditioner, you have a multi year warranty associated with it. If you wanna actually sell it as a real product, as a real company, and you can't warranty it if you're ripping out chips from bit main units. Yeah. That's a good point. So that to me has been one of the biggest barriers to entry. And we've done so I mean, back when we were doing Obelisk stuff before starting Foundation in, like, 2018, we were trying to do our own Bitcoin a six.
We've talked to all the different companies. We've begged Bitmain and Canaan and MicroBT. Not as much Bitmain, but Canon and MicroBT, you know, to sell us just chips. A year or so ago, a year and a half ago, one of the new potential Bitcoin ASIC entrants helped them with their chip bring up, like circuit board firmware. You know, they paid us to do that. We're just trying to do anything to get, like, an actual great source of chips that, you know, are new and real that could have some kind of guarantees around,
[00:26:16] Unknown:
specs and longevity, and there's just nothing. It's crazy how Mhmm. There's just nothing. Avril, if you're listening to this from Altair Tech, maybe have a chat. I think he's pretty well connected in that world. There may be something
[00:26:30] Unknown:
that can be done. Yeah. You'd be surprised though how much I mean, I'm not probably wouldn't be surprised how much of it is just buying old bit main boards and stripping the chips off of them. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's basically how the whole industry has the whole open source mining industry has evolved. Yes. Literally that. I love it. I have bit axe at home. I don't know how it professionalizes
[00:26:50] Unknown:
without having a proper source of chips. Yeah. It's a big snacking point. I guess they don't want to sell just chips because they don't want potential competition. And then if you want to manufacture your own chips, you've gotta presumably have special relationships and huge numbers going through. So I don't know how you get around. Wasn't there talk a while ago about some sort of open source chip manufacturing
[00:27:14] Unknown:
from who was talking about it? You've seen Block Square, you know, Jack Dorsey. That was it. It was Dorsey. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the status is with that. Mhmm. I just know that there's nothing that I see. There's nothing I can buy. Yeah. And then Blockstream had acquired Spondoolies several years ago. Spondoolies made, like, a DashMiner Mhmm. Back in the day and Blockstream acquired them. I don't think that went anywhere. I'm not even sure that Blockstream is still working on that actively. Okay. Besides Block, you know, there's some other companies. There's like Chain Reaction, Oradyne, some new ventures that have formed. I don't think any of them are at the point where you could go buy a reel of a million chips for your own use. I don't know if any of them were gonna do that from a business planning perspective. Block said that they would do it, but that was, you know, years ago at this point. Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard to do this kind of stuff, unfortunately.
[00:28:07] Unknown:
Yeah. I was saying to Seth the other day, we were talking about just don't put any trust in anything being done until it's actually done. And I was saying it's kind of like anything in, like, the crypto industry. If someone says I'm gonna do that, you trust that about as much as a three year old saying they're gonna do something. That's the level there should be. It's like 90%
[00:28:30] Unknown:
of the time. Is that a little jab about how we haven't shipped, Passport Prime yet? Oh, it wasn't actually, but I'll I'll take it and use it. No. I'm I'm half kidding. I mean, you know, within the crypto industry, it's so much crap out there that, you know, never comes to fruition. But also when you're doing new things, it's hard. It takes longer than you expect. So, like, with Block, I'm hopeful that they're still working on it. You know, they've put up updates about it. Mhmm. I'm hopeful that even if it's taking them longer than they expected, that they're still gonna work on it because it would be a huge win, you know, for the That'd be massive. Yeah. The whole industry. It'd be huge.
[00:29:05] Unknown:
Seeing as you brought it up, where are we at with the shipment?
[00:29:08] Unknown:
We're so close that I'm I'm frustrated that we haven't shipped yet. We have everything at the factory now and, we're this month building up the, boards and units. Mhmm. Then hopefully, by the end of the month, we'll have the software for v one in a good enough place. Yeah. It might be a little longer, though. It's really hard on the software side, but I would say we're, like, 99% of the way there now. Okay. It's just tough because we wanna give updates as much as possible to those thousand folks who pre ordered. It's tough because you wanna give an exact date, and then you miss that date. And then you wanna get an updated date, and then you miss that date. And, you know, when we originally launched, I think we said, like, April was the target. Yeah. We're a little bit more than two months after that. So it's not like we're a year and we're definitely not gonna be a year. The inside scoop in the software is there's only really two main things that we're polishing up and finishing up right now is like the initial onboarding flow, which is so much work. It's almost like the onboarding flow is the same effort as, like, everything else because you're tapping the NFC cards Mhmm. Writing Shamir shares to them. You're taking encrypted backup. You're sending it through Envoy to store in our server if you opt into that. So there's just these very complicated back and forth flows between like the phone and the device. And a lot of that got held up because the Bluetooth was too slow. So we spent a month improving the Bluetooth Right. Transfer speeds.
So it's like, you know, those kinds of knock on effects. And then the other thing we're finishing up now is the Bitcoin wallet app, which you'd think we would've done first because that's like the most important app, but amusingly for one reason or another, we did it last. We did everything else first, the files, the two FA, all that kind of stuff because that stuff was almost easier to make. Mhmm. And then the Bitcoin app is the hardest thing I think to make because of how many features it has to support, everything that Passport Core does. And so that's also being finished up right now. So that's gonna be separate to Envoy, is that? Yeah. But what's really cool, which I don't think most people realize, is Envoy is on the back end is BDK, which is Bitcoin development kit, which is a block or spirals open source project.
A lot of wallets use BDK now. Other wallets in the space. I don't mean hardware wallets. I mean, like, you know, software wallets. It has LDK. So if you wanna use Lightning, it all plugs into that. Yeah. We're actually on Passport Prime running full BDK Mhmm. Which is hugely beneficial. For example, the the Liana guys use BDK for, like, mini script stuff. So Mhmm. I think it's gonna be really awesome for wallet developers that want to interface with Passport Prime to just know that you're literally working with a device that's just running BDK, and it can do everything that, like, your software wall is already doing. So that integration between Envoy and Prime is actually very straightforward from a technical perspective because if Envoy prepares a transaction to sign, it's using BDK.
And then it passes it to Passport Prime, and it's signing it with BDK. And then it's passing it back, so you don't have to worry about why are things not consistent across the phone and the device. They're actually just all using BDK. And the reason we're able to do that is because we have the operating system that's in Rust, and we could run any Rust libraries on device. We have enough power in the processor to do that where it's 500 megahertz processor as opposed to 80 megahertz on a ledger, a 130 on a cold card. Right? So we're, like, significantly faster and have significantly more memory than any of the other devices in the industry.
[00:32:37] Unknown:
Well, like we said before, like, if you're trying to do something different and I class this as very different, it's not like making Passport two point o. Like, it's not just like I'm I'm doing core two point o, like a a slightly updated something. This is a very, very different device approach in a very different way, so I think it can be forgiven.
[00:32:57] Unknown:
I definitely apologize to all the folks where we missed the original target date in April. I'm overdue to put out some more videos showing everything because it's just awesome to walk through all this stuff. We did have, 20 of them with us at the conference, so a lot of people got their hands on them. You know, that was a few weeks ago Mhmm. In Vegas. And it was amazing, you know, to have that at the conference and to get the reaction from so many people. I'm heavily biased, but it was awesome experience. I also got to do a panel, which I think for some reason, I don't think it's live yet on YouTube. I don't think they've uploaded it. I did a panel with Seed Signer, the lead of the Bitkey project where they created a lot of controversy that week, where Jack was posting, you know, Seedless is safer. Seedless is safer. Absolutely retarded. Yeah. I don't think it was as good of a discussion as it could have been because we only had 30 on the panel, but I thought it was it was pretty good.
[00:33:53] Unknown:
Was it civil? I assume it was with SeedSiler.
[00:33:56] Unknown:
How did it work? You know what I said to my team? So Max, Max guys, not you, Max, obviously, but Mhmm. He's the guy who leads the Bikki project. And I said to my team, I wish he wasn't so nice. Because he came over earlier, you know, to our booth to meet me, to check out the product. Some of the Bikki folks came over as well. And then the guy running the panel, he's not on the Bikki Key project, but Steve Lee who runs Spiral, you know, over a block Yeah. Yeah. Who's awesome. Yeah. We talk. He's great. I said to my team, I was like, it's so annoying that these Big Key guys are all so nice to us. You wanna be aggressive. Right? You wanna tear into them. And, I mean, I wrote that blog post too a couple years ago that was really tore into them. So Mhmm. It's nice that we're able to go up on stage, and we have multiple people who work at Block. And they invited me and Seed Signer onto the panel where I'm arguably maybe the the fiercest critic of have written the most comprehensive criticism of Bitkey.
