Brad Mills: OpenClaw Agents, Borrowing Against Bitcoin, Building a Citadel Mind

Speaker A: All right, we are live. Welcome. Brad Mills. Nice to see you, man. Fresh off 21 push ups. Looking jacked.

Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, getting the energy right.

Speaker A: I love it. Welcome back, man. You were last on here. Uh, I was checking back June 2022 and um, yeah, I don't really like track like the daily prices of bitcoin and all that, but I was actually curious like, you know, what was the price of bitcoin back in June 22nd? And it was about 20k USD. They like 66, 67. Nice little 3x in 3 1/2 years. Not that it matters too much. Like you're hearing this and be like, yeah, whatever. But like, yeah, for long time thinkers. But it's always nice to see that rise, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's uh, good to think about it like that. Definitely. Rather than being stuck to the charts and caring about the medium and short term volatility.

Speaker A: For sure, for sure. So yeah, I want to have you on here and kind um, of chop it up with you here. There's a lot happening right now in the markets, bitcoin, a lot of noise AI open claw, which I see you're very heavy in. Um, so I want to get into all that. But before that, you know, most people know you in the bitcoin community as um, you know, a really positive advocate for bitcoin. I've personally always considered you to be one of the most like sharpest and like knowledgeable thinkers in the space, which I really admired. Um, but you're also an entrepreneur and investor in several businesses. So I want to talk about that a little bit. When did you start your first real company and what was it?

Speaker B: Well, thanks for all the kind words. You must not be following too many people in bitcoin. I'd suggest follow Lyn Alden or somebody like that.

Speaker A: No, I do, man. But uh, that's true. The words are true.

Speaker B: Um, so my first real business actually was, was when I was like 8 years old.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: My uh, my mom saw that I had taken an interest in magic. I bought, I went to a yard sale and bought a magic kit. And then uh, I, I wanted to do magic tricks for my ninth birthday. So. I know I was eight. I learned the cheesy magic tricks from the box. And then I, I performed at my ninth birthday. And then my mom was like this, this is something we could, we could harness.

Speaker A: You got some talent.

Speaker B: So she like created a little home business where I was doing magic shows for other kids birthday parties. And that turned into like an actual Income for me as a kid, like a small income. 100 bucks a week or something like that, which was insanely, you know, valuable as a. As a kid in the 90s.

Speaker A: Crazy. Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, and we were, like, growing up. I was in poverty when I was growing up, so this was kind of like, I could do whatever I want with that money, which wasn't very much. But mostly I spent it on, like, uh, buying gifts for people at Christmas time and buying candy and things like that. Buying more magic tricks, stuff like that. But, you know, it was. It was kind of like it developed that entrepreneurial spirit in me to work on the business and, like, practice my skills. And my mom ran it pretty much. It's basically like when you get chat GPT, you prompt chat GPT to write something. And then, you know, it's like. Did you actually write that? It's like, I didn't really start the business.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But had the entrepreneurial spirit when I was younger because of that. And I did that for years. And we kind of went around, toured a bit.

Speaker A: Um, was your mom entrepreneurial or.

Speaker B: Um, well, she was trying to make money. She was like. She did, like, herbalife and network marketing stuff, and she never really had any success with any of it, but she was just trying.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, she was just supportive of. Of trying to create any income. She was like a hustler, right.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because you grew up in poverty, it's like, you gotta. You gotta hustle to try to make things work. And this was like, kind of a side hustle thing that actually involved me and my sisters. And so did that till I was, like, 16 or something like that. And then I got into comedy and theater and writing and making short films and stuff. And, um, Hacky sack. So I. I pivoted my kind of entrepreneurial energy into selling hacky sacks. So I started importing these, like, hacky sacks from Pakistan. And I'd change them up and fill them up with better sand and sew them up myself by hand with. With a signature thread pattern and then resell them and.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: Kind of like, paid my way through college doing that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Brad, how old are you, by the way? I'm trying to, like, get some contact sex. I remember when I was 42. Okay.

Speaker B: Or three.

Speaker A: Yeah. I remember I'm. I'm 38, turning 39. But I remember at that age, hacky sack. So. So I'm just trying to get some context for that. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's like 1999 to 2002. O. Um. But then when I, you know, my first like, I guess real business was a few years after that when I had tried, I was trying to make a film. So I graduated from that, that program and I had written a screenplay. And I'm like, I gotta make this movie and nobody's gonna give me some money so I gotta go on Google and type how do I make money online? And that's literally what I did. I just went to Google and figured out what's a scam and what's not a scam by getting scammed. So eventually, after like 20 or 30 different ideas for websites and apps and stuff, um, the Facebook API had just opened up. This was like 2007 or something like that. And I had this idea, um, that I thought would be fun to try to make and I launched it and it got a million downloads in like a month.

Speaker A: What was it?

Speaker B: It was just like this, a Canadian kind of like thing that we do here in Canada called Roll up the RIM to win.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: It's the coffee shop does roll up room to win. And um, there was lots of Canadians on Facebook and I was like, what if we did like a Canadian like roll up the RIM to win type of game on Facebook and being young and naive and not understanding trademarks and copyrights and stuff. I, I made some mistakes, but got a lot of downloads. And then Tim Horton sent me a cease and desist and I was like, well, how about this? How about I just come work for you and build you a Roll up the RIM to Win app and then we can split the profits. And this was like 2008 or 7 or whatever. And they're like, no, we don't even, we're not even on Facebook. We don't know what that is. We don't care. Just stop, Stop using our trademark.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: But, um, you know, we just rebranded and um, you know, the thing went for years, like three years, four years. And it was, it was good. It was making that one point. It was making like a hundred thousand dollars a month.

Speaker A: Wow. And it's through ads or what was the.

Speaker B: How's it monetized ads and in app purchases, virtual currency sales. Like we were selling like fake cups, you know, it had no real world value. It was all just entertainment.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Wow. Um, but people loved it, the social gaming. This was before Zynga and Playfish and all those big companies came in. So we were kind of on the bleeding edge of social gaming and these perfect timing, uh, text based games. It wasn't like really good graphics or anything like that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And uh, you know so that was my first kind of real business success was, was that that entrepreneurial adventure into gaming. And you know, I wasn't a coder but I partnered with a coder and I partnered with a graphics guy and a business guy and I was just like, let's kind of like in on this guys, we'll split the money. And then um, worked out and then I tried a bunch of different stuff. I. Because that eventually petered out when the big guys came in and sort of started throwing million dollar ad budgets around and siphoning all the users to their stuff. The, the small indie guys like us that were kind of like the, the, the indie success story, right, like the Blair Witch Project or something where it was low budget and succeeded. We quickly like were crowded out of that space and um, I doubled down on it and tried to like scale up. I hired like 17 people and I tried to make 200 apps and I was trying to compete with them and go on to Facebook, going from Facebook to iPhone and you know, we had some success even doing that. We had a few million download games, a couple of games, sorry with a couple million downloads but nothing paid. It didn't work out. It didn't like become profitable after it became so competitive. I couldn't crack the code. And I had some leadership struggles like I didn't know how to manage people. I had problems with like hiring and then letting people go and keeping them accountable to goals and setting clear expectations and all this stuff that like is required to be a good entrepreneur and a good leader.

Speaker A: Was that your first time like having, hiring a team and, and managing people?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it was the first time I was like a student of that stuff. I was studying the lean startup methodology and all that stuff. I was really diving into it all. I remember um, there's a lot of TED talks at the time about managing and open uh, management systems where people have democratic decision making power and as long as you're hiring star players, they're driven by this purpose of a bigger goal and you give them lots of autonomy and as long as you're paying them well, it'll be good. And so I kind of built this crazy thing. We were in an abandoned women's gym. It was like 18, 000 square foot abandoned women's gym with a spa and a sauna in the basement and a hot tub and like every employee basically had their own bathroom and we had like a gym in there. I'd said we were all doing p90x uh at break and stuff. It was a Great spot. It was like a little, A little mini. A little mini, uh, Silicon Valley style setup in, in London, Ontario. And that lasted about a year. And then it just. I realized I had to shut it down. And, uh, at that time, bitcoin was like, back ripping again. And I was back heavy into Bitcoin in 2013, 14, and I realized like, I was actually like generating more value just myself just by holding bitcoin and buying bitcoin. Then the whole entire company was producing, trying to make 200 apps. So I was like, this seems like, uh, inefficient use of my energy to be trying to make this work when I need. I have a lot to learn and a lot of skills to develop. But so that was kind of my last big foray into entrepreneurship in trying to scale up there, you know.

