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Discovering Bitcoin with Anja · Discovering Bitcoin

0:00
Most people don't remember the first time they heard of
0:03
Bitcoin, but they do remember discovering it in the moment
0:07
that it made sense. That quiet click hard block is
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for that phase when you're done with the hype and you just want
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a simple, honest way to stack SAT's with flat fees, no tricks.
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Learn more at learn.hardblock.com dot AU.
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I see the world through an entirely different lens.
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It doesn't just give you confidence, but it gives you
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hope. Take like we're squandering our
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energy, our life force. So Bitcoin is changing that.
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For me. It's like it's healing energy.
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It gives you a kind of. Of a sudden.
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Feeling right? Deep and deep and deep.
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In the Immortal. Words of the doors, the time to
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hesitate us through discovering. Anya, what's going on?
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Hello. Welcome to discovering Bitcoin.
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Thank you for jumping on and and spending some scarce time
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finding energy. You're about to tell us the tale
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of how you discovered Bitcoin. Hopefully, fingers crossed.
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A fellow podcaster. And so my expectation is that
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you ought to know how to talk. I like guests that talk a lot
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because it means that I don't have to talk a lot.
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But I think you might be the same.
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You kind of behind your mic and, you know, love it when your
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guests are talking. So maybe, who knows, we might
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reach a stalemate and we'll just have silence for the next hour.
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I don't know. Let's see what happens.
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Let's see what happens. How did you discover Bitcoin?
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OK, so where do I begin? I first heard of Bitcoin back in
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2017 when it was pumping and I didn't really take any interest
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in it. It wasn't something I was
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curious about at all. I just thought it was like
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another thing that was like on the Internet called pop culture
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being and some people were into the way they were into, I don't
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know, Pokémon cards. And I just, you know, I just
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realized I just thought, well, this isn't really like my thing
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because I didn't even know and I didn't even have any curiosity
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about it. Then I guess my next touch point
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with Bitcoin was hearing from my auntie, like I think maybe it
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was a few years later that she was trying to help one of her
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friends get their Bitcoin off some dodgy exchange or some, I
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don't know the back story, but I should actually ask him.
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So that was my second touch point.
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So I was like, oh, OK, this is a bit like of of a scam.
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It's not that safe to buy it because yeah.
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And then my third touch point was with from one of my good
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friends. And again, this is a person
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who's done very well in, in technology, like he's got his
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own SAS company or a number of SAS companies and someone I
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really like respect as an intellectual.
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And he was talking about Bitcoin very casually.
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You know, it was just part of conversation.
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We used to talk about lots of different things.
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And when he came up, I was a little bit more curious, but
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never curious enough to think about getting it myself.
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It was more of a more of AI don't know, like, oh, OK, cool.
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So he likes Bitcoin. So maybe this is, you know,
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something. But again, it wasn't enough to
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move the needle until 2024. I actually met a man who was
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travelling through Australia and he was going to be one of the
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speakers at Bitcoin Alive and he's an ex investment banker.
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So when we met he told me about Bitcoin and having this, you
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know, background in finance and having worked in commodities
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like gold and oil, I thought, OK, maybe he knows what he's
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talking about and I should listen.
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So this person bought the Bitcoin standard for me and I
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started reading it and I remember in the beginning being
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very like overwhelmed with some of the economics because that
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was like my first touch point ever with any economics.
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And I was like, I have no idea what what any of this is about.
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And some of it went over my head.
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But what I found really interesting was the the monetary
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history, because again, that's like just telling a story about
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how people naturally select money over thousands and
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thousands of years. The properties of money.
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So what you know, what are the properties of money that make
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money good money? And I understood that very
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easily. And then, yeah, some of the more
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technical stuff went over my head.
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I found the salience of money very interesting as well.
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Failures across like time and space.
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I'm even pronouncing that correctly.
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Yeah, I don't. Know, I thought I'll have to
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Google this now. How embarrassing.
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I do mispronounce things. Very, very yeah.
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Hey, man, look, you're, you're Australian.
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This is what we do, right? We, we just mispronounce stuff
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and we and we speak, I mean, well, you know, like yours isn't
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nowhere near as nasally as my voice, but, you know, yeah, we
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so we do. I mean, we're not simply
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Bitcoin. We're not as bad as that.
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Like Nico and Opti. Geez, they struggle with
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pronouncing literally the most basic words.
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Shout out to those boys. Sorry, but it's true.
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Anyway, dunno. Salience of money.
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Sounds awesome. Sounds.
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It sounds directionally correct. Yeah, I really want to now run
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out across the room and get the bitcoins standard and try to
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look up this word because I really, yeah, I'm sorry if I get
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it wrong. You can Google it.
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Exactly. So we invented Grok.
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Yeah. So then then our I read the
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Bitcoin standard and I finished it and I was like this is really
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amazing. This is this is a thing.
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So again, this was enough to get my curiosity to learn more about
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it and to get some, but I was still at this stage where I was
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like, OK, well, I'll allocate a little bit of money into Bitcoin
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because I still don't understand it that well.
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But I, I do understand that that this is has some legs, right?
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And it's not going to go away, so I may as well allocate a
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little bit. And then I just kept reading
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book after book. So I think like I read base for
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Bitcoin and I never thought I'd find cryptography interesting,
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but I absolutely did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And then inventing Bitcoin and then I read Broken Money.
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And then I read the big prints and like I was just going
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through books and, and the more I read, the more I was like, Oh
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my gosh, this is this is amazing.
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And, and I have this like visceral reaction action to it
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where I when I read something that just blows my mind, I get
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goosebumps and I'm like, is this a sign?
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Yeah, So I just, I just, I still can't believe I'm in complete
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awe of Bitcoin. The fact that I even get to
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witness something like this in my lifetime and watch it unfold.
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Like I am so fascinated by it that I just think like it's
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almost like an abnormal obsession.
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You know what I think it's cool is you like you had all those
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touch points and obviously this particular person, you kind of,
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you know, you had enough reverence from them.
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So that's the thing like when, when obviously you meet someone
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for the first time and they start sprouting off about
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Bitcoin, if you don't know them, you're probably going to be
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like, yeah, cool bro, that sounds great.
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Or maybe it's like some rando on the Internet or whatever.
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Like it has to have a bit of substance behind the, the like
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who who's giving the message, right?
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The medium is the message. That's kind of the what it boils
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down to. But The thing is like, I've
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given the Bitcoin standard out as a book once or twice and I
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know that both those people read it and maybe that's because they
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don't Revere me. And that's fine.
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One's my brother and he can go fuck himself, you know.
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But like the fact that you even could be bothered, like I've
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always found giving a book about Bitcoin to someone to try and
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get them orange peeled or whatever is, is super
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ineffective simply because it's just too long.
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Like most people's bandwidth, their attention span isn't wide
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enough to even be bothered with a book that they're not really
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unsure of the subject. But you're like, obviously, I
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don't know, like this, this, it's all coalesced into this one
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moment. You're like, oh, OK, I'm going
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to read this book. And and you're not only like
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kept reading it. That's the other thing too.
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I would imagine that most people kind of grab the book and look
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at the cover and Yep, Chuck it on the shelf or start reading it
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and go, I don't know, I don't get any of this stuff.
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Economic concepts, never thought of them, don't care.
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And then, you know, move on. But there must have been some
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impulse within you to keep going.
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Like some, it's flicked on a lot of curiosity.
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I don't know. It absolutely did.
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And this is what I love about Bitcoin because I feel like in
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many ways it has reignited my love of learning for a while.
