Hey, everybody. Welcome to Orange Hatter. I've gotten some feedback to upload the interviews in one episode instead of multiple episodes so that you can Listen to the conversation from beginning to end. Let me know if you would preferred the other way we're experimenting we're growing and we'll see how this goes. Today's episode is with Carrie and she is based in Australia Carrie sees Bitcoin as a way to help her heal from a very negative world outlook that she inherited and has given her so much hope, not only for herself, but for her son. So I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Welcome Carrie to Orange Hatter. I am so excited to have you here and I can't wait to dive into our conversation.

I am so happy to be here, Tali. It's so gorgeous to meet you. We've been in contact for a little bit and I'm used to being on the other side and asking the questions. So, it's quite the novelty for me to be a guest and to be answering questions for a change. So, thank you for the opportunity.

Absolutely. I'm going to ask you all kinds of questions. We'll start with would you mind just sharing with us a little bit of information on your background?

Oh, wow. Oh, where does one even start with that? The, the background plotted history goes something like this. Born in the UK up till the age of nine moved to Australia. My early career was financial markets. I was in stockbroking for almost a decade. Didn't like it, didn't enjoy it. It was during the kind of Wolf of Wall Street, 1980s and nineties early nineties. And I was put through a presentation skills course, found my calling, the clouds parted, the, the angels sang, and I went, this is what I want to do with my. life, and I became a presentation skills trainer. And later, I moved into difficult conversations, influencing skills, writing skills, business communication skills. And I did that for about 30 years up until COVID. When in the city of the longest lockdowns in the world here in Melbourne, Australia. My business really got smashed. I, I was able to transfer to online for the first year of lockdowns, but in the second year clients were saying, Oh, we'd actually like to book in live again now that we're opening up. So we would book in. And then we would shut down again and so we would cancel and then this went on and then the year after that, which was 2022, people were so busy just trying to organize, getting back into the offices and doing things like wellbeing and stress management coaching, which I'm not terribly interested in that again, a lot of the business communications was put to one side. And in that time I had discovered Bitcoin and I had discovered libertarianism and I had found myself a new passion and a new love and really started. a new business and that just about brings us up to date. Almost, almost six decades in hopefully less than six minutes.

Wonderful summary. Let's let's rewind and go back to that time during COVID when you were facing the transition with your job market because of the lockdowns and you're discovering Bitcoin at the same time. Like go into a little bit more detail about that time.

So what happened there was that in that second year, I started to realize that I might need a different source of income over time. I hadn't given up on the business by any stretch, but I had restarted that business several times over the years. So I had Well, when I first started, I was working for someone else in Sydney and I had to build the client base. Then I moved to Melbourne and set up offices for him and had to start a new client base in Melbourne. And then I left him on very, very positive terms, but I wanted to broaden out from just presentation skills. And so when I left him and went out on my own, I had to start again and create a new client base. And then when I had my son I've only got the one. And things went very slow for kind of six months and it was really a matter of having to restart again. So by the time 2022 came around and I was in my mid fifties, I really wasn't up for it. And I, I had always wanted, I will be absolutely honest. It was a great business and I loved it and I loved the training, but I was tired with the sales and the marketing side of life. And to be honest, I'd always wondered what it would be like to do something else. Or was I going to simply do this till the day I died, you know? And it was a perfectly noble and good, you know, like I know I've changed lives in that business. So. It's very attractive, but it was also kind of golden handcuffs and I always wondered if I had it in me to start something new and a girlfriend of mine had done very well in the 2018 bull run. She had been trading alt coins and done extremely well and gotten out at the right time and as a single mom of two boys, one of whom was best friends with my my boy and a single mom and a nurse had just gone and bought her dream house. on the back of her profits. And I went, that sounds like a great gig. So then I started trading altcoins and didn't have her, A, her guidance, cause she had someone helping her a little bit, a friend, and B her instincts, whatever it was. And so I lost. money on altcoins. And at that stage, I'd started to understand the difference with Bitcoin. I'd started to listening to different speakers. Mostly they were talking about altcoins, but every so often a Bitcoin speaker would sneak through and I'd start to understand the difference with Bitcoin. And I started to understand what Bitcoin was. And I got really intrigued. It just captured my imagination. And then through the Bitcoin community and listening to Bitcoiners, particularly someone like Robert Breedlove, I learned the word libertarianism. And I got really intrigued I Googled to see if there was a libertarian party in Australia. And there was. So then I joined the libertarian party. So I found myself caught up in a very new world and had found myself quite isolated because I'd had a different take on the pandemic and the lockdowns and the mandates than many of my friends and I found myself a little isolated and so I guess I found a new community in the Bitcoin and the libertarian movements between them. And so that helped to get me involved and I think just it lit my imagination, it lit my heart, it lit my soul. There was just something about what this could do for humanity that really resonated with me and at the risk of just being extremely long winded and just to give you a bit of backstory that I haven't included at this stage, I was brought up by a gold bug. So my mother was hyper aware of issues to do with debt, to do with what happened when we came off the gold standard in 1971 when currency stopped being backed by gold at all. And she had painted a very, very bleak picture for me over the years. So and really gold was the only investment that she trusted and for all the right reasons. And so I already, once I started hearing about Bitcoin, not only did I connect very quickly, with the problems that it solved. But I also saw a much more hopeful picture for humanity than I had seen at any point in my life. Even with gold, because I didn't see gold as hope. I saw gold as a potential escape, as a way of maintaining value when the rest of currency went to zero in purchasing power. But I did not see it as hope for humanity. Bitcoin not only has the capacity to maintain purchasing power against fiat, like gold, but it is transformative in terms of what it does for us as individuals and therefore for society as a whole. And it's a deeply, deeply powerful, world changing technology like the internet on steroids.

