Hi everyone. Welcome to Orange Hatter. Today you're listening to a conversation I had with Sophi. Hi, Sophi. It's so wonderful to have you on Orange Hatter. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me, Tali. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So many questions for you. I've, I've visited your, your Twitter account and I just, first of all, I love, love, love the piece of music that you shared, "the Richmen from North of Richmond." So powerful. So powerful. Why don't we jump right in and just if you could tell us a little bit about your background for our audience.

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a Miami native, born and raised. My parents are Venezuelan, so I'm also a Latina. And I got into Bitcoin because I was orange pilled by Nico Moran, who's my fiance. He started telling me about Bitcoin in 2016, and of course I was very skeptical. I didn't believe that, you know, this could really be a thing. I was like, ah, this is just like the next, you know, money grab scheme of, you know, the decade. I didn't really understand it. I just lumped it in with all of the other cryptos, the way that most people do, and I figured, you know, I, I just don't understand this, and why, why would this be better than the dollar? I just had so many questions that it actually took him two years to finally, you know, get through to me and for me to understand the implications of how important this technology actually is and the ramifications that it has, not only on the economy, but on politics, culture, and every aspect of life. You know, there's a reason that people say Bitcoin fixes this and it's because how far and wide those implications reach almost every facet of our daily lives. So he, he orange pilled me on that and I basically decided to hop on board and then he started Simply Bitcoin and I decided to help him kind of do the bookings and you know, I was helping here and there in the background, also giving him a lot of moral support. Now I am working on their short form content, which has been a blast. I get to do skits and make Bitcoin as, as we say, in, in our, in simply Bitcoin. Now we are trying to make Bitcoin fun, sexy, cool. I'm trying to do that with the skits, with the cover that I just did. I wanted to make it a little bit more pop so that it could reach some people who maybe, you know, aren't into country. We're also dropping merch. So, you know, we're trying to just kind of populate the, the culture a little bit with Bitcoin so that the Normies can also understand how great of a technology this is and how this could affect their lives. So that's a little bit about me.

Yeah, so I was watching some of your skits, and I think that my kids will really find them interesting and entertaining because they're always showing me YouTube shorts. They're like, Mom, look at this. This is really funny. And then they will pop it on TV, and it's the similar style. So I feel like it would really speak to their generation. My kids are in in college, it would really reach the, that generation and like you said, it'll be like a really cool thing for them to share with each other, versus more of the traditional Bitcoin talk, which is more like really super serious. Sometimes listening to Bitcoin discussions can be really depressing.

Yeah. And they're very serious. And I think that they're meant for people who are already orange pilled, right? And people who are already orange pilled, we're there. We like, you know, you don't need to convince us, you just need to supplement us with more information. And that's where we get into debates and how to make this better and more efficient. And, you know, not how to change it necessarily because you don't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you. But it's, it's about like, you know, deepening your knowledge and understanding, whereas what I'm trying to do is break out of the echo chamber. I think it's, I mean, it's awesome to go into deeper understanding, but that's not my talent. It's not what I'm good at. I'm not a very technical person at all, but I do have a lot of creativity. I have a lot of ideas. I think that I'm an effective communicator when it comes to taking an idea that's very complex and translating it in a way where most people will understand it. And I think that this is something that is both so important, but also so difficult to get people to actually buy into, because it's money. What is, you know, I mean, aside from family and your marriage, what is more important than money, really? And to get people to change their paradigm and shift in from a fiat mindset to a Bitcoin mindset. Is probably one of the biggest challenges that we're gonna face as a society. So how do we take something that is so complex? I mean, the average person barely even knows where our money comes from. They don't know what the Fed is. They don't know that fiat is not backed by gold anymore, and it hasn't been since 1971. So how do you get people to shift the way that they are thinking about something that they, you know, have been thinking about for so long and change it to this Bitcoin thing, especially when the space is muddled with so much garbage, like all of the crypto stuff and the scammers and the NFTs and all of these things that have nothing to do with crypto, but they all get lumped in because we, you know, we as a society have a difficult time understanding nuance, so, that's, that's where I think that I can make a difference in Bitcoin and I can actually step in and be like, okay, this is how we're gonna teach the next generation. This is how we're gonna teach even the older generation how, how to shift their paradigm on money. This is how we're going to translate it and chew it up so that it is easier to digest.

Yeah, that is definitely sorely needed. And if you make it something that is easily shareable, like entertaining, shareable, then it has a chance to go viral, you know? And I think that's, that's so cool. And I can't wait to tell my girls to check you out. 'Cause uh, I think they would get a real kick out of the, the information out there and they'll learn something and they can share it with your friends. That's one of the things that I was really just trying to figure out how to do is, you know, I, as I mentioned before, my husband created a board game and I brought the game actually onto campus to try to get kids involved. But I feel like your content would be, easier to share actually, you know, 'cause it's, it's short and it's, it's to the point. And then if they get curious, the game can maybe help them understand the nuances of the technical side of it. But man, just to get them interested, that is really, really key.