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Like, you know, I went to school when I went back to university
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and I've done various courses and I've gone through phases
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where I was interested in different topics, but never to
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the extent that I've been interested in Bitcoin.
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And as a result, it's just, you know, made me more interested in
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politics, made me more interested in history, made me
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more interested in like Geo, you know, geopolitics and what's
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happening around the world. And, and, and taxation of both
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things. Like I'm suddenly really
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interesting in taxation, which I would have found like so boring
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and dry. But yeah, it's, it's, it's
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amazing. It's one hell of a drug.
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It is like it is the most intellectually stimulating thing
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I think anyone can ever like investigate and can read up on.
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Like if you are an inherently curious person, it's a
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playground basically, and you can just feel your boots in so
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many different angles, you know, because it touches so many
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different angles. I remember being at the the Bush
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Bash few years ago and Farmer Jen was talking about how it was
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helping or it might have even helped her get out of a domestic
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violence situation. I didn't.
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Know this, you know I love Jen I love Jen, but I had no idea
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I've. Got to get her on the pod at
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some point. And she can like tell that story
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officially. But that whole notion of it
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touches the most disparate elements you'd think of life.
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Like, how do those two things connect?
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But then once you see them connect, you're like, Oh yeah,
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of course, obviously that makes sense.
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Like, you know, financial empowerment and storing up a
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cache so that you can escape, get out of there.
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Like, you know, be independent, be autonomous.
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And, you know, obviously the, the, the more obvious things
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like our dear government and all of their wise wisdom, you know,
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and as a Bitcoiner, once you sort of grok those economic
12:20
concepts and those general incentive issues, you go, man,
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you guys are like fucking idiots, honestly, you know, but
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it just, it keeps stimulating that, that curiosity.
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It does and it makes you a better thinker as well, because
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now I try to think in terms of first principles across like all
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other different topics, not just Bitcoin.
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And, and it just goes to show how important it is to strip
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back any idea down to it's kind of like fundamentals.
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And I, yeah, but I, I, I love farmer Jen.
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She was one of the first female Bitcoiners I've ever met at the,
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at my first Bush bash, which was in Busselton, I think in 2014,
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towards the end. And I was such a new.
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I was so new back then. Like I had no idea.
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I was like, I remember her telling me all these, like,
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podcasts that I should listen to books and articles that I made
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this like, really long list of everything that I need to cover.
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And I was like, you know, ticking it off 1 by 1.
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Yeah. Well, between, you know, like to
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get to Busselton is a long way from really anywhere.
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So yeah, Bitcoin podcasts are like perfect for that kind of a
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trip, you know, to get to get to and from Busselton.
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Shout out to our Western Australian brothers and sisters.
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They I think they live in a different country.
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I don't know what goes on over there to be.
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Honest. I am from WA, so my parents,
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yeah, my parents live in Paris. There was like a three hour trip
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for me. That's.
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Three hours, That's still a long, long way.
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I mean, I know Australia's big, you know, but three hours is
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still a chunk of change. You'd be in the ocean if you
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lived in the UK, you travelled any longer than three hours.
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But yeah, I didn't know that. I didn't, didn't know you're
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from WA. So, yeah, I mean, because
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there's a bit of a scene over there, you know, you've got
14:15
quite a quite a few prominent Bitcoiners over there that would
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have illuminated you to all different aspects, I suppose.
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Yeah, for sure. Like I, yeah, I really like the
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different, I guess communities around Australia.
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Like I've spent quite a lot of time with like the the Western
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Australian Bitcoiners obviously in Sydney when I lived in Sydney
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with the Sydney Bitcoiners. And just recently, now that I
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live in Northern Rivers, there's a great community here, but also
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travel up to Brisbane. So yeah, I just, I just really
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feel like I've now pretty much know a Bitcoin in each state,
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not Tasmania yet I keep inviting them to the Bush bash in Byron
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Bay, but. You see, that is another
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country. I don't even know what happens
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in Tasmania. I don't think any listeners in
15:04
Tasmania listen to discovering Bitcoin.
15:06
I'm not sure what they're doing down there apart from just
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wandering around. Mona yeah, I think there's only
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like 29 people in the group I want to say from. 29 people in
15:14
Tasmania, That sounds about right.
15:17
It won't be in the Bitcoin charts anyway, but.
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They grow, they grow a decent 1. So you've you've, I mean, gosh,
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you've OK, so you're a bit of an Aussie Bitcoin nomad.
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You've you've kind of, you know, crossed, crossed the crossed the
15:32
borders and and met them all, which is really cool.
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The Northern Rivers is a is like that.
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It's it's making a bit of a noise, you know, online in the
15:43
community. We had earth mum on the pod
15:47
earlier in the year. Shout out to so 21 like awesome
15:51
Telus soap. I won't go over that again.
15:53
I've I've done that enough. But the like the whole Northern
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rivers cohort element, like culture.
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You guys have got the Byron Bush bash coming up.
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It's it's envious. I'm envious of of just how
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vibrant it is up there and all those motivated people you've
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got going on. Absolutely.
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It's a really, really beautiful community.
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And you know, I'm quite surprised that every month, even
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though we're like, I guess regional town, there's probably
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an average like of 30 people showing up to our monthly meet
16:29
ups. And then we also have like an
16:32
offshoot, which we do probably every quarter, which is like a
16:35
women in Bitcoin made-up. And that's a soft launch into I
16:38
guess the bigger community. And yeah, it's just really nice
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like to to have developed like friendships with with the people
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that live here as well. And we go on walks and we have
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steak and we have barbecues. Yeah, I absolutely love it.
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That's unreal. 30 people in in Northern rivers.
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Well, what's in the water up there?
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I don't know, I keep asking myself this question all the
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time but it just feels like the whole region is so magical.
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I can't get over the beauty of the region.
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I literally every time I'm driving around and going like
17:14
doing a trip into hinterlands or even walking in the beach, I'm
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constantly stunned at how beautiful it is.
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I even my mom's like literally every day we're talking on the
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phone, you just keep saying the same thing.
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Oh my gosh, it is so beautiful. It is so beautiful.
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And this is another funny thing. Like beauty is one of my highest
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values. And a lot of people get very
17:35
confused when they first hear that love beauty.
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But it's like, yes, you know, beauty, like man made things,
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beauty in nature, beauty in words, beauty in, in.
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Yeah, like this, this. It's just have to work.
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Such an important thing that lights me up.
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And living in such a beautiful place.
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I just feel like he's done wonders for my mental health.
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Like compared to the cities that I live with in Perth, in Sydney
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versus Northern Rivers, I feel like my baseline happiness is
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much higher. And I think that has a lot to do
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with that fact that every day I go for like Long Beach walks, I
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like encounter so much wildlife. I see dolphins, I see whales,
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water Dragons, Bush turkeys, like echidnas, like there's
18:26
snakes everywhere. Like I just I'm so used to
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snakes and spiders now like don't even flinch when I see
18:31
one. Bitcoin doesn't announce itself.
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It reveals itself not in the moment you buy, but in the
18:38
moment you stop thinking of it as a trade, start sensing it as
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19:27
Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, I don't
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know, Like there are no spiders over in WA.
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Nothing like the Northern Rivers, I'll tell you that much.
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There's like I would be lucky to see a a Huntsman like once every
19:41
few years in Perth in Northern Rivers.
19:44
I'll say you want pretty much every week and I'm like, oh,
19:48
there you are. Oh, right.
19:50
There you are. Yeah, just.
19:51
Hopefully. None of them are in your in your
19:54
sun visor while you're driving. Not yet, but look, I would not
19:58
be surprised if if that happens as well.