so let's dig a little bit deeper. You said that when you came across Bitcoin, you felt that it lit you up heart and soul. Tell us more about that.

Where do I start with that? I think different speakers helped me understand different aspects of it. So I would listen to, and I will say that One of the first people to orange pill me was Robert Breedlove and his series on zero and the idea of zero and how transformative that was when they discovered the digit zero, the idea of zero, how it gave everything from perspective to paintings to transforming our capacity with math. Et cetera. So that was a really, I don't think that was a starting point for me, but I know his philosophizing around Bitcoin really made me think about money and think about the world and money as the underpinning of society really deeply. And I really love being challenged mentally and being presented with something brand new. We watch movies, we listen to books, we listen to podcasts and so much is regurgitation and formulaic and same old, same old. And so I loved being presented with something absolutely brand new. I was listening to Alex Glanstein. And he was presenting to me the case for how the IMF and the World Bank exploit the Global South and transfer wealth from the weakest and the poorest to the strongest and the richest. And so to get that global perspective was really Really, Alex Gladstein, for many Bitcoiners, is a hero, and really and appeals as much to the left as the right. It's not a partisan issue, the way that Bitcoin can sometimes appear to be, and it really isn't. And in terms of how it transforms humanity, appeals, or should at least appeal, to the left and the right equally. And I was, I've also spoken to Lisa Hough and she has no interest in uptake at the institutional level because she can see what it does at the environmental level and the usage of stranded energy and cleaning up. If anything, it's got a, what I'm going to say, a negative impact on the environment has a negative footprint, not negative as in bad, but negative as in reducing carbon emissions, which is quite the antithesis of how it's popularly understood. And so I found each of those aspects as I've delved into the energy side, as I've delved into the philosophy side, as I've delved into the humanitarian side. Each one of those in their own right has lit something within me. And, and then of course there's the macro side and listening to people like Lyn Alden and Preston Pysh and understanding the pieces that I already had some understanding of in terms of excessive debt and money printing and the, and governments printing money to paper over their problems to kick the can down the road, ever increasing the debt to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation, such that life just gets harder and harder and harder as each year goes by as they go. create inflation, even if it doesn't look like it's very high inflation rate, it compounds, and it makes life hard for us individually. And it makes life exponentially harder for the next generation, and even more so for the generation after that. And then to hear someone as intelligent as Lynn Alden, talk about how Bitcoin fixes this, With as a scarce resource that cannot be inflated, that cannot be printed. that may not turn everybody on, but for me, that is a tremendously exciting discussion and proposition. Yep.

Yeah, I didn't hear about Bitcoin until Scott was really nudging me about it, a few years back, but I was listening to Robert Kiyosaki's book called why A students work for C students and B students work for the government. And in that book, he talked about the elephant in the room, which is the national debt. And I remember listening to that book and thinking how in the world are we going to solve this? Because at the time, this was, this was 10 years ago. So it's been a while. But I didn't know about Bitcoin back then. And there's, like, you look at this huge problem and you just, you can't even wrap your head around what the solution could possibly be. And then we find Bitcoin. So.