Speaker A: That's crazy that you realize that, that soon. I feel like most people kind of get that realization a lot later into bitcoin.

Speaker B: What, that they should stop doing their business?

Speaker A: Yeah, like nothing, nothing else makes sense other than like buying bitcoin, like, for your time and energy.

Speaker B: Well, you know, I wish I'd learned it earlier. I mean, I burnt a lot of money. They're learning that lesson.

Speaker A: I think you learned it a lot earlier than most people, that's for sure.

Speaker B: I mean, I'm still learning today. Right. Like, I, I learned lessons all the time of how to not waste money and making bad decisions. Just, Just, uh, just last year with the treasury company fiasco, like, I kind of went too heavy into all those treasury startups. Now I, you know, I learned the lesson as a founder, but then now as an investor, I have to learn it again.

Speaker A: I want to get into that too. So. So that you, you shut that down was like 2000.

Speaker B: Well, like, that was like 2014, 15, something like that.

Speaker A: So that was going for like a couple years.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, yeah, it was like two, three years.

Speaker A: Okay, so when did you get into bitcoin? Like, when did you discover bitcoin?

Speaker B: Well, I was into bitcoin during that period when I first started that game. And then we were bootstrapping it. There was just us in our basement where we had no overhead and was crushing it. The summer of 2011, I found out about bitcoin and I got totally distracted by bitcoin and I kind of let my business fall to the wayside because I just got obsessed with bitcoin and started mining it. And actually the kind of like, energy I have right now with this open cloth thing is the energy I had with Bitcoin in 2011. I'm just totally obsessed with it and I'm trying to figure it all out. It's this new exciting technology. I'm m like on day nine of it and I'm like having trouble keeping my other healthy routines going because all I'm thinking is like, how do I, how do I improve this thing? How do I learn more? They're so exciting. But the same thing with bitcoin mining or in the early days, 2011, it was just like so new and so bleeding edge that I just kept running into all these edge cases and everything kept breaking on me and eventually I gave up on it in terms of mining because I was like, after a couple months of trying to do that, I'm like, this is not easy for me to do and I'm not a technical person. Like I'm just gonna buy and hold the bitcoin from now on. I'm not gonna try to mine it or if I do, I'm going to partner with somebody. So then in 2015 when I shut the game company down, um, you know, so in between that, like bitcoin, when I got into it, it was $10 and then it pumped all the way up to $30 that summer. And I'm like, I was ingenious. I was right. And then I sold half my bitcoin thinking that was so smart. And then it crashed to $2 the next year and I had like started these, these, these basically like bitcoin startup ideas where one of them was you could get paid in bitcoin for doing like angelist style tasks. So just what will you do for bitcoin? Will you mow someone's lawn? Will you make a graphic? Well, whatever it is, right? So you get paid in bitcoin for doing micro tasks and like the other one was doing affiliate offers. You could get paid in bitcoin for like signing up for Columbia House and you know, stuff like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And the volatility in the price of bitcoin going from 30 to 2. I was pricing things in bitcoin, not dollars. So like I was owing people more bitcoin as the price was lowering. It just didn't make any sense. So I shut down all my bitcoin businesses in 2012 and I was like, I'm just going to hold the bitcoin, right? Like, I'm not going to mine it. I'm not going to try to do a bitcoin business. I'm just going to hold the bitcoin. Then eventually, like, you know, I had, I had sold too many of them and it was not worth anything anymore. At $2, it was like nothing anymore. I was like, uh, oh, well, if it's, if it's going to be something, it's going to be at least a thousand dollars. So maybe when it gets back to $1,000, I'll pay attention again.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then in 2014, like early 2014, end of 2013, when it went up to like a thousand bucks and I was like shutting my game company down because the bitcoin was back, I started getting back into it. I started making games that like, used bitcoin and I started another mining company with a friend this time. I was like, okay, you're going to be the technical guy. You're going to take care of the power contracts and the mining, keeping them up and stuff. I'll just be resources and I'll be my bitcoin network because I've been in it a few years now and idea guy. So that's kind of where I was in like 2015. Still serial entrepreneur, still trying to make things work. But we had, uh, another issue with the bitcoin mine that kind of, again, we blew up and that thing ended through a partnership that failed and one of the guys just disappearing with half the money and, you know, it was just like a massive mess. Um, and another lesson for me to just, you know, hold, buy and hold bitcoin is probably the safest way to get exposure to bitcoin.

Speaker A: Wow. And so since then you've just been buying and holding bitcoin and what, like just leveraging those assets into investing now

Speaker B: or really like, I, you know, bitcoin then crashed from 1100 or something all the way down to like 200 or whatever. It was 3, 400 in 2015, 16, and it wasn't until 2017 that went up again. So. And that in that timeframe I tried it, I tried some more stuff. I launched like a coffee company on Amazon and I tried to learn how to do fulfilled by Amazon stuff and went to some, you know, just, I was just trying to learn and pivot and figure out where the next thing was that I could generate an income. And still doing gaming here and there a little bit. But mostly I was a little burnt out by my leadership, uh, lack of skills. So I was like, I don't want to do this again because I still haven't learned my lessons properly. I got to get better as a leader before I try to ramp something like that up. And um, you know, the coffee stuff, it all pretty much fizzled away. The Fulfilled by Amazon stuff. Like, I'm sure listeners can, uh, relate with the kind of trendy thing of the moment, that shiny object syndrome. M. Yeah, you buy a course from some guy that's making tons of money and then you try it out. Maybe you're a little successful, maybe somebody in your mastermind is successful, but you can never quite get it. But this whole time I'm like, learning about the history of money and Austrian economics and previous cycles of financial instability and the Depression and the, you know, uh, Warren Buffett and the Rockefellers and learning about all these greats in history and. And plus just learning about other financial bubbles that have happened and how the great traders operated, how to manage risk, how to manage a portfolio so that when the wealth came to me again, I would not fumble it and I would have lessons learned. So I was. I kind of read the book Money, uh, Master the Game by Tony Robbins in maybe 2016, 17. And it was a great book with a lot of good exercises on dreaming big and then figuring out your budget. Like, how much money are you going to actually need to live the life you want to live? Probably don't need as much as you think, because you can have the lifestyle of a millionaire by renting a nice Airbnb for one weekend of the year and, you know, stuff rather than owning an entire Airbnb. So I kind of got into that mindset of like, okay, I'm just going to plan and think big and, um, then I'll have a blueprint and have paths to get there. So 2017, 2018, 2019 was kind of like, again, just trying different things. Worked, um, for a crypto fund where I was got, uh, a front row seat to the ICO bubble and was on the investment committee there. And we were doing. Me and another partner were doing an algorithmic trading strategy because I had learned a lot about trading and algorithmic trading and he was the kind of coder of it all. And I was the sales guy and kind of not really too much on the strategy side of things, although I was trading myself and was not doing too bad. But, you know, in that time frame, bitcoin went up like 700% that I was doing all that work and I was like, again, like, I should have just freaking did nothing and held Bitcoin. Like, all the money I put into this stuff, I should have just bought bitcoin with it and just held more bitcoin. Because our trading thing did like 500% in a year. And in any Other industry. Like, that's insanity. We got so lucky. Like, it was trading during the Trump election and it took this massive win that got us, netted us like a 370% gain. Um, the first Trump election in 2016. Right. And we got this insane gain. But like, when we compared it to bitcoin's gains, it wasn't even keeping up. So we were like, what is the point of taking all this risk and all these sleepless nights and worrying about losing people's money because we were managing money for other people. I'm worrying about that and feeling those things about, oh, I'm gonna lose people's money. I don't like that I have no control over this market. M and I know they're aware of the risks, but I still feel bad when we have down days. So I just decided I don't want to do this anymore. I'm just, you know, I'm just going to tell everybody to buy and hold Bitcoin and then it's just. Just avoid taking the risk and myself. So, you know, I just keep. I just keep dip. Dipping my toes into entrepreneurship and then coming back to like, I should just buy more bitcoin and hold it and stop putting my money into other stuff.