20:02
The the point about beauty is super underrated because that's
20:06
a lot of, I think there's a lot of overlap with what Bitcoiners
20:10
do appreciate and what to bring back into the world.
20:15
I mean, we talk about, you know, Fiat money as being destructive,
20:21
toxic, poisonous. And then you see it manifest in
20:25
form around you. For instance, you know, new
20:30
apartment buildings that get commissioned and constructed and
20:34
they're just God awful and they're ugly and they impose
20:38
themselves themselves on the the landscape.
20:44
And they just say what we're going to do is like, we're going
20:47
to fill this with people and down the bottom is going to be
20:51
this vibrant cultural hub. You know, I mentioned this on
20:55
the pod a couple of episodes ago, but you can't impose
20:59
beauty, You can't impose culture.
21:01
It has to be incredibly thought through and emerging ideally,
21:06
naturally, you know, or with an with if it if it is man made,
21:11
you know, it's got to have a form of artist, artistic
21:16
artisan. I don't know where I'm going
21:18
with that, but you know what I mean?
21:19
Like when you see something beautiful, yeah, you can.
21:24
You can. You can feel joy, basically like
21:28
it. It kind of gives life meaning
21:30
really, at the end of the day. And if you're surrounded by ugly
21:33
shit, like you just kind of feel meaningless and a bit, yeah,
21:37
upset, sad. I don't know like.
21:40
Yeah, it is 100% true. And I actually recently listened
21:44
to President B Kelly talk about this, but in a different way.
21:49
And he was talking about when he was reforming the country, El
21:52
Salvador, that one thing he really wanted to bring to life
21:57
was create a much more vibrant and beautiful city that El
22:02
Salvadorians could be proud to live in, proud to look after and
22:06
proud to, you know, be part of. And like, there's some
22:11
psychology behind it that if you live in beautiful surroundings,
22:16
you're more likely to look after those surroundings, You're less
22:20
likely to engage in crime. And yeah, like he's he's seen a
22:24
huge uplifting in the happiness of his people because of it.
22:28
That's just, I mean, one area that he's focused on in, in, you
22:33
know, conjunction with many others.
22:35
But I just found that really fascinating.
22:36
And I think a lot more people value beauty without even
22:40
noticing it because, yeah, we're, we're like, we're, we're,
22:45
yeah. Taught that values could
22:48
potentially just be. I don't, I don't know.
22:51
I don't know where I was going with this.
22:53
But imposed or. Yeah.
22:57
I remember reading this is a long time ago when I was doing
23:04
sociology at uni and I had to read this Frenchman.
23:09
God he was awful. Pierre Baudieu, like he had some
23:12
good ideas, but he, he, he liked to read his work.
23:17
Like honestly, if I had AI back then, I'd just be like, fuck,
23:20
this is so much easier. You know, I can just upload the
23:23
PDF or something. But I remember he had to read
23:26
this thing on on taste. He had this concept called
23:30
habitus, which I mentioned on the pod before.
23:32
But these kind of like unconscious sets of taste that
23:39
are like, or preferences for beauty, I suppose, I don't know.
23:43
And they're, they're generally imposed by society, by the
23:48
culture, by, you know, the community around you.
23:51
And if that is the case, because it's kind of hard to to know
23:56
what is beautiful if you haven't ever seen something, it's
23:59
beautiful. It's like modern day movies
24:01
today. They're all shit like.
24:02
Modern day music, they're all shit.
24:04
Don't get me started. Don't get me started on the.
24:07
Movies. I watched.
24:08
A movie The other night. What was it?
24:11
Hollywood Homicide, Harrison Ford and a guy that Ethan Hawke
24:20
knows Someone else. Anyway, it was a shit movie, but
24:23
it just had a silliness to it that was missing from nowadays,
24:28
you know, and like the the the culture, it reflects what that
24:37
what like. It just seems to me that that
24:40
that lack of thought and will has been erased from the culture
24:47
in the 21st century, like slowly erased.
24:50
I think we kind of, you know, maybe peaked, you know, early
24:53
2000s, but that's a subjective point of view.
24:57
My point is that the taste gets like classified by these sort of
25:04
tastemakers in the culture, you know, like critics and stuff
25:08
like where where are all the critics today?
25:09
Where's the movie critics? Where are the, the music
25:13
critics, you know, Anthony Fantano?
25:15
I mean, they're all on Instagram.
25:18
They've all got a Rotten Tomatoes account and nobody kind
25:21
of really cares anymore. Like you don't read them in the
25:23
paper anymore. And that's fine.
25:25
Like that means there's no more gatekeepers and everything's
25:29
like a free for all, but there's sort of like a standard, you
25:34
know? And and like again with the
25:36
buildings, I'm kind of all over the shop here.
25:38
But like the buildings nowadays, they're just done because it's
25:41
the cheapest way possible to put up the building rather than is
25:45
this going to look good in the next 5 years, let alone 50
25:49
years, let alone 500 years. You know, most, most people
25:52
aren't thinking that far out. Like there's buildings that go
25:55
up around where I used to live and they look like they sort of
26:00
were picked out of a Kmart catalog, you know?
26:03
And they just, they just. Crash But you even, I don't know
26:07
if you ever like going around, walking around affluent suburbs.
26:11
You, you know, in basically any town or city across Australia,
26:15
if you're walking across affluent suburbs that are close
26:19
to the water, either the ocean or the river.
26:21
And some of those houses were built like in the last 1020
26:25
years. A lot of them, you'll notice,
26:29
are really large and very unattractive.
26:33
And for this very reason, it just like, you know, they were
26:35
built because they were in fashion at that point in time,
26:39
but there's no timelessness to them.
26:42
So they already feel very dated and very.
26:45
Yeah, like, but not dated in a way like some, you know,
26:49
heritage listed buildings are dated, but they'll forever be
26:52
beautiful. They're dated as like a kind of
26:55
like a one hit wonder monstrosity.
26:58
And it's so funny going back to the Bitcoin standard, like a lot
27:02
of people criticize the Bitcoin standard for his, like, rants
27:05
against, you know, modern art. Beauty and stuff, yeah.
27:08
I actually really agree with that.
27:10
I agree with that. Like banana being duct taped on
27:13
a wall is not art for me. Like I'm, yeah, controversial.
27:18
Opinion apparently, like it's that's the thing, like what's
27:21
that guy that did the urinal and like just sort of graffitied on
27:25
it with some duct tape or whatever it was.
27:27
I can't remember that guy's name.
27:28
He was French. You know, it was part of that a
27:31
whole absurdist movement. But you know, and again with the
27:34
banana on the on the wall, like it just shows just how
27:37
culturally retarded we really have and have become.
27:42
When you when you look at that next to one of those Renaissance
27:47
sculptures where they're creating translucent, like a
27:51
sense of translucency with the marble, like it's like a veil
27:56
over a person's face or, you know, draped over a person's
28:00
body. It's just it's nuts.
28:03
But you know, the houses, what I've noticed is you can tell
28:08
like I don't like houses that don't have like that's not
28:11
finished. It doesn't have the corners,
28:13
particularly in the windows. The windows are just squared off
28:16
and there's no cornices or angle or whatever.
28:20
It is something that's kind of just, it might not be
28:24
necessarily functional, but it creates the sense of form and
28:28
finish to like particularly the windows.
28:31
That's what I've noticed. You know, when these with these
28:34
new buildings, everything's just at right angles and it's just
28:36
kind of that'll do. There's no archways, There's no
28:40
keystones. There's no like little nuances
28:43
within the building, within the brickwork.
28:46
It's, it's just, you know, it's all function and that's it.