And how hopeless would life be without Bitcoin? And I will say this on a very personal note, being brought up by a gold bug and being told every single conversation from the age of five and probably less, that The world is terrible and there's no hope and Western civilization is broken and is doomed and I suffered with terrible depression for many years and a lot of it was because of this sense of doom and gloom and that there really was no hope and that There was no way out. And so perhaps for me, part of the excitement of discovering Bitcoin was, it was quite personal. It wasn't just the global South. It wasn't just debt. It wasn't just the next generation and all those kind of altruistic things. There was something very personal in it for me, that. When I say it was the first hope I had in over 50 years, I really mean that at a, in a deeply personal way. And as someone who's Jewish and was brought up with stories of the Holocaust, and my mother was brought up in the UK being bombed, and I've told this story a couple of different places, but you know, her brothers were fighting in the war. They were both pilots, I think, or one might've been. Air Force and one might have been Navy. I might have that wrong. And you know, cousin in concentration camp, et cetera. And Really, part of her whole, my whole upbringing was the West is going to hell in a hand basket. People turn on each other when things get ugly and Jews will be blamed and vilified. And so there was a very personal aspect to all of what was going on with money printing and with debt. It felt like the world was a very dangerous place. I never really got past that. And Bitcoin. started to help to heal me. And part of that is the hope of the protocol itself. And part of it is the community who perceive the world in a not dissimilar way to me, and a sense of finding my tribe. But it's a very broad and very diverse tribe. I've been toying recently, as I think as we all do, when we first encounter Bitcoin, is this a cult? Am I falling for something here? And then someone like Greg Foss is so helpful here when he goes, it's just math. And you go, okay, so I'm in the cult of math. I can live with that. To the degree that math is a cult. That's apparently the cult I'm a part of.

So let's do a really high level bird's eye view comparison between gold and Bitcoin.