[00:34:56] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:34:57] Unknown:
They received all that criticism as opposed to doing, like, an NVK like thing Mhmm.
[00:35:03] Unknown:
Cursing us out about it. I think that's where, like, you've got adults in a room. Yeah. You know, like, me and Q on the last episode shat on bit key for a good thirty minutes just non stop from a great height about how terrible it is. But at the same time I'd just sort of shake their hands and still be civil and okay this is not the device that I would ever ever ever use personally Yeah. Or recommend to my friends or family. But you don't have to be an asshole about it. In the same way, like, I don't care if someone runs knots that I don't want to run or if do what you want, just don't be a twat about it because there's gonna be a market. Like, some people are gonna love the Bitkey, and it's gonna be good for some people, but just not for us Yeah. Or anyone we care about.
[00:35:47] Unknown:
Yeah. I I just I think what happened and I don't have an any insider knowledge of this. I think what happened is I think they had people on the project who were not aligned philosophically with, like, the Bitcoin values. And I think they rolled those people off the project and rolled other people on. And I think those people now are in this awkward position of trying to represent it favorably and engage with the whole community and sponsor the Bitcoin conference, you know, do the panel and talk about the deficiencies. My guess is they're probably gonna if they do another I don't know if they're doing another one. Right? My guess is though that, They give you the option. I'm guessing they're gonna fix a lot of the issues or fix maybe the privacy stuff over time as well even if they don't do one with a screen.
So Mhmm. You know, I I don't know. I just to me, it seems like the people who made it that I knew were there, like, when I met some of them in the previous two years at conferences,
[00:36:43] Unknown:
those are not the people that are on the project now. Right. Okay. Those people are gone, I think. Mhmm. Yeah. Well, probably for the best. Even if you get past, like, the screen not being there, which is just fucking retarded in my view. But even if you get past that, it's like, you should still give the option even if you wanna say you think Seedless is safer. So what me and Q were saying is, like, the simple fix would be at least give the option somewhere in the settings where you could go in as, like, developer mode or, like, be careful, make sure you're not by a camera, make sure, like, you're not doing anything completely stupid.
You can access your seed words. If you could just do that, that would be a step. I would push back on that though and say they can't do that without a screen.
[00:37:25] Unknown:
Good point. Their whole model is a two or three multisig, right? Where they have a key in the server, a key in the mobile app, which is troubling, right? Because if you had like a rogue employee go in and somehow ship a malicious version of the mobile app. Right? And that person also had server access. So you're trusting that company at lock, right, has those controls in place, which they probably do because you think about what they're doing on the Bitcoin side and the payment processing side. But still, so you have a key in the app, you have a key in the server, you have a key on device. If you're asking for the seed, the most you could do is you could have the mobile app give you the mobile seed, which is like what Casa does, where you can go in and see the mobile seed. But then you would also need to be able to either see that seed that's on the device, which doesn't leave the device, and that code is open source. Right? So you know that that seed is generated or that key, you know, for that multisig key is generated on the Bitkey device and does not leave it, or you need the server key somehow. Right? So once that happens, that's no longer a cold storage multisig.
That's, like, hot because you're bringing that together. So if you were to be able to display the seed for either the server key or the bit key key on your phone, you would be making that key hot effectively. That would no longer be a cold storage multisig. And then you would probably never wanna use that again. So I could see, like, a big warning thing flashing. This is if you're migrating your funds out. This key is gonna be made hot. Scan your fingerprint on the Bikki device. Are you sure you wanna continue? Yeah. I would agree with you that you should be able to see it. But I could also see the challenge of doing it as if they had a screen, it would it would be a moot point. You could just have the device display the seed. You could have your phone display the mobile key seed. You have two of the three. You could recreate that wallet in Sparrow. You could do a migration out of there and keep everything cold.
Yeah. You see what I'm saying though? It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's not as straightforward. And you know what's hilarious? This makes me think of one of the scammiest companies in the space that I think is still at these conferences is Arculus. I don't think I've ever heard of it. They're a big crypto one. I think there was some controversy in in Nashville where they included a free one in, like, everyone's bag. It's a card form factor, like a credit card form factor. Alright. Similar to a TapSigner or something from CoinKite, but it's like a full featured hardware wallet on the card. Okay. You know how they do seed backups when you set up Oculus card?
The mobile app just displays the seed that's supposed to be stored securely on the card.
[00:40:05] Unknown:
Wonderful.
[00:40:06] Unknown:
One of our team at some point, I can't remember who, this was a couple years ago, reached out to their support and said, what the hell's going on here? And they said, if you're concerned, you can just turn off the Wi Fi in your phone.
[00:40:18] Unknown:
That's amazing.
[00:40:20] Unknown:
So, like, as much as we wanna criticize Vicky, this is the other kind of stuff that we're up against. Yeah. Yeah. That's worse.
[00:40:27] Unknown:
Yeah. And Ledger and actually, I sent someone your way. Since moving, I happened to bump into someone who happened to be into Bitcoin. They were like, look. I've got these mega super VIP passes. Come with me, like, wealthy guy. Like, come with me. And I was like, I can't. I got stuff here. But I was like, make sure to check Foundation out because he was raving about Ledger. He was like, yeah. Ledger's amazing. Like, obviously, it's the best thing. Like, you obviously must use it. And I was like, no. I definitely do not. It's fucking terrible. I would never use Ledger anymore. I would never suggest anyone that I care about use Ledger. And now that we've had a drink together, I don't even want you to use Ledger. So I wanted to go I wanted to go and check these guys out. So I think a lot of people still see some of the worst projects favorably because they have the marketing, because they have that name.
It's scary, really, because, you know, you've got people putting fortunes into these devices that they don't really understand.
[00:41:23] Unknown:
And you have the leaks, you have everything else, and it's just like, oh, Jesus Christ. This is what has consumed my thoughts over the last year or so or even more than that when developing Passport Prime. I'm like, we're developing this device to be the Ledger Killer. Mhmm. I should get, like, a trademark for that. Like, Ledger Killer TM. Ledger Slayer, I think that's better. Yes. Ledger slayer. No. Because, like, it's been a decade. There's no viable competition to Ledger. You know, you they're 90% of the market. Yeah. And, like, okay. What's so bad about Ledger? There's the security aspect, you know, where I don't like that everything is taking place in, like, a black box type thing.
But at the same time, to their defense, they have not had any significant security events ever unlike Trezor. Device level. Device level. Yeah. I mean, they've done crazy shit. Like, this Ledger Recovery thing is one of the worst things I've ever seen in my entire career in this industry or in my time in this industry. Right? It's Yeah. It's bad. I've never seen anything that bad. And I'm it's shocking that they could even launch it at all. And Mhmm. From a device level perspective, the reason I think that they have not had any security events is because my personal theory I don't remember if we talked about this before at all.
They have basically built this Ledger operating system called Bolos, b o l o s. I don't know what it stands for on smart card technology.
[00:42:42] Unknown:
It's very old technology.
[00:42:44] Unknown:
It's like 30 year old technology. It's an it's a different credit card. It's, another name for it sometimes is like Java card Mhmm. Back in the day where you have these Java card applets and they run-in the secure Java card environment. If you wanna open up an applet, you have to load that applet kind of into memory. And then if you wanna switch to a different applet, you have to close that applet and load the other applet. Does that sound familiar? Because that's exactly how Ledger apps work. Yes. Yeah. They basically my theory, and this is once again, I have no insider information, but I think what happened is Ledger went to STMicroelectronics, STM in France, which is, you know, huge semiconductor company.