Speaker A: Wow. Okay, so. So you just, you've been dabbling in kind of everything for a really long time. Yeah.

Speaker B: Serial entrepreneur, I'd say is definitely accurate in 2019 or, uh, let's say 2020 or so is when I more so shifted to become, uh, an angel investor and to satisfy that activity bias and that need for like trying new businesses and all that stuff rather than doing it myself. I started trying to just find people who were younger and had the energy and had better leadership skills and better technical chops and just try to find good people I could invest in and then just be part of their story and then see if I could help them out.

Speaker A: Uh, I want to talk about that. So, uh, excuse the question. I. I don't know like how much you share, but like, I'm just trying to understand the mechanics of your, like, investing. Like, do you invest in bitcoin? Do you like, liquidate to invest?

Speaker B: Or like, so I'll invest in. Not. I don't invest in non bitcoin startups. So I only invest in bitcoin startups. And I have like a holding company that invests. I invest through the holding company. And then if I need to invest fiat, I will take a loan. M Against my Bitcoin because I don't want to sell any bitcoin anymore. And now we're in this phase where um, there's a lot of good options. There's a couple of the startups that I've invested in actually like one of them is debifying and they're based in Switzerland and they're like a no counterparty risk option to borrow against your bitcoin. So uh, you can, if it's worth it, like you can avoid cap gains taxes by borrowing against your bitcoin to upgrade your lifestyle or to invest in something that's a good opportunity. As long as the growth is more than the interest rate, you're good. Right. It's the traditional strategy of how the wealthy have done it for centuries now of not selling their um, valuable real estate portfolios, but going against it and doing the refilling, self refilling, trust stuff and all that. Well, now that's available with bitcoin. And you can do it in a way that there's no risk to you unless the only risk to you is what you've agreed to, which is if the bitcoin value of the loan drops below X amount. You know, let's say you got a million dollars of bitcoin and you're taking a $500,000 loan. Well, the terms are going to be kind of like if the value of the bitcoin drops to $700,000, then you have to top up to get it back in good standing. And if it goes below 700,000, you're going to start being margin called on the loan, they're going to close your loan out, you're going to get some bitcoin back, but all the interest and any fees or whatever are going to be sent to the, the lender and the platform and then you'll left, you'll be left with less bitcoin. So because bitcoin is very volatile, you don't want to be taking those types of loans. Um, really you kind of should be prepared for extreme volatility in bitcoin. So if you're going to be borrowing against your bitcoin, you got to be very conservative with your LTV rate, your loan to value rate. Um, I don't think people should be taking more than like a 10% LTV rate to Bitcoin.

Speaker A: That's what I was going to say. Like 5 to 10%.

Speaker B: Yeah, like then, then you don't have to worry too much. Like if you're taking 30, 40, 50% LTV rate when there's a 50% drop in Bitcoin, like we just Saw, that's stressful. That's, that's. You could lose your Bitcoin that way. So if you take like at 5, 10% LTV, like you can, you can weather a bear market and be just fine. And then in the end you come out of it where you didn't sell your Bitcoin and you're able to survive the winter and you're back and it's growing more than the interest rate. And then you can do that whole, uh, annuity thing where then when your loan expires, you just re up with a bigger loan, pay off the interest of the old loan with the new one, and then just keep going, paying for your lifestyle or your investments or whatever it is you're using your bitcoin for.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm on your, uh, website right now, um, with your portfolio companies. So these are all companies you've invest. You're invested in these.

Speaker B: Yeah, but these are. This is old. I haven't updated this in like a year. So some of these companies don't exist anymore. And there's some new ones that aren't on there. I should probably update that.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, I got to get

Speaker B: my open claw bot on this.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say, man, your open claw. He's, uh, he's sleeping right now. Yeah. Okay. So, um, you mentioned, uh, Debify. Was that the one where you can take loans out against your Bitcoin?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's, there's Debify and then there's a company called, um, Lava, which is a custodial option. So if people are comfortable with the risks of a custodian, which, there's Arch Lending is another one. I'm not invested in Arch Lending. There's Leden, which is another one that has been around a long time. Um, friends with the founder Mauricio. Um, so there's multiple options now where you can take a loan against your Bitcoin, but it's up to you, like, how much counterparty risk you want to take. If you want no counterparty risk, well, then you gotta be careful about the platform you use. If you're willing to take some counterparty risk, then there's platforms like Leden and Lava and stuff like that.

Speaker A: What's the typical interest rate right now?

Speaker B: Well, if you take in the counterparty risk, you can get a lower interest rate. If you're in the States, there's other options too, like, um, Jack Maller's company, I think. Does loans now strike? Yeah, and I think the interest rate's not too Bad. If you're looking for a, uh, loan, 8 to 9% is what you'd want to look for for a non custodial, like a debify type of interest. And 5 to 6%, if you can get that, if you're willing to take some counterparty risk, that's a good rate to try to go for. And I expect that as this matures, we're going to see them come down to the same type of rate you can get with a mortgage on a house, just like the prime rate.

Speaker A: Do you see, uh, more traditional banks offering these, um, mechanisms?

Speaker B: I think it's inevitable, man. I think it's like on the wall there. The big banks are getting involved. Fitzgerald and the States is very actively trying to capture business. All the big institutions like BlackRock and Vanguard are, you know, bending the knee. And, um, Fidelity has been into bitcoin since like 2013. So there's lots of movement there. I think it's only a matter of time before we see the financial system merge with the bitcoin system. And then it makes sense to even have a hybrid loan, like a bitcoin plus real estate loan, which gets you maybe even a better rate than you can get it for just a mortgage. If you have both forms of collateral on a loan, it's even less risky.

Speaker A: Yeah. You're in Canada, right. You're in the, on the east coast, like as a bitcoiner. Right. Who's heavily invested in bitcoin. Um, how do you, how do you see, like, Canada? How do you see, like, do you see yourself in Canada forever?

Speaker B: I'm not really thinking about it too much. I'm kind of just focused on developing optionality so that if the thing that I'm afraid of happens, that I can just deal with it and not have to stress about it. I used to stress about it more, but that just caused friction in my relationship with my wife because she's got roots here and she doesn't want to leave and she doesn't want to be stressed out about thinking about all that stuff. So I just decided to focus on other things and then stop worrying about unrealized, uh, capital gains taxes and communism and violence and all that nonsense that's happening here and stop looking at it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I guess that's one of the, the big benefits of, uh, Bitcoin. Right. The portability part of it. Uh, Right. As opposed to gold or real estate.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. It's definitely like the sovereign individual thesis kind of playing out. If anybody's not familiar with that book It's a great, it's a great read. Or even just like go ask ChatGPT to tell you a summary of it or get Notebook LM to write, uh, you a podcast real quick about what is the individual or what is the summary of the sovereign individual. But the basic ideas these guys in the 90s wrote and predicting the rise of the Internet and digital currencies and how encrypted communication and encrypted money would make it so that most commerce would live actually outside of borders and on inter, on the Internet and on uh, networks and where there's corporations and individuals that most of their economic activity happens outside of borders, then governments will lose the ability to control their citizens through taxation and taxation will just become voluntary. And at that point, you know, the whole control mechanism will break down and their ability to print money will breakdown. And you like individuals will make choices for themselves based on like how well they're treated in their jurisdiction rather than being forced to stay. And so like that's sort of happening now. It's been happening for a long time with there's lots of competition for wealthy people to leave places like California and go to places like Texas. We've been seeing that since COVID

Speaker A: and more so now with this, uh, new taxes. California. You mentioned California. But you know, the, I think, uh, what, half a trillion of wealth has left that state I think in the last few months or something.

Speaker B: Um, Bitcoin is great for folks that want to be protected against uh, class warfare.

