I speak about the yoga space because that's what I'm familiar with. So as we all sit on the floor and we all meditate for world peace. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't do that, but what we really need is a new monetary system. Because the current system that we have, it has completely twisted and corrupted and co-opted incentives. We're working harder, we're working longer, we're donating more money to whatever non profit you donate to, and yet not only are things not getting better, they actually seem to be getting a lot worse.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Orange Hatter.

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Hey Erin. Thank you so much for joining us on Orange Hatter. I can't wait to dive into your stories. You are an adventurer. It's gonna be so much fun. Thank you for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm always happy to chat about Bitcoin, of course, and anything else that might come up. I'm an open book, so we'll see where the conversation takes us.

Awesome. All right. Let's get started. Oh, if you could give us a little bit about your background, that would be amazing.

Sure, so I grew up in Canada just outside of Toronto. I grew up in a small town and gradually over the course of my life moved a little bit further out west. I moved out to Alberta, which is like the Texas of Canada, some people may know. I spent 10 years out there. I used to be I was heavily involved with horses, so I actually went to agriculture college, and I was managing the equestrian facility at the agricultural college that I went to in Ontario. And then, so when I left that job, I was living in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, and Ottawa is very bilingual, so To get almost any job, you need to be able to speak French, which I do not, so I had a decision to make at that point. I was, I could either stay in Ottawa and learn French, or I could move out west. I chose the option to move out west. I packed up my car, packed up my horse, and we moved out to Edmonton. And I had worked in restaurants my whole life. That was my very first job. When I was 14, I was hired at Burger King, and I was fired two months later, and so I took about a year off because I had a little bit of PTSD from being fired from my very first job, but I started working for a a counter service bagel, and, shop when I was 16 and ever since then I've been in restaurants while doing other jobs a lot of the time. I just didn't find that anything helped me pay the bills. as well as working in restaurants did. So I moved out to Edmonton to work for a horse trainer, but I was working in a restaurant at the same time because it's just nearly impossible to pay rent and do all of the things that you need to do on a assistant trainer salary. So I was working in restaurants and then the opportunity came up to start managing for this restaurant company. So I found myself in a management position for seven years. And then I did my yoga teacher training, and that completely flipped my life upside down. I just didn't see the purpose in the work that I was doing anymore. I was working 50, 60 hours a week. Really weird schedules. It was always changing from four in the morning if I had to do inventory, and then sometimes not going in till four o'clock in the evening, but working all the way through till 1 a. m. So after I did my yoga teacher training, I really did a big re evaluation of my life and what my priorities were. I went on a six month trip down to South America. I quit my job right after I bought a house, by the way, I think it was June of 2014, and then I quit my job in October of 2014, so my mom had a full on panic attack, but I wasn't too worried about it, so then I jumped on a plane, went to South America for six months, and came back to Alberta, started teaching yoga, and again, can't pay my rent and buy my groceries and do all the things on a yoga teacher salary, so I went back to working in restaurants. And then I bought an old Volkswagen camper van an old Westfalia, baby blue with a pop top. This was when the whole van life trend was getting quite big and something about that really resonated with me, so I rented out my house and jumped in my camper van and took a job in British Columbia for the summer just to pay some bills before I went to Mexico was the plan. And the place I was working at in British Columbia, that was the first year of really bad forest fires, so we got evacuated and, long story short, I ended up not going to Mexico, I ended up on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, which is a ferry ride away from Vancouver a really special place. Working in restaurants again, and the most recent massive life change that happened for me happened during the pandemic, which I'm sure a lot of people can relate to particularly in Canada, things were difficult because the mandates that we had, all of the rules and regulations that we had, Occurred mostly at a federal level, so we didn't have a Texas or a Florida, we didn't have a different province or a different state that we could go to if where we were living didn't resonate with our values or what we wanted at the time, so I ended up quitting my job. In the restaurant and luckily enough, I was in a position where I was able to do that. I had enough savings. I only have myself to support. I don't have children, so I was in a unique position to be able to do that, so that's when I became a death doula, and that's when I found Bitcoin. Both of those things happened almost at the exact same time, so even sitting here and talking about my life before Bitcoin and before becoming a death doula, it's wow. Was I even that person? I just, I feel like I've been this person forever. But I think as with most things, you can look back on your life and see, Oh yeah, everything I've done has been leading up to this point. Oh, so I bought my second camper van. I sold the old Volkswagen camper van a couple of years back. But when everything went down with the trucker protests in Canada when people's bank accounts were getting frozen, that was the last straw for me. I thought, I got to get out of here. I don't want to get trapped in some kind of dystopian nightmare. So I bought another camper van and I left and went down to the U. S. for a year. And then ended up going back to Canada last summer to work. Which I did, and I just lived in my camper van and saved all the money I was making. And now I've been in El Salvador, and now I'm in Guatemala, and I've been here since the beginning of November.