STM makes you, by the way, the chipset and Passport Core. Mhmm. Not Passport Prime, but Passport Core. It makes the main processor. And they said, we wanna do a a crypto hardware wallet. And, you know, these Trezor guys are doing this open source garbage that is not secure, has no physical security. Mhmm. We are gonna do it on a smart card. Mhmm. And I think what they did is I think they signed an NDA with STM. And I think STM gave them the ability to run the STM internal Java card or whatever smart card operating system. I think Ledger made some modifications and I think that's what it still runs. I think the reason why they can never open source it is because it's not theirs.
I'm pretty sure that it's a huge amount of smart card OS from STMicroelectronics. Might even be majority, you know, smart card OS from STMicroelectronics with some kind of layer that allows these apps to be loaded and unloaded on them. That explains a lot because it explains why, like, the operating system on this new touchscreen device, right, that they launched or these multiple new touchscreen devices is exactly the same that they had twelve years ago. Mhmm. They haven't done any of that. It's the exact same thing. But the flip side is that they're the only ones that allow people to make apps.
And so they've been able to capture the entire market because they're the only ones that have any kind of platform. And if you want to make whatever coin, you can come make an app, you can go work with Ledger, you get in Ledger Live, you know, it gets on the device. No one else does that. Right? Trezor, they support a few coins themselves. Yeah. Bitbox does some stuff themselves. No one has gone for the platform model, and I think that's why Ledger has becomes the market leader. Yeah.
[00:45:03] Unknown:
I agree. If you are gonna coin that term like the ledger slayer, I think that's where the new device comes in, and it is a platform and people can build on top of it. And it's open, and there's a very big distinction between the two companies and their vision and how they move. And so I can definitely see that given time. The other thing I wonder about when I think about, like, large improvements to I mean, I I only really mess around with Bitcoin and Monero. But when I think about jumps in terms of security, I wondered what your thoughts are with all this, like, CTV stuff and covenants and the potential with that stuff going forward. Because when I think about what you're opening up potentially with this new device and this platform, when I think about being able to lock coins and put conditions on things, personally, I see that as a bigger step forward for my security than I would with MultiSig. Maybe people will say, oh, that's a bit of a stretch, but that's how I see it. Have you got any thoughts around it?
[00:46:03] Unknown:
Yes. And I can kinda weave a couple things into that. We really value the platform. We think we understand why Ledger has been successful. Mhmm. So much of their success has been enabling the whole crypto space to come build apps on the device. Within Bitcoin, everything has been pretty simple thus far. But we're approaching an interesting time where there's all this new stuff. Yeah. And all these teams working on this new stuff, whether that's covenant type stuff, things that may require, you know, a hard fork, DLCs. Lava is doing that blending where you can actually borrow against your Bitcoin directly without needing to put it into some like Ethereum wrapped Bitcoin, you know, thing on a different chain.
Frost type stuff that's out there. Yeah. Very rare. New L2s like Ark. Yeah. There's stable coins that may actually able to be built on Bitcoin. So there's all these new things. There's no hardware support for any of it. Yeah. It's a chicken egg problem. If something gets enough adoption, maybe there'll be some hardware support in a couple years. And so my view is, like, you build the platform, you give the developers access to build whatever they want on the platform, especially being able to build in any Rust library. So this is not announced yet, and I'll keep the company identity confidential.
But there's another company that's come out that's doing, DLC lending similar to Lava, but more targeted towards institutions where they could, you know, deposit Bitcoin, bar against the Bitcoin. It's all decentralized. The collateral is held in Bitcoin. It's not rehypothecated. Right? You could see all this very cool tech. We're working with them on the Passport Prime app. Okay. Now would it work on Ledger? They would have a huge headache trying to do this on Ledger. But on Passport Prime, we can run any Rust libraries. There's already a Rust DLC library. You bring the library onto Prime. You run it. You do a simple UI. It's done. It works. Ship it. And so this is the kind of thing that we're really excited about because just within the whole Bitcoin space, there's so much opportunity with all these new companies, all these new projects. Most of them, if you're securing any kind of significant value, you're going to want to have to give your users access to cold storage.
You're going to have a unique user interface that you need to give the users as well. Because maybe if you're doing borrowing or lending, you want it to look exactly how it looks on your mobile app and you want the terminology to match and you want everything to match up nicely, you can't do that anywhere else. And so I think that's, like, probably our big wedge and how I think we're gonna hopefully see a lot of success early on with Prime from a developer perspective where they're gonna say, like, Passport Prime and KeyOS, you know, the operating system is the only platform that they can actually ship the stuff on, and they could go develop it permissionlessly, and they can ship it permissionlessly.
Obviously, you know, my hope is that'll lead to a lot of people buying our devices.
[00:49:02] Unknown:
Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Being able to build this stuff out is no good having it in theory. You've gotta have it in practice and just making Bitcoin more useful.
[00:49:11] Unknown:
Yeah. Be careful. When you say that, you kinda sound like a big blocker there.
[00:49:19] Unknown:
Oh god. I'm so sick and tired of all the stuff on Twitter. It is Me too. I'm very lucky that I do shows with Seth and shows with Q and shows with John, and I just have, like, stable sound minds around me that aren't flapping around and virtue signaling about running some insecure bullshit by some cat eating fuck. It is so frustrating when there's, like, all the interesting stuff, like, we've just talked about and things that are possible. That's where you should have some focus, but instead, it is always about nonsense and virtue tokens.
[00:49:56] Unknown:
Yeah. Oh my god. The cat eating fuck. There's nothing wrong with that guy. Oh, yeah. I tweeted about it. I don't think I tweeted about it directly. I think I replied to some people, you know, a month or so ago, But he was, begging for some company to employ him even at $0 salary just so he can get the health insurance maybe three, four years ago. And I was in his DMs saying, are you okay? Yeah. He's in a working company. I could look into see if this is possible. Because, you know, it it could be really hard as like a unemployed person or self employed person in The US to deal with health care, especially if you have a big family.
Yeah. And I felt really bad for him. And then it came out like a year later that he had like hundreds of Bitcoin. Yeah. And I was like, what the hell, man? Like, I feel scammed. I was trying to find a way where maybe we could help you. I was like a Bitcoin core dev, you know, begging for health insurance money. And you have hundreds of Bitcoin just sitting somewhere, like, on a hot wallet on your computer. It's crazy. Outrageous.
[00:50:58] Unknown:
I thought the same. I've heard lots of things like that through the grapevine. And then you hear, like you say, it's on a hot wallet, hundreds of Bitcoin that goes missing, and then people wanna trust that person solely for their security. And you're like, no. No. No. Literally, like, begging. I don't wanna say begging maybe is a little too harsh of a term, but pleading for someone to employ him even just for health insurance money Outrageous.
[00:51:23] Unknown:
While having that much money.
[00:51:25] Unknown:
Hundreds of Bitcoin. So much money.
[00:51:29] Unknown:
I am incapable of understanding that. Right? Either it's like a mental issue or it's maybe not true that he had hundreds of Bitcoin.
[00:51:39] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:51:40] Unknown:
I don't know. But something is just really off there. And, like, when something's off like that, the last thing I'm gonna do is go install the software on my computer.
[00:51:52] Unknown:
Yeah. It's quite a strange one. If I had hundreds of Bitcoin, I would be traveling and eating well and chilling and yeah. Why do you think, Max, that there's so much, like, mental illness in this space? It feels more
[00:52:05] Unknown:
pronounced. And I don't mean that, like, in a literal term. I mean that as in, like, people are crazy,
[00:52:10] Unknown:
like, absolutely crazy. Do Do you know what? I think it is. I think it's a weird mix of you've gotta be a bit mental to be early. So, like, you're not a normal nine to five functioning like everyone else's brain. Like, you're probably quite curious. You think about things and see things a little bit differently. Maybe you've got a slight chip on your shoulder. There's, like, a certain type, especially to be early. And then on top of that, you then get shoved into a bubble where there's loads of other quite weird people who are quite opinionated and quite autistic and can't see things from other people's perspective.
Yeah. And they also quite like attention, a lot of these people, and then they're all shoved onto this thing called Twitter. And they're all like, oh, what can I say where I get attention and I seem smart? And they're, like, all just fighting out. For me, I'm, like, quite happy being one of the more stupid people in the room because I don't have to try and fight. I'm like, this is not my battle. Whereas I think maybe if you have an inflated ego and you think I'm a fucking smart dev. I build this shit. I've been here since the beginning. I'm pretty special guy. That's where the mental illness starts to come in, I think. Yeah. I think you're probably right. It's pretty strange. Hey. You know what? I just realized. We said before, we were like, hey. What are we gonna talk about? I was like, ah, we don't need to. We'll just chat. There's always something interesting that pops up. Maybe we should chat about health and food. We've covered zero of that.
