Hey, everybody. Welcome to part two of my conversation with Lisa. So you came from energy trading and now you are full time in Bitcoin. So I'm very curious about that journey because you didn't find Bitcoin very long ago. Is that correct? Correct. It wasn't that long ago, and you are all in.

I am irresponsibly long involvement of Bitcoin. That is true. I... It's like eat, pray, love Bitcoin's all I do. Yeah, I got into Bitcoin in 2018. I had a massive change in my life and I had money in a managed fund with an investment manager and he had me in 26 different mutual funds. And I just remember getting my statement one day going like this isn't going to work for me anymore. Like, I don't feel like I'm getting any value here. This is a lot of work. I'm paying this guy 2 percent or whatever it was. Like, I can do better than this I think a little bit of it was like, okay, I can day trade my own account. I did get paid to day trade. I traded commodities, which I would argue are harder to trade than equities. So I'll manage my own money. So I started this journey of what do I want to invest in? Well, I knew I wanted to be long energy companies and I knew I wanted to be long technology companies. So this is like early 2018 at the outset you know, 2018, like you can really day trade Amazon back then, right? Like it would open at one price and go up and I would probably make, I don't know, two or 3, 000 in a 30 minute time frame. And then I would Not look at the market again all day and be like, okay, I made 2, 000 today. Yay. It didn't take me very long of doing that going. This is a lot of risk This is actually a lot of work. I'm creating a huge tax event every time I do this like this is not smart Right. It really, it really didn't take me that long to go. I'm a lot simpler of a person than wanting to manage a portfolio and study technology stocks all day. Like, this is not what I want to do with my life, but I knew I was really interested in technology. And I could see that there, you know, like everybody else, right. You could see that there was a shift coming. Like we were in the midst of a technological revolution. So I found a magazine. I don't know how I saw. I think I was in an airport. I stumbled upon it. The MIT tech review. I still take it today. I think it's a phenomenal publication and they published a list for many years in a row of the top technology companies of the year. So I, I built a very pedestrian spreadsheet to try to look for similarities and signal, you know, who are the seed round investors of these companies? What was the technology, right? It was like genomics, AI social media consumer related, you know, whatever, right? Like this started their list started, I think, in 2010. So I started looking at those companies and what really struck me as interesting was this word blockchain and I was like, oh, wait, if I buy blockchain, I am going to be financially set, right? Like, I'm going to invest in blockchain, blockchain is the future. Well, I cringe saying those words now because I mean, after 2018 to today, I realized that, you know, and I'm no technology expert, this is not financial advice, but if anybody tells me they're interested in blockchain, not Bitcoin, that's like saying I'm interested in copper wire, not electricity. Right? Like, you've missed it. You're totally wrong. But nevertheless, I kept Googling blockchain. How do I buy blockchain? And I came upon Bitcoin, started studying some and Ethereum and, you know, all the other sort of alt coins that we regard as just, I regard as just garbage now. But nevertheless, that was my journey. I started studying technology stocks, studying blockchain. Day trading all of the, you know, like 20 tokens, like a complete degen. And again, it like, didn't take me very long to go this is the biggest waste of my time. I don't want to sit on Twitter and watch the alerts for whatever token, like, this is just, something's not right in Denmark. I am going to stop. I'm not going to do this. And I just kept my Bitcoin. I sold everything else and I kept a little bit of Bitcoin. I didn't have a huge allocation at that time. I had most of my assets in Amazon and Apple and I don't know, probably like 10 or 15 energy companies from Kinder Morgan to Momentum, I mean, just a whole bunch of pipeline companies and kind of midstream companies. So anyway, so from, that's 2018. And I don't know, by about 2020, I just got further and further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I had moved from the East coast back to back to Houston. And I thought, well, I'll go back to work in the energy business. And, I just started talking with folks and having conversations and I was speaking with an oil and gas person one day who said. Yeah, you should really be a consultant for Bitcoin. You should explain Bitcoin to people. And he was actually really kidding. He wanted to date me and he didn't want to talk about Bitcoin. So he wanted me to go talk about Bitcoin with other people. So he was like, you know, you should go talk about this during the day. So we can talk about something else at night. And it was really funny and he was right. I should be talking about Bitcoin all the time. So I spun up a deck and I started telling people that I was a Bitcoin educator and that I could help them understand Bitcoin. And, that's how I got here. I got hired by a Bitcoin company. I went to work for Unchained. I went to the Texas Blockchain Council event. I met Parker Lewis. We had a couple of conversations and two weeks later, I was working at Unchained and I've been working, full time in Bitcoin ever since. And just to bring that all home, I mean, I work in Bitcoin because I think it's reachable, it's understandable, it's knowable. It's accessible to everyone. You don't need to have an MBA. You don't need to have graduated from college. You don't need to have any special skills or you know, you don't need to be an analyst of any type to understand that it is the most scarce asset on earth and scarcity drives value. And if you can really just understand that one concept. You can understand why Bitcoin over time will become the most valuable asset on earth and why it is such a vortex for value, right? It's like sucking value out of every other asset class. And the market cap of Bitcoin is growing, but what's most exciting to me is that the number of users on the network are growing. So, as Alex Gladstein has said in his piece, multiple pieces, it's not number go up technology. It's freedom go up technology.