What a wild ride, a lot of young people today think that they have to choose one thing to do, especially if you're a college age. They put themselves in the peg and then that's it But you literally just proved that life is a continual evolution Going from one thing to another. I have so many questions for you. First one is where's your horse? What happens your horse?

he's gone, unfortunately. He developed a condition in his feet that's A lot of horses get, and it's very difficult for them to recover from that, so I was actually at a point where I was paying more for him on a monthly basis, it was costing me more in his board and vet bills than I was paying for myself living in an apartment and supporting myself in all the ways I needed, so I found a really nice This older retired couple who had performance horses their whole lives and they were just looking for a really nice sweet horse that they could ride through the mountains when he was feeling okay. Yeah, he ended up going to them and I still dream about him often but I don't even know if he's still alive to be honest. If he was, he would be, gosh, he'd be almost 30 years old now which is pretty old for a horse.

Yeah, so what kind of horse training did you do?

Growing up I rode English. I don't know if you're familiar with horses at all, but it's like English is one style and Western is another style. So because I grew up on the East Coast a lot of English riding happening there. So I grew up riding English, and then when I moved out to Alberta, I discovered Western reining is the name of a sport. Essentially what reining is it takes all of the maneuvers that you would do on a horse if you were actually working cattle on a ranch, but it amps everything up a little bit, like everything is a little bit faster, a little bit neater and you're not actually working with a cow, so I was doing that, and then when I moved up to Edmonton, I was working with a cutting horse trainer. Which is when you actually are working cattle and that was a ton of fun.

I Love horses. So I always am so jealous of people who get to work a lot with horses but my daughter was taking riding lessons and I would go with her sometimes and I would just listen to her trainer talk about horses and it just surprised me so much that they're such massive, majestic, beautiful animals, but their health maintenance is a really big deal. It's very tough. They're actually quite fragile health wise.

They are, yeah. And I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's because they're living quite unnaturally, like in, in horses in the wild. They would never be living in a padded stall with sawdust and all of these different things. So it's almost akin to what has happened with people, you know We've gone from living in tribal communities small communities And now we're all living in high rise condominium buildings in the city and having all kinds of health issues and wondering why that is so I would yeah, I'd be curious to know if maybe that's it's The way that we treat them in the modern world that is causing them to be so darn expensive, because it is expensive.

Yeah. So you went from horse training to working in restaurants or sometimes actually simultaneously. And I'm very curious to, to hear from you. So why from those two things you went into yoga teacher training?