28:51
And no beauty. Yeah.
28:52
And, and, and I get it because money is inflating away
28:57
constantly. You, I mean, imagine all those
28:59
people that are building those buildings now at this point in
29:02
time and they've had to now redo all of their budgets because the
29:07
energy prices are just going through the roof.
29:10
Like how do you even manage a project when you've just had a
29:14
30 percent, 36% increase in, in, you know, bottom line costs?
29:20
You know that that has to flow somewhere and you have to make
29:23
compromises somewhere. And generally it's in the like
29:27
the, the quality of construction and the longevity of, of like
29:33
just how you know how good that's going to be.
29:35
It's the same with music, like everyone just you can go on
29:39
sooner now and you can just write a song in 30 seconds and
29:43
upload it to Spotify. And because Spotify don't give a
29:45
shit, you know, it, it gets all these different views and, and
29:50
kind of outperforms all these people that actually have took
29:53
took have taken the time to learn the instrument, learn the
29:57
skills, sing the song, whatever it is, write the song, become,
30:00
you know, artists. Yeah.
30:03
And you can just speed run this whole thing.
30:05
It's Yeah. I just, I don't know where to
30:08
like, I don't, yeah. I don't want to make like a a
30:12
judgement, you know, because to each his own.
30:15
It's got good and bad points. But ultimately, yeah, we, we are
30:19
suffering from a severe lack of beauty nowadays.
30:23
I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, we definitely are.
30:27
So you can you can all move to the Northern Rivers and
30:31
replenish your beauty standards. I don't know man, I've seen
30:37
Lords of Byron on Instagram and it does it doesn't painted a
30:42
very good picture. My biggest fear is ending up on
30:46
that on that page being like mocked for doing something
30:49
funnier. I don't know it.
30:52
Could be doing worse things. There's there's another guy I'm
30:55
pretty sure I've seen who like goes out to the beach and fights
30:59
waves. He's like a wave fighter or
31:03
something. Yeah, I've got no idea what goes
31:05
on over there. Yeah, there's.
31:07
There's that for sure. God bless you all.
31:10
You know, look, hey, man, the Northern Rivers are awesome.
31:12
Like I got a lot of time for Mullum, you know, Mullum.
31:16
Mullum is quite stunning. And that mountain and, you know,
31:21
Stonewood before they sold out, lots of cool things happen.
31:25
But yeah. And it is, it's a beautiful,
31:28
it's a beautiful place. But I wonder, do you notice any
31:31
kind of creeping Fiat toxicity within the community, like as in
31:37
how difficult it is cost of living?
31:39
I don't know, like or is it relatively isolated and
31:42
sheltered? No, there's, there's definitely
31:46
like obviously Byron being a tourist town, there's, there's a
31:50
lot of price hiking here. Like the petrol stations in
31:55
Byron are a lot more expensive than ones just that, you know,
31:58
like 20 minutes out. Same goes with food.
32:04
Every restaurant, every Cafe, you can pretty much expect a 10%
32:08
surcharge on credit cards on Saturdays and a 15% surcharge on
32:12
Sundays. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of
32:15
bad. And then some of the people that
32:16
have lived here for a very long time don't like that they're
32:19
being priced out by people with more money coming out of cities
32:24
and wanting to, I guess, build a life in the Northern Rivers.
32:28
And it's just, yeah, like, I mean, what I do like about the
32:34
region is the council seems to be very protective of like not
32:41
allowing high rise builders, developers in.
32:45
And that's kind of maintained the charm that we have.
32:49
Otherwise we'd be looking like Gold Coast.
32:51
But it yeah, it remains to be seen for how long that will
32:55
sustain because again, incentives, yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:00
So, so for now, it's it's, yeah, it feels very, to me, it feels
33:06
like Australia 20 years ago. I love walking around the region
33:11
and just seeing a group of girls pull out clothes out of their
33:14
car and set up like, you know, I guess a market on the street, no
33:19
permit, no police officers, you know, stopping them.
33:23
Oh, you can't do that. Everyone's like chill.
33:26
And it just feels like it's less authoritarian than the rest of
33:30
Australia. Like I have I I know the parking
33:33
inspector that comes around. I once made a mistake and parked
33:36
somewhere I shouldn't have. And I was like, oh, I'm so
33:38
sorry. And he just like he goes, I'll
33:39
let you off this once, but if I ever see you park here again, it
33:42
will be double the fine. I was like, I'm sorry, Sir.
33:44
I'll, I'll leave it and never park there again and I never
33:47
would. I miss that.
33:50
I really, really miss that saying with like you go to the
33:52
post office, you go to Service NSW to do something with your
33:56
license or you have to do some paperwork.
33:59
The people are so lovely. You actually have a chat with
34:02
people that work behind the counter and you connect with
34:05
them in Sydney and Perth. You just feel like they hate
34:09
their job, they hate you, you hate them, and there's just like
34:13
no connection, human connection whatsoever.
34:16
So I really hope that we're able to hold on to that for as long
34:21
as possible. I think this is probably true as
34:23
well of other smaller towns around Australia because this is
34:28
again, part of the reason why I decided to move to a regional
34:31
area is because I really, really miss that sense of community.
34:36
And having lived in cities and especially in Sydney, you know,
34:40
I, I guess I got scarred by the corporate life in Sydney.
34:44
Even Perth is much better because it's a smaller town.
34:47
So everyone's a lot better behaved because you have to look
34:51
after your reputation. If you do something that is not
34:57
nice, it, it, that will follow you around in Perth.
35:01
Sydney's so large that you can be a complete corporate
35:06
narcissist and go to another job and no one will know your name.
35:11
No one will know where you're from.
35:13
Like there's no, you know, contacts that connect you to,
35:18
to, to, yeah, to, to. So it's just I feel that he
35:23
breeds this behavior that you, you feel like you're never going
35:27
to run into the same people again.
35:29
So you don't have to behave, you know, in a socially acceptable
35:33
way. And kind of, I don't know, have
35:36
you noticed that with like larger towns and and?
35:39
Accountability doesn't scale to large you.
35:44
Know. To large cities.
35:46
And no, and this is again, like I have nothing against
35:49
centralization, but at a much smaller scale where you know,
35:54
you are not decoupled from the consequences of your actions.
35:59
So again, centralization of small community makes a lot of
36:03
sense, but on a national scale, like, you know, we have these
36:08
politicians from Canberra that, you know, are completely
36:11
decoupled from reality of what the everyday Australian is
36:15
living and experiencing. And, you know, they, yeah,
36:18
there's just no sense of accountability and no sense of,
36:23
yeah, empathy because you are so far removed from everything that
36:28
you're managing. Yeah, which is, which is the
36:32
Hayekian problem of, you know, distributed knowledge.
36:35
Like you can't know what's going on every single minute of every
36:38
single day. And so therefore it's hard to
36:40
impose laws and dictates and other things because you have an
36:43
information problem. You can't, you can't know what
36:46
Anya's doing in the Northern Rivers and what preferences
36:49
she's making in terms of like personal choices on how to
36:53
conduct her day from day-to-day. Like it's just it's impossible
36:56
to do that, although you know, with the invention of Palantir
37:00
and AI and stuff, you know, it might be possible.
37:02
But I was going to say with 30 people it the Bitcoin meet up
37:08
around around the Northern rivers.
37:10
Is there much of A can you can you go out into the community
37:14
and buy things with Bitcoin, transacting Bitcoin and it's
37:19
relatively, you know, cool. We are really trying to I guess
37:25
on board more merchants and we're particularly using the the
37:28
Bitcoin Bay bash as a sweetener saying, hey, we're going to
37:32
have, you know, hundreds of Bitcoiners in town, like maybe
37:34
you should start accepting Bitcoin.