We have covered absolutely zero of that. Yeah. Zero of that. And that is one of the things that I'm focusing on more. Yeah. And I see a lot of people are focusing on more, especially people who've been in for a little while because it does fight against that mental illness and, obviously, physical illness. And once you get to a certain level and understanding in Bitcoin and realize that the majority of what's talked about is noise and there's pretty simple things you can do to be secure and everything else. I think the focus naturally goes to, like, family and keeping yourself fit and healthy and mentally sharp. So, obviously, like, since having kids, I've had a huge shift in the way I look after myself and think about things.
I assume you feel that especially now, like, pretty hard. What are the changes or thoughts that you're having? Because I know you're and always have been very focused on health and food. And I think ever since we first spoken, I've noticed that it's like
[00:54:34] Unknown:
you care pretty deeply about what's on your table and and what's consumed. Yeah. I think a couple of things. I think one is so much of it has been learning an enormous amount about pregnancy and what that healthy process looks like Mhmm. Throughout, which we can talk about. And then the other one is just, you know, continue to do it through my own kind of health journey. I think probably the last time we talked about this, I was like raw milk Mhmm. Amish cow in the chest freezer, which is all still accurate. Yep. I also have gotten more and more in health Twitter. I actually have a lot of, like, health Twitter accounts. We follow each other now. And, I'm more into the have you heard of, like, the Petey or Ray Pete stuff, like, the bioenergetics and No. The crazy people that think sugar is good for you and everything like that? Oh, no. I've not heard that one. I have, like, one foot in that now as well. Mhmm. We can talk about both. But the most interesting thing is just going through this whole process, you know, with my wife and going to these appointments at, you know, the OB's office and the whole process, right, to conceive and carry and give birth to a child is just so fundamentally broken. It's, like, from a from a medical perspective. You know, there's always the comment on how as Bitcoin goes up in value, all us Bitcoiners are gonna go start all these important businesses and Yeah. Take in all these important projects. And I'm dead set on opening up, like, birthing centers one day because it is so broken. I think every single bit of advice that they give to women who are trying to conceive is broken. During pregnancy is broken. At delivery and birth, and then post as well is all broken.
And I don't even know where I'd wanna start talking about it. We probably did the opposite in most cases of what medicine would tell you to do. Mhmm. Obviously, who knows how much of that is just luck versus I don't I don't want us to take credit for all of it, of course, right? Because, you know, knock on wood, very uneventful pregnancy, very easy time conceiving, totally natural birth, no interventions during the birth itself, even though we were in a hospital setting, which is very rare, at least in The US. Instantly, you know, my wife bounces back and baby is super healthy. And she looked a few weeks later, like she didn't even have a baby. It was, it was insane. No. I mean, we're very grateful and happy about it, but I can't help but thinking, like, we were intentionally doing things probably the opposite of what they would tell you to do.
[00:57:02] Unknown:
It's a pretty good way to live life. It's like take the advice from the people there to protect you and then do the absolute fucking opposite.
[00:57:11] Unknown:
You you generally do pretty well. We read this great book while my wife was pregnant early on called Nourishing Traditions Mhmm. Which has gone around health Twitter. I highly recommend it for anyone who is trying to conceive or, you know, who maybe already is pregnant or whose wife is pregnant. It really breaks down kind of a different approach to diet and like what, you know, a woman needs who is trying to conceive or who's carrying a baby. A lot of it is gotta have the healthy fats and you gotta have the healthy sugars as well. And there's this huge push within modern medicine to steer everyone, but especially women away from saturated fats.
Mhmm. And then away from sugar in general. Right? Because even modern medicine now will say sugar is bad for you. Mhmm. You know, don't touch any sugar. That doesn't mean we're eating processed foods and tons of, like, candy. Right? But Yeah. Natural fruits, all that kind of stuff. Right? Very good for you. And so we were very focused the entire time, both before and then during my wife's pregnancy about lots of saturated fat, lots of natural sugar, tons of fruit throughout the day, orange juice every morning, eggs, you know, tons of eggs, meat, organ meats, all that kind of stuff. And the general idea being that, you know, you don't want your body to think that it is malnourished, right? You need this more safe environment in order to conceive a child. You can't have your body thinking that it's in some kind of starvation or survival mode. Yeah. And also that means that too low body fat on women, I think, is very bad when trying to conceive.
And so you often hear of, like, very super low body fat, like long distance runners, you know, women that are, like, struggle to get pregnant. Yeah. Or keep a baby. And I was telling my wife, who's very active, I was like, you should be eating lots of sugar. Like, not the bad kind. You should eat all this stuff. Bread. Yeah. Sourdough bread. Right? You don't wanna have bread with the crap in it. Bread, sugar, fat, all this stuff so that your body is not in, like, a state of survival and is able to be in a state where there's even, like, a surplus, right, in order to nourish this baby in the womb. And it's it's a very different mindset than what you'd see if you go, like, walk into a doctor's office and be like, alright. So we're thinking about having a baby. What should my wife be eating?
[00:59:47] Unknown:
It's crazy, like, how uninformed or misinformed medical doctors are with anything to do with nutrition. It's actually scary with having both of our kids. Well, the first one was during the COVID time, so that was horrific. You know, we were the jabs were all forced towards us. We had doctors being so disgustingly rude that I had pew drows with them and made my missus cry because they were being so disgusting towards her about choosing not to have the poison. And that never really stopped with all of that stuff, and diet wasn't even discussed. You can guess if you asked, it would be something absolutely retarded. But it makes sense. It's like, as you're saying, you don't wanna be in fight or flight. Like, I know when I'm trying to lose weight, and I'm doing it at the moment because I've turned into a bit of a fat cunt after I moved, just having too much booze and just, like, just being a bit, like, slapdash holiday mode. Mhmm. When I say pretty fat, not really fat, just, like, not what I would normally be. So I was like, right. Strict carnivore diet. And I do that because I wanna lose fat. I'm so glad we're talking about this. Continue.
I do it because I wanna lose fat, and it definitely loses fat. Because I do twenty four hour fast Yep. One meal, just meat and eggs. I cook the meat in bacon fat. There's nothing else. No oils. No nothing. But I don't actually think I feel that healthy with it. And I've done it a few times now. I think I feel more healthy when I have a little bit of carbohydrate, a few bits of fruit Mhmm. And natural not shit. Not like processed. None of that. No sugars that are like refined. But just adding a bit of fruit, adding a bit of honey, adding a bit of yogurt and cheese, and just like stuff like that. I think I feel better. I'm not quite as ripped and shredded, but I feel better. And so that would then translate that, yeah, it should be the same for someone who wants to have a child growing inside them. They don't wanna be in that, oh, I'm burning just my fat, and this is how I'm living. I don't think it's probably healthy. No. I'm so glad you said that because a lot of the carnivore
[01:01:51] Unknown:
people, what's his name? Paul Saladin. Or Yeah. Have moved away from that, and they've introduced things like fruit into their diets or milk. Right? Mhmm. This goes right into the whole bioenergetics ray pete. That's p e a t, Twitter. Okay. It was this doctor Pete who he passed away some number of years ago, but there's this whole community online that has the opinion that, which I partially agree with. I'm nuanced on everything. I've never been carnivore. Right? I've never gone all in, not some fad. I've always done more of like the, eat everything, but have pure ingredients.
Mhmm. Bread every day, but sourdough. I'll bake a lot of my own pastries and stuff like that. The Peters as they call themselves, think that sugar is very important. Okay. And sugar signals your body that it can relax. And that if you're going carnivore or just if you're in a stress state that most people are running on cortisol, they're running on stress hormones in order to power their day to day lifestyle. I think I was definitely that way for a long period of time. If you're someone that's goal oriented, if you're someone I mean, if you're a startup founder, if you try to take any big life steps, you're trying to start a business, start something new, If you're trying to lose weight and you're intermittent fasting, which I did for years, I skipped breakfast. I intermittent fasted for years when I was younger. If you do the carnivore thing and you cut everything else out, I think that your body ends up being in a 20 fourseven state of stress that you're running on stress hormones, that it can contribute to anxiety, other physical symptoms like different kinds of inflammation.