I. I'm just going to be quoting here multiple other people, none of these are original thoughts, but there are certain key characteristics when you look at the history of money, of what rises to the top as money. So, At first, you can just start with kind of a credit based system where we're on a small community and I shoe horses and you bake bread. Now, I shoe your horse and I know that you owe me bread for a year. So, maybe. I don't know how much it costs to shoe a horse, but let's imagine. And that's okay as long as I know you and you know me and we trust each other. Or maybe you've got an apple orchard and it's seasonal and you can give me a hundred apples, but I can't get through them all and they're going to rot. So what starts to happen either when we start trading with, and this is very, this is so beautifully summarized in Lyn Alden's latest book Broken Money, really recommend to anybody. But anyway Once you start trading with other villages where you don't know and trust the people, or where it's going to be transactional and there isn't going to be a long term relationship, or where the apples simply don't work as currency. Then we start to need a trusted third what do we call it? A third currency whereby we can transact in something that we can both hold and value. and trust. And that's been many things over the years. It's been everything from grain, and soy, and salt, through to, so consumables, through to shells, and glass beads, and then eventually metals, copper, silver, gold. The reason why grains and consumables don't work is if they're in high demand. people simply grow more and then it loses value. It's being devalued in the market. Well, I can just grow my own grain. You can grow your own grain. Why do I need yours? It's no, it has no value to me. So then you move to kind of glass beads and shells and shells that were polished in a particular way and became a form of, of coinage. But again, That can be mass produced by people with better technology who can make glass beads or shells in a faster more efficient way or they've got greater access to it and now suddenly they are in effect the money printer and they've got an unfair advantage over the rest of society. So that's why people moved more and more towards metals, copper, silver, gold, and ultimately gold because it has multiple multiple characteristics that have emerged over time naturally as being attractive in a currency. One of them is equally valued. It's fungible. My one gold ounce is the same as your one gold ounce. It's we can verify it. We, we can weigh it and we can cut it in half and we can melt it down and make sure that it really is gold. We can divide it to a certain degree, although probably not small enough to go and buy a pint of milk, where we're really shaving tiny amounts off, but we can divide it down just to buy, you know, a hundred apples, say. So it really, and most importantly, scarce and difficult to dig out of the ground. Just, and so there's enough that's in circulation that's in stock on the surface of the earth that it can work as a currency, but there's not so much coming out of the ground each year. that it's going to devalue all the gold that's all currently on the market. So that's why gold won't put so long. And then what happened is gold has a couple of really impractical aspects. One is the divisibility and the other is transportability. So if I go to trade with Russia in oil, or if I go to my next door village. I've got to get past Robin Hood with my gold and he's going to steal it. Or if I do it by ship, the pirates are going to steal it. It's very impractical and it's very slow. So in terms of gold versus Bitcoin, which was the original question that I'm now coming back to having gotten on a bit of a tangent of the history of money in terms of gold versus Bitcoin, what we've got. is some characteristics absolutely in common. It is scarce. It is actually even scarcer than gold in as much as its fixed supply. There will only ever be 21 million of them as written into the original protocol and it can't be changed. And we can get into the security aspects of why it can't be changed, but it really cannot be changed. There's the divisibility. So now, beyond gold, not only is it fungible and therefore I can swap it with you and one Bitcoin is one Bitcoin and there's no differentiation, plus I can verify it through my own node and I know that that is real Bitcoin. Plus it takes effort to pull out of the ground. So mining Bitcoin is a very difficult process that requires huge, what we call proof of work, which is energy usage to guess, announce, to mine the Bitcoin, to hash a piece of Bitcoin currency, as it were. So All of that, it has in common with gold, but it has two additional characteristics. One is the divisibility, because each Bitcoin is split into a hundred million Satoshis, which are very, very minuscule amounts that you can use for day-to-day transactions of the smallest good or service for a single apple with negligible fees. like transaction fees, but it's also portable. So if I want to buy Russian oil, I can get Bitcoin to Russia instantaneously and nobody can steal it and nobody can interject and we don't need what happens with something like gold over time. The way they tried to get around the transportability factor was to leave it in the bank and then to issue certificates against it that were as good as gold. Yeah, that could be redeemed at the at a bank at the other end. What starts to happen is. You can print paper certificates in a way that you can at a greater rate than the gold and so you've got way more certificates in circulation diluting in value versus the gold that's actually being held in the bank. And so the certificates or what became fiat over time because there was no longer any gold held against it as of 1971. And you could argue earlier than that. Suddenly that paper can be printed and become worthless and that's what we're seeing. And so that's what's always going to happen with gold because of that problem with transportability. It's always going to lead to certificates and those certificates are always going to be dilutable. printable and dilutable in value. Whereas Bitcoin, there's no trusted third party. They call it trustless, which doesn't mean you don't trust it. It means you don't have to trust anything else except the protocol, which you can validate for yourself. And it's open source and you can see the programming and you can see the kind of the software I've lost the correct word for it. But everything is open. And we've never had anything like this. What we've always had is approximations of money, something that we make do with as money, but it doesn't really perfectly meet all of the criteria of what we now understand money needs to be to work effectively. And that's why Bitcoin is often referred to as digital gold because it has all those positive characteristics of gold and none of the shortcomings.

That was a really, really wonderful summary. Thank you so much for that. That's so helpful. Let's talk about the Bitcoin protocol or really the Bitcoin community that has inspired you so much.