37:37
And I love that the region is very open minded and very like
37:40
freedom oriented. And they're less compliant than
37:43
the rest of Australia, Another reason why I moved here.
37:48
But yeah, we do have a a butcher, which is really
37:50
important, you know, for Bitcoiners that accepts that.
37:54
We also have a very cool Mexican place that does great tacos.
38:03
So whenever we have like a social event, we go and and and
38:07
have some tacos there, there's a jewelry store, there's a cafe,
38:12
there's Co working space. There's like a quantum uplift of
38:16
like all these fire hacking stuff.
38:18
So now we're also recently on boarded like an accommodation
38:24
place for just for the Bush brush so they can test out, you
38:28
know, if they want to continue accepting that long term.
38:31
But you know, it's more of a like as a trial.
38:34
So yeah, I think we're all very, very passionate about building
38:39
this community here in Northern Rivers where they're through
38:43
education and, and yes, so super excited that we're bringing the
38:48
Bay Bash and yeah, hopefully, hopefully everyone's able to
38:54
travel by then. Well, yeah, I mean, God, let's
38:59
let's let's not, let's not indulge in that.
39:03
Let's not direct our attention and and energy to that
39:06
particular topic. Yeah, that'll just wind me up.
39:10
I'm sorry. I.
39:12
Can't do it. OK, back to beauty.
39:13
Back to beauty. Back to beauty, back-to-back to
39:16
Bitcoin. How has discovering Bitcoin
39:19
changed you? That's a great question.
39:23
So I think about this all the time and as as much as is is had
39:29
changed me for the better, it's also been quite a a large change
39:35
and late in life like so I guess I just turned 40 recently.
39:40
So I'm no, I'm not super young, right?
39:44
And, and I never expected to have such a transformative life
39:52
changing experience so late in life.
39:58
I sound like I'm 80, but you know, it's, it's just, I, I
40:01
really thought my personality was quite fixed and my values
40:06
were quite, quite fixed. So it was very surprising that,
40:10
you know, I, I guess. It just really pushed me more
40:14
towards freedom, truth, personal responsibility, valuing beauty,
40:19
valuing community, valuing relationships.
40:23
Again, another thing I really love about Bitcoin is I found it
40:27
really hard to make friends as an adult prior to Bitcoin.
40:31
And now I honestly feel like I have really good friends all
40:35
over Australia that I'm so excited to see like at a, you
40:39
know, and, and these are people I deeply respect.
40:43
These are people with a lot of integrity, a lot of heart who
40:47
care about things that are much bigger than them.
40:50
And not in a collectivist way, but more in, you know, trying to
40:54
change the world for the better and make, I guess the Australian
40:59
community and individuals more resilient through knowledge.
41:04
So I, I'm, yeah, like I definitely, I'm way less
41:09
materialistic. I was never super materialistic,
41:11
but I just feel like Bitcoin just really made me way less
41:16
material materialistic. So yeah, but I also really value
41:22
having fuck you money, you know? You're you're 100% correct on
41:29
the fuck you money like that is that is it's something actually
41:34
you. I find I have to kind of remind
41:37
myself sometimes when you know, you like it's, it's not
41:42
something the stack is huge or anything like that.
41:45
It's just there's a little bit there just in case, you know,
41:48
break glass in case of emergency and, and whatever that emergency
41:53
is, you know, it could be literally saying fuck you to
41:56
something, or it could be, you know, a genuine emergency,
42:01
whatever it is. But it's that optionality,
42:03
knowing that there's a firm foundation from which you can
42:06
act on in order to get a better outcome than you would
42:10
otherwise, you know, and, and the making of the friends thing.
42:15
Like honestly, it's super random the the friends that I've made
42:20
since, you know, hanging around bitcoiners, like they're people
42:24
that I talk to everyday, as opposed to some high school
42:28
friends, which I love. And we hang out from time to
42:32
time and it's great. But like, there is an ease of
42:36
like, it's almost like we're all kind of meeting each other where
42:39
we are sort of thing. And you and, and you can just
42:42
say stuff without knowing that it's you don't have to sort of
42:45
tiptoe around, you know what I mean?
42:47
Like you don't have to be a jerk, but like you, you can just
42:50
kind of share ideas and know that it's going to land with
42:53
somebody and you might vibe with somebody and hit their
42:56
frequency. And like, that's a really,
42:59
again, a freeing feeling basically like a very, very nice
43:04
thing to have where you can discover new things down this
43:09
Bitcoin rabbit hole and discuss them with people who aren't
43:11
going to call you a kook or a cooker or a crazy person or
43:15
whatever the fuck it is. You know what I mean?
43:16
Like you can come with the most random shit.
43:19
Like in the chat today we were talking about like, like Christ
43:24
impulse and religion and stuff. And like, that's the thing that
43:26
I would just be like shying the fuck away from, you know, 10
43:29
years ago. But you know, I was kind, you
43:32
know, I mean, people have had me on this pod now, but like, that
43:37
is not a like the people in the chat felt comfortable to kind of
43:41
just have a back and forth. Very considerate, very, very
43:45
reverential, but also very contentious and and considered
43:53
in a really, really respectful way, you know?
43:59
100% agree with that. And sometimes I giggle like when
44:02
we go out for tacos in Byron, like the conversation goes from
44:07
zero to 100 in nanosecond. And you know, usually when
44:10
you're around, I guess normies, you know, you have to make small
44:16
talk and there's a warm up and usually you need alcohol for
44:19
everyone to get lubricated for the juicy stuff to come out.
44:23
Whereas with Bitcoin is you just go straight in and I just
44:27
sometimes laugh and I'm like, do you guys realize what we're
44:30
talking about? I bet with you any people in
44:31
this restaurant are talking about this.
44:36
Yeah, I'd. I mean, sometimes it does.
44:39
You just wonder if you're a fly on the wall or like a a table
44:42
that's overhearing some of the conversation going on over to
44:44
Bitcoin table and just like what in the name of crimes are they
44:48
talking about? Yeah, I did actually have once
44:53
an experience when I was in Sydney.
44:55
We, we, yes, I organized this. I asked JP and Baiani if I could
45:02
like organize a walk, you know, to help kind of draw more
45:07
daytime people. They always do meetups in a pub.
45:11
And a lot of women don't want to go to a pub.
45:13
They want to go for a nice walk in the sun around a park.
45:16
So we, we literally, we organized a walk and then we
45:19
went to like a rooftop bar. And the conversations that we
45:22
were having at that table, what we're talking about, I think
45:25
we're talking about that ray gun.
45:28
Oh yeah, yeah, from the. Olympics.
45:30
Yeah, yeah, we're talking about that.
45:32
We're talking about Australian politics.
45:33
We were talking about all these spicy things, you know, and
45:37
there was a whole table of maybe like 14 people next to us who
45:42
went from having a conversation to just being dead silent and
45:46
looking at us and listening to our conversation.
45:49
I was like, guys, we have an audience and they were just so
45:52
fascinated by what we were talking about.
45:56
Well, JP loves a spicy take. And so I mean this, this down
46:06
grading of materialism like it's, do you think it's
46:12
something that's been amplified by Bitcoin or do you think you
46:16
would have potentially gone through it anyway because.
46:19
No, no way, not, no, no way. I'll tell you why.
46:22
Like, so I went from being in Sydney from being in the highest
46:27
tax bracket to now like earning so much less.