Yeah. Whether that's like, you know, stomach related, skin related, like hives or rashes or eczema, which so many people have, other types of aches or pains, right? Kinda all the different inflammation based symptoms. And you don't know that your body is running on cortisol or stress hormones twenty four seven. You're just like that. You just fall into that. So you think you're fine, but your body's under this constant state of stress. And what I've personally found over the last year and a half or so since I started to introduce some of these principles, specifically, like a glass of orange juice every morning, having some dates with coconut oil. Peters really love coconut oil because they actually boost the metabolism. So we can talk about the metabolism boosting effects, and then just lots more fruit throughout the day. I am like my baseline is so much better. The things that used to bother me, the things I would get stressed or anxious about, I am so much more stable than I've ever been. I think a lot of it is from the natural sugars in the diet. I really do. And not fasting. Right? Not skipping meals Mhmm. Snacking, and specifically no longer intermittent fasting, which I did for a while. The other thing that the Peters would say, which is key, is that there's two main ways to lose weight. One is you cut calories.
Mhmm. Right? Calories in calories out. You cut calories, then maybe that's new carnivore. Right? You cut out a lot of the stuff that you don't need like sweets or whatever. Mhmm. And you lose weight, of course. Right? You lose fat. Yeah. You're in ketosis. Right? You're burning everything up. The other way that the Peters would say to lose weight is you actually ramp up the metabolism. And so you actually you eat more, but you burn more as well. And they would say that the way to do that is actually by introducing more sugar, because sugar is like a fuel for your metabolism.
And as you consume sugar, you will actually ramp it up. And one of the easiest ways to ramp it up is to measure your body temperature. And most people's body temperatures have been falling in the last couple of decades. That's in Fahrenheit here. It's 98.6 is what it's supposed to be. Like, if you open up the book. Right? I don't know what it is in Celsius.
[01:05:47] Unknown:
I'm bad at that conversion. Normal body temperature. The The core body temperature.
[01:05:51] Unknown:
Yeah. Most people are in the low mid 90 sevens here now in The US. Right? So that's, like, a degree or more lower than what it's always been. That just because
[01:06:01] Unknown:
everyone is
[01:06:02] Unknown:
weak little pussies and they have no muscle? No. I think it's because our modern society causes all of us to become metabolically impaired in some way. That's what I that's like the Peters. That's how they think is that everyone's walking around. Their metabolism has slowed. That's one of the reasons why people are getting really overweight. And if we can cause the metabolism to ramp up, you know, great examples you go, you might you've probably seen this on Twitter. You've seen like a US army standard set of meals that a soldier would get in one day.
I don't know if you've seen something like that. And people have calculated the calories and it's like 507,000 calories. And this is like not an active soldier either. This is like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This normal ration type thing. And so now people are eating, like, sub 2,000 calories. Yeah. Lose weight. And they're saying, well, I'm I'm eating the salads and I've cut my calories down to 2,000. Why am I not losing weight? And I'm so stressed and I have all these medical issues.
[01:07:03] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that could certainly be it. I know when I've been trying to put on weight going for strength, I've eaten four, five, 6,000 calories without blinking, like, most days, and still not really putting any weight on just, like, packing on muscle because you've got as long as you're eating good stuff, like, you're not eating shit. But, yeah, it makes sense. I guess it probably depends on what sort of person you are. Like, I I've always run on stress to some extent in terms of, like, I've got these things to do, and I have to get them done. Mhmm. And I'm up, and I have my coffee. I know, like, I'm running on coffee until, like, one, two, three, four, 05:00 in the afternoon. Are you doing, like, black coffee? Yep. Just black coffee, nothing else. Black coffee, water, and I'll get, like, three, four in the afternoon, and then I'm like, I'm gonna eat someone. Like, something need I need to eat something, and I'll just, like, go and eat my carnival stuff. You don't eat that much. Like, you've you sort of think you're going to. And then after, like, going through three, four, five burgers or a steak or, like, six eggs or something, you're like, they're sort of bored of this.
Yep. I see it as, like, a tool. I mean, I went from, like, a hundred kilos, like, whatever that is, two hundred and ten pounds, dropped 20 kilos in, like, less than a month. Just, like, fucking burns off Wow. Because it's so strict. I'll train every day. Only water, only black coffee, only meat, nothing else, nothing. And it's twenty four hour fast, and it just falls off, but you don't feel healthy. If you're saying these pitas or whatever they're called Yep. The sugar ones and, like, what Paul Saladino is doing, to me, that kind of makes the most sense. Okay. I don't know. I can only go on how I feel, and I can only go on, like, there's these two conflicting ideas of, like, no sugar at all. That's bad, bad, bad. And then there's, like, well, some sugar, but only good sugar. If you're somewhere in the middle where you're eating meat, eggs, raw honey, cheeses, milk, fruit, even if it's not the optimal, it's still better than ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of people in the world who just eat, like, junk.
[01:09:09] Unknown:
Well, I think it's more complicated than that. That's the problem because there's also some memes, like, within the Peters or, like, the biohacking type Twitter accounts where everyone goes to the same journey where they Yeah. Fasting, they go to carnivore. They everyone goes to the exact same journey and then they and now where they've ended up is this, like, Peter thing with the sugar. And there's some accounts. There's, like, I think Anabology. There's, like, the honey diet. You can look this up where this guy only eats honey until, like, dinner time. Amazing. And then and his body temperature goes to, like, 99. His, like, arms are red. Oh, those are actually two different accounts. I'm commingling them. But you get the point. Like, I'm not one of those people that's experimenting like that. But Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of things. So one is I think we're all being poisoned. And this is a very RFK thing to say. So that's why I think that that argument is very important, where if you take the base case as we're all being poisoned Yeah. You can forgive a lot of people for gaining weight. And I think you can forgive yourself as well because even just a few select things, there's, like, the water that you drink, which in The US, if you're not doing something like serious filtration Mhmm. And remineralization, you're getting horrible stuff in there, like the fluoride and all these chemicals. Yeah. Just crap. So there's the water. There's the seed oils, which I think is probably, like, 80% of the problem.
Mhmm. Which is less of a problem in certain European countries. There's the joke that the American goes to vacation in Italy, and they come back, they lost 20 pounds, and all they did all day was eat pizza and pasta. And they, like, can't understand why. Right? Because since everything's cooked in olive oil, they don't do Yeah. Like, that kind of stuff there. And it's not just that. It's also what's in the bread products and the flour. So, like, here, we have the water. We have the sea oils, which is so it's everything. It's horrible. Yeah. We have the, glyphosate, which is, you know, the pesticide that's sprayed all over all over wheat. And that's just one of the many pesticides, but glyphosate is especially horrible, carcinogenic, gut issues. I suspect most of America's like gluten intolerance is just the glyphosate intolerance. It's not an actual intolerance to bread because they can go over to Italy and eat whatever, you know, they want. Yeah. But then also in our bread, they fortify it. It's almost impossible. I mean, you could find it. It's just more expensive for the organic, you know, wheat. But here, you go buy anything with wheat in it, whether it's a loaf of bread, crackers, pasta. Literally, every single bread product here that's based on flour is fortified with iron and all this other stuff.
And it's all artificial. Right? So it's called enriched wheat. Everything is enriched, enriched flour. And they do that because at some point, I think in The US, they said, oh, the American population is not getting enough of their iron and vitamins and whatever. So we're just gonna put it in the flour Mhmm. With all these artificial sources. And so there's that. And then there's all the hormones and antibiotics and everything in the meat and how fake all the meat is and what the meat eats. Right? And and to what the cows eat, what the pigs eat, what the chickens eat, conditions that they live in, antibiotics, all this crap they're pumped up with completely unnatural. You combine all that, a normal American can't even go out to a restaurant or any food place. You go in a Whole Foods stick, you're gonna be healthy, which is like high end grocery stores, a lot of organic stuff. You go grab a random thing off the shelf, it probably has at least two or three of those things that I said in it. Yeah. So, like, what are they supposed to do? Yeah. It's tough. And how do you afford it? Oh my god. We spent a fortune.