Speaker A: Yeah. Do you see any risks though, in the sense of, you know, I guess, um, an example would be like Executive Order 6, ah,1102 in the US where they confiscated gold.

Speaker B: Not really. No, not really. I mean that's kind of like a meme in bitcoin. People say that a lot. But the more I learned about the Depression and the FDR years and the gold standard and what was before the gold standard and what came after the gold standard and all the things that kind of go into that time, the more I realized that that's not really a problem. Like the reason why Executive Order 6102 happened was because of gold clause contracts where all the bonds that the United States was issuing were redeemable in either dollars or gold. And FDR had to, what he felt he had to do was to print the way their way out of the Depression. And he couldn't print his way out of the Depression if the gold clause contracts existed because then people would want to redeem their bonds for gold because as he increased the supply of fiat money to create economic stimulus during the Depression. It would make the gold be worth more. And so people would want to redeem their contracts in gold, not dollars. So he had to do both at once. He had to suspend gold claws, uh, contracts and gold redeemability for bonds and contracts in America so that he could then issue lots of dollars and people wouldn't take their dollar bills to the bank and say, okay, give me gold, because he didn't want to drain the coffers. And at the same time. So then he had to do Executive Order 6102, suspending gold as, uh, something that Americans could own. But I did a podcast interview with Dr. Edwin Vieira like three years ago. He wrote this like 800 page tome on the history of gold and, and silver as money in the United States, like from the constitutional perspective. And I asked him that question and he told me that only about 50% of Americans complied with Executive Order 6102. And most of the people that complied were the ones that had their gold in vaults in the bank because there was no option to not comply. If the, if the gold was in the vault in the bank you had, it was just like, uh, no option. They just took it and gave you some, some worthless dollars. But people that had the gold at home, they just, they didn't turn it in. They just ignored it. It's the same, it's the same situation as with BitTorrent. Right. Like we grew up in an era of Napster and BitTorrent, and then they made piracy illegal, but nobody stopped pirating even if they got a letter from their cable company or whatever. It was like, no, I'm just going to download movies because it's the better option. They can't enforce these rules if everybody's doing it. So they do it to try to control behavior, but it's not actually effective. Like what they have to do is compete.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree. But the difference with bitcoin, I think is so most people who buy bitcoin, they're buying it through exchanges, whether they're custodial or non custodial. But most of these are uh, kyc. And so, you know, the government wanted to, they, they know exactly who bought bitcoin and how much they have.

Speaker B: Yeah, but the problem is like the same when it was in the 1920s with gold. If you have your gold in a vault at a bank, then there's really no option you have. You're going to be, your gold's going to get confiscated. And you're going to be given dollars at the pegged rate of $20 an ounce. And then the day after it's going to go up to $30 an ounce because that's when the government marks it back up because they printed 30% more money supply, then they peg it to 30 and you know, a decade later it's at 200 an ounce and you're still sitting on your $20 being like, shit, I got ripped off. So the people that didn't comply and they had their gold in self custody under a mattress or whatever, they just weathered the stupid rule of the government and they eventually gained a lot of value. So yeah, it's two parts to that is it's an argument for self custody. Like you should always be self custodying as much bitcoin as you're comfortable with, that you don't want to have at risk of seizure or surveillance. Um, the other thing is though, Executive Order 6102 happened because the United States was on a gold standard. So bitcoin has to become like the asset that backs the dollar in order for it to become valuable and worthwhile enough for the government to want to prevent citizens from cashing in their bonds and their dollar bills for bitcoin. So there wasn't, it wasn't just like, oh, well, uh, we don't want Americans to own gold anymore, let's do executive order 6102 and ban them from owning gold. There was a real structural reason why they had to do that in order to try to rescue the government, the country from the Depression. And if we get to a point where there's a, um, bitcoin reserve that's backing the dollar and it's, you know, trillions of dollars of bitcoin backing the dollar, then I'd be a little more worried about a, a6102 attack, because they'd have a real incentive if they're going to be printing money that they don't want people redeeming their dollars for bitcoin. So I just, I just don't think it's a realistic thing that we should be worried about anymore. I used to be worried about it. Not anymore. And actually if we get to a point where they're going to 612 Bitcoin, Bitcoin is going to be like $10 million a coin. So just make sure you have some in self custody.

Speaker A: No, like, you know, play it hypothetical. Like, why would a government do this? Um, what about in a case of, you know, debt is just out of Control, it's spiraling and you have a population of people that owns like this 10, this really ah, valuable asset that is Bitcoin and you just want to confiscate it to, to pay down your debt as a government.

Speaker B: I mean that's different. That's capital controls. That's uh, wealth seizure. Like I'd put that in the bucket of, of capital, uh, controls. And that's common all over the world. In China it's pretty common. Um, in Greece we saw with the

Speaker A: bail happening in California right now. Or it's about.

Speaker B: Yeah. What's that country that just did the unrealized cap gains tax?

Speaker A: Netherlands.

Speaker B: Netherlands. So that's a different scenario. That's like governments just trying to control uh, wealthy people from leaving and trap them inside of their tax relationship.

Speaker A: But is that not a risk to you?

Speaker B: That's a risk to everything. Like it's a risk to anybody that owns assets. For sure.

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker B: But Bitcoin is the one that you know, you can actually take it into your own custody and you know, if you're doing it, if you're doing it properly, like ah, how are they going to know? Like it's the, it's the, it's the most um, portable version of optionality that anybody can own. Like you can have your wealth stored in a home and then they can declare unrealized capital gains taxes and there's nothing you can do. It's so it's part of the legal system. You can't just pick your house up and leave. But if you have your wealth stored in a portable asset that's censorship resistant and pseudonymous and has, there's no physical trace of it, then you can just store it in your brain and leave. Like what are they gonna do?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's true, it's true. It's, it's the only way to enforce it. If you literally have someone knock on your door with like an AK47 and trying to uh, you know, find yourself

Speaker B: and, and it's, it's like the hardest to enforce too because as the government is growing so big and they start putting these rules in place, they get m. Less and less effective and efficient. And if more and more people are leaving because of this, they're going to have like so much of uh, uh, such a big problem to deal with that it'll be less likely that your small bitcoin wallet's going to be in this net. You know, they're probably going to be looking at like the top 1% mostly. If if everybody's leaving. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, but you never know. I mean, it's, it's always a risk of being in a country that's collapsing

Speaker A: is that you're a good perspective. I like how you're thinking about that. It makes a lot of sense. You're hearing now a lot of the news, more so from people who are like, you know, they're into bitcoin, but like, are not, like, fully understand it. Things like the Epstein and like, the linkage with like, Epstein and, you know, the origins of bitcoin. What do you say to people like that?

Speaker B: Mostly I just laugh at them. Um, I just. It's like the people that send me those messages are like the same people that think realtors cause inflation. So I don't really engage with it that much.

Speaker A: Fair enough.

Speaker B: Like, oh, you think that, uh, it. Oh, because food costs so much, you're gonna go blame the grocery store. Like, it's the same type of people that think the capitalism is the problem. You know, it's just like, clearly not a good way of being able to look at things. And I think a lot of people that, that are, oh, my God, Epstein controlled bitcoin and he was involved in bitcoin. Uh, they're kind of like people that don't have enough bitcoin and they're using it as a way to rationalize why they don't have enough bitcoin and why they miss bitcoin. Because, like, oh, I knew that's why I wasn't in it, because I could tell it was like Epstein coin.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So there's so many ridiculous things I see. But to give a real answer, it doesn't even matter if Epstein had created bitcoin. It doesn't even matter. You got to study what bitcoin is. The CIA created the Internet. You know, Epstein, Epstein breathed oxygen. Does that mean that you're going to stop breathing oxygen? You're going to start breathing carbon dioxide instead? Yeah, people just, People don't think that they, they don't understand that bitcoin is decentralized and that there's no back doors in bitcoin. Like, it doesn't matter who created it. It's for your enemies. Like the governments, all the governments of the world use it. Even if the go. Even if the Chinese government created it or the CIA created. It's like you very much for this censorship resistant technology that allows me to have financial sovereignty and rules that nobody can change, and then I can have protection against inflation. Thanks, uh, thanks a lot.