46:31
And that's something, if you had told me that if I didn't have
46:34
Bitcoin and I'd be doing this, I'd be freaking out, I'd be
46:37
having a meltdown. Like, am I crazy?
46:40
You know, like I'm never going to make it.
46:41
I'm going to stay poor for the rest of my life.
46:43
And, and now I actually really like the fact that I have a job
46:49
that allows me to go to the gym at 10 AM, I go for a beach walk
46:54
at 4 PMI. You know, I have so much
46:57
flexibility because I, I do like shift work around, you know, I
47:03
guess a schedule that that's not a nine to five.
47:06
It's more like I either start early morning and finish midday
47:10
or start midday and finish early evening.
47:12
So again, and I'm like earning a miserable salary, but I am by
47:18
far the happiest I've ever been because I have enough to get by.
47:22
I have enough to stack a little bit and like I'm good.
47:26
I'm really good with that. And it's like, there's no way if
47:31
you had asked me that I'd be happy doing something like this
47:34
before I got into Bitcoin and this would be my life.
47:37
I'd be like, no way, no way. Like I need the financial
47:40
security, I need the high income, I need the status, I
47:43
need the job title. I need, you know, to live in a
47:46
city, to wear a suit. And I'm like, no way, absolutely
47:52
no way. Like you couldn't pay me if
47:54
someone offered me like, you know, a 300,000 salary and said
47:58
you need to work in this large corporate corporation and lead
48:02
A-Team and, and deal with the political games and, and
48:05
managing optics. I would just be like, no thank
48:08
you. I'll keep my job.
48:10
I'll keep my low paying job. I'll stay in my country town.
48:14
I'll go for walks, I'll collect spiders that are in my house,
48:17
let them out. And you know, this, this is now
48:21
like my, my what, what, what I want.
48:24
And it gives me opportunity to focus on growing honest money,
48:28
which again, who knows how AI is going to change the workforce.
48:32
If I can build a brand around that and offer value to other
48:37
people and help them on their journey, if I'd like a positive
48:40
touchpoint in their journey, well then that's far more
48:44
important to me than having all those things that I had before
48:48
and I thought they were valuable.
48:50
That's yeah, it's kind of hard and funny to pinpoint it like to
48:56
to make Bitcoin the catalyst for that.
48:59
But I totally get what you're saying because it's giving you
49:01
the confidence to take that leap.
49:04
Like I dare say if you hadn't discovered it, you'd still be
49:08
potentially fearful of taking that leap and, and still be
49:12
putting on the suit each morning and, you know, doing the doing
49:15
the meetings and meeting with the stakeholders, etcetera,
49:19
etcetera, etcetera. Is that fair?
49:21
Fair comment. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
49:24
Like, I, I feel good about the money I hold.
49:28
I, I'm feel secure in it. I feel like it's going up
49:31
forever, Laura, you know? Yeah, it's it, it, it's funny
49:37
how it, I mean, you mentioned you just recently turned 40.
49:40
I think you posted about that on on Twitter just recently as
49:43
well. Yeah, I love writing.
49:47
There's a, there's an impulse that's Dana talks about here we
49:51
go, here we go, strap in. But basically he talks about how
49:56
when you're up to up to about the age of 35, there's a lot
50:02
more development outward. You know, you're a bit more body
50:05
orientated, material orientated, building the personality,
50:09
engaging the world, absorbing the influences that come in.
50:13
And this element of soul, what he calls soul.
50:17
And then the spirit world, it kind of remains a bit aloof, a
50:21
little bit at arm's length. But there's something that kind
50:23
of kicks in and he calls it second puberty.
50:28
And it's I guess it's kind of almost around the time of
50:30
midlife crisis too. Like the culture pokes fun at
50:33
that. You know, back in the day, it
50:36
would be like the dad goes out and buys like a sports car.
50:40
I mean, honestly, what like, I mean, so if you're 40, you'd
50:43
probably be a early millennial or millennial then like what
50:49
fucking millennial do I know that's going to go out and can
50:51
afford to buy a sports car? Like not at these gas prices.
50:57
Like so like it's kind of shifted and I feel like there's
51:00
a bit of a there's there's all of these things coalesce
51:04
together and Bitcoin, I said this on the pod before I'd
51:07
borrowed it from source node, but it's a neutral amplifier of
51:11
effect. And so you pass through this
51:13
filter and all these other things that are going on in your
51:16
life, all these other impulses, com compulsions, whatever they
51:20
are, they kind of just get shoved through this thing and
51:24
then amplified out the other end.
51:26
And because you have that firm foundation to stand on, you can
51:31
indulge in that feeling in that sense perception and you can
51:35
really follow that, that impulse.
51:40
You know, you can, you can, you can entertain it rather than
51:42
kind of shove it to the side. Oh, I don't have time for those
51:44
sorts of those sorts of wishy washy, woo woo feeling things
51:48
like I've, I've got to, I've got to do the things.
51:50
I've got to be mature and I've got to, you know, earn the money
51:53
and do the things like I've got to build the stuff.
51:56
Sure it is so overrated it. Really is.
52:00
It really is. But I feel like the closer I am
52:07
with someone like friendship wise, the more I feel like I can
52:10
be a child around them and I just love that.
52:14
I just love being a child around my friends, like.
52:18
It's super underrated. It's super underrated.
52:20
I've got to ask, so you, you wrote on Twitter about the, the
52:26
private joke you tend to have with the with the universe.
52:29
And you know, you're born in a Croatian town, which means a
52:33
little titty, which I thought was quite funny.
52:36
Sisak. Is that how you pronounce it?
52:39
Sisak, yes. Sisak.
52:41
Little titty I. Like it, I like it.
52:44
But I mean, did your did because your parents would have moved to
52:48
Australia from Croatia like you, you mentioned just before the
52:52
war in the early in the early 90s.
52:55
So is this, is this having some kind of influence on your like
53:00
your psychology in terms of gravitating eventually over to
53:03
Bitcoin and then kind of grokking it and being like, oh,
53:06
OK, this is like, I've been looking for this thing.
53:10
Look 100% like you know, obviously you had Earth's mum,
53:14
you know you on your podcast. There's also Katie the Russian.
53:19
Natalie's Polish. Like what's her name?
53:23
Oh my God, I'm having a mental brain.
53:25
Brain freeze Walker, Americans partner.
53:27
What's her? Name.
53:28
Oh, Carla. Carla yes, you know, she's
53:30
Romanian. So I feel like there's
53:33
definitely a correlation. I don't know, you could say
53:36
there's probably some causation, at least in my story, that
53:40
between hardship endured in your early life or watch, you know,
53:45
watching money go to shit, your local currency and and having
53:51
that I guess instilled in you that it's money's not as secure
53:56
as we're told, right. So yeah, like I grew up in a
54:00
mixed Serbian Croatian family, mostly Serbian.
54:04
And because of I guess you adopt the the nationality by the by
54:11
the mail in your family. So even though my dad's half
54:14
half his, his father was Serbian, so he was considered
54:18
Serbian, My mom's full Serbian. And we were Serbians living in
54:22
Croatia before the civil war broke out.
54:24
So when they noticed in the like late 80s that there was going to
54:28
be turmoil, we moved before there were lines and live queues
54:35
of like cars crossing the border.
54:38
Like we, we moved before all of that.
54:41
And yeah, it was pretty much leaving our home and, and it was
54:46
all survival from then on. You know, we had my parents were
54:50
building a house in Croatia. They had a house for like, you
54:54
know, a holiday home. And that all had to, you know,
54:58
be left behind and we had to cross the border.