[01:12:37] Unknown:
Yeah. We do it. And since moving, it's taken a bit of time to find butchers and grass fed beef, trying to, like, get the proper pasture raised chickens and all that stuff. But it is painful how much money we spend on food. It's a lot. Yeah. And you look at it and it like, okay. We've been relatively okay, and my missus used to earn well. And we do alright because we've had corn and, like, all that kind of stuff, but most people just couldn't do it. If you went to the butcher that we go to Mhmm. And spent those sats, it's eye watering. But you need it because you wanna have a healthy family. It's you either pay it now or you pay it in, like, $20.30 years when you're fucked and old. And then, like, doctors are like, right. Well, we're gonna have to pump you full of all this toxic shit.
[01:13:23] Unknown:
We don't even have kids that are eating real food yet. Yeah. Just for my wife and myself, we probably spend depends on the month. Depends on if we're going to, like, the farmer's market or for if you were to amortize also the money that we've spent on, like, frozen like, the cow or the half cow and Yeah. All that kind of stuff. I mean, over a thousand dollars a month for the two of us. Yeah. If not approaching 3,500 on certain months. And sorry. That doesn't account for going out for like to dinner. Yeah. That's just at home. Yeah. That's just at home. And that's just the two of us. So I'm like, great. I have a boy now. And so give him a few years to get eating more than both of us do combined.
Yeah. And the amount of care that we go through and we shop at the store. We don't even go to Whole Foods usually. We go to a grocery store. It's like an organic market. It's like a normal grocery store, but it's much more limited. So it's actually more pleasant to shop there because you go through and like like every fruit and vegetables, it's organic. I don't have to look for it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Makes my life so much easier to just quickly walk through the store. I went last night, go through the whole store in like ten minutes. Don't have to look around for things, read ingredient labels as much, but you do have to read actually ingredient labels because you go to grab the milk. Most American milk has like vitamin D3 and A whatever in it with whatever artificial sources. I'm like, I don't want that. I just want milk. Yeah. Just give me the milk. You go grab the packaged goods. It's all seed oil stuff, even though it's organic.
It's impossible to avoid this stuff. And so if you're not a little neurotic about educating yourself about it, you're going to be screwed. You're going to think you're getting all this healthy stuff because you just went to like the fancy grocery store. You spent hundreds of dollars in your grocery shop. Do not look at the ingredients in most of the stuff you just bought. And the stores will stealthily swap the ingredients. So for years I bought like a pasta sauce from Whole Foods. A couple of years ago, I looked at the ingredients and I saw that they had swapped the olive oil for like some, canola oil or something.
And they just swapped it. They didn't say anything. Right? Of course. Dirty bastards. I was like fuming. I was throwing shit out. I get really upset about this kind of stuff because it's like a betrayal. Well, you're being poisoned. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So a book I would recommend about this, like if you're like the perfect candidate about like the stress hormones, carnivore, fasting. There's a great intro book that is not crazy that distills kind of like the pro metabolism, like ramping your metabolism approach as opposed to not eating or cutting things out approach. And I'll send you both the links after. I'll send you the baby one, how to eat for, like, the mom before, during, after pregnancy that's nourishing traditions.
And then this one is how to heal your metabolism, it's called. They're both available on Amazon or wherever. Have not been banned. At least Amazon doesn't really ban books, which is great. It kinda distills all this stuff down to a very accessible format. It doesn't sound crazy like the guy who only eats honey. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds a bit far. That's a bit like okay. Yeah. But, you know, those guys are the ones who experiment for the rest of us so that we can, you know, learn the thing or when you adapt. But, yeah, I mean, for me, I've I've experienced huge benefits to introducing the natural sugars. And I would also say it's like, how do you wanna feel every day? Because the few times I've tried to do any kind of carnivore type thing, I felt horrible.
Mhmm. I was always tired, hungry, annoyed. I could feel it in my body. Maybe I'm more sensitive, you know, than others to it because I probably already was running on too many like stress hormones. Yeah. But it's like, how do you wanna feel? Right? And the other thing is like, what relationship do you want with your food? I love pastries.
[01:17:11] Unknown:
Mhmm. What's your favorite pastry?
[01:17:14] Unknown:
Scones, which is hilarious because most people in The US hate scones. Really? Yeah. My father-in-law makes fun of me. He says they're like chalk.
[01:17:25] Unknown:
With raisins or without raisins?
[01:17:27] Unknown:
No. Like chocolate chip based. Okay. I'll make them often. I'll do, like, an espresso chocolate chip scone or, like, a coffee base or Crazy one was like a grapefruit chocolate chunk scone. You know, you do like your orange chocolate. You bring in the citrus, you know. So I love scones, croissants, all that kind of stuff. But if you actually because I bake things. Right? I cook. I bake. You know, what goes into a scone? Okay. I use the spelt flour from, like, the Amish. Mhmm. I use organic, whatever chocolate chunks. Milk or heavy cream is what goes into the scone. Right? It's the main ingredient besides the flour. So it's a lot of there's barely any sugar in it too. Right? There's, like, a little bit, but when you measure out, you're like, wait. That's it? Or same thing if you make, like, pancakes or waffles.
There's, like, barely any sugar in this stuff. Croissants is mostly just butter, butter and and flour. From a first principles perspective, there's no reason why this stuff should be bad for you. Yeah. If you're making it at home. Down with some coffee, you have a scone, add some really nice flour, or all organic. It's some really nice heavy cream in there. Maybe it's even raw milk or raw. You know, if you're baking it doesn't really matter as much. Yeah. But it's, you know, organic. Like what's wrong with that? And so, because I enjoy all that stuff so much, I enjoy the process of cooking, of baking, of making my cappuccino every morning, having a little bite of a pastry with it. I don't want to be in a relationship with the food where I feel like I need to go to these crazy, no offense, but these like crazy kind of elimination diets. Right? And then it pulls a lot of the joy out of eating. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. It's boring. I've never managed more than about four or five weeks because I just get Right. Extremely
[01:19:12] Unknown:
bored. And I love food. If I have time, I wanna take the family out and go and experience, get a new restaurant, go somewhere and have nice food. It's too dull to do long term. I just use it as a tool to be like, woah. Because I'm so extreme. I'll be like, I'm not drinking at all, and I won't drink for eight months. And then I'll be like, I'm on holiday.
[01:19:32] Unknown:
I try to stay away from all of that. Right? Like, we rarely drink at home. Mhmm. But at a restaurant, I will absolutely order a glass of wine, some kind of cocktail. A couple weeks ago, I made myself, like, a very basic cocktail for whatever reason at home. Or if we're hosting someone, I will but, like, I'm not the kind of guy that has, like, the bar cart, you know, in the house. Yeah. Yeah. They solved everything in moderation. Right? And but I think that the problem is is that well, actually, I think the reason why these elimination diets are so successful, carnivore is so successful is because a lot of people see chronic medical issues resolve when they go on carnivore.
And then they say, well, I have to be on carnivore now. And I think what's actually happening is if you think about all those things I just listed out, all the things we're being poisoned by, right? The seed oils, the glyphosate, the fortified grains, the water, a lot of the water, you know, maybe you avoid, but like so much of that stuff is not present in a carnivore diet. If you're using low quality meats, you'll still have antibiotics and hormones in the meat. Yeah. But you're cutting out everything else. I would argue and a lot of like Peters and Health Twitter people now or even probably like Saladino, people like that would argue. The reason why carnivore was effective is not necessarily the switch to carnivore, but it's what you're eliminating.
[01:20:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Which is so much crap with the average person. Like Yes. It's so much shit. That's why, like, with kids as well now, like, I'm more focused on it. I have to eliminate all the shit out of my diet. I don't have to necessarily be on a crazy carnival thing, but just, like, eat healthy and be healthy because you wanna be the best version of yourself for them. But, also, like, you hear parents like, oh my god. I'll do anything for my kids. And, yeah, that's true. Everyone will. Yeah. But you won't stop them from poisoning themselves, will you? Because Yeah. Yeah. Look at the average shit that these kids are eating, the kids at my kid's nursery and stuff. It's like packets of crisps full of shit and these bars that are full of shit. And I've look at everything there, and I'm like, there's very little to no actual nourishment in anything that they've got. And they're kids, so they're running around, and they're burning it all off, and they're just, like, whizzing around. So most of them aren't fat. There are a few, like, proper fatties, but, like, most of them aren't. And you just think, like, that's surely the most important thing is, like, that these kids, if you want them to function properly and not have behavioral problems or any sort of, like, physical deficiencies or anything like that. It's like, surely, you just, like, feed them good quality food. Number one.