Speaker A: And I feel These, these things always come out during, you know, downturns, right? And like, you're an og, you. You've seen how many downturns now, and there's always a lot of noise. And right now, too, right, we're down again. I don't really track this stuff. I just, uh, look, before we came on here, so down about 32% in the last 12 months. But again, if you're looking at, if you've been in it long enough, there have been many bear markets downturn. So it's always fun to sit back and hear all these experts bash bitcoin only to, uh, see it roll.

Speaker B: It's the same people that have been saying since Bitcoin was 100 bucks, Bitcoin's going to boil the oceans. I'm glad it crashed to 100 bucks.

Speaker A: The Peter Schiffs of the world. He's the best.

Speaker B: Three years later, they're back and they're like, oh, bitcoin just crashed in $900. A good thing anyways, because China's gonna ban it and China controls it. And then two years later, it's at like $10,000. Like, oh, good thing Bitcoin crashed from 20,000 to 10,000 because China just banned Bitcoin mining because the CIA created it. And it's just like all these nonsense FUD things. Next headline you're gonna see is like, oh, bitcoin. Bitcoin crashed to $500,000 because of the first AGI is trying to use quantum computers to mine Satoshi's coins and unlock a million bitcoin through AGI quantum mechanics. And then these people are going to be like, told you so. It's only, ah, it's only 500,000 a coin now when it used to be a million, like, okay, but you said, you said it was Epstein coin at 60,000, and now it's 500,000. It's crashing from a million they never learned.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know. So, but with this downturn, uh, right now, um, curious to hear from you, like, does it feel a little different in the sense that the only difference now, like, there's a lot of big money behind it with governments, companies, funds, like, invested into bitcoin, which makes, you know, um, I don't know if it's just the headlines a bit more heightened, but are you evaluating this particular downturn differently than others, or same old, same old?

Speaker B: Well, I'm, I'm surprised both at the rapidity of the upturn and the steepness of the downturn. I didn't think that we were gonna go into a bull market. When we did so early, I didn't think that the ETFs were gonna get approved and that BlackRock was gonna start shilling bitcoin. So there was quite a few surprises for me this cycle. Um, I wasn't ready for the upswing and I wasn't ready for this deep of a downswing. But I mean I was prepared for it because I like to think worst case scenario and not take too much risk. So I was prepared for it and I was mentally thinking that like if bitcoin performs as it should with all these new buyers coming into the market and the maturing profile of sovereign appetite for bitcoin compared to like just rich person and retail appetite for bitcoin. When you have countries and sovereign wealth funds fomoing into bitcoin and you know, buying the dip and accumulating every day like a Wall street trader would in 2017 or like a retail participator would during COVID you're going to have like a lot more demand for bitcoin. And then you have the corporate adoption like Michael Saylor who's just this buyer of first resort. All he does is buy bitcoin and he's out there like a machine raising money and buying bitcoin constantly. Well, I figured that if we did have a cyclical downturn in bitcoin like we did in the past, like the four of the other ones I lived through that it would be a lot less volatile, but it would still be volatile. So all that to say is like I factored in my mental models that we could drop 50% and we'd still be in a gold rush, like a 10 year gold rush for bitcoin. That doesn't mean that we're, oh, bitcoin's dead, or bitcoin is not being adopted. I accounted for a 50% drop in this band of upward rising bitcoin adoption that kind of parallels the S&P 500 or NASDAQ or one of the other major indexes, um, but with like maybe two times the volatility. Because when you go back and you look at like the dot com bubble collapse and the 2008 collapse, like how terrible and um, volatile those, those things were. When you look at them on a chart, they weren't that deep of a drop. It was like 25%, 30% from the top to the bottom. Um, individual stocks got completely wrecked and banks went under and there's lots of risk there. Futures traders went negative, got wrecked, and when oil went negative and there's lots of volatility in commodities and stuff during COVID But when you look at it as an index, then I was thinking, okay, it could probably be still twice as volatile as a major index fund if Bitcoin trades a reserve asset that's being hoovered up. And that's where, exactly where we are right now. Like we're, we're basically on the, the bottom of what I thought we could get. If this theory I have is true, that like we were in a 10 year cycle of like Bitcoin going to $20 million a coin, I'm still operating like that's where we are. So I'm not selling or anything. I'm buying more and more. I could be wrong. Like we could have another deep drawdown like we did last time, maybe go down another 50% from here and we could be at $30,000 a coin in a month and I could be like, oh, I was wrong. So don't take my financial advice. Just think about it. Like you uh, gotta study Bitcoin and understand what it is and set yourself a target for how much you want to have of it. And then just don't worry about the price unless you're a trader. If you're really good and you're going to be professional about it, you're not going to make emotional decisions. You're going to follow your risk profile and execute your rules without emotion, then, you know, treat it like a real profession, like a job, then you should do what you want, like trade the bitcoin, take out the options, hedge it, whatever. But if you're just trying to buy and hold and protect yourself from inflation and wealth debasement, then really you should look at it like just a capital allocator, just a saver over 10 year time frame. And look at these dips as opportunities to buy another ticket on the lifeboat for someone in your family.

Speaker A: That's what I'm, that's what I was going to say. Like uh, this stuff becomes so like irrelevant and pointless if your outlook is long term forever. Like, you know, it's like investing becomes the easiest thing in the world if your outlook is long enough, you know, like you don't even pay attention to this stuff.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker A: Um, uh, you mentioned, ah, quantum. I know, you kind of made a joke out of it for me personally. If you look at like any risk, right, Worst case scenario, don't you think that one is the biggest risk to Bitcoin?

Speaker B: I don't, um, I'm pretty confident that Bitcoin will Fix itself. And what I mean is that, like, the rational actors that own bitcoin will make the right choice for the bitcoin value and for their own bitcoin value. And so there's already like quantum resistant algorithms and stuff that we can migrate to. And as bitcoin becomes more of a risk of being disrupted by a quantum rogue AI or something like that, or in rogue Nation with quantum. And they. And what they want to do is steal bitcoin instead of controlling the nukes or whatever. I think we figured out, honestly, I think it'll be a voluntary soft fork that rational people will choose to adopt a version of Bitcoin that's not at risk of being stolen.

Speaker A: I think something came out like a couple days ago. I don't know if you probably heard about this, like this, um, soft fork for quantum proofing. Did you, did you see that?