The protocol itself, I'm not, I'm not a coder. So I don't really get the tech as much as I need to or want to and I've gone down rabbit holes where I've really tried to understand it and understand SHA 256 and the cryptography and how the difficulty adjustment works and how the actual hashing of Bitcoin works. And I've kind of got broad general principles without getting the detail. Luckily I've made enough friends in the Bitcoin community over time with people who are developers who can explain that more to me and who I trust personally enough to trust them. And what they're telling me about that in terms of the community. I went down this rabbit hole very much on my own to begin with you know, really just off the back of that initial contact with my friend who was trading, but she wasn't a Bitcoiner per se. She was a trader and she was a trader of cryptocurrencies being the other 20, 000, 30, 000 projects that are out there. that are entirely unrelated to Bitcoin. And that's an absolute must to differentiate in the world. There's Bitcoin and then there's everything else. So I didn't really have anyone and I was going down and I was listening to these podcasts and I was reading these books, et cetera. And I heard advertised the Miami Bitcoin conference And I saw Michael Saylor was speaking there and Jack Mallers was speaking there and Lynn Alden was speaking there and I was just hearing all these names and going, that is crazy. I have to go. I have to go. And so I booked myself a flight from Australia. It's like 33 hours to Miami. It's this crazy long journey. I was so jet lagged when I got to the other end. And It was the first time meeting another Bitcoiner. But not only meeting another Bitcoiner, I met, what was it? 35, 000 other Bitcoiners. And I was saying to you before we hit record, I lost my voice. I talked so much. I found my people. I loved every minute. It's embarrassing to say, but I would talk deep into the night about Austrian economics and, and stranded energy. Kind of all these crazy things and gold and, you know, and, and kind of and just different people's approaches and it was just mind blowing for me. I just loved it and then I came back to Australia and I was alone again. And I'm like, this is no good. So I started a podcast so that I could just meet other Bitcoiners. And that podcast has been going for just on or just over a year now. And I meet daily Bitcoiners and I've met some of my heroes. I've gotten to meet some of the better known names in Bitcoin and. It's now really kind of taken over my life to a distressing level for my husband and son. But you know, it's given me a new lease of life in middle age and that can't be a bad thing. You know, it's given me a whole new, I seem to have these hobbies that go for 10 to 15 years. So at one stage it was self development and psychology and, and spirituality. Spirituality continues, I must say, but I was really intensely into all of that for about 15 years. And I was really into dancing for about 12 years or so. And I was really deeply into motorcycling for, again, about 10 years. And now it's Bitcoin. So I can see this totally taking over for at least 10 to 15 years before maybe something new comes into my life. Like Satoshi Nakamoto, I might come to a point where I go, I'm moving on to other things, but I can't see that in the foreseeable future.

So, how do they feel, your husband and your son, how do they feel about this particular hobby?

They tolerate it. They tolerate it. My... Husband gets it, but unfortunately when I was still trading crypto, I got him into crypto and he got burned and so he's very wary, even though he does understand the difference with Bitcoin. He's very wary of going anywhere near it now, unfortunately. He's also not someone who tends to get hugely carried away with anything. He's very stable and very You know, even on a good day, even if he's been out for a great motorbike ride or a great ski or a great something, he'll go, it was, it was good. It was good. I mean, I'd be just, I'd be jumping out of my skin going, oh my god, it's the most awesome day and I'm full of hyperbole and noise and so forth and he's just not that guy. My son, I was actually really interested the other day. We went to the local market to we were just we go there fairly regularly on a Saturday morning. And we went there, my son likes to get a Kransky for lunch and we'll have a wander around. And my husband knows a lot of the stallholders really well, I'm a little less regular there. And we chat with people and it's a very hippie kind of market. And there was one stall there that took Bitcoin. And so I went over there and I bought myself a lemon meringue pie with Bitcoin and ended up in conversation with these guys and my son was with me and they turned to him and said, How do you feel about Bitcoin? What do you think of it? And he said, Oh, something about I kind of understand it. And they gave him a bit of a lecture. They kind of indoctrinated. Oh, it was amazing. And they got it and the gold and the whole thing. And I went down that track and I got into the car with him to come home and I went. I don't know how much I should be talking with him about it. I don't want to put him off. I know that when your parents talk to you about something, if it's their hobby, that's kind of, it's quite off putting. I certainly had that experience as a kid. So I tried to shield him from it a little bit, but like you, he edits my shows, so he's exposed to it, whether he likes it or not, to some degree. But he he got in the car and he said, yeah, no, this is what I get about it. And I only got the 21 million cap and therefore it can't be printed and therefore it can't create inflation. And he gave me a two minute summary and I went, okay, that's good enough. I don't need him or want him to get more than that. I would love him to go heavily down the rabbit hole and do a thesis But he's got his whole life, and if I shove it down his throat too much at this age, I'm bound to be counterproductive in my, in my efforts. So I do my best to refrain and then I just go to Bitcoin meetups and I talk at a million miles an hour. And so we've got about a monthly Meet up down here in Melbourne. Quarterly, we've got a Bitcoin bush bash in the regional areas of Australia. We rotate between Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria and the regional areas of those states. And so I try and get myself along to as many of those as possible. So I'm meeting up with Bitcoiners and, you know, and then just interacting with them on Twitter and so forth. And they're the people who I try to release my pent up enthusiasm with.

So, what is the community like there? Is it pretty large? Is it very small? What is it like in Melbourne and those four places that you travel to?