Ah, that's a good question. Well, Yeah, gosh, restaurants have just been in my life, my whole life, and I'm very grateful for that, and for a really long time, I was always looking for a way out of restaurants. Or the way that I looked at it was, working in a restaurant was a means to an end. When I was in my 20s, I thought, there's no way I'm going to be 30 still working in restaurants. That is just not acceptable. And then I was in my 30s, and I was thinking, okay, there's no way I'm going to be in my 40s. That is just a ridiculous idea. I find myself at 43 still working in restaurants. And, I finally have reached a point where I just have so much gratitude for restaurants, actually, because it's provided me a really beautiful life. It's really enabled me to do a lot of things. Like I said, I've been in El Salvador and Guatemala. I'm going to Mexico next week. It's allowed me to travel. It's allowed me to pay my rent and have a car and buy healthy food. And Really support myself in all of the ways that I've needed to be supported. But, so after I sold my horse, Horses are very expensive, as we were just saying, and I don't think I would ever have another one unless I had a farm and had somewhere to keep it. After I left the horse world, I needed something to do, I needed something physical to do, so I started running. And I had always hated running. When I was a kid, I used every excuse in the book to get out of doing anything that involved running, like track and field day at school was the worst day of my life, so it was horrible, but for whatever reason, I was in a really bad relationship at the time, and I think that had something to do with it, I just needed to Move some emotions through my body and I don't think I was conscious of that at the time But something was just pulling me towards running. So I started running like a maniac and Became really imbalanced in my body because of that you know really tight hamstring really sore back all of that kind of stuff and I just happen to be living around the corner from a strip mall where a brand new yoga studio opened and I thought, yeah, I probably need a little more balance in my life. I probably don't need to run seven days a week, maybe I'll take a day off and do a little stretching. So I invited some of the girls from work and we all went to a yoga class and this was over 10 years ago now. So I think yoga was really starting to peak at that time. Everybody was starting to do yoga. And the first class I went to, I absolutely hated it. I absolutely hated it. My runner's brain was just, thought it was just ridiculous. I could not handle just laying there and doing nothing but breathing. And for whatever reason, that resistance that I felt. I just kept going back. I just kept on going back, and then I became obsessed with yoga, just like I had been obsessed with running. I'm very much, when I find something that, that I resonate with, I am all in 100%. Yeah, I went down the yoga rabbit hole pretty quickly. I

That's a familiar story. I've spoken to several people who started yoga and hated it, but for whatever reason felt compelled to continue to go and then becoming a yoga teacher. So what about yoga eventually after you got over the, I hate yoga thing, drew you down the yoga rabbit hole?

think I could answer that question in a number of different ways. I think ultimately it's just the path that I was meant to be on. Yoga helped me to redefine my relationship with my physical body. I think most women can relate to struggling with body issues, struggling with food, and that has certainly been my story through most of my life. I had a really scrawny, athletic older brother. And I was a really shy, chubby bookworm. We were just totally opposite in that way, and so I was always very conscious of my body. My mom was always dieting. I grew up during the 80s and the 90s when diet culture was just going crazy. I think I went on my first diet when I was 9 years old. So I had always really struggled with that and yoga really helped me to exist from the neck down. Because I've always been a very cerebral person and I still have a lot of those tendencies but I just had no relationship with my physical body. So yoga really helped me in that way and through that I developed a relationship with Now I would call that thing God. I wouldn't have called it God ten years ago. I would have said universe or source or whatever word you want to put for it. But now because of Bitcoin, I call it God, actually. Yeah, so I I found that spiritual aspect to my life as well and just a whole wide array of Buddhist philosophy and a lot of things that just really helped me to deal with life that I had never had before and that actually now that I'm talking about it I always used alcohol to deal with in the past and Particularly being in restaurants, the culture around drinking and partying is it's more strange if you don't get hammered every night, if you work in a restaurant now I'm the weird one because I don't drink anymore, and everybody at my work still does, but, Yeah, it, it just, I was ready to evolve, I was ready to evolve in all of the ways physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and yoga helped me to do that, so how do you not get addicted to that or how do you not go down that rabbit hole? Yeah

Well, the listeners can't see you right now, but you are so toned and fit and healthy. And you said you were 43, but I thought you were 33. Honestly, you look so fabulous. And it's just wonderful to hear where that transformation took place. I want to dig just a little bit deeper, just out of my own personal curiosity. So you said the yoga helped you deal with the neck down or at least realign your relationship with what's going on below the neck. And then you touched a little bit on the spirituality. So you said 10 years ago, you called the higher power source, but now you call it the higher power of God. What's the difference and what caused the change?