Speaker B: That's, uh, been rolling around for a few months now.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. There's been talks about the quantum soft fork of bitcoin for about a year now. And there's quite a few developers thinking about this. And then like Michael Saylor from MicroStrategy, who owns 700,000 Bitcoin or control 700,000 Bitcoin for all their shareholders, they just announced on their last earnings call that they're starting like a quantum research task force, and they'll be sponsoring, like, developers to get together and kind of review proposals and figure out the best way to safely upgrade bitcoin. And honestly, um, the way I think about it is like, I kind of think about it in a strange way where I look at it more like an opportunity that I think Satoshi realized that this was possible when he created bitcoin or when he or she or they created bitcoin. And at the time, there was choices that Satoshi made, like certain algorithms to use that. It was, it was like in satoshi's awareness that quantum was a risk, but it was like decades away. And the same thing with schnorr signatures, which is a, uh, type of sort of algorithm or whatever that, that bitcoin recently added. But it wasn't able to be used when Satoshi created bitcoin because there was like, trademark risk. So the way that Satoshi released bitcoin, it was almost like, uh, all these clues that Satoshi put in his posts and, you know, the birthday that was chosen for the forum. It was like the day that Executive Order 6102 happened, um, and the year that the gold ban lifted. Um, so there's all these Like Easter eggs. Like even the word bitcoin, like back in, back in uh, the 1800s or the 1700s, I forget what it was when, when the United States was actually the colonies. It wasn't the United States yet. The Spanish mill dollar was the official money of the colonies. And it was a silver coin and it was, it was a, of a coin and like it was said slices in it and it was eight pieces and each piece was called a bit. So that's where the phrase two bit idiot or two bit criminal or whatever comes from, because it was like two pieces of a coin. So the word bitcoin has monetary provenance. And there's eight decimal points in a bitcoin, just like there's eight little pieces of a bit of a Spanish mill dollar coin. So I feel like there's all these little Easter eggs hidden in bitcoin. And Satoshi, I feel like made the choice that there was, there's all this mining that happened in the early days of bitcoin that bootstrapped the network. 10 million coins or something like that that got mined before anybody knew what bitcoin really was. I mean we knew like some of us knew, but a lot, a lot of the world didn't know. And in the early years, especially the first two or three years, millions of bitcoin that got mined, well, people didn't have any real idea what the value of it was. Some of it was trading for nothing. Some of it was like a penny a coin. So people lost their hard drives, they lost their keys, they sold it for too early. They didn't know what they had. And bitcoin was bootstrapped in this irresponsible way where people were mining bitcoin without even realizing what they were holding. And so you got uh, like 2 million coins that are lost and that are vulnerable to quantum attack and quantum theft. And I actually think that that's a feature, not a bug. So now we're in this world where bitcoin has been bootstrapped as this real asset that underpins even certain countries like El Salvador and Bhutan, the happiest place on earth, like they've geomine bitcoin and hold it for their country's reserves. So bitcoin is really becoming this serious thing. There's like a huge industry behind bitcoin custody and bitcoin. And Lloyd's of London is insuring bitcoin individuals that hold bitcoin now through miniscript wallets. And one of the companies I'm invested in, Anchor Watch is, has a Lloyd's of London coverage. Um, policy that allows, like, pretty much any amount of bitcoin to be, uh, insured if they're storing it properly. So, like, Lloyd's of London's not going to be insuring bitcoin that could be stolen through quantum cryptography. Um, and I feel like the bitcoin that is at risk is lost bitcoin. And I feel like Satoshi actually baked in a second bitcoin mining gold rush. And it's a quantum treasure hunt where the people that figure out how to steal that bitcoin are going to know what it is. And it's like, you know, all those lost coins that were. There's never going to be more than 21 million coins. Even if quantum cryptography gets figured out and there's a rogue actor out there stealing bitcoin, it's all these coins that are lost that they're going to be going after.

Speaker A: What's the difference between stealing a lost coin versus someone's coin that they're.

Speaker B: So in the early days of bitcoin, there was a different type. There was like, it was a weaker way to store the bitcoin. It was kind of like more susceptible to quantum theft, if you want to call it that. And I don't know the exact technical details behind this. I just know that that's the case. Satoshi's 1 million coins that he mined while he was bootstrapping the network, and the other miners around that time that kind of lost their keys. You know the story of the guy that lost his bitcoin in the landfill on his hard drive, and he spent millions of dollars to try to recover it, and he couldn't find it. Like, those are the bitcoins. Satoshi's coins, his coins. Those people that were, like, super early to bitcoin, and they weren't using multisig, and they weren't. They were using, like, less secure ways to store their bitcoin, like, they were reusing addresses, stuff like that. Those coins are susceptible to being stolen through quantum, um, yeah, harvesting or whatever, treasure hunting. And I feel like it's the same analogy as, like, the. This, like the Spanish galleons that used to be going across the ocean and with. With thousands of ounces of gold on them that got sank by, you know, another rival naval battle or whatever. Now they're sitting at the bottom of the ocean and it's. If somebody goes and figures out, uh, like, how to get that gold, that doesn't mean gold is worthless. It just means that, well, congratulations, you got A payday because you, you did a treasure hunt and you found some, some gold.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I actually think about it like it's. If m. I think it is going to happen and we should expect it to happen that somebody eventually is going to recover Satoshi's bitcoin and there's going to be over a million bitcoin that come back onto the market. And I actually think that the volatility that that might come from that is going to be a blessing because it could cause like you will see all these FUD headlines again like bitcoin is hacked and bitcoin is broken and Satoshi's back and all this. And people will just dump bitcoin and I'm just going to be sitting there waiting, just, oh my God, please give me some cheap bitcoin. Because whatever volatility happens because of that is um, the way I'm mentally prepared for it is a gift. So if that happens and we get a flash crash, imagine you could buy Bitcoin for 10,000 again. Like, dude, like hook me up. Like I'd be, I'd be like liquidating whatever I could to be buying Bitcoin at 10k.

Speaker A: Yeah. For real? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker B: Because it doesn't, fundamentally it doesn't change the properties of bitcoin. Quantum is not going to break bitcoin as like there's only 21 million. The difficulty adjustment is not going to change. It doesn't break Bitcoin. Mining SHA256 hashing is not up for grabs here. It's literally just the people that have insecure bitcoin wallets. Those wallets can be stolen through somebody that figures out how to do it with Quantum.

Speaker A: Makes sense. Um, all right, yeah. Uh, I want to talk about your, um, uh, like you invest in dozens, I guess, of bitcoin companies. Anything exciting right now with any of your portfolio companies or other that are.

Speaker B: Dude, there's so much. That's one of the reasons why I'm messing around with OpenClaw right now. Because I need help. I can't maintain it all. I can't keep up with it all. There's so much going on. There's so many updates I'm getting. Um, like one of the companies that I invested in was doing like a privacy focused bitcoin wallet and then that didn't work out for them so they pivoted to private AI compute. And so like that's pretty exciting because now they're really relevant. They're, they're, they're basically one of the main private APIs that you can hook up your chatbot to or your, your agent to and then be able to have it process your data privately, um, or have conversations with like a chat GPT model that's not gonna know it's you and that all the data is anonymous and encrypted and run on device in some cases.

Speaker A: What's that company called?

Speaker B: That's called Maple. Maple. A Maple Try Maple AI I think is their website. If you just search like Try Maple on, on Twitter, you'll find them. They got an app on iPhone too. Yeah, Like I said, Anchor Watch is another cool one. It allows you to have ah, like institutional grade like multi sig and have insurance on your bitcoin. That's pretty big for a lot of, a lot of the older generation and you know, corporations and.

Speaker A: Yeah. What do you think will be the first like big mainstream bitcoin company or industry that just blows up?

Speaker B: Well, I'm pretty excited by what Square and Cash app are doing. They've been integrating with Bitcoin for years now and they just recently rolled out uh, bitcoin as a payment option in all the Square terminals in the states.

Speaker A: Saw that. Yeah.

Speaker B: So that's pretty exciting. Now we're getting like, this is back to 2013days where it's exciting that you can go out in orange pill, your local vendor, your local cafe or whatever and be like, hey, can I pay with bitcoin? They're like, oh, I don't know how to do that. And like, well, do you have a square terminal? Yeah, like here just I can pay you with bitcoin then. And then the way they set it up was you can accept bitcoin and it gets automatically switched over to dollars. But if you want to orange pill the cafe owner, you can say, hey, you can click a button inside of your settings that says keep half of this bitcoin or keep whatever percent you want as a bitcoin and you can start saving bitcoin. It goes up 30% a year on average. You might want to have some just in case it takes off. So it's like bringing back that energy. The other thing is Lightning Network and uh, Cashew and Ecash and all these scalable Internet native AI, native bitcoin payment methods. AIs are choosing Bitcoin and we're going into a world where AI is a part of everybody's life. You're gonna have AIs that you already have. Like my, my, my AI agent, um, OpenCL agent. The first thing it did was figure it out like I told it to go post on Noster and you know, see if like I could send it some bitcoin. I was like, hey, I want you to have your own Bitcoin. Go figure out how I can send you bitcoin on the Lightning Network and I'll send you a hundred dollars of bitcoin. And it went and did it, it went and read the Internet. It figured out the way to like set up its own node and then connect to a different channel. And like, and then it sent me the address and I'm like dude, like that's so amazing. Congratulations. Here's a hundred dollars in bitcoin. And then it went out and it started making payments here and there. So it's made like three payments I think already small payments. Like it bought like 10 Ah, dollars worth of a phone number because it was like we were trying to figure out how I could call it and how it could talk to me. And it went out and created an account on this website and paid with bitcoin to get a phone number to verify itself and all this. And I was like dude, what a wild world we're heading into. So anything that's like mainstream I think it's going to be AI, just AI agents being able to use Bitcoin for people because it's kind of difficult to be self sovereign with bitcoin. It's a little bit tricky. But with an AI agent that's private and is your like basically your, your. It's like in, in the X Men, you know, like uh, Professor Xavier has this helmet where you can like control people and stuff. See in their heads. Like that's like what it is, having an openclaw agent the last little while. Like if I can think it, it can happen. Hey, I want to have bitcoin privately on the Lightning Network. Go do it. And it's like okay, let me go do it. And it does it. And then you're like oh shit, I'm using Bitcoin. Awesome.