Yeah, really good question and funny enough, it's a question I ask people when I'm speaking to them around the world on my podcast. So I've tried to ask, you know, to get a sense of it in Bulgaria and Namibia and Nigeria Eastern Europe, et cetera. And it's really difficult to know or to tell. I can tell you that just at our Bitcoin Only conference last year, there was maybe 300 people, but of course we know only a very small section of the Bitcoin community can actually physically turn up to these things. Many people are just holding and they have high conviction, but that doesn't mean that they're showing up to these events. We've got... I would say a smallish, so at the bush bashes, we would end up, I mean, bearing in mind, Australia is not a huge population, and the bush bashes are hard to get to, deliberately, proof of work, you better find a way to get there. So they're in these kind of quite out of the way, remote towns. So I would say, you get maybe 50 regulars at those and then at the local Bitcoin meetup, there would be probably an average of 20. But I do know that in the Melbourne community, I know quite a lot of folk who don't show up to the meetups on a regular basis. So there's a lot of hidden Bitcoiners who I'm not aware of and it takes time to get to know the community and what I like about it is that the people who are there are very I'm going to say still early adopters to the degree that even now, I would consider we are all early adopters and they're hugely enthusiastic and everybody's doing their bit. Everybody's actually in the industry, or most of us are in the industry in some way, shape, or form. If we're running our own podcast or building an exchange, you know, running an exchange. Or in some capacity involved in building out the Bitcoin network, whether that's the social layer. Or whether that's the physical railways, or whether that's at the lightning development, which is layer two apps everyone's involved in some way. And that's the nature of the, a little bit like I'm assuming the internet community was in the early days. before it was just everyone and you never needed to look, you don't need to look under the hood of the internet anymore. At this stage, the early adopters are people who have looked under the hood of either macroeconomics or technology and that seems to be the crowd. And I would say that's reflective of my discussions with Folk in various countries around the world. It's still relatively small, but there's 200 million wallet holders out there. That's a lot of people who own at least a tiny bit of Bitcoin for whatever reason. They may not be all in with the high conviction of what it is and what it can do. But there's enough and the adoption that we're now seeing more broadly across politicians and institutions and high net worth individuals and it there's a real groundswell going on now. And. We can still, the small person, the little person, you and I can still front run the big institutions in a way that has never been possible in human history. And that's really powerful and I think the people in the community at the moment understand that and feel really privileged and many of them deliberately keep their heads down and maintain privacy and don't want to be seen or heard in the public sphere because they feel very strongly that this is going to be a multi million dollar asset. A single Bitcoin will be worth multi millions and they don't want to stand out in the community as being that person. I'm so worried about that in my lifetime.

That will be very exciting.

It would be very exciting.

Yeah, let's talk about... The transformative aspect, you have mentioned that earlier, that it not only is changing the way you look at money, but it literally changes the way you look at everything.