I'm not sure if there is much of a difference to be honest I think I don't I try not to get too caught up in the dogma of different words for things, but I didn't grow up religious in any sort of way It just wasn't and i've discovered this after spending a year in the US versus growing up in Canada, there's just not a lot of traditional, if you want to call it that, traditional religion in Canada. We're just more of a, I don't know if we're atheists necessarily, but it's not as central to our culture as it seems to be, at least in some areas of the U. S. Again, I don't really subscribe to calling myself one thing or another, but if you would have asked me before yoga, do you believe in God, I probably would have said no. But it's simply because I just didn't have any connection with any of that. I'm not sure if there is a difference between source, nature, universe, God, at least not in my opinion. And someone asked me this question the other day, like, how did Bitcoin redefine your relationship to God? And I'm not even entirely sure. I'm still, digging through it. But I just think the fact that Bitcoin exists. I think it's a divine gift to humanity. And even the creation of Bitcoin itself has this kind of mysterious, immaculate conception magic just going on around it. Yeah, I I look at Bitcoin as proof that God does love us and that God is here and in everything and all things. And I think I'm just more comfortable now with using the word God. I think maybe it's something that comes with age as well. I notice lots of things shifting at midlife and I think you do start to reflect on life and death, and where the heck did we come from, where are we going, and why are we even here at all? And, yeah, I just have a closer relationship with God, I think, for a number of reasons, but Bitcoin has definitely played a part in that, for sure.

We'll dig into the Bitcoin bit, but I want to circle back a little bit, just a couple of years. You mentioned that you ended up becoming a death doula. Somehow you went from being a yoga teacher to a death doula. What happened?

Again, I think, when you get into yoga, there's a lot of exposure to Hinduism and Buddhist philosophy, and a big part of that Buddhist philosophy is The truth of impermanence, how nothing lasts forever, and how we cause our own suffering by clinging to things, expecting them to never change, and just this constant practice of letting go in every moment of everything, so that was something that I had never thought about before and then an actual event that happened was my cat, like my little soulmate I have a tattoo of him on my arm here he died in my arms, and he died a natural death And I had worked with animals most of my life. Also, I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was younger, so I worked in a lot of vet clinics. I actually managed a vet clinic for a short period of time when I thought I would step away from restaurants, and that didn't last very long, but so I had been present at a lot of euthanasias. But I had never witnessed a natural death before, and it was one of the most transformative spiritual moments that I've ever had in my whole life. And when I zoomed out of the situation, I was in my mid thirties, I think, at that point. I couldn't help but think of how strange it was that I was an adult. I was 35, 36, but I had never witnessed death before. And that just really got me thinking about death culture in general, in particular in the Western world. So It just planted that little seed for me, and it it germinated, and it was with me for a number of years, and then randomly on Facebook, I started seeing ads for an end of life doula certification program through Douglas College in Vancouver, and I think I saw that ad for a year, two years, and then Like I said, when the pandemic happened, I found myself with a bunch of time on my hands, and when that ad popped up again, I thought, yeah, okay, this is the time to do that. And it's interesting, because when I told my friends that's what I was doing, they all said, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense. This is what you're supposed to be doing. That was an interesting response from them, and an interesting feeling for me, because I hadn't really felt That aligned with, I don't want to say a career path, just a path in general. I hadn't felt that aligned with something in a really long time.

You said something that's very intriguing to me. You said by the age of 35 or 36, as an adult, you had never witnessed death. As in you should have witnessed death up to that point. Why did you say that?

We used to die at home. We, humans, used to die at home. When we were living in small communities, before, I mean in Canada we have socialized healthcare, so before we had universal healthcare. Before we had mega hospitals to go to. Death was a life event. Just like giving birth, just like everything else that, that would happen over the span of a lifetime. We would die at home. That's actually what coffee tables were made for initially, was to lay a dead body on in a home so that family and friends could come and view the body and pay their respects. It wasn't until like the 1940s, 1950s, when the Industrial Revolution started happening, people started moving into cities. We started to leave these smaller communities and then, like I said, in Canada, universal healthcare, I think we got universal healthcare in the 50s. It's just so closely tied with fiat money and all of the ways in which our monetary system is broken. We were living in cities, but our community was much smaller, we only had the nuclear family. And if both parents are working, then there's nobody at home to take care of grandma and grandpa as they age and as they die. So we started outsourcing death to hospitals, nursing facilities, paid professionals, people that could step in and take that role. Because of all of those reasons, death has come out of the home, and it's now more of a medicalized event. And many of us don't get to see it anymore. We just, we simply don't get to see it. And I think a lot of parents want to protect their kids from the big, scary reality of death, but Death is just a truth, it's a universal truth, and I think it's the one thing that really connects us as humans, and not just humans, but we can look to nature, everything dies, nothing is permanent, so we've really just become separated from all of that, I think our natural human tendency is the more we don't understand something, the more afraid of it we are, the bigger and scarier it becomes. So there's an even bigger motivation to avoid it, right? Instead of leaning into it and going, huh, what's happening over here? We look at death as a negative thing, but it's, in my mind, it's not negative or positive, it simply is. It just is a truth. And I just don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by avoiding it or attempting to protect people from the reality that's what happens. I think it's the one thing we should talk about the most, actually, because out of everything in life, it is the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to every single one of us. So the fact that we're not talking about it all day, every day, I think that's crazy, as opposed to talking about it all the time.