So when you first came across Bitcoin, as part of your general interest in blockchain technology, when you're doing your research, what set it apart from the other so called shit coins now That made you really open your eyes and go wait this is the only one that I want to focus on

There's no marketing team and there's no CEO, right? It just is what it is. It's code. It's pure. There's no gimmicks. There's no sales team. There's nobody collecting 2 percent a year to manage your assets. Right. It just is what it is. It's the way to, own a more beautiful proper form of property than Malibu beachfront property or name, whatever you think is you know, it's like owning the Rocky Mountains. It's, it's like this majestic, pure, unpolluted asset, you know, no matter how many of us try to screw it up. Right. Like us, like the collective us of people creating products, I mean, I really am appreciative of BlackRock. I think that their leadership and stepping into the spaces is huge and will be huge for people touching this asset. And it's been a long road, the mainstream media has not been a friend to, to Bitcoin. Warren Buffett has not been a friend of Bitcoin. There've been a lot of negative narratives that have kept good people out of this asset class,

yeah there's definitely a lot of misunderstanding surrounding bitcoin and Now that Black Rock and other companies are proposing the ETFs. Can you explain? Since you're background is in finance what the difference is between the Bitcoin that you hold and an ETF for our audience?

So Bitcoin is a physical bearer asset. And what that means is that you can actually physically take possession of the asset and be in complete ownership of the asset without a third party. And as you know, and probably many people in your audience knows, but for those that don't private keys are the asset. Bitcoin lives on the blockchain. Bitcoin does not live in a hardware device or signing device. Right. It although people often think that those things are that is the asset and if you lose that, that signing device or that hardware device, right. It kind of looks like your key fob. I, I think it looks like my key fob and the way that I equate it to people is that so if I have my, my key to my car and I press the unlock button, it is transmitting a code to my car that allows My car to unlock. And when my key is inside my car, it allows my car to start. Right. So you would agree that that's a code inside that fob. If I lose that fob, have I lost my asset, my car? No, I can go down to the dealership and pay the dealership 350 or whatever ridiculous price it is to replace that key fob, but they will load the code into a new key fob for me, and I will drive down the road mad, but I will be driving down the road again in my car. So those hardware devices, those hardware, those signing devices. look like a key fob. And what they do is they, they hold your seed phrase or they hold your code so that when you use that and access Bitcoin, so let's say you're like an unchained client or a Casa client, you have a multi sig collaborative custody agreement. And you're signing a transaction, right? Like it's got the code in it. It makes it easy so that you don't have to punch in all the digits, but if you lose your hardware device, as long as you have the digits written down, you still own the asset. So in an ETF like that BlackRock and basically every other financial services firm in the world will eventually offer it is a wrapped form of Bitcoin. And what that means to you is that you may hold air quote Bitcoin in your retirement account or in your whatever account it is within Fidelity or BlackRock. But you don't hold those keys. Someone else holds those keys. You have essentially price exposure to the asset, but you don't actually own the asset. So, I'm delighted that BlackRock is doing it. I'm delighted that That other financial services firms are going to help people touch Bitcoin. I would just offer to folks that, you know, know the difference. It's fine, I guess, to own inside of BlackRock, but, you know, I, I think about Bitcoin, like part of the beauty of it is that if we dial back to kind of like 1943, when people are walking out of Germany and they're going into Poland, or they're going into like, they're escaping Germany. You can visualize what those people look like they're in their winter coats and their pockets and their clothes are just stuffed with gold and their candlesticks and all their silverware and everything of value is stuffed in their pockets, and they're crossing a border, but with Bitcoin, you need your 12 words. And you can cross a border and have a hundred percent of your wealth, right? Or a hundred percent of what you've got invested in Bitcoin, right? Like nobody can take it from you. And I mean, some people say that they memorize their 12 words and then they feel like, you know, they can cross any border without, you know, essentially they can cross without anything in their pockets at all and get to the next country, buy a phone, download a Bitcoin wallet and put the 12 words. And there's your net worth. Like it's kind of miraculous.

I love that visualization with the key fob. I've never heard that before. It's such a perfect analogy. It's so easy to visualize what it is. There's a lot of, I think, confusion with the chosen word to describe something like when they say hardware wallet, what is that? You know, but I love that. I love that imagery of the fob that really makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. Thanks for joining us today and learning with us today. If the discussion with our guests resonated with you and you would like to dive deeper into the world of Bitcoin, don't miss out on joining the Orange Hatter Women's Reading Club. The meetup link is in the show notes. Also, if there are women in your life whom you think would both enjoy and benefit from learning more about Bitcoin, please share Orange Hatter with them. Until next time, bye.