Yeah. I think that if you can make somebody laugh, or understand something in less than a minute, then you've, you've, you've done something great. I think that's the reason why Twitter is such a popular platform and such an effective way of communicating where, you know, at first it used to be only 180 characters and people would be able to get huge ideas across and jokes and just like powerful messages in these very short characters. Whereas before you would have to write essays and long speeches and books and this very long format and like all of that content for Bitcoin exists. And I give it up to the people who have made it because, man, Bitcoin is not an easy thing to explain, and there is so much depth and technicality that my hat goes off to all of them. But like I said, I, I think most people, especially in today's day and age, where people are used to instant gratification, instant access to knowledge, instant... like you, you wanna know something, you Google it. If I can explain to someone what Bitcoin is in less than a minute, if I can orange pill someone with five points and, and get them to at least start turning the wheels and thinking about their monetary situation, then I feel like I've done my job because I, I also like, then I leave it to the experts who are good at deepening the knowledge and explaining all of the rest. But my job is like, you know when you go to a club and like there's a promoter at the door and the promoter's job is to like get girls and, and people to come inside of the club and they're like, we have the best tables. We're gonna have the best DJ we're gonna have. That's, that's me. And then we leave it to all, like is like the DJ, you know what I mean? Like he'll like really like pull you into like the experience that is Bitcoin. But you know, I just see myself as kind of the promoter and, and the person who's gonna get you in the door.

I love that analogy. That is so perfect. That's, I feel like I'm standing outside the club with you and I'm, I'm the one who's passing out the pamphlets. You know.

That's so funny.

I, I'm like, you know, in baggy clothes and like, hey, would you like a, a, a pamphlet? I have some information for you. And then you'll be, you'll be like the sales person. And then once they get in, all the rest of the people can talk tech.

Exactly.

I'm just the one who passes out the pamphlets.

Exactly. No, we're we're passing out the wristbands. We're like, here, you get a discount, you get SATs. You get SATs. You get SATs.

I love that. I wanna ask you some questions about your upbringing because you mentioned that your parents are originally from Venezuela. Has being in sort of a bicultural family, you know, American and Venezuelan, did that influence how you perceive your sort of monetary interactions in day-to-day life?

At first, it didn't, at first, I, I'm gonna be honest with you, I just never thought about money, because I, I mean, except for like, in the way that most people would think about it. Do we have it? Do we not? Are we gonna live like the next day? But I never really thought about where money came from. Even as the inflation crisis was hitting Venezuela, I just didn't understand what that actually meant. In my mind, I was like, well, an evil dictator has taken over the country, so of course the economy is gonna do badly. But I didn't understand the bridge between A and B. I didn't understand what it was that the government was doing and what nationalization was doing to our country to make the currency inflate. And you know, to make basically corruption devalue our, our currency. So I never really thought about it from that point of view until I understood what Bitcoin was. And when I understood Bitcoin, I started going back to my upbringing. I started, I started understanding, wow, okay. So they started printing more money to pay off more people to, 'cause it was a corrupt government and the more people they paid off, the more dollars they stole from other reserves because the, the was backed by the dollar. And then, you know, when they ran out of dollars, they had to print more money so that the dollars would be worth more then I understood, wow, they're doing something very similar in the United States. How could that be? We don't have a corrupt government or, so I thought, and then that, that all started making sense. But at first my upbringing didn't really clue me in to any of this stuff because I was just, I was living in a bubble. I didn't know what was going on, and I was very, I just didn't know.

What about your parents living in America and being able to see what's going on here just on the edge of what Venezuela has gone through? Do they talk to you about their experience and give you some like recommendations or are they just watching it and thinking there's nothing they can do about it?

Well, So there's a couple of things there. My parents came to this country in the eighties when the United States was at the peak of its economic performance, and so they had no idea that that, you know what, what has happened in the last 20 years happened. Even today, they're very much in denial that the dollar could collapse or that the government is corrupt because they've seen it in such an extreme version in their country that they cannot fathom that it would happen here. Even though, you know, people, people are people and people make mistakes and, and nobody is immune to sin, you know. So, and power corrupts, you know, everybody. So for them it was very difficult to, and now I've orange pilled them a lot and they're coming to terms with it. But for them it was very, very difficult to accept that this was happening here as well. And, and they still believe in the institutions. They, they, they grew up in, in the height of it. Again, it's what I was mentioning before, it's hard to shift someone's perspective when they've grown up knowing one thing their whole life and they were, they grew up thinking that the United States was the greatest country in the world, and it still is. And because it's the greatest country in the world, they thought it was immune to what's happening now with all of the money printing and the corruption at a government level. So it was, it's difficult for them. I have to constantly kind of provide proof of what's happening. I have to tell them about bricks. I have to tell them about the CDBCs and FedNow, and everything that's happening, they just, they, they don't believe it. It's difficult for them to come to terms with it because they already had to come to terms with it in their country, and so for them to have worked so hard to come to the United States, it's hard to go through that trauma again.

Thanks for joining us today and learning with us today. If the discussion with our guest 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!