I heard this lecture several years ago, given by, I think it was one of the spiritual teachers. And she was saying, I think everybody should go to the hospital and witness someone passing away. Cause she said, it's a beautiful thing. And as I was listening to her lecture, I thought, what a strange thing to say. Why would you say everybody needs to witness this? So you became a doula. for death. You're calling it a truth that none of us can escape. Every single one of us will one day have to face that. She's seeing it as a beautiful thing. You're saying it as a truth. So how do you connect the two? what is a death doula? What does a death doula do?

Good questions. I call it a truth because, I'll circle back to what is a death doula, but I call it a truth because I think the truth contains all things. I think it contains beauty, and pain. I think it includes joy and grief. I think truth just is. I don't necessarily think that it's one thing or the other. So I do think it's beautiful. I do think death is beautiful. And, it's also horribly sad and sometimes not beautiful, sometimes ugly, but it's, it is the truth. I guess I'll just I'll leave it there and you can come back to that if you want to, but A Death Doula is You can also use the term end of life doula. They're interchangeable. Most people are more comfortable with end of life as, even the word death, a lot of people are not comfortable with. I prefer death because I don't want to sugarcoat anything, but that's just me. But essentially what a doula is a person of service. Most people nowadays are familiar with birth doulas. A lot of women will have a birth doula. Even if they're planning on giving birth in a hospital they still have a doula as a support person. I like to say that birth doulas help people in, and death doulas help people out. We function in a relatively similar way. We help people prepare by helping them come up with an end of life plan. To whatever extent you can plan for things there's oftentimes things that are not in your plan, but if you at least have an idea of what your ideal end of life looks like then we can navigate whatever comes to resemble as much of your plan as you wanted. Essentially we advocate for people. We help people become clear on their values, on what it is that they want, and then we help to make sure that those things happen for that person. So end of life planning is a big part of it. Actually companioning people as they die is another part of it. Helping loved ones after their person has died. Helping them with the grieving process. And also supporting caregivers. And I think that's something that I'm really going to focus on this year. Especially with all of the baby boomers now that are entering elderhood and late elderhood, a lot of people like myself at midlife are going to sooner or later find themselves in some sort of caregiving role. And a lot of us don't know how to do that. The idea of caring for an elder parent feels really overwhelming and really scary because we don't have any of that experience with death. What are we supposed to do? What does death actually look like? What's going to happen? It's a really big, and I think maybe that's part of the reason why we outsource a lot of that process. I just think that does us a major disservice. I think death is a really fertile time for connection and healing and love. But in order for those things to happen, there needs to be a support system in place. And I think that's really where doulas come into the picture in a big way. So we can support the caregiver who is supporting the parent or the friend or whoever the person at end of life may be. I would say the biggest thing is though is that, this is the last thing I'll say about it, a doula has no agenda. So We don't go in there saying this is the way that you should do it, because nobody has ever died and come back with the curriculum on how to do this properly I think that's the biggest not challenge, but it's definitely something that doulas are most mindful of, is it's not my way. We're not gonna die my way, we're gonna do it your way. And then it's up to me as a doula to be really honest with myself. Am I able to support that person in the way that they need to be supported? Because it's not my end of life experience, it's theirs.

I have a lot of questions. I'll start with I'm just going to go back to that lecture that I heard cause that was the only time that I've really thought about that issue. She said that the moment when the spirit leaves the body, you really understand life. And I want to ask you. When you went, I don't know if you've been there in person, I'm assuming you have, so when that actual moment comes, when they have exhaled their last breath, what is that because most of us are very afraid of that. What you said, we don't know it. We only see it in movies. What is that moment like actually?