[01:22:09] Unknown:
So many of these kids are getting the completely wrong start from even before they're born. Mhmm. Just to bring it back to the medical advice with, you know, pregnancy. And I know some people can't breastfeed. Right? Like, they can't do it. But, you know, they ask you in the hospital, will you be breastfeeding? Mhmm. I'm like, what the fuck? Like, what do you mean will you why are you posing this to me as a question? Like, my wife and I are gonna make the choice. Why are you not saying you should be, and we're gonna help give you the resources? Like, we're gonna help you out a lot in the first few days. We're gonna tell you how you should be eating, how you should have taken care of yourself throughout the pregnancy. Obviously, I'm setting aside if there's like a physical reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. Even back in the day, you know, obviously very back in the day, like, you know, hundreds of years ago, you had wet nurses. Right? You had other people, you know, the wealthy families. They had the kids, the mothers that even have to breastfeed. There were other people breastfeeding their kids. There was no formula. But you can also go back and you could look at what infant formula looked like in the early nineteen hundreds, right, where they're using goat milk and other things like that. And it's very natural ingredients. So you literally plop out the baby. They ask, oh, will will you be breastfeeding? And if there's any issue, right, with the baby, if the baby needs to go into any kind of intensive care, if there's a problem, they might take the baby away from you, right, bring the baby to a different location on that floor in the hospital wing, and they might feed that baby formula from the very beginning. Oh my god. You look at these ingredients in the formula. At least Europe is a bit better, but The US formula is like the most horrific thing I've ever seen in my life. Mhmm. I mean, everything is doctor recommended. Right? Pediatrician recommended. I don't usually, like, Google things when I'm on, like, the podcast or whatever. But if I just go to, like, infant formula ingredients, you know, in The US, they're required to have certain amounts of unsaturated fats in the infant formula, which means seed oils. So, like, you open up one of these I'm literally just gonna find a random image on Google, whey protein concentrate, vegetable oils, which is in parentheses, palm, soy, coconut, hyalae, safflower or hyalae, sunflower, corn maltodextrin, and then all these chemicals that you can't even pronounce. And this is just like a random one. The first ingredient in one of the most popular ones is corn syrup solids, and then the second ingredient is vegetable oils.
So baby comes out, and then they just give the baby this or they say, oh, don't worry about breastfeeding or trying to breastfeed. You know, sometimes women have a little bit of difficulty in the first couple days. Mhmm. And then they go to the formula, and then the baby's on formula, and then the baby from day one is being given corn syrup and vegetable oils and whatever else. And then that's how they start their life. That's how their metabolism
[01:25:00] Unknown:
evolves. So
[01:25:01] Unknown:
even at the point where the kids are a few years old and they're eating real foods and they're running around, literally day zero, day one, these kids are getting, like, destroyed eating this as their main source of food. And it's definitely better in Europe, but it's just a complete mess in The US.
[01:25:17] Unknown:
But you think it can be turned around with these pitas or whatever. They think that you can turn around your metabolism
[01:25:24] Unknown:
even if you've had all the shit and you've not eaten properly. They think it's all, like, can be turned around. I don't know, honestly. And that's kinda scary to think about or talk about. Right? Because, you know, I think we have such obesity problems in The US with children. Mhmm. It starts, I think, from when they're born. I mean, it starts moving before that. They test for gestational diabetes. You know, one of the tests that they ask you to do in the hospital. Why should anyone have that? Yeah. That's mental. Right? And it's the whole thing is just completely insane. And so I think the real answer is, like, the RFK approach where I actually am pretty bullish on RFK here. The fact that he was pointed to our government in charge of basically all The US, you know, medical agencies or federal agencies is incredible because one of the first thing he did was there's a whole group looking at the infant formula, and I'm pretty sure they're gonna come out and make some significant changes to the requirements for what's in or or what cannot be in, you know, infant formula. Mhmm. But there's just so many things. It's, like, overwhelming. It's not like a couple years of work. It's, like, probably a decade of work, you know, to try to clean it all up. And this is also where I think it gets interesting where maybe a few years ago, I would have called myself kinda like a libertarian or, like, have a libertarian flare.
Mhmm. I mean, you can't be a libertarian and fix this, like, at a population.
[01:26:48] Unknown:
You can fix it for yourself.
[01:26:49] Unknown:
You can fix it for yourself. But at a population level, I mean, I'm kind of above the opinion. Yeah. You have to ban substances. You have to ban things. You have to say you can't have corn syrup and the infant formula. You can't have vegetable oil and the infant formula. That's like the opposite of libertarianism.
[01:27:07] Unknown:
Right? It's the same as if you say, oh, I'm a libertarian or anarchist. It's like, okay. What if somebody is abusing their child and you know they are Right. Or their wife or whatever? Do you not think there should be some intervention there? That's the bits where for me, I'm like, yeah. If there's not within a village or, like, neighborhood where people just, like, go and kill that person, then, yeah, there should be. And if that's child abuse, then so really is giving a baby seed oils. That's child abuse, really. I would kind of agree with that. But it's a difficult one, isn't it? Because it's like, where where do you draw the line? Once they take a little bit, they keep taking more. There's just so many little things, though. It's just it's crazy. Like, in The US, it's very rare to even have the baby sleep in the same room as the parents. Really? I don't know how it is over across the pond. With a baby?
[01:28:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, you you have the baby's room. You have the crib. You know, you have put the baby in the crib. Mhmm. You put the baby on the baby's back. Right? Because back sleeping is so important. And you if they were to sleep on any other angle, they could potentially just suffocate. And these parents, they're they're so scared when they leave the hospital being told what to do that they can't get any sleep for months Yeah. Because they're going back and forth to the baby's room. How's the mother gonna be breastfeeding all that time? And so then you kind of introduce, like, the formula or the bottle, you know, very early in the development because it's so difficult.
Or the more affluent families hire someone to bring the baby to the mom at night, you know, like a night nurse type situation. And babies in our room, we have no problems. I mean, sleeping, we have no complaints.
[01:28:47] Unknown:
Maybe that's an American thing. Like, in The UK or what I've experienced, we have to the side of the bed, there's, like, a separate cot thing with, like, zips that come down. So they're kind of You call it, like, a bedside bassinet. That's right. We have one of those as well. That's right. So so you're not gonna roll on them, But if baby cries, it's like, get them immediately, make sure they're breastfed, they can go back. To be honest with you, after a couple of months or, like, a few even weeks probably, it was like, oh, you should never have a baby in the bed. It's like when they breastfed for the, like, fifth time that night and, like, my missus would fall asleep or whatever. It's like it happened. You know?
[01:29:28] Unknown:
You've heard the term, like, the bottom quintile. Mhmm. So much of society, like the rules and the recommendations are all about like the bottom quintile. No one's rolling on their baby if they're not- Pissed. Morbidly obese. Yeah, or drunk. Or they're not drunk or drugged up in some way. But a lot of people are, especially in The US. Right? We have so much prescription drug use in general. Not even, like I'm not talking, like, recreational drug use. I'm talking, you know, sleeping pills and other things like that. We have so much obesity. We have so many issues that they'll just say to you, you can't have your baby in the bed. You could roll over and suffocate them.