55:01
And then when the war started in the 90s, we actually moved back
55:06
to the border. And because of conscription, my
55:10
dad had to go to army, just like every man over the age of 18 had
55:13
to go to the, you know, fighting the war.
55:16
And, and that was really traumatizing because I remember
55:19
my father leaving, you know, every few months.
55:24
I guess I didn't have a concept of time.
55:26
I was 6, but he was coming, going to war.
55:28
And each time he came back skinnier and like a longer beard
55:32
and, and, and, you know, there was a month where he was missing
55:36
and we didn't know if he was going to come back.
55:38
And I remember my mom being very distressed because she's got two
55:42
young kids. We're living in poverty.
55:46
They're working, but because of the economic situations, they're
55:50
not getting paid consistently at least.
55:53
And, you know, my brother and I had just started school, which
55:58
is so funny. I, I remember coming to
56:00
Australia, I was just shocked that kids got driven to school
56:05
in four wheel drives. I'm like, I have to walk to
56:07
school like on my own at six and prepare my own breakfast and
56:11
dress myself up like I didn't have anyone doing this shit for
56:15
me. So I learned this, I had like
56:18
adult level responsibilities very early on, which is, again,
56:22
another reason why I love being immature with my friends is
56:25
because I love going back into my childhood.
56:28
But yeah, I, you know, during the war there was hyperinflation
56:34
in Yugoslavia. It was like rampant.
56:36
We had like million, billion dollar bills.
56:39
And I remember there was all these men standing on corners of
56:43
St. And I was like, Mom, who are
56:45
they? And they were just people who
56:47
would you who would like changing German marks for
56:52
Serbian dinners or Yugoslavian dinners?
56:56
And yeah, like, I remember one month we had money and you could
57:02
buy bread with this like gazillion dollar note.
57:04
And the next month or even like the next day, you couldn't.
57:08
So money was melting. And that was my, my 1st, I
57:13
guess, touch point with money, just knowing that you can really
57:16
lose value. And then we'll be using a
57:19
foreign currency to store value. And that was like a more stable
57:23
foreign currency. When I spoke to Katie, the
57:25
Russian, she basically said that, you know, in, in, in
57:29
Russia, they didn't even have that option because they were so
57:32
far away from the border. Their money was just melting and
57:35
they had nothing to like no other option.
57:38
So again, thank God for Bitcoin. The fact that, you know, now we
57:43
have a store of value that people globally can utilize in
57:49
times of crisis. And we've seen this time and
57:52
time again when there's currency collapsing, you can see Bitcoin
57:57
just going up, you know, in that country, like, and, and yeah,
58:02
like to me that it's the human rights angle of it that just
58:07
really inspires me so much, these stories that it's like,
58:11
yeah. So it was absolutely,
58:14
absolutely. What I guess a part of the
58:17
reason why I'm such a hardcore bitcoiner is because very early
58:22
on I had this, yeah, visceral memory of of, you know, hardship
58:27
with money. But it's, it's that imprint too.
58:30
I mean, it's a six year old. I mean, you're, you're, you're
58:33
like fresh, like fresh into the world.
58:36
You're like a piece of soft wax. You could just like easily make
58:40
a dent in it, you know, and I just can't even like fathom, to
58:47
be honest, what that was like. I don't know where I'm going
58:52
with this, but like, how the fuck do you like do we have a
58:59
civilization in the in the late 20th century?
59:02
I know you know that the, the 20th century is the bloodiest
59:07
century of, of, of, of all time because of fucking central
59:11
banking and all of these these warmongering banker twats
59:16
basically sending these people off to fight their unjust wars.
59:22
And at at that young of an age, like it's really about the
59:29
adults that have to have education of the self, like they
59:35
have to be able to create a a harmonious loving environment
59:39
that that the child can kind of just be in and be a child and
59:44
not have to deal with this. Like hyper.
59:50
What is it like? I don't know.
59:52
It's just it's violence. Like it's, it's like, yeah.
59:55
So I mean you, I dare say you probably carried some of that,
1:00:00
those impressions, those impulses.
1:00:03
Something through. And so you land on something
1:00:06
like Bitcoin and then, you know, compound that with people's
1:00:09
misunderstanding of this thing and they just think, well, maybe
1:00:12
you're right wing or, you know, like, I don't know, a tech bro
1:00:21
or whatever. And and yeah, like you're trying
1:00:24
to square that circle and you're like, no, it's just, it
1:00:27
literally comes from a place of love as we were in gay as that
1:00:31
sounds like. I just.
1:00:33
I can't even imagine that, to be honest.
1:00:37
Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Sorry.
1:00:42
Oh, you remind me of like the kids in high school because when
1:00:45
we were in, I think in year 10, we had to write a biography.
1:00:49
And my friend Sonia, her life was way harder.
1:00:53
Like she lost her father during the war and she was, yeah, the,
1:00:57
the war situation she was in was quite, you know, a a lot more
1:01:01
dire than where I was because the, the radio presenter in her
1:01:07
local town actually got killed on air when he was trying to
1:01:10
tell people to go hide and, and, and, and get out of Yeah.
1:01:13
So we had all these Australian kids in tears reading the
1:01:17
autobiography. Hey man, I'm not crying.
1:01:20
I'm not crying. You're crying.
1:01:21
It's OK if you are. It's yeah, I don't know, like
1:01:29
I've I've had Katie the rush on before and and and mags as well.
1:01:32
She's Polish shit, shit to flee. And like it's just it's such a
1:01:36
world away. Like it really is just a
1:01:38
complete world away from from growing up in Australia, like,
1:01:43
you know, from the from the get go.
1:01:46
It just kind of eviscerates the preciousness of childhood and it
1:01:49
just it just it just grinds my gears.
1:01:51
And so like I'm reading this book at the moment called Spirit
1:01:53
LED Community, and it's all about, you know, creating these
1:01:57
these kind of sacred places within a community for the child
1:02:01
to be in and to grow up without, you know, having to kind of, you
1:02:06
know, deal with the intellectual head sort of stuff.
1:02:09
It's more about sitting in the heart for a long, long time, for
1:02:12
as long a time as possible. And and I'm reading this book
1:02:15
and I'm thinking this is this is all sounds great, great.
1:02:18
But how do we coordinate this community around these kind of
1:02:21
ideals? We can't just impose them.
1:02:23
They have to be some sort of access from which we can, we
1:02:27
can, yeah, coordinate this human action.
1:02:31
Like these things are great. But like, how do you, if people
1:02:34
can't afford to have a spirit LED community or to create these
1:02:39
harmonious environments because, you know, fuels at $4.00 a litre
1:02:43
or, you know, grocery bills through the roof, you're more
1:02:47
used through the roof, whatever. You literally have a
1:02:50
decivilization effect and and it's very it's almost impossible
1:02:56
to kind of create those environments and to cultivate
1:02:58
those sorts of things. And so I'm trying to think of
1:03:00
ways that I can insert Bitcoin, of course, into this book and
1:03:06
and it's and, and take it to some some people that are here
1:03:09
in the community that are kind of similarly aligned to try and
1:03:11
explain. Yeah, like these are all cool
1:03:14
ideas and everything, but none of it's going to work if we have
1:03:17
to keep using fair money. It's just not going to work, you
1:03:20
know? Quick break just to say, if
1:03:23
you're enjoying the show and digging what you hear, please
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1:03:46
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1:03:54
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1:03:59
Thank you for listening and thank you for your support.
1:04:04
Yep, I don't have a follow up. You don't have to.
1:04:10
Yeah, no, I'm just yeah. What community do you live in?
1:04:13
Like where are, where are you based?