I will say, I became certified as a death doula during the pandemic. Because of some personal medical choices that I made, it was not an easy time for me to enter people's homes and companion people through the actual dying process. So my experience up to this point has been working with people on creating end of life plans. Also, I travel a lot, and I haven't been in one place for very long over the past two to three years, so it's difficult to be a traveling death doula. I do what I can in having conversations and working with people through planning, so I haven't actually been present at the passing of a person. Like I said before, I have been present at the passing of my cat, and some people might think that's not the same thing. To me, it was. I was absolutely panicked. I was calling every single vet clinic that I could get a hold of because I just, I didn't know what to do. I was beside myself. And then something just came over me like, wait a second. I'm not the one dying. He's the one that's dying and he needs me as his person to just to not panic, right? To be this compassionate rock is the way that I think about it. So I just got really calm. What I was afraid of was the unknown. I didn't know what was going to happen. When he died, I didn't know if he was going to be in pain, I didn't know, I just didn't know, but I just took a moment to center myself and I thought, this is my little soulmate, I love him, I can handle whatever happens. When he took his last breath, his whole body shook. And I felt from the bottoms of my toes all the way up through my body to the top of my head just this cold rush, like this cold movement of energy, and I knew that was him moving through me, and I knew that he was gone. And then it was just, that was it. I know a lot of doulas that have been with people that have passed, and they say the same thing it's quite peaceful by the time the end comes. What freaks most people out is there is a period of time Where breathing sounds quite difficult. It's called the death rattle, actually. It sounds like the dying person is drowning when, as they're breathing, because their lungs are filling with fluid. But at that point, Most people are, they're in the in between they're not fully conscious and they're not quite gone, and a lot of people at the end are given pain medication as well. There's a lot of really good ways to help mitigate pain at the end. So It's, it can be, hours long that process can last, which gives the family time to gather, and then the breathing just stops, and there's just quiet

it's a difficult subject to think about. It really is. Even I think for the most spiritual people, it's still that transition is very difficult. Okay, let's move on to Bitcoin. How did you come across Bitcoin and what was it like?

It's a good story. I had just started dating someone. We'd been dating for a couple of weeks. And it was the weekend in Canada that the government announced vaccine passports that you were going to need to show your proof of vaccination to go to restaurants, movie theatres, all that kind of stuff. And I was working in a restaurant at the time, as an unvaccinated person, I wasn't one of the people that I had to become vaccinated in order to keep my job, I was actually free to continue to work as an unvaccinated person, but I just, that is where I drew the line, like I could not, as an unvaccinated person, check The papers of people and turn away people that were not vaccinated like that is where that was the final straw for me. So I was talking to this guy I was dating about this and I said I think I'm going to have to quit my job. I can't handle everything that's happening anymore. And he just looked at me and he said, have you ever heard of Bitcoin? And I had actually heard of Bitcoin. So that was September of 2021 that he asked me that and everything was happening with the vaccine mandates. I had actually heard of Bitcoin because I had been listening to Joe Rogan for a very long time. And he had Andreas Antonopoulos on his show, I think that was back in 2015 or 2016. And I remember thinking at the time, Oh, this sounds like a really good idea. This Bitcoin thing this makes a lot of sense. But back then I had no idea. How do you get it? Where do you keep it? I didn't even know. I thought it was an investment. It was a stock. I just, I didn't gather enough from that three hour conversation to, to really know what it was. So when he said, have you heard about Bitcoin? I said, yeah, I have actually. Tell me more about this. And it took maybe half an hour for me to know yeah, this is what I want to do. And because I had quit my job in that same weekend. I had a lot of time on my hands so I just went down the bitcoin rabbit hole. I don't even I think I ordered a copy of the Bitcoin Standard right away I started watching youtube videos. I started listening to What Bitcoin Did with Peter Mccormick. I was obsessed. And then I found Bitcoin Twitter. In Canada, Twitter's not a huge thing. There's just not a lot of people on Twitter. But there was a day in October of 21, when Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp all went down. And they were down for a whole day. And I was thinking, What is going on here? How do I find out what's happening with Facebook and Instagram? So I thought, oh, I'll go to Twitter. Twitter's like this news platform. And when I got onto Twitter, I was just like, this is where all the Bitcoin people are. Yeah, I think within two weeks. I had a hardware wallet and was buying and putting Bitcoin into cold storage,

that's really fast. What did your boyfriend say in those 30 minutes that got you so excited?