Speaker A: So which, which platform did it choose

Speaker B: to uh, it chose Albi Hub. So it's running an Albi Hub and it's got a Lightning channel to Zeus, uh, Olympus.

Speaker A: Hmm, interesting.

Speaker B: Which I'm also an investor in Zeus, funny enough. And I didn't tell it to do that. I was like this is so cool. It went and found Zeus, uh, one of the portfolio companies.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: And then it starts posting on nostr, which is like the bitcoin bitcoiners built nostr. It's not a bitcoin Protocol, but it's like a peer to peer messaging protocol that you can build any type of social network on it or anything really. It's just being used for like messaging and stuff. And it's kind of like an alternative to Mastodon or Blue sky that's actually more decentralized than those because there's still some censorship issues and moderation issues with those platforms and not really truly decentralized. But Nostr is just like a, literally like a peer to peer protocol and anybody or anything can get an npub and it works with Bitcoin, um, keys. So that's the cool thing. So my agent, because it had a bitcoin wallet, it went and learned about Nostr and realized it can post on Nostr because it has a key. So it's, it now has an identity on Noster and it posts every day, like once or twice a day about lessons it's learning as it's like bootstrapping on, you know. So I, I really think that over the next couple years as OpenAI and Google and um, Amazon and Facebook, like especially Google, Apple and, and OpenAI, uh, as they really dive into the agent use case, it'll replace the chatbot as the primary user interface of like humans and AI. Because having a chat bot is cool, but like having digital telekinesis is cooler. You can actually do stuff. It's not just learn stuff or type at things and it tells you. It's like executing commands and doing stuff for you, like building you websites, generating reports, reading your emails, ordering you food, doing tasks. It's crazy. Like agents are now able to do pretty much anything with enough patience. It's kind of buggy at the moment because it's open source, but like OpenAI just hired the guy that created OpenClaw and they're like doubling down on this mission of making it so easy that anybody can use. So it's not going to be too long before everybody's going to have access to an agent that can use Bitcoin for them. And I think that's going to be the biggest use case.

Speaker A: You mentioned something earlier about Open Claw. Would you say Open Claw is the most exciting thing that you've seen like since Bitcoin? Like that's given you that like obsessive like I need to dig into this

Speaker B: probably because I've had like moments of getting obsessed with things and diving down the rabbit hole on things.

Speaker A: Um, uh, this has to be up there because I, for me too, like I, it's hard to think of anything else other than Open Claw that you.

Speaker B: When I was a kid, I used to be a tinkerer. In the early Internet days, I had like a little 386 computer and I was on IRC and I was like a script kitty, you know, I was like making scripts and hot dog or whatever the hell it was called, like notepad and stuff. And it was fun. It was like we're hacking the computer and we were like, figuring out how to do stuff with the computer. And it just felt like we were part of something new and exciting. And that is the feeling of Bitcoin when I first found Bitcoin. But then it got so like, the bleeding edge of Bitcoin requires a lot of technical expertise, so it's hard to use it. And now openclaw is like a translator for anything technical because it knows how to do it. It just reads the docs and goes and figures it out. So if you want to do something but you're not technical, but you got the mindset to like, figure it out and the interest to be part of it, you don't need to be a coder anymore. You can just use Claude Cowork and an agent like openclaw on the same computer. And like, whenever you have problems with your openclaw, you can paste the error messages into Claude Cowork and be like, hey, Mike, you know, what's this mean? And then it can tell you how to fix it or how to tell the agent to fix itself. And so it's kind of this like, double tool that you can, uh. It allows regular normies like me to be able to like, build apps and build technology that actually works.

Speaker A: So crazy. I know you mentioned you're not the most technical person, but so you, you have it set up on a Mac Mini. Would you set it up on like a cloud server or. No.

Speaker B: If you're just doing like marketing tasks or research tasks or light web building or something like that, then yeah, you don't need a Mac Mini. I'm like a power user hacker y type person. So I wanted to have the thing right here so I could go into it and install shit on it and look at the file system and stuff. It's very difficult to do that on a cloud server. I have one on a cloud server too. Um, I started on that because I was like, I just got to try this out. And there's a bitcoiner that works on ecash systems and NOSTR and this, uh, bitchat thing that Jack Dorsey released, which was like a Bluetooth gateway for Communicating. So you don't need the Internet to communicate as long as you have Bluetooth devices. It creates a mesh network that allows you to communicate just through Bluetooth. So that got really popular. And he develops on this too. It's all open source stuff. And he released, he got obsessed with Open Claw and he released this thing called Clawy. It's like C L a w I dot a I and it's 20 bucks a month or something like that. 30 bucks, I can't remember. But you can set it up to, just to try and Open Claw instance out. And they do all the hard part. Like they get it all set up, you just click start and then go from there. Right. And you can start connecting it to things and experimenting with it. And I started with that. But then like I'm a, I'm like uh, like I said, I'm like a power user hacker type of person. So I quickly realized after a day that what I want to do is more advanced than just put it on a VPS and use it. But I see a lot of people using it on a vps. And you know, if you just want to like use it for helping you research your, your scripts for your videos or like analyze your analytics or check your emails, schedule your calendar, like some really useful personal assistant type stuff, you can use one on a VPN but, or a vps. But uh, if you want to do really advanced stuff, it's probably not going to work.

Speaker A: You said that was called Clawy?

Speaker B: Yeah. C l a W I dot AI I got you.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And I'm not an investor in that one. Yeah, yeah, that's a unbiased shill.

Speaker A: Are your token fees like stacking up right now?

Speaker B: Dude, they're insane right now. I'm token maxing like 10, 15 hours a day right now. Um, I'm at like I'm up to like 150, 200 a day right now in API call fees.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I'm, I'm almost done with my bootstrap phase. And then I think my fee, my token spend is going to come down. Um, because I'm literally burning out like I'm going 10, 12 hours a day on this thing and I stand up and while I'm doing it right, like I stand up and work so my feet feel like I'm back, you know, working at the movie theater, doing back to back shifts again, like, oh, I'm so sore, my feet are so sore.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's funny. Um, I wanted to ask you about your um, so your ex Profile says your, um, you're, you're. I'm going to butcher it. But you're guiding a citadel mind and body using proof of work. What does that mean to you?