Meanwhile, the nuanced view would be, well, everyone always did that for thousands of years. But if you're drinking excessively, if you're taking some kind of prescription drug that can make you drowsy, right, or or have a hard time waking up, if you're very overweight, any of these different circumstances, then you're at a much higher risk of doing that. But instead they just say, don't do it because you could kill your baby. And I think there's a lot of medical advice, especially around pregnancy and infants and you know all that kind of stuff that's heavily tailored to just giving advice that works for that bottom quintile that ends up making the life of everyone else really difficult and ends up introducing a lot of fear as part of, like, the process as well. Right? Because you should be focused on bonding with the baby, feeding the baby, all that kind of stuff. Instead, you're terrified that my doctor told me I can roll on the baby. And so I have to be sleep deprived. Oh, we felt that, especially for the first. I was
[01:31:17] Unknown:
terrified because I was working really disgustingly long hours, like, eighteen hours a day just, like, fucked. So tired all the time. And then I was like, oh my god. I'm gonna roll on the baby. Oh god. And I was, like, wrapping myself in extra covers and then having, like, pillows in between me so I could only possibly roll and fall off the bed. I was so scared. And then when the second one came around, I was like, no. This is fine. It was like, we're fine. Don't worry about it. And, like, my worry levels went down, like, 90%. But that first one, you can bring them back, and they're just this tiny little, like Yeah. I I felt like every time I moved, the neck was gonna break. I was so scared of it. It was so small, and I was just, like Yep.
Terrified. But, yeah, now, like, if if we had another one now, I'd be like, that's fine. Just, like, whatever. That'd be fine.
[01:32:07] Unknown:
So, like, I think I really wanna do some kind of birthing center or something. It's like the way I would do it. Right? And I think it's a great business idea because I think it's recession proof almost. Everyone needs to have babies. Right? I mean, maybe the numbers change a little bit, but especially now, you know, and so much money is being spent on, like, IVF and all these other types of interventions. I would split it up into the chunks. Right? You do the trying to conceive, and it's all about maybe it's someone who just wants to do it because they wanna be healthy about it. Maybe it's a couple who's been struggling to conceive. Right? And it's like, what do I do? And, you know, IVF is one option, but they maybe don't wanna actually do that. And it's also so expensive, you know, to do that. It's like tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes insurance covers it. Sometimes employer covers it. You know, it's getting more common, but, you know, it's difficult. So you do like a conception all about you come in, you learn about how to do the right diet, how to get yourself as healthy as possible, get yourself into that state where you're, you know, most likely to be able to conceive a child easily.
And then you go into, okay. Well, once you get pregnant, you get that support, you get that education, you get someone talking to you where it doesn't feel like a medical office, which is one of the things I was most off put by where we actually switched midway. We were going to a normal, like, OB, like a doctor, and we switched to a midwife halfway through. It was a much better experience for the midwife, but it was still in a medical setting. At least they weren't like coming in saying, you know, when are you getting your flu shot type thing, which is what happened. Like the first appointment where I was like, what are you talking about? Like what we're like one month into this pregnancy and you're like coming in, you're trying to talk about shots and like all this stuff. And how about, hi. How are you? How's your baby? How are you guys? What are you eating? How are you sleeping? How are you taking care of yourself? These are the things you should expect between the first trimester or the second trimester. Literally, my wife has, you know, of course, some morning sickness and everything, and I ended up making her eggs three times a day, scrambled, fried, and then omelette at night. You know, have a nice variety because that's all she could really eat, eggs and bread. But, you know, you go into the office and they don't say that. They say, well, could we put you on, like, the nausea medication? That's crazy. I'm like, woah. Woah. Woah. Why are you trying to put her on medication? She's eating. Like, yes. She's throwing up. Mhmm. Yeah. It's not great. But, like, she's able to get you only should do that if it was, like, a problem of, like, malnourishment, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Right? And so you kinda go through this whole thing. And then in the hospital, it's like I mean, sorry for the birthing process. They don't tell you that if you do have a natural birth, if you don't get the epidural, you don't get all these interventions during it. I mean, a woman's body is actually able to produce the hormones that dull the pain that's experienced. And you're actually able to feel and have more control over the pushing.
Yes. Because you're not numb down there. And then you're less likely to have tearing, need stitching, have other complications. And then your recovery is also much faster because of that. You know, my wife was walking thirty minutes later going to the bathroom. That's incredible. And I was like, what the hell is going on? I was in shock of the whole thing. It was it was psycho. And they don't tell you that. Right? They don't say, well, if you do this, we can can prepare you to do this. We're gonna help you through this and understand that if you're gonna try to do it naturally, that these are all the benefits to you and the baby. They don't tell you that. I would do a whole thing through the entire process and afterwards. And after going through all this, I'm just like, oh, man. I don't wanna say pessimistic. Right? But you have to spend so much time, like, educating yourself and advocating yourself that I think for a normal person, it's just totally overwhelming. No. I think totally. And I think it would be a much better way to deal with it and make sure that people are looked after because
[01:35:47] Unknown:
it is so overwhelming, and there is so much information to go through and sift through and what's right and what's wrong. And it's really fucking hard work, and it takes a certain type of person to actually do it. And I would say it's a very, very small percentage of the world who would actually do it. So if they have, like, a plan laid out and done properly, people would pay money for that. I'd pay money for that. Like, if I knew, okay. This is done properly, and I didn't have to go through all the shit myself and, like, battling with doctors and just all that stuff that, you know, anyone who really goes into this stuff realizes there's a business there. So we've got two businesses. We've got we've we've got the air conditioning, which the plug miners are gonna jump on now, and we've got the birthing sensors.
[01:36:33] Unknown:
So excellent. And I would pay for it too. It's a no brainer. Just not having to battle Oh, and getting assigned for, like, a doula. We had a doula, by the way, that we paid for separately, which helped us out. How good is a doula? That was a huge oh my it was it was such a necessity for us, and it it changed the entire thing because at the hospital, we did not have to advocate for ourselves because she was there where I could focus on my wife and all that. And just the whole process and so much of this I learned from not just reading stuff, but also from, you know, having this dual. So you come in, you get assigned a doula, you get assigned a midwife. It would be game changer for most people, I think. I would pay for I don't know how much I would pay for that, but I I would pay for that. Especially if it was medical, you potentially could at some point, you know, work with insurance, right, and potentially make those certain things through insurance. That would also help along. So that's two business ideas. Yeah. The, the air conditioning and the, and the birthing, center. Check us out. Here we go. Yeah. What was that? It's always a pleasure chatting to you. We always cover some interesting ground. I'm sure we'll have
[01:37:31] Unknown:
loads of questions and bits and pieces in the boost and XMR chat. So,
[01:37:35] Unknown:
anything that I can't cover, I'll ping you away or in the mesh to del. You're in there anyway, aren't you, the mesh to del. So Yep. I am, ma'am. That was fun. It was great catching up. And, I'm excited and congrats, you know, for your move. I'm glad you got out of the, UK. Thank you. Gotta get Q out next. But, We'll work on him. We'll get him out. I don't know how feasible I don't know how feasible that'd be for him with his family and everything. Let's keep chipping away. It will happen.
[01:37:59] Unknown:
Great to catch up. Good to catch up, and we'll do it again soon. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed recording. I always love having Zac on and going into these different topics. If you have any questions about the things we've talked about today, you can join us in the Meschadel and ask some questions there, or you can boost. Before you go, I just wanted to remind everyone we now have clothing back in the store. We have hats, hoodies, t shirts, free samurai gear, pleb miner gear, and there's more to come. We also have Freedom Tech Fridays launching at the end of this week with me, q and a, and Seth for privacy.
It's gonna be the first live show for Ungovernable Misfits, so definitely tune into that one and there may be a sneaky little giveaway, so don't miss it. And finally, and I'm very excited about this, we have a new show sponsor, MyNimBox. They offer anonymous domain name registrations, VPS servers, dedicated servers, and web space. They don't require any personal information. They accept Bitcoin, Lightning, and Monero. You can run a BTCPay server with them, run a Lightning node, or anything else you might want, and do it privately. It's really rare for us to find a company that is aligned with what we preach and what we care about, and MyInbox fits right in. We're gonna be moving all of our services for ungovernable misfits over to them. We never shill a company that we don't actually use and actually love. But these guys are incredible.
Check them out at mynimbox.io. I'll be having someone from the team on very, very soon in the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions about their services, you can reach out to me, and I'll post those questions across to them, or we'll cover it in that episode. But, yeah, very excited to have them on board, very excited to be switching over and using their services, and I think this is something that is gonna be very helpful to the ungovernable misfits. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.
BOOSTS
THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
Welcome Back
Family and Relocation
Bitcoin Mining Dreams
Passport Prime Updates
Conference Vibes and HWWs
Critique of Bitkey and Ledger
Mental Health in the Bitcoin Community
Health, Nutrition, and Family
Future Plans and Business Ideas