At the time, I was just fed up with the government. I just had enough. I had enough with being told what to do. I had enough with not being able to live my life when everything around me was seemingly, it was business as usual, when I would go for a run or go for a hike through the forest, it was like, I don't know, everything seems pretty normal to me. And then you turn on the TV and it's Death and destruction and you're not allowed to eat at a restaurant. So I just had enough I had enough of the government So that was the big thing for me and he said look Bitcoin Separates money from state you can peacefully remove yourself from that whole System and you can exist inside of a different reality from the one that we think is our only option. He basically positioned it as a way to circumvent the government, and whatever I could do at the time to stick it to the government, I was all in on. So that one, that was the big thing for me, for sure.

So after you went into the Bitcoin space, you actually started traveling a lot and just spending a lot of time in locations that are Bitcoin circular economies. Tell us about your experience. How did you choose where to go? And what did you experience while you were there?

Yeah, it's so crazy. September 21, I found Bitcoin. I think by February or March of the next year, so five months later, I started my own Bitcoin podcast. And then when I decided to leave Canada and go to the States of course I wanted to connect with Bitcoiners in the US so I went to my first Bitcoin event in Colorado the Beef Initiative, and just met a whole bunch of people. Colorado's got such an incredible Bitcoin scene. So I just spent a lot of time. I ended up dating a guy who is a Bitcoiner, that was really nice, and I was just in this really juicy little Bitcoin bubble for a while. And then, yeah, I went back to Canada last summer to work, and then I decided I wanted to go to El Salvador the previous winter, but because I had met this guy and was living in Colorado, I didn't go. So I knew this year was the year to go to El Salvador and El Zante, specifically Bitcoin Beach, so I just love circular economies. I think it's so important for us as Bitcoiners to bring Bitcoin into everyday life. It's not just this imaginary magic internet money that we can't hold, that we can't see, that has no daily utility, so I had actually started creating a little circular economy where I was living on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. I was talking to businesses and doing presentations and I just think circular economies are so important for a number of different reasons. I really wanted to do some traveling and check out some other circular economies. Of course, Bitcoin Beach is the big one. El Salvador as the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. And It's just, it's been so cool. I spent two months there and it's been so cool just to live on Bitcoin. I haven't taken money out of a bank machine in three months, like cash money. Even now I'm here in Guatemala in Panajachel, which is also known as Bitcoin Lake. I haven't gone to a bank machine. There's not quite as big of a circular economy here, but there are ways that you can still transact in Bitcoin and get the things that you need, even if what you're giving on the other end is fiat currency. And I'm going to Bitcoin Yucatan next week., It's been great. It's just, it's such a cool thing just to see it be normalized, to walk around town and see Bitcoin accepted here signs, just like you would see Visa MasterCard signs on the front of every single store in the US and Canada Bitcoin signs everywhere down here, so to all the people that Where Bitcoin is still just an idea and it's not something tangible, I would just encourage people to come to these countries and see that it's quite normal and it's way better than the current system that we have.

I love that when we go to country like El Salvador, you don't Have to go through the exchange of the currencies. They also use the US dollar So I guess that's a unique situation, but before Bitcoin before this time When I traveled internationally you gotta bring travelers check Because it was at the safest and then you bring it to a counter and then you exchange for the locals currency, but with Bitcoin, you don't have to do any of that. But there are technical stuff that you have to feel comfortable with, the different wallets and the diff using the QR code and transaction fees are now a big thing versus just a few years back. It wasn't a thing or as much of a thing. What would you say to a woman who has heard about Bitcoin and now is seeing in the news that Bitcoin price is going up, the ETFs have been approved, but they're sitting there going, how can I possibly get involved? why should I get involved? I don't have any extra money. What would you say to that person?