Yes. So there's a number of different angles where we could come at with this. Once you start understanding money as a core piece of communication of how people transact with one another and the trust we need in money in order to transact, so really a base layer of the basic economics of society, even about a society. Once you understand that it represents trust and that once the money is broken, the trust is broken and the schism that we're seeing in society and that we're seeing play out in the culture wars on Twitter and other social media and frankly in the mainstream media as well. And you start to see all of that as a function of a broken money system. And once you start to see the corruption in government and the lobbying groups, and I'm going to say it, big pharma and the, and big media and big tech and the crony capitalism, that is all a function of what we call the Cantillian effect, which is those closest to the money printer benefit the most because they Get the deals with the government. They, if they're in the big finance, so financial institutions are part of that. And the people in those industries can go out and spend the money on assets like shares, property, gold, etc. And so they can outstrip Inflation and value of their assets goes up faster than the rate of inflation and then eventually inflation dribbles down to the day in and day out goods and the people who have been unable to invest, who are unable to invest in assets. and are just living paycheck to paycheck, and now they're being pummeled by inflation, and the cost of living is going up and up. And so the whole way in which you see society becomes a representation of what corrupt money has done to society. And so I'm, I get caught up in the culture wars and I have some very strong opinions about lockdowns and mandates. And it's not that I'm immune to this. When I'm involved, when I'm looking at Bitcoin and thinking about the money and you go, it is absolutely understandable how we got to this point. And nobody is to blame except the money printing over years and years and years. And that's got absolutely nothing to do with one party or the other. Both parties do it equally. So there's absolutely no partisan angle on this. Literally both parties do it. Both parties are guilty. And we suffer as a result and the breakdown in society as a function of it. So it does help to understand the world in a bigger picture way. And it doesn't mean I'm immune to being petty and small minded and irritable. So that's one way in which it changes things, the hopefulness at the personal level, a sense of optimism. At the personal level, it's for me, it's about the community and finding like minded people and that's how it's changed me. But at the societal level. It feels like I have greater hope, frankly, for my son and for his generation, that things could change for the positive in his lifetime. And that to the degree that we might be in a fourth turning now and a crisis period. that we won't come out of for a decade because that's how long a fourth turning goes for. So for anyone who's listening and doesn't know what I'm referring to, there's a book called The Fourth Turning that talks about generations that go, it's that it's kind of the story but it's much More deeply elaborated in the book and quite thoughtful and quite a sophisticated but really the way that it often gets summed up is strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times. Bad times create strong men. So that's the kind of concept and we are at a time where we have had weak men who have created bad times. Weak men in government printing and we're now in those bad times and a crisis period at the societal and the economic level. And I'm hopeful that by the time my son is hitting the workforce and, maybe get married and have kids, we're actually through the other side of this crisis period. And who knows how quickly Bitcoin might take off. And I'm not interested in the price of it here. I'm interested in global adoption. And how it starts to create and we've just seen the BRICS nations, which is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and my understanding is that a bunch. In fact, I need to look into this and read this up. But I think a bunch of South American nations have now joined BRICS, including Argentina and so forth, you know, Peru, Venezuela. So. They all want to trade with each other in something other than US dollars. Their currencies are worthless to each other, so they need a different option. So they're looking at things like a basket of commodities backed currency of some sort. And I don't think it's going to take them long. I mean, you've already got El Salvador who's using Bitcoin. You've got a guy running for president, so he's the nominee for One of the parties in Argentina, who's a hardcore libertarian, wants to see the size of government. So I, and he's talking about Bitcoin. So you're getting some big front running politicians talking about, and you've got it on both the left and right in America. So you've got Robert Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy on the left and Vivek Rimaswamy on the right, both talking about Bitcoin. We could see this happen. We could see this happen in our lifetime and certainly we could see it in my son's lifetime and that's in your children's lifetime and that's really hopeful that we could see from these bad times, we could see some strong men come in and create good times and so within another generation or two, God willing, we'll have a very different, very different society.

Yeah, Scott talks about that book all the time. He keeps referring to the fourth turning and he quotes exactly the same part of the book that you just did. So,

It's the best way to summarize it.

yeah. Any last suggestions or recommendations for women who are sitting on the fence?

I would say it can sound when we get into it like it's quite complicated or there's a lot of different aspects or that at some level you need to understand economics or you need to understand technology. You really don't. All you need to know is that it is a revolutionary technology that you may as well have a little bit of. Just in case. What the hey, throw 20 at it. Throw 20 a week at it. Something that if you don't have the conviction that I do, you don't need it. You just want to go, what if, what if maybe there is something to this thing and it's a little bit like buying Amazon in the early days. Or if you could buy a piece of internet. in the early days? Or if you really want to think about it, if I could have bought the money printer in the early days? Or what if I could own a piece of, because this is about transaction technology, what if I owned a piece of the Visa, MasterCard, PayPal industry, collectively? Because this could replace all of it. All of them. What if I got in on that early? And I just threw something at it that I'm not afraid to lose. Twenty dollars, maybe a hundred dollars. Learn a little bit about just how to onboard it and what's called self custody. Just look after it myself so that nobody else can ever touch it or ever take it or ever steal it from me in any capacity. And just little, little baby steps. Little baby steps of just, you know, learn a little bit about an exchange, transfer a little bit of money across to the exchange, buy a little bit of Bitcoin, and then get it off and self custody in a cold storage device. If you could do each of those steps, set up with an exchange, transfer some money over, buy some Bitcoin, get your Bitcoin off the exchange. Those four steps, 20 bucks, go through those four steps, do those four steps half a dozen times until you've gotten a little bit more familiar with the process and it doesn't seem so scary. And who knows, you may be setting you, your children, your grandchildren up for life.

Wonderful advice. Thank you so much. It was so much fun talking with you. Thank you so much Hatter and sharing your stories.

You're a delightful host. Thank you so much for having me.