1:04:15
Oh, I don't dox myself on air, no.
1:04:16
OK, OK. All right.
1:04:17
Fair enough. I'm not confident like you are.
1:04:24
What do you wish more people knew about Bitcoin?
1:04:27
What do I wish more people knew about it?
1:04:30
Yeah. That it is so much more than
1:04:37
money. That it is, again, not just in
1:04:40
asset class, it is money, and it is just this amazing tool for
1:04:45
civilization that can lift us out of the pickle that we're in.
1:04:53
Pickle is being very nice about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like.
1:04:59
That's very polite. Yeah, it's a polite way.
1:05:02
We're in a bit of a pickle, guys.
1:05:04
We need to get. Ourselves out of it.
1:05:05
I think Bitcoin might help. Yeah.
1:05:12
I like it. I like it a lot.
1:05:13
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing.
1:05:14
A lot of people, I mean, I guess I'm still envious of these 30
1:05:20
people that you've got in your community like that are
1:05:22
bitcoiners that meet on The Reg and are highly motivated to
1:05:27
inculcate this thing into the community that that is.
1:05:30
I'm going to have to figure out how to get there and learn from
1:05:35
you guys. But when you go out and I mean,
1:05:41
the cost of living, I'd imagine in Byron is is quite high.
1:05:45
And so it would Bitcoin kind of do you ever have those
1:05:49
conversations with people that you're trying to maybe orange
1:05:52
peel and be like, well, listen, like it's not going to happen
1:05:54
overnight. But the fact is things do tend
1:05:58
to get cheaper on a Bitcoin standard.
1:06:01
And if you start now, it's entirely possible that you can
1:06:05
stay in the community that you grew up in or whatever it is.
1:06:10
Yeah, like the the I think I mentioned before the the region
1:06:14
here is very open minded. So there's quite a lot of people
1:06:16
that are already curious about alternative ways of living,
1:06:21
right. And it's not really a hard sell
1:06:25
to to get them interested in Bitcoin.
1:06:27
Like just recently I started that new job that I was talking
1:06:31
about and they asked me like what it is that I do and I told
1:06:37
them I have a podcast. Like what is it about?
1:06:38
I'm like, it's about Bitcoin and I left the conversation and that
1:06:43
like this is how much I've involved in getting to Bitcoin
1:06:46
in 2024, right? Like I used to be like, Oh my
1:06:50
God, you need to learn about this.
1:06:51
And now I'm just so chill about it.
1:06:53
So I'll let it go. Like that was the seed that I
1:06:55
planted and never mentioned it again.
1:06:57
But it was my colleague that actually brought it up and she
1:06:59
goes so like that Bitcoin thing, like, how did you get into it?
1:07:04
Like, did you put a lot of money in?
1:07:06
And she's like, Oh, I have a friend who put some, you know,
1:07:09
percentage of the superannuation into Bitcoin And, and I'm just
1:07:13
like, Yep, Yep. She goes, how would you
1:07:15
recommend that I get started? I'm like, learn about it, like
1:07:18
study it. There's, there's no like, it
1:07:20
would be very dishonest of me to just say you put your money in.
1:07:24
Like I'm like I did actually say to her, I'm like, if you're the
1:07:27
type of person that needs to have your skin in the game to be
1:07:29
more interested, to learn, then put aside whatever that amount
1:07:33
is for you. That's not going to make you
1:07:34
freak out with volatility, but it will, I guess, motivate you
1:07:39
or incentivize you to want to learn about it more.
1:07:41
But I'm like, it's a wonderful thing to learn about.
1:07:44
And it's important to learn about, especially now because we
1:07:48
do have a, you know, changing monetary order globally.
1:07:51
None of us know what that's going to look like.
1:07:54
We have an idea and obviously you and I are, you know, betting
1:08:00
on Bitcoin, but I think anyone being educated about money from
1:08:05
first principles is is really going to benefit significantly.
1:08:09
And even if you're getting gold and silver or, I don't know,
1:08:12
like I think, yeah, just anything, then putting all of
1:08:16
your eggs into Fiat is you're going to, yeah.
1:08:20
Whether those storms that are coming a lot better than someone
1:08:23
who's, yeah, hoping that the Fiat experiment is, is somehow
1:08:27
going to, you know, finished more positively this time than
1:08:31
it has every other time in history.
1:08:34
Right on 100% What does Bitcoin mean to you?
1:08:40
Well, I guess what does Bitcoin mean to me?
1:08:45
Ha, I guess it's it's a tool for.
1:08:56
Yeah, like it's money is a language.
1:08:59
We use it to communicate value. We use it to exchange and trade
1:09:03
things with one another. We use it to organize society.
1:09:08
I actually had a great guest on recently to talk about, you
1:09:11
know, Bitcoin is time and that's such a wonderful article that
1:09:15
was written by Gigi. And, and yeah, like this, it is
1:09:19
definitely a tool for a better civilization.
1:09:25
And Bitcoin to me is hope. It's optimism.
1:09:30
It's returning back to what it means to be human in in an age
1:09:36
where technology is speeding up, information is speeding up,
1:09:41
everything's speeding up. It's like the the tool that gets
1:09:44
to kind of rewind the clock back a little bit so that we can
1:09:46
start to feel like we're not just cogs in a machine.
1:09:52
We can go back to doing things that actually matter to us.
1:09:56
Having relationships, touching grass, going for a beach walk,
1:10:01
you know, cooking slow meals on a Sunday instead of getting take
1:10:05
away that that's yeah, that's essentially what Bitcoin is to
1:10:08
me. It's it's the best thing that
1:10:11
I've that I'm most proud of is, is orange peeling my parents and
1:10:16
they went from, you know, thinking, Oh my gosh, you're
1:10:18
nuts. What are you doing with your
1:10:20
money to now being like, they love that I have a podcast.
1:10:25
They love the guest that I have on every time.
1:10:28
You know, they, they, they, they watch every single one of my
1:10:30
episodes. And no matter who it is that I
1:10:32
interview, they learn something new and they hear a fresh
1:10:36
perspective. And they, they, they, yeah,
1:10:38
they, they 100% Bitcoiners. Like they're Bitcoin
1:10:41
maximalists, which is so funny to say because they're like in
1:10:45
their 60s. Yeah.
1:10:50
So, yeah, it's just been this wonderful thing that's kind of
1:10:52
brought my family closer together.
1:10:54
And we can be like, OK, well, let's let's talk about how we
1:10:58
can survive whatever's coming. There's going to be a lot of
1:11:02
changes. And you know, the the the more
1:11:04
educated we are about money and the more educated we are about
1:11:10
everything that's happened in the world, we can be more
1:11:12
prepared and more resilient. OK, so I know that and I'm just
1:11:19
going to shout out honest money, the podcast it, it's a Kraken.
1:11:23
I mean, you've had you've had Mr. James lavish on all the
1:11:26
macro Bros. They ignore, they ignore my
1:11:29
request. They think I don't know what
1:11:31
they think. Maybe it's the spiritual woo woo
1:11:33
stuff that makes them puts the fear of God in them.
1:11:35
I don't know. But all the macro Bros, they shy
1:11:38
away from replying in my DM. So I believe for you get Mr.
1:11:43
Lavish shot. You know, he's he knows he's
1:11:45
onions. But yeah, honest money, Kraken
1:11:47
show. And Anya, I got to say thank you
1:11:49
so much for spending some scarce time find out energy telling us
1:11:52
the tale of how you discovered Bitcoin.
1:11:55
It's been an honour and a pleasure having you on.
1:11:57
Thank you for having me on.