Yeah, I actually just met with a woman here yesterday for coffee. Her and her husband own a paragliding business. And I went paragliding on Monday, and they are actually on, there's an app called BTC Map, and when you open it up when you're in Panajachel, I think there's 60 locations that take Bitcoin, it's really cool, and they were on there as one of the locations, so I said, okay, that's where I'm gonna go paragliding, so I walked into their shop, and I met her, and her husband are just wonderful people. And I said, okay, I want to fly with you guys. Can I pay in Bitcoin? And there was a little bit of hesitation. Even though it's a circular economy here, for whatever reason, they just don't, not a lot of Bitcoiners come here. And I'm still trying to figure out why that is because I Love it. This might be the most controversial thing I'll say in this whole podcast, but I like Guatemala more than El Salvador. Anyway, it just took us a couple minutes. I said, look, I'll help you. I'll help you do the transaction. And anyway, so she wanted to know more about it because she said, you've got really cool energy and Her husband asked me why I was into it. And I said it's changed everything about my life mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And he looked at me like, what? Like that wasn't the answer that he was expecting to get. So that piqued her curiosity. So we met for coffee and I explained it more to her from a social standpoint. She's Guatemalan, but she's also half German. So they've lived in Guatemala and Germany. And I think for most people in North America and in Europe, it's this number go up. Like we're just focused on, okay, is Bitcoin going to make me rich? Am I going to be rich if I buy Bitcoin? And I'm not saying that's not a really awesome Side effects of being in Bitcoin, it definitely is. If you go spend 100 on paragliding and then you open up your wallet the next day and Bitcoin's gone up a couple thousand bucks, it's like you went paragliding for free. Yeah, that part of it's really cool. But we have the time to sit and actually talk about, like, why are third world countries? Why are 75 percent of Guatemalans unbanked? Why does everybody here work seven days a week from sunrise to sunset and they still don't have enough money to buy a dozen eggs? Why is that happening? I don't know if there's one thing to say to all women, but I would say that Whatever your biggest concern is, or whatever you feel that your purpose is, or whatever your cause is, whatever it is that you're working on making better in the world, whatever you're doing to be of service, I truly believe with every cell in my body. I believe that Bitcoin is the tool that is actually going to allow us to build this better world that I think we all want and that we've all been envisioning for a long time now. And I can say that coming from the yoga world. There's a lot of environmentalists in yoga, a lot of people who want fair trade, a lot of people who want to protect the environment, a lot of people who want world peace there's a lot of really altruistic- meaning people in that space. And I believe in all spaces, but I speak about the yoga space because that's what I'm familiar with. So as we all sit on the floor and we all meditate for world peace. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't do that, but what we really need is a new monetary system. Because the current system that we have, it has completely twisted and corrupted and co-opted incentives, and are actually working just to make things worse and worse. And yet we are all out here as a global collective wanting to make things better. We're working harder, we're working longer, we're donating more money to whatever non profit you donate to, and yet not only are things not getting better, they actually seem to be getting a lot worse. And not just in my opinion, what I actually believe to be true is that it's the current monetary system that's the problem and that is preventing all of those things from happening. So just to circle back and to tie it all up, I would say whatever it is that you want to do in the world, Bitcoin will help you actually do that thing.

You presented that so well. I need to memorize that speech and be able to use it for myself. Because when I try to answer that question, I end up going all over the place, but thank you so much. I so enjoy our conversation. I feel like I could ask you a zillion more questions, but it'll take forever, but I just want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experiences. I think it's so amazing. yeah, I'm so glad that you're able to come on today Thank you so much.

Thank you. Very few things bring me more joy than talking about death and bitcoins, so any opportunity that I have to do that and just connect with other people, other women like you that are helping to spread these conversations, I think it's really important, so it was my pleasure.

Thank you for listening to this episode. Did you enjoy it? Wasn't our guest absolutely fabulous. I just love every woman's story on this show. Everybody has a unique perspective and yet, we all come to the same place, which is Bitcoin is an important part of our lives. If this story has inspired you and you would like to know more, go to www.orangehatter.com. Get involved. Join and our reading group, send me an email and introduce yourself. I will be so happy to hear from you. The best way you can support this show is to spread the word Tell every woman, you know, to listen in. You never know how they will be impacted by these stories. I appreciate you so much. See you next time. Bye.