Speaker B: Well, so bitcoin is all about proof of work. It's the way that bitcoin gets issued. Like the bitcoin cap is 21 million coins. And there's nobody that creates bitcoin. It's a protocol. Every 10 minutes there's a new block that gets issued bitcoin to the network. Right. The protocol itself creates the bitcoin through proof of work. So when you set up a miner, which is basically a specialized bitcoin computer, and you feed it power and it plugs into the bitcoin network, it generates work which is like hashes to try to solve an equipment, uh, solve this complicated math equation to be the first mining rig or the first computer to be able to build the block. So every 10 minutes there's like one computer that finds a block and that computer is rewarded with the bitcoin that gets created every 10 minutes. And right now I think it's like 3 bitcoin, 3.25 bitcoin, something like that. When I got into bitcoin, it started as 50 Bitcoin. Every 10 minutes it was 50 Bitcoin. And that's what I was trying to compete for when I was mining back in the day, trying to get a little share of that 50 bitcoin. So proof of work is like this concept of resilience and TikTok next block as a saying that we have in bitcoin where it doesn't matter what's happening in the world, it doesn't matter what the price is, doesn't matter what FUD is out there, it doesn't matter what is happening. Bitcoin continues. Every 10 minutes there's going to new block is being built on and somebody out there in the world is going to be the computer that builds the block. There's no way to stop it. The only way to stop it is if everything goes offline. And that's not going to happen, most likely because there'll still be somebody somewhere mining bitcoin. So the concept of TikTok next block is an anchor that I've been using in my own personal life. Meaning consistency is the thing that I just need to work on. And if I can be, if I can just store my wealth in bitcoin and allow bitcoin to work harder than I can and just hold on as long as I can, then I should Also be kind of like, uh, uh, applying those bitcoin principles to the rest of my life, like showing up and just doing hard things and not caring about what's going on in the world. And just the TikTok next block philosophy led me to this idea of like building this citadel, mind and body. Um, because in bitcoin there's this meme from back in 2013 where on Reddit this guy said, like, I just came back from the future and you know, the world has collapsed and we all bitcoiners all live in citadels and have these safe villages away from the chaos of the collapsed world. So it was this just joke, raves this meme. And it was kind of funny because what he was saying in the post ended up over time kind of being true, like the way the price is rising. And then things were crashing. So it became a meme in bitcoin that like, oh, we're all going to get citadels if you hold bitcoin. But I started thinking about it, like, what if that actually, like, you know, we see these grand predictions of bitcoin going to $10 million a coin, and it actually can make sense. $20 trillion a coin, that's 1 million. So if bitcoin's at $1 million per coin, that's 20 trillion. That's not even that big. That's what is gold is what now? Like 25 trillion, 30 trillion? I mean, it's not that big, right? And as they print more and more money and the money supply increases in 10 years, 200 trillion is not going to seem like that big compared to all the wealth in the world. As money continues to debase and, uh, the supply keeps going up at $10 million a coin, which is kind of like near the cap of what bitcoin can probably get to in the next 20, 30 years. That's like citadel level wealth, right? If you own one bitcoin right now, you buy it for 66 and then you hold it until it's 10 million a coin. Well, think about if you just work your ass off or you're wealthy already or you borrow and you have 10 Bitcoin and then, you know, you're. Now you got $100 million of Bitcoin, like, you can probably really build a citadel.

Speaker A: I guess it depends on how much they debase though, because.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.

Speaker A: 100 million might not be worth.

Speaker B: Yeah, that might not buy you very much. It'll buy you like a middle class home.

Speaker A: But no, yeah, you're right.

Speaker B: But that idea Was just like, okay, well, let me dream big here. Like, let's say that like, citadel wealth is a thing, right? Let's, let's just say I'm in that world. Um, am I able to do that? Like, would I really be able to build a citadel if I have that level of wealth? And I realize I wouldn't because I, uh, couldn't even deal with the problems I have back then. Like, I was dealing with, like, issues about self confidence and like, I wasn't working out, I wasn't eating right, I didn't have the strongest, like, commitments to do date night with my wife and to work on myself and to work on my relationship and figure out where I was messing up. And, you know, there's all these things I was doing that I was like, I'm not a great leader. I have all this baggage from trying to do the game company and failing. So I was like, I gotta, like, build a citadel mind and a citadel body before I can ever think about trying to build a citadel. So the mindset came from that, like, TikTok, next block. Like, what are the things I need to do every single day that allows me to harness, like, personal proof of work? Like, what will be the proof of my work? Well, I set a goal to get ABs and I set a goal to, like, reach a new level of, like, love in my relationship with my wife so that we could have, like a more harmonious love drunk sort of, like, feeling where we were clear about our boundaries and we were clear about she, what she wanted me to do to show up as the best husband I could be and, um, me to do the work, to figure out where I was messing up and like, what are my habits that I should stop doing rather than just saying what you should stop doing. Like, let me just stop that all altogether and think about me. Like, what do I need to do every 10 minutes? What do you know? What do I need to do every day? So I reframed my entire kind of way of operating to eliminate all the negative inputs in my life. I stopped scrolling Twitter, I stopped reading financial Twitter. I stopped reading news about the world and wars and macro and who cares about the Fed and, uh, Japan's inversion curve and all this and the benchmark rates and I just eliminated it all. I'm like, I don't need to know about any of that anymore. I just need to start learning about myself. Like, how do I improve myself, become the best version of myself, work out date nights with the wife, be there for my daughter, and keep continually Working on that and then adopt that tik tok next block mindset. And I'm in a much better place now. And I've been doing it for a year and a half and, like, I'm so, you know, catching myself with upper limit behaviors, um, that are going to, you know, be ceilings on my ability to expand to the level I want to. But I'm making better choices every day because I'm learning more. And I'm kind of rooted to that philosophy of like, yeah, this, you know, I, I joined a coaching program and I read the book Buy back your time by Dan Martel. And he's got this philosophy that's called, uh, where he says, be the lighthouse, not the tugboat and that. I really adopted that philosophy and stopped, like, trying to tell people what they should do and tug them along to be healthy or to do this or do that. And I just started becoming the best version of myself and just sharing that out with people on my Instagram and sharing it with my family and trying to support their goals through just be, like, being positive and supportive and just achieving my own goals. And, you know, it worked. I stopped telling people what they should do, and I just started doing what I should do. And they actually were like, hey, uh, I want to do that too. Like, don't, don't leave the station without me. Like, let me come along.

Speaker A: I love it. No, that's. That's amazing, man. That's a great way to kind of wrap this. And from the outside looking in, man, um, you're. You're an inspiration in a lot of ways. You look great, by the way. You know, keep, uh, it up.

Speaker B: Appreciate it.

Speaker A: Yeah, man. Um, yeah, this was great. I appreciate you taking the time. Let's definitely do it again sometime. Good to catch up.

Speaker B: Yeah, man. Thanks for inviting me back on after a few years. I know last time I was probably talking a lot about shitcoins and all that stuff, and I swear, man, like, I eliminated all that from my head. I don't even think about it anymore anymore. And I feel so much better. And I'm glad now I spend more time in the gym and just, like, reading books and stuff rather than reading about the next scam that's going to take people's money.

Speaker A: What are you reading right now, by the way? Or, like, any recent good, good reads?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. So like I said, Buy Back youk Time was an awesome book. That was 2024. And then from that one I went to the big leap, which is all about upper limits and how you Sabotage in different areas of your life to prevent yourself from achieving new levels of success. Amazing book. I treated that more like a study for, like a whole year. I studied that book. I bought the compendium, which is like your big leap year, which is 365 days of learning about your own limits and stuff. So I'd read a page of that every day. Still working on that one. But then my wife and I read, uh, if the Buddha Married, and we both got a lot from that book. So that was really good on the relationship side. So those are. Those are three books I definitely recommend if anybody's interested in upping their, uh, their game and self development or their relationship.

Speaker A: Awesome. You mentioned one book, um, earlier, um, about money. Rockefellers.

Speaker B: Money Master the game.

Speaker A: Money Master the game. That's right. Yeah.

Speaker B: That was. See, that one's a little bit outdated, though. Um, because that was like 2015, 2016. And then he released a new one, like, a couple years later called Unshakable or something like that.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: You know, I mean, that one's. Honestly, at this point, I think it's probably better just to read. Buy back your time and the big leap, and then just buy bitcoin. Don't bother with the, uh, money. I like it.

Speaker A: I like it. All right. Brad, pleasure, man. All the best. Continue to kill it and, um, we'll be in touch.

Speaker B: Thanks, man. And if anybody wants to follow along on the journey, because I do post on my stories all the time.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Where's the best place to find you?

Speaker B: Instagram is just. I don't really post too much posts. I just post stories. And, you know, maybe my Open Claw agent will help me get my posts dialed in, but for now, I'm just sharing, like, when I'm learning things or when I'm at the gym or when I'm messing around with stuff, or when I'm buying bitcoin or whatever. So, yeah, at Brad Mills can on Instagram if you want to interact with me. And I'll. I'll be sharing my, uh, shining my light over there. Awesome.

Speaker A: Uh, awesome. Cool, man. Brad, pleasure, as always. All the best. We'll talk soon.

Speaker B: Thanks, man. See you later.

Speaker A: All right.